To his credit, Rockwell tried hard to reinvent himself as someone free of the compulsion that drove his work—the desire for crowd adulation, for assurance that his work was seen by the masses and appreciated by many. Validation through his art was what kept him from regressing to the pigeon-toed beanpole of a nonman. But he also feared that the Golden Age of Illustration was dead, and that the divide between a “real” and a “commercial” artist was now absolute. His concerns were not that he lacked the talent to do the real art; instead, the ghost of apprehension flitting over Mary’s letters is fear of the cost. He had achieved great fame, respect, and income; now, to risk being unappreciated or ignored must have terrified him as much as the thought of decades of more Post covers. And when, in an aside, Mary tells her parents that the magazines reassuringly keep contacting her husband, even in Paris, we know by now that she speaks for them both in these letters, not even primarily herself: “I must say it is gratifying to get cables from the Post and the Journal even though you [we, Rockwell] aren’t doing any work.”
The turmoil created by Rockwell’s roller-coaster moods about his work surfaces in the near frantic shifts in Mary’s correspondence, sometimes wildly contradicting the previous day’s confident information. A week after the explosive news of her husband’s change of direction, which must have shocked her parents, she wrote them that “. . . the important thing is about Norman’s work. I last told you about how he decided to experiment. That didn’t satisfy him for long so he and I thought and talked a great deal more, went to the Louvre and he decided that the only thing he really wanted to do was the same sort of thing he’d always done so we felt much better.” He had restarted one of the canvases discarded a few weeks earlier, applying to it new ideas, and he was mollified (although her parents surely know by now, even if their daughter doesn’t, that this, too, will change). And, Mary adds, they decided to move out of New Rochelle “the minute” they can find a colonial house in Connecticut situated on large grounds. “We couldn’t stand going back to New Rochelle! But I honestly look forward to getting back and finding our place.” Who really knows if Mary wanted to move to Connecticut, when she herself probably didn’t?
The Barstows can’t be blamed if they came to dread the mail; just noticing the manic swings in their child’s married life would have justified any fears they had of their daughter marrying an older artist set in his ways. Perhaps they started worrying, too, about the reference to Rockwell’s obsession with work that had been published as the grounds for Irene’s divorce petition; it did sound as if all the man valued was work. No return letters to Mary exist, and very few comments in hers about them, to apprise us of their response. All that Mary’s younger sister recalls are her parents’ concerns that their child was a quick solution to the older man’s wounded pride, and that she would not prove up to being in the limelight anyway.
But Mary had adapted well, to the extent that she ends up maternally reassuring them, a few weeks later, to calm their fears: “Please do not be worried about Norman, because there is really nothing to worry about. I meant to make it clear that he is just going through a period of transition which is necessary to an honest artist when he is changing the purpose or direction of his work. Before he had few thoughts beyond Post covers. Now he wants to do much finer things, but of the same human sort, and probably he will do some covers again when he gets straightened out. . . . Neither of us is worried at all down at the bottom. We both know that he has to go through this to get out in the clear again. And because he has the courage to do it, he’s bound to come out.”
Week after week, as if enmeshed in ongoing negotiations of the most delicate, crucial sort, Mary reported on Norman’s state of mind and progress. It is easy to imagine the readers on the other end making a game of opening her letters at some point, just to leaven the unending seriousness of the saga. Soon even biological and aesthetic procreation become coequals in the Rockwell household: “I have one big tremendous announcement to make—no, not another child—but its equivalent—a picture finished. . . . He worked terribly hard on it, but it doesn’t look worked at all. [N]ow he feels he has something he can develop and go on and on with instead of working right up against a flat wall all the time as he has since we have been married. So it has all been worth while, all the agony and struggle he has been through.”
Incredible as it seems, the family had resisted mentioning the obvious, though others had apparently urged upon the couple a recognition of Rockwell’s state of mind: “By the way I give you people a tremendous long mark of credit, not one word have you said about depression and no one else has missed mentioning it. But then you’re not a depressed kind of family, praise Heaven.” In such praise lies the root of Mary’s own denial of negative emotions, a habit that meshed neatly if dangerously with her husband’s own.
Other than managing Norman’s crisis, which was her priority, Mary concentrated on doing right by the baby—and, after her duties to both family members were done, enjoying her new life in a foreign country. She explained to her parents that Jerry was the best baby imaginable, but that because of Norman’s needs, she found it impossible to give him her undivided time. On July 15, she detailed for the Barstows the precise schedule by which she tended her child. In the middle of this letter, she reaffirmed their newest arrangement to return to New Rochelle in October rather than to stay on in Paris (an earlier plan), partly because Norman felt that he should see his mother. Also, she commented incidentally, “my longing for familiar things and sudden eschewal of drink and cigarettes would point to the fact that another member of the family is on the way, which I am very glad about as I am very fit—and much thinner—and feel even better than last time, and especially because Norm is SO tickled.” After thus casually announcing her pregnancy, she immediately added: “I have other even better news. The day I have been waiting for two years arrived yesterday and Norman came home with the definite knowledge and feelings that his problem is completely solved and that whole new worlds are opened to him.” Her husband had found a new method of executing the Post covers: “It will take him perhaps five days at most to do a Post cover now whereas before it took two weeks time, out of all proportion to their value.” She exults: “And do you realize how entirely remarkable what he has done is? What perseverance and patience and every other good quality it has taken?”
