During the 1920s, homesteading had increased in the coastal regions of Alaska. Along the beaches, log cabins with spectacular views from the front porches were being built. The pioneers who lived in these cabins gathered coal and seafood on the shore. With remarkable ingenuity, they made their own furniture by hand. In their gardens, because of the rich glacial till and the long summer days, cabbages grew to the size of pumpkins, though the homesteaders did miss having fresh fruit. Many families carved out a decent living but often dreamed about moving to a warmer climate. A favorite sourdough joke in Homer, on the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, was that homesteaders grew “sour on the country” but “didn’t have enough dough to get out.”19
Kent, who was intrigued by ethnography, also befriended a number of Aleuts he encountered in Seward. He venerated Native Alaskan groups and thought that the Aleuts, like all maritime peoples, were riveting storytellers. As a modernist, Kent preferred Aleut primitive art rather than that of the Hudson River Valley school. The intrepid Aleuts were similar to Kent himself in caring little about social structure or about laying down permanent roots. A large Aleut village would have makeshift dwellings, and would usually be situated on an island in the Bering Sea where the fishing was good. Aleuts, to Kent’s surprise, were sexually permissive. Kent marveled at how they used animal parts for tools. Clams, mollusks, and sea urchins were part of their regular diet. Excellent hunters, they used atlatl (a throwing stick) to bring down ducks, geese, and loons in flight. Wild berries grew abundantly on Fox Island, and the Aleuts instructed Kent on which ones were edible.
Kent’s series of abrupt drawings and rhapsodic paintings of Resurrection Bay are, arguably, the finest landscapes ever done on Alaskan soil. They were influenced by Aleut art. Because Fox Island was often foggy, Kent thought of sunny days as a benediction; sunshine was good for painting the brotherhood of man and nature. “The wonder of wilderness was its tranquility,” Kent wrote. “It seemed that there both men and the wild beasts pursued their own paths freely and, as if conscious of the freedom of their world, molested one another not at all.”20
Many of Kent’s brush-and-ink drawings and engravings, free from presuppositions, accompanied the prose of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska in perfect harmony. The cold far north appealed to his love of forlornness. Even the rotten ice—called aunniq by the Inupiat—had its charms to a symbolist painter.21 “It’s a fine life,” Kent wrote to a friend, “and more and more I realize that for me such isolation as this . . . is the only right life for me.”22
Some of Kent’s Alaskan work is reminiscent of the intricate illustrations by the poet Vachel Lindsay, who tramped around America promoting the “gospel of beauty.” Kent drew Resurrection Bay in a biblical, folklorish way, the style common in the “outsider” art movement of the 1980s. Celebrating the spectacle of life, his paintings and drawings still defy easy categorization. Taken with totemic symbols, Kent populated his Alaskan paintings with Norse gods in a semimodernist style, almost like socialist realism. Some of his images of laborers—The Whittler (1918), The Snow Queen (c. 1919), Lone Man (1918)—have a touch of Dürer; they’re paeans to heroic hardworking Alaskans who understood the power of biomass, forlornness, and self-reliance. In another context, they might be considered proletarian art. (Later, Kent would draw recruitment posters for the Industrial Workers of the World—the IWW—though he refused to join the Communist Party.)
Kent’s bizarre Mad Hermit series—included at the end of Wilderness—celebrated the age of voyages. His Alaskan sun was a Cyclopean eye. The legend of the Viking Leif Eriksson—possibly the first European to land in North America, almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus—was suggested in many of his lyrical paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. It was as if Scandinavia came into his every brushstroke; his painter’s fascination with light was piqued by the ever-shifting scenes created by the northern lights.
Never before had such a gifted poet-philosopher-painter contemplated Alaska’s subzero climate, long winter nights, and rainy landscapes with such imaginative flair. The broad glare of winter afternoons had a bracing effect on him. Life opened up every morning in the most amazing ways, and he was there to document the pageantry. “Cold?” he once said: “We had come to love it. The snow lay deep. The sun at noon now rose above the mountain, flooding our clearing with its golden light. The north wind raged and swept up clouds of vapor from the steaming sea.” Who knew that getting drenched could be fun? Kent’s attitude anticipated the back-to-nature movement of the 1960s: Scott and Helen Nearing; The Whole Earth Catalog; organic gardeners; and the rejection of plastic, chemicals, and prepackaged food.
