Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Norman Rockwell’s New England
Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
The view from Rockwell's bedroom at his home in Arlington, Vt. The house is now an inn.
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
The New York Times: November 1, 2013 Comment
I had driven for three and a half hours from New York so that I could go for a walk. And here I was at last, strolling along River Road in Arlington, Vt. The quiet, unpaved street winds along the banks of the Batten Kill, which is said to be the best trout stream in Vermont. In the distance, the green hills were ablaze with red and orange and offered what seemed like a quintessential New England view.
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"Freedom From Want" illustration, owned by SEPS. Licensed by Curtis Licensing. All Rights Reserved.
Rockwell painted "Freedom From Want" during his time in Vermont.
Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
A view of Arlington and the surrounding hills.
Norman Rockwell Family Agency. All rights reserved.
Rockwell relaxes in his Arlington home, circa 1940s.
Caleb Kenna for The New York Times
Rockwell's bedroom, now part of the Inn on the Covered Bridge Green in Arlington.
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Norman Rockwell, who bought a house on this road in 1938, was not what you would call a lover of autumn foliage. His instincts as an artist were firmly figural, and he declined to paint a landscape in the 15 years in which he lived in Vermont. A native New Yorker who was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and began his career in the suburb of New Rochelle, N.Y., he did not farm or garden. Other Vermonters kept stables, but Rockwell, by his own admission, harbored a trembling fear of horses.
When he moved to Arlington, he was in his mid-40s, a celebrated magazine illustrator who was looking to deepen his art. He had painted his share of amusing covers, of freckled schoolboys and their mutts, and he hoped to tap into some truer, more expressive vein of American life. What drew him to New England was not so much the picket-fence tranquillity as the larger idea of it, the reassuring we-the-people symbolism. New England was the birthplace of American democracy, and Rockwell, as it turned out, would update the communitarian ideals articulated by our country’s founders.
It was here in Vermont, during World War II, that Rockwell painted his much-heralded “Four Freedoms.” Although based on lofty civic principles — freedom to speak and to worship, freedom from fear and from want — the series does not feel didactic. The four paintings have nothing to do with patriots on horseback and the fiery battle for independence. Rather, they portray the civic and familial rituals that connect random people in a town. Using his Vermont neighbors as models, Rockwell posed them in emblematic scenes: attending a town-hall meeting, saying prayers, socializing around a Thanksgiving table, and peeking in on sleeping children.
Other artists have given us other New Englands. It’s remarkable how many competing portraits of America emerged from this corner of the country in the first half of the 20th century. Grandma Moses, for one, was a friend of Rockwell’s who lived on a farm just across the Vermont-New York border. Grandma, as the whole country once called her, was nothing if not a late bloomer. She took up painting at the age of 76. Working at her bedroom desk, she churned out cheerful views of farm life, nostalgic scenes of snow-covered farmhouses, split-rail fences and horses trotting along dirt roads. She offers a view of New England as a green Arcadia where no one ever comes down with a cold.
Robert Frost was not quite so peppy. He moved to this part of Vermont in the ’20s. His stone house in South Shaftsbury, just a few miles from Rockwell’s, is open to the public. The snowy woods, the roads that diverged, the “nothing gold can stay” sense of loss and dissipation: nature provided him with his great subject. He seized on it to create a portrait of Americans as resourceful but emotionally reserved and fond of putting up fences.
Today, Rockwell is associated less with Vermont than with Stockbridge, Mass., the town in the Berkshires where he settled in his later years. Stockbridge was the last place he lived, and it is the home of the Norman Rockwell Museum, which houses the bulk of his artwork and personal papers. In the course of the past decade, I spent many days there. I was writing a biography of Rockwell and contentedly sifting through his letters, datebooks and mounds of bills. Compared with most other artists, he left a very long paper trail.
I hadn’t spent much time in Vermont, but it offered biographical rewards of its own. Namely, here one can sleep in the Rockwell bedroom.
