Norman Rockwell (31 page)

But the price Rockwell paid for repressing and denying so much anxiety and turmoil would have to be paid, and almost as if the very security of his current surroundings allowed him to relax his vigilance, the depression he’d been holding at bay now surfaced.

During the summer of 1931, happy to play the part of a knowing, famous relative and relieved to feel pride again in the company of his wife and her family, Rockwell generously wrote Mary’s sister, Nancy, about her fledgling attempts to become an artist:

Draw all day, cast in the morning and life in the afternoon, or vice versa. . . .

The reason I keep harping on the drawing is that good draftsmanship is in more demand and better rewarded than any other department of art.

Learn how to draw people sitting down, standing up or on their heads or any old way and your work will always be liked and wanted. . . . Many times in art school you’ll hear the phrase “anyone can learn how to draw.” This is one of the most ridiculous fallacies in the world, as only about 1⁄8 of the people who go to art school ever learn how to draw after years of hard work. . . . you’ll hear plenty of fine talking from those who can’t draw—all about abstractions of design and color and symmetry and all that sort of stuff.

Rockwell’s irrefragable belief in the importance of drawing well fit squarely within the tradition of the greatest illustrators. Recently, N. C. Wyeth, like his teacher Howard Pyle before him, had become disgusted at the tendency of students to avoid “that vital necessity of knowing how to draw.” Concerned that the current slew of art students was slighting the task, Rockwell emphasized the point to his sister-in-law: “There’s one thing that all great artists have in common—when I say great, I mean really great—some have color, but poor composition. Some have great feeling but no arrangement. Some have lofty ideas but no color. But believe me they all can draw, because you can’t express yourself decently without it. So Nance, old kid, let ’em laugh at draftsmanship, but he that laughs last lays the golden egg.”

Mary especially appreciated her husband’s taking the time to write her family back in California because she herself was feeling the burden of advanced pregnancy. The first humid air of the summer felt portentous to everyone, as family and friends watched Waring degenerate painfully, his naturally slight body wasting into signs of impending death. During the spring, Jerry and Carol and their two young sons had visited the stoical man several more times. Nancy and Waring had decided to travel to Florida to see relatives, and no one expected Waring to return alive. On August 6, a month after Rockwell expansively wrote his sister-in-law, Waring Rockwell died in DeLand, Florida. And, on September 3, Norman’s first child, Jarvis Waring Rockwell, assumed his patrimony. The illustrator became the New York patriarch. He joyfully took on the role of father and, far more uncomfortably, moved to ensure his mother’s well-being, financially underwriting her move to Kane, Pennsylvania, to live with Jerry and Carol. Rockwell was relieved that his brother welcomed her. Nancy herself was deeply comforted by the new baby’s birth; she wrote to the son of her dead brother Thomas that “I am so sad without Waring. . . . But the baby, named Jarvis Waring Rockwell after my dear husband . . . is great solace to me.”

Before “Baba” could go live with her son and daughter-in-law, Norman had to loan Jerry the money to buy a house. During their first year in Kane, Jerry had rented a house on the south side of town, but the one they bought now was much nicer, with its large front porch, grand piano, and four bedrooms upstairs, the “huge” one for Baba. The combination of feeling responsible for both his mother and a new child added to the stresses that he was registering from other sources. Not at ease about his own finances, Rockwell realized that his investments were showing the effect of the Depression. The same portfolio of stocks valued at $38,000 the year before had now declined by 30 to 40 percent.

Yet for all his worry, Rockwell was better positioned both personally and professionally than he’d ever been. In accordance with the times, as well as in keeping with his own strict adherence to the domain of the studio, he did virtually no childcare. “He bragged about not knowing how to change a diaper even after I was born,” his grandchild Daisy Rockwell remembers. Mary delighted in caring for little Jerry, however, though her first concern remained her husband’s welfare, which meant, essentially, his career satisfaction. Luckily, in light of the Depression, it was a good time to be associated with
The Saturday Evening Post.
As if the
Post,
along with the rest of the country, had recovered from the long party of the 1920s, in 1931 a leaner, more aggressive magazine suggested a new direction for the next decade. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s exquisite melancholic story “Babylon Revisited” was published, and Sinclair Lewis returned to the
Post
’s pages as a Nobel laureate. Most startling, Lorimer had chosen to serialize Leon Trotsky’s
The Russian Revolution,
granting a cachet of unpredictability at the very least. Perhaps the
Post
would prove capacious enough to give Rockwell room to grow.