It is amazing that at this juncture—the twenty-four-year-old woman pregnant with her second child—Mary considered it “even better news” that the anxiety over Norman’s career was resolved. More astonishing still, she seemed to believe this resolution in spite of all evidence pointing to the continuance of the drama. Predictably, by the end of July, she was writing that they were now considering going to Manhattan to live: “We are thinking—only thinking so far—of taking an apartment in New York this winter which would be loads of fun. I’ve always wanted to live in New York in the winter.”
By early August, her hopes were high: “Norm has just sent off two Post covers, and, now, having found a different technique in which he feels there are possibilities, he feels free to experiment to his heart’s content, which means he is really going to be an artist.” The real issue—and we can only imagine how it hung over the little household—was what Lorimer would say about the new technique. “Of course, privately speaking, it is going to be perfect if the Post approves of his new covers and I’ve not the slightest doubt that they will; it will be so much velvet because it takes him about one third of the time it did to do them, so he can depend on one a month for income and spend the rest of the time painting from which there will also be income of course. So the struggle is really won.” Not yet, of course.
At least while the Rockwells awaited Lorimer’s judgment, Mary had a few weeks of hoping for “normalcy,” whatever that must have come to look like to her. She confessed that she felt that she and “Norm” were starting out on a “normal sort of life” for the first time since they’d gotten married, because now, at last, Norman was strai
ghtened out. In an unusually self-conscious moment, she notes how “amusing” they must appear for changing their minds constantly; they’d decided to find a nice little New England town in place of Manhattan for the winter.
While Mary seems to have taken at least this brief moment to ponder her personal journey, by mid-August the Barstows were once more receiving letters centered on their son-in-law, although the writing reeks with anxiety that threatens to break through their daughter’s optimism: “Everything he does now shows new advancement and new possibilities until I feel that he is really going to do great things. I know it and he must have every possible chance. Of course our present decision rests on what we hear from the Post concerning the two covers he just sent over. I have no doubt what we’ll hear. Of course he has.” She proceeds at a near manic pace to explain again the difference it will make if Norm can spend just five days a month producing income (doing a Post cover) and devote the rest of his time to painting whatever he wants. Believing himself liberated from the past as a result of his tenure in Paris, he has suggested that they stay there at least for the winter. If they were to return to New York, Mary clearly parrots her husband, it would mean being in New Rochelle for at least a month before moving to Manhattan, and seeing all their friends again would drag down the work.
But of course, within a few days, the Rockwells are again undecided. “The difficulty is that we are still awaiting word from the Post about the two covers, which makes Norman just as upset as possible, though he is bearing up nobly and working on the Boy Scout calendar.”
According to American friends who stopped in to visit, the artist was working nonstop, nobly or otherwise. Leah Parmelee and her four girls were on their way back to New York after a year of living abroad, and they arranged to visit with the Rockwells on their return to New Rochelle. Daughter Betty Parmelee recalls how happy Mary seemed, taking care of her baby; she also remembers that they didn’t get to visit with Norman at all: “He was always off working, like usual; we never saw him.” Mary eagerly prepared a lunch for them all, noting that her grapefruit cocktail, cold chicken and tomato, string bean, pea and cucumber salad (made, she told her mother lovingly, just like you make it), homemade biscuits and ice cream and cake all do her proud. Sounding incapable of being anything but giddy with happiness, the woman remembered by her children as rarely going near a stove if she didn’t have to concluded her letter: “I really do adore cooking.”
Social distractions such as the Parmelees’ visit sprinkled Mary’s days with some relief from her husband’s relentless worry about Lorimer’s reaction to his new paintings. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a good time to appeal to the Boss’s more liberal instincts. At the Post, workers were noticing the dark cloud Lorimer carried with him. He worried that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal would be disastrous for the country in the long run; though he often explained that he agreed with some of the objectives, the president’s methods for obtaining them were at the heart of the problem. More worrisome still, the muscular shape the Post exhibited at the opening of the decade had already gone flabby, as Lorimer published too many ghostwritten memoirs from stage, screen, radio, and government celebrities designed to stanch his audience’s interest in glossier publications. Rockwell represented a failproof winning commodity, and the Boss was in no mood to indulge his major illustrator’s wish to experiment.
As long as he worked for Lorimer, not only was Rockwell hampered in his desire to try new formal directions in his art; his subject matter was circumscribed as well. In particular, nothing controversial was to be part of the cover illustration. Such intransigence over the illustration topics fueled Rockwell’s need to find other ways to avoid repeating himself.
