91 Northampton, MA: What Am I Doing Here?

Pretty Penny was painted in Nyack but ended up in Northampton because a Smith alumna donated it. How Hopper's paintings ended up where they did is interesting to consider. I think that his paintings were accessible to nontraditional art collectors. They show everyday subjects and scenes, not blobs like Jackson Pollock.

Another thing in Hopper's favor was that his paintings were affordable in his lifetime and shortly after because his kind of realism was out of favor with art buyers at that time. An interesting subculture is those who need to collect anything, especially art. (One gallery owner confided, "I have been in the collector's circle. I was dealing with art collectors, and, for some, it becomes a life and not just a hobby. They all are trying to scam each other. They want to put their name in front of a painting's name.") The art buyers dictate the price of a painting, but not the value. Nighthawks has always had a grip on the American psyche. But art buyers were convinced that an abstract painting or unmistakable Van Gogh was worth more. Now, Hopper's paintings fetch top price.(1)

Perhaps the most telling example of how his paintings ended up where they did is provided by a lesser work in a less well known museum. The Santa Barbara Museum of Art has November, Washington Square. The painting has two dates: 1932 and 1959. That is because he started it long before he finished it. He finished in the year that one of the museum's great patrons was on an art-buying spree in New York. I can't help but think that Hopper's dealer called him and asked him for a canvas, any canvas, and Hopper picked out an old one already half done and finished it quickly in hopes of a sale.

Another great story is Wichita's collection. It includes some of the finest works of certain individuals, including Hopper's Conference at Night and Sunlight on Brownstones. The buyer was Elizabeth Stubblefield Navas, the former interior designer for the wife of the man for whom the collection is named: Roland P. Murdock. She inherited the money and his charge to keep buying good art and sending it back to Wichita. One local art insider told me he thought Murdock wanted to force-feed high art to the lowbrow plains people whether they wanted it or not.

Many of Hopper's buyers were similarly nouveau riche. In West Palm Beach, the buyer was named Ralph Norton (like a merging of the characters Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton on the 1950s sitcom "The Honeymooners"), and his business bore the cartoon-worthy name "Acme Steel." Neuberger in Purchase was a self-made millionaire. And Helen Hayes gained fame through theater. But many other buyers were old wealth. Stephen Clark was heir to the Singer Sewing Machine money. Edward Root was son of Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State.

So in many ways, Hopper pleased people of all walks of life. Only those with money could actually buy his paintings. But the range of buyers shows that he was not only a painter of everyman, but also bought by everyman.

(1) Addendum September 21, 2008: I saw a great movie over the weekend: Who the #$&% is Jackson Pollock? It's about a female truck driver who buys a painting that may be a Jackson Pollock. A noted forensic scientist finds strong evidence that it is: a fingerprint matching one on Pollock's paint cans in his studio; dust on the canvas that matches dust from his studio; etc. Yet the art world refuses to believe that it is a Pollock or (more importantly) even consider that it might be a Pollock. A most telling moment is when a former bigwig at the Met says that art world opinion is worth more than scholarship or science. Also tellingly, a Wall Street investor says that the painting would have more chance of selling if it were signed, even if the signature were a fraud!

90 Northampton, MA: Sylvester's

[Sylvester's]

Despite 40-degree weather, the customers waiting to get into Sylvester's, the local breakfast fave in the former house of Graham cracker inventor Sylvester Graham, hung around out front, leaning on the fences siding the property or resting on weathered benches sprinkled with bright orange leaves. I approached three young women who were Smith students. One had olive skin and an elfin nose that flaunted a nose ring; she was from Boston and majoring in neurosurgery and wanted to work with the brain. The second was dark black with short dark hair; she was from Brooklyn and didn't have a major or a direction. Lastly was a young woman who had kinky hair and café-au-lait skin; she was from the Bronx and wanted to go into social service. Her East Indian father was visiting and treating the three to breakfast. He listened, curious, as I asked his daughter and her friends questions. His daughter, however, asked why I was asking the questions. After I told her, the girls said that people aren't isolated here; they were more isolated in their big-city hometowns. They all insisted that people are only as isolated as they want to be.

When they got called to table, I interviewed a barrel-chested, white-mustachioed man and his pasty portly wife. She wore a sweatshirt with flowers on it. He was balding and wearing a black turtleneck beneath a black Greek fisherman's cap. He said that the people around here were mostly university people or farmers. Northampton lies in a valley that gets runoff from mountains, making it good for farming. Whatever their work, he implied, most locals make a pretty penny.

89 Northampton, MA: Smith

Like the painting, Smith's campus is filled with pine trees and 19th-century buildings: Greek Revival white pillars set into brick siding. Smith opened in 1875 when Sophia Smith inherited a fortune at age 65 and decided to found an all-women's college. Poet Sylvia Plath was a Smith grad, and displays in the library honor women leaders: birth-control crusader Margaret Sanger; the papers of Gloria Steinem; and the Epistole devotissime of St. Catherine of Siena. A sign on Pretty Penny says, "gift of Mrs. Charles McArthur, LHD Class of 1940." Smith College should have labeled it with Helen's name, out of alumni pride or feminist equality.