While he was on Fox Island, Kent would sometimes write a newspaper column either for amusement or for a little extra money. He could, it must be said, be abrasive and self-righteous at times. Locals discovered that he was a man of great humor but also was very difficult. No matter what the discussion topic or issue was, he refused to be a shrinking violet; he preferred a stance of competitive firmness. Sometimes he literally threw paint at a canvas and then ran around naked in the snow. But he was not insane (although bipolar disorder is a possibility). A brouhaha occurred in Seward when Kent’s son Rocky was asked by a teacher which of several flags shown in a book was his favorite. While the other children went with Old Glory, Rocky chose the German flag because it had an eagle at its center. The angry schoolteacher thought Rocky was being treasonous and expressing support for the kaiser. The Great War had ended, but anti-German sentiment was still strong. Kent nobly defended his son’s honor to the teacher; he also challenged people in Seward to fisticuffs. Upon leaving Alaska, Kent wrote a frank, open letter in the Seward Gateway, denouncing local busybodies but also proclaiming that Alaska was “the only land that I have ever known to which I wanted to return.”23 The lines and colors and illuminations of Resurrection Bay, he said, spoke to him like a hymnal. “As graduates in wisdom,” he wrote, paraphrasing Muir, “we return from the university of the wilderness.”
What Kent philosophically promoted in Wilderness was the power of solitude and ahimsa. It didn’t matter that a “heartless ocean” eliciting a “terror of emptiness” surrounded Fox Island. Neither the five-foot chops in the ocean nor a steady “miserable drizzling rain”—about 300 inches annually—could deflate him. For Kent had a rare gift of optimism wherever he traveled, even in Alaska’s “luminous abyss,” as long as his paint kit was at hand. Kent convinced himself that the desolation of Fox Island, where winds raced in swirls, was a bracing cure for the neurotic anxiety associated with the modern condition. Solitude was better than all the pharmaceuticals in the world.
“The Northern wilderness is terrible,” Kent said in a letter to an esteemed art critic, Dr. Christian Brinton, written for publication. “There is discomfort, even misery, in being cold. The gloom of the long and lonely winter nights is appalling and yet do you know I love this misery and court it. Always I have fought and worked and played with a fierce energy and always as a man of flesh and blood and surging spirit. I have burned the candle at both ends and can only wonder that there has been left even a slender taper glow for art. And so this sojourn in the wilderness is in no sense an artist’s junket in search of picturesque material for brush or pencil but the fight to freedom of a man who detests the petty quarrels and bitterness of the crowded world—the pilgrimage of a philosopher in quest of Happiness!”24
Much of the tone and tenor of Wilderness arose from the bonding of father and son. Like Huck Finn on the river, Rocky found freedom in many things: fox dens, hollow logs, starfish in the icy water. Together Kent and Rocky created “magic” kingdoms on the island, fantasizing about being marooned like the Swiss Family Robinson. Birds, they marveled together, were better swimmers than fliers along the windswept offshore islands. They drank hot chocolate, flipped buttermilk pancakes, read Robinson Crusoe aloud, memorized William Blake’s poetry, sang Celtic ballads, explored headland coves, and sailed to remote blue islets. They collected driftwood
for the evening campfire. Together they measured wind velocity with a new gadget picked up in Seward. They caught a little black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia), caged it, and trained it to mimic words like a mynah. Out in the back corral, the Kents reluctantly tended goats when Olson went into Seward. (One afternoon an angry or scared goat got into the cabin, comically trapping Kent inside.) On a few evenings the full moon rose bold and blood-orange, magically illuminating every tree and rock. Rocky’s indispensable textbook was J. P. Wood’s Natural History. With the help of Audubon’s Birds of America, the Kents were able to identify a red-throated loon, a couple of eider ducks, and a hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus).
