AUG. 29-31, 2019 PART 10 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 10 – Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: Influences & Reviews

Aug. 29-31, 2019

ABOVE – An ad for Wilderness in the Dec. 17, 1920 New York Tribune.

BELOW – A review of Wilderness in the Aug. 24, 1920 issue of The Guardian (London)

Like critic Henry McBride, who calls Kent a young artist (anyone 35 or under in his mind) -- so too, Jesse Lee Bennett, in his March 27, 1920 Baltimore Sun review of Wilderness -- refers to the artist as a youngish artist (“near 40”). While on his quest, seeking a new environment which would bring him vivid new inspiration, Kent doesn’t follow classic footsteps, according to Bennett. If he did he would settle in some bizarre, little-known and exotic place, preferably warm and pleasant. There he should have made sketches and paintings of outlandish folk, preferably in some outlandish style and medium. Next, according to Bennett, Kent would have oiled the press (if he followed the traditional method) and hyped up his art and adventure. That is the way the trick is done, the critic notes. But Rockwell Kent did not do it that way. Instead he treks to the cold north – Alaska, and in winter -- with is young son and settles on an island in Resurrection Bay with an old Swede fox farmer. And there Rockwell Kent sawed and split wood, cooked, washed, darned, educated his son, read, painted and wrote,” Bennett writes. What did he paint – endless genre pictures of Olson and goats, endless inspirational pictures of wave-washed rocks? Not by a jugfull! He drew and painted what he felt inclined to draw and paint. And sometimes his inclination was for a picture – endlessly impressive – of a man and boy, sitting at a table by a window eating. Sometimes it was for an “air-tight” stove with a bunk and coats hanging from a rough wall. Sometimes for an old man sitting in a window whittling.”

ABOVE – “Meal Time” from Wilderness. A reviewer of Wilderness in the Chicago Post wrote, …the artist who can put into the simplest drawings of a man and a little boy eating together at a rough table in a rough cabin all the dear solidity of family and home life – that artist can make me bow my head before his sincerity.

BELOW – Chapter X, “Olson” from Wilderness followed by a pen and ink of “The Whittler,” from Wilderness.

 This was the kind of art that touched the heart, enlightened the soul, strengthened the spirit. Even some skeptical critics recognized this, or at least they observed it in the public’s response. This art emphasized the prosaic, the everyday, the common – the ideal way it was, or at least should be – or as Warren G. Harding stated while campaigning for the Presidency in 1920: America's present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.

But Kent’s art didn’t stop at that, according to Bennett, for sometimes it was for subjects of a hugely different kind. “Woman” or “Superman,” “Night” or “Zarathustra” or “Victory.” And sometimes the inclination was to draw pictures – getting up and going to bed by windows looking on a radiant world of mountain peaks and sun. Bennett sees the pen and inks interesting specimens of art alone, even without the text – But if you had read the book you would feel a warmer and kindlier interest, a greater understanding and appreciation. He notes the influence of William Blake and Albrecht Durer. Blake’s manner was rarely distinctive, he claims, and the world can use a lot of pictures made after it, particularly if individualized as those of Mr. Kent’s. The critic sees Kent as not merely a mystic, but the practical kind of mystic – that kind of mystic that those who use the word loosely are prone to forget. He has big ideas. And he not only has a humor, a robust normality and healthfulness which Blake lacked, but this technique is surer and more flexible. Bennett sees Blake as one of the immortals. Kent is hardly that, he admits but adds But why should he be? For he is sane, healthy, happy, generousy-minded and awake to the mystery and beauty of the world. That is enough. Particularly if you can transmit all those qualities to your fellow-man in two mediums. Importantly, Bennett notes that this intimate journal was written for Kent’s home circle and close friends. Kent also notes in his letters that he’s writing it as a memoir for Rockie. Because of its personal motivation, text gives less attention to itself. It reeks of authenticity.  The narrator and his characters are absorbed within the surrounding wilderness and become part of it.

BELOW – The pen and inks from Wilderness in the order mentioned above.

BELOW – Jesse Lee Bennett’s review of Wilderness.

A brief digression into the life of critic, Jesse Lee Bennett 1885-1931) can give us insight into why this man was able to articulate what others couldn’t about Rockwell Kent’s Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.  Descended from an old and prominent Baltimore family, Bennett graduated from Johns Hopkins University and began his career in a Wall Street brokerage house. Abandoning that effort, he invested in Maryland clay deposits. He was a major during World War I, attached to the moral branch of the general staff, and wrote the first comprehensive manuals of systemic morale work ever prepared for an army. That military background enabled him to read Wilderness as a morale booster for a public traumatized, disheartened and disillusioned with the rapid changes emerging in the new world after the Great War and influenza epidemic. After the war he became a lieutenant-colonel in the Army Reserves. From 1916 to 1926 Bennett wrote a column for the Baltimore Sun called The Skeptic. He covered everything from politics to culture, literature, education, and economics. He founded the Arnold Company, Inc., publishers; he founded the Readers’ Advisory Service in 1924, and by 1926 was editing Modern World.  Later he directed the Adult Education Association, and contributed to the Van Guard League for Education, and the National Citizens’ Commission on Relations with Latin-America.

