Norman Rockwell (9 page)

“I sometimes think we paint to fulfill ourselves and our lives, to supply the things we want and don’t have,” Rockwell explained when asked for the motivation behind his work. “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and so painted only the ideal aspects of it”—pictures, he states very specifically, that contain no “self-centered mothers”; stories, he made sure, that show “grandpas” playing baseball with the kids. The illustrator adopted the psychological and formal method that Dickens used to distill complex narrative scenes into dominant emotions painted with one broad brushstroke, filled in with an overspill of graphic details.

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The popular nightly readings had to be temporarily suspended for a few weeks in 1903, when Phoebe Waring Rockwell died. The stout, dignified woman, like the rest of the Waring family highly respectable and equally well-to-do at the time of her marriage, had, it seems, somehow lost most of the money made several generations before and bequeathed to her at various stages. Rockwell later acted, in front of his children as well as with curious journalists, as if he knew almost nothing about either Phoebe or John Rockwell. In spite of having lived close to each other throughout Norman’s youth, the two generations apparently shared the barest of relationships. No rancor is evident, simply a psychological distance so extreme as to render the grandparents mere acquaintances instead of close relations.

And yet, upon Phoebe’s death, Waring’s newly widowed father convinced his son’s family to share his too-empty Manhattan brownstone. The spacious apartment at 152nd Street and St. Nicholas Avenue marked an improvement in the young family’s fortunes; the neighborhood was slightly more residential, the grounds were landscaped, if only with a few elms here and there, and now the trolley rumbled romantically several streets away, instead of nerve-rackingly in front of their door. In contrast to his brother’s slightly scornful nod at the “mock fireplace with the plastic mantelpiece” that connoted “a move up,” Jerry Rockwell, even forty years later, would remember the apartment at 832 St. Nicholas Avenue as a lovely dwelling worthy of pride, a memory at odds with Norman’s ambivalent, cautious praise, as the older brother himself recognized. “The central hall was ninety feet long and all the inner rooms opened on this long hall. . . . Our parlor and sitting room was on St. Nicholas Avenue and our dining room looked out on St. Nicholas Place. Street to street.” The new address was part of a high plateau that rose 110 feet above the level of the river, affording a “panoramic sweep of the Harlem plain, the Bronx and Long Island Sound.”

But in spite of the certain excitement Rockwell felt at moving to his grandfather’s handsome residence, and though his grandfather remained a steady fixture in his life until Norman was nineteen, he would rarely refer to John William Rockwell. The strongest sign of his presence may well be the frequent motif of (often idealized) elderly men in the artist’s oeuvre. A picture taken of “Father Rockwell” around 1880 suggests that the odd mixture of cold and heat that characterized Waring took its temperature from the coal executive’s family hearth. A loyal man who appreciated his wife’s more frivolous nature, John was an authoritarian yet distant parent, just as his son would be. Paradoxically, the remoteness that characterized the Rockwell men seemed to depend on a loving wife’s loyal presence for its power. These husbands relied on their spouses needing them, and when the women died or grew unmanageably ill, the men became uncentered, their carefully organized mental states fractured. Partly a matter of generational and old New England ancestral inflections that imigrated with them to New York, their particular brand of intimacy—one based on an impassable psychological space between family members—coincided with marital love.

John William Rockwell’s loneliness after Phoebe’s death led him not only to house his son’s family; it encouraged less tonic measures that threatened to embarrass the beneficiaries of his largess. Nancy’s niece Amy Milner was in residence again, but now she was a young woman who had begun to be wooed by equally youthful and attractive suitors. Nancy and Waring hadn’t counted on Father Rockwell insinuating himself among them. “Aunt Nancy used to tell us that they were worried sick that Waring’s father would embarrass them by marrying Amy, who was still staying with them,” Mary Amy Orpen recalls, still chuckling at the memory. “She was in her early twenties by then, and after he started wining and dining her and taking her to the theatre so he’d have companionship, my aunt was just scared to death about the whole possibility. Luckily Amy found someone else to go out with before long. Father Rockwell was over sixty at the time.”