By a nice coincidence, Rockwell’s home in Arlington (the second house he owned there) is now a bed-and-breakfast offering clean, adequate accommodations. The Inn on the Covered Bridge Green, as it is named, is a few miles from Main Street, in a large, white-painted Colonial house that dates to the 18th century. As country inns go, it is fairly spartan — there is no front desk and no one ever answered the phone when I called. You reserve your room on the inn’s Web site.
What the place lacks in traditional amenities it more than makes up for in creaky ambience and romance. On the weekend I visited, another guest had already claimed the best room: Rockwell’s former studio, a freestanding building in the yard. So my husband and I reserved a room in the house. Although no effort has been made to restore the architecture or decorative elements to their precise appearance in the years when Rockwell lived there, the guest rooms — with their floral wallpaper and hardwood floors, their four-poster beds and quilts — evoke the vanished past. It helped that my husband and I were the only ones in the house that weekend and eager to feel haunted. In the upstairs hallway, the doors to the other rooms remained closed. The middle-age couple who own the place live in another house on the property.
Biography, as the British writer Richard Holmes observed, “is an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past.” It can also be an act of literal trespass. Or so it seemed when I woke in the middle of the night and got out of bed. I was in Rockwell’s former bedroom, gazing through the same window that he had gazed from. Outside, the village green, with its white steepled church and red-painted covered bridge, gleamed in the moonlight.
What did this view tell me? Nothing vastly useful. Nothing I could put in a book or trumpet as a revelation. It is a commonplace of biography that the everyday events in artists’ lives shape their work. But in Rockwell’s case it was the opposite. Life was the stuff he left out of his art. To see his actual surroundings is to be reminded of their very exclusion from his paintings. He did not paint the covered bridge; he did not paint the village green. No, in his work he gave over to an imaginative vision whose sources remain largely hidden. It encompassed many factors, from his powerful love of Rembrandt and Dutch realism to an extreme sense of his own inadequacy. In his skinny, unathletic boyhood, he had felt perpetually vanquished, “a bean pole without the beans,” as he put it.
Heading downstairs to the living room, I sat down and opened a novel. The room was lovely, aglow with yellow lamplight, hushed except for the intermittent whoosh of a car. It was easy enough to imagine Rockwell sitting here, an anxious, rail-thin man in his blue chambray shirt, lighting his pipe and relighting it, brooding on the day’s work. In general, he woke up early and liked the morning hours, rushing out to his studio by 8 and drinking a bottle of Coke for a caffeine jolt. He often noted that the sense of possibility he felt on most mornings was overtaken by regret by the evening. So many days ended the same way. He would sit in the living room, fussing with his pipe, lamenting that he did not “get anywhere with the picture,” as he said.
In truth, his years in Vermont scarcely resembled the vision of community and gladness he had created in his work. In his letters from this period, he complained of terrible isolation, especially after the summer people cleared out and returned to their homes in the city. Writing to his friend Clyde Forsythe in 1944, shortly after his 50th birthday, Rockwell opined: “It’s been lonesome up here. Next winter tho I swear we’re going to New York. I miss having someone to help with criticisms and encouragement.”
His wife, Mary, the mother of their three sons, had troubles of her own. An elegant, bookish woman from Southern California, she had studied at Stanford and aspired to write short stories and poetry. She had a difficult time in Vermont, in part because her husband spent so much time away. Even when he was home, he was not necessarily available, there but not there, disappearing into the studio for what seemed like days at a time, the door shut. Over the years she fell increasingly into depression and alcoholism, and was sent off to hospitals for treatment.
In some ways, Arlington seems to have changed little in the six decades since Rockwell and his family lived here. According to the town clerk, there are now 2,317 residents, about 500 (registered) dogs, and not one traffic light. There’s not much to do at night. Early risers, on the other hand, have options. The Wayside Country Store, an old-fashioned all-purpose emporium, starts serving breakfast at 4 a.m. A sign in the window proclaims, “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.” This is not to imply you need everything the store stocks, which, I noted, includes ammunition and maple-flavored lip balm.