Bennett was best known for several books. Rockwell Kent’s Wilderness is listed in his 1922 work, On Culture and a Liberal Education with Lists of Books Which Can Aid in Acquiring Them. A year later he published What Books Can Do For You, and lists Rockwell Kent along with Cezanne, Gauguin, Beardsley, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, Whistler, and Matisse – as artists whose work is interesting. In 1925 Bennett published an anthology, The Essential American Tradition. One reviewer wrote: An American writer, Mr. Jesse Lee Bennett, has hit upon a novel plan of challenging the attitude of those “hundred per cent Americans” who nowadays are so intolerant of any criticism of existing U.S.A. institutions. Instead of arguing with these folks, the review notes, Bennett merely collects some utterances of the most highly honored sons of the Republic which would today expose them to denunciation as “Reds.” For example, Bennett quotes Abraham Lincoln – This country, with its institutions, belong to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it. Bennett also quotes Woodrow Wilson: You have taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Of allegiance to whom? Of allegiance to no one unless it be God. Certainly not to those who temporarily represent the great Government. (The Baltimore Evening Sun, Oct. 7, 1925)


The hundred per cent Americans referred to above -- or Hundred Percenters, as they were called -- formed groups throughout the country. Some of the movement tied in with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist, white-supremacist and anti-immigrant groups. They promoted the Red Scare, and a suspicion of anything not purely American. Some naturalized-Americans -- Germans, Japanese, Italians -- formed Hundred Percent Groups to show their loyalty. Shortly after the Great War ended groups like the "Americans" formed. The article BELOW in the Nov. 13, 1919 Seward Gateway demonstrates how widespread the movement was. The fact that Jesse Lee Bennett opposed this movement shows how close his politics and philosophy were to Rockwell Kent's.

         On April 21, 1931, Bennett died after exhausting himself while fighting a forest fire near his home at Forked Creek, about two miles from Arnold Station, in Anne Arundel county, Maryland. He had been attacking the flames with a shovel, and as he emerged into the clear he suffered a heart attack and fell. A writer in the Baltimore Evening Sun wrote: Probably in the last few years a generation has come to maturity to whom Jesse Lee Bennett was little more than a name. But five, ten and fifteen years ago there was hardly a restless youth or tired intellectual in this vicinity who had not been stimulated and perhaps carried away by the passionate eloquence of the man who, ensconced in his little retreat on Fork Creek, observed the world through the eyes of “The Skeptic.” Bennett was a fine writer, but he delivered speeches even better. And it was to hear him talk that scores of young people made the somewhat difficult trip to his house on the water. Here they heard, many of them for the first time, a plea for a life lived for ends rather than material. Here they heard the doctrine that a man should strive to be something as well as to do something set forth by a fine mind which had ranged over a wide field in literature and the arts. Mr. Bennett had many activities. But certainly none was more worthy of praise than his constant effort to open the eyes of young men and women to the meaning of the good life.

Critics like Bennett still remembered the self-conscious style of the aesthetes movement. Augustus John is still alive and well in 1920 when Wilderness is published. Ezra Pound sought out as a mentor W.B. Yeats who he considered the best poet alive. About that time Yeats accepted that the style he had perfected was at an end, and loosened up by studying, of all poets, Ben Johnson. Writers and critics like Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm blasted and satirizing the verbose and dense 19^th century writing. Henry James – clinging to his heavy style -- may have learned something about popular writing from his friendship with H.G. Wells. Times were changing and many writers struggled to step sure-footed out of the old and into the new. Some did so successfully, others called more attention to themselves than to their art. For a brief moment in history, Rockwell Kent epitomized and captured the present mood, baffling critics with a book as fresh, biting, and authentic as the Alaska wilderness – a work that both revered universal past values and gave hope for the future. All this, not despite his confusion and ambivalence, but because of the tension it produced. While sketching, painting and writing on Fox Island, he was both elated and despondent, delighted and disgusted, a success and a failure, victorious and vanquished.

BELOW – Not much seems to be available on the web about Jesse Lee Bennett. My information above comes from several obituaries, esp. the April 22, 1931 issue of the Baltimore Evening Sun. Former Iowa Congressman William Darius Jamieson reminisces about his friendship with Jesse Lee Bennett, in the May 2, 1931 York Daily Record (York, PA). This provides a more personal insight into the man.

It’s one thing to have wonderful reviews. It’s another to have buyers, and the paintings are not selling well. On April 7, 1920, Kent writes to Olson that it’s an unfortunate season – just the time of the income-tax returns – and no one was spending money. Kent has been corresponding with Olson who has left Fox Island and is now living in his Seward cabin. The old Swede is not in good health, and Kent wants him to come to Vermont. Olson is considering the move.

 Kent had helped his friend, composer Carl Ruggles, obtain work giving music lessons and acquiring sponsors. The composer is instructing Mrs. Janet MacDonald Grace, wife of the shipping magnet Joseph P. Grace of Grace Lines (Second Link). She loved one of Kent’s cover designs for a Ruggles composition. In a letter to Kent the composer says that hearing that gives the him a fine opportunity to launch forth on your behalf.  Kent’s painting, North Wind, is available for purchase at Knoedler’s Gallery, he tells Mrs. Grace. That delighted Kent, and in a Dec. 26, 1920 letter to Ruggles, Kent writes: Yes, that’s fine about Mrs. Grace looking {at} my work. Bear Glacier is sold but the North-Wind isn’t…Do take her there and telephone Mrs. {Marie} Sterner in advance. God, but I need to sell a picture. Sell it for me! On Jan. 31 Ruggles responds, Mrs. Grace told me the other day that she was going to see your North Wind. I hope she will buy it for her new house. I said all I thought wise. In an Aug. 16, 1920 letter to Ruggles, Kent thanks his friend for taking Seeger to see the paintings. This is most likely musicologist Charles Seeger, the brother of poet Alan Seeger, and the father of singer Pete Seeger (who was also a friend of Rockwell Kent's).

Meanwhile, Kent entertains visitors at “Egypt,” his new Vermont home, works on his art, and contemplates his next adventure. Sales of his paintings are slow, but Wilderness sells well and the excellent reviews keep coming.

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PART 11

WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA

INFLUENCES & REVIEWS