Students at Smith live in "cottages" rather than dorms, and self-governing "houses" are still part of the Smith experience for its 2,500 students. Other traditions include Mountain Day, a fall day chosen randomly by the president when ringing bells announce that classes are canceled and students encouraged to go enjoy the outdoors. Ivy Day, the day before graduation, alumnae walk a parade route lined by seniors, and seniors plant ivy to show a connection between the college and its graduates.

88 Northampton, MA: Pretty Penny

Northampton, Massachusetts: Pretty Penny

Northampton looked like a thriving New England hill town, with a broad road gently sloping up a business district of majestic old storefronts. In a Hopperesque transformation of American architecture, the three-story Greek temple style bank at the corner of Pleasant and Main had been made into a jewelry shop. The Holyoke Mountains loomed all around, and side streets downtown breathtakingly rose or fell away.

Northampton prides itself on being surrounded by five schools: Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, University of Massachusetts, and Smith College, who collectively comprise the "Five-College" region. Many students from all five choose to live in Northampton because it is the largest and most central city in the region.

One of these colleges, Smith College, houses the Hopper painting in town: Pretty Penny. It shows the house in Nyack owned by actress Helen Hayes and her husband Charles Macarthur, who wrote the hit play The Front Page. Hopper's dealer Frank K.M. Rehn, knowing Hopper's Nyack upbringing and love of theater, proposed that he do it. Hopper chafed under his first commission since giving up commercial art. The painting in fact looks a little like an ad in an architectural magazine, though Hopper has applied his usual artistry.

The house is viewed from under a pine tree, whose haphazard dark green shadows on the front lawn help frame the house. The stories rise in a series of steps that make the squat house seem taller. By making the square forms on the right side jut forward, while the bay windows on the left side sink back, Hopper makes the house seem monolithic.

It's such a pretty painting that you'd be surprised the drama that went on to get it made. Gail Levin details Jo's extensive entries and other accounts. Hopper said, "I can't do this house. I don't want to paint this house. It does nothing for me…. "

Hayes recalled that Hopper turned up unannounced. "I went to the window and sure enough, there was Hopper, grumpy as ever, sketching our house." Helen said MacArthur "…phoned Frank Rehn and said, 'How did you do that? What changed his mind?' And [Rehn] said, 'Well, Jo and I have been working on him and after having an afternoon of Jo...'" Hayes said Hopper was "like a big hellcat of anger and resentment.... I had never met a more misanthropic, grumpy, grouchy individual in my life, and as a performer I just shriveled under the heat of this disapproval. " By contrast, Jo wrote of Helen Hayes, "It was so nice to meet her, very simple, real genuine, like her work. She's very nice--& friendly & interested. After lunch Mr. McA. kept us at table talking about movies."

After all the trouble Hopper went to for this picture, Jo, the Rehns, and Helen Hayes suggested putting in Hayes's daughter and French poodle, leading to Edward "cussing" the lot of them. After the painting was delivered, though, MacArthur phoned to say how pleased with it they were. Rehn asked twenty-five hundred dollars, more than half of Hopper's sales for the entire year.<sup>1

1</sup>This story is told in more detail in Gail Levin's Hopper biography, where you can also find more of her Helen Hayes interview.

87 Andover, MA: Land End

The Lantern Café had somehow managed to withstand Andover's increasing preciousness. Unfortunately, when I walked into the matchbox-sized place, all of the seats were filled, and the people in them glared at me as if to leave no doubt that they wouldn't be giving them up to me any time soon. I backed out.

I had a tight schedule to keep, and Andover's residents were being standoffish. At the academy's 190-year-old bookstore, the store's assistant manager had beamed, "Our store is a community meeting place," and in 1996, local son Jay Leno drew 1,500 people when he signed books there. But she and the rest of the staff begged off saying anything about Hopper, and the place was deserted besides them. Andover felt like a town that combined staid settlers' descendants with newer suburbanites who didn't want to be bothered. The locals had one foot fiercely set in tradition, and another grubbing to make a better future. In that, they mirrored Hopper's characters: in a nostalgic setting but victims of modern life's isolating effects.

86 Andover, MA: The Old School Try

[Andover Town Hall]

Before going to Andover, I called one of its residents that my SAS high school alumnae directory listed as living there. A prep school's bond is tight enough that I felt comfortable calling him even though we had never met before. True to the code, he didn't bat an eyelash in offering to answer my questions about Andover, Hopper, and isolation.

"Andover is a commuting suburb of Boston," he explained. "So it doesn't have that urban isolation of Hopper. Phillips Academy defines the social life here, with its events and offerings. I've lived here since 1993. There are a lot of high-tech firms in Andover now. We're a large geographic township but fairly heterogeneous. There are no extremes. At a coffee shop downtown you might get a cross section of townies, especially early in the morning; Phillips kids in the afternoon."

I didn't see any coffee shops offhand, so I backtracked to the Town Hall. The woman working the Town Hall welcome desk didn't want to answer my question, but she gave me a lead on where to go: the Lantern Café. She told me it was probably the oldest in town and most like one I would see in a Hopper painting. It took me five times with her Yankee accent to realize that she wasn't saying "Land End" but "Lantern."

