GAS AND GHOSTS
1.
It is mid-winter, and I have flown to Melbourne wearing my long black coat. Years old, it dates back to a time when I lived on an island in the Irish Sea, a salt-scoured place of spare, treeless hills, a rock set in the blast of the skinning north wind. Under the coat, two fine woollen tops are a precaution against Melbourne’s legendary winter chill. Later, passing through the airport on my way home to Adelaide, I will reflect that I always over-prepare for everything, and yet life still catches me unaware. Especially the inner life, with its warp-threads deeply bedded in the past and its capacity for springing disturbing surprises.
This rare interstate trip is a treat for a young man who loves Australian Rules football, and we will spend an afternoon at the MCG. But my secret mission is to visit a painting by Edward Hopper at the National Gallery of Victoria. With Hopper it has been half a lifetime between drinks: I last stood in front of one of his paintings in 1982, when a selection travelled from the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Art Gallery of South Australia. “The World of Edward Hopper” consisted of fifty oil paintings, many watercolours, drawings, and prints. I was studying watercolour painting with South Australian artist and teacher Ruth Tuck, and I noted in my diary that I was excited to see Hopper’s work.
I must have forgotten, I think, that his paintings always subtly evoked the grief-benighted months after my father’s death. I first encountered reproductions of Hopper’s work around that time, which is why they return me to that afflicted period. It could also be the quality of the light in Hopper’s paintings that carries me back, the draining light of interiors in which figures sit as if numbed by nameless sorrows, or poised on the brink of some impending event, after which nothing will ever be the same. Added to this is the erased detail in his work, a quality that draws his paintings close to memory, close to dream.
When I first became aware of Hopper then, I was in my early twenties, a young woman making her way alone. It is easy to see how his figures in landscapes that threaten to overwhelm them resonated with my solitariness. Hopper’s women, especially, appeared to be nursing private griefs and disappointments. Like Matisse’s young women, I imagine they were managing precarious lives, yet Hopper’s female figures have none of the calm courage Matisse gave his girls; they were not animated by the same spirit. Nor did they dwell in the charmed, bright realm Matisse favoured, but in scenes of daunting melancholy, whether staring out of a hotel window, or sitting in a train carriage with a book, or at a café table with night pressing at the window.
All his life, Edward Hopper resisted narrative interpretations of his work. In a sense, each of his paintings resembles an exquisite short story in which he evokes place, character, tension, and he invites the viewer to receive these elements according to their own experience. ‘The loneliness thing is overdone,’ Hopper said. And I doubt I would have described his figures as lonely when I first saw them – if they were alone they had been captured in a moment of typically human solitude. Now, decades later, I see that Hopper’s figures spoke to something deeper in me than the apparent loneliness of a young woman living far from home. They struck a note against my truest self, the part that had chosen the solitary path, despite its perils and pitfalls.
Born in 1882, in Nyack, New York, a small shipbuilding settlement on the Hudson River, Edward Hopper was the younger of two children born into a middle-class Baptist family. By the age of twelve he was an awkward six-footer, constantly drawing and painting. His facility with pen and ink would set him on a course as an illustrator, a career he despised. Alongside it, Hopper kept painting, and in 1906 he travelled to Paris, where the Fauves and Cubists were stirring up the art world. Too reticent to approach the figures at the centre of the city’s bohemian art scene, Hopper painted out of doors whenever the weather was good; he absorbed the light and colour of the Parisian spring, and then returned to America. He would go twice more to Paris, and for a long time the paintings he made there, or made under its spell, seem to have held him back from breaking through into the essentially American vision of his artistic maturity.
At the Adelaide exhibition in 1982 it was Hopper’s coastal studies that drew me, their weatherboard houses assailed by a fierce bright light that subtly suggested violence in otherwise idyllic New England landscapes. His most famous painting, Nighthawks, was not included, and neither were the paintings that have since become my favourites, Automat, Morning Sun, and New York Movie. But a handful of oils pulsed with the mystery for which Hopper is famous: Carolina Morning (1955); Seven A.M. (1948); Stairway (c. 1925).
The works in that exhibition had been bequeathed to the Whitney Museum by Hopper’s wife Josephine, a bequest of some 3,000 pieces that had included her own accomplished watercolours and oils, and all that she still held of her husband’s. But while the museum kept Edward Hopper’s paintings, they retained only three of hers. A list of titles was made but no documentary photographs, and the works are rumoured to have been dispersed to hang in the corridors and waiting rooms of New York’s public hospitals and other buildings.
