Norman Rockwell (8 page)

Unfortunately, school did not provide for Rockwell the escape from an oppressive home life that it has for many children. In the early 1900s, the primary years curriculum depended heavily on drawing and coloring, activities that might have been congenial to the young boy. But the rigid structure of the classes and the rewards for doing things the teacher’s way played to a nascent imperiousness that would characterize the adult artist as well. Unwittingly replicating the behavior of his mother, Rockwell refused to exert himself for any activity he felt not in his self-interest. And he could not convince himself that school was of much benefit. Even walking back and forth four times a day (the boys ate lunch with Nancy) grew tedious, so Norman and Jerry got roller skates that made the seven-block trip between their apartment and the school on 157th Street more fun.

Skating enabled Norman to get home in ten minutes, time spent in dreaming up schemes to make up for the day’s lost hours. The boredom of school was a spur to being “bad” in the afternoons, in the determinedly subversive mode common to restless city boys. His buddies dug holes to China under any tiny plot of ground they could find; they raced to the top of telegraph poles; and they huddled around the
National Geographic
s one lucky lad ferreted out of his parents’ hiding place, in order to look at the naked native women. Race and class mattered, Rockwell remembered: “There was . . . a lot of racial prejudice in New York City in those days [a “nasty, stupid business” as he notes]—we called Italians wops, Frenchmen frogs, Jews kikes—and class feeling was strong.” In the 1940s, when asked to define his “boiling point,” Rockwell responded: “I was born a white Protestant with some prejudices which I am continuously trying to eradicate. I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people or in myself.” In the far Upper West Side of Manhattan, Norman befriended a boy who would ordinarily have been beneath the notice of Rockwell’s group because his mother took in laundry. The lad would do anything to be allowed to join in the boys’ activities, the illustrator remembered, slightly ashamed, so the poor child volunteered to be the subject of the group’s experiment one day: how many encyclopedias could you drop on someone’s head before he passed out? “Ewald” collapsed after four books hit him, but he made up for his weakness by taking his friends to the police station in the paddy wagon when he had to identify his dead uncle, a “drunkard” whose corpse Ewald promptly vomited all over, making him a real hero to the boys.

Waring sought to be the weighty, somber family head his wife seemed to desire (even those aunts who had liked Howard Hill agreed he’d been “very dictatorial and stern,” values Nancy apparently imbibed as patriarchal duties). He tried to tame the neighborhood boys’ exploits into more decorous pleasures. When allowed to give way to his own impulses, however, he exposed a less obvious side of his personality, one that relished the activities of childhood. One escapade recalled by several of his nephews consisted of running up and down the fire escape outside his apartment. Especially given the kinds of stunts Rockwell pulled with his own sons later on, it is easy to imagine what pleasure Waring’s playfulness provided his boys. He wanted his sons to have a “normal” boyhood, and he tried, sometimes clumsily, to match theirs to what his had been in Yonkers. “I do remember one Fourth of July disaster,” Jerry reminisced. “Pa had bought us a lot of fire crackers. We were allowed to shoot them off one at a time—not in packs as lots of the other boys did. Somehow the box we had them in took fire and our entire celebration was banging off in about five minutes. I am sure we both cried.”

But Waring’s attraction to things childlike, including his capitulation to his wife’s babyish coquetry, all too often merely highlighted a certain ineffectiveness that his sons later associated with him. Even his earnest work ethic, which enabled him to rise from office boy to manager of the New York branch of George Wood’s cotton firm, sometimes verged on the pathetic in his zeal to impress his boss. His sister Grace had married a doctor who made a handsome living; his brother Samuel lived luxuriously off wealthy women; and his cousins all made more money than he did as well. On the infrequent occasions when George Wood appeared in Waring’s Manhattan branch office, the excited employee would hurry home in the evening to share the great news with his family. At a young age, the boys recognized that Waring needed their affirmation, if only to compensate for their mother’s failure to give him the praise he obviously courted: “He was intensely loyal to the firm. Every so often he would come home from the office beaming with pleasure. Then we all knew what had happened that day—Mr. Wood had been in the office. At dinner after my mother had said grace he would unfold his napkin and arrange it carefully across his knees. Then he would lean back in his chair and say: ‘Mr. Wood was in the office today.’ My mother would continue eating, but Jarvis and I would beg him to tell us what Mr. Wood had said. And he would recount his conversation with Mr. Wood verbatim.”

