Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  They cut no more classes after that, although Alex did take Diane down to meet his parents in nearby Northampton and they spent the afternoon with Ethel Cook and Sam Eliot, a tall man with a terrible stutter, who showed her his pride and joy: a huge book he’d written—the definitive book on the birds of the Connecticut Valley. Afterward Diane likened Alex’s family to the pattern in their living-room carpet. She said, “Your father reminds me of the middle of the rug—worn, walked over; you’re the bright patch under the chair—you haven’t been touched yet.”

  Toward the end of the summer Allan Arbus came up on the bus to visit Diane and she introduced him to Alex as “my fiancé.” Alex says, “She had told me she was planning to marry this Allan Arbus, but she was only fifteen. I kept hoping she’d change her mind.”

  He found Allan handsome, slight of build, and amazingly self-contained. When he spoke, his voice sounded deep, almost fruity. Alex was surprised at the way Allan treated Diane, “tender but dominating; he’d keep telling her, ‘Finish your sentence, girl, don’t let your thoughts hang.’ Diane never finished sentences—that was part of her charm. It had never bothered me.”

  After that summer Diane wrote to her brother, Howard, at Harvard about Alex and urged them to meet. The two young men eventually had lunch in Cambridge and, says Alex, “talked a blue streak.” Later they attended Ezra Pound’s controversial lecture during which Pound made some anti-Semitic comments. Howard said nothing, although he was very conscious of being Jewish; a definite quota system existed at Harvard and in most Ivy League universities, and Harvard was a conspicuously Brahmin establishment. Howard was aware of this and believed the best thing to do was keep his mouth shut. Nevertheless he was intent on making a name for himself and he did by excelling in everything—top grades, swimming, high jumping, tennis. He got into the prestigious Signet Society; he published short stories in the Harvard Advocate. “Howard was a golden light on campus. He was brilliant,” says Clara Park, who was at Radcliffe at the time. “He was rich, he was good-looking. He got sixty dollars a month allowance—astronomical in those days.” Dryly witty and courtly with people he liked, he could be arrogant and contemptuous of anyone less bright than he. He chose his friends carefully: there was Clara, there was Bill Ober, an aspiring music critic, and Reed Whittemore from Yale, who was just about to start a little poetry magazine called Furioso with James Angleton.

  Howard and his friends read T. S. Eliot, his archenemy William Carlos Williams, and Archibald MacLeish, and Howard began scribbling poetry, competing with his first-year roommate, Billy Abrahams, who’d already won awards for his poetry and been published in The New Yorker. “Howard wasn’t going to be a poet—he was a poet,” Clara Park says. “He had a grandiose vision of himself—to many girls he became a darkly Byronic figure. God, he took himself seriously! I’ve never known anyone to take himself so seriously! He gave himself a goal to write three thousand words a night and he kept it up for quite a while. But he didn’t think he improved.”

  Howard explains: “Writing was for me at the beginning sinful and a transgression…the emphasis I place to this day on work, on being industrious for the sake of being industrious, contains a guilty acknowledgment that I became a writer very much against the will of my father, who wanted me to go into his business, or, as it used to be called, go to work.” He adds, “In retrospect, one of the reasons I worked so hard at Harvard was to prove to my father that even though I wasn’t going to take over Russeks I was still a man of good character—that creating art—writing poetry—could be as much work as working in a department store.”

  At the time, Howard identified with Thomas Mann (one of his “spiritual fathers”). Mann’s persona—that of a lofty, elegant recluse—appealed to him. He may have also identified with this great writer because, despite his talent for defining character, Mann was privately not very interested in people. In his junior year at Harvard, Howard won the prestigious Bowdoin Prize for an essay on Mann’s The Magic Mountain and how the novel embodied the quester myth. He had tea with Mann at Princeton and later spent the $500 prize on a secondhand Buick. When he realized he wouldn’t have enough money for the insurance, he phoned his father and asked if he would give it to him. Mr. Nemerov chastised him severely for not having considered this detail before buying the car. “Howard was absolutely crushed by Daddy’s disapproval,” Diane said.