“The day has been glorious, mild, fair, with snow everywhere, even on the trees,” Kent wrote in a journal entry. “The snow sticks to the mountain tops even to the steepest, barest peaks painting them all a spotless, dazzling white. It’s a marvelous sight. Rockwell and I journeyed around the point today and saw the sun again. Tonight in the brilliant moonlight I snow shoed around the cove. There never was so beautiful a land as this! Now at midnight the moon is overhead. Our clearing seems as bright as day—and the shadows are so dark. From the little window the lamplight shines out through the fringe of icicles along the eaves, and they glisten like diamonds. And in the still air the smoke ascends straight up into the blue night sky.”25
Fox Island had, briefly, been selected by the Biological Survey as an experimental fox-breeding station. But instead the land was leased to Seward’s farmers—local businessmen like Hawkins. All over southern Alaska—particularly in the Aleutians—foxes were bred in captivity in the hope of producing fur pelts for the market. There were nonnatural foxes on 1 million acres of Alaska, on more than forty islands. The corral behind Kent’s goat shed, in fact, had been built for fox breeding. Luckily, Roosevelt had created places like Saint Lazaria as fox-free zones, allowing bird species to survive. Nevertheless, a few feral foxes roamed freely on the island. For all of Kent’s rhapsodizing about wild animals, most of the blue foxes on Fox island were being raised in captivity by Hawkins for money. Kent, in the end, didn’t write anything substantial about fox propagation along Alaska’s southern coast from Dixon Entrance all around to Attu (the most westward island of the Aleutian chain).26
Groups such as the National Audubon Society and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service were concerned that the proliferation of foxes in Alaska would lead to the extinction of the Aleutian Canada goose (Branta canadensis leucopareia). Foxes, it turned out, particularly loved the cream-colored eggs of these geese. Starting in 1940, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service successfully worked to remove the unwelcome foxes from public lands. After a fifty-year effort the Aleutian Canada goose became one of the few species to return from the brink of extinction. Its recovery gave hope that other Alaskan species could rebound, with proper game management.
IV
When Kent’s Wilderness was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1920, it received splendid reviews. Kent had kicked out the doorjambs; he was a mystic who had flung himself into the Alaskan galaxy and returned with stories. The New Statesman went so far as to say that Wilderness was “the most remarkable book to come out of America since Leaves of Grass.” According to the Chicago Post, Kent was a genius: “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 dear solidity of family and home life—that artist can make me bow my head before his sincerity.” The perceptive Robert Benchley, in the New York World, thought Kent’s sojourn on Fox Island was a magnificent artistic feat: Kent had brought back both wonderful prose and priceless illustrations, making him “the envy of all urbanites” in Greenwich Village.27 Another astute critic—Martha Gruening—compared Wilderness to Paul Gauguin’s memoir Noa Noa, which was about his first trip to Tahiti and was filled with descriptions of Polynesian mythology.28
Kent’s Wilderness was a pioneering first-person narrative, promoting Alaska as an ecological retreat where city dwellers could find “OURSELVES—for the wilderness is nothing else.” On every page of Wilderness, Kent paid homage to Thoreau and gave consumer-driven America the back of his hand. Like Thoreau, Kent kept a detailed list of all the provisions he brought to Fox Island and how much they had cost. Kent, a simplifier, was content with a sleeping bag, poncho, cooking pots, and paint kit. Whether he was studying otter tracks, marveling at the moonlight, or decorating a Christmas tree for his son, he made Wilderness a quirky hymn, a sudden burst of quiet celebration, for the offshore islands around the future Kenai Fjords National Park. In Alaska the drifter had found the true heart of the universe. “And now at last it is over,” Kent wrote at the book’s end. “Fox Island will soon become in our memories like a dream or vision, a remote experience too wonderful, for the full liberty we knew there and the deep peace, to be remembered or believed in as a real experience in life. It was for us life as it should be, serene and wholesome; love—but no hate, faith without disillusionment, the absolute for the toiling hands of man and for his soaring spirit.”29
From Fox Island Kent moved to Vermont, where he completed his stunning series of Alaskan paintings—the windblown green sea, blue-golden hillsides, piercing gray mountains—along with intriguing character portraits of locals. Even as late as the 1960s Kent produced oil paintings of Alaska from the ink-and-brush drawings in his sketchbook. Alaskan Sunrise (1919), for example, is a minimalist scene of Resurrection Bay with a wide range of blinding blue and icy white hues; it conveys a barrenness that is humbling to contemplate. Somehow Kent made foreboding lifeless landscapes seem like uncrowded, untouched, unhurried holy land. Kent’s painting Alaska Winter (1919) vividly shows the view from his cabin on Fox Island. Varied shades of blue-green capture the cold of Resurrection Bay and the mountains beyond. Long shadows and cool yellow light radiate from objects that warm the winter horizon and appear, mesmerizingly, from behind the stark, split trunks of trees. Doused in wintry light, the painting shows no humans, but only the brownish shadow of a lumberjack.