Rockwell must not have found his grandfather’s behavior amusing, or he surely would have translated it into the Dickensian frame he used to discuss other family comedies. Perhaps neither Father Rockwell nor Amy provided him grist for his particular narrative sensibility, which typically depended on a kind of childlike innocence for its punch line. Unwilling to embrace the conventional adult wisdom that judged as deviant what to him was merely eccentric behavior, Rockwell sought the gently ironic, the harmlessly funny, the generous, or the exceptional in such people instead. Gil Waughlum, for instance, the brother-in-law of Phoebe Boyce Waring, became an almost Falstaffian figure in the artist’s catalogue of stories. Uncle Gil festooned the family’s house with Christmas presents on Easter Sunday—and actually decorated the wrong house at that; he held Fourth of July fireworks on Christmas Day and brought chocolate rabbits for Thanksgiving, until finally he was put away in an institution.

To the young boy, Uncle Gil’s bighearted embrace of life brought to mind Mr. Dick from
David Copperfield,
an intriguing identification given its window into Rockwell’s associative methods. This Dickensian categorization of his uncle Gil “reassured” Rockwell that all was right with his world—and his perceptions. “I guessed,” he decided, setting down the principle at age nine that would guide his career, “it was all a matter of how you looked at something.”

Similarly, Rockwell cast his eccentric great-great-aunt Paddie, widow of Isaac Paddock (and sister of Phoebe Rockwell’s father, Jarvis Waring) as Mrs. Jellyby from
Bleak House,
whose “telescopic philanthropy” caused her own children to go without food while she focused on the natives in Africa. In his autobiography, the illustrator recalled his aunt’s wealth, although “we didn’t visit Auntie Paddock because of her money. We genuinely liked her. Still, the thought of the money did cross our minds.” Inside his aunt’s imposing but narrow gray stone house, maids, summoning bells, and incense greeted the Rockwells as they waited for the “firm footsteps” of the serious but good-natured woman. According to Rockwell, on every visit she insisted that the family troop upstairs to pay homage to the untouched bedroom of her eleven-year-old son, who had died in 1861 during the same tragic week that she lost her husband. The vivid recollection of the boy’s room—the “wheels of the overturned toy wagon” and the “dump cart loaded with sand”—insinuates the strong impact that his aunt’s altar to her lost child made on her nephew. He was impressed, too, by her lack of macabre or self-pitying airs; she simply wanted to maintain the dead among the living, and inviting her relatives to visit the childhood scene kept him alive for her.

Rockwell remembered well how Aunt Paddie’s trips to Sing Sing were her “lifework.” “Once a week, rain or shine, winter or summer,” the coachman drove her to Ossining, New York, where she distributed and read Bibles to the convicts. It irritated the boy that she didn’t do as much for her own family; every Christmas, she gave him nothing “but a hand-embroidered washcloth with my name stitched on it. I wasn’t strong for washcloths in those days.” When Auntie Paddie died in 1904, she left everything to the convicts at Sing Sing, with the exception of one hundred dollars to Jerry.

As Tom Rockwell, the artist’s middle son, has taken pains to emphasize whenever someone cites his father’s autobiography as a bible of truth, his father felt free to invoke creative license, especially with already eccentric characters who seemed able to stand on their own. In contrast, Rockwell’s most poetic memories of his youth inevitably emphasized people connecting, whether through familial, social, or physical structures. Against urban chaos, he began early to contrast a utopian harmony just outside the city’s reach. One of his most romantic recollections involved leaving Manhattan behind during his family’s Sunday outings on the trolley, where members of the neighborhood sought the elixir of fresh country air through their joint pilgrimage to the Bronx park at the far end of the streetcar line.