85 Andover, MA: Isolated As You Want To Be

[Andover school green]

On my way out of the museum, I asked the woman at the sign-in desk whether people in Andover were isolated. "Not at all," she answered, a cheery smile crinkling the corners of her almond-shaped eyes. "I'm not isolated though I live alone. You're only as isolated as you want to be." Then with a wave, she was off to meet someone for lunch.

The school's green dominates Route 28 for about a mile on the south end of "town" (the business district), and, from the edge, you can just make out the downtown skyline of Boston. The town of Andover (as opposed to the school Philips Andover, which also just calls itself "Andover" to separate itself from its sister elite school Phillips Exeter in New Hampshire) lies on the banks of the Merrimack River about twenty-three miles north of Boston. Andover was originally settled in 1636 under the Indian name of Cochicewick. The community incorporated in 1646, named after a town in England where many of the settlers had come from. Being on a river, Andover was home from the early days to powder, paper, and woolen mills. Although now primarily residential (most homes go for around $1 million), Andover has a number of companies in defense, computers, and medical products.

Andover is still governed by open Town Meeting, a scene depicted by Rockwell but never Hopper. The town's 20,000 registered voters meet at Andover High School to debate and vote on the town's financial and business decisions over the course of two or three nights. The local newspaper boasted that it's "the purest expression of democracy" but warned that the success of the system requires "the active participation of our residents." Tellingly, they added, "electronic forms of communication do not eliminate the need for face-to-face meetings."

84 Andover, MA: Phillips

[Andover Parade]

Andover, Massachusetts:
Freight Cars, Gloucester and Manhattan Bridge Loop

The Hopper paintings in Andover were not available for me to see when I visited, and technically they didn't hang in a "public" museum. The reason there were three paintings here, in what is essentially a suburb, is because Andover is home to an elite boarding school where adolescents go to be isolated from their families: Phillips Andover Academy. Phillips Andover was founded in 1770 by Samuel Phillips, and alumni include George Bush (1 and 2), Dr. Benjamin Spock, and former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Addison Gallery of American Art is on the academy's campus, though it holds its own with many big-city or university art museums and is available free for anyone who wants to visit. (The day I stopped in, the person who signed in below me was from Ireland.) The museum's founder intended it "to cultivate and foster in [the students of Phillips Academy] a love for the beautiful." It began in 1930 with works by prominent American artists, including Hopper. The two here are both from 1928.

Manhattan Bridge Loop shows blood red buildings along a deserted elevated train platform below a flat sky. An upside-down brown square U (a trolley scaffold) dominates the otherwise empty platform horizon from which a lone figure walks off left.

In Freight Cars, Gloucester, Hopper's magical yellow light makes everything holy, both the magnificence of the church in the background and the tawdriness of the freight cars at rest in the foreground. Edward and Grace Root of Hamilton College in upstate New York bought Freight Cars, Gloucester, but it ended up back where it began (Andover is but a half hour's drive from Hopper's beloved Gloucester).

In 1939, the museum asked Hopper for a statement. Hopper wrote back that he had invested "a long time on the proportions of the canvas, so that it will do for the design, as nearly as possible what I wish it to do. Carrying the main horizontal lines of the design with little interruption to the edges of the picture, is to ... make one conscious of the spaces and elements beyond the limits of the scene itself."

"The picture was planned very carefully in my mind before starting it, but except for a few small black-and-white sketches made from the fact, I had no other concrete data, but relied on ... my memory." He grumbled that "[t]he preliminary sketches would do little for you in explaining the picture. The color, design, and form have all been subjected, consciously or otherwise, to considerable simplification."

Hopper made a gift of the two studies for Manhattan Bridge Loop to the Addison. It's listed in the books as "anonymous donor." The book about their collection says, "The museum does not encourage gifts from artists to avoid potential embarrassment, but when an opportunity arose to acquire something from an outstanding artist, custom was bent."

83 Boston: Post Card

Hi, Joe. Just wanted too thank you for all your kindness during my visit to New Haven. Tell your friends I really appreciated their comments and enjoyed their company. I'm in Boston now. Walked the Freedom Trail. My third time. I always feel at its end like I accomplished something difficult and spiritual, a cross between the Appalachian Trail and the Stations of the Cross. Harvard here may be our country's oldest educational institution, but I am learning from an even older one: firsthand experience.

Kevin (The Hopper Guy)

82 Boston: History Lesson

[Granary grave]

Boston certainly was a very very modern city, a fast-paced East Coast town with an edge. But it was also "very very" historical, with its winding colonial lanes , old buildings, and curmudgeonly, irascible people. Boston virtually drips with history.

Boston's first resident was a hermit who lived alone on Beacon Hill. The Puritans who settled on the hill after him were no less cranky about having neighbors. They hanged a woman on the Common for "promoting Quaker beliefs." She's buried in Boston's first cemetery, the Granary, as are Mother Goose and Benjamin Franklin's parents. This is the first stop on the famous Freedom Trail detailing Boston's history and conflating it with that of the country as a whole.