  During the 1938 winter holidays Alex Eliot attended the Nemerovs’ annual Christmas party. “A crowded affair—lots of rich eggnog in silver bowls.” As far as the Nemerovs were concerned, Alex Eliot was Howard’s friend, but Alex spent most of his time with Diane, “although it was difficult because Howard never left us alone.” Diane got so annoyed at her brother’s continued presence that she finally stuck her tongue out at him and he burst out laughing. “It was one of the few times I have ever seen Howard laugh.”

  That same Christmas, Alex accompanied Diane when she sneaked off to a rendezvous with Allan at an East 86th Street delicatessen. Alex sat with the couple for hours over their coffee while they recounted the drama of their romance, explaining in graphic detail how the Nemerovs disapproved of it and how they planned to marry in spite of the opposition; how they loved each other passionately and well. Suddenly Alex, swept up in the emotion of the moment, blurted out his feelings for Diane—extolling her talent, her sensitivity, her beauty—while Diane giggled with delight.

  By New Year’s the three had become inseparable—wandering into art galleries, roaming through Central Park knee deep in snow. They went to Russeks, too, and Diane took Alex on a tour of the entire store, ending up in David Nemerov’s wood-paneled office. Nemerov, knowing that Alex wanted to be a painter, gave him an assignment to do some fashion illustrations. Alex sketched a few rapidly on big sheets of paper and then he and Allan and Diane pasted them up along Fifth Avenue opposite B. Altman and near the Empire State Building.

  By themselves, Allan and Alex talked for hours—discovering they shared many interests in art and in books. They both wanted to be artists—Allan an actor, Alex a painter. And they shared the same Renaissance idea—that friendship, even more than sexual passion or romantic love, was the essential ingredient of a good life. Eventually they told each other a great deal about themselves and “we became as close as brothers,” Alex says, “which was funny because, looking back on it, we were the exact opposite. Allan was cautious, cool, a perfectionist, while I tended to excess—I drank too much, talked too much, ate too much, smoked too much. Allan never did too much of anything.”

  Over the next year Alex would periodically come down from the Boston Museum art school to New York and see Allan. The two young men developed a strong and affectionate friendship, but it was Diane who made them feel alive. “Because, no matter how well we thought we knew her, she was elusive—an enchantress.” Anything could happen when they were with her; she was a catalyst, a troublemaker, a source of joy and despair. “She was such a profoundly feeling being—we were both deeply touched by her,” Alex says. “Her emotional, feeling life was the dominant part of Diane; her intuition, her emotions were extraordinarily developed by the time she was fifteen. The intellectual life was brilliant, too, but secondary to that; and the life of the will—the drive to accomplish something—was very much a third.”

  Alex was sure she was a genius. “Always surprising. Like the objet trouvé she’d made for Allan that he had framed in his room. What Diane had done was place a worn and polished stone on top of two twigs—one bent and one straight—and it became a composition and one I found strangely moving. I asked Allan, ‘What is it?’ and he told me that Diane had fashioned it for him during one of their walks through Central Park, and I said, ‘What does it mean?’ and he said, ‘I think it’s meant to be us.’ ” Allan knew how greatly gifted she was, and although he was gifted himself, I think he was afraid he couldn’t hold her—that she was too much for him, that he simply wasn’t on her level. At some point in 1939 he confided to Alex, “I’m just going to hold her ba
ck, you know.”

  Alex says that his “heart leaped because I wanted to marry her so terribly, so I asked, ‘Why are you marrying her, then?’ thinking I might stand a chance.” Allan replied that Diane wanted to and he wanted to because he believed he could give her the security she needed. Desolate, Alex returned to Boston.