Still, the artist found himself unable to kick his depression, the conviction that he was at a dead end, unsure where to take his talent, unconvinced he had staying power. From letters Mary wrote to her parents the following year, as well as from comments Rockwell himself made in the decades ahead, during the early thirties his ideas weren’t coming like they used to; he felt his work for the
Post
to be stagnant, and yet even such disappointing results took him longer than ever.

Tom Rockwell, the artist’s middle son, believes that the illustrator had never paused to calculate the costs of dealing with his failed first marriage, adjusting to a new one, confronting his father’s death, and welcoming the birth of his first child. Instead, he exerted prodigious efforts to detour anxiety via his art—essentially the insight the illustrator himself maintained openly throughout his life. He focused his emotions in his paintings. Sometimes, in a circular movement, the work diminished as a result, making him feel even worse.

Rockwell’s books on the life of the long-suffering Rembrandt were well-thumbed from the illustrator’s earliest years. In his self-definition as a perpetual underdog and outsider, as Tom Rockwell puts it, Rockwell enjoyed identifying with others of similar psychological cast. Rembrandt had experienced deep periods of depression when his first and second wives died, ceasing his painting entirely for years. At other times, just like Rockwell, he scurried to take on as many heinous commissions as he could find, in order to make the payments on the lavish house he had built in Amsterdam to prove to others, including his parents-in-law, that he was more than “just a painter.” As one critic notes, “after years of trying to break out of portraiture and into history painting, he had condemned himself . . . to portraiture, to an endless scrambling for money, to a perpetual sensation of being behind, to an interminable scurrying for commissions to paint people he didn’t like and a ceaseless avoiding of people to whom he owed money.” Rockwell did not, so far, have to evade bill collectors, but he worried that such a fate might be his if he let up on his work.

Mary Barstow Rockwell, whom at least one of her sons would always think of as a kind of Pollyanna, had progressed overnight from the protected status of a sheltered young woman living with her parents to being the wife of a world-famous illustrator. To her everlasting credit, she proved herself up to the demands of marrying a depressed artist carrying a great deal of emotional baggage. In February 1932, when the exhausted illustrator decided that a dramatic shift of location would jump-start his imagination, his loyal wife promptly agreed, with only two weeks’ notice, to move to Paris. On February 1, 1932, two days before Rockwell’s thirty-eighth birthday, the artist had written his sister-in-law about the recent exhibit of Diego Rivera that he and Mary had seen in Manhattan, stressing Rivera’s solid groundedness before the Mexican painter had dared risk studying in Paris. The illustrator also wanted to paint “his own art,” informed by the best lessons of his elders and contemporaries as well. As his thoughts jelled, he had decided to follow the course so many young men had two decades earlier—he would chuck it all to live in Paris. Of course, he was not a young man, and it was 1932. The relocation was unlikely to result in radical artistic reorientation, and in his heart he must have realized that.

Fully aware of the challenges of moving to a foreign country, and armed with nothing but good intentions, adequate income, and a baby and family dog, Mary nonetheless encouraged her husband to seek his professional rejuvenation. Yes, she told him, we’ll go to Paris, and there you will find inspiration.

What must Rockwell have felt, now that he had a helpmate who put his needs above her own? Mary’s behavior contrasted starkly with that exhibited by both his mother and Irene, and the grateful illustrator, always generous with his laurels, would have shared his pleasure with her. His gratitude, deeply and sincerely felt, would have egged her on, rewarding her for her complete focus on Norman’s needs, on Norman’s feelings, on Norman’s life. Mary not only organized his home life so that he could work whenever he wanted, but she was available to him emotionally and socially the minute he called. The result? The couple grew to trust Mary’s intuitive response to any crisis or more mundane aesthetic expression that Rockwell encountered.

