SEPT. 6 - 9 PART 12 WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA - INFLUENCES & REVIEWS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 12– Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: Influences & Reviews

Sept. 6-9, 2019

ABOVE & BELOW – G.P. Putnam’s Sons brochure with excerpted reviews of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska. Special thanks to Kent scholar Scott Ferris for sending me a digital copy.

One of the more interesting reviews in the brochure above is from The New Statesman in London comparing Wilderness with Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Another is by American critic C. Lewis Hind had earlier described the artist as a combination of Walt Whitman and Winslow Homer. Others had compared Wilderness to Gauguin’s Noa Noa, Thoreau’s Walden, and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. But critics had a difficult time finding a proper genre for the book. It was travel-adventure-art-philosophy-poetry-memoir mixed with a good dose of a talented and eccentric personality. But what was there about Wilderness that reminded some of Walt Whitman?

ABOVE – A Putnam add for Wilderness in the Oct. 24, 1920 New York Times. BELOW – The British popular magazine, Tit-Bits.

Tit-Bits was a popular British weekly newspaper founded in 1881 by George Newnes. In A Sinking Island: The Modern British Writers (1987), critic Hugh Kenner wrote: Though craft of perhaps a low order, Tit-Bits fiction did take craft. But its style remained static well into the 20th century. Tit-Bits paid well and young writers like Joseph Conrad and James Joyce submitted their work. About 1900, the Copyright Act of 1842 was still in force, meaning, rights to British classics became available forty-two years after publication or seven years after an author’s death. Now was the time to republish these works in inexpensive editions for a public hungry for culture. Joseph Mallaby Dent saw the opportunity with his Everyman’s Library. These volumes helped carry an old literary style well into the 20^th century creating a powerful force against which upcoming modernist writers struggled. Audiences, and thus the market, demanded this older style of writing. Literacy – at least the ability to decode words and sentences -- had increased. Earlier writers like Dickens had faithful audiences awaiting anxiously for their weekly novel installments. Kennan writes that by the early 1900’s public norms had been enfeebled; symbiosis with a literate body could be enjoyed and exploited only by hollow best-sellers or by hearty bookmen. To experiment with modern diction and styles – assuming a writer could even do it successfully -- meant to lose the popular audience.

ABOVE – An ad for the Everyman Library in the Oct. 20, 1906 Chicago Tribune.

BELOW – An Everyman book.

Only by great effort,” Kenner wrote, could a writer of English arrive at natural diction. Joseph Conrad had gone his own way, but English was not his first language, and his diction avoided the typical pitfalls due to a fresh vision, a kind of healthy distance from stale English that native speakers lacked. Kenner claims this elevated British style might be traced back to the Norman Conquest and the influence of the French language. Diction became a question of social status. It was more sophisticated to eat porc and mouton rather than pig and sheep. Cloth became drapery and graveyards morphed into cemeteries. One would rather go to the theatre than to the playhouse. Kenner continues: Soon writers’ diction was being routinely elevated, if not by an author than by a middleman…Small words like “ask” and “sorrow” were being ousted by words not only longer but exotic; “demand” and “lamentation” aren’t Saxon but French. This French disease would prove incurable. Ezra Pound was in London earlier with his imagism insisting on using just the right word rather than a flowery, poetic diction. Stay away from the ornate. Use only the solid and real. Don't tangle the poem poem up in language. Use the sequence of the musical phrase, Pound insisted, not the sequence of a metronome which will only show off your skills and distract. Stick to the ideas of the poem. Your language, as Robert Frost said, should sound like a conversation heard through a door, the storm of Beethoven, the beauty of Chopin, the disjunction of Stravinsky. The “short poem” became popular, capturing an image, perhaps influenced by the Japanese Haiku and the Tanka. But when readers are hooked on the Everyman Library poets like Tennyson, Shelley, and Keats – it’s a struggle to get them to move on. Some poets began experimenting with what they felt they must call vers libre rather than free verse. As Kenner states: Poetry, for Everyman, meant rhyme and meter, certainly meter…“Free verse” came to be thought of as American anarchy. Its best practitioners did in fact tend to be American, partly out of a new American interest in capturing speech rhythms they’d learned need not be British. Whitman (1819-1892) had published his free verse in Leaves of Grass in 1855. The classic went through several editions before the poet’s death, by which time he was well-respected. Mark Twain revolutionized American diction with Huckleberry Finn – first published in the United Kingdom in 1884 and in the U.S. the next year.Rockwell Kent’s American diction in Wilderness is engaging yet poetic, somewhat visionary yet concrete, stylish yet authentic. He had read and admired Whitman as a young man along with the American Transcendentalists, especially Emerson and Thoreau. About 1909, while living on Caritas Isle off the Connecticut coast, young Kent met and befriend Horace Traubel, a dedicated socialist, and Walt Whitman’s friend and biographer who, at the time edited The Conservator.