  At that time he was renting rooms in a Beacon Hill house on Pinckney Street that belonged to Evans Dick. Dick and his wife had once been extremely wealthy. Now they took in boarders, and their four daughters—a beautiful, eccentric brood—lived jammed together on the top floor. Anne, the eldest, was a fashionable, high-strung blonde who had just broken off her engagement to the poet, Robert Lowell.*

  Jean Stafford, who married Lowell soon after, used to cry, “If you say that Anne Dick looks like Bette Davis one more time, I’ll do you violence!” Anne did have slightly protruding eyes and a seductively caustic manner, and she was very bright, having already had poems published in Hound & Horn. “An aura of glamour surrounded her,” her cousin Frank Parker says, “because she had been psychoanalyzed for her depressions. Her parents were afraid of her—her beaus were afraid of her—she and her sisters fought like cats and dogs. She could get very edgy.”

  Anne was thirty when she met Alex Eliot; he was nineteen. She was terrified of becoming a spinster. “Getting married was essential to Anne,” Parker goes on. “Having a man to depend on—to live through—was of prime importance. And Alex was intelligent and charming and sexy—and he came from a distinguished family.”

  So Alex and Anne “courted” for the next six months while he painted furiously but without much success. He had very little money. In fact, from time to time Allan Arbus would send him $5 a week from his meager Russeks salary to help pay for groceries. Then Alex managed to scrape enough funds together to start an art gallery in his rooms, which he called the Pinckney Street Artists Collective. He showed friends’ experimental work, including Diane’s, and he was extremely enthusiastic about the venture, but it failed in less than a year. In his distress he phoned Diane, who was properly sympathetic. At the close of the conversation she said that she and Allan wanted him very much to be the best man at their wedding.

  After that Alex continued to see Anne Dick and they decided they were in love and he would give boisterous parties in his rooms and serve iced Russian vodka while some of his friends made charts of the novels they were going to write. Early in 1940 Alex and Anne got married.

  Later he would tell people he’d been totally unaware of Anne’s violent mood swings—one day she would be euphoric, the next so despondent she became physically ill and took to her bed and the only thing that seemed to soothe her was warm tap beer that Alex used to fetch from the local bar.

  When they met, Diane responded instantly to Anne’s struggle with depression since she suffered from bouts of deep depression herself. As their friendship grew, they were to spend much of their time together cheering each other up.

  * Diane always believed in female naturalness. Although she’d been taught that hairiness, menstruation, and body odors made one “impure,” she rebelled against her parents’ preoccupation with cleanliness. She couldn’t understand why women were kept in a state of innocence about their flesh and blood and denied their sensual animal selves. In time Diane chose to wear no deodorant, and as she grew older, people—particularly men—would comment in embarrassed tones about her “funky body odor.” However, she enjoyed her smell. She carried herself proudly—shoulders squared—totally accepting it.

  * Lowell’s parents had forbidden their son to leave college and marry Miss Dick. They had bitter arguments about it and Lowell had become so enraged he knocked his father to the floor, breaking his glasses. Throughout his career Lowell returned obsessively to this incident in his poetry—expressing continued anguish and remorse.

  7

  UNTIL SHE REACHED HER senior year at the Fieldston School, everyone thought Diane would go on to college. She had the reputation of being such a singular student, and nobody else took herself as seriously. She was solemn, she was dedicated. Naomi Rosenbloom can still see her “trotting over to me during recess—I’d been goofing off, and she let me have it. ‘You can be much better than you are,’ she chided. ‘You should always strive to be as good as you can possibly be.’ ”

  She was certainly striving. In her autobiography she had scribbled: ‘For about four years I had visions of being a great sad artist and I turned all my energies toward it.” This was evident not only in her painting, but in Elbert Lenrow’s Great Books course, “because,” Lenrow says, “she wouldn’t accept other people’s ideas of composition.” The essays she wrote on Flaubert and Sophocles predict her work with a camera; she was already preoccupied with ambiguity, with contradictions. She was examining rather than interpreting the world.

