Sept. 10 - 13 PART 13 WILDERNESS: A JOURNAL OF QUIET ADVENTURE IN ALASKA - INFLUENCES AND REVIEWS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 13– Wilderness & the Alaska Paintings: Influences & Reviews

Sept. 10-12, 2019

ABOVE – Barrett Willoughby at the peak of her fame. Early on she began to establish a narrative of her life that helped enhance her reputation. Courtesy of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

BELOW – Rockwell Kent with his fellow traveler, Ole Ytterock, aboard the SS Curaca on their way to Punta Arenas, Chile in 1922. Ytterock, a sailor from Norway, was known as “Willie.” This hand-colored glass lantern slide courtesy of the Rockwell Kent Gallery at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York. For an interesting article about this trip, see this link.

Shortly after Kent returned from Alaska, he helped his composer friend, Carl Ruggles, by finding him work teaching music. One of the students was Mrs. Janet MacDonald Grace, wife of the shipping magnet Joseph P. Grace of Grace Lines. She soon ended these lessons.  In an Aug. 26, 1966 letter to John Kirkpatrick (who was helping Ruggles organize his files), Kent wrote that, at the time, money from Mrs. Grace was all Ruggles was earning. Though I didn’t know Mrs. Grace, I volunteered to try to see her and urge her to continue the lessons. I recall talking with her, urgently, in her rose garden. I was asked to stay the night, and her husband having returned, I was taken horseback riding with him after breakfast the next day. For the first time in my life I was seated on a trained jumper and permitted to do some stunt jumping into and out of a small enclosure. My acquaintanceship with Grace led me eventually to asking him for passage to the Strait of Magellan on a Grace Line freighter and being signed on to the Curaca as an assistant freight clerk – with no duties and a titular salary of 256 a month, the same as that issued to the Captain’s wife, who was signed on as “stewardess,” with no duties but to share his bed with him. That trip I have recorded in my book, “Voyaging.” 

BELOW – Photo take on Bayly Island, Chile in 1923. Kent is holding Kathleen Kent Garcia, an infant named after him who he has just baptized. Photo courtesy of the Rockwell Kent Gallery at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, State University of New York.

While Rockwell Kent is off on his Tierra del Fuego adventure, Florence – now Barrett Willoughby – is basking in her new fame with the publication of Where the Sun Swings North by G.P. Putnam – due much to Kent’s help. He hoped to get Putnam at least to read her manuscript, but probably had no idea how quickly her fame would come. Kent and Ytterock have disembarked at Punta Arenas and are building a sailboat with plans to round Cape Horn. On Oct. 18, 1922 Kent writes: That night I sat…and felt the wilderness about me and something of the terror and the wonder of that darkness there, of the huge pitiless quiescent might of those mountains, felt the vast loneliness of that whole land, was homesick and afraid – and proud that I still loved it.

I haven’t located the first letter Florence sent to Kent after she read Wilderness, but Nancy Warren Ferrell in Barrett Willoughby: Alaska’s Forgotten Lady (1994) writes that Kent forwarded it to his friend George Putnam -- who had just published Wilderness – perhaps with a recommendation to at least read the manuscript. That letter may be in the Putnam papers. There may be other letters as well.

ABOVE – Florence Willoughby’s letter to Rockwell Kent dated January 6, probably 1922 – after Where the Sun Swings North had been accepted by Putnam but before it was published. Archives of American Art.

BELOW – A transcript of the above letter. In conjunction with all the positive reviews Wilderness receives, it is significant that someone raised in Alaska and who knows it well considers Rockwell Kent one of the only Outsiders who has captured the place's spirit.

Dear Rockwell Kent:

         Your message came to me just at Christmas and it made me happier than all the material things I received. How Alaskan of you to write and help me when you learned I was standing bewildered at the forking of many literary trails! Hear after I break my own. After all where would this world be if we all kept to our own trail.

         About being a best seller – I feel just as you do. I want only to write of my country as it is – at once fiercer and gentler, and savage and clean. (Promotions) and politics are already changing it.

         My next book shall be my own, and I shall keep your letter to read often when I writing it – for you of all the adventurers who have gone to Alaska, are the only one to interpret the spirit of the north.

         “Wilderness” is to me as the Psalms of David. “Immanence” hangs framed above my desk. {"Immanence" is from The Mad Hermit Series in Wilderness}There is that about it that brings me peace and strength and a great confidence in myself – the same feeling I have when I walk by myself after sundown, in my own country. I like to think how exalted you must have felt on your little island when you made those drawings.

         I should like to see you and yours in your Vermont home – but I don’t think the East will ever know me, it is so far from Alaska. At my window where I write, I can look away over many roofs to where the great dome of a Jewish synagogue blocks the pale gray sky. It always brings me a feeling of Russia – of Russians and old Sitka. I feel the gray days of the north with their hint of the past – of Indians and Russians and other white adventurers who have lived and loved and died up there – gayly and picturesquely. And next summer I hope to be in Sitka to revive my childhood memories of the place. I should like to know you there in the North, better than in civilization.

