The Symbiosis of Man and City: “Summer Solstice, New York City” and Nighthawks
Sometimes, inanimate entities are endowed with the ability to emote. Cities exist not because of presidents and borderlines but because of people, drafts of wind, the hole where there was once a building and now there is air (or vice versa). Sharon Olds views New York City this way–not as the product of bureaucrats but as the home of people, a place where fish and clothing and coffee are sold. A place where men are born and saved and stop breathing. Edward Hopper, similarly, sees the city as a place where Phillies cigars advertises above a diner, and inside there are men and women, and outside there is night, and these things are true anywhere. Olds views New York City as a previously sealed deal, where nothing, even life-altering events, can change much, and where the city carries on, responsible for its inhabitants, but oblivious, gathering steam. The same is true of Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, which depicts the city as apathetic to itself, to its tenants, and to the night. Both pieces display an unaware New York City, but not necessarily an uncaring one.
Olds’ poem, “Summer Solstice, New York City” explains New York through a series of mug shots. The most clear one, of course, is of a man who threatens to jump off of a building but is convinced to come down. But there are also shots of the police officers trying to save him; the son one of the police officers is trying to raise, “the crowd gathered in the street” (Olds 3). The lone woman in Edward Hopper’s painting, The Nighthawks could easily be the mother Olds describes, “whose child has been lost,” who screams “at the child when it’s found,” or perhaps she was once the child (Olds 4). She is painted humanly and lonelily enough to be either–for although she is sitting at a bar, directly next to a man, she is occupied only with herself, glancing at her fingernails. She is bored to be out, but there is something more friendly to her about the solitary night among strangers than returning to whatever home she may have. There is something better about this lack of communication.
Conversely, the lines of the poem are separated as they might be in a conversation. In reading the piece out loud, one finds that the line breaks come at moments of natural breath, as people speak, in keeping with the intimate and personal quality of the poem. Similarly, the language is, for the most part, conversational, as when Olds says, “The tallest cop approached him directly/softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking” (Olds 3). Olds is poetic in her precision, not by placing flowers at the reader’s feet. The same is true of Hopper–the painting is bare, with only as many objects as are necessary for a late night at a diner–a few cups of coffee, sugar shakers, coffee presses. The colors, too, are subtle, a variety of muted browns and greys. Even though there is a woman dressed in red, she is red under a fluorescent restaurant light, and she is as washed out and as earthy as any other color present. Hopper paints in the voice Olds uses when she talks.
On the other hand, reading the poem aloud makes one breathy, because it has a quick, consistent movement. In the poem, the city surges a man forward, the earth begins “to work for his life,” and in this same way, the poem surges the reader forward (Olds 3). The line breaks, as in “everything stopped/as his body jerked and he/stepped down from the parapet and went toward them” are like the movement of a city or a friend, distracting the man from his lonely goal. In this same way, the fact that the diner is open saves the nighthawks. Were it not for the openness of this one place, they would have to come to grips with a whole city, and their lives. Instead they are distracted, taken someplace specific, given hot drink.
The hot drink is part of a larger trend. Olds says that she believes the mind is “spread out in the whole body–the senses are part of the brain” (Garner). As such, it is important to know about the “soft, tarry surface” of the rooftop where the man wants to die, about “his shirt/glowing its milky glow” (Olds 3). It is also important to see the saltshakers on Edward Hopper’s counter, the barman’s hat. Because for Olds, these things define the brain, are a different kind of thought, and are perhaps the most prevalent kind at night when there are only a few people left in the cafes. No one is theorizing, but they are all drinking coffee, and so for the present, that is their mind. Hopper, like Olds, sees the city as “an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and bad dates” (Cook). It is the role of the artist to be a flaneur, a singular notion among all the pieces of a city, observing them but not collecting them.
New York as represented by Sharon Olds, too, makes these kinds of observations. When the man in Olds’ poem is hanging over “the lip of the next world,” all of a sudden he is the charge of the city, the city recognizes him as a child it was supposed to take care of and didn’t (Olds 3). But once he is back over the edge, in the fold again, the city makes no great spectacle of him. Even the police officers who worked so hard to save him did nothing but “leaned against the wall of the chimney and…lit a cigarette” for each of them (Olds 4). Once he is back over the edge, he is safe again, just as the nighthawks are safe inside the diner–there may be something still wrong with the city, but it is its best trying to look out for its own. This is reminiscent of a concept E.B. White outlines in his essay, “Here is New York,” when he writes, “New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along” (White 15). As soon as things are back to normal, he says, they are normal. Just as the poet must collect images and smells in a city, the city collects the poet and puts him back where he belongs “without inflicting the event on its inhabitants” (White 15). In this way, the city and the population maintain their deal, to coexist and to look out for each other, but not consciously, and to avoid at all costs acknowledging each others’ presence. This balance is crucial to New York’s survival as it currently exists.
Also essential to the city, as well as to both the poem and Edward Hopper’s painting are “hint[s] at mysterious stories we can’t quite puzzle out” (Cook). In the case of the painting, both the relationships of the pictured parties and the empty street go unexplained. In the poem, the reader knows very little about the man who is trying to kill himself. His life, origins, and reasons for wanting to die are completely silent in the poem. The reader only knows that “he could not stand it” any longer (Olds 3). They do not even specifically know who “he” is or what it is he cannot stand. The artists, in both cases, legitimize this vagueness because it is not really vagueness at all–it is only that the subject matter is not necessarily what it originally seemed to be. In the case of The Nighthawks, the painting is really about the night, not the people surviving the night. And in Olds’ poem, the subject is not the specific man on the specific roof but rather, the interaction on a regular basis between man and city. It is about “the tallest cop” and how part of his life is watching men die and come back down afterwards, okay again (Olds 3).
The end of “Summer Solstice, New York City” brings the poem back into the context of the world. The speaker reveals herself–not as any particular party, not as a cop or a would-be suicide, but as a part of the whole scene, of New York. The speaker says, “then they all lit cigarettes, and the/red, glowing ends burned like the/tiny campfires we lit at night/back at the beginning of the world” (Olds 4). In these four lines, the speaker brings herself into the poem as a part a human, which reinforces the poem as a testament to humanity and its power. They are all the people who were at the beginning of the world, even if they weren’t really there, because everything is part of vast categories from which life is born and saved and ended. So, just when E.B. White says that “New York often imparts a feeling of great forlornness or forsakenness,” the poem says that the man wanted to end it all (White 16). But just when E.B. White says “it seldom seems dead or unresourceful,” the speaker says the police officers got him to come down; the speaker comes back to the poem and starts fires with the people he could have stayed so far from if he’d wanted to (White 16). They bring themselves together, and moreover, the city which played at ignoring them brought them together, to save each other.
Olds says that it is the job of poets to “get in art’s way as little as possible” (Garner). In this way, she and Hopper create art of a kindred nature. In their respective pieces, they allow their cities to breathe, to exist, to be lonely if that’s what they need to do and “to step down from the parapet” (Olds 3). The artist steps out of the way and the man steps off the roof and you see that the city is working, holding things together that you thought it had no hand in. It would save these people even if there was no poem written about it later. It would send the cop up the building even if, “the man was armed” at the top. It would keep them all bound to being each others’ saviors and part of each other (Olds 3). It would keep the diner open for an extra hour if the woman kept ordering coffee, simply because she looked as though she had no place else to be.
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