Norman Rockwell (2 page)

One way that some critics have elected to back into the problem, so to speak, has been to manipulate Rockwell into escaping the whole dilemma. The nation’s first father of popular culture was, it turns out, conveniently called “Pop” by his sons, a delicious coincidence that anticipates the postmodern culture that today would claim him as its own. Earnest art critics, eager to determine a respectable way to include him anew in the art histories of the twentieth century, find themselves mesmerized by the prospect of wedding popular to postmodern: perhaps Norman Rockwell’s decades of sentimental, narrative painting prophesied the postmodern brilliance of marrying high and low culture; maybe Rockwell was pomo in spite of himself. If nothing else, Rockwell’s art clearly was meant to be disposable (a good thing) versus monumental (negative), finding its temporary home on the cover of magazines that were discarded weekly.

This biography engages in such theoretical questions more by implication than directly. I have sought to offer one interpretation of the complicated, fascinating long life of a major modern American figure. The very lack of a full-length biography of a man of Norman Rockwell’s long-term fame intrigued me, especially as the reasons for such a rude omission are implicated in the shifts of aesthetic tastes and social values that the march of the twentieth century demanded. My account is limited in the way that all historical assessments are, by the lack of a bird’s-eye view. “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written,” Mark Twain wrote in his own self-history.

I console myself that most readers nowadays hold truth to be a complicated achievement, and few among us believe anyone’s telling of a life to be the final word, the only way of its telling. Because those of us in the twenty-first century are close to Rockwell’s times—seeing them, quite rightly, as the context from which our own lives emerge—we mine such lives as a means to understand the families that spawned us and the selves we’ve become.

It obviously wasn’t all that incongruous for me to wed my initial interest in Norman Rockwell’s
Calling the Game
with the more academic interests I’d long been pondering, theoretical questions about biographies, histories, and other narrative art forms. I decided I wanted to know all about the man who lived his own life grounded in the power of narrative, of telling stories. Over the countless trips I made to Stockbridge to work in the extensive Rockwell archives, capped by a writing fellowship at the International Ledig House in Hudson, New York, I came to trust my first aesthetic instincts. The shock of recognition that I had first felt when seeing Rockwell anew—really, for the first time—back in Cooperstown, remained true to the place where I ended.

And it proved especially fortunate that I wrote the first draft of
Norman Rockwell
during my idyllic retreat among poets, novelists, reporters, and visual artists from Sweden, Bangladesh, Spain, Germany, Poland, and England. These colleagues helped me think about the differences between the intimidation of Americans by institutional criticism and the greater freedom abroad to stand by one’s sensuous reaction to art as a valid criterion for its worth. The Catskill Mountains at sunset, the autumnal colors competing against the sun’s defiantly brilliant nocturne, painted an almost too perfectly clichéd backdrop for many intense international discussions about Rockwell’s talent. After all, Rockwell’s Massachusetts and Vermont homes were both an easy drive from here, their Berkshires and Green Mountains mere variations on our local Hudson Valley panorama.

But I also realized how Norman Rockwell’s presence was recorded in my life even closer to home. A few months earlier, writing yet another thank-you note to an acquaintance of Norman Rockwell generous with his time, I found my afternoon’s work at a Brooklyn waterfront café interrupted by the antics of two art students laughing over their sodas and onion rings. After they filled their straws with cola, they expertly squirted the stream of liquid to imaginary lines on the street below, deciding that whoever hit closest to the East River was destined to make a six-figure sale first. Probably because my project was drawing to a close, nostalgia overtook me, and I was transported vividly, if for only a minute, to the similar scenes that must have occurred around 1915, when Norman Rockwell shared studio space with his art school friends in this same neighborhood. The landscape has remained fairly constant, but Rockwell and his buddies were talking about where they could gain exposure: money, they scoffed, wasn’t meant for real artists, a position Rockwell took pains in later years to disavow. I wondered what he would think of these students, so comfortable admitting that their ambitions included monetary success. At the very least, he would have found them interesting, his curiosity one of his most salient features.

