AUG. 27-29, 2019 PART 9: WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA - INFLUENCE & REVIEWS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 9 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: The Reviews

Aug. 27-29, 2019

ABOVE – Various editions of Wilderness. The edition with my foreword is at lower left, a reprint of the 1970 special signed and boxed limited edition overseen by Kent himself – at upper right. At lower right is the 1930 Modern Library edition. At upper left is the 1920 edition. If you look for the book at amazon.com, you find several recent new printings of the 1920 edition. Since it was published before 1920, the book is now in the public domain.

BELOW – Various editions of Northern Christmas. For the original 1941 edition published by the American Artists Group (at upper left), Kent excerpted the Christmas chapter from Wilderness with minor changes and a special format. The 1996 edition with my foreword is at upper right. The boxed edition at front was published in 1983 by Random House with an introduction by Fridolf Johnson.

But think – if Energy is Delight and if Exuberance is Beauty, the Manic-Depressive knows more about Delight and Beauty than anyone else. Who else has so much Energy and Exuberance? Maybe it’s the strategy of the Psyche to increase Depression. Didn’t Freud say that Happiness was nothing but the remission of Pain? So, the more Pain the intenser the Happiness. But there is a prior origin to this, and the Psyche makes Pain on purpose. Anyway, Mankind is stunned by the Exuberance and Beauty of certain individuals. When a Manic-Depressive escapes from his Furies he’s irresistible. He captures History. I think that aggravating is a secret technique of the Unconscious. As for great men and kings being History’s slaves, I think Tolstoi was off the track. Don’t kid yourself, kings are the most sublime sick. Manic-Depressive heroes pull Mankind into their cycles and carry everybody away.

      from Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

I saw the position into which Humboldt had placed Kathleen {Humboldt’s wife}, and I put it into words: Lie there. Hold still. Don’t wiggle. My happiness may be peculiar, but once happy I will make you happy, happier than you ever dreamed. When I am satisfied the blessing of fulfillment will flow to all mankind. Wasn’t this, I thought, the message of modern power? This was the voice of the crazy tyrant speaking, with peculiar lusts to consummate, for which everyone must hold still. I grasped it at once. Then I thought that Kathleen must have secret feminine reasons for going along. I too was supposed to go along, and in another fashion I too was to hold still. Humboldt had plans also for me…When he wasn’t a poet he was a fanatical schemer. And I was particularly susceptible to his influence. Why that was I have only recently begun to understand. But he thrilled me continually. Whatever he did was delicious.

       from Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

It’s said the character of Humboldt is based on Saul Bellows relationship with writer Delmore Schwartz. Medical diagnosis of historical figures is fraught with dangers – although there is a legitimate field. Some medical historians have done insightful work (See The Strange Deaths of President Harding by Robert H. Ferrell, 1998). With the quotes above I’m not making a medical diagnosis of Rockwell Kent. Some have suggested he might have been manic-depressive or bipolar. That wouldn’t be uncommon with creative, talented people. I happened to be reading Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift and found these words interesting. All I’m suggesting here is that Kent was not unique in his behavior and proclivities. Many artists, writers, and poets – creative people in general – live on the edge. This is not to justify Kent's occasionally insensitivity and cruelty to his family and friends. He had another side that could be gentle, kind, and loyal.  He was who he was and did what he did. (I happen to be reading the life of Scottish writer, adventurer and naturalist, Gavin Maxwell (1914-19690). He was another fascinating and talented genius.

The contrast between Rockwell Kent’s inspiring and upbeat Alaska book – Wilderness -- and the relationship with his wife, Kathleen (and Hildegarde) as exhibited in the correspondence – is significant. There are clues in the book. In Wilderness, on Tuesday, New Year’s Eve 1918 – the tenth anniversary of his marriage – Kent writes: I’m terribly homesick to-night and don’t know what to say about it in these genial pages. It has been a solemn day. On Feb. 17, 1919 his journal reads: It has become necessary to go back to New York very soon – with no specific explanation.  Rockie is heartbroken and wants to know all the details. Kent discusses it with his son, but the reader is not privy to what is said. In the letters we learn that Kent probably puts the blame on Kathleen’s state of mind and encourages Rockie to write several letters begging her to join them. Kent even has Olson write to Kathleen. His wife, in return, pleads with Kent not to tell Rockie she just doesn’t want to come, that their early return is because she refuses to join out of stubbornness. It would be too expensive, she tells her husband. Kent often reminds her there’s no good reason for her refusal. Two of the children can stay with his and her mother, and the youngest can travel with Kathleen free of charge. Ultimately, Kent walks a fine line between making his wife feel guilty and also agreeing that he trusts her judgment. In the letters Kent writes for Kathleen to read on New Year’s Eve – their anniversary – he claims he is now a new man. He realizes how cruel and unkind he has been to his wife. He has ended his affair with Hildegarde, and as their correspondence continues through January and February, Kent promises to be faithful to Kathleen, to leave the city with his family to find a quiet rural homestead.