         Now I go to work. Tay a wah cu sha – that means “goodbye.” I thank you for your wonderfully kind letter.

                                    Sincerely yours,

                                       Florence Willoughby

January Sixth

       {1922}

BELOW -- Ironically, Putnam is advertising Willoughby's new book along side one by Rockwell Kent's close friend, George Chappell, who writes as Dr. Walter E. Traprock. This ad from the Nov. 10, 1922 New York Herald.

We don’t know whether Willoughby sent Kent the manuscript of her first novel or if he even read it, but someone at Putnam’s certainly did. With the favorable reviews Wilderness was receiving, this would be a good time to get out another Alaska story while Kent’s book was fresh in the public mind. There might be only one problem. Though the book read authentic – after all, the writer was from Alaska – Florence Barrett Willoughby was a woman. It would be better if she wrote under the name Barrett Willoughby. Following the Alaska storytelling tradition of Jack London and Rex Beach, a male writer would be more successful. That’s what Putnam recommended and Willoughby agreed.

BELOW – The two articles below were published on the same day in 1922 in different newspapers. Is “Barrett” Willoughby a man or a woman? She writes like a man, many reviewers observe. For years Florence would get letters addressed to Mr. Willoughby, and the press often called her a born Alaskan – an error she didn’t feel compelled to correct. At the time she was born, civil registrations of birth were not required by the federal government. The 1910 U.S. Census records her birthplace as Wisconsin in 1886. Her California death records say she was born in 1901. Florence didn’t hesitate to take years off of her age. 

On July 4, 1942, Willoughby wrote to her niece – the daughter of her brother, Lawrence: About my age, it wasn’t that I didn’t want anyone to know… but that I don’t know, and mamma doesn’t know the year I was born in. I’ve had a hell of a time all these years when it has been necessary to put age down on anything – because I have a leeway of about five years, and I’ve used the age most convenient. There is not birth certificate where I was born apparently. And I’ve had to take any year convenient – sometimes a year that belonged to someone else…I’m your Auntie…that’s all that counts – and no matter what year or in what place I was born. Or who brought me into the world.

With the publication of her first book at age 36 in 1922 followed by excellent reviews, Barrett Willoughby was savvy enough to know she was trending, and this was no time to waste. That summer she took a trip to Kodiak to gather material for a new book with a fox farming backdrop. One might wonder whether memories of old Olson and Fox Island from Wilderness might have inspired her. Possibly, but fox farming was prevalent along the coast of Alaska where she had grown up. In Rocking Moon, published by Putnam in 1925, she augmented the fox farming narrative with love interests, raiding pirates and the romance of Alaska’s Russian past.

BELOW – A review of the book, Rocking Moon, in the April 25, 1925 Boston Globe.

Willoughby’s books were melodramatic to be sure. -- even Alaska newspapers admitted that. However, the stories were not only engaging, but the details and descriptions surrounding the melodrama were uncannily accurate as compared with books written by authors who didn’t know Alaska. It was obvious she grew up in the territory and knew its people well. In a 1925 radio interview she said: Our big, ramshackle store is really a sort of wilderness club. On winter nights, the men gather and form a circle about a big stove made of a gasoline drum…Everyone of them is an adventurer and everyone has a story to tell. I know because I always used to wedge myself into a dark corner by the sugar barrel to listen, and watch them through the haze of their tobacco smoke. And marvelous yarns they tell, those Sourdoughs, tilting back in their chairs, their mackinaw coats unbuttoned, their caps pushed back on their heads. Those old friends gave me my first lessons in the art of fiction.

Willoughby emphasized the ordinary, prosaic Alaska life, adding enough adventure and romance to attract a hungry audience curious about the Northland. Rocking Moon went into a third printing in April 1925, the month it came out. By September it had gone into a fifth printing. Like most Alaskans (even today), Willoughby was tired of clichés in fiction and film. (Just look at most reality shows on TV about Alaska today.) In a 1932 radio interview, she noted that when a cameraman decides to bring you back a bit of Alaska home life – what does he do? He goes way up into the Arctic and returns with reels of fur-clad Eskimos engaged in winter activities…Jack London had written just a few stories of summer Alaska, I tell you, the world would have a different and much warmer conception of that country today. She admitted the terrible cold, lawlessness and cruelty in Alaska, but these same conditions existed in many parts of the U.S. You’d have exactly the same one-sided presentation of the United States if all writers confined themselves to the gangster activities of Chicago or the blizzards of North Dakota.