The weekly frolic was infused with a sense of community that knit the scene into a harmonious whole: “I remember that everyone I knew—grownups, kids, maiden aunts—had a trolley pillow which had been made by the ladies of the family especially for these Sunday and evening excursions,” Rockwell reminisced years later. He re-created vividly the way the trolley would pick up speed the farther from Manhattan it got, and how the ladies would clutch their hats and their children, with the men affecting nonchalance as the trolley seemed terrifyingly close to swaying off the tracks. At the end of the line, his family would unpack their picnic, and, “spreading our second-best tablecloth on the grass, would enjoy a meal in the country, then catch a later trolley back to the city.” The conductor’s hands, “always gray from handling the change all day,” the crunch of the gravel when the conductor walked around the parked car, the shower of electrical sparks when the trolley was revved up for the trip home—Rockwell’s recall depended on details that carried with them strong visceral charges. A melancholy gradually replaced his earlier joy as the evening darkness of the city’s outskirts yielded to the overabundance of light the closer he got to home. Such emotion—the desire to rekindle the perfect moment that also hovers over the bittersweet redemption of Oliver Twist as he finds himself perpetually suspended between community and the peculiar solitude of the big city—sustains the grown man’s memory over the decades.

5

Urban Tensions, Pastoral Relief

In spite of boyhood pleasures that evoked vivid associations over fifty years later, Rockwell consistently typified city life as evil incarnate. At the age of sixty-five, he distilled the thirteen years he lived in New York City into a couple of potent vignettes: “Unfairly perhaps,” he admits, but “two memories of the city overshadow all else.” He then frames these personal touchstones within a masterfully eerie style, almost guaranteed to bring to life the fear that overtook the boy. The first story centers on the night that President McKinley was shot: “I remember the streets were dark except for the yellow pools of light beneath the gas lamps. The newsboys were shouting: ‘Extra, Extra. McKinley assassinated. Extra. Extra.’ And people were gathering under the gas lamps, reading the news and brushing off their faces the moths and flies which swarmed about the light. There was a kind of horror in the streets. Because I did not understand the meaning of the word ‘assassinate,’ I thought McKinley had been killed in some cruel, torturing way. I was only seven at the time. The next day we went to church, where they played ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ McKinley’s favorite song, and my father and mother cried.”

Whereas the first recollection reveals a general sense of foreboding, fractured sentences recall the boy’s anxiety in a slightly more ominous second scene: “The other memory is of a vacant lot in the cold yellow light of late afternoon, the wind rustling in the dry grass and a scrap of newspaper rolling slowly across the patches of dirty snow. And a drunken woman in filthy gray rags following a man and beating him over the head with an umbrella. The man stumbling through the coarse littered grass, his arms raised to cover his head, and the woman cursing and screaming, beating him incessantly until he fell, then standing over him, kicking and striking him again and again about the head and belly and legs. And I remember that we kids watched, silent, from the edges of the lot, until a policeman ran up and grabbed the woman. Then the man got slowly up and, seeing the policeman struggling with the woman, attacked him, swaying drunkenly and swearing.”

The horror of it all is what mattered: “I forget how it ended. But the memory of that night and of that drunken woman became my image of the city. Against this image of the city—exaggerated and distorted as it is, I have never been able to rid myself of it entirely—I set the country.”

Both Dickens and Rockwell, in spite of their own urban sensibilities, powerfully indicted the depravity of large cities, though, typically, Rockwell’s harsh judgment was rendered through his general artistic denial of the subject. It comes as no surprise that in spite of spending the majority of his youth in Manhattan, Rockwell so successfully shucked off his native identity that his audiences were constantly surprised by his New York accent. Even though Rockwell lived on the Upper West Side until he was a teenager—a true urban kid—upon his first whiff of fame, he would disclaim all ties to the city. And he would exaggerate the humbleness of his Manhattan childhood, transforming its landscape into a Dickensian cauldron of violence bubbling on every side street.