But I was surprised how many things along the Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail conflicted with the myths handed down about them. Massachusetts was the first state to outlaw slavery but also the first to send slave ships to Africa. Paul Revere's famous warning that the British were coming "by sea" actually meant that they were coming via the Charles River, and he never completed the ride named for him—though two other riders did. (History here might get misremembered but never forgotten. Near the end of the Freedom Trail, in Copp's Hill Burying Ground, I found fresh red flowers lain atop a gravestone from 1767.) Maybe our murky understanding of our birth and history reflects our murky notion of what constitutes our community, adding to the sense that Hopperesque isolation is uniquely American.

81 Boston: Meg

I also caught up with my SAS classmate Meg, who had been working in Boston for 11 years. We met at the Boston Common, still a gathering place after being used in old times to graze settlers' cattle and house British troops. "Your project sounds fascinating," she said. "Hopper is one of my favorite painters, and I have seen his paintings at the MFA. I'd definitely agree with the popular perception that Boston tends toward the provincial and its residents can be somewhat distant. I find the longer I am here the less I notice (or pay attention to). That Old Boston Brahmin (associated with exclusivity and pretense because, after all, they did come over on the Mayflower, lest you forget) is definitely very much alive and kicking even today."

80 Boston: Deborah

I had arranged to meet up with Deborah, an acquaintance of mine back in Chicago, a clothes designer in her early twenties who moved cross-country to Boston where she knew no one. But she was intent on being independent.

Of Room in Brooklyn, Deborah decided, "She does look lonely. She has flowers to make herself feel not so alone. Either she bought them herself, which is lonely. Or someone bought them for her and is not there, and that's lonely. I get the feeling she's ill and house-ridden. Or maybe it's just that women in those days weren't allowed to go out. Her dress may be black and she's in mourning.

"I can imagine a lot of Bostonians alone in their rooms. Everyone in Boston is in their own little world. They never meet your eyes. Boston is a hodgepodge. Most of my roommates have come from elsewhere: Indiana, St. Louis, Florida. Many come for school and stay."

79 Boston: A Brahmin

A tall, fiftyish woman approached next, prim and imperturbable, as square-shouldered as a football player. She wore a mole overcoat and held a handbag in both hands in front of her lap.

"Oh, no," she answered emphatically, "we're not isolated. Boston is very connected." She spoke as if she were the authority. "If I was an instructor, I would point out to students that this is more an example of the inner world of the painter: alone, isolated, and desperate. I don't think of the people of Boston like that. They're exciting, filled with life. There's a big student population here, a lot of energy, a real sense of community and support. It's a sports town (take it or leave it). It's also a big bank town. I work for a bank, and we have lots of outreach programs."

"Boston is also becoming known for computers and Internet companies, right?" I asked.

"But that's new," she objected. "It's not, I think, the way Bostonians think of Boston. If there is an isolated community, I would think of that as being it. They're new."

She stalked away. Maybe newer Boston communities are isolated because older Boston communities are closed off.

78 Boston: CVS and the Guard

Up walked a thin, red-haired, older woman, arms crossed over her chest in a protective X. She eyed me through large square glasses. "Hopper's paintings could be Anywhere USA," she answered my question. "They certainly look like the buildings here. Maybe they remind us of home or our favorite drug store."

"You've probably run out at night to a drug store like this," I suggested.

The woman waved away my comment. "It's all CVS now," she bellowed. "You drive."

The museum guard--a portly fellow in his thirties, his face mashed into a sour, world-weary expression--insinuated himself into the conversation.

"This Hopper does make you feel like our city," he said. "It's very depressing. All his paintings are very depressing. That's what I like about them."

About Room in Brooklyn, he said, "The room's so neat, you know it has to be a rented room. She may be contemplating throwing herself out."

I said, "Her look out is a look in. She's looking across the street at buildings just like hers."

"She's unhappy," muttered the red-haired woman.

"No she's not," the guard grumbled.

"She's not unhappy?!" she asked incredulously.

The guard barked, "No. I was talking to him. She's not sitting in a building that's anything like those she's looking at. She is looking down on the others, so hers is taller. And her room has a bay window as opposed to the flat ones across the way. She's sitting in a building from the early twentieth century, looking at brownstones from the nineteenth. She's looking at the past."

"Well," the woman joked, jerking a thumb at the guard, "you found the right person for your research. He's smarter than both of us."

"No," said the guard, pointing to the painting. "He's smarter than all of us."

76 Boston: MFA

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts was "very very." With an entrance fee of twelve dollars, it was by far the most expensive that I had to visit. The museum's fee, size, and opulence were reminders of the culture-keepers, the "Boston Brahmins," who funded this institution.

And the Hopper paintings here were "very very" indicative of Hopper's main themes. Drug Store shows a brightly lit storefront on a deserted street at night, like the restaurant in Nighthawks. "EX-LAX" is prominently displayed across the drug store's eave, helping it stand out as it would if you needed EX-LAX. Hopper changed that to EX-LAS from fear that the painting would not sell. Instead, the sympathetic buyer insisted Hopper change it back to EX-LAX.

