Norman Rockwell

by Laura Claridge

  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, wh
o 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 repres
entative 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.