ABOVE – A book about Horace Traubel by David Karsner published in 1919 by Rockwell Kent’s friend, Egmont Arens. BELOW – An article about Traubel on the lecture circuit in the March 11, 1909 Boston Globe.

Kent introduced his new friend to his fellow students in Robert Henri’s class. Painter John Sloan, in his journal for April 25, 1910, recalled meeting Traubel when Kent brought him to a dinner. He proved a fine likable man, short, thick-set, white bushy hair, heavy eyelids and though a bit slow at thawing out he was fine when he got started. Yeats asked him whether Whitman believed in Ghosts, fortune telling, etc. I don’t think that Traubel had any remembrance of Whitman’s ideas on those subjects. We left late with Kent and Traubel. Henri rode home. Kent spent night with us.  {John Butler Yeats was the father of Irish poet William Butler Yeats.}

BELOW – John Butler Yeats

BELOW -- Yeats at Pepitpas by John Sloan.

In the above group portrait -- reworked at odd moments over a period of three years until Sloan was satisfied with it, now fewer than nine people are arranged around a table in the backyard at Petitpas while one of the hostesses, Celestine Petitpas, serves the after-dinner fruit. The writer Van Wyck Brooks sits to the left of the head of the table where Yeats is ensconced, cigar in mouth and sketchbook in hand, drawing one of the guests. The poet Alan Seeger pensively examines Yeats's progress. Dolly {Sloan's wife}, looking looking especially animated, shares the midpoint of the composition with Celestine; the pipe-smoking writer, Robert Sneddon; and the journalist Charles Johnston's attractive wife. To the right, the painter Eulabee Dix, the editor Fred King, and Sloan himself, in a striking red tie, complete the gathering under the canopy. Several bottles of wine have been consumed in the course of the dinner, and the talk now seems fragmented but relaxed. This excerpt is from John Sloan: Painter and Rebel by John Loughery (1995). Petitpas on Twenty-ninth Street, writes Loughery, was run by three sisters from Brittony, offered unpretentious accommodations, a table d'hote at reasonable prices, and dining in the backyard during the warm months. (p. 14).

 In his biography of Kent, David Traxel writes in a footnote: He {Yeats} had a special relationship with the Sloans, and lived his final years in New York in order to be close to them.  Sloan writes quite a bit about Yeats in his journal. {See John Sloan’s New York Scene; from the diaries, notes and correspondence 1906-1913 (Harper & Row, NY, 1965; also, Chaper VIII of Van Wyck Brooks John Sloan: A Painter's Life, 1955, is titled "At 'Pettitpas': J.B. Yeats" and Loughery in his book about Sloan writes quite a bit about J.B. Yeats}. It would be like Yeats to ask Traubel about Whitman’s thoughts on ghosts and fortune telling. Having just read the newly published (2019) Library of America Walt Whitman Speaks:His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of Americaas told to Horace Traubel (edited by Brenda Wineapple) – I’m not surprised Traubel hesitated. Although Whitman would probably be open to those possibilities, he doesn’t seem much interested in them. But his table talk confirms why Kent would find him a fascinating, inspiring and a tangible connection to Walt Whitman. Traubel quotes the old bard: The great man is not only the man who conceives an idea but the man who can incorporate that idea into practical working human life – of a nation, class, what-not. Kent had done that with his art and his book. In later years, he would illustrate an edition of Leaves of Grass.