Room in Brooklyn shows a woman alone in her apartment in a chair looking out a window onto endless red brick tenements. Hopper claimed that this was the only work in which he included flowers, in a vase on the table beside the woman. "The so-called beauty [of flowers] is all there," he said. "You can't add anything to them of your own."

When the museum bought the painting, Edward's handwritten note of thanks said, "There is not a great deal to be said … It was largely improvised." Recognizing Boston's reputation as an academic town, Hopper added, "It is agreeable to me if any student should wish to copy the picture." Jo explained that Hopper "thought the [Brooklyn Bridge] would clutter up the picture. He loathes clutter so left out the bridge (and more or less Brooklyn…)."

75 Boston: A Local Politician

Whereas randy Richard insisted that people in Boston were mean and standoffish, I came to him from an interview with a local who had introduced himself when I took the boat back from where the Freedom Trail ended near Bunker Hill. The public transportation system back from the Charlestown navy yard at the end of the trail was a boat. As I fiddled with my camera at the back of the ship, I was approached by a jowly, white-haired man who resembled local politician Ted Kennedy. He wore a dark blue business suit with a patterned blue tie over a crisp white shirt.

"Are you visiting our fair city?" he asked forcefully, pointing to the camera around my neck.

"Not only visiting; writing about. How do you feel about it?"

"I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole," he grumbled and pursed his lips disapprovingly. Then his face softened into a smile. "Nah. That's just what we tell visitors because everyone who comes to Boston wants to live here. It's a great place." His blue eyes looked out over the water as he answered my question.

"I don't think we're as isolated as we're made out to be. A lot of places' reputations here are based on outdated ideas. In South Boston, there were problems when busing was introduced back in the 1970s, and that gave it a certain reputation. But it's twenty years later. Things move too quickly to stay isolated. Those people are not there anymore. There are a lot of new kinds of people coming to Boston: Vietnamese, Thai, Orientals. They can live cheaper than we can. They open up the possibility of living in neighborhoods we no longer think viable. I'm lucky. I have a lot. I've lived many places, Somerville, then Beacon Hill, where I met my wife. We bought in South Boston, then moved to Winchester when it was time to raise a family. I'm not a neighborhood guy. I like to go do my job, come home, spend time with my family, and work around the house so I don't have to pay someone else to do it."

74 Boston: Very Very

Boston, MA: Very Very

Boston was a key town in the anti-slavery movement, and the Black Heritage Trail (an alternative to the more famous Freedom Trail) wends past the former middle-class homes of successful pre-emancipation free blacks, including Uncle Tom author Harriet Tubman's house and the first school for blacks, the African Meeting House. There, I asked the guard about Hopperesque isolation. His name was Richard, but it might as well have been randy: red hair stuck out in all directions from his head, and auburn stubble rambled across his chubby cheeks below eyes glinting like knife blades. My friend Julie who had moved to Boston from Chicago the year before warned me that everybody here seemed "very very: whatever they are, they are intensely." The young guard was (luckily for me) very, very opinionated about Hopper and isolation.

"That's an interesting thesis," he began, reminding me that Boston was also a college town. "We are isolated in the U.S., and Boston is one of the worst places for it. I sympathize with people who come here and talk about how mean, how downright mean, Bostonians can be. They're grumpy. Bostonians cut you off in traffic, and it's true road rage, in that it's inward. If you cut someone off in New York, at least they'll scream at you. People here don't even look at you. I'm someone who looks people in the eye and says hello when I pass and is suspicious of someone who doesn't, but I've given up trying because people on the train give me dirty looks.

"I think a lot of people look at Hopper's paintings and feel isolated for reasons having nothing to do with Hopper's motivation for painting. I see Hopper painting the Depression. He's painting the development of the city, modernism. In the 1920s and '30s, a lot of New England was small-town: frumpy guys in fedora hats alone filling up their cars with gas, and beautiful blondes who are all lonely and depressed. I see Hopper's characters as obviously disturbed. I wonder if people originally saw his paintings as pretty.

"What's great about Hopper's paintings is what they don't have: no glass in the windows, no cars, no trash. You could eat off of that street. In his one of people fully dressed in suits, they're just baking! It's a harsh, awful light. There's no atmosphere. It's like those pictures of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, just direct shadow."

In closing, he noted, "We could be in a Hopper painting right now. It's perfect light for him." I looked up to see a cloudless November sunset descending on the narrow streets outside. His lamp-lit desk stood out in the otherwise dim entryway of this historic building. "If he was painting you and me talking, he'd be out there, and the night would be surrounding the building and there'd be a little bit of light around us. He'd be looking in and it'd just be you, a person talking, looking at something else."

