PART 2 - JUNE 3 - 8, 2019 VERMONT: FLIGHT FROM THE CITY

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 2 - Vermont: Flight from the City

June 3-8, 2019

ABOVE – Rockwell Kent, his new car, his family and members of the Fisher family. Kent stands at right. Seated beside him on the running board is Dorothy Canfield Fisher. To her right is his son Rockie. At far left in the car could be his wife, Kathleen, his daughters or some members of the Fisher family. The little boy at right in the car looks too old to be his new son, Gordon, born in Oct. 1920. This photo was probably taken sometime in July 1922 or shortly after. On July 5, 1922 the Bennington Banner reported the following: Rockwell Kent has purchased a Ford touring car of the Arlington Garage. Photo from Rockwell Kent’s “Egypt”: Shadow & Light in Vermont by Jamie Franklin and Jake Milgram Wien (2012). From the Kent/Whiting photo album, private collection.

 VERMONT

Flight from the city

Part 2

Rockwell and Kathleen moved in with Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Aunt Mattie at Arlington. And so, Kent wrote in IMOL, after a careful study of the maps and, following that, a good night’s sleep, I left Kathleen and took the morning train to Manchester. From there it took him two hours to hike ten miles to Peru, where he sought out a specific 40-acre house for sale – a little, old-time house set in the midst of open fields and distantly rimmed round by mountains. It belonged to an old man named Batchelder. In IMOL he describes a bizarre conversation with Batchelder that focused more about the old man’s hound dog than about the $2000 price he was asking for his property. Kent could afford the price but he couldn’t make a deal. A year later, Kent writes in IMOL, while purchasing the house on behalf of his friend and patron, Marie Sterner, he leaned from a reliable source that Batchelder was not only a scoundrel but insane. With the help of the Fisher’s, the Kent’s did find the perfect place: At road’s end, high on the southern spur of Mt. Equinox and commanding a far view down the valley lay a farm of more or less one hundred acres., with a house that though finely situated was in a state of advanced repair. In fact the whole place had fallen into such neglect as would indicate its occupants’ best hope to be to sell it and move out. Everything was perfect – except the $3000 price. Not that it wasn’t worth it, Kent noted. It contained 60 more acres than did the Batchelder place. They turned it down and Dorothy Fisher asked why. Kent told her they just couldn’t afford it. She laughed, Kent wrote, and said, We’ll let you have the thousand dollars. So buy the place. And they did. The Kent’s eventually paid her back. In an August 1920 letter to Fisher, Rockwell wrote: I’m sending over my cheque for Thirteen Hundred Dollars ($1300.-) which pays off the mortgage on the farm. Your lending me that sum of money was most spontaneous, the finest act of friendship that I have encountered in my life. I do not forget that there is almost, if not quite, a year’s interest due on the money. Before long I’ll be over and fix that up. It is difficult to frame any expression of thanks for an act that on your part was surpassingly generous to us and determined in definate (sic) measure the course of our lives.

BELOW – Kent’s house in Arlington, c. 1921. The house burned down in the 1930's, but Kathleen had sold it shortly after their divorce in 1926. The unidentified little boy looks too young to be Rockie and too old to be Gordon. Photo from Rockwell Kent’s “Egypt”: Shadow & Light in Vermont by Jamie Franklin and Jake Milgram Wien (2012). From the Kent/Whiting photo album, private collection.

The Kent’s were not the first talents Fisher brought to Vermont. Famous for her nonfiction, novels and short stories, her family history dated to Arlington’s early years. As Jamie Fisher writes in Rockwell Kent: Shadow & Light in Vermont (2012), Canfield fostered Arlington’s cultural blossoming not only through her work as an author, but more broadly through her generosity and support of other writers, artists and musicians. During the 1920’s and 1930’s she went out of her way, both personally and as a member of the Vermont Commission on Country Life and through her efforts with the Vermont Publicity Bureau, to attract to Vermont , and Arlington in particular, “those men and women teaching in schools, colleges and universities; those who are doctors, lawyers, musicians, writers, artists – in a word those who earn their living  by a professionally trained use of their brains.”

BELOW – Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Even with that loan, most of Kent’s recent monetary windfall was gone and he was back in debt. But this was nothing new. David Traxel writes: By this time they were used to poverty. They spent little on clothes or entertainment, their food was simple. But they needed money now to run Egypt, as the farm was called, and the children were growing and needed more of just about everything. Kent, turning forty, was tired of living on the financial edge. This is where Kent’s plan to incorporate himself paid off. His friends, Putnam and Zigrosser, had found enthusiastic investors. Kent reasoned that if he could trade the time he spent trying to earn a living into time producing art, he could easily pay back his patrons. There were buyers, as the Knoedler show had demonstrated. As general manager of his corporation, Kent’s salary would be $2000 a year at $166.66 a month. He’d also get expenses covered for administrative expenses for what was called his manufacturing plant, an echo of economist Ralph Borsodi’s philosophy of the simple life.

ABOVE – Syndicated article about Ralph Borsodi in the May 13, 1922 issue of the Emporia Gazetta (Kansas). BELOW – The stock certificate Kent designed for Rockwell Kent, Incorporated.

