Norman Rockwell: A Life - Laura Claridge - Hardcover - 1 ED

Chapter 1 Narrative Connections, the Heart of an Illustrator We tell ourselves stories in order to live. -Joan Didion, The White Album Norman Rockwell was not sadistic. He was, however, expert at creating desire, both in his public and in his private life. His family, who too often felt themselves to be "living out the cover of a Saturday Evening Post," as his oldest son, Jarvis, once expressed it, were routinely seduced by his invitations of intimacy, though the artist established a subtle but impermeable distance when they tried to respond. His real sensitivity was reserved for his art, his empathy lavished on his easel, day after day, for over six decades. As do many artists, he tended to exorcise his internal tensions in his paintings, so that the energy that might have been expended on the work of rearing three sons born within six years of each other exploded into the narrative stories on his canvas instead. In the summer of 1954, for instance, at the height of his powers, Rockwell undertook a Saturday Evening Post cover of an aspiring artist studying master works in a museum, The Art Critic, published on April 16, 1955. The cover shows a young man scrutinizing a woman's decolletage in the head-and-shoulders portrait in front of him, while on the adjacent wall, prosperous Dutch burghers in an Old Master painting appear to start with indignation and amusement as they watch the impudent student. The model for the student was Rockwell's son Jarvis (named after the illustrator's father); for the portrait the young critic studies so assiduously, Rockwell used his wife (and Jarvis's mother), Mary. The timing of this particular painting, in terms of familial harmony, was way off. Mary had been struggling valiantly against alcoholism and depression-possibly a bipolar illness-for at least five years. The family had been racked by the demise of their formerly predictable upper-middle-class home, as the mother, previously the anchor of their household, suddenly needed all the tending. Boarding school plans had been upended in an attempt to rally round her, trips were rescheduled, tremendous amounts of money were poured into treatments, and finally, a permanent move was undertaken from Arlington, Vermont, where the family had lived since 1939, to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, when it became clear that Mary's treatments at the Austen Riggs Center would be long-term. Unknown to the family, as they struggled to adjust to Mary's illness Rockwell suffered a simultaneous spate of suicidal thoughts. Jarvis, however, could give both his parents a run for their money, and in terms of expensive sessions with mental healthcare specialists, he did exactly that. From his earliest years, he was a particularly complicated member of the family: "I never caught on to what you're supposed to do in school," he remembers. "So it kind of never made sense to me, from the beginning." Born in 1932, by 1938 Jarvis had been displaced by two younger brothers, and as he approached first grade, his parents were contemplating yet another major dislocation in his young life. The next year, they would decide to leave the sophisticated enclave of New Rochelle, New York, to make their home in Arlington, Vermont. A greater contrast is hard to imagine, at least on the face of it. New Rochelle fed on the overspill from Manhattan, seeing itself as a haven for worldly artists, entertainers, and intellectuals who wanted to be within commuting distance of the city, while enjoying the yacht club environment of what many treated as a wealthy distant suburb of the city. Even at his young age, Jarvis would feel the shock of adjusting to a bucolic life after the faster pace of his earlier years. Between the move at age nine and posing for The Art Critic immediately prior to his twenty-third birthday, Rockwell's eldest son re-trod many of his father's steps, though too often, to Jarvis, tClaridge, Laura is the author of 'Norman Rockwell: A Life - Laura Claridge - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780375504532 and ISBN 0375504532.