PART 4 OF 5 THE NOT-SO-QUIET ADVENTURE

ABOVE --About an hour before the sun rises above the mountains along Resurrection Bay at 9:27 a.m. on January 27, 2018. Notice the fog pouring out of Humpy Cove just right of center. At lower left a sea otter rests on its back. The otters Kent writes of in Wilderness are river otters, not sea otters. River otters have rear paws allowing them to easily maneuver on land. Sea otters have flippers as rear feet. Capra photo

NOTE– This article is Part 4 of 5 of an expanded version of the lecture I delivered at the Anchorage (Alaska) Museum of History and Art on Nov. 9, 2018 as part of a one-day Rockwell Kent Symposium. If you’ve reading this website you realize there is much more the story that’s contained on this website. I’ve tried to incorporate some of that information in this draft, but I advise those interested to check out this entire website for fuller context. The article focuses on the emotional baggage Rockwell brought to Alaska using various sources, especially his letters to his amour Hildegarde and his wife, Kathleen – and Kathleen’s letters to him. Kent can escape into the wilderness. There is the “quiet adventure.” But he can escape neither himself nor his demons.  Beneath the surface of his book is…

THE NOT-SO-QUIET ADVENTURE

Rockwell Kent in Alaska 1918-1919

by Doug Capra © 2019

PART 4 of 5

PART 4 of 5

On Dec. 28^th Rockwell Kent to writes to his wife, Kathleen: “Do you know – it is easy to die when you are friendless and unloved, and hard when love makes life dear to you. In my uncertainty and general unhappiness (now) I’d rather welcome and end to it all. At least so it seems. And I close my eyes as I lie weakly on the bed and think come, death, I offer you no resistance. With these are unrueful thoughts. I’m on the whole not sad tonight. No spectors of your unfaithfulness haunt me as they usually do.”

 Penelope and the Suitors by John William 

In Wilderness about this time he writes: “I read the ‘Odyssey,’ great story! Just now I am past that magnificent slaughter of the wooers…” He must enjoy that scene tremendously. In his letter he reminds Kathleen that Odyssus’s wife, Penelope, always remained faithful to him over his ten-year absence. Penelope is the “model of womanhood” he recommends to Kathleen. Kent ends: “Mother darling: we have so sweet a little boy. We sleep hand in hand and nose to nose. But really he’s much too boney and rigid. He will stick out his hard knee or curl out his crinkled spine and then it takes lots of imagination or sleepiness to believe that it is you. Sweet bedfellow – if only we can soon be together again and have nights that are even more delicious than the days!”

 Sketch from Wilderness

On Dec. 29^th he writes: “I feel so tired, tired, tired. As if I’d lived many lifetimes and was worn out. And yet the thought is mine that through all the age long years of my life I have loved you alone tenderly and faithfully. Let it be so. Truly I believe I have. Ah, mother, if you could come to see it, it would again put faith and loyalty into your nature. You’re not breaking up are you? You’re not less glorious than when you were really mine? Some day if we ever really are together again we’ll nurse for each other our worn tattered souls back to their true strength and glory. Sweet Kathleen of mine!” New Year’s Eve is approaching and Kent anticipates Kathleen will be getting the two letters he wrote to her a month earlier – the ones he sent to friends George Chappell and Carl Zigrosser to give to Kathleen. How will she respond? Will she believe he has changed?

On Dec. 29^th he writes a disturbing letter to Chappell. He tells Kathleen, “I wrote to him bitterly of you – when I did mention you. I couldn’t help it.” Kent has asked George to take care of his family if anything happens to him in Alaska. His friend visits Kathleen and the children at least every week, has dinner with them and reads to the children. Kent sends letters to George to pass on to Kathleen, probably because he wants his friend to know his expectations of wife and wants George to advocate for him. In Kent’s Dec. 29^th letter to George, he accuses his friend of disloyalty. A month later, George writes back affirming the sacredness of their friendship and piling on necessary admiration before venturing into what Kent might feel is criticism. Chappell writes:

“And please do try not to worry too much about home affairs. It hurts me terribly to have you speak of Kathleen’s ‘faithlessness’, of how she has ‘ shown herself up’ – it seems to me harsh and unfair, when I see her at home giving unremitting care to the children, tied hand and foot with daily drudgery that would make a man into a maniac in a week – and always sweet patient, always trying in her dumb inarticulate way to do what she thinks is her duty. O, Rocky! Perfection is always the peak beyond, and the way to it is full of bruises, but we can attain a kind of perfection by idealizing what we have, and still not lose sight of the great unattainable. You have much to think of with most precious comfort, much to work for with great patience, much to come back to with supreme joy – if you will only surround them all with greatness of heart, with forgiveness for short-comings, with tenderness and with unfailing love.