Waring’s pleasure at satisfying his boss boded well for the financial stability Nancy sought, but his easy acceptance of the paternal order worked against the excitement and change the demanding woman equally valued. At least Waring came by his living honestly, we can almost hear his frequently bored wife avowing self-righteously, when she learned of the rapscallion Sam Rockwell’s remunerative marriage to a prominent heiress.

It had so happened that when Sam, Waring, and their sister Grace were young, Phoebe and John Rockwell owned a modest country house in Stamford, Connecticut, near the lavish estate of the wealthy banker and philanthropist Francis A. Palmer. Especially since Susan Lewis, the ward of her uncle Francis, had been a “chum” of Grace Rockwell at Drew Seminary and later at Wells College, the young woman had on several occasions interacted with Grace’s suave younger brother, Sam. After her graduation from Wells, Susan Lewis married Miller Crampton, whose own investments in western mines had netted him a handsome income. Crampton unexpectedly died in 1896, leaving behind a young, very wealthy widow and their two sons. Mrs. Crampton spent the next two summers at Trumansburg, New York, her birthplace, where Sam Rockwell was also vacationing. He believed that his “sciatic rheumatism,” probably the syphilis that would later kill him, responded particularly well to the spa treatments at Sheldrake resort on Cayuga Lake. At the time of Miller Crampton’s death, Sam Rockwell was apparently married (sketchy extant records strongly suggest the presence of a wife) and living in Warehouse Point, Connecticut; two years later, inexplicably, he was once again a single man, whereupon he promptly wed the Crampton widow at a private wedding at the Cayuga Lake House.

But there was a serious problem from the beginning: Susan Crampton Rockwell’s eccentric uncle and guardian, Francis Palmer, had warned her not to remarry or she would risk disinheritance from one of the largest personal fortunes in New York City. The couple commanded family and friends to keep their marriage silent, a pact sustained, amazingly, for three years. Waring and Nancy, averse to anything that publicly compromised one’s moral stature, undoubtedly clucked in disapproval at the slick older brother’s methods. And they would have seen him often; Sam worked daily with his father at the coal business on 1 Broadway. He lived, however, in an elegant brownstone residence at 10 West Seventy-first Street that his wife’s uncle had given her (in addition to a country house) at the time of her first marriage, and such handsome surroundings would have caused his relatives, whom he frequently invited over, to forgive him much.

Although jewels and gifts of money had been lavished on the Cramptons seventeen years earlier, banker Francis Palmer felt differently about this second marriage of his beloved niece when he finally found out about it. It appears from his carefully worded response to reporters hounding him for a statement that he sniffed a gold digger; Samuel Rockwell’s reputation as a ladies’ man, his work in the coal industry, and the contrast between the playboy’s elegant slimness and Susan’s matronly appearance all cast suspicion upon the union. Publicly, Palmer stated that because his niece had married without his consent and then deliberately deceived him, he had disinherited her from the $5,000,000 reported to be previously promised her.

Publicity raged. The November 26, 1901,
New York Journal
deemed the event worthy of a bold headline on its front page: “
WED FOR THE SECOND TIME IN SECRET,
” followed by the subtitle “
NIECE OF F. A. PALMER LOSES FORTUNE.
” The article claimed that “millionaire Philanthropist and Bank president discovers his selected heir married again and decides to leave his millions to charity and Education Institutions—niece kept marriage secret three years and is ‘happy though married.’ ”
The New York Times
reported that after Palmer “accidentally” heard about the marriage, he obtained a “confession” from his adored grandniece, who for the entire period of her marriage had been leaving her own house by six in the morning in order to breakfast with her uncle at seven, then shop with him daily before returning to her home on Seventy-first Street, where a reporter claimed to have seen the “slender, delicate-looking” young Samuel Rockwell.

