MAY 22 - 25, 2019 PART I -- FINDING HIS RURAL VERMONT SANCTUARY

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

May 22-25, 2019

ABOVE – The front piece from Rockwell Kent’s 1955 autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (IMOL)

Part 1

FINDING HIS RURAL VERMONT SANCTUARY

The World At Year 36

As I indicated at the beginning of this website, Kent brings many years’ worth of personal and emotional baggage with him to Alaska. We learn much from his correspondence. Now, having been in Alaska for eight months with his young son, isolated for most of that time on an island in Resurrection Bay about 12 miles from Seward – Kent has accumulated more emotional baggage which follows him home. Years of his unfaithfulness to Kathleen, his most recent love triangle, and the potential new relationship with his wife based upon his Alaska epiphany – gets packed away with his art work and other belongings accompanies him on his search for a rural paradise.

ABOVE – From IMOL

By March 1919 Kent is packing, preparing to leave Fox Island and Alaska. Rockie is devastated. The youngster has fallen in love with their free life, the wildness, and old Olson. Kathleen’s response to Rockwell’s two anniversary letters coupled with her husband’s promise to leave Hildegarde, have given both hope for the future. Kathleen’s January correspondence, which Rockwell doesn’t receive until Feb. 11, is full of love and optimism. They try with genuine honesty to discuss their differences during February and March. Kathleen still questions Rockwell’s sincerity. Apparently, the message she gets from Hildegarde is that the affair isn’t over. That’s Hildegarde’s opinion, Kent tells Kathleen. He assures Kathleen he’s told Hilda he’s returning to his wife and family. Both feel their communication via letter isn’t adequate. They need to be face to face. We have much to talk about when you get home, Kathleen tells him.

ABOVE – From IMOL.

In the anniversary letters Rockwell has promised Kathleen that they will leave the grime, chaos and temptations of New York City upon his return and find the perfect rural paradise somewhere in New England. Like a drowning woman grasping onto a life ring while watching her marital ship slowly sink, Kathleen latches on to that pledge. She makes plans, dreams, sketches and designs for rooms and imagines their furnishings. After so many years of moving from here to there, selling their belongings, surviving in genteel poverty, scrimping, saving – would they finally really settle down? On March 4, 1919 Kent writes one of his last letters from Fox Island, imaging the perfect home he will create for his family.

In our new estate there must be a stream of water and we must conduct it near to the house and over a fall. To it must lead a smooth sanded or grassy path. And every morning, summer and winter, father and son, daughter if they will, and wife shall take their ‘plunge’ beneath it. There must be a sheltered, sunny, soft, grass-carpeted dell adjacent to it where all of us can bask in nakedness and get from the sun the true golden color that human bodies should be. Isn’t this wonderful ------ ! There must be an arbor with a long table spread beneath it for our summer feasts; there must be a bower, or trellised vine-covered summer house where both the sun and moon can flicker through, where you and I and the young ones in their turn shall make love. There shall be smooth lawn, wide pasture with sheep and a cow upon it, woods that will always hold a mystery, a garden on a sunny slope, neat paths bordered with flowers, bird houses in the gables – and a model of this little cabin on Fox Island. These are some of the wonders of the paradise among some remote, forsaken hills!

ABOVE -- From IMOL.

Kent wants to not only the idealistic pastoral homestead, but he also wants to recapture the less-forgiving wild of Alaska in a safer location. If nothing else, a replica of his Fox Island cabin will be a reminder. Later, Olson will join him in Vermont – but Kent will learn that there are some experiences one can’t recreate. He is deathly serious at this point about his dream home and the escape it will provide him. He adds: If for any reason I can’t bring this about for us I think always that I’ll just say farewell to this damned world and at last really leave you in peace. I’ll talk with you about this scheme. I somehow count on your agreeing. To-day I baked such light fluffy top-heavy loaves that wanted to run out all over the oven! I tell you, you women know nothing of the art of bread making so I have at last learned it. It has begun to seem to me that the best summer’s plan for you and me is to find an abandoned farm and then move the whole family there and camp in tents while I repair the house. Wouldn’t it be fun! The children would be no trouble, just turn them loose, naked. You’ll think I’m strangely fond of the ‘undraped nude.’ Rockwell and I have indeed become wild men. And wild folk all of you must be to watch us and not incur our scorn. Rockwell is filling out splendidly ambitious about his development.

