Читать книгу A Northern Christmas - Rockwell Kent - Страница 4

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.