Encouraged by the success of Wilderness, Kent soon thereafter wrote two other books: Voyaging (1924) and N by E (1930); both did well. He also went on to illustrate a special three-volume limited edition of Moby-Dick for the Lakeside Press of Chicago. Kent’s black-and-white pen, brush, and ink drawings of whales and Ahab were stupendous. Those first editions constituted a high-water mark in American book publishing. Kent’s illustrations helped inspire the Great Depression generation to rediscover Herman Melville. Throughout the 1930s, in fact, Kent was as celebrated for his illustrations as Norman Rockwell of the Saturday Evening Post.30 He was hired to illustrate classics such as the Canterbury Tales, Candide, Beowulf, and Boccaccio’s Decameron.
The Norse side of Kent continued to ring forth. Believing that folk sagas were a window into cultures, he famously illustrated books about Paul Bunyan and Gisli of Iceland. Major magazines—such as Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, Henry Raymond’s Harper’s Monthly, and Richard Watson Gilder’s Century—commissioned his vivid black-and-white works. Even Kent’s doodles were coveted in New York literary circles. One afternoon Kent was talking with Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House. On the spot, he drew the colophon that Random House still uses. When Modern Library was created, Kent designed its logo, an elegant torchbearer. Eventually, no publisher felt adequate without a logo designed by Rockwell Kent. When Harold Guinzburg started Viking Press, for example, Kent produced its image, a ship.31 “He was, indeed, so indefatigably busy at desk and drawing board,” the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal noted, “that in the 1920s and early 30s his work was virtually inescapable.”32
But it was Wilderness—the prose of a lonely seeker combined with bold illustrations—that has survived as a classic of travel literature. There was something noble about Kent at Fox Island, painting by day, drawing by oil lamp at night. By the 1960s, some readers considered Wilderness a second Walden. It is hard to describe the religiosity Kent had found in the
wilderness at Resurrection Bay. The town of Seward honored him by painting a mural of his nautical map of Resurrection Bay—the frontispiece to Wilderness. Doug Capra, a ranger at Kenai Fjords National Park, hopes to someday rebuild Kent’s cabin, which remains private property. Painters regularly make pilgrimages to the area to have their try at Bear Glacier. To Kent, the far north sky was “God’s abode,” with “truth and beauty emanating as the light from Heaven.”33
For fifteen years after the publication of Wilderness, Kent, always full of pent-up passion, looked for an excuse to go back to Alaska. That opportunity finally presented itself in early 1935. The U.S. Treasury Department had commissioned him to paint two enamel murals for a post office in Washington, D.C. The idea was to demonstrate, in an impressive way, the far-flung services of U.S. airmail. Kent was to show Eskimos from Nome, Alaska, sending letters to a family in Puerto Rico, 5,350 miles away. So, suddenly, thanks to this commission, Kent found himself in Nome, in a frigid wind, looking for Arctic families to sketch under the graying sky. “Alaska in 1935 belonged, as much as a colonial country can, to ‘the people who inhabited it’: the miners and prospectors, the big merchants and little shopkeepers, the artisans and upper laborers; all white,” Kent wrote. “It was no longer, as to a great extent was Greenland, the country of the aborigines. And although the Eskimo, to judge by what I saw of them in Nome and at my farthest north, Tin City, near Cape Prince of Wales, appeared to enjoy a greater material prosperity than the Greenlanders, their citizenship—politically, socially, and economically—was second or third class.”34
Kent painted his mural, which he infused with the left-leaning political disposition of Diego Rivera. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a consultant to Pan American Airlines, gave Kent some tips about the difficulties of aviation around Arctic Alaska, where long gravel spits and permafrost tundra were used as landing strips. The landscape was flat and mundane, and Nome did not even have a single attractive, tree-lined square. In Nome, Kent befriended George Ahgupuk, a talented Eskimo painter, who taught him about dogsledding. (Kent did Ahgupuk the great favor of arranging for him to have a gallery show in New York.) “I got every kind of information as to details and equipment and if, when I finished my picture, there is a single rivet in the dog harness out of place,” Kent wrote to a friend, “it won’t be my fault.”35
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