more important ritual: reading aloud a chapter of Dickens. Nancy was pleased; she felt her children were getting the benefit of high (British) culture and monitory lessons about life as well. If George Horace Lorimer’s individualist politics spun out an American folklore of good and bad citizenry, then Charles Dickens might well, in this respect, have been considered his English cousin. As the media historian Benjamin Stohlberg would put it, both men, theatrical creatures that they were, believed that the “meaning of life is not hidden but wrinkled on its surface, its secrets exposed in the truthful light of daily living.”
From the first words that he heard intoned, Norman found himself mesmerized by Dickens’s stories. Waring would pull out the novel they were working on, and proceed to read aloud in his “even, colorless voice, the book laid flat before him to catch the full light of the lamp, the muffled noises of the city—the rumble of a cart, a shout—becoming the sounds of the London street, our quiet parlor Fagin’s hovel or Bill Sikes’s room with the body of Nancy bloody on the floor (I squirmed and lifted my feet to the chair rung).” The image of Nancy’s bloody body in
Oliver Twist
must have carried particular impact; after all, Nancy Rockwell frequently voiced her sense of victimization, resulting in her extended family tagging her, half ironically, as “poor Nancy.” Possibly the inadequate mothers who crowded Dickens’s stories provided an escape valve for Norman’s own deep resentments toward his mother’s insensitivity. Unaware of the pain she was inflicting, Nancy worked against his fledgling attempts at self-respect at every turn, from commenting unfavorably on his appearance to “curing” his bed-wetting by hanging the soiled sheets prominently outside their window in hopes that public humiliation would deliver her dry linen.
The evening readings commenced when Rockwell was around eight years old, an age when children begin to explore, in hopes of comprehending, the logic that governs their complicated universe. Later reminiscences imply that Rockwell believed his own little world off-course from its beginnings, largely because of the confused values that bruised family interactions. Dickens clearly celebrated community, the relatedness that came through filiation of any sort, not only familial. His world, as Rockwell’s would be, was one of romance. And it was a world in which a sense of humor had the potential to redeem what would be otherwise intolerable.
Michael Kimmelman, art critic for
The New York Times,
wrote in reference to a very different artist from Rockwell that “art, or at least art that matters, trafficks in a space between the world as it might be and the world as it is. Whether we feel better or worse about ourselves in its midst depends on the kinds of artists involved, but either way the best artists make us linger in the spaces they concoct if only because afterwards the real world comes more clearly into focus.” A similar Dickensian oxymoron—idealistic realism—gave shape to the young boy’s earliest observations of the world around him.
“I would . . . draw pictures of the different characters—Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep. They were pretty crude pictures, but I was very deeply impressed and moved by Dickens. I remember how I suffered with Little Dorritt in the Marshalsea Prison, had nightmares over Bill Sikes and Fagin, felt ennobled by Sydney Carton: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do. . . .’ The variety, sadness, horror, happiness, treachery, the twists and turns of life; the sharp impressions of dirt, food, inns, horses, streets; and people—Micawber, Pickwick, Dombey (and son), Joe Gargery—in Dickens shocked and delighted me.” Rockwell learned to draw exaggerated characters whose appearance functioned as an entire network of values. More important than the specific experiences of illustrating the figures on Dickens’s
From the first words that he heard intoned, Norman found himself mesmerized by Dickens’s stories. Waring would pull out the novel they were working on, and proceed to read aloud in his “even, colorless voice, the book laid flat before him to catch the full light of the lamp, the muffled noises of the city—the rumble of a cart, a shout—becoming the sounds of the London street, our quiet parlor Fagin’s hovel or Bill Sikes’s room with the body of Nancy bloody on the floor (I squirmed and lifted my feet to the chair rung).” The image of Nancy’s bloody body in
Oliver Twist
must have carried particular impact; after all, Nancy Rockwell frequently voiced her sense of victimization, resulting in her extended family tagging her, half ironically, as “poor Nancy.” Possibly the inadequate mothers who crowded Dickens’s stories provided an escape valve for Norman’s own deep resentments toward his mother’s insensitivity. Unaware of the pain she was inflicting, Nancy worked against his fledgling attempts at self-respect at every turn, from commenting unfavorably on his appearance to “curing” his bed-wetting by hanging the soiled sheets prominently outside their window in hopes that public humiliation would deliver her dry linen.
The evening readings commenced when Rockwell was around eight years old, an age when children begin to explore, in hopes of comprehending, the logic that governs their complicated universe. Later reminiscences imply that Rockwell believed his own little world off-course from its beginnings, largely because of the confused values that bruised family interactions. Dickens clearly celebrated community, the relatedness that came through filiation of any sort, not only familial. His world, as Rockwell’s would be, was one of romance. And it was a world in which a sense of humor had the potential to redeem what would be otherwise intolerable.
Michael Kimmelman, art critic for
The New York Times,
wrote in reference to a very different artist from Rockwell that “art, or at least art that matters, trafficks in a space between the world as it might be and the world as it is. Whether we feel better or worse about ourselves in its midst depends on the kinds of artists involved, but either way the best artists make us linger in the spaces they concoct if only because afterwards the real world comes more clearly into focus.” A similar Dickensian oxymoron—idealistic realism—gave shape to the young boy’s earliest observations of the world around him.
“I would . . . draw pictures of the different characters—Mr. Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Uriah Heep. They were pretty crude pictures, but I was very deeply impressed and moved by Dickens. I remember how I suffered with Little Dorritt in the Marshalsea Prison, had nightmares over Bill Sikes and Fagin, felt ennobled by Sydney Carton: ‘It is a far, far better thing that I do. . . .’ The variety, sadness, horror, happiness, treachery, the twists and turns of life; the sharp impressions of dirt, food, inns, horses, streets; and people—Micawber, Pickwick, Dombey (and son), Joe Gargery—in Dickens shocked and delighted me.” Rockwell learned to draw exaggerated characters whose appearance functioned as an entire network of values. More important than the specific experiences of illustrating the figures on Dickens’s
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