American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (49 page)

From there he traveled to Paris, where he wrote a short letter to Erikson on stationery from the Hotel Montalembert, in the Seventh Arrondissement. His greatest disappointment, he said, was finding himself without adequate time to sketch. “I tried it in England but our stops are so short that I must make the ‘sketch’ book mostly from photos we are taking.” Reporting on his anxiety level, he added that he had felt “apprehension” the night before, when he was walking back to his “obscure hotel” and couldn’t find a taxi. “But nothing like panic.”
25

He next wrote to Erikson from the Hotel Metropole in Karachi, Pakistan, which was “Picturesque beyond words. Camels, turbans, veils. But poverty I never dreamed existed.”
26
He had not reached any decisions about his work: “no revelation from above on my future in the art world.”
27

Two weeks later, writing to Erikson from the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, he reiterated his failure to make any decisions about his work. “I haven’t had time to consider my future or anything but the work at hand. But you said, ‘Perhaps you’ll have a revelation over the Formosa Straits.’ We fly over the Straits this Sunday so I have hopes.”
28

A twenty-minute newsreel released by Pan Am after the trip shows Rockwell strolling through the capitals of the world, his oversized sketchbook tucked beneath his arm. There he is, browsing in the bookstalls in Paris, riding in a rickshaw in Hong Kong. Disembarking from the plane in Honolulu, on October 25, he was greeted by a bevy of dark-haired, hip-swaying hula girls. As one of the girls pecked him on the cheek and tossed three flowery leis around his neck, he worried about sneezing. “They don’t even ask you whether you have allergies or not,” he noted with a straight face.

*   *   *

On November 1 Rockwell returned from his Pan Am whirl; the newsreel concludes with footage of him in his studio, showing off his new souvenirs, including a Buddha figure from Siam, some Japanese dolls, and an old-fashioned French pistol. Mary was released from the hospital, joining him at home. Although her four months in Hartford had been restful, the salutary effects did not last long, and within a month, as winter descended and brought darkness in the afternoons, she returned to her old habits. She mixed daiquiris to boost her mood before dinner and sneaked sips of rum from bottles she hid around the house. Bills from December 1955 itemize in a clerk’s neat cursive the toxic purchases—Taylor dry sherry, Club bourbon, eight bottles of Bacardi rum, cartons of Pall Mall cigarettes.
29
“She never got better,” her son Jarvis recalled years later. “She was on her way down. She really was on an inclined plane.”
30

As Mary faltered, Rockwell took refuge in his studio, allowing the prod of deadlines to drive out rogue thoughts. Mary had not been cured by her years of therapy and he could hardly pretend that his own sessions with Erikson had led to life-changing disclosures. No, there had been no great revelation over the Formosa Straits. “Art heals,” the maxim goes, but Rockwell had no illusions about the curative power of art. Rather, he made art because he couldn’t be healed.

At the same time, he valued his therapy sessions with Erikson, who was an indisputable ally. He could not say the same for Dr. Knight, who had treated Mary and Tom and was professionally obligated to stand beside them in family conflicts. Tom was about to turn twenty-three, and Rockwell wrote a witty birthday poem for him, part of which reads:

Mosquitoes sting and bedbugs bite.

Reminds me much of Dr. Knight.

But thoughts that make me very lyric

Come from good white-haired Uncle Erik.
31

TWENTY-TWO

YOUNG MAN LUTHER

(1957 TO 1959)

Doctors and senior staff at the Austen Riggs Center were expected to divide their time between the care of patients and research. But sometimes the two could not be balanced. Erikson received a grant in 1956 that allowed him to leave Riggs altogether and tend to what he called “this writing business.”
1

On October 1, 1956, Erikson began a yearlong sabbatical. He arranged for Rockwell to be treated in his absence by Dr. Edgerton Howard, the associate medical director at Riggs. Unlike Erikson, Dr. Howard wasn’t well-known in intellectual circles or even in psychoanalytic ones; he was just a sturdy, self-effacing professional, all but unpublished except for a few book reviews.
2
Although Rockwell was loath to switch therapists, he soon assured Erikson that he was making the best of things. “You told me not to underestimate Dr. Howard and you were absolutely right. He’s very fine but let’s be honest. There’s only one Erik Erikson.”
3

Erikson, at the time, was living in Mexico, in the tiny fishing village of Ajijic. This is where he wrote
Young Man Luther
, one of the first books to qualify as psychobiography. It offers a conceptually daring interpretation of the life of Martin Luther, who, according to Erikson, suffered a late-adolescent identity crisis of such mammoth proportions that the only way to resolve it was to reject 1,500 years of Roman Catholicism and invent a brand-new religion. The outcome of his identity crisis was not only a new Luther, but the Protestant Reformation, which favored inward soulfulness over the old regimen of rules and rituals.

For all its obvious limitations, including the absurdity of attempting to psychoanalyze a German preacher five centuries after his death,
Young Man Luther
abounds with tossed-off profundities and entertaining asides. Some of Erikson’s thoughts spring from his status as a painter manqué attentive to the visual world. Thoughts on faces, for instance. He claims that the quest for religious faith represents an attempt to recapture the lost visual gratifications of infancy—in particular, “the smiling face” of an appreciative parent. The recognition bestowed by a welcoming face represents “the beginning of all sense of identity.”
4

The search for “mutual recognition, the
meeting face to face
,” he contends, is common to monotheistic religions. God is the caring face that religion projects onto the sky and that allows faith to flourish. “In the beginning are the generous breast and the eyes that care,” Erikson writes in reference to a mother’s love for her baby. “Could this be one of the countenances which religion promises us we shall see again, at the end and in another world?”
5

Countenances, faces, “eyes that care”—Erikson’s emphasis on the face serves to remind us that Rockwell was, among other things, a painter of faces. All his paintings are figure paintings, ones in which the facial expressions are likely to be distinct and legible. A Freudian might point out that Rockwell, who complained that his mother failed to look at him in his neglected childhood, made up for the loss by devoting his life to the creation of a gallery of interlocking, hyperattentive faces. In the process, he was able to direct the gaze of the American public onto himself and find a respite from the ache of invisibility.

