A book for taking comfort in the loneliness of others
OLIVIA LAING MAKES PEACE WITH URBAN LONELINESS BY STUDYING ITS ART
British author Olivia Laing knows from desolation. Her third and latest book of memoir-travelogue-analysis, The Lonely City, opens with Laing in a state much like that of her first book, To the River: reeling from a ruptured relationship, brokenhearted, alone. But where To the River found Laing recovering from love’s demise bucolic maundering, following the same Sussex waterway in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself, this new book finds her taking the opposite tack, submerging into a metropolis, navigating a circuit of sublets. New York was supposed to be the place where Laing nested in coupledom; instead it became the locus of her loneliness, surrounded by others while feeling profoundly isolated.
New ardour arrived, but not in the form of a lover. “I was possessed with a desire to find correlates, physical evidence that other people had inhabited my state,” Laing writes. “I began to gather up works of art that seemed to articulate or be troubled by loneliness, particularly as it manifests in the modern city and even more particularly as it has manifested in the city of New York over the past 70 or so years.” That the subjects of Laing’s previous book, the captivating and incisive The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, were alcoholics seems indisputable. Can we make the same claim with regard to the ostensibly lonely artists featured in The Lonely City? Or, if they themselves were not chronically lonely, does their art say something singularly meaningful about loneliness?
Laing’s selection of painter Edward Hopper is a no-brainer, so much so that it constitutes The Lonely City’s least urgent section. I don’t know that anyone is likely to say anything new about loneliness in the work of the author of Nighthawks at the Diner anytime soon. Hopper’s influence is broad — we find it in the films of David Lynch, the music of Tom Waits, the photography of Gregory Crewdson — and the commentary on his work is already sufficient to furnish a small library. The Lonely City begins to stake a real claim with Andy Warhol, an artist who, despite having prompted his own surfeit of exegesis, remains divisive and is still being reckoned with. Warhol might seem a counterintuitive choice, given that he’s as associated with playing impresario to a scene as he is with artmaking, yet this is precisely why he’s the paragon of Laing’s conception of urban loneliness: the company of people eager to be noticed, along with the cloak of his creative apparatus — the camera, the tape recorder, the body double — provided the timid, at times pathologically laconic Warhol with the ideal caul for both his sense of isolation and desire for an anonymity of his own design. Engaging fervently with Warhol’s works and diaries, Laing articulates this dichotomy with elegance and acuity.
Just as vital to the thrust of The Lonely City is Laing’s investigation into the life and work of the mind-bogglingly prolific outsider artist Henry Darger, who some may know from Jessica Yu’s acclaimed 2004 documentary In the Realms of the Unreal. Darger’s childhood, marked by loss and abuse, his marginalized, hermetic existence, and the populous, fantastical cosmology of his art radiate loneliness like a distant desert planet. Less familiar to me at least was multidisciplinary artist David Wojnarowicz, whose photos of figures disguised as symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, loitering in various sites of urban decay, form an arresting collection of portraits of New York in its late ’ 70s, no-wave efflorescence. Laing considers the way these photos use masks both as creative device and negotiating tool for a hostile world. Laing reflects on Wojnarowicz’s oftenharrowing accounts of loneliness and despair as recorded in his writings, most especially Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, which, based on what’s excerpted here, seems a remarkable piece of literature. Wojnarowicz hanging from the ledge of a seventh- storey window or cruising the piers for anonymous sex comprise some of the book’s most indelible, thematically flush images. Wojnarowicz, like another of Laing’s key subjects, singer Klaus Nomi, died of AIDS-related illness. Laing goes on to write about the AIDS epidemic as kind of collective loneliness, but also as an issue that would foster solidarity in the face of appalling institutional neglect.
Upon its publication,
it was often remarked that the subjects in Echo Spring were all white American men. This same inclination carries over into the new book. Though The Lonely City is more loosely structured than its predecessor, it likewise weaves together biography and analysis of a handful of artists, with Laing’s abundant empathy and associative gifts constituting the thread. The artists given sustained attention are indeed all white men, and if not American by birth — Nomi was German — they are united in their having lived, worked and died in the U.S. It’s their having died that strikes me now. With the exception of Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris — who, from what I gather, Laing hasn’t met — all her subjects are dead. Death means their stories, strictly speaking, already have an ending. Death keeps them at a comfortable distance, and primed for projection. Dead subjects also allow a lonely author to protect her loneliness, a state precious to many creative people, a state which, as Laing writes, “might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.” It may sound perverse to suggest that loneliness is desirable, but there are several points in The Lonely City where what is called loneliness is not entirely distinguishable from solitude, something essential to many artists. This book, after all, is subtitled Adventures in the Art of Being Alone.
None of this is meant as indictment. I’m not suggesting that The Lonely City would be inherently better were it to focus on women artists, non- American artists, artists of colour or living artists as its primary subjects — but I think it would be a different book. A less insulated one. And it’s not entirely true that Laing’s subjects are all dead, because one of Laing’s subjects is Laing. The curatorial or analytical versus the autobiographical is another thorny question that Laing’s books raise and that merits analysis. I have a predilection for first- person essaying, for writing with an unabashed point of view, but a point of view doesn’t necessarily require that the writer write herself and her experience of writing directly into the prose. Echo Spring is a formidable, rigorous, highly focused study of the exceedingly colourful lives of famous writers ravaged by addiction, but the book’s travel-o-guey, memory bits were, for the most part, sympathetic, ordinary and inevitably less gripping by comparison.
The incorporation of memoir into The Lonely City is harder to evaluate, especially given that Laing’s depiction of her own loneliness eventually yields one of the book’s most resonant sections, one that speaks to a loneliness very much of the digital age. Laing writes of holing up in someone else’s cocoon-like apartment, where every day would begin with her snuggling up with a computer and tumbling long and headlong into the labyrinth of social media, where not only the lonely but the lonely most of all can find an ethereal refuge of dubious nourishment or sustainability. Social media are a figurative version of that strange duality of solitude and togetherness of which the city is the literal version. Laing is at her most poignant in this passage. Whether or not you identify completely with this particularly desperate purposing of the Internet, Laing’s portrayal rings eerily true. I am writing these words alone, on a computer, in my home, where my solitude is safe and contained. You may be reading these words in a mirror scenario. Tell me, dear, are you lonesome tonight? But please, no visits or calls. Just inform me via Twitter.