Indeed, he was slender. A picture from 1902 would reveal a substantially overweight bride with a scarecrow of a husband at her side, the couple surveying “their” property at the Lamertine Mine in Idaho Springs, Colorado.

Samuel gave the newspaper his own self-serving version of the uncle’s actions: “The marriage was kept from Mr. Palmer because he is an old crank, a perfect fanatic. He does not believe in second marriages, and we feared the news of ours might kill him.” Shifting his tactics totally, the young groom continued energetically: “He says that I cannot support Mrs. Rockwell. He has only gone on this tangent because I am showing I am able to do so. He is angry because his niece has not been compelled to eat humble pie and because when our marriage was announced a short time ago [after Palmer found out first] our friends in society rallied loyally to our support and Mrs. Rockwell’s social position has not suffered. The anonymous letter to Mr. Palmer, telling of our marriage, was written by a scheming relative who wanted to get his money.” Not to be deterred in his self-righteous anger, Samuel continued: “If Mr. Palmer keeps on talking about the affair he will hear from me. I will show him up. We are married and are happy. We have been happy ever since our wedding three years ago. We are not worrying about the future, or the loss of Mr. Palmer’s millions.”

The embarrassing publicity did not inspire Nancy and Waring to cut off contact with their relative; not only would family gatherings have been impossible to negotiate, but Nancy particularly enjoyed the chance to consider herself part of society by association. Although he barely referred to his wild uncle in his autobiography, Norman spent plenty of time with him until about the age of thirteen. Sam’s new stepson, eleven-year-old Frank Crampton, remembers proudly the pleasure that Norman took in the set of carpenter tools his stepcousin bestowed on him one Christmas. This same new relative inadvertently reveals, in his own memoir, that his mother and stepfather spun a different story for him than the one printed by
The New York Times—
a version that was probably passed down to the Rockwell boys as well: he believed that his Uncle Frank invidiously disinherited Susan Crampton to obtain control of stocks and securities she had endorsed over to him after her first husband’s death. The disinheritance “followed a request of my mother that the securities be returned to her.” Only a few years after Uncle Frank’s death did Susan recover her fortune, according to her son, and even then it was but “a small fraction of what had been hers.”

If Waring and Nancy indulged in the sin of envy around this time, no one could blame them. Nancy’s side of the family had decided that it was the Rockwells’ turn to care for Eva Milner, Nancy’s mentally retarded niece; Amy, who had been staying with Nancy and Waring, would exchange places with the sweet but emotionally demanding girl. Eva Milner Orpen, two mothers dead by the time she was eight years old, would, over time, disappear from the map of the Rockwells’ lives, unnoted in family stories and memoirs, a quiet footnote in a few distant cousins’ memories. Certainly Nancy and Waring, basically compassionate people, tried to do their Christian duty by her, and at least one cousin claims that the girl lived for five or six years with the Rockwells. Norman Rockwell’s sons recall his vague mention of Eva as an additional drain on his mother’s meager psychological resources. But the dominant impression in family recollections is of the Rockwells’ shame at having such a clearly defective relative. Oddly similar in instinct to Erik Erikson’s denial of his own Down’s syndrome baby, none of Rockwell’s colorful anecdotes even suggests that Eva existed, in spite of the fact that her care further exhausted his mother. Surely by this point, when the young boy was about seven years old, he must have sorely needed a lens with which to focus his often chaotic, drama-ridden city life, especially since his parents believed in providing few explanations to children. How to make sense of the family logic that seemed so irrational to him, even then? His deliverance would come at the hand of a British and, more significant, thoroughly Victorian novelist—Charles Dickens.