*   *   *

On April 12, 1957, Erikson wrote to Rockwell from Mexico, and his tone is openly caring (“I miss you and Stockbridge”). He was enjoying his stay, sitting in his yard in the shade of banana trees, slowly making his way through Luther’s tracts in scholastic Latin. But the writing part of his efforts was more complicated. “The job is going well,” he informed Rockwell, almost deferentially, “but who knows the ups and downs better than you do?”
6

With the letter came a ten-page travelogue intended to be read aloud or merely circulated at the next gathering of the Marching and Chowder Society. (“It’s of course written primarily for you,” Erikson notes sweetly, “but I thought you would want to include the friends.”) Ajijic was then fashionable as an artists’ colony and Erikson was surprisingly critical of the American bohemians he met there. “Some of the ‘painters’ and ‘writers,’” he notes with patronizing scare quotes, “do seem arty in a homeless, pathetic way; and some of those who have money, drink themselves into a nostalgic stupor day after day; but there are also quite a number of people who do some work in apparently contented and heterosexual monogamy.”

Interesting choice of words. He could have written that there were artists who do work in “contented monogamy.” Why the qualifier, why contented “heterosexual monogamy”? Perhaps he was trying to steer Rockwell away from his homoerotic desires. Like most psychoanalysts of his era, Erikson regarded homosexuality as a consequence of arrested development and believed it needed to be treated.

Rockwell wrote back to Erikson in Mexico, in a letter in which he acknowledges his overly intense relationships with men. His latest adventure or rather misadventure was with his photographer Bill Scovill, a Riggs patient who suffered from severe depression. Although he was descended from the Scovill family of brass-button fame, his resources were not unlimited and he was crushed when he lost his job at the Riggs workshop, where he taught photography.

“After threatening me with his self-destruction,” Rockwell wrote, “he swung over to the idea of my taking over the full responsibility for his financial and spiritual life. In fact he was forcibly crawling back into my womb but found it was already overcrowded. Now, believe it or not, he’s doing fine.”
7
Rockwell had often joked in the past about feeling weak or womanish, and his very first cover for the
Post
,
Boy with Baby Carriage
, had derived its humor partly from the milk-bottle nipple poking out from the boy’s breast pocket. But the notion that Rockwell himself was equipped with female reproductive organs and the obligations of maternal care—this is a new one.

Granted, he had been protective of Scovill, who continued to work as his photographer and to keep him company in the studio. “We built a darkroom up there,” Scovill recalled later, “and Mrs. Guerrieri was upset when we moved the enlarger in.”
8
She was the landlord and perhaps it was the acrid, vingary scent of the photographic chemicals that made her unhappy. Rockwell’s relationship with her deteriorated so severely he felt he had to move out of the studio, which still occupied a second-floor space over the butcher shop on Main Street.

Before the Shot
, 1958
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

On May 7, 1957, Rockwell signed the deed on the place formerly known as the Loomis house. It was just down the road from his house overlooking the cemetery. He moved partly to get away from the cemetery, the view of which his wife found intolerable. But his first priority was to put up a studio, or rather remodel the red barn tumbling down in the yard, which he expected to take two months. “We are having the studio finished first and when that is completed I am going to give a whiz bang party with two bars going full tilt,” he wrote to Erikson, “one in the studio and one on the lawn. It’ll be about July 1st.”
9
The new studio would include a built-in darkroom for Scovill.
10

It had been only three years since he had acquired his previous house in Stockbridge and he probably set some kind of record for buying and selling houses and moving around the New England countryside, which is supposed to be a place where you put down roots. On the other hand, his new house—it was on Route 7, which turned into South Street as it entered town—would be his last. It was the kind of house he had always favored: a chunky white-painted Colonial, creaking with two centuries of history and enhanced by the rumor that a famous patriot, Aaron Burr, had been a former occupant. It was across the street from the Red Lion Inn and as close to the Austen Riggs Center as a house could be.

Moreover, his new house was near the Stockbridge elementary school, and he still, at this late point, was on the lookout for new child models. Escorted by the principal, he would wander the halls on weekday mornings and peer into brightly lighted classrooms, in search of boys with the right look. He would wait until the children had broken for recess or filed into the lunchroom before making contact with them, not wanting to intrude on their lessons.

“He would come during our lunch hour and pull you into the hall,” recalled Eddie Locke, who first modeled for Rockwell as an eight-year-old boy, in October 1957. Locke is among the few who can claim the distinction of “posing somewhat in the nude,” as
The Saturday Evening Post
reported in a bizarrely sanguine item on March 15, 1958. The comment refers to
Before the Shot
, which takes us into a doctor’s office as a boy of around eight stands on a wooden chair, his belt unfastened, his corduroy trousers lowered to reveal his pale backside. As he nervously awaits an injection, he bends over, ostensibly to scrutinize the framed diploma hanging on the wall and reassure himself that Dr. Campbell is sufficiently qualified to perform this delicate procedure. (That’s the joke.) The doctor, a gray-haired man in a white coat who has his broad back turned to the patient as well as the viewer, is an ominous figure. He seems to have little in common with earlier Rockwell pediatricians, like the avuncular one from 1929 who indulges a schoolgirl by listening through his stethoscope to the pretend-heartbeat of her doll.