There is at least one great restaurant in town, Jonathon’s Table, which offers classic country fare while banishing all blandness. Our heavily tattooed waitress suggested an appetizer that was practically a meal in itself, Mama’s mushrooms, which came doused in garlic and olive oil and accompanied by an oval loaf of hot bread. The décor is unpretentious but jazzed up by strings of white Christmas lights. There are no tablecloths, and the blocky oak tables are wide and deep.
To visit Arlington is to feel the need to venture beyond it. The towns around it have different personalities. If you drive 20 minutes to the north, to Manchester Center, suddenly you’re in the midst of shop-around-the-clock consumerism, of noniron dress shirts and slim-ankle pants, of cashmere sweaters knit in Scotland. Manchester abounds with factory outlet stores — Brooks Brothers, Ann Taylor and all the rest, most of which occupy prim clapboard houses that riff on the historic architecture of New England. At the Orvis store, I bought a white linen blouse, a bit guiltily, wondering whether it was morally defensible to spend a shining fall afternoon in Vermont patronizing stores you can find elsewhere.
Put another way, outlet shopping appears to be the leading recreational activity here in the heart of the rugged Green Mountains, overshadowing such classic diversions as fly-fishing. Is this a loss? Surely there is something to be said for staring at the surface of a river for hours on end and waiting for a sign of trout, for the first splosh and glint. I vowed to myself to rent a canoe sometime before the end of the millennium.
On the other hand, Main Street in Manchester is home to a superb independent bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore, which occupies a light-blue Victorian house and encourages sojourns of the armchair variety. A cafe on the premises serves dark-roast coffee and homemade carrot cake, and you can sit undisturbed until closing time. “This was Starbucks before Starbucks,” Charles Bottomley, one of the booksellers, told me.
If you want to see art in southern Vermont, go to Bennington, the college town, about 20 minutes south of Arlington. The Bennington Museum is a one-of-a-kind institution that spurns the fashion for globalism in favor of regional artists, both living and long-dead. The place is impressively ecumenical. While the permanent collection pays reverent tribute to Grandma Moses — the premises include the actual one-room schoolhouse of her childhood — it also champions the color-field painting of the ’60s. In one enchanting gallery, an early Helen Frankenthaler composition is juxtaposed with the curvy abstractions of Paul Feeley, her teacher at Bennington College.
There were no Rockwells on view at the museum, at least none by Norman. But his artistic progeny are well represented, and it is interesting to note the degree to which their work turns his utopian paradise on its head. In the lobby of the museum, I stared with fascination at a small-scale tableau by 83-year-old Jarvis Rockwell. The untitled piece can put you in mind of a wooden dollhouse in which the relationships among the dolls has gone awry. Two couples, one older, one younger, sit around a dining-room table stark naked. They’re staring at an orange orb that may or may not offer spiritual solace.
Jarvis Rockwell’s daughter, Daisy Rockwell, was having her own show at the museum. “Topless Jihadi and Other Curious Birds,” as it is titled, consists of small, lushly colored paintings that traffic in political subjects, including terrorism. She uses a palette of candied pinks and turquoises to extract a dissonant prettiness from mug shots of female prisoners and victims of all sorts.
Truth be told, there was one nature-related activity that Rockwell enjoyed during his Vermont years. He liked to go for walks in the hills that rose steeply behind his house. He would climb through the apple orchards and then disappear into the woods, often trailed by his beloved dog, Butch, a springer spaniel.
I was eager to retrace the path. On a Sunday morning, I woke early and headed out into the yard. A thick morning mist hovered on the ground and made the fields appear a little blurred, as if visible only in soft focus.
The yard was not what I had expected. Where were the fabled apple orchards? Instead I found a pasture and a pen for animals. Two tall llamas, one brown and one white, stood chomping on a bale of hay and glanced up in unison when I approached. I paused for a few moments to make sure they weren’t about to do that llama thing of spitting. Then I started to climb over the fence to proceed up the hill when, suddenly, I was stopped by a literal shock. An uncomfortable jolt shot through my left arm. The fence, I realized belatedly, was electrified. Odd that there had been no Do Not Touch sign. Doubtless the fence was there to keep the llamas in, as opposed to keeping the inn guests out. Nonetheless, it was all a little surprising, not least because the incident seemed so uncannily like something from a Frost poem. He had written much about fences and barriers, about structures that divide.
