Norman Rockwell (36 page)

At the same time, the past spring’s events lend special explanatory power to the “due date” sign at the top of the blank canvas. Here, in place of Rockwell’s unfailing creative progeny appearing when it is supposed to, sits an all-encompassing yawn of white, the due date productive of nothing this time, the painter turned not to his audience, but in private, mute dialogue with the missing picture.

Rockwell connected with others most vividly and viscerally through the
Post
covers—and with himself, most intimately of all. Years later, his friend Erik Erikson would tell him that he painted his happiness rather than lived it. The statement was one that resonated deeply with Rockwell; he described it often, as an acute moment of self-realization. For his family, a sense that their life to some extent imitated art—that they spent their energies trying to live the covers their father painted—frustrated their desire to be close to their parents. Jarvis maintains that his family can best be understood “as a group of well-meaning people all turned away from the center of the circle, with a cipher at its heart.” “I felt that our home was unreal, and I felt it early on,” he continues. Almost preternaturally observant, the oldest son very early on displayed his father’s great intelligence and restless ambition. “Somehow, at age seven, I recognized the truth. And I felt things were given to me and then taken away, suddenly not there anymore. Like I’d feel secure as if I understood how things were, how they were supposed to be, then it was all gone somehow.”

Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of Erik Erikson, believes her relationship to her father similar to Jarvis’s with his: “Dad’s fame—particularly his idealized image as a father figure—engendered fantasies in both of us: he SHOULD be the perfect father, and I SHOULD be the ideal daughter that one would expect a perfect father to have. We were both drawn to the illusion of specialness that his public image seemed to offer us. As a result, the experience of disconnection left us both feeling more deeply flawed and ashamed.” Yes, responds Rockwell’s oldest son, that sounds just right.

A preoccupation with the missing father, or with the need for the child to father himself through his art, must have reverberated in unconscious tracks each time that Dickens’s novels brought Rockwell’s own remote father back to life. And Mary read Dickens aloud to her husband throughout their marriage. When Rockwell’s own father had died, a month later the illustrator’s firstborn son had replaced him, neatly, almost without missing a beat, engendering a new Jarvis Waring Rockwell. Of course—even inevitably—the artist would replicate the same well-meaning but distant relationship with this son, who inconveniently refused denial and protested, almost from birth, instead. “I wanted to connect so badly, and I kept trying, and all I can remember from my earliest days is my father trying too, but pulling back, every single time I got close,” Jarvis still laments. But at least within this generation of Rockwell men, the father encouraged his son’s voice, enabling Jarvis to aim his protests in the right direction, in contrast to the illustrator’s own internalization of his discontents with his Victorian father.

His father’s absence unfortunately heightened Rockwell’s gentle but unmistakable contempt toward his mother. According to his sons, he thought her a hypochondriac, a silly and annoying, ineffectual complainer. Never once did he fail to take care of her logistically, but his lack of filial affection was fairly clear to everyone, including her niece, Mary Amy Orpen, who salutes Rockwell’s unceasing generosity to his mother in spite of his feelings. Having tired of Providence—or the exhausted relatives in Rhode Island having exceeded their patience with Nancy—Mrs. Rockwell was back in New Rochelle that year, looking forward to spending Christmas of 1938 among her three young grandsons, “even though,” as her niece remembers well, “she preferred girls instead.” Her artist son disliked having her around because she distracted him from his painting. Besides, he often felt anxious during the December holidays, wishing they would pass quickly so he could resume his work schedule without feeling the brunt of family expectations.

His confidence regained as a result of having successfully illustrated
Tom Sawyer,
Rockwell once again resumed accepting far more commissions than would prove feasible to complete. Word was getting around that with his acceptance came the unspoken—he might renege on the agreement, or at the least, end up months if not years late completing the assignment. From now to the end of his life, Rockwell felt oppressed by his inability to say yes to more requests, and by his compulsion to accept so many commissions that his only hope of ever making deadlines was to work seven days a week.

On February 24, 1939, George Macy wrote him a playful but worried letter from London, asking if the silence from his side by any chance meant he had not yet begun the
Huckleberry Finn
illustrations. Macy’s suspicions were of course on target, and Rockwell wired him finally on March 10 that he didn’t see how he could possibly meet the deadlines. On April 6, Macy wrote a beseeching letter: “I beg you to try to arrange your affairs in order that you may do these pictures for us.” He offered to rearrange the already announced publication schedule so that Rockwell would receive an extra five months’ grace period. Although it still placed tremendous pressure on him, Rockwell agreed. The sleepless nights from worry, the embarrassment at dealing with disappointed clients (he usually had Mary deliver the bad news), the concern over finances—the artist’s difficulty with arranging a practical work schedule was real and caused him great distress. But at some level, it served more than one purpose. It delivered the rewards that made the pain worthwhile.