I would not hear Josephine Hopper’s name or learn that she had been a painter for perhaps thirty years, which might have been common among Hopper fans who lived outside America. But before her marriage, Josephine Nivison had studied under Robert Henri (1865-1929), a leading figure of the Ashcan School of American realism, and her work had been respectably exhibited and well received. From the extensive journals Jo Hopper kept it is clear that she, too, was a passionate painter, and that while she tirelessly supported her husband, she understood – and minded bitterly – that her own painting, even her existence, would be eclipsed by his.
Not only was she doomed to live in her husband’s shadow, but Hopper disparaged his wife’s talent with the patronising description ‘lady flower painter’. Josephine Hopper, a small, talkative woman, retaliated with bouts of silence, and even hunger strikes. She believed a prejudice against artists’ wives operated among gallery owners and art critics, and that this, combined with her husband’s refusal to support her art, ensured that from the moment they married she was excluded from important exhibitions.
2.
At the National Gallery of Victoria I pass paintings by legendary artists, from Cézanne and Matisse to Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O’Keefe. The walls are crowded with such luminaries, each worthy of close study, but my time is limited and I am anxious to locate Edward Hopper’s Gas, painted in 1940.
I come upon it unexpectedly, and have to step away to take it all in. Plainly framed, its image of a petrol station on a lonesome road shadowed by locust trees is familiar from reproductions. But it is even more radiant than I had anticipated, and its mix of light sources – a technique Hopper favoured – creates the impression it is illuminated from within. I spend much of the morning in the room with Gas, looking, taking photographs, observing as people move in and out of the painting’s orbit.
Its three petrol pumps are painted in a jumping red that draws the eye yet manages not to be jarring, or to overpower other elements in the picture. The pumps are arranged so that the circular light of the front pump is at the absolute centre of the composition. The figure standing to one side of that pump, a man of middle-age, appears to be closing up ahead of the gathering dark. At the bend where the road disappears from sight, darkness thickens in a dense, suggestive vortex between the man at the petrol pumps and the brightly lit roadhouse.
The figure is soberly dressed in a white shirt and dark tie, in blue trousers that have the colour but not the cut or fit of jeans. He wears a brown waistcoat that might be leather, and with his thinning hair and rounded shoulders, he appears resigned to his role in this out of the way place, even if he is a little beaten by it. Along the roadside, grasses flame with the last of the light and with the light from the roadhouse. Their fiery presence suggests that the way out is fraught, that the road is an escape route this tired man long ago allowed to burn. Light spills from the doors and windows of the quaint weatherboard building, with its squat, louvered tower; when the man has locked up he will go inside to whatever evening pastimes await him there, while a winged red horse – the Mobil gas trademark – prances high on a pole, and night creeps down out of the locust wood.
Hopper said of this painting that it was not any one petrol station but a composite of many such places he had seen. He made charcoal studies of filling stations at Cape Cod, drawings made ‘from the fact’, as distinct from those improvised in his studio. Jo’s diary records Hopper’s disappointment that these country gas pumps were not lit until late in the evening, making it difficult for him to study the effects of their light. The scene at the petrol station, as has often been noted, focuses on a place where the built environment meets the natural world – the lit roadhouse pitted against the impenetrable wood – and it is set at dusk, that indistinct border.
The Hoppers travelled often in search of subjects for Edward. When he became restless in his Washington Square studio they would embark on a trip, most often by car. Jo was an enthusiast for these adventures, which at times took them as far as California and Mexico. She complained in her journal that her husband would not stop to let her paint. With him it was always ‘on-on-on’, according to Jo, although his watercolour Jo in Wyoming (1946) shows her in the front seat of their car with a paintbrush in her hand and a picture propped against the dashboard. Hopper would collect drawings of isolated outposts, like the little three-pump petrol station, and one of his studies for Gas was part of the 1982 exhibition that travelled to Adelaide.
Jo noted of Gas: ‘Pictures come so hard this year...Ed is struggling’. Hopper was fifty-eight when he painted Gas, a sufferer of debilitating bouts of depression as well as thyroid and pituitary conditions. Everything about the demeanour of the man at the petrol pump suggests that it is Hopper himself. Although he travelled far and wide in search of subjects, each painting was an expression of his own inner life, and Hopper publicly expressed his belief that ‘the man’s the work’ and that the pictures ‘talk about me’.