         And here endeth the gospel.”

 A section of Dec. 29, 1919 letter quoted above from Geroge Chappell to Kent.

Keep in mind that although I’m presenting most of these letters in chronological order on this website, they are not read or responded to in sequence. Kent mails a large batch of letters but doesn’t get a response for many weeks. During that interval he’ll write another batch of letters. When he mails them out on the steamers while he’s in Seward, he receives new letters not relevant to the letters he just sent out. That’s why he frantically writes new letters in Seward to go out with his old letters after reading the new letters that have just arrived. Sound confusing? It is – and contributed extensively to not only Kent’s loneliness and frustration but also the misunderstandings and confusion between him and Kathleen. Add to that Kent’s ambivalence, swaying back and forth between love, criticism, distrust, forgiveness, depression, death wishes, and exuberance. Kathleen, too, is ambivalent – Do I love him or hate him, remain his wife or divorce him, believe him or distrust him, forgive him or not? Kent doesn’t make it easy for her. If you sometimes feel worn out reading this correspondence here, realize that you’re only seeing a small portion of the total. Imagine how they both feel – especially Kathleen. She is inundated with hundreds of pages of her husband’s letters arriving within a few days in batches of anywhere from 25 to 50 pages in his small hand. Rockwell wrote on high quality paper and his letters are mostly intact and relatively easy to read. Kathleen is trying to save money and buys cheap, onion-skin-type paper and writes on both sides. There is much bleed through. Her hand is not as neat as Rockwell’s. She isn’t as articulate or fluid as her husband and admits that she has a difficult time expressing her feelings in writing. Some of her sentences are difficult to reconstruct. Many of her letters to Alaska are water damaged or faded. Even Kent may have had a difficult time reading them.

 Some of Kathleen's letters from this period look like this. Some are almost completely faded. She was writing on both sides thin paper. On Jan. 17, 1919 she wrote to Rockwell: "This is such disgusting cheap paper. I am almost ashamed to write on it, but  it won't last long, as soon as the kiddies find it." Some letters may have been water damaged on their way to Alaska or during the fire at Kent's home in the late 1960's. 

New Year’s Eve, Dec. 31, 1918. In Wilderness he writes: “I’m terribly homesick to-night and don’t know what to say about it in these genial pages. It has been a solemn day.” In his letters, he tells of a prayer and secret vow he makes that evening. 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.”

His wife gets the letters with the flowers and some gifts and reads them on the evening of their tenth anniversary. They are the most honest, reflective letters of Kent’s I have read. He is authentic and truthful about his faults and unfaithfulness. He admits his unkindness to Kathleen and vows to improve. He has changed, he assures her and is a different man. He may be rationalizing, romantically optimistic, idealistically certain of his ability to keep his promises. She believes him and a new round of letters begins with much more uplifting sentiments from both of them. She writes more frequent and longer letters. This won’t last long – especially when Kathleen learns that he’s still writing to Hildegarde and has sent her a Christmas present addressed to Mrs. Hildegarde Kent.

Kent is disappointed even outraged that Kathleen hasn’t been answering the specific questions he’s been asking in his letters. He wants her to reread all his letters and answer his questions. After reading his anniversary letters, she does just that, but that experience revives old disagreements and memories. As they say, be careful what you wish for. Kathleen goes back to Kent’s responses to those two letters from her about Mr. Walker that Kent received from her in early December 1918 when he was in Seward. He was so upset that he sent those letters back to her. On February 3, 1919 – after rereading his past letters, she writes: “Rockwell dear, I have suffered so much from your unfaithfulness that, as dearly as I love you, your last love affair will be the breaking point in our lives; I will pack my trunk & bid you goodbye, to go anywhere, anywhere where I don’t have to suffer the torture and neglect that I suffered last winter. Dear, think of what I have suffered, think of last winter! Oh, you have no conception of what I went thro’, you don’t yet know half of what it is to suffer by the hand; or heart, of one you love! Do not reproach me anymore. Those two letters of mine would look like two peas beside the elephant if contrasted with the unhappiness you have given me.”

