PART 6 - JUNE 23-25 FLIGHT FROM THE CITY: VERMONT & A LETTER TO OLSON

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 6 – Flight from the City:

Vermont & A Letter to Olson

June 23-25, 2019

 ABOVE – Kent and his family at Egypt in Arlington, Vermont. From right to left, daughter Kathleen; Rockwell; Barbara; Clara; Kent's wife, Kathleen, and Gordon. Son, Rockie is missing. Gordon was born in October 1920. This photo was probably taken in 1922. Photo from a private Kent family collection.

Events moved quickly once Kent returned from Alaska. He left Seward on March 31, 1919. He was home in early April. The show of his drawings occurred within a month followed by outstanding reviews and financial success. He had a book contract to feature his drawings, investors for Rockwell Kent, Inc., and patrons who supported him in other ways. The fame and success he craved looked promising. At the very least, the art world now gave him the attention he knew he deserved. The rest would be up to him -- which meant he had to invest his whole being into the Alaska book and paintings. This was his opportunity. His whole life could change when his paintings and book emerged together.

We know less about the inner workings of his personal life during this time, especially his relationship with Kathleen. Their revealing correspondence while Rockwell was in Alaska has ended. Now they can talk face to face and we have no written record. Kent has ended his relationship with Hildegarde as he promised, but he does write a few letters to her into 1920 – probably just to settle up things. He has managed to fulfill another guarantee he made to Kathleen by finding the perfect rural retreat far from the city where he can work on both his art and his marriage. On an emotional level, his family is as important to him as is his art. In a March 4, 1919 letter to Kathleen, he had word-painted a stunning image of the ideal place he would create for her and the children. It became a promise he had to keep. He wrote: 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.

ABOVE – An excerpt from Kent’s March 4, 1919 letter to Kathleen. BELOW – Kent at Arlington, Vermont with his daughters Barbara and Clara, from a Kent family album.

The success upon his return was both a surprise to him and an expectation. He knew he deserved it. He had worked his heart out and had an inner confidence that the Alaska art represented his best. But he’d felt that about Newfoundland, too – and that whole venture had been a failure. When his demons visited him during the cold, dark, isolation of Fox Island, he realized that Kathleen was not the same innocent 18-year-old he had married ten years earlier. She was savvy to his ways now and less tolerant of what he called his transgressions. In her letters she told him of her love, but also that she would no longer abide his cruelty, unkindness and affairs. Soon he’d be 40-years-old. Among the lantern-lit shadows of those murky nights on Fox Island – those Hours of the Wolf -- Kent may have feared that if Alaska turned into another Newfoundland, he’d not only remain an artistic failure – he’d also lose his wife and family. In a March 6, 1919 letter to Kathleen, Rockwell wrote: Put fences of thorns all about me and I’ll help you in building them; take me into the wilderness and hide me from temptations and, even if I don’t like it for its own sake, I’d go for yours; but above all please please mother darling try to be to me that compliment that my wild and unstable nature, rightly or wrongly, requires,- and these thorns and wilderness can be or not be -- our happiness will be secure. No – I know that your happiness too must be achieved; but we assume now, don’t we darling, that when we’re both true and loving to each other we’ll both be so happy that nothing else will matter a bit?

BELOW -- The excerpt from the March 6, 1919 Kent letter quoted above.

If Kent’s Alaska book is to come out simultaneously with his painting exhibit in early 1920, he has to get the manuscript to the publisher soon. That task becomes a priority. He and his family probably live in the barn and/or in tents that first summer while he tends to chores, plans the house refurbishing, and completes his book. In the biography, David Traxel writes: He isolated himself from all distractions, then went through the journal he had kept for his son, supplementing it with material from his letters to Zigrosser. He may also have used other letters, like the one I own that he wrote to artist Gus Mager. He subtitles his book -- A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. Although some of his letters to Kathleen contain descriptions of his day-to-day life and the wonders of Alaska, most of them are more personal. I doubt whether he even reread them, for they might have driven him back into the deep despair he experienced on Fox Island. Perhaps that energy had been useful in producing his art, but it serves him no purpose now. His focus now has to be on the whole concept of wilderness – its freedom and liberty; its people like Olson and features like Bear Glacier that embody that wildness; its awesome power symbolized by the north wind, fearful seas, and the rugged towering mountains rising from ocean’s edge. During the summer of 1919, though his body is in Vermont -- much of his mind in still in Alaska. 

Kent receives a letter from Olson in June or early July. I haven't found that letter, but the artist does publish an excerpt from it in Wilderness under the Jan. 18 journal. Olson relates an incident on Fox Island that happened on May 29, and Kent prints it misspellings and all: Had a scear or acksedent on the eighteenth. i vas putteng som grase in to the fox Corrals an i most heav left the hok of van i turnd around the dor vas open and 1 fox var over at the tant i cald to me et vas suppertam to Com bake and get som sepper and He sat down and luckt at me bot finly mosed of op in the Hill. i take teh other fox and put em in the other Corall and left the 2 -- tow Coralls open andput feed in the seam es nothing ad apen. the first night i did not sleep vary val. the sakond night and not showing up, bot naxt morning i Came out to the Corall the feed vas goin en the pan an the fox vas sleping on the box var he allves du and i felt a little Beater van the doors ar shut.

By the end of August 1919 he has finished the book. On Sept. 2 he writes to Olson in Alaska.

