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 appea
rance in commercial, even disposable formats.
“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.
. . .
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 cr
eative 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.
Norman Rockwell Page 9
