The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [116]
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