by Olivia Laing
Outside the window, people threw dinner parties. The man upstairs listened to jazz and show tunes at full blast, and filled the hallways with pot smoke, snaking fragrantly down the stairs. Sometimes I spoke to the waiter in my morning café, and once he gave me a poem, typed neatly on thick white paper. But mostly I didn’t speak. Mostly I was walled up inside myself, and certainly a very long way from anyone else. I didn’t cry often, but once I couldn’t get the blinds closed and then I did. It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop’s glare.
I knew what I looked like. I looked like a woman in a Hopper painting. The girl in Automat, maybe, in a cloche hat and green coat, gazing into a cup of coffee, the window behind her reflecting two rows of lights, swimming into blackness. Or the one in Morning Sun, who sits on her bed, hair twisted into a messy bun, gazing through her window at the city beyond. A pretty morning, light washing the walls, but nonetheless something desolate about her eyes and jaw, her slim wrists crossed over her legs. I often sat just like that, adrift in rumpled sheets, trying not to feel, trying simply to take consecutive breaths.
The one I found most disturbing was Hotel Window. Looking at it was like gazing into a fortune teller’s mirror, through which you glimpse the future, its spoiled contours, its deficit of promise. This woman is older, tense and unapproachable, sitting on a navy couch in an empty drawing room or lobby. She’s dressed to go out, in a smart ruby-coloured hat and cape, and is twisting to look down into the darkening street below, though there’s nothing out there save a gleaming portico and the stubborn black window of the building opposite.
Asked about the origins of this painting, Hopper once said in his evasive way: ‘It’s nothing accurate at all, just an improvisation of things I’ve seen. It’s no particular hotel lobby, but many times I’ve walked through the Thirties from Broadway to Fifth Avenue and there are a lot of cheesy hotels there. That probably suggested it. Lonely? Yes, I guess it’s lonelier than I planned it really.’
What is it about Hopper? Every once in a while an artist comes along who articulates an experience, not necessarily consciously or willingly, but with such prescience and intensity that the association becomes indelible. He never much liked the idea that his paintings could be pinned down, or that loneliness was his metier, his central theme. ‘The loneliness thing is overdone,’ he once told his friend Brian O’Doherty, in one of the very few long interviews to which he submitted. And again, in the documentary Hopper’s Silence, when O’Doherty asks: ‘Are your paintings reflective of the isolation of modern life?’ A pause, then Hopper says tersely: ‘It may be true. It may not be true.’ Later, asked what draws him to the dark scenes he favours, he replies opaquely: ‘I suppose it’s just me.’
Why, then, do we persist in ascribing loneliness to his work? The obvious answer is that his paintings tend to be populated by people alone, or in uneasy, uncommunicative groupings of twos and threes, fastened into poses that seem indicative of distress. But there’s something else too; something about the way he contrives his city streets. As the Whitney curator Carter Foster observes in Hopper’s Drawings, Hopper routinely reproduces in his paintings ‘certain kinds of spaces and spatial experiences common in New York that result from being physically close to others but separated from them by a variety of factors, including movement, structures, windows, walls and light or darkness’. This viewpoint is often described as voyeuristic, but what Hopper’s urban scenes also replicate is one of the central experiences of being lonely: the way a feeling of separation, of being walled off or penned in, combines with a sense of near-unbearable exposure.
This tension is present in even the most benign of his New York paintings, the ones that testify to a more pleasurable, more equanimous kind of solitude. Morning in a City, say, in which a naked woman stands at a window, holding just a towel, relaxed and at ease with herself, her body composed of lovely flecks of lavender and rose and pale green. The mood is peaceful, and yet the faintest tremor of unease is discernible at the far left of the painting, where the open casement gives way to the buildings beyond, lit by the flannel-pink of a morning sky. In the tenement opposite there are three more windows, their green blinds half-drawn, their interiors rough squares of total black. If windows are to be thought analogous to eyes, as both etymology, wind-eye, and function suggests, then there exists around this blockage, this plug of paint, an uncertainty about being seen – looked over, maybe; but maybe also overlooked, as in ignored, unseen, unregarded, undesired.
In the sinister Night Windows, these worries bloom into acute disquiet. The painting centres on the upper portion of a building, with three apertures, three slits, giving into a lighted chamber. At the first window a curtain billows outward, and in the second a woman in a pinkish slip bends over a green carpet, her haunches taut. In the third, a lamp is glowing through a layer of fabric, though what it actually looks like is a wall of flames.
