NOVEMBER 30 -- DECEMBER 5, 2018 Part 2

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Nov. 30 -- Dec. 5, 2018 Part 2

Rockwell Kent often called Fox Island his Northern Paradise. And it was. In these writings I don’t want to dismiss that important aspect of his Alaska adventure. He never called it his Northern Crucible – but it was that, too. He had never been so isolated from family and friends, unable to have any direct control or influence over “the remnants of your family,” as his wife Kathleen sometimes wrote in letters referring to herself and their three daughters. Kent had never been so stuck, unable to travel at will a mere twelve miles. He enjoyed the pioneering – clearing land, felling trees, cutting up firewood, fixing the cabin – but it took more time away from his art than he had expected. But they had to survive in this wild and wonderful place. And the rain, the dark and the storms – the awesome, sublime wild – all that enthralled him but also had their disadvantages. He probably never had experienced the sole responsibility for one of his children for so long a period. The military draft and the influenza worried him. He packed with him his complicated love life which included his troubled marriage and his current affair with Hildegarde. And of course, there was his career, his art, his purpose for living. How would this adventure – which he made sure to note was “no artist’s junket” – finally end? Would the art he produced get positive reviews by the critics and, even if that happened, would they find an audience? Would he finally have the time to paint – set aside all the odd jobs necessary to support his family but that distracted his life's work? As November ended and December began and the darkest days of the year approached, Kent’s personal life started to untangle thousands of miles away – and he could do little about it from Alaska. Despite all this, we must remember that he brought back exciting paintings and an inspirational book – using that negative energy of his Northern Crucible to create his Northern Paradise. 

Kent and Rockie arrive in Seward on Nov. 30^th – finally. They had been packed and ready to go on Fox Island since Nov. 14^th while the weather kept them stranded. Kent learns in town that it’s fortunate he has been away for so long because the influenza epidemic swept through Seward. More anxiety for Kent, though we only find it detailed in the letters. On the surface, his stay in Seward is a productive and enjoyable visit, as Kent describes in it Chapter 6 of Wilderness. Beneath that chapter hides Kent’s stress and worry -- so severe that on the evening of Dec. 4^th, prepared to leave for Fox Island the next morning, Kent collapses both physically and emotionally. He believes he has the influenza. “…I lay there dreaming rather delusionally of death,” he writes, “planning my last instructions for the care of Rockwell and my last messages to you, my darling, and our children.” He calls Rockie to his bedside for comfort. We learn of that in his letter of Dec. 5, written once he's back on Fox Island.

The first letters Kent finds in Seward from Kathleen elate him. “I can never have known such profound happiness,” he writes on Nov. 30^th. “Your letters are all about me here. I could cry over them for joy.” She has responded positively to his earlier gloomy and depressing letters. He wants long, loving, admiring letters showing her faithfulness and confidence. Perhaps Kathleen is used to Kent’s bouts of melancholy and insecurity, especially while they’re separated. She knows what he wants and needs and so now she writes a series of letters to assure him. “The reading of your beautiful letters from Berkshire put me into so wild a joy,” Kent writes, “that I threw myself at…writing to you from the fullness of my heart such outpourings of love as sometimes, mother dear, I wonder if you comprehend or like.” He’s so encouraged by those first letters from Kathleen on his arrival in Seward that he hurries down to the Cable House and sends a telegram to his wife.

That response he writes on Nov. 30^th  -- after reading those twenty beautiful letters from Kathleen -- is one of Kent’s most revealing letters. He had been desperate after his wife’s earlier, negative letters. “These weeks of despair!” he confessed. “I have thought of death so often in that lonely, tragic place. And I clung to Rockwell – as if that sweet child could understand my sorrow. But his very innocence helps me…as something beautiful that could brighten...midnight in my heart.” Darkness. Midnight. The Hour of the Wolf. A time when mystics may confront both the diabolical and the divine.

Kent can’t sleep because of his unspeakable nightmares about Kathleen – who is “so pure and holy.”. By will --  he tries to shun images of her from his mind, replacing them with “others, no matter whom…” By will -- he refuses to think of her -- but he is weak. The darkness, the isolation, the wilderness, have driven him deep into his soul. “I have thought profoundly to the roots of life,” he writes. “I am changed. You must be good to me. I have not lived lightly and the years that you and I have lived together have bound me to you as I never knew. We are not individuals any longer, we are one. The life that you and I began so innocently together has become for us all life. And in these past weeks there were times when I forgot all misunderstanding and all doubt and saw you so heavenly beautiful and true that I could have wept at your feet for the tenderness of my love.”

