SATURDAY, JANUARY 26, 2018 PRESENTATION

Saturday. January 26^th at 5 p.m. at the Seward Community Library

The ‘Not-So-Quiet’ Adventure

 Unpacking Rockwell Kent on Fox Island 100 Years Later.”

“Brimming over with energy,” his friend Carl Zigrosser wrote, “he could and did wear out two wives. I salute all for their loyal and unselfish devotion.” Another of his friends, George Chappell, warned him that “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.” This wasn’t advice he wanted to hear.

            The artist is Rockwell Kent II. This year is the 100^th anniversary of his stay on Fox Island in Resurrection during 1918-1919 with his 9-year-old son, Rockie. If you’ve read his book, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, published in 1920, you’ve only been exposed to half the story. Perhaps the most interesting portion of his Alaska visit is contained in the hundreds of letters he wrote and received during those eight months on Fox Island. Those letters, when combined with all the emotional baggage he brought to Alaska with him, represent the hidden “Not-So-Quiet” adventure that lurks beneath his book.

            I’ll present an illustrated program about all this with excerpts from these letters at the Seward Community Library at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, January 29, 2019.

            In the letters you’ll find a tragic love story. A flawed artist’s awakening to his unkind, hurtful behavior amid the darkness of an Alaskan winter on an isolated island in Resurrection Bay. His overly romantic love letters to his wife combine with his ranting criticism, and cruel words. This is often followed by his immediate regret for what he has written. Some of her letters taunt him with hints of other men courting her. His insecurity, vulnerability, and need to be admired and worshiped drives him deep into depression. We must remember that the Rockwell Kent on Fox Island has no idea that the work he produces in Alaska will propel him to rapid fame, making him one of America’s best-known artists during the 1920’s and 1930’s. From his perspective on Fox Island, the venture could be all for nothing.

            His Alaska trip is serious quest – not artist’s junket – he reminds us. He is 36-years old -- desperate to earn a living with his art, responsible for his wife, Kathleen, and four children. He’s in love with family, but also with his new lover -- a New York City follies dancer named Hildegarde Hirsch. He keeps his affairs no secret from his wife and expects her to accept his artistic exceptionalism. Hildegarde is not his first affair and Kathleen is no longer the innocent 17-year-old he married nearly ten years earlier when he was 26 years old. She still loves him and wants to keep her family intact – but only under certain conditions. She demands he leave Hildegarde. Kent is an avid socialist, and resents a money-hungry world that he must negotiate that doesn’t recognize his genius. Like many intellectuals, he’s against U.S involvement in the Great War and the new military draft. Meanwhile the influenza is killing tens of millions around the world, and has reached Alaska. He learns early on the hard way that his trips to Seward and back to the island – in his 18-foot dory with its unreliable Evinrude engine -- can be treacherous. Each trip now drains him emotionally with fear for his young son’s life.

            He was talented, selfish, insecure, obsessive and dedicated – a painter and a perfectionist. No one, not even he, could live up to his idealism and expectations. He could be kind, generous and deeply concerned with social justice and the working class. He was also an elitist who sometimes saw himself as a better man than he was, above the herd of humanity. Because he was an artist seeking every kind of experience, he justified his philandering and hurtful behavior. Yet he could never jettison his Victorian conscience and early prudishness. His guilt sometimes devoured him. In many ways, he wasn’t unlike many talented artists and writers of his era. From his Fox Island adventure came a book that today is considered an Alaska classic, as well as dozens of paintings and sketches, including those of Resurrection Bay and what later became Kenai Fjords National Park.

            In Alaska Rockwell Kent works obsessively on his art and the illustrated letters that will later become his book. As he descends into the darkness of winter hoping to emerge – like the mythic hero – into the light of spring – he turns all his negative energy into his art, and returns with the golden fleece to success and fame. But as to the fate of that love triangle?

            To find that out join me on Saturday, January 26^th at 5 p.m. at the Seward Community Library for “The ‘Not-So-Quiet’ Adventure: Unpacking Rockwell Kent on Fox Island 100 Years Later.”

Doug Capra wrote the forewords for two books by Rockwell Kent – “Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska”, and “Northern Christmas” – both published by Wesleyan University Press. He is also the author of “The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords.”