ABOVE – Kent illustrated Leaves of Grass for a limit edition published by New York’s Heritage Press in 1936. This is a later printing. BELOW – From the May 17, 1923 The Town Talk (Alexandria, Louisiana).

During 1919-1920, Rockwell Kent hitched on to a rising current of American patriotism and racial pride. His second book, Voyaging, came out in the fall of 1924, and David Traxel in his biography of the artist quotes one critic as saying Mr. Kent is one of our white hopes. Traxel adds An America feeling of new political and economic power in the wake of the world war desired that its art and literature reflect that greatness in American terms…This need for American genius was a dominant theme of the decade {1920’s} and Kent’s status as a contender was recognized even by Europeans. When the English artist Maxwell Armfield wrote a book about his travels in the United States {An Artist in America, 1925}, he had to make note in a chapter titled “The Interpretation of Landscape,” that “Rockwell Kent is one of the really typical painters, for he could have been produced nowhere else.” Critic Henry McBride who had favorably reviewed Kent’s Alaska work, also praised his Tierra del Fuego paintings. Americans sign increasing numbers for the racial quality of our output. We’d like to stamp all our art with an unmistakable hallmark certifying its birthplace. We’d like Europeans at the first glimpse of our pictures to say, ‘Ah, that’s American.’ {April 18, 1925 in the New York Herald/Sun.} That was the reaction in 1920 when Wilderness arrived in London at The New Statesman. Ah, the critic responded after reading the book, that’s American. Like Whitman himself and his Leaves of Grass, Kent himself and Wilderness could have been produced nowhere else but in America.

While Kent is off to Terra del Fuego, critic Helen Appleton Read in the Dec. 2, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle titles her essay “The Tropics in Art.” She writes of John La Farge, Robert Louis Stevenson, Winslow Homer, Paul Gauguin, W. Sumerset Maugham, and George Biddle. Appleton makes a distinction between artists and writers who go to exotic places for violent and tragic reasons or to escape poverty and those who go for the pure quest. Stephen Hawels, whose group of 12 water colors were showing in New York at the time, travels in the spirit of the painter-adventurer who goes vagabonding and painting up and down the world. Just such a man as Rockwell Kent, who goes first to Alaska, and now is cruising about Tierra del Fuego in a fishing boat.

About the time Gauguin’s Noa Noa became available in the U.S., writer Frederick O’Brien (1869-1932) publishes his White Shadows of the South Seas. Kent and O'Brien had been in touch at some point, though O’Brien is 13 years older. Kent had dreamed of adventuring to the South Seas. In 1909, not long after Rockie was born, he wrote to Jack London asking for information about Pitcairn Island. London answered beginning with a Dear Comrade Kent. He had sailed the area but never been ashore, though he met some Tahiti natives. He agreed to write Kent a letter of introduction – and ended the letter with Yours for the Revolution.

At some point Frederick O’Brien and Rockwell Kent made contact. The connection probably happened in 1920 and came from O’Brien’s 34-year-old secretary, Frances Barrett Willoughby (1886-1959). Though born in Wisconsin, when she was ten years old her adventurous father, Martin Barrett, brought his wife and three children to Alaska in 1896 searching for gold. She knew the Alaska coast, and lived a life aboard her father’s boat. For ten months the whole family became marooned on Middleton Island struggling to survive. Florence and her brothers saw it as an adventure, and she later restructured the experience into her first novel, Where the Sun Swings North (1922). While working for O’Brien in San Francisco years later, she wrote the book and now needed to find a publisher. Though White Shadows of the South Seas had just come out, Florence needed a publisher more sympathetic to colder climates.

