Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  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.

  Unfortunately, his parents decided that Norman’s socializing would best be expressed through a demanding church schedule that would make the most devoted worshipper flinch. St. Luke’s had been organized in 1820, the first church in Greenwich Village, according to New York diocesan records. Known as “St. Luke in the Fields,” it was supported financially by Manhattan’s prestigious Trinity Church on Wall Street. An uptown parish offshoot—a Romanesque brownstone church on Convent and 141st Street—would dominate Rockwell’s “free time” throughout grade school, his country summer idylls the only exception. The boys joined the choir, where the choirmaster bullied them until, according to Rockwell, they “sang . . . like angels.” He raged at them, called them insulting names, and hit them, while they passively “perched [on their stools] silent, white-faced.” The boys were held to a punishing weekly routine of three rehearsals a week, a dress rehearsal on Friday, and four services every Sunday. Their putative reward was to graduate to singing at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the nearly completed bishop’s seat. In truth, the boys’ only pleasure derived from a church battalion motivated by the recent action in the Philippines; this warrior-inspired religious group was given authentic miniature uniforms complete with wooden swords and allowed to participate in parades under St. Luke’s banner.

  Nancy’s own participation at St. Luke’s appears to have been impressive as well, at least for someone too weak to perform ordinary household duties. Church records show her to have been a particularly active parishioner. She was appointed as St. Luke’s representative to the St. John’s Cathedral building drive, and she served as a delegate on the Women’s Auxiliary to the Cathedral League. Such activity belies her nephew’s observation that she seemed “a typical Victorian woman—Waring did everything, she didn’t know how to do anything, even manage her finances, after he died.” Nancy’s “complete looniness” was somewhat selective, a matter of where she chose to spend her energies. Her mother’s pattern of seeking release from the demands of a busy household through church fellowship had imprinted itself on Anne Elizabeth Hill’s youngest daughter. From the early days of her marriage, she had found being a housewife tedious and exhausting. In contrast, church life invigorated her. Even Nancy’s love of needlework, her favorite way of showing affection, went most often toward beautifying the parish chapel (although one of the few remaining relics of the boys’ infancy is the first pair of booties that she knitted Jerry and then passed down to his brother).

  From their earliest memories, Jerry and Norman Rockwell associated their mother’s giving of herself with her participation in the local church—and rarely with her relationship to their father or themselves, which lacked the easy warmth they observed in other homes. In 1900, New York City’s population was 85 percent foreign or had foreign-born parents, creating a mixed neighborhood that reflected family styles much more expressive than the New England and Victorian heritage dictating that of the Rockwells. Looking around them, the boys perceived that their mother poured into the church the affection that neighborhood women lavished on their households, and so religion became their competition for her attention.

  The dangers that Norman felt he and his brother faced just getting from 832 St. Nicholas to 141st Street contributed even more reason to associate things religious with punishment. “A slum lay betwee
n our house and the church. We’d walk hurriedly through the dim, gaslighted streets. Gangs of ragged children taunted us. Drunken men lurched against us. We clutched rocks in our fists, expecting every minute to be set upon,” the illustrator later recalled.

  Although the boys had been warned too vividly by their parents to be able to pause and assess the scene for themselves—no one ever did attack them—the local landscape varied bewilderingly. Up at the 155th Street station, where the Sixth Avenue El stopped, they’d hop off the clanging steel stairs and emerge into an odd mix of old picnic grounds and new housing developments. But the area most worrisome to Rockwell consisted of four-family row houses built next to overgrown lots with weeds too thick to walk through. He might have to pass an empty lot where rats scurried even in the daytime, while on the adjacent land construction for a business office would be under way. The competing bids for his attention merely added to the overall aura of violence he associated with the neighborhood. Peter Rockwell remembers his father’s recounting how “he used to climb up on the apartment roof and watch the Irish and Italian gangs fight each other with bicycle chains. He felt that this kind of violence kept him from ever really experiencing the proper innocence of childhood.”