Just as he reaches these heights, Kathleen’s “poison” letters arrive – like the ones about her interest in Mr. Walker on Monhegan Island --  “and my letters became fiendish. There’s no help for a man alone at such a time. I felt your love gone from me. Every time, every word of what you had written to me told me that.” Kent counted and reread the poison letters – all twelve of them. He admits he’s to blame for their troubles. “I have felt myself alone the guilty one.” Kathleen is a beautiful creature, infinitely tender and sensitive. “But mother,” he writes, “you are more than that or years ago I would have lost you forever…” Believe in my greatness, he begs her, even more than I do, and please forgive my weakness, “with all my fiery and cruel aspirations after supermanhood and spiritual things.”

Kent wants to share his spiritual quests with her and “lay my pictures before you to feel my enthusiasm in what, since months, has seemed to me one work.” When he found himself “alone with his own heart” everything became clear to him – even the thought that Kathleen might leave him. “I see no face but yours, madonna like – no eyes but yours that are so deep as a heaven, an infinite, dark, starred heaven into which I all alone had risen and could peer and dream with a peace that is absolute. I have felt they were for me and I for them and that for us outside of each other no living being counted. And I have seen your shape, your limbs, and have lain with you in such need and final happiness. Oh, God! Kathleen, your lips and breasts, your arms that have held me so close, your legs so beautiful and strong, and all the mad and wonderful and sweet things that we have done at night, how they have filled my soul.”

Kathleen, you are all that a woman can be to a man, he tells her. “I’d never find love in all the world like yours…I have long ago thought that I can never be away from you again. I am not young enough for that.” He had wanted her to come to Alaska for her sake as well as his, for “it would have been a divine reunion for us two, and no matter whatever happened afterwards that alone would have illuminated all.” But he admits that it would have been madness for her to have ventured to Alaska. You were right to have stayed. “And now of other things,” he writes:

“I ought to whisper to you that I have grown in spiritual status – that is so great a thing to say. As if out of a chaos of half understood or half seen purpose I have emerged to where I viewed my own destiny. Is it too soon in this deep understanding that has come to me to tell you that I feel myself to be an instrument of the divine will, that I begin to discern in my own chaotic longings as they have been expressed in my art as constant and lofty philosophy? I am redeemed from arrogance by my art’s seeming no longer to be self expression but an expression of man’s will to higher things, appearing, strangely, through me.”

He’s been reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Is Kent beginning to emerge from his cave to become the Ubermensch? “Stand with me dear soul,” he tells Kathleen, “no longer as one asserting her rights to balance mine but yielding toward me all that you can of your individual nature that our union be more perfect, and believing in my will to give up all I can for you.” 

Merge into my being, my greatness, so that we become one, he tells his wife. Early in their marriage, Kathleen told him she had lost faith in herself. Perhaps insecurity began back in 1911 when she learned that Jennie, Kent’s first affair, was pregnant with his child. Kathleen left with baby Rockie and returned to her family in the Berkshires. She wrote him a desperate compelling letter begging him to leave her and go to Jennie. The affair hadn’t been secret. Kent made sure the two women knew each other. They corresponded. Jennie was desperate and Kathleen considered herself the cause of Jennie’s suffering, and she couldn’t bear that. Over the years there were probably other instances when Kathleen wrote to Kent of her lack of self-esteem. “Nothing in all my life has filled me with deeper humiliation,” Kent writes, “than when you told me of your own going away and your loss of faith in yourself. For that more than for any other act of my life – for that…if there were punishment I should deserve to be damned.” Kent urges Kathleen to be true to herself, true to her destiny – which is “to be true and dear, a serene and beautiful mother and faithful wife. And if it is hard for you as great things often are, I promise you to try to make it by my love a joy to you.”

Kent is in Seward on Nov. 30, 1918 as writes these words. In this entry I’ve covered half of this long and important letter. He probably gets the letter off on a steamer that leaves the next morning. I’ll finish this in the next entry, and move on to how Kent reacts the next morning, December 1, when he receives more “poison” letters from Kathleen on the next steamer to arrive.

TO BE CONTINUED

Sunrise over the Resurrection Peninsula at about 10 a.m. Dec. 3, 2018. Actual sunrise was at

9:39:47 a.m. The sun will go behind the mountains of the Aialik Peninsula by 2 p.m. Actual sunset will be at 3:56:20 p.m. NOTE -- This photo is from a specific position at the south end of Seward. When and where the sun goes down behind the mountains depends upon your position. Kent would have seen the sun longer from Fox Island.