There’s something odd, too, about the vantage point. It’s clearly from above – we see the floor, not the ceiling – but the windows are on at least the second storey, making it seem as if whoever’s doing the looking is hanging suspended in the air. The more likely answer is that they’re stealing a glimpse from the window of the ‘El’, the elevator train, which Hopper liked to ride at night, armed with his pads, his fabricated chalk, gazing avidly through the glass for instances of brightness, moments that fix, unfinished, in the mind’s eye. Either way, the viewer – me, I mean, or you – has been co-opted into an estranging act. Privacy has been breached, but it doesn’t make the woman any less alone, exposed in her burning chamber.
This is the thing about cities, the way that even indoors you’re always at the mercy of a stranger’s gaze. Wherever I went – pacing back and forth between the bed and couch; roaming into the kitchen to regard the abandoned boxes of ice cream in the freezer – I could be seen by the people who lived in the Arlington, the vast Queen Anne co-op that dominated the view, its ten brick storeys lagged in scaffolding. At the same time, I could also play the watcher, Rear Window-style, peering in on dozens of people with whom I’d never exchange a word, all of them engrossed in the small intimacies of the day. Loading a dishwasher naked; tapping in on heels to cook the children’s supper.
Under normal circumstances, I don’t suppose any of this would have provoked more than idle curiosity, but that autumn wasn’t normal. Almost as soon as I arrived, I was aware of a gathering anxiety around the question of visibility. I wanted to be seen, taken in and accepted, the way one is by a lover’s approving gaze. At the same time I felt dangerously exposed, wary of judgement, particularly in situations where being alone felt awkward or wrong, where I was surrounded by couples or groups. While these feelings were undoubtedly heightened by the fact that I was living in New York for the first time – that city of glass, of roving eyes – they arose out of loneliness, which agitates always in two directions, towards intimacy and away from threat.
That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper’s images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as ‘our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness’.
I don’t suppose there are many people in the western world who haven’t peered into the cool green icebox of that painting, who haven’t seen a grimy reproduction hanging in a doctor’s waiting room or office hallway. It’s been disseminated with such profligacy that it has long since acquired the patina that afflicts all too-familiar objects, like dirt over a lens, and yet it retains its eerie power, its potency.
I’d been looking at it on laptop screens for years before I finally saw it in person, at the Whitney one sweltering October afternoon. It was hanging at the very ba
ck of the gallery, hidden behind a shoal of people. The colours are amazing, a girl said, and then I was drawn to the front of the crowd. Up close, the painting rearranged itself, decomposing into snags and anomalies I’d never seen before. The bright triangle of the diner’s ceiling was cracking. A long drip of yellow ran between the coffee urns. The paint was applied very thinly, not quite covering the linen ground, so that the surface was breached by a profusion of barely visible white pinpricks and tiny white threads.
I took a step back. Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
A tour guide came in then, her dark hair piled on her head, a group of visitors trailing in her wake. She pointed to the painting, saying do you see, there isn’t a door? and they crowded round, making small noises of exclamation. She was right. The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.
Inside, in their livid yellow prison, were the four famous figures. A spivvy couple, a counter-boy in a white uniform, his blond hair raked into a cap, and a man sitting with his back to the window, the open crescent of his jacket pocket the darkest point on the canvas. No one was talking. No one was looking at anyone else. Was the diner a refuge for the isolated, a place of succour, or did it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferates in cities? The painting’s brilliance derived from its instability, its refusal to commit.
Look, for instance, at the counter-boy, his face maybe affable, maybe cold. He stands at the centre of a series of triangles, presiding over the nocturnal sacrament of coffee. But isn’t he also trapped? One of the vertices is cut off by the edge of the canvas, but surely it’s narrowing too sharply, leaving no room for the expected hatch or gangway. This is the kind of subtle geometric disturbance that Hopper was so skilled at, and which he used to kindle emotion in the viewer, to produce feelings of entrapment and wariness, of profound unease.
What else? I leant against the wall, sweaty in my sandals, itemising the diner’s contents. Three white coffee cups, two empty glasses rimmed in blue, two napkin dispensers, three salt shakers, one pepper shaker, maybe sugar, maybe ketchup. Yellow light flaring on the ceiling. Livid green tiles (brilliant streak of jade green, Hopper’s wife Jo had written in the notebook she used to log his paintings), triangular shadows dropping lightly everywhere, the colour of a dollar bill. A hoarding above the diner for Phillies American cigars, Only 5cs, illustrated with a crude brown doodle. A green till in the window of the store across the street, not that there was any stock on show. Green on green, glass on glass, a mood that expanded the longer I lingered, breeding disquiet.