They packed for at least six months abroad and sailed with five-month-old Jerry and Raleigh, the loyal German shepherd, to Paris aboard the R.M.S.
Mauretania
on February 28. Even though Mary Barstow had grown up comfortably, the social level of this shipboard experience dazzled her. From the “fried smelts rémoulade” to the “roast Pheasant à l’Anglaise,” everything seemed exotic. In her letters to her family, the twenty-four-year-old woman wrote of the people they met and of her attempts to keep her husband company on deck while also tending to the often upset baby below. Mary especially worried about the artist’s back, which caused him constant discomfort from an injury he received when he had tried to lift their Ping-Pong table on his birthday. Throughout the fall, he would require the ser-vices of an osteopath, and his daily work at the easel would literally pain him.

But for now, on board the ship, Rockwell felt new enthusiasm for his profession, armed with the certainty that something good would befall him abroad. And in truth, this trip, with his firstborn son and, finally, the adoring wife he had sought at his side, must have promised a kind of rebirth.

The results of his own self-consciously pursued renaissance, predictably, fell short of his hopes. Even in 1922, over a decade after Picasso had inaugurated a revolution in art, Paris had provided a near surfeit of pictorial riches, it is true; the variety of representational and figurative art expressed by those loosely grouped under the name School of Paris would seem a dispensation for the kind of work most congenial to Rockwell’s imagination. But by 1932, the climate toward such painting was shifting, and critics were restless for something new. Rockwell again had waited to make his bid to join the “real” art world just long enough that he was out of sync.

They docked at Cherbourg, arriving in Paris by train in the early evening. Before the couple even considered sight-seeing, the first order of business was finding Rockwell a studio. By the end of the first week in March, as Mary shares in her letters to California, the couple had found the “perfect” place, an old building being renovated, on the avenue de Saxe. “It has a direct north light, grey walls, and a coal stove and—piece de resistance—a couch and shelves in a corner all covered with deep wine colored velvet. It’s really nice and the woman had an easel Norm could use. He bought a table, a stool, put out his sketches and a clothes tree with costumes until it looks very homelike and exactly the place to work.” The couple had been staying at the Hotel Wagram on the rue de Rivoli until this point, and since they had now located Rockwell’s workplace, they had a better sense of where to look for housing. Even without a home of their own, however, Mary found the radical change from New Rochelle wonderful: “I am beginning really to enjoy Paris. There is NOTHING like it. There isn’t the rush and hecticness there is in America.”

After a month and a half of looking for an apartment, on April 11 Mary and Norman found a “little villa with a garden,” at the end of a “funny little street that ends against a pair of gates, where the only sounds you hear are convent bells and roosters.” Complete with bowers of spring flowers, a fig tree in bloom, and wicker garden furniture, the furnished apartment within easy walking distance from the studio seemed perfect to the young, eager housewife. Although they signed a six-month lease for the furnished house at 12 Villa de Saxe, paying 3,500 francs a month, she imagined they would stay even longer, “as it is the absolutely ideal place for Norm’s work.”

It also seemed the ideal place for Mary, who wrote her parents that “I love Paris more and more and feel I could be perfectly happy here pretty nearly always. It is about seventy times as nice as New Rochelle and I think I feel more at home already. We never want to go back there again, I am sure.” The young woman merges her identity with her husband’s consistently, a habit she would refer to ironically many years later, but one that, for the moment, granted her security. Her emotional dependency is understandable: not only had she married a man she barely knew; according to her sister, she had been warned by well-meaning relatives and friends that the famous artist had just gotten divorced, that it was dangerous to risk being salve for his wound—being a transitional relationship, a trophy for a man on the rebound. And, Nancy Barstow has explained, Mary grew up winning love from her stern, imposing mother by being the good oldest child, tending the others, making good grades, earning affection. Described as sweet and giving by almost everyone who knew her, Mary’s goodness tends to obscure the reality that while her husband was often absentmindedly blind to her suffering, he did not ask, even implicitly, for the level of self-sacrifice she rejoiced in giving. Nor did he reject it. Whatever made her happy and did not get in the way of his work was okay by him.