It's clear that as he gets ready to leave Alaska, Kent is disgusted with the world to which he must return. He and Zigrosser have deliberated on not just art topics in their correspondence, but also socialism, the war, the draft, and militarism in general.  Kent has probably followed enough of the news from Alaska to have a good idea of what’s happening in the nation and the world. As Kent scholar Jake Wien has suggested to me, Carl Zigrosser has had considerable influence on Rockwell. Zigrosser titles many of Kent’s drawings that appear in the Knoedler Gallery exhibition, and probably titles others that will go in Wilderness. Although Kent has been reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra it is Zigrosser who is most familiar with that philosopher and the anarchist movement. Both Kent and Zigrosser have been influenced by Columbia University English professor, Bayard Boyensen’s anarchism – but is Zigrosser who takes the deep dive into the philosophy. As Alan Antliff writes in Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), “Over the winter and into the summer of 1912, Zigrosser had retired to his family’s farm, where he studied Nietzsche’s books, reading Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Will to Power, The Gay Science, The Birth of Tragedy, and Ecce Homo.” He became dedicated to Boyensen’s “brand of antibourgeois anarchism,” and it showed its face in a June, 11, 1913 article he wrote titled “Sunday at Haledon” in the socialist newspaper, the New York Call. The article was about the Paterson, New Jersey silk strike.  See THIS source and THIS source. By the he time leaves Alaska, Kent has absorbed much from Zigrosser in addition to his own reading.

In the March 4 letter Kent continues: I think that in our new life we must cut loose from time and place and all the conventions of thought and living of this rotten period in the world’s history. I think that now with the ‘allied victory, which is an American victory, mankind is betrayed into such a slough of mediocrity as must stifle all the finer flowers of genius. I simply want to flee from it as from a hateful dangerous thing. I want our home to be a kingdom situated in space in the year of the lord 36. Amen.

ABOVE -- “The Vision,” from Rockwell Kent’s Mad Hermit series.

Kent is exhausted. He’s 36 years old and wants to reinvent himself, to have his life begin anew from this point on. The Fox Island adventure has been invigorating but grueling – not just physically. He’s in good shape and enjoys the challenge of manual labor. It is the spiritual and psychological stresses that have been punishing. In his letters we see how these anxieties give him boils and bowel problems. It’s like it was in Newfoundland, he tells Kathleen. While in Alaska he’s been navigating the patriotism and war issues while in Seward; agonizing over the influenza epidemic not only in Alaska but at home; fearful mostly for Rockie’s safety over each trip across Resurrection Bay; delving deep into his psyche during those early morning hours writing letters; tip toeing across the tightrope love triangle -- Kathleen, Rockwell, Hildegarde. All this while frantically struggling to make time to produce some art that will finally strike at the heart of both the critics and the public. Kent ends that March 4 letter: I am tired. I want to be with you. Don’t fight with me anymore. You’ve never gained a thing by fighting for it. You have gained and held my deepest reverence by your submission. That is your power to overcome me with. It is that alone which has reunited us now. Don’t be unhappy anymore, dear sweetheart and: don’t lose courage, for I have always adored you for that. Goodnight, my sweet sweet girl. Ever and ever your own lonely husband.

Up to this point, Kathleen has probably been enthralled with her husband’s letter. She most likely balks at this last paragraph. He can admit his weakness and flaws, his need for her protection and strength, his worship of her. But all this depends upon her submission to him, her melding her life into his aspirations and goals. Kent may be right – she hasn’t gained much by fighting with him except for his condescending ridicule and wrath. But he has decided to leave Hildegarde, even if he convinces himself it’s by his choice not hers. He is the great I AM -- and the new world will begin at his current age – 36.

ABOVE – Sketch from a Feb. 17, 1919 letter from Rockwell to Kathleen.