73 New Haven: Dream

That night, I dreamt I was in a coffee shop, going over my notes from the trip so far. It was an incredibly bright day, and I moved from the too-bright front window to the shaded section in back. As I read my notes, two people came up and sat at the table I had been sitting at. I could not see their faces clearly. It was that thing that happens in my dreams a lot, where it feels like there is something in my eye, and I can’t get it out, yet there is something I need to see. I wanted to be able to write a description of these people before I interviewed them for the book. I tried to remember what city I was in, but again when I looked around for a sign or a barista to ask, I could not see clearly. Just isolated bits of wood counter, linoleum floor, fluorescent lamps, and window sunlight with no detail across the road. I started to panic that they would leave before I could interview them. I decided to approach them. But when I stood up, my walk over to them was unsteady because of my limited eyesight. When I got to their table and asked them their thoughts of Hopperesque isolation, the man replied smoothly, "Excuse us, but we're having a private conversation here." I apologized and crawled along the linoleum to my booth. The black metal post on which the table was anchored looked like a life saver on which I could seize. I woke up clinging to the post and squeezing my pillow in the same fashion. I wrote down this dream and now am staring out my hotel window into the featureless New England night.


Andre Gide, who Hopper read and enjoyed, noted in his journals, "If upon opening that door I were suddenly to find myself facing--well the sea…. Why yes I should say; that's odd! Because I know that it ought not to be there; but that is a rationalization. I can never get over a certain amazement that things are as they are, and if they were suddenly different, it seems that they would hardly amaze me any more."

72 New Haven: Town

[Street sign in New Haven]

The cloud cover that seemed atmospheric on campus seemed downright threatening away from it. Once you got off campus, you were either downtown or somewhere you shouldn't be.

The highway extension barreling through town was called "The Connector," but it might as well be called "The Isolator." It was designed to whisk you directly to campus or its adjacent downtown. You never have to see the deteriorating neighborhoods that comprise much of New Haven. Signs point to New York, New Haven, and Hartford--the very name of the railroad line that ran past Hopper's Cape Cod house and that he used as the subject for a painting.

When I drove through town briefly the night before, New Haven's greens looked like African veldts on which existed only the hunted and the hunters. The walkway signs counted down how many seconds until the cars ran you over, and the locals assured me that they will run you over. To make visitors feel safer, the city now had "Hospitality Officers" decked out in lime green shirts and fedoras with mint-colored ribbons that made them look like demented St. Patrick's Day revelers. I noticed with irony that the Economic Growth Center was closed for construction during my visit.

I started sightseeing at my version of a safe zone: an independent coffee shop. A bench out front where I had hoped to sit was already occupied by a grizzled character whose baby face had turned sour, aging him past his 30 years. He wore green jeans with rolled up cuffs, white sox, black shoes, a T-shirt, and a frayed sweater beneath an open coat. He hunched like a boxer ready to throw a punch, and each knuckle bore a tiny cross tattoo and figures that spelled out "SORT" and "13½."

I asked him about New Haven and isolation.

He paused, then growled, "If you step outside the downtown area, it's a ghetto. Why do you want to know this anyway?"

"I'm studying New Haven and some other towns," I explained.

"Why New Haven?" he hounded me.

"There are paintings by Edward Hopper in the museum here."

Suddenly, he perked up. "Oh, he's one of my favorites. His paintings here are really great. You're gonna like them. I go to that museum about a dozen times a year. You know about the British Art Museum here too, right? I go there all the time, too. You'll enjoy those museums. Those Hoppers are really beautiful."

"Do you think people here are as isolated as they're portrayed in Hopper's paintings?"

He squinted and dragged on his cigarette. "Yeah. It's a real town-and-gown place. The real division here is between the haves and have-nots. I'll tell you what kind of a town it is. The Yale University food workers thought they'd be out of a job at Yale if students were given vouchers good at local restaurants, so they picketed the restaurants and put the workers there out of jobs." He looked to one side. "That's when I lost my job." He grew quiet and sucked hard on his cigarette.

I thought it best to move on.

[Daumier's The Print Collector]

I was embarrassed by how this man's knowledge and love of art surprised me. The museum, after all, is free. And warm. I felt a kinship with him. I was lucky enough to be able to afford "rooms for tourists;" otherwise, I was as homeless in this town as maybe he was.

Except for that, he was a younger version of me or Joe or Joe's friends. In a society that worships youth and camaraderie and mocks aging and isolation, I admired such single aging men fighting for dignity. I was well on my way to becoming one myself.

I made a note to be sure to send Joe a thank-you note.

71 New Haven: Dinner and a Show

Afterwards, Joe offered, "I hope you'll have dinner with me and a group of my friends tonight. I told them about your project. After five or so, it's not going to be possible to do anything around here anyways: too dangerous."

"How do you know all these people?"

"They're just friends. I've lived in New Haven a long time; most of my life. I arrived in 1966. It's a good place. I had dinner last week with a friend who loves Hopper. Turns out someone else I know owns a couple Hoppers. Drawings, I think. My other friend is an artist in a big way. He's a medical illustrator and was commissioned to paint a dinosaur mural on the front of the natural museum. He says he doesn't know a lot about Hopper. But he knows a lot about art."

We rendezvoused with the dinner guests at Joe's apartment, which felt like it had been preserved from the 1950s, stuffy and dim. Joe whisked me into his study to show me the Hopper poster he had on the wall: Lighthouse at Two Lights. Joe's guests entered and took what seemed like their usual places. A tall man with five o'clock shadow sat in a chair, while a baby-faced East Indian sank into one end of the sofa. On the other end of the couch, a short, wiry, rough-trade character missing a few teeth and all his hair leaned his chin on the shoulder of a ruddy guy with short-cropped hair and one earring.