ABOVE – At upper left, Rockwell Kent and his family in Vermont, 1921. Kathleen is holding Gordon, born in October 1920. Rockie is standing in front of Kent. The girls from left are Kathleen, Barbara and Clara. At upper right and far lower right, Hildegarde Hirsch. Lower photos from left, the Fox Island cabin, the cabin interior, and Kent’s wife, Kathleen. Hildegarde’s photo at lower right is from a 1920 passport. Lower photo of Kathleen and the cabin exterior are from private Kent family albums. Others are from the Rockwell Kent Gallery at Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, N.Y.

Wilderness contains none of Kent’s personal struggles, nor should it have. Unlike todays popular market for excruciatingly revealing memoir and autobiography, the standards of 1920 would not allow it. It’s not so much that Kent is hiding his dirty laundry. Over the years he had not been shy about his unfaithfulness to Kathleen. Rather, he’s latching onto an already popular genre – the artist/writer/adventurer tale.  Others had succeeded in that realm, including Paul Gauguin with Noa Noa (1901), the journal from his 1891-93 Tahiti adventure – and while on Fox Island Kent was reading Fridtjof Nansen’s illustrated In Northern Mists.

ABOVE – The 1919 American edition of Noa Noa was being advertised the spring Kent returned to New York from Alaska.

BELOW – Nansen’s work compared with Kent’s.

Upon publication, Wilderness stood out among all the other new books. It was compared with Paul Gauguin’s Noa Noa, with Thoreau’s Walden, even with Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.  Though fascinated with it, critics couldn’t seem to find its niche. It was an artist’s travelogue and showcase for his work; it was memoir, adventure, and philosophy salted with the spiritual; it was a paean to the simple life, to childhood, to wilderness. And it was real. Because Wilderness was based upon heart-felt journals originally not meant for wide publication, Kent’s narrator (himself embedded within the “quiet adventure”) offered an authenticity and a genuineness, a self-effacement so absent in much of the current literature struggling to find a place in modernism. Most reviews were unable to articulate this directly.

Of all the reviews of Wilderness I’ve found, one in particular comes closest to capturing the reasons for the book’s positive impact upon the public.  The review’s headline in the March 27, 1920 Baltimore Evening Sun, reads “Wilderness,” By Rockwell Kent, Treat of the Season – Human and Refreshing. Critic Jesse Lee Bennett (begins:

Amid the chaos of valueless fiction and of serious books infinitely important but alas, infinitely dull, there appears a real book, a regular book, a joyous book, a refreshing book, a very, very human and delightful book.

Why these torrential encomiums? Because it is such a delight to leave all this perfumed pother about intricate personal relations, all this dreary talk about mankind, and to be brought close to man – to man, happy, normal, sane; to man, living with joy, joyously adapted to a clean, simple and wonderful world.

It has become so easy to forget that there is joy and simplicity and normal happiness anywhere on this tremendous, this illogical, this very terrible old planet. It has become so easy to forget that somewhere the cold wind blows free, the salt waves dash furiously against rocky cliffs and man – keen, alert, glad to be alive and with all his senses and all his intelligence awake to the splendor and wonder that life somewhere holds – moves and has his happy being far from dust, disorder and despair.

Surely we should be grateful to any man who comes to tell us of months of simple happiness lived under vigorously inspiring conditions. Surely, in this day when bookshops are becoming tombs of dreary tedium, we can heap encomiums on a book which is alive; which can make even the deadest of us feel a momentary pulse of life, throb for a brief moment with the rhythm of a purposeful, resplendent universe.

BELOW -- A portion of Jesse Lee Bennet's review of Wilderness.

When we learn more about the critic, Jesse Lee Bennett, we can understand better why he was able to see deeper into Rockwell Kent’s Alaska book. 

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PART 10

WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA

INFLUENCES & REVIEWS