4

A Dickensian Sensibility

Given the broad strokes with which Norman Rockwell’s melodramatic early life could be painted, his parents’ choice of Charles Dickens as their literary hero seems a natural fit. What we know of the Hill and Rockwell familial sensibilities from at least the 1860s suggests that the determinedly middlebrow novelist would have appealed to Norman’s great-grandparents on both sides. With their frequent access to Manhattan, it is likely that either John William Rock-well or Thomas Howard Hill caught one of Dickens’s lectures on the novelist’s second speaking tour of the States, when he exhausted himself reading in sixteen eastern cities between November 9, 1867, and April 22, 1868.

Around 1902, Waring began to augment the after-dinner routine of copying magazine illustrations with what quickly became an even more important ritual: reading aloud a chapter of Dickens. Nancy was pleased; she felt her children were getting the benefit of high (British) culture and monitory lessons about life as well. If George Horace Lorimer’s individualist politics spun out an American folklore of good and bad citizenry, then Charles Dickens might well, in this respect, have been considered his English cousin. As the media historian Benjamin Stohlberg would put it, both men, theatrical creatures that they were, believed that the “meaning of life is not hidden but wrinkled on its surface, its secrets exposed in the truthful light of daily living.”

From the first words that he heard intoned, Norman found himself mesmerized by Dickens’s stories. Waring would pull out the novel they were working on, and proceed to read aloud in his “even, colorless voice, the book laid flat before him to catch the full light of the lamp, the muffled noises of the city—the rumble of a cart, a shout—becoming the sounds of the London street, our quiet parlor Fagin’s hovel or Bill Sikes’s room with the body of Nancy bloody on the floor (I squirmed and lifted my feet to the chair rung).” The image of Nancy’s bloody body in
Oliver Twist
must have carried particular impact; after all, Nancy Rockwell frequently voiced her sense of victimization, resulting in her extended family tagging her, half ironically, as “poor Nancy.” Possibly the inadequate mothers who crowded Dickens’s stories provided an escape valve for Norman’s own deep resentments toward his mother’s insensitivity. Unaware of the pain she was inflicting, Nancy worked against his fledgling attempts at self-respect at every turn, from commenting unfavorably on his appearance to “curing” his bed-wetting by hanging the soiled sheets prominently outside their window in hopes that public humiliation would deliver her dry linen.

The evening readings commenced when Rockwell was around eight years old, an age when children begin to explore, in hopes of comprehending, the logic that governs their complicated universe. Later reminiscences imply that Rockwell believed his own little world off-course from its beginnings, largely because of the confused values that bruised family interactions. Dickens clearly celebrated community, the relatedness that came through filiation of any sort, not only familial. His world, as Rockwell’s would be, was one of romance. And it was a world in which a sense of humor had the potential to redeem what would be otherwise intolerable.

Michael Kimmelman, art critic for
The New York Times,
wrote in reference to a very different artist from Rockwell that “art, or at least art that matters, trafficks in a space between the world as it might be and the world as it is. Whether we feel better or worse about ourselves in its midst depends on the kinds of artists involved, but either way the best artists make us linger in the spaces they concoct if only because afterwards the real world comes more clearly into focus.” A similar Dickensian oxymoron—idealistic realism—gave shape to the young boy’s earliest observations of the world around him.

“I would . . . draw pictures of the different characters—Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep. They were pretty crude pictures, but I was very deeply impressed and moved by Dickens. I remember how I suffered with Little Dorritt in the Marshalsea Prison, had nightmares over Bill Sikes and Fagin, felt ennobled by Sydney Carton: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do. . . .’ The variety, sadness, horror, happiness, treachery, the twists and turns of life; the sharp impressions of dirt, food, inns, horses, streets; and people—Micawber, Pickwick, Dombey (and son), Joe Gargery—in Dickens shocked and delighted me.” Rockwell learned to draw exaggerated characters whose appearance functioned as an entire network of values. More important than the specific experiences of illustrating the figures on Dickens’s stage, however, was the philosophical cast of mind the boy absorbed from the fiction: “So that, I thought, is what the world is really. I began to look around me; I became insatiably curious. . . . And I began to look at things the way I imagined Dickens would have looked at them.”