We all headed over to the basement Thai restaurant where Joe had made reservations. I asked if they all lived in New Haven, and the lanky artist with five-o'clock shadow said, "No, but we all come to New Haven to socialize." Joe introduced him to me as Michael, who Joe mentioned earlier was painting the mural at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. "Joe is the glue," Michael nodded. "Joe is the reason we're all in New Haven tonight."

One of the pirate-looking couple quipped, "Oh, yeah; otherwise, we just go outhouse tipping." His partner tried to offset his sarcasm by assuring me, "Each of our small towns has socializing places and meeting places, even if only a pizza parlor. And we're very close to New York: only an hour forty-five minutes by train."

"Yeah, but that makes the area attractive to commuters," the East Indian launched into a story about recent changes in his small town. "I was walking my dog down the road where I live. Well, now there is a new subdivision at the end of the road. This huge four-by-four went by, and the driver beeped and waved his arms. He was upset that I was walking my dog along the road, which I have done for years--before his subdivision was there. And I was taking a lot less space than the four-by-four."

No one had much else to add about isolation or Hopper, except Michael, the artist. "There's something that seems 'unearned' by Hopper. I don't see him struggle. I think Hopper found a formula for something that worked and then stuck with it. A friend of mine owns a couple of Hopper watercolors. In those, I see Hopper doing more interesting stuff than in his oils."

[Yale Theater]

As we were talking, someone on the edge of our group began talking to another patron, a friend of theirs. I recognized him as George, a graduate student in theater during my days at Northwestern. He had moved here for Yale's theater program, which is well-known for its famous alumni (Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, etc.) and because New Haven has become a cliché for where Broadway shows have their trial runs. One Hollywood mantra is, "Satire is what closes in New Haven."

I had told the group earlier about Joe's sister giving me his address and how I had developed a large network of friends in my many studies, travels, and jobs. Seeing me talk to George, who they all knew well, the East Indian said, "Wow, he really does know everyone."


As I drove to the hotel, I was warmed by memories of the dinner conversations and laughter. Joe displayed the same generosity that his sister had when she gave me his number. In my motel room, I experienced again the feeling of being in a Hopper painting. Joe and I had started the day at a tiny café table in Atticus, mimicking the two characters in Hopper's painting Sunlight in a City Café. Now, I was ending my day by being reminded all at once of the other three New Haven Hoppers. I was in Rooms for Tourists, in a motel like a Western Motel, and (New Haven being a port town), I was in Rooms by the Sea.

70 New Haven: Yale

[Yale Dorm]

Unfortunately, I was unable to interview Joe or anyone else in front of Yale's Hoppers because the museum was closed for renovation. But he did give me a tour of campus, which looked like a British city from centuries gone by: red brick walls, white mullions, dark shutters, slate roofs and tall elms (New Haven's nickname is "the elm city"). Yale was named for its founder, wealthy merchant Elihu Yale--descendent of one of the 500 Puritans who founded the New Haven Colony in 1638 in hopes of establishing a church-run state. Alumni include five U.S. presidents: Taft and every U.S. president between 1986 and 2008: Ford, Bush, Clinton, and Bush II. All governed the first country to require in its constitution a separation of church and state.

Yale's campus, with its castle-like buildings, was at its most atmospheric that November day. The slightly chill air that smelled of soap and hung heavy with gray cotton-ball clouds lent a gloom that felt at home at such Gothic colleges.
Joe took me into the main library, normally open only to Yalies. Dimly lit, with cold stone walls, it felt like a distillation of the campus as a whole: medieval, secretive, privileged, erudite, and slightly menacing.

Next, Joe took me to his residential college, an institution Joe explained was unique to Yale. Students lived in residential colleges with a master who meted out privileges and punishments, and each college sponsored events like lectures and concerts. Joe's college was Jonathan Edwards, named for an early Eli (that's what Yale students call themselves). Edwards wrote an essay in the 1800s titled "The Glory of God" that was about spiders, so residents in this college are called "Spiders." Spiders adorn all the college's objects, including the dining plates and utensils.

Over the back wall, Joe pointed out the art museum. "I told you that I lived back-to-back with it." On the other side, he pointed out Skull and Bones, a secret society made famous by George Bush the elder. Members have to leave a room whenever the society's name is uttered. One journalist with a sense of humor asked a question with the name in it during a presidential press conference. Sure enough, George left. With no windows on its soot-darkened graystone façade, and its windowless front door padlocked shut, it looked worthy of the campus nickname for such a society: a "tomb." It was as eerie as Hopper's huge, outdated, unpeopled mansions.

69 New Haven: Atticus

Just then, the man I was there to meet arrived. On my very first stop on this journey, a woman in Muskegon, Michigan, said her brother Joe in New Haven was a Yale professor and a big Hopper fan and would love to talk to me when I came to visit. He was about sixty, a tall man with big ears and watery blue, loyal-dog eyes. A lifelong bachelor, he spoke with an earnestness that made me suspect he was eager for company.