I thought of his poem “Mending Wall,” in which the speaker recounts his impatience with his next-door neighbor, who each spring mends the stone wall separating their properties. The neighbor insists, “Good fences make good neighbors,” which, frankly, is not the most inspiring proverb. Certainly there are more important things to endorse in this world than distance and standoffishness.
But the wall-building neighbor represents another New England, not the caring and concerned Rockwellian society where people gain strength from their neighbors and look each other in the eye when they talk. No, this was the Frost version, in which townspeople went out of their way to put up barriers, where neighbors electrify fences. I suppose the Frost version is closer to everyday life in America than the idealized Rockwell version. But then “art is no less real for being artifice,” as the critic Clive James once observed, and Rockwell clearly dwelled in the kingdom of his imagination.
In October of 1953, Rockwell and his wife abruptly left Vermont. They moved to western Massachusetts, to Stockbridge. It, too, seemed on the surface like a perfect New England town, with tranquil pastures and grazing cows. What few people realized is that Rockwell moved to Stockbridge to live near the Austen Riggs Center psychiatric hospital. His wife already was an inpatient there, and he was an outpatient. In his final months in Vermont, he had begun seeing the legendary psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, a German-born intellectual who coined the phrase “identity crisis.”
In the ’50s, Rockwell continued to paint pictures of a mythic New England, where contentment and community ties prevailed. But the national unity bred by World War II was already unraveling. The growing inclination among Americans was to define their battles in psychological terms rather than in political ones.
Over the years, their searching gave rise to yet another image of New England, one that had little in common with that of Rockwell, Frost or Grandma Moses. Rather, in James Taylor’s telling, New England was a place where people had nervous breakdowns and openly bemoaned their sorrows. He sang of it in 1970 when he described “the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston,” “covered with snow,” with 10 miles behind him and 10,000 more to go.
IF YOU GO
All these places are in Vermont.
Robert Frost Stone House Museum, 121 Historic Route 7A, South Shaftsbury; (802) 447 6200; frostfriends.org. Frost resided here in the 1920s and wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” at the dining room table. The museum is closed until May 1, but the grounds are open for walking, at no charge, and offer the chance to see such spartan Frostian sights as fields, birch trees and a stone wall.
Inn on the Covered Bridge Green, 3587 River Road, Arlington; (802) 375-9784;coveredbridgegreen.com; Norman Rockwell lived in this house from 1943 to the fall of 1953. Inn rooms are $185 to $225, depending on date. The artist’s studio, which easily sleeps four, is $280. Rates include a hot breakfast.
Jonathon’s Table, 29 Sugar Shack Lane, Arlington; (802) 375-1021;jonathonstable.com; dinner only.The entree selection is broad and unpretentious, ranging from Vermont maple pork chops and eggplant Parmesan to roast prime rib au jus. Expect to pay about $30 per person for dinner, without drinks.
Sugar Shack, Sugar Shack Lane, Arlington; (802) 375-6747; sugarshackvt.com. A deluxe country gift shop with a large assortment of Vermont goodies and memorabilia, from fresh-picked apples to gallon-size jugs of maple syrup to Rockwell-theme postcards and mugs.
The Wayside Country Store, 3307 Vermont Route 313 West, Arlington; (802) 375-2792. This quaint general store has been in business for more than a century and sells everything from sweatshirts and ammunition to egg sandwiches and homebaked cookies. Its motto is: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
Northshire Bookstore, 4869 Main Street, Manchester Center; (802) 362-2200;northshire.com. This rambling, well-stocked bookstore offers both new and used books and peerless opportunities for browsing. Chairs and stools throughout, and a comfortable couch beckons from the science-fiction section.
The Bennington Museum, 75 Main Street, Bennington; (802) 447-1571;benningtonmuseum.org. Interesting, one-of-a-kind mix of advanced contemporary art, Grandma Moses farm scenes and 18th-century American furniture. Current exhibitions include “Topless Jihadi and Other Curious Birds: Works by Daisy Rockwell,” through Dec. 30.
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