Ordinarily, one must give serious pause to artists’ self-prog-nostications. In most cases, when public figures pronounce on the best ways to “read” them—what cultural ancestors explain or contain their power—the danger exists of our being taken in, of being led to interpret the subject exactly as he or she wishes. Rockwell, in contrast, developed the habit of speaking plainly by his early twenties, but his self-revelatory truths tended to be dismissed by his fans and critics alike, who thought his bald reflections were just another manifestation of his modesty.

Rockwell did not make statements about influence lightly; at age sixty-five, when he was reflecting on Dickens’s impact, ten years of therapy had, at the least, delivered to him the self-examined life. Although Rockwell avowed the importance of Charles Dickens upon his imagination in his typically understated fashion, his choice to place Dickens center stage in his autobiography—to have the novelist appear on the first page, as well as several times thereafter—speaks volumes.

Atypical in his candor, Rockwell nonetheless eventually learned to hide behind the truth, accustomed to having his pronouncements about his depression, his artistic insecurity, and his debt to Dickens ignored. His humility became a protection against people taking seriously anything that would jar the popular perception of an artist who painted bromides. To his own detriment, the trails his insights led to yield far greater game than the illustrator himself ever was willing to track, even at his most introspective. Dickens, for instance, provided a grid within which to position the disparate scenes of his urban childhood, and Dickens’s theatrical storytelling validated the exaggerated strokes by which Rockwell painted his own tales. Even the moral substance that undergirds Dickens’s novels—comic and dramatic—helped shape Rockwell’s own ethical imagination. Awkward and ironic as it may be, the reality remains that England’s most popular literary novelist largely inspired the Rockwellian narrative vision of America.

If Dickens was such a determining power on Norman Rockwell, then we also must ask: How did Dickens look at things? In
David Copperfield
and
Bleak House,
the very immensity of the novels speaks to their theme of worlds splayed across cities that symbolize the absence of the family kindnesses that should be innate. Their sprawling plots indict communities, including the government, that harm rather than heal the weak individual. Important to these novelistic visions is the mandate that society act as a surrogate parent for the frequently missing father (and mother)—and the tragedy that follows upon its failure to do so. Rockwell chose Dickens’s favorite “child” (as the author referred to his novel) as his own:
David Copperfield,
a story of a fatherless boy tended by the Micawbers, wonderfully humane projections of Dickens’s own desires for substitute parents. In this often humorous parental displacement, Dickens, who had actually begun the novel as his autobiography, evades plumbing his psyche in favor of fantasizing an adult fairy tale full of redemptive pathos. In the process, he is able to give birth “to his own father,” parenting, in effect,
David Copperfield.
It is a method of repeating and reinventing childhood that Rockwell would absorb and tailor to his own illustrative uses.

By far the most consistent positive image of family life that Rockwell would later brandish, Dickens’s nightly presence in the Rockwells’ dining room bonded, however superficially, father and sons. The rather limited emotional connection forged between Waring and his boys occurred through typically Dickensian images: narratives centered on desire, on gentle womanhood and loyal fraternity, strident selfishness and the regeneration of human connections, city decay and pastoral restoratives. Dickens gave Rockwell a way to think of masculinity outside of athletic prowess or professional achievement: the writer’s male heroes seemed most celebrated for their courage in the face of temptation, their gentility and modesty when they could easily act otherwise, and their expansive spirit and goodwill. Hard work was valued; sloth despised.