Part of the pressure slowing Rockwell down with the Heritage commission was his uncertainty about his new boss at the
Post,
Wesley Stout, a man who enjoyed wielding his power by sending Rockwell’s paintings back for changes. Stout ensured that Rockwell saw negative comments that came his way; though he admired Rockwell’s work, he disliked the unchallenged position that the illustrator seemed to hold at the magazine.

Stout’s touchiness agitated Rockwell; he was used to the way Lorimer operated, and he knew how to make him happy. Worst of all, under Stout, the
Post
decided that J. C. Leyendecker represented the past, and it wanted the magazine to seem more future-oriented. Unceremoniously, the famous illustrator was dropped from the ranks, and Rockwell alone remained of the truly old guard. But at least now, the motivation for Rockwell to keep up with the times emanated from outside as well as his own inner drive, and such a challenge was exactly what he needed to feel new.

Rockwell was aware that Stout seemed resentful as much as grateful for his continued presence. Under such conditions, with the tensions threatening to distract him from his work, a move to the country sounded a wise prescription. And, according to the Rockwells’ oldest son, who had just become old enough to notice family nuances, Mary Rockwell had started getting nervous at times about the flirtatious attentions the New Rochelle socialites paid her husband. She was struggling with tending her husband’s voracious emotional needs for her support—as well as serving as his business manager and secretary—while raising the boys basically by herself. The vestiges of Rockwell’s much looser “society” days hung all around them, including the daily reminder of the very house that Norman and Irene had lived in together.

By the summer, the Rockwells had decided to make the Vermont home permanent, their hot weather experiences having yielded everything a life in the country could offer at its best. On July 10, 1939, Mary wrote her sister: “You should see the swimmin’ hole! It is about three times bigger than we expected it would be! We have an ancient row boat and the children row over it most of the day; they learned the first day. We had a great adventure yesterday: took the old row boat with Jerry, Tommy, Norman, Fred and me in it and went about two miles down the river, over rapids and so on, landed and ate our supper which we had had the foresight to put in a tin pail as the boat leaks. The boys decided they had had enough of rapids, and I don’t blame them, so they and I were put ashore and went up through the fields, successfully evaded a large skunk which I nearly stepped on, got through a sturdy barbed wire fence, me on my back, and walked up the road past an assemblage of people in front of the house, me in shorts, and you can imagine how that would look and the seats of all our pants wet.”

In mid-August, Nancy’s cousins from Providence visited the Rockwells in Arlington for a family weekend. Mary arranged for a perfect country atmosphere: a steak dinner on the porch, swimming in the brook, mountain climbing, lots of peach ice cream. Cousin Mary Amy Orpen, long interested in pursuing a career in art, created a series of pen-and-ink sketches to record the visit. Rockwell admired their combination of cartoonish spontaneity and adroit design sense; over the next few years, she would share her visual diary with him, until he borrowed her visual concept for a famous
Post
cover of his own—her influence not acknowledged.

By the end of October, the Rockwells were ready to concede defeat; the house simply had to be set up for winter before the five of them could live there. “We are not staying up all winter after all,” Mary wrote her sister. “There were too many obstacles in the way, such as three quarters of a mile of road that would probably be impassable part of the winter and no heat, except our two chunk stoves and a fireplace, which would not be adequate in zero weather. . . .

“I can’t tell you how much I love it up here though. It is such a neighborly, friendly atmosphere, and everybody is so nice. I think the secret of the whole thing is, that Norman has always wanted to be able to get a change each year, and in this way we can. But you know me, my enthusiasm always runs away with me, and I want to go the whole hog and stay right here all year! But knowing I have to go back, I think I certainly ought to be able to find some advantages in doing so, don’t you?”

Even sixty years later, Jarvis Rockwell finds his mother’s lack of reality confounding. “She thought nothing of yanking us in and out of school,” he recalls. “I hated leaving New Rochelle, where my friends were, and where city life was all I knew. In Arlington, one kid came to school with no shoes—he couldn’t afford any. And my parents really didn’t prepare me for this at all. I just was kind of thrown in there.” And confounding the children was the abrupt about-face that seemed to accompany every so-called decision. The children were never sure where they’d be in a month’s time.

