PART 1 -- JULY 21-24: WILDERNESS & THE ALASKA PAINTINGS 1920

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 1 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: 1920

July 21-24, 2019

ABOVE – An ad announcing Wilderness in the March 7, 1920 New York Times. BELOW – An ad announcing the show of Kent’s paintings in the Feb. 29, 1920 New York Herald.

this wholeness of essence

Wilderness and the Alaska Paintings

Part I

Places have their identity as flowers or creatures have, their soul, or genius loci. A Place, in nature, is, after all, only a larger more complex organism, a symbiosis of many lives. All inviolate places have this wholeness of essence; their perfection lies in their remaining intact, undisturbed by intrusion of any life which does not itself participate in that harmonious organic unity…Never, in later life, do we experience that sense of perfect arrival that is, in childhood, the term of every walk; we bring the whole of ourselves to the very place, we have not already in thought moved on, or away; our thought is what we see and love and touch…That is perhaps the secret of our power of returning to certain places in memory; to places to which we never truly came, we can never return.

         Kathleen Raine in  Farewell Happy Fields (1973), the first volume of her Autobiographies.

Lars Matt Olson, Kent’s and Rockie’s friend and companion on Fox Island, says it best in a letter to Kathleen written on Dec. 22, 1918:

ther ar something strang about this alaska that I can not explaine nin tent of peple that go out vary sunn Coms bake to alaska so I am tanking efter your Husband Coms hom ther vill be no other talk except alaska. {There is something strange about this Alaska that I cannot explain. Nine tenths of people that go out {leave Alaska} very soon come back to Alaska.  So I am thinking {that} after your husband comes home there will be no other talk except Alaska.}

BELOW – Lars Matt Olson with his goats in his cabin on Fox Island. Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

For Kent, Fox Island is like those childhood memories Kathleen Raine describes above – perfect because the place itself remains in memory intact, undisturbed by intrusion of any life which does not itself participate in that harmonious organic unity… You may recall how disturbed Kent is in Wilderness when the island has visitors and they stay too long. They don’t belong there. They are not part of the place’s organic unity. They don’t contribute to the wholeness, the place’s essence. Kent enjoys their conversation for a time but is anxious for them to leave.

BELOW – Kathleen Raine’s obituary in the July 8, 2003 issue of The Guardian (London, England). Poet and William Blake scholar, Kathleen Raine, believed in the sacred nature of all life. With Blake, she believed that one power alone makes a poet – imagination, the divine vision. Like WB Yeats, another poet’s biography she wrote, she believed poetry and religion were the same thing. As this obituary says, To this vision she committed not only her poetry and erudition, but her whole life. She stood as a witness to spiritual values in a society that rejected them.

Ironically, Kent’s disturbing deep dives into his soul during those late evening, early morning sessions on Fox Island when his daemon emerged – these descents become part of that harmonious organic unity. It provides him with the creative will and energy to produce his Alaska art. Perhaps that’s why Kent tells Ruggles in a Feb. 18, 1920 letter that the two paintings of most significance to him are Superman and The North Wind because they represent Will and Energy.

ABOVE –  – “Superman,” one of the pen and inks in Wilderness. The actual painting hasn’t been seen since 1920, Kent scholar Jake Milgram Wien emailed me recently. Presumably destroyed, he says. Perhaps painted over by Kent who may have feared that it was too Nietzschean, when Nietzsche was seen as a proto-Nazi in the 1930’s. Kent’s reference to “Superman” representing “Will” and the “North Wind” symbolizing “Energy” shows how Nietzsche influenced him, especially while he was on Fox Island. We might assume that the missing painting was based upon the pen and ink above. BELOW – North Wind -- Energy

Kent redirects that negativity into the dynamism that produces both his book and his art. In his biography of Kent, David Traxel calls Wilderness a remarkable book, and adds, With lucid style, and in diary form, Kent recaptured Fox Island. Olson, his son, and Rockwell himself came alive on is pages. The artist’s love of Alaska’s beauty also shone forth. Only the agony of his loneliness for Kathleen was muted. He had taken the reality and made a work of art.

As I’ve suggested, it wasn’t only his loneliness for his wife; it was also his realization that she was now a grown woman, not the innocent just-turned 18-year-old he had married on New Year’s Eve 1908. Kathleen forces Kent to make a choice – it will be either her or Hildegarde, and she makes it clear she will no longer tolerate his unfaithfulness and unkindness. In the fall of 1918 she taunts him with the interest other men show her on Monhegan Island. Kent is ready to leave Fox Island and return home as early as mid-October. It is not only Kent’s agony we see the letters. It was Kathleen’s agony as well. Once she moves to New York, Kathleen reflects on what her life would have been had she never married and pursued a career in music. She loves Rockwell and tells him so, but also informs him at this point in her life she's prepared to leave him. The suffering we see in her letters has not been fully told. In fairness to Traxel, he was not writing a biography of Kathleen, nor was he focused on their relationship. He did an outstanding job of covering the extremely full and controversial life of a complicated artist – while plowing through thousands of letters in the Archives of American Art. Ultimately, as Traxel says, Kent knew the story he had to tell was about the wonders and relationships he chronicled in his illustrated letters – not the emotional abyss he had descended into while writing ranting letters to Kathleen into the early morning hours. He took all that negativity and with the energy of that fierce north wind he encountered in Resurrection Bay and the will and determination of an advancing glacier -- he turned his suffering and misery into art. An important a part of his experience is the human element of Fox Island -- that secular trinity – the old pioneer, the middle-aged artist, and the child. Kent has embedded himself within a William Blake engraving, his struggling, agonized figure locked in the middle – striving for the wisdom of experience on one side without losing the innocence of youth on the other. The book and the art he produced tapped into universal human longings, desires, and yearnings – especially after the horrors of the Great War, the tragedy of the influenza epidemic, and the chaotic political divisions of the year 1919. People wanted peace and a return to home, family and the simple life. Warren Harding won the Presidency on a return to normalcy in 1920, and Kent earned his success latching on to the same movement. The popularity of our western National Park System was growing, and soon the Alaska Railroad would make it easier to visit the territory from Resurrection Bay to the Interior. 

