PART 2 -- NEW YEAR'S EVE -- 1918

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 2 -- New Year’s Eve 1918

It is Tuesday, December. 31, 1918

New Year’s Eve on Fox Island

The hour has come and gone in New York City

It is also the Tenth Anniversary of Rockwell and Kathleen’s Marriage

“It has rained most of the day,” Kent writes in Wilderness. The rain has melted most of the snow and it is so mild that he has to keep his cabin door open and the stoves on low. “To-night is as warm as any night in spring or autumn,” he observes. As Kent works, he constantly looks out for a steamer to pass the island on its way to Seward with the mail. This isolation, this lack of communication, is torture to him. It’s been weeks since he wrote those two soul-searching and introspective letters to Kathleen and mailed them to his friend Carl Zigrosser to give to his wife on New Year’s Eve. He sent them off while he was in Seward between Nov. 30^th and Dec. 4^th. He poured his soul into those letters – his shame, his sorrow, his regrets. Has Kathleen read them he must wonder? How did she respond? He won’t learn for many more weeks. “I’m terribly homesick to-night,” he laments in Wilderness “and don’t know what to say about it in these genial pages.”

 Kent has been careful in his Alaska book to keep those pages genial, gracious and inspiring. The draft of his “quiet” adventure is in his illustrated letters, and in some passages of the more personal communications. There are clues in his book, but what he couldn’t say there is in his letters to Kathleen, Hildegarde and to a few others. In Wilderness he tells us that as midnight approached he made a secret resolution, “that I may make it as earnestly and as truly as possible, the stars and the black sky shall be my witness.” He reveals that secret resolution in a Jan. 1, 1919 letter to Kathleen written on Fox Island:

“Last night at one minute to midnight I poured a drink into a cup and went out of doors with it. Through the soft night air I could see overhead the faithful stars. ‘One prayer I have this new year’ I cried. ‘It is Kathleen’s happiness. To you silent stars I appeal to hold me true to my resolve to make Kathleen happy – not this year alone but all the years of my life. Amen.’ And I drank the potion with as deep faith as ever I have had. And last night you were home with…my letters and my flowers and my pictures! And last night you loved me wonderfully. Oh, darling, be good always.”

Kent is hopeful and sincere. He begins this New Year’s Day letter written on Fox Island at 11:30 p.m. with “My darling! Oh, my sweet Love. Letters from you have just passed within two miles of us. I’m wild with joy…We see the steamers as citadels of light gliding silently by in the blackness.” It is the Admiral Watson, scheduled to arrive in Seward at 3 a.m. Jan. 2nd. In had 250 tons of freight which, included the mail which came only by freight since the contract dispute between he federal government and the steamship companies. It stayed in port 19 hours before sailing to the westward -- perhaps Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula, Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians.
Kent is excited. He’s tempted to wake Olson but decides against it. If the weather cooperates, Olson plans to go to Seward on New Year’s Day to get the mail. Kent is especially anxious to read the letters from Kathleen and the kiddies. Maybe there’ll be one or two from his mother. Perhaps a few from Hildegarde and from Zigrosser and Chappell. 

He’s maddened with Alaska’s sluggish mail service, and has even written a letter to the Seward Gateway about it. He realizes how this lack of communication is making his and Kathleen’s life miserable. They need to be face to face. He wants her, he needs her to be with him on Fox Island. A few days before Christmas he write her a letter with specific directions for her travel. Indeed, he ordered her to come. It was a confusing letter. If she couldn't be faithful to him in the city she was to join him immediately. If she wouldn't come, she was to send him the money so he could return. Near the end of the letter he urged her to come. By the letter's end he said he knew there might not be enough money for her travel so he would leave the decision up to her. It was one of his desperate letters written in those early morning hours between nightmares.

On New Years Eve 1918 he writes: "Today I made a drawing of you standing at a gate as if your sweetheart had gone away just then on a long journey." The work below -- Nostalgia: Autumn -- is ink on paper, 6 1/2" x 4 7/8" from a private collection, published in Rockwell Kent's "Egypt" Shadow & Light in Vermont (2012) by Jamie Franklin and Jake Milgram Wien.

He awaits New Years Day with anticipation, hoping the weather will allow Olson his planned trip to Seward. Kent has many letters to send Kathleen – 32 separate envelopes. Based upon the length of his letters – if we say conservatively that each envelope will contain four pages – Kathleen will receive 128 sheets. “And if these letters do not reach you soon,” Kent writes, “I know trouble will come.” In his enthusiasm, he ends the letter with a flourish. 

It is Tuesday, December. 31, 1918

It is New Year’s Eve in New York City

The hour has yet to come on Fox Island

It is also the Tenth Anniversary of Rockwell and Kathleen’s Marriage

At her 139 W. 15th Street apartment in New York City, Kathleen Kent keeps her word to her husband. As he will do on Fox Island, she will spend the evening of their tenth anniversary alone with thoughts about him. The flowers he sent are beautiful and their scent fills the room – yellow and white narcissus, and two other kinds she can’t identify. The kiddies are in bed. She looks at the sketches her husband and son have sent with the letters. Kathleen sits down and reads the letters – a total of ten pages in Kent's small script. He’s crying as he writes, he says, and asks if she too is crying as she reads. “How could I do what I have done to you?,” he reflects. “To-night I am so humble, mother. All my sins toward you have come before me. I have lain awake hours in the past night and understood so much. And my shame! Mother darling, it will take me a life time to make up to you what I have taken from you.” He has dedicated this “sacred” day to his wife. That evening Kent holds Rockie in his arms and sings to him a song called “Daddy.” He has sent the lyrics to Kathleen. 