  “We talked—we argued together,” Phyllis Carton says, referring to the group of bright students she and Diane belonged to. They would meet in the cafeteria and hold long discussions about what they were being taught. “We were passionate about the school, our futures, ourselves,” Eda LeShan says. “We wrote letters to each other—’I can’t live without you’ kind of thing.” As if to prove it, LeShan and Carton gathered up a bunch of twigs to symbolize their clique and buried it under the foundation of a new building going up on campus. “We laughed a lot,” LeShan goes on, “but we took ourselves very seriously.”

  They all planned to go to college, and although Diane didn’t say anything, everyone assumed she’d be going to college, too. That is, until Shirley Fingerhood asked where she’d applied—Radcliffe? Bennington?—and Diane answered that she hadn’t applied anywhere; she wasn’t going to college, she was getting married to Allan Arbus and that was that.

  “Falling in love with Allan had made Diane feel very grown-up,” Phyllis Carton says. “To her, marriage would mean a huge life experience, and college was dry—it meant more education. That wasn’t life for her. She was preoccupied with anything physical—any physical sensation that made her believe she was alive. Her menstrual cycle fascinated her—after she fell in love with Allan, she talked to me about her longing to conceive and bear a child. We discussed the mysteries of conception; she thought childbirth must be the most extraordinary experience in the world.”

  One of the last things she did in art class was to create a weird collage of a mother and child out of different-colored paper towels; it was three-dimensional—a woman with a fetus swelling inside her womb. “It was very strong—very powerful,” Phyllis remembers. “And the mother’s eyes were so sad. It was so different from the stuff the rest of us were doing—I was sketching the Cloisters, for God’s sake.” Everyone in class was impressed by Diane’s collage, but “spooked by it, too. There was something about it that was downright scary.”

  “Her talent was very special,” D’Amico says. But being thought of as different made her feel self-conscious. “In some ways Diane wanted people to think she was like everybody else.”

  So in a way it was a relief when her father, after praising her gift for painting, dismissed it as a “hobby.” Her true goal, he said, was “to live under the wing of a man.” Yet he was very disturbed about her continuing romance with Allan Arbus. Allan Arbus wasn’t proper “husband material”—couldn’t she see that? With all the advantages she’d been given, with all the expectations, how could she possibly want to spend her life with a would-be actor? She should go to college first. To which Diane would reply that she was in love with Allan and intended to marry him.

  Throughout her senior year at Fieldston, despite her father’s anger and disapproval, she continued seeing Allan as often as possible. None of her friends ever met him, but she talked about him constantly, telling Phyllis Carton that she was “madly in love.” Every so often, looking grimly determined, she would bring him home. “Mommy and Daddy were going to have to accept them as a couple,” Renée says. “Diane wouldn’t budge.” It finally became a battle of wills between father and daughter, and
David never stopped carping, criticizing, mocking. Diane kept quiet.

  Now suddenly it seemed more important than ever to believe she could escape from her family—Allan would take her away and they would create a life together free from all memories of the gloomy, oppressive Nemerov apartment so thick with useless experience, so cloudy with cigarette smoke. She told Phyllis that she felt she had never belonged there (“I’m an orphan,” she said). In fact, she felt it was impossible to be herself at all. She was conditioned to please—to do what her parents wanted, what Allan wanted, and it was always extremely hard for her to make up her mind about the little things. Should she go to the movies? Or the theater? What about the ballet? And should she wear her pink cashmere sweater or her pale silk blouse with the pearl buttons? She would grow overwrought trying to decide. For much of her life she would be like this. Only when she began photographing on her own did she turn decisive.

  In the meantime, crazily, she concluded that if she got married and became a wife (even Allan’s wife), she would somehow win her father’s approval—since he did expect her to play out that role. Then she would enjoy the rewards of being a “good girl” (whatever that meant). Married, she would fulfill the demands of others—the demands of her willful, striving self would have to wait; and at least if she was married her parents would finally leave her alone. But she was ambivalent about whether or not she was doing the right thing.