Over the years, Rockwell’s celebrity has proved cumbersome to his three sons, and it took but a few interviews for me to see the potential barrier it would erect for me as well. Americans, especially those whose lives he personally graced with a way he had of making people feel important, believed they owed him his hero’s status, and that too much information might tarnish the mythology. As a result of his fans’ reluctance to commit potential sacrilege, the family’s cooperation and the precedents they established turned out to be especially important in the research for this biography. All three sons, of strikingly different temperaments but sharing a communal decorum, graciousness, and goodwill toward others, promoted publicly their hard-won belief that it was time to make peace with their father’s humanity—that he was weak as well as strong, and there was nothing to be ashamed of in that. Jarvis Rockwell, the artist’s eldest son, made himself available whenever and however I wanted to talk, in spite of illness and pressing professional concerns. His interest in the mind’s processes and his years of scrupulous introspection made him a particularly rich source of informed speculation. Tom Rockwell inconvenienced himself without hesitation every time I asked for help, and he delivered that help with a gentle humor, lively wit, and modesty that surely hinted at his father, as well as attesting to his own strengths as a writer. Often I left his farmhouse feeling a bit more in touch with the affection the illustrator had so effortlessly bred in others. Peter Rockwell, the youngest of the three, met me everywhere—literally as well as psychologically in this case, since we conversed in Atlanta, Stockbridge, and Tuscany, where he even gave me a free lesson in stone carving. The precision demanded in his art reverberated in his conversations about his father: Peter repeatedly and carefully fine-tuned his reflections so that I felt him a real ally in my search for some kind of truth. These men—not coincidentally artists all—as well as their lively, thoughtful wives, Nova, Gail, and Cinny, provided physical hospitality in addition to allowing me the material support of their memories and personal archives. Jarvis, Tom, and Peter Rockwell proved extraordinary resources and exemplary sons: alternately skeptical, proud, loving, unsure of their father, they were both loyal and honest about him—a difficult combination—though it was clear that these emotions proved costly at times.

The museum built around Norman Rockwell, where the archives contain everything from the illustrator’s four pairs of eyeglasses to more than thirty boxes of his business correspondence alone, was an idyllic place to study my subject. Its director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, ensured that the repository was open to my intrusions, its collection easily accessible to my sometimes overreaching curiosity, in spite of the inconvenience my presence frequently caused. But in terms of sheer impact on this biography, no book or individual has approached the influence of Linda Pero, curator of the museum’s archives. With her encyclopedic and learned grasp of her subject, her quiet and strong sense of Rockwellian duty—meaning that for her, hard work and graciousness go hand in hand—she is every researcher’s dream. For such as us mere mortals, she tethers her creative intelligence to the fastidious world of archival documents, numbers, and other artifacts of “hard” history. Not only her practical advice but the sagacity of her insights enriched my own a hundredfold. I thank her for enabling this project to see daylight.

Although it is true that when I began my research no comprehensive biography yet existed of Norman Rockwell, there were dozens of immeasurably useful and often well-informed books about various aspects of his art and person. Particularly helpful for my purposes were Arthur Guptill’s pioneering study of Rockwell’s technique,
Norman Rockwell, Illustrator,
especially significant because the artist cooperated with the author during its composition; Thomas Buechner’s invaluable
Norman Rockwell, Artist and Illustrator;
Christopher Finch’s
Norman Rockwell: 322 Magazine Covers,
with some of the most trenchant and on-target evaluations of Rockwell’s major oils that exist, in spite of too many factual errors; Jan Cohn’s
Covers of the Saturday Evening Post;
Donald Walton’s chatty
A Rockwell Portrait;
Susan Meyer’s books on Rockwell’s models and on great illustrators in general; and Laurie Norton Moffatt’s
Definitive Catalogue,
an indispensable tool for any student of Rockwell. More recently, by going back to the drawing board themselves—by refusing too easy classifications and categorizations—the social and art historians Dave Hickey, Karal Ann Marling, Wanda Korn, and Michele Bogart have elevated the discourse surrounding Rockwell, brilliantly nudging the vocabulary used to explore his work into one of serious—not to say solemn—cultural respectability. Students of Rockwell today are heavily in their debt; they were there first. Also fortunate for Rockwell scholars is the plethora of good “picture books” that exists; their first-rate quality ensures that readers of this biography have easy access to much of Rockwell’s oeuvre. Given his substantial output, any severely edited selection ends up somewhat capricious and personal, but in general I have tried to provide examples of different periods, different genres, and most of all, of his finest painting per se, the oils that could be at home in any thoughtful collection of twentieth-century art.

Humility—the acknowledgment that no one creates alone—is one of the first lessons taught by the demands of this particular genre. To complete the project in a timely fashion, sustaining along the way the same enthusiasm with which I began, I have relied over the past several years on a handful of people who patiently allowed me to talk or to research Rockwell with them again and again, as I tried to absorb into myself their own special knowledge of the subject: Robert Berridge, John Favareau, Wayne Kempton, Virginia Loveless, and Dick Rockwell. Others tended my project in far less direct ways that probably I alone recognize: Bruce Fleming, Phil Jason, Elizabeth Langland, Dori Sless, Joseph Wittreich, and Arnold Dino Rivera, whose expansive knowledge of the human body and its possible ailments, in concert with a humanity that, cliché though it may be, shines forth from his eyes, makes him a surgeon I’d choose any day.

For advice about the ever-elusive psyche, mental health specialists Sue Erikson Bloland, Robert Coles, Kaye Redfield Jamison, and Jennifer Naidich provided wise observations and cautious clues that helped me understand Norman Rockwell far better than I could have on my own. In varying degrees, they blended friendship with professionalism, a nexus that yielded yet more bounty during the biographer’s hunt.

I have learned that during the writing of any book, certain individuals bear an importance disproportionate to their actual involvement with the project. Arthur Danto, Robert Rosenblum, and Michel Witmer hold pride of place for
Norman Rockwell:
the first two learned professors took time to encourage my vision even when they bore weighty demands on their own schedules, and the notoriously generous art dealer shared his near encyclopedic knowledge of art historical moments with me, week after week, year after year.