To the real extent that the somber Waring exhibited many of these values himself, Norman was now able to appreciate and admire his own otherwise uxorious father. “[My father] had something aristocratic about him, the way he carried himself or the set of his fine dark eyes. His substantial mustache was always neatly trimmed. He wore dark, well-tailored suits and never removed his coat in the presence of ladies. He did not drink but was a gentlemanly smoker. Dignified, holding to the proprieties, gentle and at the same time stern; but distant . . . even when we were children, treating us as sons who have grown up and been away for a long time.” Victorian, in other words. Reading Dickens aloud clearly animated Waring’s solemn demeanor, and in its afterglow the man’s dogged devotion to his wife assumed an aura of selfless sacrifice: “My father’s life revolved around [my mother] to the exclusion of almost everything else. He cared for her constantly and with unflagging devotion.” Such loyalty would impress and influence Rockwell’s own development as a family man.

Just at the point that Rockwell was beginning to interpret his environment, if in the piecemeal, impressionistic manner of a child, Dickens was there. The often violent and frequently hilarious scenes given voice by Waring’s nightly readings surely allowed Norman to project his internalized bogeys onto the outside world instead, dissipating them into Dickens’s universe. Such projection, Bruno Bettelheim argues, is the reason that classic fairy tales still retain their near universal appeal. Dickens’s ability to mediate through narrative images the intensity of city life seems to have provided Rockwell with tools by which to make sense of, even to tame, the chaos he believed surrounded him. And as Rockwell drew his way out of the stories his father read—as he illustrated the terrors and humor himself—he owned them and created the resolution to his own uncertainties. He was discovering that he could voice his feelings by articulating them in his work. If a too-scary passage hung in the dining room air, Norman could concentrate instead on redoing Micawber, that genial parent substitute for the fatherless David Copperfield: “I’d draw Mr. Micawber’s head, smudge it, erase it and start over, my tongue licking over my upper lip as I concentrated. Then I’d ask my father to read the description of Mr. Micawber again.” It was up to him, the illustrator, to decide what to emphasize.

Except for
Great Expectations
and
Hard Times,
all of Dickens’s novels were initially published with extensive illustrations.
Pickwick Papers,
Dickens’s first novel, was in fact conceived as a text in support of a series of prints. The novelist worked with eighteen illustrators, including some of the most prominent artists of his day. His principal collaborators, however, were H. K. Browne, known as “Phiz,” and George Cruikshank, both of whose precise, exquisitely controlled pen-and-ink drawings leaned toward the kind of social satire produced by William Hogarth. Browne’s and Cruikshank’s ability to render the competing emotions of a dozen characters in one scene made the artwork so important to the interpretation of Dickens’s novels that critics tended to pay as much attention to the illustrations as to the text.

Such a collaboration between visual and verbal artists seemed natural to Waring and Nancy’s generation, and Rockwell grew up tutored by cultural assumptions that valued illustration as much as its verbal correlative. Rockwell drank in the power of pictures to ameliorate the often ugly realities as well as to illuminate happiness, through the shrewdly calibrated expression of extreme emotion. Phiz and Cruikshank especially rendered fine line drawings that retain their ability to please today, quite apart from the stories they illustrate. But the major relevance of their illustrations for Rockwell’s own later work would be the pains these two illustrators took to exaggerate the emotions on each face: however complicated the group scene, its thematic point was made quickly by a shift from otherwise “realistic” drawing to caricaturing facial expressions.

No wonder that his grandparents’ generation had awaited so impatiently the next chapter of the new novel; learning how, forty years earlier, Americans had practically laid siege to New York Harbor, anxious to see if Little Nell would live or die, Rockwell was sure he would have been among those fans as well. How sensible it must have seemed to the child, accustomed to the communal pleasure that mass periodicals provided his own little household, that these great books had almost all been published first in serial magazine format, usually monthly, occasionally in weekly installments, easily accessed by millions of readers. The power of the periodical was no surprise to him; on a personal level, a magazine’s arrival had heralded joyous hours of escape since he’d been five years old. Norman grew up accepting as natural the coalition of serious literature and illustration, and as normal their joint appearance in commercial, even disposable formats.