His outlook was surely influenced by his parents’ fears, in addition to his own. As the New York City historian Barry Lewis reminds us, the subway’s completion in 1904 allowed unprecedented numbers of African Americans and Eastern European Jews to move into Rockwell’s neighborhood, the part of Harlem eventually called Sugar Hill, later to be absorbed into Morningside Heights. Lewis explains that “[F]rom the point of view of Waspy couples who typically were entrenched in an English world view that depended upon pastoral ideals and urban horrors, such ‘infiltration’ was extremely scary. All they saw was the ‘foreigners’ taking over, and they felt threatened physically as well as psychologically.” Steven Millhauser’s novel
Martin Dressler
describes early-twentieth-century Manhattan’s evolving landscape from the viewpoint of a nervous white observer: “The old neighborhood was changing. Poles and Bohemians stood in doorways and leaned out of windows, ragged children sat on the curbs, and everywhere you looked you saw the black-eyed Ostjuden, dark and curly-bearded, gabbling their harsh tongue, crowding the streets, filling the tenements.”

It was against this image of the city that Rockwell would establish his myth of the country. The summer vacations that his family took to outlying counties, where the rural boardinghouses—working farms, for the most part—offered up croquet for the adults and daily freedom for the children, would eventually codify his aesthetic: “Those summers, as I look back on them now more than fifty years later, have become a collection of random impressions—sights, sounds, smells—outside of time, not connected with a specific place or event and all together forming an image of sheer blissfulness, one long radiant summer. God knows, a country cur has just as many fleas as any city mongrel. But I didn’t see them. . . . that’s the way I thought of the country then and still do in spite of myself.”

His attempt at fairness over, Rockwell almost immediately defends his preference by explaining that two months after he signed a year’s lease on a New York studio, he was walking down Sixth Avenue and saw a man knock a woman down under the El. During World War I, the elevated trains lost their status as stylish, even sublime monuments to Modernism, and became symbols of the underside of industrialization, their thick, black girders casting into shadow all who walked beneath them. To Rockwell, such deterioration seemed inevitable in a city predicated on violence. That same day that he witnessed the man slugging the woman, he observed an old man leaning against his window at Child’s Restaurant drop dead directly in front of him. “These things happen in the country,” he admits, “but you don’t see them. In the city you are constantly confounded by unpleasantness. I find it sordid and unsettling.” He had not, of course, been “constantly confounded” by unpleasantness in his boyhood in Morningside Heights, but it was safer to blame the city than his parents for his failure to receive the family warmth and validation he craved.

The country, his psychological salvation, became Rockwell’s safety zone, the place where he could center himself mentally and experience the freedom from failing to measure up to the male norm that was increasingly his lot in Manhattan. His country memories vividly re-create everything from the horses’ shaggy manes trailing in the drinking hole, to the animals’ “hot heavy smell,” to the satisfaction he gains when he currycombs them well. The kids wrestle in the warm hay, and after they fall exhausted into its sweet smell, they gaze upward at the late afternoon sunlight reflecting dust motes swirling around them (a dramatic contrast to the “small patch of blue sky” enclosed by the “tenement concrete walls” when Rockwell and his city buddies “dig to China” in the city). In Manhattan, “we kids delighted” in running up to the roof and spitting on passersby in the street below; but “we never did things like that in the country. The clean air, the green fields, the thousand and one things to do . . . got somehow into us and changed our personalities.”

From at least one photograph of Rockwell’s summer in Florida, New York, around 1904, his joy transformed his face. Catching frogs, which he was allowed to take back to the city (where they promptly, and appropriately, given his beliefs, died), the high-spirited skinny country kid looks as if he has just won first place in a 4-H footrace. To his surprise, he found that he came off well in the country, especially in contrast to Jerry’s snarling superciliousness. Norman’s slightly retiring nature, coupled with the quick wit and expansive curiosity that often charmed those around him, was appreciated by farm boys and their families. And he appreciated in return their “open” expressiveness, the quality he sought in others, according to his granddaughter, to compensate for the “negative space” his own emotional distance created. Helping the local farm boys milk the cows, Norman found himself at peace, the harmony of his surroundings reflected in a new self-assurance. He was by nature a hard worker, as long as he was interested in the task, and the farmers must have been impressed with his constancy. The sense of community that resulted at the end of long days spent sharing the farm boys’ labor surrounded him with a bonhomie otherwise missing in the tense city life to which he returned.