Around this same time, Norman, too, writes Nancy Barstow, but, predictably, his letter centers more on his work than on his family. He shares with the eighteen-year-old aspiring artist his contradictory attitude toward using a camera to expedite his illustrations: “Now I’m painting every other picture with the help of photograph[s]. But even in the ones with photos I make a color sketch from off the model. The younger generation of illustrators (damn ’em) are all drawing from photograph[s] but I can’t get over the feeling it is cheating. . . . Last summer Joe Leyendecker (the old maestro) dropped into the studio and I had the floor plastered with photograph[s]. Neither one of us appeared to notice them but it was just as though a fresh corpse I had just murdered lay there. The awful and unmoral thing about it is that the pictures that people seem to like best are the ones that I leaned on photographs with.”

The documentary realism that photographs allowed soon became more urgent to the work of anyone interested in the fate of his society. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. In the midst of great anxiety about the future, Rockwell’s work began to emit a stronger sense of the present moment, less idealized, rooted more in time and place than during the previous two decades. Paintings from the late 1930s have convinced those interested in the illustrator’s evolution that by 1939, he had successfully negotiated the transition to a new level of skill. From this point on, his paintings evince the qualities that elicit from critic Dave Hickey the appellation “democratic history painting.”

During this period, Rockwell appropriated and updated the traditional (primarily Dutch) genre painting, which emphasized low subjects and everyday activities primarily as symbols of the ephemeral, into an American version that invested the everyday with a sense of historical consequence. In Vermont, Rockwell could finally bear to ground his art in the particular; the satisfactions of place and family would allow him to become rooted in the present at last.

Rockwell’s move to New England also represented a completion of a circle: his earliest American ancestors had settled in Connecticut, and now, almost a half century old, the artist embraced the countryside as symbol of the liberality he believed, rightly, to have triumphed in the United States, whatever the politics of the moment.

More important than the reverberations of the past, the move gave him the sense of newness he periodically needed to find in his physical environment or risk drying up in his art. The relocation allowed him to construct more fully the myth out of which he could create: the return to the idealized countryside of his youth would “win us back to the delusions of childhood days,” as Dickens poignantly celebrated the power of representation to remember utopias that never were.

Part II

NEW ENGLAND

19

New Roots in Old Vermont

The Rockwells returned to New Rochelle before the winter became unbearable in their summer home. Six-year-old Jerry especially had been a victim of their failure to plan ahead. Shocked at the differences that school in a rural community entailed, on his first day of second grade, he decided the experience was beyond him and, at recess, he simply walked home. His mother, according to her letter to Nancy Barstow, may have thought the experience healthy, but Jerry—not called Jarvis until he was an adult—grew up feeling constantly displaced instead. The whimsical manner in which his parents had begun his grammar school in a sophisticated suburban area, then precipitously announced that he must forgo the many friends he had made there in favor of starting second grade in a one-room schoolhouse, and, finally, removing him from that environment with just as little notice—this pattern of unintentional ill treatment stored a reservoir of resentment in the youngster, who felt he couldn’t make himself heard.

Back in New Rochelle, while her husband worked frantically on covers and advertisements during January and February, Mary’s days ranged from tactfully answering voluminous and sometimes presumptuous fan mail that included special autograph requests—inscribed on proofs or prints to be provided by Rockwell, rather than on a piece of paper—to paying bills for veterinarian runs last summer and fall to Dr. Treat, whose records show near comical disasters surely influenced by the city slickers’ inexperience at rural life: one day a cat was brought in with a fishhook in her tongue, a month later a dog stuck with porcupine quills. But Mary’s least favorite work came from having to parry with annoyed patrons who were the victims of Rockwell’s overextended schedule. The letter she wrote her sister on January 25, 1940, contrasts dramatically with the excited, eager tone she had adopted eight years earlier when discussing her responsibilities to her husband regarding his career. Now she acknowledged being behind on everything, and having been forced to put aside her letter writing in favor of tending the three boys, running errands, and performing “little jobs” for Norman. In addition to helping him in the studio, she was in charge of entertaining work-related guests, such as an editor from Brown and Bigelow, the calendar company that paid Rockwell so handsomely for the yearly Boy Scout cover. Even as she sneaked in these fifteen minutes to write her sister, she should have been on her way to Manhattan to “inform about six people that after all he can’t do their jobs.”

