AUG. 22 - 25 PART 8: WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA - INFLUENCE AND REVIEWS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 8 – Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska: Influence & Reviews

Aug. 22-25, 2019

ABOVE – Henry Beston. BELOW – The Fo’castle.  Both photos courtesy of The Henry Beston Society.

Among the many things for which I remain profoundly grateful is the fact that so much of life defies human explanation. The unimaginative and the dull may insist that they have an explanation for everything, and level at every wonder and mystery of life their popgun theories, but God be praised, their wooden guns have not yet dislodged the smallest star. It is well that this be so, for the human spirit can die of explanations, even if, like many modern formulae, they are but explanations which do not explain.

         Henry Beston in Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm (1948).

The despair and misery of the Great War was not something Henry Sheahan had to read about in the newspapers or history books. He experienced it first-hand. He later wrote under the name of Henry Beston. As Don Wilding, Cape Cod historian writes in “Beston and the Great War,” that conflict was one of the major factors connected to the solitude Beston sought within the Fo’castle, his small hut on the Cape Cod beach. His mother was French, and his father and brother were doctors. In 1915 – while Rockwell Kent and his family are struggling in Newfoundland -- Sheahan decided to use his medical knowledge to join the Harvard Ambulance Service as part of the French Army. He recalled a long, long winter, the great melancholy sound of distant cannon in the night, a bombarded town and the arriving whizz and rending crash of the big shells, an air shell at Verdun which all but got me. In 1916 he published a memoir A Volunteer Poilu and in 1919 became a press representative for the U.S. Navy and saw action at sea. In 1919 he published Full Speed Ahead about that experience.

ABOVE – Henry Beston in his American Field Service uniform, 1916. Photo courtesy of The Henry Beston Society.

Like many veterans, his war experience left him scarred. Upon his return from service, he edited The Living Age, part of the Atlantic Monthly. Soon he began writing fairy tales to cleanse the horrors of war from his soul. A writing assignment about the Coast Guard found him trekking the Cape Cod beaches with Coast Guard surf men as they did their rounds. That, and later experiences in New Mexico with the Navajo, opened his eyes to the healing power of nature. His memories of those Cape Cod beaches beckoned, and soon he retreated there within the solitude of his hut.

BELOW – Henry Beston on the Cape Cod dunes. Photo courtesy of The Henry Beston Society.

The world to-day is sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot…The great rhythms of nature, to-day so dully disregarded, wounded even, have here their spacious and primeval liberty; cloud and shadow of cloud, wind and tide, tremor of night and day.

         Henry Beston in The Outermost House A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod (1928).

In the spring of 1920, Beston – still Henry Sheahan – visited Knoedler’s Gallcry to view Rockwell Kent’s Alaska paintings. He most likely also read Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska at this time. Almost a year later, on Feb. 16, 1921 he wrote to the woman he had met the year before who would become his wife in 1929, Elizabeth Cottsworth: So you have been reading Rockwell Kent. I thought his canvases, which I saw at Knoedler's in N.Y., quite the most extraordinary things I saw last year. The new technique of course, bright blue and sea green meeting edge to edge without any attempt at shading, a queer enough style when used to bring out a conventional interior, but oh, by all the Olympians, what a style for Alaska! In that frozen land, without “atmosphere” in the painter’s sense, surface evidently does approach surface in that unblurred manner which the new technique illustrates, mountains that are cones of solid white rise from solid ocean green and thrust their lifeless pinnacles hard against a sky hard as steel. The gallery at Knolders was positively haunted with an arctic cold and desolation. The sense of silence, of polar immobility that dwelt in the canvas was stupendous. Do see them if they are sent to California. I like Blake. There is so much “rhythm of the universe” in his work that studied contemplation of his drawings almost makes me dizzy. There was a wonderful exhibition of Blake originals at the Fogg Art last year; I rushed to it hot foot. The present sensation is a Russian who is exhibiting a number of scenes from the legendary history of Russia. (New Technique) But of him, more anon…