Jerry Rockwell’s memoir cues us to a curious omission in Rockwell’s memories of his country summers: “I sometimes wonder whether Norman got his first thirst for art up at Wallkill, New York. One of the other boarders at this time was a Ferdinand Graham, a commercial artist with cowboy tendencies. Norman adored this man and loved to watch him sketch and paint. Graham had a regular cowboy saddle and rode a very small horse. He had overlong legs so they almost touched the ground on either side. I can see him now riding by at a gallop and Norman standing wide-eyed in awe.” Jerry’s complete disregard for the years of drawing that had already defined Norman’s interests suggests its own brand of sibling competition. “I think that I’ve always wanted to be an artist,” Norman believably informs us. “I certainly can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. . . . It was gradual. I drew, then I found I liked to draw, and finally, after I had got to know something about myself and the people and things around me, I found that I didn’t want to do anything else but draw.”

It is possible, of course, that Jerry’s memory was inaccurate, or that Graham’s kind of painting was beneath the adult illustrator’s notice; but it is just as plausible that, whether consciously or not, the memory was simply too potent to be articulated. “I think the [country summers] had a lot to do with what I painted later on,” Rockwell said. Imagine the wonder felt by the child, who felt his own worth to consist entirely of his ability to draw, when he happened on a perfect template for his dreams—the artist hero as masculine, western horseman. At some level, as Jerry’s account implies, the mesmerized boy must have felt that anything he could ever wish for was right in front of his eyes.

Another pleasure of Norman’s summer vacations consisted of escaping Nancy Rockwell’s vise. She tended to linger on the porch, where she would drink iced tea and gossip; and when family events such as hay wagon rides brought them together, the group was too large for her to control her sons. On the one hand cloyingly expressive in the love she professed for the child whom she felt most resembled her, she also was notorious among her own siblings and their offspring for her critical nature. “I heard that Aunt Nancy was always like she was when she lived with us, later in life,” states even her one defender, Mary Amy Orpen. “I liked her, because she was kind of plucky and interesting, in her own demanding, odd way. But she always went up to kids and told them they ought to be doing the very thing they were not. If they were playing outside, they should come indoors and read. If they were enjoying quiet activities inside, she’d tell them to go out and get some exercise. Always, always, she criticized children as her way of guiding them. She didn’t mean it so badly; it just came off that way. It must have been a real trial to grow up with her. Maybe her sons just learned to tune her out.”

No wonder Norman developed his desire to avoid the unpleasant. And little surprise either that the summer farms vouchsafed him an emotional center where he felt complete and fulfilled, harmoniously in sync with a world he wanted to be part of.

If we consider the way his psyche was organized—reflected in his later compulsion for a clearly focused, precisely defined professional life, punctuated with flights of spontaneous escape whenever he felt the urge—the hyperstimulation of urban life must have alienated his affections early on. A cacophony of sounds competing for prominence assaulted the ears of New Yorkers: horse hoofs beating against hard pavements or cobblestoned streets played off the sounds of modernity—seemingly ceaseless subway construction, the roar of the elevated trains, the clatter of the omnibus, and even the infrequent automobile vying for space. Pungent aromas of coal residue mixed with omnipresent horse manure to create acrid early-century air pollution. To Rockwell, the vision of pastoral escapes perfuming the corrosiveness of the cities seemed real, not romantic. The country’s simplicity, magically thought by some to reunite the child with his authentic self, was perfectly articulated when Waring read from
Oliver Twist:
“Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods, of an inland village! . . . It was a lovely spot to which they repaired. Oliver, whose days had been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence here.” As more than one critic has observed, Dickens reconciles in this particularly dark novel (which Rockwell recalled so viscerally) the warring desires for independence and community. Rockwell, whose cool but insistent autonomy coexisted with an equally compelling need to be (a well-liked) part of a group, would have intuitively responded to the major mythic tracks laid down in this novel.