The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [110]
After a well-received show at Knoedler Galleries, primarily of his Atlantic coast paintings, Kent was considered a rising star. George Bellows, the famous painter of Both Members of This Club, a dramatic boxing scene, saw him as a genuine rival, the most intriguing of the up-and-coming modernists. Kent’s colors glowed on the canvas. Because of his representational symbols—heavily influenced by Nietzsche—his works resembled those of the German painter Franz Marc. Early in Kent’s career the wild Adirondacks served as an inspiration for his intense nature studies.9 Eventually Kent moved to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, hoping to soothe his troubled mind, painting the enchanting cliffs and fish houses of Monhegan Island. Even though Kent painted like a man possessed, he managed to read the collected works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Wordsworth for inspiration. While working as a lobsterman, struggling to find a commercial audience for his art, he developed into a Spartan survivalist, a singular craftsman comfortable living in genteel poverty. All Kent needed to be happy was a floor to sleep on, a bedtime vodka, and mediocre food. “If minds can become magnetized, mine was: its compass pointed north,” he wrote. “I set out for the golden North, for Newfoundland, to prospect for a homeland.”10 For a while he lived in Newfoundland, finding comfort walking over the steep hillsides and rock outcroppings that dropped dramatically into the Atlantic Ocean.11
Kent was also a pugilist, and his arms were muscular from boxing. With dark hazel eyes, his head prematurely balding, his hands fidgeting with whatever object was nearest, he was an intimidating adversary, able to quote Nietzsche verbatim and to eat halibut raw. Practical jokes were an important part of his everyday life, which, to Kent, was a dutiful exercise in carpe diem. Local mariners saw him as a peculiar piece of work, a human clock that ran backward. “Do you want my life, in a nutshell?” Kent once wrote. “It’s this: that I have only one life and I’m going to live it as nearly as possible as I want to live it.”12 Sleeping, however, didn’t come easily to the hyperactive Kent, who wrote in It’s Me, O Lord, “Insomnia isn’t nice.”13 Physical exertion outdoors, what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life, appealed mightily to Kent, who felt that it directed his inner compass and uplifted him. His favorite verse of Blake’s was “Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet./This is not done by jostling in the Street.” Kent lived by this creed.14 Going to Alaska wasn’t a random impulse; it was an imperative—the three words stood for everything free, unspoiled, and democratic.
Life for Kent was always hand-to-mouth, and an ordeal. By the time he was thirty-six years old, he was stone broke, rudderless, and furious at Woodrow Wilson for not keeping America neutral during the European war. Making matters worse, Kent was often estranged from his wife, and he had a string of affairs that proved corrosive to his family. His temper was volatile, his willpower unnerving, his attire indecorous. Deeply self-centered—his friends floated into and out of his life—the fatalist Kent knew that in the end only he would be around for the curtain call. Disappearing to south-central Alaska, living a Thoreauvian life in a little shack on Fox Island, and using the inhospitable remoteness of Resurrection Bay to bond with Rocky made perfect sense to Kent. A bundle of energy, always an escapist, Kent had very little to lose by going to