In several of my classes, I bring in Edward Hopper's painting, Nighthawks. I put it up on the Big Screen to help my students understand the requirement for visual analysis in their research papers. If you don't know already, Nighthawks reflects the anxiety and isolation that pervaded this country in 1942.  Hopper completed this painting just a few weeks after the Pearl Harbor Attack.  It's from the viewpoint outside-looking-in at a group of very lonely people sitting in a New York City all-night diner. Their faces are hard.  Their gestures are nervous.  I ask my students "What is the message here?"  Personally, I think I know these people and what they are feeling inside the painting.  They have nowhere else to go. 

The lesson appears to work.   I follow Edward Hopper with a visual analysis assignment for our sixties research papers.  I share a picture of Marilyn Monroe in her famous sewn-on "Happy Birthday" dress she wore at Madison Garden in 1962.  She's standing between President Kennedy and his brother Robert.  Marilyn doesn't look too  happy.  Her jaw is clenched.  I tell the story behind the story, that these two pendejos passed her back and forth like a football, and after they were done with her, they tossed her aside upon the risk of a scandal.   My students dissect Dealey Plaza crime-scene photos.  They examine the parade route.  The position of the limosine prior to the killshots.  They detail on-stage fashion choices for historic perfomers at Woodstock.   They capture the expressions on faces of Elvis, Nixon, and Charles Manson.  This is so cool.  We look at a few of Hopper's paintings.  Watch a couple of art-history videos.  Hopper's work seems to capture our imagination.  Students respond in a variety of ways. At the end of the semester we are all Hopper-heads.

I now can draw on multiple Hopper books and biographies I have here on my shelves in Mexicali.   I  have an anthology of poems that were inspired by Hopper paintings.  The book is called The Poetry of Solitude.  In class, we read a Joyce Carol Oates poem that depicts the sadness of the Nighthawks woman in  the red dress.  For a women, who is sitting shoulder-to-shoulder at a bar with a handsome man, why does she look so lonely? Currently I'm reading an anthology of  crime-fiction short stories based on Hopper's paintings: In Sunlight or in Shadow.  Each author responds according to his/her own style and perception.   In a favorite story of mine, author Joe R. Lansdale has named one of his characters Mr. Lowenstein.  He created blackmail scenario based on the painting of a young woman usherette featured in Hoppers New York Movie.  Two wiseguys approach Mr. Lowenstein, the manager/owner of a neighborhood theatre with an offer he can't refuse. He either has to pay for protection, or his building burns down.   This young women will be beaten.  Or worse. In this collection, I have discovered a new favorite hardboiled writer.  Her name is Meg Abbott. She created a story behind Hoppers Girlie Show. I won't spoil the story for you here, but the woman in the painting is Hopper's wife.

Somewhere in the middle of my classroom instruction I will tell my students Hopper's wife, Josephine, posed for all his female figures.  Ed and Joe married after they had reached their forties, so the woman you see sauntering across the stage naked is married and middle aged. The only thing she is wearing is a tissue-thin piece of blue netting between her legs.  Her nipples have been dabbed with rouge. In her story, Meg  Abbott compares their shape and color to clown hats. I've read my share of biographical material about Hopper and his wife.  She was known for her diminutive size and firecracker-red-colored wild hair.   She was a determined artist in her own right.  You can see it in her face in the painting.  That's her, Josephine,  I know it.

I also know Meg Abbott must have read the same biographic material that I did before she wrote "Girlie Show."  Ed and Joe maintained a brutal relationship.  He could be, and mostly was,  an abusive husband.  He was known to strike her on various occasions, and she was known to hit back. In the 1930s they lived in a modest Greenwich Village with only a small kitchen stove to keep them warm in the winters.  On many a night, apparently, Ed forced Jo to pose naked for hours upon end in the biting cold of the apartment kitchen.   He would become increasingly angry if he she moved, but the colder it became, the closer she would move to the stove.  On one of these nights, she got so close, that she seered her ass.  Ed would not let her treat her wound until he was done with his painting. Meg Abbott reconstructed this scene in her short story "Girlie Show."  Her protagonist is married to an asshole who happens to be a painter.  At the end of the story, when this woman steps onto the stage she feels hotter than she has ever felt before.  Her breasts are bouncing. The trombones are blaring.  The wolf whistles are calling.  Her unsuspecting husband is sitting in the audience.  He is shocked at what he sees. He screams her name, "PAULINE!"  She doesn't care.  She doesn't love him now, and never will again. 

I began this post with the plan to discuss Megan Abbott's noir novel Queenpin,  for her short story inspired me to search out more of her work.  From the very first pages, I appreciated the poetry of  her writing style.  The lights.  The colors.  The emotions.  Surprisingly,  her short story was also full of violence and rough sex. In Queenpin, the author takes it up a notch;  her main character is a young unnamed woman who finds a job in a nightclub business office.  She thinks she's going to keep the books, but that's not even the beginning of what she's going to keep.   She's a twenty-two-year-old kid who goes to business school in the morning and works for gangsters at night. She falls in love with a denerate gambler and the gangster she works for is a woman, a bad-ass Joan Crawford type.  The gambler uses and abuses her.  Joan Crawford teaches her the ropes.  This young woman knows if Joan Crawford ever found out about her secret lover, she would kill them both. Here is the thing: the young woman just can't stop what she's doing.   Almost all she ever thinks about is this man's hands on her.  The rest of the time, she fears what will happen if Joan Crawford finds out.  It just gets crazier.

I'm not planning to read Queenpin with my classes any time soon, but I will definitely plan more activities based  on Edward Hopper paintings.  I've enjoyed reading about Ed's background.  When he was the age most of my students are now, he moved to France to study art, but what he learned had nothing to do with anything French; he realized that in order to succeed, he would have to embrace his American Self. For the next twenty years, he worked to capture  the loneliness and alienation we Americans have all felt at one time. All of the characters portrayed in his painting express a longing to escape their dreary lives.  The turning point for Ed was finding his soulmate.  With Jo's love and support, he finally began to paint scenes that captured world-wide attention. The Hopper forty-year marriage was rocky and often violent, but the result of their artistic collaboration will always be hopeful and thought provoking.  I don't like telling my students what they should read after they leave the classroom, but discussing Hopper's paintings will open their eyes and their hearts.  I can only expect more reading to follow.  We all need someone to love.