Having read all Rockwell and Kathleen’s correspondence between 1907 and 1919, I can tell you her faith in her husband is hopeful yet ambivalent. She’s been there before. He can be extremely convincing on paper. But that was then. In a Dec. 26, 1918 letter she writes to Rockwell while he’s on Fox Island demanding he send her a copy of his letter to Hildegarde, the one in which he tells her the affair is over. I’ll tell you why,” she writes. Rockwell, you have deceived me in many things connected with her and you know it. How easy it would be to deceive me in this! You have also written me very, very loving letters before this, promising to be faithful and kind & to make me happy. Has that come to pass! Certainly it hasn’t or I wouldn’t be writing to you as I am or crying as I am. You blame me for breaking my promise. Many, many, many, times have you broken yours to me, and thru that I have suffered tortures, even as you have suffered and more; so don’t blame me for that, even if I had done it. I feel that I have a right to see what you have written Hilda. I must see it if we are to begin anew, with a new love for one another, and if my love for you is to be a pure and happy one.

ABOVE -- From IMOL.

This is written before Rockwell’s confessional anniversary letters are delivered to her by Zigrosser and Chappell on their New Year’s Eve anniversary. This letter and earlier ones demonstrate that Rockwell’s affair with Jennie remains a wound, that knife in the heart Kathleen earlier described, that scar that will never really heal. Now his affair with Hildegarde opens that wound. Kent’s anniversary letters do give her more confidence and hope, but in early 1919 she discovers Rockwell sent a Christmas present to Hildegarde addressed to Mrs. Hildegarde Kent. This she will not abide. Kent claims he should have realized how insensitive such a letter would be – he doesn’t have that letter to Hildegarde that Kathleen wants to read. Hildegarde has it. Do you think I’m a lawyer and copy all my letters? he argues. But he does send her a letter to him from Hildegarde that affirms Hildegarde has received notice that their relationship is over.

Once the Hildegarde affair begins in 1916, the tone in Kathleen’s letters change. She’s no longer that 18-year-old he married on New Year’s Eve 1908. She knows him too well. During 1918, once she moves from Monhegan Island to New York City, she becomes even more assertive. During the fall of 1918, Rockwell hovers begs, insists even demands that Kathleen join him in Alaska. She refuses. They need to save money, and what about the children? she tells him. My mother is willing to take Clara, and your mother will take little Kathleen, Kent reminds her. You can take the little one. She can travel free. At this point, the little one is still called Hildegarde, but pretty soon Kathleen changes her name to Barbara. In a Dec. 13, 1918 letter to Carl Zigrosser, Kent writes: Paradise is far, very far from complete. I have terrible moments, hours, days of homesick despondency…for my family. There are times when if I could I’d have fled from here in any raging storm. He has death wishes, contemplates suicide. He can’t stand the loneliness, the isolation, the separation from Kathleen, the thought that he may lose her and his children. He convinces himself, however, that he has to return because she can’t remain faithful to him while he’s gone. She needs him, she’s desperate, she can’t survive on her own. In earlier entries I’ve printed excerpts from letters that show by October 1918 he’s already considering leaving Alaska early.

ABOVE – Nightmare, c. 1915. Ink on paper.

Kathleen has spent much of their ten-year marriage struggling alone with the children while Rockwell was off somewhere trying to earn a living. It was difficult. She missed him dearly. But over the years she has assembled a safety net – a cadre of relatives and close friends who offer her help. She is less anxious about the possibility of leaving Rockwell – and he has come to realize that. Kathleen hopes for the best but is less apprehensive if the marriage fails. While in New York City she gains more self-confidence, most likely with the help and advice she’s getting from some of her friends.

ABOVE – Kathleen Whiting Kent c. 1920 by Rockwell Kent, graphite on paper. Private Collection

Unfortunately, once Rockwell leaves Alaska and they are together, their intimate correspondence ends and we’re left to wonder at those revealing face-to-face conversations they must have had.

NEXT ENTRY

 Part 2 

FINDING HIS RURAL VERMONT SANCTUARY