{Years ago I felt the echo of Rockwell Kent in Beston’s writing, especially in The Outermost House. I contacted Don Wilding, founder and head of The Henry Beston Society, and later Daniel G. Payne, author of Orion on the Dunes: A biography of Henry Beston. They searched Beston’s correspondence for references to Rockwell Kent and sent me the above and one other letter. I want to acknowledge this and thank them for their help.}

A world without wonder, and a way of mind without wonder, becomes a world without imagination, and without imagination man is a poor and stunted creature. Religion, poetry, and all the arts have their sources in this upwelling of wonder and surprise. Let us thank God that so much will forever remain out of reach, safe from our inquiry, inviolate forever from our touch.

         Henry Beston in Northern Farm: A Glorious Year on a Small Maine Farm 

(1948).

Perhaps Beston had read some of the reviews of Kent’s Alaska paintings – or the one of Wilderness in the May 30, 1920 New York Times Book Review, placing the book at the top choice of the season’s publications: The very pearl of this collection is Rockwell Kent’s “Wilderness.” To what can we compare this very beautiful and poignant record of one of the most unusual adventures ever chronicled? It is not like “Walden,” it is not like any other diary of experiences in the wilderness. It is the artless diary of a father who takes his little son to Alaska and there on f/ox Island makes the most unusual and amazing Winter home. Those who know the appeal of Rockwell Kent’s art, the strength, which is the strength of genius, of his drawings, will know how to places this volume when we say that the text is even superior in force and beauty to the drawings. The review compares the book to Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, but adds that these books are as rare in their way as “Wilderness.”

Most early reviews sounded similar, and by the fall of 1920 even young Rockie was getting raves as his father. A review in the Oct. 10, 1920 Pittsburgh Post noted: Of all the recent expressions of children that have appeared, the sporadic drawings and sayings of young Rockwell Kent in his father’s illustrated journal, “Wilderness,” are the most spontaneous and original…Young Rockwell’s work has a truly natural quality. In comparing his drawings with those of his father, a mature artist, one finds that the child has not copied either his father’s technique or idea. The boy has transcribed the mountains, the birds and other objects within his experience as part of his adventure.

BELOW -- A list of Rockwell Kent’s competition that season, just from his own publisher. New York Times, April 18, 1920.

Another review (April 4, 1920) in the Buffalo Courier noted that the art and writing are set down with the accent of conviction and with a symbolism that gets its message straight to the spirt at first glance before the intellectual process can get to work. This was evidently his main purpose and not the study of his nine-year-old son, but he took his son along, and this delightful young creature constituted for the greater part of the time his entire human environment. He has for young Rockwell the whole-hearted appreciation tinged with gratitude for his being alive and at hand, which makes an ideal basis for understanding, and by the time the “journal of quiet adventure” is at an end it is just as much a record of young Rockwell’s reaction to primitive life, to beauty and to his little brothers, the beasts, and the portrait drawing of the boy on the first page is no more vivid to the reader than the image of the child he has made by the last one.

A few reviews were mixed. On March 14, 1920 a critic from the New York Tribune wrote: The drawings of Rockwell Kent which adorn “Wilderness” (Putnam) “a journal of quiet adventure in Alaska,” are so fine and unusual that it is rather a pity to find that the text, which accompanies them, although simple and pleasant, is of much more prosaic character. At times, it is true, there is some delightful insight into child life and more particularly the life of the artist’s son, who is presented as a most attractive youngster. Yet one cannot quite reconcile the fact that the printed matter which separates “Day,” “Night,” “Ecstacy,” and some of the other remarkable drawings in Mr. Kent’s book, should be devoted to such matters as “four lengths stovepipe,” “5 lbs barley,” 12 cans tomato and so on.