She answers another of her husband’s questions: “The reason for the short letter of Monhegan was simply that I was tired, tired to death of the struggle! The struggle to be happy & content while you loved someone else and neglected me. It was a great relief to get away from the whole tangle. I did not know how to write to you. At the time of parting you seemed to love me desperately and want my love, and yet many many times in the last two years you had shown me as well as told me that you did not want my love. I suppose you have forgotten these things but I have not. They made too deep a wound in my heart ever to be forgotten. Now, darling we’re going to start anew with a clean slate. I want no more complaints from you of my treatment of you or I will give you up for all.” Kathleen’s letter above comment “…I was tired, tired to death of the struggle!” is a good example of what Kent’s friend Carl Zigrosser meant when he wrote four years after Kent died, that his friend wore out two of his wives. 

 Carl Zigrosser, editor of The Modern School at the time Kent was in Alaska.

Now, as the new year of 1919 begins, Kathleen is parsing each word in her husband’s letters and to her it sounds like he’s telling her that he planned to break up with Hildegarde before he left for Alaska? That doesn’t match her memory. “I had not the faintest ghost of an idea that you once thought of breaking off with H. Do you remember a scene we then had in your studio when I went to you determined to have things settled one way or the other? If you would not give her up, I said, you have to give me up. Hilda was crying and hanging on to you crying. She could not give you up. You said you would not give her up and you could not give me up. And after a very heartbreaking and crying argument, that’s the way it ended; a deadlock. That was our last talk on the subject.”

Kent is still having nightmares about his marriage and Kathleen also reveals some of hers. In one nightmare she goes to a lawyer to get a divorce. Kathleen writes it on Jan. 13, and we see here a confession that will doubt hit her husband hard and give him a good reason to end his Alaska trip earlier than he wants. The night before Kathleen had arrived home terribly depressed:

 “I didn’t want to write you a blue letter,” she says. “I could have gone into the garden and eaten worms with great gusto last night. It makes me sick and sad to think that I am nearly thirty and will grow old and die without ever having or doing the many, many things that I crave, and have craved all my life. It makes me sore that I have been so good and patient and loving – suffering all through my youth. People like that never get what they want in this life. For years I really believed I would get my reward in Heaven as mother used to tell me; though I {also} believed I would get my reward on earth. Now I no longer believe in a reward but feel sure I will die as I have lived, longing for things unattained.”

Kent has been complaining to her about her friends Bernice and Billy taking her out on the town to plays and concerts. His expectations of her are of ideal motherhood, homebound, spending hours reading his lengthy letters and responding in detail. Her response: “Don’t begrudge me any jolly times dear. I must have them or I shall get bitter.” A few weeks later Kent responds – probably talking as much to himself as to Kathleen -- “There is no reward, there’s just life.”

On Feb. 17^th Kent writes to artist Gus Mager: “I’m glad the war’s over. I’ve become a confirmed anarchist. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t think I owe anybody anything -- who has never done anything for me.” He knows he must leave Fox Island and return home. Ironically, this is just as Seward opens up to him. He has made many friends and writes about them in Wilderness. Like Bear Glacier, like old Olson, like the wilderness itself – these pioneers represent the freedom wildness. Alaska represents freedom itself – the freedom to create and live one’s life as one sees fit. That’s what Kent hopes to recreate in some rural setting far away from New York City when he returns home.

 Some of the friends Kent made while in Seward. He mentions them in Wilderness.

  He’s angry and bitter: “Isn’t it ridiculous,” he writes. “But what a contrast to Newfoundland – or New York or any other spot I’ve ever landed on.” On their trips to town Rockie has sleep overs and goes to the movies with other children. Kent is offered furnished houses and a cabin at Kenai Lake. He’s been invited to speak to the Seward Chamber of Commerce. The weather has improved and one can feel spring in the air. In April he had planned to camp out at Bear Glacier and paint. Landing on the beach at Bear Glacier in a small boat is dangerous enough in summer. It’s fortunate Kent never tried in winter. Perhaps before he left in May he could venture further south into Aialik Bay and Northwestern Fiord. He was never able to visit Bear Glacier that fascinated him and appeared in many of his paintings or visit the coastline that later became Kenai Fjords National Park.

TO BE CONTINUED

BELOW -- Both photos below are courtesy of Adventure 60 North. The first is of Aialik Glacier in Aialik Bay, the next fjord south of Resurrection Bay along coast of Kenai Fjords National Park. The second shows kayakers in front of Northwestern Glacier at Northwestern Fiord. NOTICE the two spellings of "fjord and fiord." Northwestern Fiord and McCarty Fiord -- now part of Kenai Fjords National Park -- were named before the park was designated in 1980, and that was the spelling of fiord decided upon. When the park was named, they decided to use the "fjord" spelling. Aialik and Northwestern were officially named bays, not fjords.