Free Norman Rockwell by Laura Claridge

of the inevitably upcurved lips. Impossibly, the heavily hooded eyes stare forth boldly and tentatively at the same time. Rarely does their emotion match the implication of the smiling mouth. Pleasant though wary, provocative if emotionally removed, happy but sad: these are the paradoxes that defined the man as well as the boy. Apparently, the personality they reflect was laid down early and irrevocably.
    The tension that even the toddler wears on his face seems part of what would prove his mother’s mixed legacy. By default as much as design, Nancy Hill yoked her sons to stereotypes: Jerry represented the masculine ideal in the household, and Norman the effete nobleman. Somewhat reminiscent of British primogeniture, where the firstborn son inherits the manor, Jerry, named after his father, was to be successful in business, and a “real man” besides; Norman, tasked by his names to represent the royal as well as the feminine side of the family tree, would develop his artistic talents. Accordingly, Nancy projected the appropriate behavior onto each son: she encouraged Jerry to be aggressive, strong, and fearless, while she reassured Norman that he was weak, like she was, and therefore probably entitled to protection as a result—though she quickly turned the equation around so that he was meant to succor her.
    Through the names she bestowed on her sons at birth, Nancy hinted at the duality she would use to guide their development. Rockwell ruminated aloud that “My mother, an Anglophile . . . and very proud of her English ancestry, named me after Sir Norman Perceval (‘Remember, Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘it’s spelled with an e; i and a are common’). . . . The line from Sir Norman to me is tortuous but unbroken, and my mother insisted that I always sign my name Norman Percevel Rockwell. ‘Norman Percevel,’ she’d say, ‘you have a valiant heritage. Never allow anyone to intimidate you or make you feel the least bit inferior. There has never been a tradesman in your family. You are descended from artists and gentlemen.’ ”
    The strained stories about their royal heritage that Nancy repeated to Lord Perceval’s New York namesake (she seems to have been quite mistaken about the spelling of the name) sounded dubious to Rockwell even when he was young, contributing to a lifelong gentle scorn toward his mother. He felt diminished, not elevated, by bearing so patently inappropriate a name as this sign of his mother’s misplaced pride, and he “darn near died” when a boy called him “Mercy Percy” in his youth. It was Jerry, named after one of the family’s true Yankee aristocrats, Jarvis Waring, who got handed the real identity, as far as the younger son could see. Somewhat gratifying to the competitive older child, such classification encouraged Rockwell to believe from an early age that his own masculinity was never the given that his brother’s was—“I had the queer notion that Percevel (and especially the form Percy) was a sissy name, almost effeminate”—and he lived “in terror” of being ridiculed because of it. His idea was not queer; it was an accurate reflection of his times. At this point in American culture, media use of the name Percevel functioned as a kind of shorthand for pretentious, effete old-worldisms. The crusty H. L. Mencken even warned parents that giving their sons such a “sissy” name was tantamount to ensuring a childhood of playground fights for Percevel to defend his masculine honor. Rockwell would always feel himself falling short of the model American male, and having to stave off the identity attached to
Percevel,
a part of his name until he left home, contributed to his insecurity.
    Oddly, in light of such perceptions and his relatives’ own observations to the contrary, Norman (as well as Jerry) confusedly believed that he had been the favorite son, a complicated assessment buttressed by Nancy’s unfortunate edicts to her friends that “Norman and I are