Like Matisse before him, Hopper wrote his own “Notes on Painting”, although his 1933 document gives little away. Artist and author Brian O’Doherty, Hopper’s long-time friend and one of only eight people who attended his funeral, said of Hopper that ‘his silence was half process, half paralysis. He was mysterious even to himself. And he plumbed the sense of mystery he found in himself’.
If every painter paints himself, then in 1963, towards the end of summer at Cape Cod, the self that Hopper painted was an empty room with two rectangles of sunlight and two corners sunk in shadow. In Sun in an Empty Room, the dark shapes of vegetation fill the window, as ominous and impenetrable as the locust wood in Gas. It is a room someone might be moving in to, or out of. German film maker Wim Wenders insists that every Hopper painting is the beginning of a story, but there are few clues as to whether this story is about to start or to end.
The Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has written that ‘in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness’. Edward Hopper was nearing the end of his life when he painted Sun in an Empty Room, and perhaps he had also reached the end stages of this progression towards the acceptance of loneliness. His final painting, Two Comedians (1965), shows two diminutive figures on a darkened stage: himself and Jo. The shadows at their backs are reminiscent of the woods that loom in paintings like Seven A.M. and Gas. When the curtain falls, the figures will step back into the dark.
3.
I saw my father for the last time in Sydney; it was a winter's day in King’s Cross. I was leaving for New Zealand in a week, and in Kellet Lane we stood on the broken concrete of the forecourt outside the flats where I had been living to say goodbye. I don’t remember what I wore, but he was in his old bottle green cable-knit jumper, V-necked and unravelling a little at one elbow.
“I love you, Darling,” he said and hugged me.
As he drove off towards the Blue Mountains in his battered Fairlane I had no way of knowing that those would be his last words to me.
With his death three months later, the world in Sydney I had imagined I would return to collapsed. After the funeral my mother would leave the farmhouse outside Penrith, where they had been living, and having squeezed everything she could salvage from their life together into her car, make the long drive back to her parents' house in Adelaide; my fifteen-year-old brother went with her. Not knowing what else to do, I returned to my job in Wellington.
For the next forty years I would have dreams in which my father was alive and living a secret life elsewhere. His defection filled me with fury, as if we had been tricked into living without him. In other scenarios he had made a date for us to meet. Once, it was to be in a restaurant, but I had an engagement I was unable to break and was in an agony of distress because I would not be able to go. Yet even in the dream I knew the meeting would never eventuate, and I was anxious that my mother and brother would not be disappointed when this longed-for event fell through. Whether it was destined to fail because he was dead or because he was alive but would not come to the restaurant, I could not decide.
Dreams of failed reunions with my father have taken many forms, a fugue of grief and loss played out as a consequence of not having seen him in the last months of his life, nor at his death. At the time, I thought this meant that my memories would always show him strong, but instead I was left with the sense of something crucial left undone, and an uncertainty around his absence. If I happened to be in Sydney I would revisit the street in Kings Cross where we had said goodbye. It was as if I expected some pocket of time to open out of the old bricks and mortar there in Kellet Lane, and that he would appear again and embrace me. But he was ever a no-show, and the place where we had stood did not remember him; it barely even remembered me.
But there was one more dream to come, more vivid than all that had gone before. In it, my father suddenly appeared in a doorway. I went to him, and he took me in his arms – it is impossible to describe the intensity of that moment, but the longed-for embrace was as real as anything has ever been real. In my sleep, I was flooded with happiness. He was there; his arms were around me, and my face was wet with tears. And then there crept over me the old carping realisation that he was not ill, but healthy, and I could not help asking where he had been all these years. He could not answer; he stepped back a pace and disappeared.
I woke then, certain that he had been present. Still radiant with amazement and joy, I became convinced that he would not visit me again. For after that long, electrifying moment when I had felt his living warmth, it had seemed as if he was insisting that I stop grieving, that all was well, and that I no longer needed to pursue him through the realms of sleep.
In “A Sketch of the Past” Virginia Woolf describes how, after her mother’s death at the age of forty-nine, she had remained obsessed with her for the next forty-four years. It took the writing of To The Lighthouse to clear her mind, as if the portrait of Julia Stephen as Mrs Ramsay had both brought her mother to life and laid her to rest.