Mary sighed over the morally shaky practice of accepting commissions and then failing to do them, saying that “the only ethical thing about the whole matter” is that nowadays she knew how to alert the victims right away, instead of “putting it off” as had been the case in years past. With some asperity, she complained that the only code artists follow is to protect their work; “minor things” such as someone else’s plan or even a commitment to help them “just don’t enter into the picture.” “From nine years’ experience I would say that you can’t tie artists down to any kind of ethics except what is best for their work, which is after all a pretty high kind of ethics itself, which an awful lot of them don’t follow.”

Mary knew her husband’s disingenuous method of taking on more than he could deliver must have seemed oddly out of character for him, and she explained that he had “unfortunately [pursued] the policy of accepting almost all of the jobs that were offered to him so that he’d feel very safe and secure, I guess.” Mary had begun to sense from his nervousness that he’d once again gotten himself into a bind, so she forced him to review his schedule with her, resulting in his request that she go deliver the bad news to the six unlucky firms in New York.

Particularly because of the tension this pattern caused, she felt keenly the release of the four days they had spent the previous week with the Schaeffers in Arlington. Mead and Elizabeth had already made the permanent leap from New Rochelle to the country, and Mary was struck by how much fun everyone had together and how reassuringly “simple” life felt. Whether walking in Robert Frost’s snowy woods—the poet had been an earlier denizen of Arlington—or attending the high school boys’ and girls’ basketball games, “there was more to do than we had time for.” The boys loved the increased opportunities for physical activity in the countryside, though Mary includes mention of Rockwell’s superstition (really, his unremitting anxiety) that they “knock on wood” when speaking of the children’s well-being, to ward off injuries. Almost incidentally, she remarks that she is about to begin reading Verlaine to her husband, but that “Mrs. R” had been taking up too much of their time for them to be able to read much at all. She had been taking her mother-in-law to the doctor at least once a week, who found nothing wrong with her except “just nerves,” and, Mary added in an aside at odds with her sweet sentiments a few years earlier: “If he only knew it, an extreme case of self-centeredness.”

At times, Mary Rockwell’s life sounds unmanageable. From repeated comments by friends and professional associates, Rockwell did far less around the house than the other hardworking husbands of that era: “I don’t see how he got away with it,” the well-respected and busy illustrator Jack Atherton once said. “He never even took out the garbage.” And yet, because he indulged himself so little except in his work, Mary felt protective of his exhaustion more than her own. She carried out the filial duties toward Nancy Rockwell, and strove to be an involved mother. The shortcuts she tried to incorporate often fell short: “For three months, we had a housekeeper who packed Tommy’s and my lunches for school,” Jarvis remembers, only half-laughing. “Every day, for all three months, we’d open up those lunches to nothing but a sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise.”

Most of all, Mary had become her husband’s most trusted critic; he enjoyed talking over his ideas with her, and elicited her critique of the finished product. Although he solicited opinions from anyone who walked into the studio, Mary’s counted the most. Yet her consistent plea that he recognize when he had finished a painting, instead of holding on to it, repainting a tiny detail until the last moment possible, went unheeded. So did her suggestions for loosening his style, in spite of his lifelong lament that he too often tightened up and overworked a painting.

Mary also handled the couple’s finances, including their checkbooks (which went unbalanced, as the checks rarely were entered) and their taxes, which were complicated. That she rarely felt the satisfaction of doing a job well is understandable; just covering all her bases required an enormous expenditure of energy. There was no time to complete an assignment thoroughly, and to know the joy accompanying such activity. She didn’t even have the opportunity to stop and appreciate the team she and her husband played on together. And she worked at remaining physically and mentally attractive as well: her husband looked forward to having a good time as his reward for working seven days a week, from eight to five—and then some. When he felt himself able to take a break and go out to dinner or to that week’s square dance, he wanted Mary to join him, and the nicer she looked and the happier she seemed, the better off their evening. Nor was his wife unaware of the opportunities her husband, as a celebrity, had for extramarital dalliances, especially since many of his frequent business trips did not include her company. She took pains to ensure that his appreciation of pretty women remained focused on her.