ABOVE – An ad in the Capital Times (Madison, WI) for the movie, Rocking Moon. Note the comment in the lower left-hand corner: Alaska – Without a Single Dance Hall Girl, a Miner, A Dog Team or a Snow Storm. The move was filmed on location in Alaska – but in Sitka rather than Kodiak.

BELOW – A feature story about Barrett Willoughby in the April 19, 1925 issue of the San Francisco Examiner. 

Rockwell Kent focused on “the quiet adventure” in his Alaska book. He described not only the dangers, but also the natural beauties of the land and sea, the forests and the glaciers, the sun and moon. He even described real people who lived in a real town during a time of rapid change. He wasn't always kind, but honest when he described Seward as a tradesman's town with narrow reactionary thought on modern issues. Kent describes a town subject to the stresses of change. We see this in the local context of Wilderness and Seward during the construction of the Alaska Railroad. Willoughby no doubt respected the different perspective Kent had of Alaska life. Both Kent’s and Willoughby’s work emerged during a time when many newcomers were arriving in the territory. Alaska was in the national news. Industries like fishing and fox farming were changing. A major theme in Alaska history is the tension between those who come to Alaska get away from “civilization,” and those who want to bring it with them. Willoughby had grown up in a different Alaska, and in Kodiak she observed what was happening. A character in Rocking Moon, Nicholas Nash, complains about his Russian/Irish blood being diluted and lost through marriage with milk-and-water strangers from the South. When Willoughby was in Kodiak, an oil boom in places like Cold Bay and her old stomping grounds, Katella, excited Alaskans. Suddenly I was thankful, she recalled, that I had come in time to see tranquil Kodiak in her present beauty and charm, before the hustle and bustle of an oil boom descends upon her. (Cordova Times, Dec. 13, 1922)

By 1925 with the completion of the Alaska Railroad two years earlier and the arrival of air travel in the territory, the old sled-dogs and mushing tradition was disappearing. Both the book and the film, Rocking Moon, came out in 1925 – the same year of the Alaska Serum Run. During that winter diphtheria was devastating Nome on the Seward Peninsula, and there wasn’t enough medicine in town. Planes couldn’t get in due to the weather. It took dog sled relays involving twenty mushers covering 674 miles to get the medicine there.

ABOVE – A map showing the route of the Alaska Serum Run and the Iditarod Trail. The Iditarod Sled-Dog Race doesn’t follow the route of the serum run and isn’t run to commemorate that event. The first serum to Nome came from Anchorage and went up to Nenana by rail. That wasn’t enough. Another batch came in by steamship and went by train from Seward to Nenana, then by dog-sled.

BELOW – This statue of Balto, one of the lead dogs on the last relay team, is located in Central Park, New York City. The drama of this event lasted many days and made front-page headlines in newspapers nationwide. All the publicity couldn’t have hurt the arrival of Rocking Moon in print and on screen.

BELOW – Front page of the Seward Gateway for Feb. 3, 1925

Rockwell Kent must have been aware of Barrett Willoughby’s rise to fame throughout the 1920’s.  By 1927 with many articles, several books, and a few movies under her belt, Willoughby was established. In his article, Rockwell Kent in Hollywood found the Archives of American Art Journal (Vol. 42, Nos. 3-4), Jake Milgram Wien writes: Between 1927 and 1945, Kent attempted to parlay his growing critical and popular acclaim as a painter, graphic artist, and writer into work as a screenwriter, art director, or technical advisor. Whether driven by a practical need or an unshakeable belief in his own creative versatility, Kent at midcareer did his best to cultivate Charlie Chaplin and to enlist the support of other influential players in the film industry, including publishing scion George Palmer Putnam…

I don’t think it’s coincidence that Kent begins this quest in 1927. Barrett Willoughby, the writer he had connected to his publisher, has skyrocketed to fame with both her books and motion pictures. Putnam must be involved as Willoughby’s publisher. Even Willoughby’s boss, Frederick O’Brien, has had his book turned into a movie. Alaska is also trending with the completion of a railroad from Seward to Fairbanks. The serum run to Nome brought more publicity to the territory. Kent now has two adventures under his belt – Alaska and Tierra del Fuego – and soon he’ll add Greenland. Why shouldn't Hollywood turn his books into films? 

I’ve spent much time on Florence Barrett Willoughby for several reasons. First, her relationship with Kent demonstrates the compassionate, giving side of Rockwell Kent. She won't be the first Alaska artist he will help. Kent had spent enough years struggling to know the frustrations. He could be testy, distant and cruel. He could also be kind and loyal. He also had a special connection with Alaska and its people. There are other connections to the territory as Kent’s life progresses through the 1960’s with his death in 1971. I’ll cover some of them in later entries as I round out Kent’s life. But for now...

NEXT ENTRY

PART I

THE LIFE OF LARS MATT OLSON

AND HIS STAY IN VERMONT WITH THE KENTS