I am reading “A Sketch of the Past” during this expedition to Melbourne and, coincidentally, it is the 19th of July – seventy-nine years to the day since Virginia Woolf set about writing this fragment of memoir that was posthumously published as part of Moments of Being. And as I read it I am filled with a new, more specific grief, for I know that I will never write anything as luminous and as lasting as To The Lighthouse. I may never even write an adequate portrait of my father.
4.
That night, after visiting the Hopper painting, I dream again of my father. This time it is my mother’s birthday, and I have arranged a celebration. I go outside, where my father is walking towards me wearing a long tan overcoat. At the sight of him, my joy is so intense I almost wake, but perhaps because I long for this meeting I stay with the dream. The terrible thing is that he appears not to recognise me. I clutch at his arm, imploring, but he never meets my gaze. There is a sense of avoidance, as if he is being accosted by a stranger. Still, I manage to coax him through a gate; it is my own front gate at home. He comes willingly enough, but refuses to acknowledge me. Unable to bear it a moment longer, I run away, crying.
“I’m sick of you all!” I shriek. “Especially you!”
And I wake up wondering whether I have cried out loud in this silent hotel room in which three of us sleep.
Tearful and disturbed, I lie listening to the quiet breathing of my loved ones, a Bob Dylan song running through my head: “The Man in the Long Black Coat” tells of an abrupt and unexplained departure, an exit with no goodbye. And I remember how when I led my father into our garden he had begun to idly tear the heads off roses and hydrangeas, to my distress. All the frustration of earlier dreams is reprised in this one: there is the pain of the distance between us that cannot be bridged, except in the one rare, ecstatic dream, which is not, as I had thought, to be the last.
In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Sigmund Freud proposed that all dreams are a form of wunscherfüllung, or wish fulfilment, a theory that would dominate scientific thinking and research around dreams for many decades. In trying, as an amateur, to make sense of Freud’s ideas in that book, I found myself confused by the proposition of wish fulfilment: to see my father again would be my dearest wish, but if the meeting were written to my script I would never put myself through those rejections. At best, there were conflicting wishes at work – under pressure of the desire to reverse time, to make him not dead but still alive, the dream produced the thing wished for, but perhaps in that moment of almost waking, the desire arose for common sense to prevail, and for what cannot be changed to be accepted.
But what lay behind my heartfelt shriek? I was baffled by that furious and accusatory ‘Especially you!’. For his death at forty-nine was never his fault. It was a family catastrophe that would haunt me, as the death of Virginia Woolf’s mother haunted her, as all such deaths of parents haunt bereaved children. I can only suppose that what I felt in that moment was the frustration of having to deal with it over and over again in dreams.
Modern dream and memory research casts doubt on Freud’s wunscherfüllung theory, and scientists have come closer to decoding the function of dreaming. One study claims to have identified the site in the brain where dreaming occurs as an area associated with visual processing, emotion, and visual memories. The findings suggest that dreams help us process emotions by constructing memories around them. While what we see in dreams might not be real, the emotions generated are real. So it seems our dreams might be a way of stripping emotion from certain experiences – creating a memory out of them so that the emotion itself is no longer active.
On the other hand, some people believe in ghosts. I have never been convinced, though there was one experience that defied explanation: it involved a death on the far side of the world and, simultaneously, a vivid dream in which the deceased appeared at my bedroom window. Since then, I have accepted that hauntings can take many forms, and that dreams are a place where the ghosts that trouble us may make a last approach.
I was born in Melbourne but I do not know the city, just as in the dream my father does not know me. Are these two things related? I have no idea. But I travelled to Melbourne with him a few times, and two of these trips have a connection with the Hopper painting that would never have occurred to me if this dream had not sent me raking through the past for answers.
5.
When I was about ten, my family moved to the damp limestone country in the South East of South Australia. In Mount Gambier my father worked at the local radio station. Tuesdays were his day for visiting smaller towns, selling advertising slots, collecting copy, and he set himself the task of writing one song on the outward journey, and one on the way back. He had been selling songs to music publishers, often in batches of ten or a dozen. Slim Dusty had recorded one of them, and the single “Boomerang” entered the music charts. Throughout Slim Dusty’s long career it would be included on half a dozen albums, and a song book, and would still be bringing in royalty cheques long after my father’s death.
It was around this time that he teamed up with a singer; Johnny Mac had recently returned from Canada, where his band “The Downunders” had opened shows for Roy Orbison, Marty Robbins, and Jerry Lee Lewis. When Johnny recorded a tune my father had written one song-writing Tuesday, “Pink Champagne and a Room of Roses” became an Australia-wide hit. In America it was released on Select Records, and became the first recording by a South Australian artist to enter the US music charts.