ABOVE – A Nov. 3, 1922 add for Where the Sun Swings North by Florence – now Barrett Willoughby – in the New York Herald. BELOW – Frederick O’Brien with a Somoan girl in the South Pacific.

Florence's mind overflowed with stories from the northland. She had read Jack London and Rex Beach. They were good storytellers but they exaggerated life in Alaska, writing about sled dogs, miners, gold rushes and dancehall girls. There were many other stories to tell, especially from people like her who grew up in the northland. After the Middleton Island fiasco, her father dragged the family to Dawson for the Klondike gold rush, then to Katella and Cordova where prospectors and entrepreneurs obsessed over gold, copper and oil and where railroads to the resources in Alaska's interior dominated even small talk. She had sat at the feet of these adventurers in her father’s saloon and general store listening to their stories. There were times spent in Sitka, and a young Anchorage. Florence had seen much of Alaska from the inside, and written many articles about Alaska for Sunset magazine and other publications. Now she had a novel, but what well-known writer who was actually from Alaska could help her? There were few if any.

When Wilderness came out in early spring 1920, Florence read it with more than delight. Here was someone who had captured the authentic Alaska spirit. She is most likely the one who sent Kent a copy of O’Brien’s book, with a letter about her book and her dreams of the writers life. Her life hadn’t been an easy one. By age 34 she had survived two failed marriages and a still-born child. Her father and one of her brothers had died. The other brother would later be murdered. Florence still corresponded with her first husband, Oliver Willoughby, and he occasionally sent her some money. But she needed a means of support, and was determined to earn it as a writer. Above her desk at O’Brien’s office in San Francisco, hung the Rockwell Kent pen and ink – “Immanence” from the Mad Hermit Series in Wilderness. It inspired her to write a book as popular and true to Alaska as Wilderness. By 1920, Florence is approaching the same age Kent was when he ventured to Alaska and settled on Fox Island. It won't be long before she turns forty years old. Perhaps it’s time to dive as deeply as Kent did in Alaska and take a good look into her past and into her future. (See Barrett Willoughby: Alaska's Forgotton Lady by Nancy Warren Ferrell, 1994).

Kent receives Florence’s letter with O’Brien’s book and writes back. He also sends a copy of Wilderness to O’Brien. (I have been able to locate only some of these letters) On July 12, 1920 O’Brien writes to Kent from Sausalito, California: As you want to go to the South Seas, so I want to go to your island, and live there as you and little Rockwell did. Maybe I will do it, too, if the possession of a little house here, does not obsess me, and make me a man of property. You have written a singular, and inspiring book, which is out of your heart and mind, and not so much out of Alaska. I think you would have done it at Martha’s Vineyard, or even in a Harlem flat if it had a roof for hanging out clothes. Your book is beautiful, and brooding, as are the pictures you have made. I thank you heartily for sending it to me. I am waiting to get a copy of “White Shadows” to send to you.

O’Brien has it half right. To Kent, true wilderness is in one’s mind. It’s connected to authentic solitude, and one can carry that almost anywhere. At the same time, Wilderness is indeed an Alaskan book. It captures the country’s spirit, as Florence notes, and it features information about a real town with real people and an authentic old timer, Lars Matt Olson. Florence would have liked Olson, who died in 1922, the year her first novel hit the bookstores. Yes -- Florence did get Where the Sun Swings North published with Kent’s help, and her rise to fame coincided with his during the 1920’s and 1930’s. But unlike Kent, she quickly found her way into the Hollywood film industry and attained quick fame. It wasn't long before critics were calling her “The Female Jack London.”  

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PART 13

WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA

INFLUENCES & REVIEWS