Others with me on a near daily basis were my invaluable research assistants. Lulen Walker and Elizabeth Ann Parker worked fast and furiously early on, before leaving for curatorial positions. Devin Orgeron proved an adroit, intuitive interviewer in California as well as places East. Ingrid Satelmajer’s sharp intellect prompted my rethinking every time she read a chapter of the manuscript, and her natural warmth smoothed more rough corners than texts alone. The burden of assistance, however, was borne by Tracey Middlekauff and Marsha Orgeron, and if I had a wish list for the future, they’d be near the top of it. Whenever I needed them (often), wherever (all over the country), whatever (from redoing three hundred endnotes to translating Latin marriage certificates), they delivered. They saved me from countless errors; they went the extra mile to assuage my fears. I am deeply grateful for their presence.

There were other people at my side throughout this project: Linda Chester, my agent, and her associate, Julie Rubenstein, eased my way professionally and personally. Their enthusiasm, friendship, and affection buoyed my spirits whenever they were flagging. At Random House, I was lucky to have Caroline Cunningham design a beautiful interior, Casey Hampton a perfect series of photo inserts, and Dan Rembert a handsome jacket; and Benjamin Dreyer, the production editor, with the assistance of the sharp eyes of John McGhee and proofreaders Michael Burke and Maria Massey, magnificently put the pages through their paces until they came out a book. Matt Thornton helped us all, one way or another. Early on, Ann Godoff’s support and Jonathan Karp’s editorial sponsorship had convinced me that I’d found the right home for Rockwell’s biography. Then, when Susanna Porter edited the manuscript, I decided that this home was very heaven. Her intelligence and sensitivity to language saved me from every possible kind of mistake; she did so with utmost grace and tactfulness; and she pulled it all off creatively, sometimes working in unconventional methods in order to avoid the delays common to biographies. She is, in short, every writer’s dream editor.

Many individuals bound not to my text but to Norman Rockwell himself gave selflessly when I turned to them for help—most of them strangers to me until their efforts bridged that gap: Betty Parmelee Aaronson, Barbara Alan, Mary Best Alcambra, Lyn Austin, Joanne Bartoli, Jonathan Best, Terry Bragg, Sue Bronstein, Thomas Buechner, Paul Camp, Stephanie Cassidy, Ardis Clark, Christopher Clark, Rachel Clark, Jan Cohn, Sally Hill Cooper, Barbara Davis, Kara Dowd, Amy Edgerton, Bud Edgerton, Joy Edgerton, Kai Erikson, Barclay Feather, Peter Franck, Ilene Frank, Joy Freisatz, Lawrence Friedman, Elizabeth Fuller, Bill George, Shelley Getchell, Dalia Giladi, Jim Gilkinson, Tom Glazier, Judy Goffman-Cutler, Leah Schaeffer Goodfellow, Jennifer Gould, Douglas Greenberg, Trevor Hall, Lauren Henkley, Bradford and Kay Hertzog, Dave Hickey, Charles and Maren Hobson, Tom and Jeannette Hochtor, Helen Hutchinson, Gary Jaffe, Nancy Jarman, Timothy V. Johnson, Clemens Kalischer, Deane Keller, Fran Kessler, David Knowles, Pam Koob, Matt Kuhnert, Terry Lehr, Barry Lewis, Susan Lyman, Constance Malpas, Donald March, Allison Marchese, Karal Ann Marling, Margaret McBurnie, Pam Mendelsohn, David Ment, Susan Merrill, Susan Meyer, David Michaelis, Melissa Mosqueda, Francis Murphy, Kenneth John Myers, Chris Niebuhr, William Nordling, Tim O’Brien, Pat O’Donnell, Mary Amy Orpen, Robert Orpen, Anka Palitz, Barbara Davis Pappas, Dean X. Parmelee, Fred Paulmann, Anne Pelham, Gene Pelham, Elizabeth Peters, Steve Pettinga, Yvette Cohen Pomerantz, Gloria Pritts, Ferdinand Protzman, Mary Quinn, Tom Range, Cris Raymond, Azra Raza, Sugra Raza, Walt Reed, Paul Richard, Bea Rockwell, Daisy Rockwell, Mary Rockwell, Peigi Rockwell, Michael Rubenstein, Cecelia A. St. Jean, Steve Schlein, Ron Schweiger, Eric Segal, Richard Seigman, Theresa Sharp, Maryann Smith, Janet Solinger, Leo Spinelli, William Stauffer, Ann Stokes, Nan Timmerman, Betsey Travis, Kathleen Triem, Miriam Tuba, Agata Tuszynska, John Updike, Leonard Verrastro, Ida Washington, Mary Welsh, Ess White, Nancy White, Jonathan Witte, Nancy Barstow Wynkoop, David Wood, and Mitchell Yockelson.