In a twist my father might have predicted, had he been paying closer attention, the backing singers provided by the Melbourne recording company W&G were called The Seekers. Judith Durham, Athol Guy, Keith Potger, and Bruce Woodley were about to embark on the adventure of their lives, working their passage to England as performers on the cruise ship Fairsky. Their unmistakeable vocal sound, already fully formed before they left Melbourne, can be heard on “Pink Champagne” and even more clearly on the subsequent singles that my father produced and released on his own record label. The label, G.A.S., was an anagram for Good Aussie Songs, as well as a play on the sixties slang for anything exciting.
Before the group left for England, my father brought them to Mount Gambier, where they performed to a packed house at a local restaurant, the Rose Marie. I have often wondered, as I guess he must have, too, what might have happened if he had scrapped Johnny Mac and got The Seekers to record his songs. A year later we were listening to them on the radio, when their recording of the Tom Springfield tune “I’ll Never Find Another You” went to number one.
I was born in Melbourne because my father loved the city. But I left it as a baby, so it is odd on this visit to feel a sudden tug of connection. The Hopper painting has stirred up the past, and out of the murk has arisen the dream; though painful, it is responsible for the pull I feel, the lingering sense of my father’s presence, which I never feel in Adelaide – Adelaide is my mother’s city; safe, a little set in its ways, it has nothing of my father’s mercurial spirit.
He had grown up in rural Victoria, the eldest of four children, his parents working a small farm at Kangaroo Flat outside of Bendigo. They kept pigs and grew tomatoes, until a string of bad years forced them to retreat to Broken Hill, where the mines promised steady employment. His mother was from a large Italian family. In Bendigo they ran a boarding house in Hargreaves Street – “Specimen Cottage” is said to be the oldest building in the city, and before the Cusini family leased it, it is reckoned to have been a brothel.
In the late 1940s, as a promising bass baritone, he came to Melbourne to study singing with an exceptional teacher. Jessie Schmidt trained voices in rooms near the Russell Street Police Station, and my father would swear by the vocal exercises she taught him, and practise them all his life. A thin-faced, lean young man, he would have been tumbling from one bright idea to the next in those days, up at dawn, whistling, living on the scent of strong black coffee and cigarettes, buoyant with the optimism that was his default mood. I am sorry to think that, after his three years in Melbourne, it might have been my birth that put an end to his dreams.
There are so few people left who remember him. We each have a handful of anecdotes, but our stories seem two dimensional; there is no sense of the chronology of his life, none of its casual disorder or the daily routines that would give it substance. Yet as I wander along the golden flank of Flinders Street Railway Station, or study the shimmer of the river from Princes Bridge on this cold bright morning, I know that I have stepped beyond mere remembering: I am seeing what he once saw.
When a parent dies young, there is the first sharp sorrow; later, there arrives the desolating regret of never being able to know them as an adult, so that in the remembering one is, inevitably, destined always to be a little child-like. But stepping into his preferred surroundings, albeit many years later, does sketch a sense of the young man who once lived here; it adds a dimension that will always be missing from worn-thin memories.
6.
Hopper’s paintings are as much about what is left out as about what is included. He erased everything that would distract the eye, and each viewer can find space in his pictures for their own story – that is the alchemy Edward Hopper’s art achieves. The story I always bring to his paintings is some version of the aftermath of my father’s death. And if they rouse in me the old, unresolvable grief, each time I see them, I am awed by the light great art shines into ordinary lives. Like the sweep of a lighthouse, its beam passes over us, illuminating here and there a detail in the dark undulating mass of the unconscious. And whether Freud was right or wrong, whether my dreams are transforming grief into memory, whether they act as a trysting place for beloved ghosts or whether what arrives in the dark is only the result of word association, Gas bringing up G.A.S. through the mind’s subtle gymnastics, while I still remember, while I continue to dream, a dimension exists in which my father lives.
So I resolve to be less anxious about the dreams when they come, and to trust whatever neurological process they perform to do its work. I resolve too to travel more often to Melbourne, perhaps even to trace my own early days here. For I have felt on this trip the beginnings of a bond with the city – its rattling trams, its football fans, the weather in its wintry streets that is conducive to the wearing of a long black coat.
Carol Lefevre is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. Life-writing is a notable feature of her work, including the fiction. Her most recent book is the memoir Bloomer (Affirm Press, 2025).