N by E

Foreword: On Rockwell Kent

FOREWORD On Rockwell Kent Edward Hoagland L I K E JACK Lo NDo N,George Catlin, Frederick Church—and like John Ledyard, William Bartram,John James Audubon, John Muir, Herman Melville, Stephen Crane (one could go on naming others, from Clarence King to Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac)—the artist-memoirist Rockwell Kent was a caroming American who drew his subject matter, inspiration, and credentials from his risky and impromptu travels. He believed in impulse , and flourished during the Roaring Twenties. In fact, he thrived in the so-called Roaring Forties, too—those wild latitudes of Tierra del Fuego to which an adventurous sea voyage carried him in 1922. "Man is," after all, as Kent said, "less entity than consequence and his being is but a derivation of a less subjective world, a synthesis of what he calls the elements. Man's very spirit is a sublimation of cosmic energy and worships it as God." This compact bit of Transcendentalism isfrom Nby E, Kent's journal of his first trip to, and shipwreck on the shores of, Greenland , published in 1930. He was a stunning landscape and seascape painter as well as, for his time, a limber, nonpareil book illustrator, specializing in such picaresque, imperishable epics as Candide, Moby Dick, Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, Beowulf, Paul Bunyan's saga, and that of the Icelandichero Gisli. Indeed, asthough doodling, he sat one day in the office of Bennett Cerf, Random House's cofounder, and sketched the colophon that all Random House books continue to bear. The Modern Library 's logo, a stylish Torchbearer, is also his. And for Harold Guinzburg, cofounder of the Viking Press, he quickly dashed off Viking's Viking ship. (Guinzburg had planned to call his publishing house the Half Moon Press, after Henry Hudson's ship, but the panache of the nautical Vikings, as conceived by Kent, changed his mind.) Rockwell Kent was a figure in bon vivant and bohemian circles in the Twenties. Always busy, he drew visual bibelots for Frank Crowninshield's Vanity Fair magazine, Rolls Royce ads, and simulacra of unbuilt buildings for a tony architectural firm. But he would dart off inopportunely to the Strait of Magellan, or Resurrection Bay in Alaska, or to the headlands of Newfoundland , or the west coast of Ireland, or the Alpes-Maritimes. He was not a narrow careerist, and had missed, for example, the famous Armory Show of 1913 because he had been working in Winona, Minnesota,while it was being organized. His interludes of derring-do, often in subpolar regions where he seemed to put himself in harm's way for the purposes of allegory, cut into commercial jobs but ultimatelyfurnished him with successful books like Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska (1920) and Voyaging: Southwardfrom the Strait of Magellan (1924), and, more important, with the kinetic geometries of many trenchant paintings. If you look at the extraordinary faces he lent to Chaucer , Melville, and other master writers (Whitman, Goethe, Voltaire , Shakespeare—he was game to tackle anybody), a number viii of them surely were engendered in the back of beyond. But he also drewthe gentler shapes of MountEquinox, Vermont, Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks, and Monhegan Island, ten miles off the coast of Maine—places where he 'd sought to live in peace and quiet with one of his wives for a spell, until his engines of internal combustion accelerated again. N by E, published when Kent was forty-eight and at the top of his form, is the reconstructed diary of an improvised sail in a yacht called Direction (he disliked the name as needlessly provocative) from Nova Scotia to Greenland in midsummer, 1929. He returned for a more intensive tussle with Greenland's glacial grandeur and Eskimo society, producing another book, called Salamina (1935) after his mistress and kifak housekeeper in the village of Igdlorssuit, where he settled blithely for a while. When his then-wife, Frances, arrived from America, Salamina moved next door. A second timehe came back, bringing along his thirteen-year-old son, Gordon, reconnecting with Salamina,and driving a dogteam out to promontories where he could pitch a tent and paint. But N by E has a scary, exuberant edge. First there is the excitement of an explosion of genuine pelagic perils, hairsbreadth escapes, and goofy errors. Finally the author, with his exasperatingly mismatched pickup companions, both less than half his age, comes a...