With the quote near the beginning of this entry, the old fox farmer, Lars Olson, writes about the Alaska mystique – the myth of the frontier. Myths are not lies. Rather, they try to express intangible truths in a form that humans can understand. In my nearly 50 years in Alaska, I’ve met many who have come on a visit, decided to stay, left, and then returned to spend the rest of their lives here. You’ll find professionals – doctors, lawyers, teachers, CEO’s – who are working as guides, bed and breakfast owners, or boat captains because they choose a life style over a job. Historically, many arrived on the frontier to escape a troubled past, hoping to reinvent themselves in the eyes of strangers who don’t ask too many questions. Historically, small towns like Seward have sought out new arrivals with talent and attempted to convince them to settle. On the frontier, one theory goes, fewer people means each human has more value to the community.

While working on Wilderness and then the paintings in Vermont -- Alaska and Fox Island must be on Kent’s mind. He is concerned about Olson. In his early 1919 letters to Kathleen he expresses some guilt about leaving the old Swede on his own. Olson isn’t in good health and Kent does much of the heavy work for him on the island. There are family matters at “Egypt,” of course, with his intense work refurbishing the farm house and property. Visitors and social life are both a positive and negative distraction from his writing and painting. The beauty of Vermont and the Green Mountains enthrall him. To Kent, wilderness isn’t so much a specific place as it is a state of mind – an attitude or spirit one can embed within his or her soul. But a significant part of the wildness concept that Kent embraces after Alaska probably comes from his memories of that Fox Island. He hesitated to privilege the Alaska journey, however. In his preface to that special 1970 edition of Wilderness he quotes his son Rockie, now a balding, six-foot-four tall scientist as saying that the year we spent together on Fox Island was the happiest of all my life. Kent replies, “Of mine, too, Sonny,” I might have added but for loyalty to my whole long past and the “adventures,” both quiet and unquiet, that had somehow come to fill it. Kent plays ambivalent about how important Fox Island is to his life. I contend it was the seminal interior experience up to that point in his life, but he feels he'd be disloyal to his other experiences if he says so. 

Kent has gone through all his illustrated letters from Fox Island. I doubt he reviewed all the disturbing, toxic letters between him and Kathleen. The two probably discuss some issues brought up in the correspondence. They both recognize the lack of communication and misunderstandings that occurred due to the time it took their letters to travel back and forth. Kathleen especially needs a face to face with her husband. In her letters she often laments her inability to communicate her feelings in writing – though she certainly rises to the occasion at times. For Kent, most likely, those emotionally torturous nights on Fox Island, extending into the early morning hours – are now in the past. They don’t matter. They were all part of the process – and the energy created has resulted in a successful pen and ink exhibit and a book contract.

As Kent goes through his source material he decides to maintain the diary format he used in his illustrated letters. He selects and reworks the art work. This is his first book. He is pressured to make cuts. There are a few unnecessary politics jabs that would be dangerous to print, and probably too much local information about Seward that would be of little interest to general readers. He doesn’t agree with all the cuts, but at this point in his life Kent doesn’t have the power to force the issue. He can’t pass up this opportunity – the possibility of literary and artistic fame when the book and the art work emerge simultaneously. 

This is why, I believe, that shortly before he died, he spent tremendous time and energy producing a new edition of Wilderness that restored much of what he had to cut. This would be the last major literary project of his life. That first book, the one that represented such a seminal experience – he wanted to get it right. Was he back on Fox Island in his mind with little Rockie and old Olson in early March 1971 as he sat in his easy chair at his Asgaard farm in upstate New York, signing that special Ward-Richie Press edition of Wilderness? His third wife, Sally, told me Alaska was much on his mind during that time, as one might expect – as he reread the original manuscript and decided what to republish. As he sat signing the books he collapsed and died ten days later at the hospital. It wasn’t an easy ten days, Sally recalled. Though unconscious, he struggled to hold on to life. That would be like Rockwell Kent. Never give up. What dreams went through is mind during those ten days? Was he wandering the coastline of Monhegan Island or Newfoundland? Sailing toward the Cape along Tierra del Fuego? Was he trekking across the snowfields of Greenland? Was he back on Fox Island?

Rockwell Kent had experienced fully all those places. But there had been something special about Fox Island, so unique that even he sometimes had a difficult time articulating its intangible attraction. Why? Perhaps because his mysticism during this part of his life had given him a vision of what's been called  the mountain behind the mountain. I’m not claiming he had visions like William Blake or Emanuel Swedenborg. Perhaps. Who knows? But months later and thousands of miles away in Vermont, Rockwell Kent is able to recreate the magic presence he had experienced on Fox Island. As Kathleen Raine wrote in the quote I began with, That is perhaps the secret of our power of returning to certain places in memory; to places to which we never truly came, we can never return. Kent had lived fully alert on Fox Island -- in body, mind and spirit.

And now, in March 1920 – after the hint of success and fame with his Knoedler Gallery pen and ink exhibition – after struggling to deal with the Wilderness proofs while finishing the paintings – after having the paintings framed and setting them up the night before the exhibit at Knoedler's Gallery -- he anxiously waits for the opening followed by the reviews and hopefully some sales. This could be the moment he had been waiting for.

NEXT

Part 2

Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: 1920