Apparently, though there is no record of the actual transaction, Lorimer rejected both of Rockwell’s new works, nor do we even know what the pictures looked like. Whether the illustrator was devastated or relieved—most likely, at some level he experienced both emotions—he decided that he had to follow the path others thought of as his, and his little family returned to New Rochelle in October after all, taking the S.S. Berengaria back home.
Within a few months of their return, Rockwell learned that he was being included in the 1932–33 edition of Who’s Who. Any hope Mary entertained that the honor would boost her husband’s aesthetic energies quickly proved another chimera. At 24 Lord Kitchener Road, everything returned, way too soon, back to normal.
16
No Solution in Sight
Mary Rockwell spent the first part of 1933 getting a room ready for the child due in early spring; her husband plowed on in his studio, the weight of increasing financial responsibilities beginning to unnerve him. He had been earning around $40,000 annually for the past couple of years, which should have allayed his anxieties. He knew no one was immune from the Depression’s reach, however, and he had learned how easy it was to burn through money. And his expenses were high; his itemized expenses actually amounted to about one hundred dollars more than his total income. His household costs totaled over $12,000; his insurance and taxes and dependents (including his mother) another $12,000; his studio expense almost $9,000; and household additions and painting over $6,000. And although he and Mary did not live acquisitively, they enjoyed being able to tend to their growing family’s needs without having to cut corners. If they decided to take a trip, for instance, they wanted the money easily available, even on a whim. And when Mary saw the perfect transitional bed for little Jerry, she enjoyed buying it without worrying about the price.
On March 13, 1933, an unseasonably cold day, Mary gave birth to the Rockwells’ second son, Thomas Rhodes Rockwell. Tommy’s father had turned thirty-nine the month before, enabling him to joke that his energy for a baby did not equal that of a young man’s. The drain on his physical resources came not from fatherhood, however, but from work, which in turn left him less to give as a father and husband than everyone in his family, including himself, would have preferred. But the painter knew no other way; his art came first, babies or not.
Mary’s hope that her husband would become happy with his work after their return from Paris went unfulfilled, in spite of the ripe cultural moment that Rockwell, arguably, could have seized. During the thirties, a loosely termed movement that celebrated close ties to one’s roots developed, a quasi-Romantic American regionalism. Among the painters who influenced such artistic currents at various phases were John Stuart Curry, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton. In their own way, the gritty American Ash Can painters of the twenties, whose stylized naturalism hovered over some of the Post covers a few decades later, served as precursors to these new realists.
If Rockwell had wanted to enter the world of “real art” according to his own lights, and leave illustration behind, it seems logical that he might have found a way to do so exactly here, among the Regionalists. In wealthy Westchester County alone, the aesthetic efforts of the government’s intervention—the 1933 Public Works Administration and its offshoot, the Works Project Administration, two years later—left their imprint on everything from murals in post offices to the newly redesigned parks and graveyards. The kind of art that thrived under such patronage tended to be regional in nature, dedicated to representing somberly the reality of the ordinary person.
Mary Rockwell’s letter of 1932 had reassured her parents that “Norm” would stick with representation—his trips to the Louvre had convinced him to be true to himself—but it would be a new art-full representation. As the Washington Post critic Paul Richard noted in 1978, Rockwell could be said to stand halfway between the bookends of American realism, Thomas Eakins and Richard Estes. Why did the artist ignore the obvious possibilities suddenly open to him in the 1930s?
In light of the identity Rockwell later assumed as an avatar of the New England homestead, an integral part of the mythological landscape of rural America, it is startling to confront the lack of rootedness that lay at the heart of his art. He had not developed a strong sense of grounding in any one place either by temp
erament or through childhood experience. In spite of having spent almost all of his childhood in New York City, he limned that experience as a lack rather than the fullness that urban identities provided to other artists. And rootedness was integral to Regionalism. Historian William Graebner has argued convincingly that the artist was not comfortable with the local, relative quality of the individual embedded in a particular society. Previously a master of mass culture in the 1920s, when the absence of strong ties to family, friends, and a particular community, accompanied by pleasure in social mobility, defined the period’s common values, Rockwell lost his way during the following decade, when his dependence on the individual-as-universal lost its meaning in the context of the Depression.
“What was missing [in Rockwell’s paintings of the thirties] were the grounded, placed, and ultimately political voices of the Great Depression: the cotton farmer in Alabama, the steelworker in Gary, the retired couple in Long Beach, the housewife in Des Moines,” Graebner comments. But what else would we expect, the historian shrewdly points out, from an artist whose autobiography uses a Dickensian lens to focus on the importance of the grounding he himself lacks, and therefore idealizes: “My address,” said Mr. Micawber, “is Windsor Terrace. . . . I live there.” In choosing this line as his autobiography’s first quotation from Dickens, Rockwell implicitly reminds us of his own childhood traversed by too many moves and too much uncertainty to root the artist to his landscape.
Norman Rockwell Page 30