Kent’s art became property of the corporation, with a 20% a yearly dividend payed to investors out of profits. If no profits resulted, shareholders could choose the value from Kent’s art. By January 1920 – even before he completed his Alaska paintings and book – he produced a $1500 profit. Within a short time, he bought-out all his shareholders. Now if he could just focus on finishing the paintings and writing his book, more sales would ensue and more money. Kent would need time to repair and restore his new property at Egypt, but that would be a good break from his art work. After all, in Alaska he spent much time cutting wood, repairing his cabin, cooking meals, mending clothes, writing letters, and traveling back and forth between Seward and the island -- in addition to educating and reading to Rockie. Even the rainy weather, the fierce seas, and the growing darkness and loneliness had conspired against him – had nearly drove him insane at times. But he had won. He had competed with and defeated the elements and still had been able to produce a large quantity of drawings and paintings. A little work on a dilapidated old farm house was nothing compared to that. Again – for the fifth time in far less than a score of years, he wrote in IMOL, I am at work upon a house for all or some of us to live in. Again I’m jacking up sagged timbers, leveling old floors, laying new ones, ripping out the worn out, building in the new; making it, with little reverence for the past, to be as near as could be as we would have built it.

To build an addition, Kent cut down some red oak which he described as pretty hard stuff. He took lessons from an experienced Canadian logger on how to form oak logs with a broad axe, square them, and cut the mortise and tenon. Carl Zigrosser showed up to help as did a new admirer, Egmont Arens, who later wrote, After a day of back-breaking labor Kent would knock off, cook dinner for us, and after dinner we would sing and tell stories until about eleven. Then Kent would sit down and draw for about two hours. After the most exhausting physical exertion, Kent’s hand did not tremble in the slightest degree. Next morning he was up at five as usual; and we kept this up until I for one had to go home and rest. I couldn’t stand the pace. (from “Rockwell Kent – Illustrator,” The Book Collector Packet 1, no. 9, Dec. 1932)  

Kent had met Arens upon his return from Alaska. Arens owned The Washington Square Bookshop in New York City and the periodical, The Playboy. In 1919, Arens published some of Kent’s and Rockie’s Alaska drawings. In later years Arens recalled that, after seeing the exhibition of Kent’s Alaska drawings, I lost no time in finding Marie Sterner who was conducting the exhibition and having her introduce me to Rockwell Kent. I sputtered forth my enthusiasm as best I could and told Kent that these drawings must be made into a book, and I offered the services of myself and my printing press. Imagine my delight when Kent entered into my plans without a moment’s hesitation…A great many of the drawings had already been sold and it was necessary to have engravings made while he collection was still on exhibition, so we lifted the drawings from the walls a few at a time, took them to the engraver and back again before they would be missed from the exhibition. Arens planned to publish the book with some text as in an elaborate relatively expensive limited edition. Kent’s friend, publisher George Putnam, thought the book should be printed in a form more available to the public. Arens wrote: I raised no objections because I felt the book deserved a wider distribution that Putnam could give it.

ABOVE – Issue No. 6 of Egmont Arens Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire.     BELOW – One of Rockwell’s illustrations in that issue. NEXT – Arens also published some of young Rockie’s drawings that had been in the Knoedler exhibit. Special thanks to Jake Milgram Wien for sending me these illustrations from Playboy.

Both later regretted their decision to let Putnam take control, according to Arens. Both Kent and I were sorry afterward that we did not go through with our original plan of making a deluxe limited edition, for Putnam’s did an atrocious job of printing the first edition of Wilderness…The sad experience that Rockwell Kent gained with bookmaking in that first venture stood him good stead in all of his future work. He made it a rule that he would never again allow any of his books to be published without the stipulation that he personally supervise the format and the printing of them…”

Since Kent had not yet established any significant economic clout in the art world when Wilderness was published, he had little say in the editing and printing process. As he is working on his paintings and finishing up the draft of Wilderness in Vermont -- on Aug. 12, 1919 – he writes a letter to his friend, composer Carl Ruggles. Mrs. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, has written a very fine and appreciative introduction to the book. The publishers count on this of great value in the selling of the book. I don’t think my own part of it is viewed very appreciatively. I have had to cut out some of my reflections on the war,- but as they were not at all essential to the book I put up no protest. I’d have liked, however, to have put into print my contempt of the outrageous patriotic frameup. It’s clear Kent isn’t satisfied with the book’s content. On the other hand, with the political atmosphere in 1920, if Putnam had included all Kent’s antiwar sentiments the book would have been, if not unpublishable, at least controversial and most likely a failure. I’m confident Kent realized that. As he had written to Hildegarde in the winter of 1918, he desperately craved success and fame. At this point in his life, on the edge of that celebrity with the triumph of his Knoedler exhibition drawings, Kent was quite willing to compromise. That would happen less and less with his other books. It’s no coincidence that he demanded complete control over every printing aspect of his now famous illustrated edition of Moby Dick – and by the late 1920’s he had the reputation and credibility to make that demand. It is also no coincidence that not long before he died in 1971, he arranged to have a special signed and limited edition of Wilderness published by the Ward Richie Press. He was able to get the original manuscript, which he had donated to the Soviet Union in 1960 with much of his art, loaned back to him. That edition, which Wesleyan University Press reprinted in 1996 with my foreword, restored much of what he had originally wanted published in 1920 – including a significant amount about Seward, its people, and Lars Olson. The Rockwell Kent letters online at the Archives of American Art contain a category titled Wilderness. Within that you’ll find the extensive correspondence Kent had concerning that special edition of Wilderness demonstrating how resolute and adamant he was about finally getting an edition that would satisfy him.

BELOW – From left to right -- The first edition of Wilderness; the 1970 special, signed limited edition with slip case; the 1996 Wesleyan University Press reprint with my foreword.

In 1924, Arens did publish a portfolio, Alaska Drawings, which included fifteen of the originals in the Knoedler exhibit and thirteen that were not. In addition to a more precise format, Arens used a high-quality Japan paper. As Kent scholar Robert Rightmire points out, It’s difficult to argue with Putnam’s choice of paper because fine press work and mass publication are inherently different. Putnam was publishing a book for wide circulation, Arens was not. Kent and Arens seem to view this work {Wilderness} as drawings accompanied with text while Putnam’s considered it as an illustrated book.

TO BE CONTINUED