ABOVE – A portion of Kent’s Sept. 2, 1919 letter to Olson. Archives of American Art.  BELOW – A photo Kent took of Olson and two of his goats in his cabin on Fox Island. Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

We haven’t heard from you for a long time, Kent writes to Olson. That probably means you have been staying right there on the best spot in the world living the best life there is. It’s fine here, but I envy you. I can’t think of Fox Island without being a bit home-sick. Kent’s concept of wilderness is all encompassing. Wildness embodies the kind of liberty and freedom one internalizes wherever one lives. On Aug. 2, 1918 – as he and Rockie traveled by train through Canada, Kent wrote to Carl Zigrosser: The prairie is impressive. Land so monotonously bare and flat that it suggests the infinite as the sea and sky do…It’s so marvelously elemental! Echoing Henry David Thoreau, life stripped bare, everything elemental represented wildness. He incorporates this idea in Wilderness in the Feb. 19, 1919 entry. He and Rockie lament that they must leave Fox Island. Kent wonders at the connection between a man near forty and a little boy of nine. What they have in common, perhaps, is that they have exchanged the crowded, complicated world for the healing solitude of the simple life with its freedom and liberty. Kent writes: It seems that we have both together by chance turned out of the beaten, crowded way and come to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness; and here we have found OURSELVES – for the wilderness is nothing else. This is a motif that runs through Kent’s life. In Salamina (1935) he writes: Why do men love the wilderness? For its mountains? – there may be none. For its forests, lakes, and rivers? It might be a desert; men would love it still. Desert, the monotonous ocean, the unbroken snowfields of the North, all solitudes, no matter how forlorn, are the only abiding-place on earth of liberty. Not long after his divorce with Kathleen in 1926, she sells the Egypt property. Kent marries Frances Lee and the two seek out a new rural retreat far from the city. They find it in far Upstate New York (Au Sable Forks) at the home he builds and calls Asgaard. He eventually turns it into a working dairy farm. Kent describes this search in This is My Own (1940).

So – working on his book while in Vermont during that summer of 1919 – part of him misses Alaska while another part feels refreshed and hopeful as his professional and personal life seem to merge positively. The beauty of Vermont’s Green Mountains thrills him. He writes to Carl Zigrosser on June 22^nd: I really think that every time and forever that I stand on these hilltops I’ll love life again as if it were all glorious. Kent is in an exuberant mood. He is together with his family. In Arlington they lived the simple life that Kent would highlight in Wilderness. They read to each other, sing, make music in the evenings, and engage in local theatrics – as Rockwell works on the house. Here everything goes well, he tells Olson. I’m starting on a large addition to my house. I’ve been hewing the timbers for the second floor. They’re of oak, and that’s pretty hard stuff to cut. My foundation is under way. That’s the worst job of all. Tomorrow we move onto our own place. We’ll probably sleep in the barn until we’ve had time to paint some of the rooms and put the place in order. Everyone asks me whether or not you’re coming. But I have to tell them I’m afraid not. Kent writes about the play his family is participating in, about Vermont days after the Revolutionary War. We’ve given it in two towns before full houses…my wife, little Kathleen and I, - Rockwell too…My wife was the heroine and I suppose I was the hero. Little Kathleen got as much applause as anyone in the play. She looked very pretty and she surprised the audience by turning somersaults all over the stage. Rockwell was an Indian…It’s all prohibition here but I had a flask full of Irish whiskey in my pocket and drank out of it all through the show. The audience thought it was part of the play and supposed it to be some kind of make-believe drink. My book is in the hands of the Publishers, but it will not come out until next winter. I’ve set Seward about as Seward deserves. And my dear old friend, I’ve paid you part of the tribute you deserve. What does Seward deserve? Kent describes Seward as a tradesman’s town, in many ways a typical Alaskan commercial outpost with hideous architecture. It’s a place where generally capitalist views prevail – narrow, reactionary thought on modern issues. But that’s not the whole story. He is surprised at the amenities available in such an isolated, frontier town. Kent has bonded with Seward’s old timers, the pioneers. He begins to realize that for most it’s not about the gold or the money. It’s about the spirit of adventure, the freedom, the liberty. Olson is the best example, as represented in the stories he tells Kent. Like other gold seekers, the old man prospects, finds gold, gets rich, goes to San Francisco, spends it all, and goes back for more.

The rest of Kent’s Sept. 2, 1919 letter to Olson is political. Most veterans he meets are disillusioned, he says, and claims they wish the allies had been defeated. The man who talks patriotism now-a-days sounds like a jackass braying in the wilderness. The best hope for the world, Kent avers, is in the Russian Revolution – but the capitalists are doing their best to stop that uprising by sending in troops. But those soldiers are refusing to fight against Russia, according to Kent, and the falsehoods don’t fool anyone but such poor, brainless simpletons as you do find in far off parts of the world and the half-imbecile type of which that creature on the Gateway is a blooming specimen. One of only two references I’ve found from Kent about his battle with the Seward Gateway and the local teacher. He ends the letter thanking Olson for the oil painting he has sent him, saying it is always being admired. I think the world of it. My guess is this is the portrait Kent did of Olson, the one he gave the old Swede for Christmas. At this point, Olson has no firm plans to join Kent in Vermont. He’s about ready to give up on Alaska, and he travels light. He has no family or relatives as far as I can determine. What could he do with a portrait of himself? Best give it to Kent and Rockie as a remembrance of their time together.

NEXT ENTRY

OLSON’S RESPONSE TO ROCKWELL’S SEPT. 2, 1919 LETTER