The window was the weirdest thing: a bubble of glass that separated the diner from the street, curving sinuously back against itself. This window is unique in Hopper’s work. Though he painted hundreds, maybe thousands, in his life, the rest are simply openings, apertures for the eye to gaze through. Some catch reflections, but this was the only time he ever painted glass itself, in all its ambiguous physicality. Simultaneously solid and transparent, material and ephemeral, it brings together what he elsewhere did in parts, fusing in one devastating symbol the twin mechanisms of confinement and exposure. It was impossible to gaze through into the diner’s luminous interior without experiencing a swift apprehension of loneliness, of how it might feel to be shut out, standing alone in the cooling air.
*
The dictionary, that chilly arbiter, defines the word lonely as a negative feeling invoked by isolation, the emotional component being what differentiates it from lone, alone or solo. Dejected because of want of company or society; sad at the thought that one is alone; having a feeling of solitariness. But loneliness doesn’t necessarily correlate with an external or objective lack of company; what psychologists term social isolation or social privation. By no means all people who live their lives in the absence of company are lonely, while it is possible to experience acute loneliness while in a relationship or among a group of friends. As Epictetus wrote almost two thousand years ago: ‘For because a man is alone, he is not for that reason also solitary; just as though a man is among numbers, he is not therefore not solitary.’
The sensation arises because of a felt absence or insufficiency of closeness, and its feeling tone ranges from discomfort to chronic, unbearable pain. In 1953, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan came up with what still stands as a working definition: ‘the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy’.
Sullivan only approached loneliness in passing in his work, and as such the real pioneer of loneliness studies is the German psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Fromm-Reichmann spent most of her working life in America and is memorialised in popular culture as the therapist Dr Fried in Joanne Greenberg’s semi-autobiographical novel about her teenage struggles with schizophrenia, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. When she died in Maryland in 1957, she left on her desk an unfinished pile of notes, which was subsequently edited and published as ‘On Loneliness’. This essay represents one of the first attempts by a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst to approach loneliness as an experience in its own right, distinct from and perhaps fundamentally more damaging than depression, anxiety or loss.
Fromm-Reichmann viewed loneliness as an essentially resistant subject, hard to describe, hard to pin down, hard even to broach as a topic, noting dryly:
The writer who wishes to elaborate on loneliness is faced with a serious terminological handicap: Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people do practically everything to avoid it. This avoidance seems to include a strange reluctance on the part of psychiatrists to seek scientific clarification on the subject.
She picks through what little material she can find, gathering up scraps from Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud and Rollo May. Many of these, she thinks, muddle together different types of loneliness, conflating that which is temporary or circumstantial – the loneliness of bereavement, say, or the loneliness that stems from insufficient tenderness in childhood – with the deeper and more intractable forms of emotional isolation.
Of these latter, desolating states, she comments: ‘Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person’s empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person’s loneliness.’
When I read those lines, I remembered sitting, years back, outside a train station in the south of England, waiting for my father. It was a sunny day, and I had a book I was enjoying. After a while, an elderly man sat down next to me and tried repeatedly to strike up conversation. I didn’t want to talk and after a brief exchange of pleasantries I began to respond more tersely until eventually, still smiling, he got up and wandered away. I’ve never stopped feeling ashamed about my unkindness, and nor have I ever forgotten how it felt to have the force field of his loneliness pressed up against me: an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen.
If it’s difficult to respond to people in this state, it is harder still to reach out from it. Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee. In her essay, Fromm-Reichmann returns repeatedly to this issue of
incommunicability, noting how reluctantly even the loneliest of patients approach the subject. One of her case studies concerns a schizophrenic woman who asked to see her psychiatrist specifically in order to discuss her experience of deep and hopeless loneliness. After several futile attempts, she finally burst out: ‘I don’t know why people think of hell as a place where there is heat and where warm fires are burning. That is not hell. Hell is if you are frozen in isolation into a block of ice. That is where I have been.’
I first read this essay sitting on my bed, the blinds half-drawn. On my printout, I’d drawn a wavering Biro line under the words a block of ice. I was often feeling then like I was encased in ice, or walled up in glass, that I could see out all too clearly but lacked the ability to free myself or to make the kind of contact I desired. Show tunes from upstairs again, cruising Facebook, the white walls tight around me. Hardly any wonder I’d been so fixated on Nighthawks, that bubble of greenish glass, the colour of an iceberg.
After Fromm-Reichmann’s death, other psychologists slowly began to turn their attention to the subject. In 1975, the social scientist Robert Weiss edited a seminal study, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation. He too opened by acknowledging the subject’s neglect, noting wryly that loneliness is more often commented on by songwriters than social scientists. He felt that in addition to being unnerving in its own right – he writes of it as something that ‘possessed’ people, that is ‘peculiarly insistent’; ‘an almost eerie affliction of the spirits’ – loneliness inhibits empathy because it induces in its wake a kind of self-protective amnesia, so that when a person is no longer lonely they struggle to remember what the condition is like.