American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (10 page)

In America, the success of the Boy Scouts was almost guaranteed. Americans were already sold on Teddy Roosevelt’s belief in the rugged, well-oxygenated life. What was Roosevelt if not a Boy Scout grown up? The former U.S. President was named “chief Scout citizen” and honorary Scout vice president when the movement was founded in America, and his name appeared on the masthead of
Boys’ Life
, which was published once a month in New York.

Each issue of
Boys’ Life
contained a mix of adventure fiction, scouting news from around “the world” (meaning, primarily, England and Scotland), and how-to articles that encouraged boys to master feats that almost seem designed to drive mothers to the brink of despair. Learning how to earn a merit badge in knot tying or stamp collecting is one thing. But do boys really need to know, for instance, “How to Wear a Blanket as an Overcoat,” to cite the title of an article? And surely the family yard could not have been the same after a boy had perused an article entitled, “Your Own Hockey Rink, and How to Make It.”

But the heart of the magazine consisted of juvenile fiction, short stories written by novelists of various ability. Every issue included a few adventure tales, the kind that situate young men in physical jeopardy in the pristine out-of-doors, stories in which boys were shipwrecked on foggy desert islands or forced to ward off a pack of wolves at a campsite. From one story to the next, boys fell off cliffs and searched for their satchels and limped along winding trails with a full moon beaming down. Of course they triumphed in the end. Most of the stories were set in North America, west of the Rockies.

Acting on a tip from Fogarty, Rockwell arranged to see the magazine’s editor. Edward Cave had grown up in Ontario, Canada, and prided himself on his skills as a hunter and fisherman. He had previously edited various magazines devoted to the outdoors, most notably
Recreation
, which billed itself as “The Been There” sportsman’s magazine. By coincidence, Cave lived with his family in Mamaroneck, just a few blocks from where the Rockwell family had lived. Although his one child was a daughter, he served as Scout master of Mamaroneck’s then-new Troop 1.
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Rockwell left Cave’s office that day with a plum assignment. He was handed a typed manuscript of “Partners,” a short story by Stanley Snow, a regular writer for the magazine, and asked to illustrate three scenes of his choice.
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Rockwell returned home to his room at Mrs. Frothingham’s boardinghouse and carefully read “Partners.” Then he read it again, just as Fogarty had taught him to do at school. Like most other boys’ stories, it was set on the frontier, in this case the Canadian wilderness in the winter, and it didn’t have any female characters. The two “partners” of the story’s title are Tommy Watkins, “a raw English boy of 18,” and Blackbirch, a Cree Indian whom he befriends and saves from a sneering (white) bigot.
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Rockwell picked out three scenes to illustrate; his pencil-and-wash drawings show husky, muscular figures carrying a toboggan and crouched and twisted in the snow.

Rockwell quickly endeared himself to Cave.
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He was asked to assist with
The Boy Scout’s Hike Book
, a manual that would require more than a hundred pen-and-ink drawings. Moreover, Cave bestowed a title upon Rockwell—he became the magazine’s first “art editor” and was paid a decent salary of fifty dollars a month. Which is not to say that he had an office or was an employee. He went into the magazine’s offices about once a week, to handle production details and hand out assignments to other illustrators, and the rest of the time worked on his own drawings at home.
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With its striped swimming trunks and cropped legs, Rockwell’s
Boys’ Life
cover, from August 1915, strips away moldy detail in favor of modern spareness.
(Courtesy of the National Scouting Museum, Irving, Texas)

The job had its limitations. The magazine’s circulation was modest then (about sixty thousand) and not every Boy Scout automatically received a copy. You had to subscribe, which cost a dollar a year. And Rockwell’s name and title were not listed on the lofty masthead.

A scout named Gailey is ridiculed for bringing pink pajamas to camp in this 1913 illustration, which Rockwell drew for Edward Cave’s
Boy Scout Camp Book.

But it was a regular job, and for that he was grateful. In the next three years, he would produce a profusion of illustrations for
Boys’ Life
, both inside-story illustrations and an occasional cover. The inside drawings were in black and white, but the covers were in color, if that is the word for “duotone” affairs in red and black and the mixed gradations—grays, dusky pinks, and roses—they could yield. The covers usually had seasonal themes. A plump boy wolfs down a turkey drumstick (November). A bundled-up boy skates on a frozen country pond (January). And, in one starkly modern image, a pair of striped swimming trunks and male legs disappear with a visible splash into the depths of a pond (August). The
Boys’ Life
illustrations are not Rockwell’s best work; they’re the formative efforts of an artist trying to find his voice. Rockwell’s name, of course, continues to be associated with the Boy Scouts, largely because he produced one painting per year for the annual Boy Scouts calendar, which was published by Brown & Bigelow. But that started a bit later; the Boy Scouts released the first of their calendars in 1925, and Rockwell would furnish the paintings for half a century.

Rockwell was never a Boy Scout himself; the organization did not exist for most of his childhood. But he had not been a Boy Scouts type of boy anyhow. He wasn’t outdoorsy. He didn’t go camping or know how to tie esoteric knots. By his own admission, he “didn’t know a red maple from a brown bear.” He would go to the Central Park Zoo and locate models for his animal pictures when he was assigned to draw one. He had even less interest in the social side of scouting, its quasi-military regimentation, complete with uniforms and badges. Scouts had to “Be Prepared,” a slogan that suggested an imminent if nonspecific catastrophe, as well as Baden-Powell’s initials. Rockwell never became a Scout leader or got involved with activities other than promotional ones, which required showing up in large, crowded halls to give an award or to receive one.

And yet it makes sense that his first job was with the Boy Scouts, with its vision of an all-male Arcadia. From the start, he seems to have been searching for an ideal boy in his work, of conjuring an athletic boy and keeping him close. His every illustration for
Boys’ Life
started with the same basic image: a figure of a boy on a sheet of white paper. As he made adjustments to the figure—the head tilts, an arm bends—the paper became a space that the boy inhabited. In addition to creating space, a figure on a sheet of paper could conjure the plotlines of a story. And, as an illustrator, Rockwell was professionally obliged to be more concerned with the quality of his storytelling than with the quality of his space. His job was to pick scenes from short stories and make them as immediate and present as possible. There was skill in all this, and pleasure as well.

To his relief, his monthly paycheck from the Scouts allowed him to rent a studio away from the boardinghouse. He shared his first atelier, in the West Forties, off Broadway, with E. F. Ward, a future illustrator whom he had met at the League. But the boys fled in a matter of days, after realizing the building housed a brothel.
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Next they moved, easels and all, to the collegial terrain of the Brooklyn Art School, behind the arches and shimmering cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. They shared the room with other art students and pooled the cost of hiring models, until they were evicted for sweeping mounds of dust and trash down the hall, in front of the door of a well-known artist. So Rockwell moved his easel back home, or rather to the second floor of a deserted brownstone next door to Mrs. Frothingham’s boardinghouse, and acquired a small coal stove to heat the space.

But the problem was that his first illustrations for
Boys’ Life
appeared in the January 1913 number—just a month before the Armory Show opened in New York. Rockwell had the misfortune to begin his career at the precise moment that storytelling in art was about to get clobbered by a new generation of modernists.

*   *   *

At the Art Students League, he had learned that illustration was a division of art. Yet outside the cocoon of the League, the gap between fine art and illustration widened immeasurably in 1913. Almost overnight, it seemed, illustration broke off from the mainland of art and became its own island. Actually, it wasn’t just illustration but the old belief that art existed to tell stories that suddenly fell out of favor. An avant-garde invasion had arrived from Paris and students seemed to talk of little else.

The Armory Show opened on February 17, 1913, in the armory of the 69th Regiment of the National Guard, on Lexington Avenue at Twenty-fifth Street. It remained on view for only a month. The exhibition was gargantuan and, although most of the work in it was by American artists, it was the European presence that made the show so incendiary. American viewers who had failed to follow new developments in art, and who thought that modernism at its most brazen consisted of Cézanne’s blue mountains or the curling brushstrokes in van Gogh’s skies, were more than a bit taken aback by the radical abstractions of Picasso, Braque, and the rest. The new avant-garde was rendering nature and the visible world wholly unrecognizable. The defining image of the Armory Show was Marcel Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
, which caused a stir precisely because no one could locate the female nude ostensibly tucked in there somewhere, amid the welter of brown planes. You suspect the piece would have passed practically unnoticed had it been titled Composition No. 2.

Rockwell was a fervent admirer of Picasso, whom he called “the greatest of them all.” He made the comment in later life, by which time he had come to believe that abstract painting and figurative painting were not as easily divisible as critics pretended. But, in 1913, as a young illustrator just beginning his career, abstract painting did not speak to his needs. Abstraction broke the smooth surface of art, searched out depths; Rockwell, a repressed nineteen-year-old, was scared of depths. He preferred the reassuring pleasures of the unbroken surface.

Still, the Armory Show reminded him of the possibilities of painting, the largeness and radiance of it, beside which life seemed so precarious. On March 18, 1913, just as the show closed, his grandfather John W. Rockwell died suddenly at Roosevelt Hospital in New York. This was the grandfather who years earlier had bequeathed Rockwell the hand-me-down coat that he saw as emblematic of his shamed boyhood, the too-large overcoat with the moss-green velvet collar that had elicited mocking laughter from his schoolmates and which, in the end, he had burned.
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Most students at the Art Students League stayed for three years, but, according to school records, Rockwell was there for less than two.
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By the time the Armory Show closed, he was feeling restless not only with his studies but with his job at
Boys’ Life
. He longed to do more meaningful work, to reflect contemporary life, and to have his art seen by someone besides twelve-year-old Boy Scouts.

To this end, he befriended John Fleming Wilson, a popular novelist and Princeton graduate who lived in Riverside, California, and was roughly twenty years his senior. Wilson’s stories appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
, which gave him a near-heroic stature in Rockwell’s eyes. His lesser stories ran in
Boys’ Life
, and Rockwell came to know him after illustrating his story, “Waves of the Moon,” for the September 1913 issue. For this he provided a painting of a lanky Scout in a pointed felt hat, holding the steering wheel of a ship. It was his first-ever magazine cover.

He later recalled meeting Wilson on one of the writer’s many trips to New York over a breakfast of two fried eggs and a double whiskey—Wilson ordered for both of them. In coming months, Wilson urged Rockwell to shed his cloistered ways. Let me show you life, he would say, and Rockwell would laugh tensely. Their jaunts around Manhattan took Rockwell away from his studio, away from his fixed routine. But he believed something large was at stake.