As Rockwell worked frantically on several major ads he had accepted, including a series for Niblets corn, where his picture of two children eating—one of them his son Peter—was offered by the company for sale as a “full color reprint, suitable for framing,” other patrons fumed. (Peter himself recalls the experience ruefully, because his father paid his sons only one dollar to model, versus the five dollars that other kids now received.) By this point, George Macy had written increasingly frantic letters to the illustrator regarding his Mark Twain edition, at first sending Rockwell pleasant, apologetic queries, asking him to reassure the Heritage Press that the
Huckleberry Finn
illustrations were on track. But the formerly starstruck owner became apoplectic when Rockwell finally got up the courage to tell him he was far from meeting the deadline. Macy sent out delay notices to all the subscribers to the series, a list of twelve illustrated books that were to culminate in 1940 with Rockwell’s
Huckleberry Finn,
and the response overwhelmed him with worry. On April 1, he wrote Rockwell, “I have tried to be pleasant. . . . I like you and Mrs. Rockwell too much, to want to do anything nasty; besides, legal action would not bring beautiful pictures from you, and I do want to get beautiful pictures from you. . . . But do you not think that I have the right to conclude that you are taking advantage of my good nature? I do not believe that you would so blithely break a similar contract with the Curtis Publishing Company. . . . This is not fair treatment of me or of my company. . . . What are you going to do about it? Are you going to do work for others in that portion of your time which should be devoted to my work? When will you now promise to deliver the color paintings?”

The indignant Macy attached a list of representative responses from the club’s subscribers to the announcement that Rockwell’s
Huckleberry Finn
would not be part of the series they had paid for after all. The illustrator must have winced painfully at the letters, if he allowed himself to read them at all. “Your changing of your contract is improper. Please cancel my membership”; “Is the Heritage Club in healthy shape if it cannot produce its books?”; and “It happens that
Huckleberry Finn
is the book I most desired. I shall be unable to continue my membership” represent the panoply of angry responses.

Rockwell wrote one of his agonized apologies for the mess, and promised to get the pictures done as soon as possible; Macy received them in time to publish the book before the year was out.

Why did he consistently bring such dilemmas on himself? The fear of running out of money was real; enough illustrators who had committed suicide when their work was no longer fashionable stood as examples to Rockwell of the ephemeral nature of his fame, and he didn’t want to feel compelled to pinch pennies, particularly given his childhood experiences. He’d given up pursuing fine art, he could argue, for financial security; if he threw that away, all his choices would be for nil.

On an emotional level, his need to accept more commissions than he could possibly execute served to stave off the feelings of inadequacy that he never was able to shake. If he believed that without his work he defaulted to his childhood identity of a skinny beanpole, one way to ensure a more attractive self-image was to keep the coffers of work overflowing. Many years later, in relationship to less important issues, child psychiatrist Robert Coles would suggest that Rockwell was occasionally passive-aggressive with him, though they were both extremely fond of each other. The term may be too much of a catchall to elucidate the dynamics of Rockwell’s overextensions of his schedule, but certainly it is possible that he “got back” at the very public that lauded him for his ordinariness by exerting power over them as a reminder of how special he was.

Perhaps the Macy tension was the final motivation to undertake a simpler life, but by spring, the decision was firm: they would move to Vermont and see if making it their permanent home felt right. Mary corresponded with contractors, landscapers, and other experts at winterizing Vermont homesteads. Wallpaper for Peter’s room was chosen, lilacs and wisteria planted, and train schedules to Philadelphia for the delivery of Rockwell’s
Post
covers scrutinized. Already an expensive enterprise—Rockwell, unlike other cover artists, matted and framed his
Post
covers extravagantly, connoting their position as serious oil paintings—the transition of the illustration from Rockwell’s studio to Curtis Publishing’s office building would become even more costly, as connections from Arlington were more complicated than from the suburbs of New York City.

Although they wanted to hold on to their New Rochelle house until they were sure Vermont would be a permanent home, the Rockwells needed to rent it out, which they did for $150 a month. They were buying the isolated farmhouse and four hundred acres for half what such a setup would cost in New York, but their finances were precarious in spite of Rockwell’s handsome income. A few years earlier, they had found themselves unable to pay back a $1,500 bank note when it was due and, though the bank allowed them to roll the note over for another three months, until Rockwell’s expected checks came in, such incidents embarrassed them, and fueled the illustrator’s tendency to overload his schedule. They did not examine ways to trim the fat from their spending, however; the pace at which both Mary and Norman worked seemed to demand the conveniences that ended up eating into their budget. And, though the Fords they drove did not have to be new, they both felt they deserved to order household items such as wallpaper and prime cuts of beef with impunity. Rockwell bought only the best, top-grade materials for his painting, and Mary, especially, was unlikely to think the personal side of their lives should absorb the costs.