Over his hot cocoa, Joe confided that New Haven was dying. "It looked like this place [Atticus] would go bankrupt when it first opened. That's when they got the idea of selling some food. Now they sell more books too. There was a lot of opposition to putting this and the British Museum right here. The city threw a fit and tried to put up obstacles because already Yale takes such prime property tax-free. Actually, Yale is protected from taxation by the constitution."

"Connecticut's?" I asked.

"No, the U.S. Yale was founded long before we had a country. And the constitution says very explicitly that all contracts and agreements entered into in the colonies would be honored in perpetuity. And Yale never paid taxes."

I was anxious to hear Joe's answer to my question about isolation in Hopper's paintings, but he thought it unfair to conjecture about the psychology behind a work of art. "I just think that Hopper does everything so well. My sister came out from Michigan; the day after Thanksgiving, we saw the Hopper show in New York City together. I liked the painting of the lighthouse so much that Esther bought it for me. Also there was Rooms by the Sea. And she just really fell in love with that. And I said, 'Well the painting is in my backyard.' At that time I lived… I'll show you where I lived. Literally back-to-back with the art museum. So I thought, 'Well, gee, that'd make a good present: get her a reproduction of that.' And they had a nice reproduction of it in the gift shop right out on the main floor. The American paintings are on the third floor, and I kept going back and forth between the print and the original trying to make up my mind, ya know. The guy who was tending shop there finally said, 'Can I make a suggestion? Your sister's not going to be able to go upstairs and look at the original.' So I said, 'That's right.'" A broad smile split his face, and his eyebrows raised in glee at this stratagem.

We went to pay at the cash register/bread counter where traffic bottlenecked as friends stopped to visit by the front door. Joe greeted a portly older gentleman with a garland of gray hair surrounding his round bald head, and they set to commiserating. When they separated, Joe lamented that the co-op building in which they both live was going bankrupt. "Nothing downtown can hold its value."

68 New Haven: Gown and Town

New Haven, Connecticut: Gown and Town

The first thing I did when I got to New Haven was take a phone number out of my pocket and make a call. I knew no one in town, but the man who answered agreed to meet me for coffee and suggested a rendezvous site: the legendary bookstore-cum-coffee shop Atticus across from the campus of Yale University. Yale was home to four Hopper paintings I was here to see--more than any city besides the nation's capital of DC and the art capitol of New York.

Rooms by the Sea depicts the view out a door open seemingly directly onto the ocean. Jo noted: "could be called 'The Jumping off Place.'" Rooms for Tourists shows a Gothic house looming out of the dark night, cinematically lit by lamps on the lawn and street; only a fool would inquire about rooms here. In Western Motel, a woman in a full-length dress formally twists toward the viewer on a bed before a picture window outside which a long-hooded car noses into the scene. The final Hopper here, Sunlight in a City Cafeteria, portrays a café, with a cadaverous woman at one table and an equally pale man smoking a cigarette at another. Both stare into space, unable to connect. Hopper wrote to the painting's buyer, "I think it's one of my very best pictures."

Atticus roared with clattering plates, avid conversations, and babbling waitresses rushing around wearing T-shirts that read "censorship causes bad vision." Books and tiny café tables ringed the walls beneath bright fluorescent light. I took a seat at the epicenter of activity, a tiny square diner counter surrounding the grill. I could have plucked War and Peace off a shelf and read it entirely in the time it took to get served.

So I interviewed the sallow-skinned, blond girl in her early twenties sitting next to me and staring into space. She was a Yale student, and when I asked her major, she replied flatly, "Security Studies." I had heard that Yale was a breeding ground for CIA agents, and I suspected that she would fit right in when she said that European nations are "happy our troops are there. Really." She pleaded the Fifth on my question about isolation in terms of United States policies abroad but did comment about isolation in New Haven.

"I don't know a lot about New Haven, and that might be a good sign that we at Yale are set apart and isolated. And Yale is, what, the fourth largest, uh, richest, university in the entire world? They could do a lot more for the city's economy. Some people say, 'Yale is reaching out.' But once you drive about ten minutes from Yale, you don't see that."

Her boyfriend nodded his dark eyes from below a bulging brow and a floppy white tennis hat. When I asked if he, too, was a student, he balked, "No. No no no. I'm from about 20 minutes away. I think people in New Haven are isolated. Socioeconomically: the haves and have-nots are separated. You see at Yale incredible disparity: the best of the best and worst of the worst, right next to each other, crossing paths down the street. You see people near campus who obviously (well it's terrible to stereotype but you kind of assume) don't go to Yale. And the people literally just passing them are probably going to go on to do something like be a scientist or something. And it's amazing how they both live right in the same area, but one is just so far away from the other. Yale's a very strange place.

"You're always isolated in some way," he continued. "Emotionally, people are isolated from one another because you can never really truly completely connect with another person. Even if you have good relationships, people who love you, you still can be feeling isolated from what goes on around you. They don't know who you are. Lots of people, you figure they're happy if they smile. But they're hiding their minds."