That critic completely missed what connected the Alaska book to the public psyche of 1920. It was the “mythic,” and if not the “modern” as Kent scholar Jake Milgram Wien titles his book – it was certainly the prosaic, the realistic, the ordinary, everyday life. It was Robinson Crusoe in the rain, rain, rain; King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table prospecting for gold, Odysseus in search of the Northwest Passage. Kent was reading these books on Fox Island to Rockie, along with Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales. Indeed – In 1917 Kent wrote a fairytale for Hildegarde called The Jewel – and produced a unique hand-made book for her. In the story, Kent dreams of his Edenic paradise calling it his Hildegarden. With four young children, Kent was most certainly familiar with fairytales and other children’s literature. Wilderness is that odd mixture the imaginative and the real, the fairytale and the adventure story, the confrontation with adversity and the satisfaction of victory.

Alaska is a fairyland in the magic beauty of its mountains and waters,” Kent wrote in his letter to his patron Dr. Christian Brinton – a text that introduced his art show at Knoedlers and became a foreword to Wilderness. He goes on: The virgin freshness of this wilderness and its utter isolaton are a constant source of inspiration. Remote and free from contact with man our life is simplicity itself. We work, work hard with back and hands felling great trees. We row across thirteen miles of treacherous water to the nearest town; and the dangers of that trip, and the days and nights, weeks and months alone with my son during which time I have learned to see his wonder-world and know his heart – such things are to me the glory of Alaska. In living and recording these experiences I have sensed a fresh unfolding of the mystery of life. I have found wisdom, and this new wisdom must in some degree have won its way into my work.

The disillusioned public of 1920 did find wisdom and solace in Rockwell Kent’s hard-won wisdom. A review by Leila E. Bracy in the April 25, 1920 Detroit Free Press continued the praise: Rockwell Kent has been conceded by art critics to be one of the most brilliant of the modern school of artists and whether or not you agree with this estimate of him it is improbable that anyone could read his book “Wilderness,” just published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, without feeling the conviction that the man is very truly an artist.

BELOW – After the Great War and the influenza epidemic, a feeling of disillusion was not uncommon. People become anxious and stressed during times of change, and a new world was emerging. This syndicated reprint is from the May 2, 1920 Nebraska State Journal. It ran in many newspapers across the country.

Bracy is drawn to the mythic quality of the books beginning, as readers find the boy and the man in a rowboat without any definite goal other than an imaginary cabin, which they feel sure is somewhere awaiting them on a friendly shore. Suddenly and by chance they are met by an old man in a motor driven dory to whom they confess their object. Olson…declares that he knows the very place for them and without more ado proceeds to tow them southward to Fox Island where, on the shore of the harbor, he has a little cabin, a goat house, a fox corral and another cabin which though of comparatively recent building was used for a short time as a goat house.  This is an adventure of the spirit, the critic acknowledges, one of those rare happenings that never reproduce themselves but so simply has the life on the lonely island been disclosed to us that every reader can enjoy the benefits which the Kents reaped from their close communion with the Arctic.

Fox Island is hardly the Arctic, but Kent promotes that myth in the book. Gladness prevails throughout most of Wilderness, with only hints at the inner struggle we find in the letters. Bracy writes, despite the fact that no book ever written held so much rain. Literally rain, rain, rain, was the weather report in the journal except on those days when frightful windstorms and snowstorms are reported…As for the artist himself, one gets the impression of a glimpse behind the segues, for in these notes, which were written for the eyes of his loved family and his friends, he speaks out with absolute freedom as one among those sure to understand him. And he appears in the eyes of a stranger as one full of limitless energy, keenly alive, reveling in work in the abstract and satisfied with his own creative powers.

BELOW – A review of Wilderness in the June 6, 1920 Los Angeles Times.

If you’ve been reading this website and the excerpts from Kent’s correspondence with his wife, Kathleen – you know there’s an entirely different story behind the segues. To his credit – Rockwell Kent is able to focus his energies toward the journals rather than the letters – to tell an enriching, inspirational, elevating story. Bracy’s review goes on to describe the homey simplicity embedded within an island adventure of the spirit that so appealed to an American pubic exhausted after the Great War, the influenza, and the rapid and radical changes happening all around them. Most reviews only suggest these elements that contributed to the positive public response to Kent's art and book. One review in particular, however, is more direct.

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PART 9

WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA

INFLUENCES & REVIEWS