A Northern Christmas

A NORTHERN CHRISTMAS

ROCKWELL KENT

With a Foreword by Doug Capra

Published by

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown, CT 06459

© 1998 by Wesleyan University Press

Foreword © 1998 by Doug Capra

Reprinted by arrangement with the Rockwell Kent Legacies from the 1941 edition published by American Artists Group, Inc.

All rights reserved

Printed in Singapore

5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kent, Rockwell, 1882–1971.

A northern Christmas / Rockwell Kent; foreword by Doug Capra.

p.      cm.

Originally published: New York : American Artists Group, 1941.

ISBN 0–8195–6362–5 (cl. : alk. paper)

1. Kent, Rockwell, 1882–1971.

2. Artists—United States—Biography.

3. Renard Island (Alaska)—Description and travel.

4. Christmas—Alaska—Renard Island.     I. Title.

N6537.K44A2   1998

760'.092—dc21

[B]                98–8211

WHENEVER I reread
A Northern Christmas
by Rockwell Kent, I am struck by a sentence from his Christmas Eve 1918 journal entry: “I suppose the greatest festivals of our lives are those at which we dance ourselves.”

At age thirty-six, the New York artist found himself with his nine-year-old son on Fox Island at the entrance to Resurrection Bay, about twelve miles south of Seward, Alaska. This was no romantic retreat for an artist in search of peace and beauty but rather “the flight to freedom of a man who detests the endless petty quarrels and the bitterness of the crowded world—the pilgrimage of a philosopher in quest of happiness and peace of mind.” It was to be no easy quest.

Lars Olson, a seventy-one-year-old Swede and Alaskan pioneer who ran a goat and fox farm on the island, welcomed the Kents by offering
them an old goat shed. Kent took up the challenge and created a comfortable refuge. Disgusted with a money-hungry world at war, struggling to save his marriage, and desperate to earn a living with his art, Kent teetered on the brink of what he called the “emptiness of the abyss” before eventually filling that void with the wealth of his own soul.

As Christmas approaches on Fox Island, Kent choreographs his own dance, teaches the steps to his son and Olson, and even provides the music with his flute. “You need nothing from outside,” he writes, “not even illusion.” The artist, his son, and the old man brighten the winter darkness with a candlelit tree, hang spruce and hemlock boughs for decoration, make do with homemade and improvised gifts, and cook up a Christmas feast announced with hand-printed menus. He has again fulfilled a life-long goal by creating his culture rather than being created by it.

Back in New York after seven months in Alaska, and encouraged by a successful show of his sketches, Kent wrote
Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska
. Its publication
in 1920, timed to coincide with a show of his Alaska paintings, began Kent's rise to fame. Years later, he excerpted the Christmas chapters from
Wilderness
, made some minor changes to them, and designed a gift book published in 1941 by the American Artists Group. With this fine reproduction of the first edition, we are fortunate to have
A Northern Christmas
back in print.

A NORTHERN CHRISTMAS

BEING THE STORY OF A PEACEFUL
CHRISTMAS IN THE REMOTE AND
PEACEFUL WILDERNESS OF AN
ALASKAN ISLAND
BY

ROCKWELL KENT

A
LL
R
IGHTS
R
ESERVED

Copyright
, 1941
by

American Artists Group, Inc
.

New York

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

T
O
EVERYBODY

A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND
A HAPPY NEW YEAR

THE south coast of the mainland of Alaska is a wilderness of spruce-clad mountains whose outlying, isolated peaks are islands. On one of these we lived, a father and his eight-year son. We lived there in the winter of nineteen-eighteen and nineteen, the man in pursuit of his profession, the boy in pursuit of what of education lay in doing things, and both in that pursuit of happiness which, with whatever right, is still what every living creature wants. They had come a long long way, these two: and what they sought they found. If home is where what you desire is, then we'd come home.

There in the forest on a low-lying level kween two mountain peaks we lived: our house a one room cabin crudely built of logs and caulked with moss; our dooryard—toward the view—the space we'd cleared by felling trees for fuel; our view a crescent cove, the bay, the mountains of the distant shore, the sky, the moon and stars at night. And, for companionship, ourselves, each other, and a genial, wise and kind old man, old Sourdough of early gold rush days, old trapper, lifelong pioneer, a Swede named Olson: we three, a pair of foxes shut in a corral, a milk goat (christened Nanny), an obstreperous Angora goat (one Billy) and some foolishly adoring women of his kind, otters that now and then sat basking on the rocks, blue jays and gulls, and porcupines. It was enough. Of the fullness of the days—fullness of work and thought, of play, of little happenings, of uneventful peace—we kept record.