and language (as opposed to institutional art and language) always cite the exception, and it was Norman Rockwell’s great gift to see that life in twentieth-century America, though far from perfect, has been exceptional in the extreme. This is what he celebrates and insists upon: that “normal” life, in this country, is not normal at all—that we all exist in a general state of social and physical equanimity that is unparalleled in the history of humans. (Why else would we alert the media every time we feel a little bit blue?) Yet, we apparently spend so many days and hours in this state of attentive painlessness that we now consider it normal—when, in fact, normal for human creatures is, and always has been a condition of inarticulate, hopeless, never-ending pain, patriarchal oppression, boredom, and violence—while all our vocal anguish is necessarily grounded in an ongoing bodily equanimity, a physical certainty that we are safe enough and strong enough to be as articulately unpleasant as we wish to be.
Most artists understand this, I think, and consequently, most of the artists I have known actually like Norman Rockwell and understand what he is doing. De Kooning loved Rockwell’s pictures and admired his paint-handling. Warhol reverently stole from him, extending the franchise of Rockwell’s face-to-face domestic set-ups by copping them for paintings and Factory films. My pal Jeffrey Vallance actually lent me the Rockwell book I am looking at now. The people who hate Rockwell, however—the preachers, professors, social critics, and radical sectarians—inevitably mistake the artist’s profession for their own. They accuse him of imposing norms and passing judgments, which he never does. Nor could he ever, since far from being a fascist manipulator, Rockwell is always giving as much as he can to the world he sees. He portrays those aspects of the embodied social world that exist within the realm of civility, that do not hurt too terribly. But it is not utopia.
People are regularly out of sync with the world in Rockwell’s pictures, but it is not the end of the world. People get sick and go to the doctor. (Remember that!) Little girls get into fights. Puppies are lost, and jobs too. People struggle with their taxes. Salesmen languish in hotel rooms. Prom dresses don’t fit. Tires go flat. Hearts are broken. People gossip. Mom and Dad argue about politics. Traffic snarls, and bankers are confused by Jackson Pollock. But the pictures always rhyme—and the faces rhyme and the bodies rhyme as well, in compositions so exquisitely tuned they seem to have always been there—as a good song seems to have been written forever. The implication, of course, is that these domestic disasters are redeemed by the internal rhymes of civil society and signify the privilege of living in it, which they most certainly do.
You are not supposed to forget this, or forget the pictures either, which you do not. I can remember three Post covers from my childhood well enough to tell you exactly what they meant to me at the time. One is a painting of a grandmother and her grandson saying grace in a bus-station restaurant while a crowd of secular travelers look on. The second depicts an American Dad, in his pajamas, sitting in a modern chair in a suburban living room on a snowy Sunday morning. He is smoking a cigarette and reading the Sunday Times while Mom and the kids, dressed up in their Sunday best, march sternly across the room behind him on their way to church. The third depicts a couple of college co-eds changing a tire on their “woody” while a hillbilly, relaxing on the porch of his shack, watches them with bemused interest. The moral of these pictures: Hey! People are different. Get used to it.
So let me insist that however strenuously ideologues strive to “normalize” popular art, popular artists like Rockwell do not create normality. Governments, religions, and network statisticians create normality, articulate it, and try to impose it. Artists like Rockwell celebrate ordinary equanimity for the eccentric gift that it is—no less than the bodily condition of social justice in a society informed by forgiving rhyme and illuminated by the occasional shining hour. Because if social justice is a statistical norm, everybody at that jam session fell short of it—Magda, Butch, Ron, Julius, Mary, Diego, Dad, myself, all of us. Nor did we believe in statistical norms. We believed that social justice resides in the privilege of gathering about whatever hearth gives warmth, of living in a society where everyone, at least once, might see themselves in a Norman Rockwell, might feel themselves rhyming with Johnny Mercer as he sings:
This will be my shining hour,
Calm and happy and bright,
In my dreams your face will flower,
Through the darkness of the night,
Like the lights of home before me,
Or an angel watching o’er me,
This will be my shining hour,
Till I’m with you again.
PONTORMO'S RAINBOW
This could never happen today, so you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that I made it all the way into sixth grade before a bunch of people whom I did not know, who weren’t my family and weren’t the government, tried to deprive me of something I really wanted—for my own good. Up until that time, my parents had routinely deprived me of things I wanted, but they always deprived me for their own good, not mine (“No, you can’t go out. I’m too tired to worry about what you’re doing while you’re out there.”), and this tactic was annoying enough. For years, I attributed it to my folks’ bohemian narcissism. Now I suspect they were shrewder than I thought, because, finally, since my parents were always more concerned with my thoughtfulness than with my goodness, I grew up well assured that I could decide what was good for me—and maybe get it—if I could get away with it.
So I was shocked by my first encounter with communitarian righteousness—all the more shocked because, at that point in the life of our family, things were really looking up. We had just escaped air-conditioned custody in this lily-white, cookie-cutter suburb of North Dallas and moved to Santa Monica, to a house right under the Palisades, between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. The house was the quintessence of coolness. There was a big deck on the second floor where we could sit and gaze off across the Pacific toward China. There was a white brick wall around the house, low in front and high in back, covered with bougainvillea. There were hydrangea bushes and hardy hibiscus in the front yard, honeysuckles along the side wall where a small yard ran, a mimosa tree in the front and a wisteria in the back—and, because of the wall and the breeze off the ocean, we could crank the windows open and let the house fill up with colored light, cool air, and the smell of flowers.
Died and gone to heaven. That’s the only way to describe it. After creepy, prissy Dallas, the escalation of sensory and social information was so overwhelming that I would lie in bed at night, in the sweet darkness, listening to the trucks rumbling on the PCH and the murmur of the surf on the sand, and literally giggle! There was just so much, and it was all so cool! I had black friends at school, like my dad’s jazz buddies. I got to be the only gentile in this kooky B’nai B’rith Boy Scout troop down in Venice (Reformed). Whenever I wanted, I could just walk out the glass front door with my dog, Darwin the Beagle, and slog through the sand down to the ocean. Or we could turn left and stroll down to the Santa Monica Pier where there was a dark pool hall with surfer criminals in residence. Or we could wander past the pier to Muscle Beach where multitudes of semi-naked women loved to pet Herr Darwin.
About once a month, on Sunday afternoon, we would pile in the car and tool down to Hermosa or Redondo to listen to jazz music, and every Saturday morning my brother and sister and I would climb the concrete stairs up the Palisades (or scramble up, commando style, through the ice plant), and make our way over to the Criterion for the Kiddie Cartoon Carnival. There we would sit for three hours, happy as clams, communing with Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry, just fucking blown away; and this, it turned out, is what the three ladies wanted to talk to us about. They showed up at Santa Monica Elementary about four months after we got there and set up shop in the lunch room. There was a crackly announcement on the speaker in home room that said if we wanted to talk to them, we would be excused from class to do it. So, naturellement, everybody