Now Rockie is asleep. “All day I have worked on a drawing for you and it is now finished. You and I, naked, have just sprung ashore from a little boat on to a flowery strand and are fleeing hand in hand. And we have been but just in time, for a dreadful siren of the sea – half woman half serpent, was close upon us and has seized our boat. But we are safe, mother, darling, you and I. We have passed this terrible peril – and now still fast together we shall love each other as never before, with deeper passion and more understanding. I hope you’ll like the drawing. If the siren is a terrible creature you and I are as lonely figures as I’ve ever made.” The scent of the flowers Kent sent fill the air beside Kathleen. She probably looks at the drawings her husband sent with the letters. This is a different Rockwell, she thinks. He’s not written quite like this before.

“Last night – it was toward morning I think when I awoke,” Kent writes. “I lay in thought over my wrong doing of all these years, one by one. I saw them without one shadow of justification. One thing alone was enough to condemn me; it was that I had made you suffer. I see every unkind act of mine and every word, I see the mistakes I have made and I see how for everything you suffered. Your devotion has {been} so wonderful, so beautiful and so far more than I have deserved that if ever mother you turn from me I will still do everything in the world for you. But to-night I do believe in your love for me. I know it is still deep and true; I know that all I have to do is deserve it. And that is my one and only resolution now on New Year’s Eve. I will deserve your love. You shall be happy and more happy year after year and {I} will make the memory of these unhappy years so faint that they can never even cast a shadow. Rockwell and I drank tonight a toast that I taught him to say, “I hope mother will always be wonderfully happy with you, father.”

 Kathleen realizes the sincerity of this letter, and the thought behind her husband’s gifts is not just romantic, but heartfelt. As she reads the anniversary letters and admires the flowers and sketches, her hope increases. Something has happened to him on Fox Island. He has changed. Perhaps they have crossed over into a new beginning.

Kent continues: “I made lots of false starts. I have time and again sacrificed much of (our {lives}) to gain nothing…Newfoundland was a disaster. It may be that it was of value in my development, maybe we’ll both someday see it as an experience that was worthwhile. And all the things we sacrificed then! We did mean to stay there. But how impossible that would have been! But of all we sold and gave away then I most regret the lamps, your lamps. We gave them to the Milers and that they did not offer them to us again on our return will always be between Miller and me. We’ll never be friends again. About that I am bitter because I know you loved them.”

Kent finally begins to see what had been invisible to him -- the seemingly insignificant things behind Kathleen’s suffering all those years. Moving from place to place with the children. Having to sell off her precious possessions like the lamps. The affairs with Jennie and Hildegarde pierced Kathleen’s heart, she had told him so, but so often he had tried to brush all that away. Now on Fox Island, during his late night-early morning letter writing – The Hour of the Wolf -- he begins to see all his "little" unkind acts, his criticisms, his demands. All these “little” transgressions he failed to even recognize. During his fall and winter isolation on an Alaskan island Kent has experienced a secular Dark Night of the Soul.

The little things haunt him now – the lamps, the andirons – as he writes: “But believe in the “someday” mother. I will return it all to you in happiness, I promise. The andirons that we had in Berkshire, I cannot remember anywhere else. Surely, we didn’t pack them around with us to 23^rd Street & Perry Street and out west, where we had no fireplaces. I think we must have sold them or given the away in Berkshire. But darling don’t you ever worry about these things. In our wanderings we always sought the place where we could be happy. We have always dreamed the city. I want to be far from it with you and you alone.”

Kent wants out of New York City, away from not only the herd but most also from the temptations. He imagines a quiet, rural paradise not as isolated as Fox Island, but just as magical. When he returns he and Kathleen will go away “for a few weeks in the early summer walking into New Hampshire or in some of the milder parts of New England to look for the framework of such a place as I have pictured. Let’s avoid the city. I can be so content away from the crowd, away from all the vulgar lot that have always persecuted me. Then I shall work and become a prophet over all the land and you shall be my helpmate and the children shall grow up with pure and loftier ideals than they can ever know in contact with the masses…To do all this I’ll find a way. I am now doing my best to get the support I need for it – and the work that I am doing here will bring the confidence of those who can help me. But that is my affair. But the search for the place to live, won’t that be a delightful holiday for you and me?”

A new day has begun in their lives, Kent says. The letters end: “Sweet, sweet, mother, have peace tonight. Sleep close, close in my arms, my hand on your brow, my lips to yours, our legs twined wonderfully together. Oh God, for such nights again! Oh mother, mother I am crying as I write now and Rockwell wonders at my sobs. I love you, I love you, dear true and tender wife. Forever, forever we shall be true. Your Rockwell.”

Rockie, with the Fox Island cabin in the background. Kent photo.

In other letters, Kathleen had told her husband she no longer trusted his sweet, romantic words. She didn’t know whether to believe him anymore. But these letters were different. She had written him that she just couldn’t put her feelings into words – she didn’t have the skill – that’s why her letters were so short. “Write to me hours long,” Kent now asks her, and “say for once if you can all those unspoken beautiful things that being in your own depths wake the calm of your mien so profound.”

After reading Kent’s two letters in New York City late on that New Year’s Eve 1918 – while many hours earlier her husband and son are on an island in Alaska dedicating the day to her – Kathleen Kent responds with a heartfelt letter to Rockwell.