Blog

Jun 28, 2023

We Are What We Hide

By Lee Siegel Deborah Solomon’s “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman

By Lee Siegel

Deborah Solomon's "American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell" is a masterpiece of the biographer's art, not least because of Solomon's highly developed capacity to enter into an alien experience or personality without passing judgment. Rockwell seems surpassingly strange: a depressed, enervated man, a repressed homosexual, whose pictures of happy, vital, heterosexual people became icons of an ideal American life. As Solomon puts it:

Rockwell, a repressed man who feared dirt and mud, a neat freak who washed his brushes with Ivory soap and polished his shoes on fishing trips, created a vision of human connectedness that dovetailed with the American fantasy of civic togetherness …

In the hands of a different biographer, the chasm between Rockwell and his creations would be the occasion for a derisive unmasking of both the man and his idealizations. But Solomon doesn't mock or scold, or wonder too much at the discrepancy. This is gratifying, because the gulf between who Rockwell was and what he made characterizes a common condition of artistic creation.

Consider all those boy/girl love songs written by gay men: Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, Robert Wright, Chet Forrest, Jerry Herman, Stephen Sondheim. At the same time, several generations of straight boys and young men were modelling their masculinity on the screen images of Marlon Brando, Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Tab Hunter, Randolph Scott—all of them either gay or bisexual.

You might call this condition of artistic creation the law of opposites, which can be a displacement of identity, as in the case of the gay composers and actors of yesteryear, or a transmutation of identity. When Irving Berlin, the son of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants, wrote "White Christmas," he was both hiding his Jewishness and fulfilling his ambition to be not just accepted by his new country but socially ascendant in it. The same went for the Jewish director George Cukor's fashioning of the perfect Wasp, in "Philadelphia Story"; for the fabrication of Wasp archetypes in the Jewish screenwriter Sidney Buchman's "Holiday"; and for countless similar films created by Jewish writers and filmmakers. Indeed, as the unhappy Rockwell was producing one happy American scene after another, the rapacious Jewish moguls of Hollywood—Mayer, Goldwyn, Warner, Selznick, Thalberg—were manufacturing images of an America that was decent, selfless, and driven by the pursuit of love, not lust.

The law of opposites in artistic creation has many variations. Edmund Wilson wrote a famous book called "The Wound and the Bow," in which he explored the way artists react against a personal weakness and turn it into a creative blessing. The book's title refers to the legendary Greek archer Philoctetes, who was afflicted with a festering, malodorous wound that would not heal, yet whose prowess with his bow was crucial in the Greek victory at Troy. For Wilson, the myth demonstrated the idea of, as he wrote, "superior strength as inseparable from disability." You think of D. H. Lawrence, the fiery apostle of liberated sexuality, who was plagued by sexual impotence. Or the reckless adventurer and seducer Lord Byron, born with a club foot. Or the deaf Beethoven, or the blind Goya; or, to shift to another realm, Mike Tyson, bullied as a kid, or Mark Spitz and Jackie Joyner-Kersee, champion athletes afflicted with asthma.

Of course, the law of opposites doesn't always spring from a disability. The gay composers and gay actors, as well as the Jews of Hollywood, developed superior talents in response to external barriers: they were unable to thrive socially or professionally as themselves. In much the same way, the black jazz musicians who transformed popular songs—many created by gay songwriters; mask behind mask—into their own idiom were, among other things, responding to the segregations of the time.

In these instances, one of Wilson's less well-known formulations in "The Wound and the Bow" is more relevant. Describing how the Hemingway hero draws his bravery and dignity out of a self shattered by war and injured by personal failures, Wilson makes an analogy to something he describes as "the principle of the Bourdon gauge, which is used to measure the pressure of liquids," the principle being that "a tube which has been curved into a coil will tend to straighten out in proportion as the liquid inside it is subjected to an increasing pressure." The pressure of a social prohibition or a social barrier can be as strengthening as the pressure of a mental or physical wound.

The countertendency that is created by a psychic or physical injury has been clinicalized and banalized along with countless other mysterious human qualities. We sum it up and dismiss it in some of its forms as "projection" or "compensation." The psychologist Alfred Adler based his therapeutic world view on what he called "organ inferiority," the tendency to compensate for a weak organ—an asthmatic lung, for example—by developing an opposite strength. Such compensations, he believed, spring from mental injuries, too, and can have both good and bad effects. (During a public lecture, a student asked Adler what made him decide to be a psychologist.) You can see the dual effects of trauma in J. D. Salinger's work: his painful experiences of war yielded both fragile, ethereal characters, like the Glass family, and the cynical, alienated, and alienating Holden Caulfield—himself the product of the trauma of his older brother's death.

Maybe because the law of opposites has been psychologized so thoroughly, we usually associate people's countertendencies with something negative, with bad faith or hypocrisy. But the law of opposites is too rich, too weird, too universal to be classified and dismissed as a character defect. Perhaps the American writer who most successfully explored this fathomless condition is Philip Roth. His novel "The Counterlife" is a veritable atlas of lives lived under the pressure of opposing tendencies.

Roth, in fact, constantly investigated the hidden counterpoint to the unordinary, undomesticated life he has lived. In "The Anatomy Lesson," Nathan Zuckerman returns to his alma mater, the University of Chicago, to attend medical school. In "The Counterlife," Zuckerman's brother Henry, a nice Jewish dentist with a wife and kids, provides the occasion for an extended picaresque meditation on the rigors and salvations of art and on the sanity and futility of ordinary life. The typical-seeming existence of the family-man Seymour (Swede) Levov, in "American Pastoral," is tenderly evoked and then torn apart by Roth with heartbroken defiance. In "Sabbath's Theater," the Jewish mother of the dissolute puppeteer Mickey Sabbath advises the nihilistic satyr to kill himself; she is at once a gleeful travesty of the proverbial Jewish mother and a wry acknowledgment of the author's own failure to fulfill her dull and decent expectations.

Roth is a direct descendant of Flaubert and Mann, both of whom had a complex, contrapuntal relationship to ordinary life. Flaubert, who frequented just about every brothel in Cairo, and who obliterated bourgeois mores in "Madame Bovary" and "Bouvard et Pecuchet," was out for a walk one day when he passed a modest house with a white-picket fence and a mother and father and their two children playing in the yard. He stopped in his tracks. "They are in the truth!" he cried longingly, in an eruption of his countertendency. The anecdote was a favorite of Mann, whose artist-hero Tonio Kroeger's almost comical attempts to become "normal" end in an affirmation of everyday life which is also absurdly sentimental. Behind the author of "Death in Venice" was a conventional family man; and behind Mann's "Buddenbrooks," the great novel of the German bourgeoisie, was the artist who existed beyond the boundaries of conventional morality, treating his children icily and enjoying the love of men and women.

The miserable, repressed, cheerily idealizing Norman Rockwell is not so strange, after all. Rather, the law of opposites is a universal condition. The psyche is a clock with at least four hands that move in different directions simultaneously. We live amid the riot of our own secret counterpoints, some of which complete and fulfill our human promise, some of which betray it. As Malraux, the Resistance hero, adventurer, diplomat, and novelist, who is said to have suffered from Tourette's syndrome, once wrote: "Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides."

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis