Diane Arbus

by Patricia Bosworth

  It was partially true. Although Diane and Allan always pretended everything was going well in their work, they were still not earning much from fashion photography—they often earned barely enough to pay for rent and groceries, and, given the cost of film and paper, the extra music classes for Doon…

  The Nemerovs were undoubtedly aware that Diane and Allan were struggling, but they made no move to help. They would just beam proudly and say, “What wonderful kids” and fuss over them, insisting (much to Renée’s annoyance) that they describe to the group for the umpteenth time their latest fashion assignments.

  Mr. Nemerov bragged to all his friends on Seventh Avenue about “the kids’ ” assignments from Glamour and later from Seventeen. He was particularly proud when they got their first Vogue sitting (in 1949 they photographed a young woman seated in a limousine wearing a polka-dot dress). Nemerov never knew how much Diane and Allan hated the fashion business. Renée says, “They never told Daddy, because fashion was so much a part of his life.” Also he was having problems. During the late 1940s, Russeks, like most big department stores (Saks, Altman, Lord and Taylor), was battling the unions in their fight to organize the retail salespeople.

  Over the years Diane would always bring her camera to the Nemerov apartment. She told Tina Fredericks she wanted to capture the solemn ritual of the Friday-night dinner. Her sister recalls how she would wander into the dining room with her camera around her neck and wear it throughout the meal. “She would take a couple of bites of potato and then focus on all of us. The camera was almost like a shield. She seemed to be hiding behind it. I think she imagined that if she was invisible, everybody would forget she was there.”

  Often there wasn’t any film in the camera, but she would click away—click! click! After she read Cartier-Bresson’s famous essay on photography, she began talking to Renée about “the decisive moment” when everything falls miraculously into place—she talked about training her mind’s eye (which is why she kept her camera with her at all times); how the mind’s eye cannot see everything—that nobody can see everything in an image until the negative has been printed and hung up to dry.

  At the Nemerov dinner table she would focus her camera on the familiar figures of her childhood—on Grandma Rose bent over her lace work (she loved to watch the gnarled hands work the colors), and on Howard’s mother-in-law, Hilda, flirting delicately with David Nemerov.

  Sometimes other relatives dropped by—like Harold Russek, Gertrude’s handsome brother, and Aunt Ruth, who collected erotic art and was Howard’s favorite because she had a terrific sense of humor. And there were also David’s two “black sheep” brothers who were always borrowing money, and a crazy cousin who talked too loud and smeared lipstick all over her face and used to make scenes when she came to Russeks to shop.

  On occasion there was Uncle Joe, the lawyer, who had offices on Broadway and had been a pacifist during the war. Joe died in 1950 and supposedly on his deathbed told his brother David that since he had no children of his own, he’d decided to leave his considerable fortune ($4 million) to Diane, Howard, and Ren. Always competitive with his older brother, David told Joe, “Don’t do that. I’m taking good care of them in my will.” Whereupon Uncle Joe agreed and left all his money to other relatives. When Diane, Howard, and Ren heard about this, they were flabbergasted, but there was nothing they could do.

  Diane’s family obsessed her. In the 1960s she would plan an autobiography with pictures and text (which she never completed, but which she called “Family Album”). By that time she had abandoned the idea of “the decisive moment”—there was no decisive moment for self-revelation—and gave as much importance to her crazy cousin as to her art-collecting aunt. All her subjects became equivocal. She said she found most families “creepy—because none of us can ever grasp the scene of our own conception…it is probably the most tempting of all secrets…,” and she added, “Once in the middle of love-making I thought I was forgiving them for conceiving me.”

  Diane could never properly document the images floating around the Nemerovs’ candlelit table. “How does one photograph one’s father making funny noises in his throat to signal the maid?” For a while, however, she attempted a series of pictures of Renée, her younger sister—dark, sensuous, willowy Renée, who had just married twenty-three-year-old Roy Sparkia, a tall, handsome man from Owosso, Michigan, who resembled a college fullback.

  Roy’s nickname was “Slim.” He could walk on his hands and do acrobatics. In an effort to see America, he had hitchhiked through many states before training as an engineer in Bay City. During the war he worked as a bridge builder and camouflager with the Third Army in Luxembourg and France. After VJ Day he studied playwriting at Shrivenham University in England, then came back to New York, where he paid his way through the Art Students League by sketching caricatures at the Hotel St. Moritz.

  He and Renée had met when Renée was studying sculpture at the New School. “My roommate was in her class,” Roy says, “and he arranged to paint a portrait of her in exchange for a bust of his head. I first saw her when she knocked on our door holding a heavy bag of clay in her arms. It was love at first sight. I proposed a week later.”

  The Nemerovs disapproved of Roy “because I was Gentile and poor. David Nemerov tried to buy me off—offered me ten thousand dollars if I wouldn’t marry Ren. They took her off with them to Hawaii to think it over—but our love prevailed.” They eventually got married at the Nemerovs’ Park Avenue apartment on October 19, 1947. Diane was matron of honor.

  Now the couple were living in a basement apartment on West 16th Street and Roy was studying writing with Saul Bellow at NYU while Renée went on with her classes at the Art Students League. To bring in extra money, she worked part time as a sales clerk at Wannamaker’s department store.

  Diane visited them frequently, remarking later that she couldn’t believe Renée rose at three a.m. to cook breakfast with her husband. “That’s one of the reasons they fell in love—because they actually like to get up at three in the morning,” she said. After breakfast they would sit together holding their coffee cups on their laps in their darkness…

  Renée recalls, “It was always great seeing D. Part of me still hero-worshipped her—lived in her shadow, dressed like her, talked like her, even prayed to look wistful and waifish. When I fell in love with Roy, Diane was my confidante. I’m not sure I would have had the courage to get married if Diane hadn’t rebelled first and married Allan against our parents’ wishes.”

  When they were together, the sisters discussed money. Neither of them had any idea how to earn it, let alone handle it. “We’d grown up rich and spoiled and been given all the advantages, so we never learned thrift—we couldn’t even balance a checkbook. We were often near broke, but, you see, ladies didn’t talk about money. It wasn’t done. Being privileged had influenced us to the extent that we never thought we’d have to go out into the world and earn our living, which we were both now trying to do. We felt woefully inadequate. We always expected somehow to have money. It came as a continual surprise to us when we didn’t.”

  Both sisters swallowed their pride and asked their father for small sums, which he always gave them in cash. “He still had power over us. We still wanted to be protected by him—but he never volunteered help—he always had to be asked.”

  “We were taught that money was meant to be saved, to be put away in a bank,” Diane said. “Like when my grandfather would give me a ten-dollar gold piece, I wasn’t ever supposed to spend it.”

  The two young women envied their brother, Howard, who was managing to be completely independent financially. He’d spent the last two years writing while he and his wife, Peggy, lived on the $7000 he’d saved from his Air Force pay. Howard describes his first attempt at a novel (begun in London) as “Kafkaesque—a fable about a village under a rock. I was lucky nobody published it.”

  For a while he wrote poems and sold them to the Nation for $10 apiece. He also composed essays that were p
ublished in the Sewanee Review. Periodically he would show them to Diane, who in turn would show them to close friends like Phyllis Carton. Phyllis remembers one essay in which Howard elaborated on his view that “mankind is at once hopeless and indomitable.” She and Diane discussed this essay at length. “And Diane was so proud of Howard’s intelligence.” She envied his discipline because she fantasized about becoming a writer herself, but thought she was too disorganized.

  In 1946 Howard became associate editor of the literary magazine Furioso, working with Reed Whittemore and John Pauker. “It was mostly editing by long distance,” Pauker says, “because I was living in Washington, Reed was in Connecticut, Howard in New York.” The three men filled the magazine with their own poetry, and, Whittemore adds, it was their joint inclination at the time to “write about the futility of action.”

  Howard was also at work on his latest novel, but he was restless—pacing up and down, running out for fresh bottles of gin—so Peggy chained him to a chair. “It was my idea,” she says. “He was forced to remain at his desk.” It seemed to work until late one afternoon the doorbell rang and Howard bolted to answer it, dragging chair and chain after him. He flung open the door “and the look on the visitor’s face was stunned,” Peggy says.

  Every so often, to relax, Howard would break his isolation and he and Peggy would borrow the Nemerov limousine and, together with Diane and Allan, they would careen around Manhattan in the big car. Once they were stopped by the police, who were sure they were riding in a stolen vehicle until Howard (who was driving) solemnly convinced them he was the chauffeur.

  When Howard began writing poetry, it was “to write the war out of my system.” He was still having nightmares about the bombing missions (he would have them off and on for years). Like many other modern poets (Jarrell, Ciardi, Dickey—all of whom became his friends), Howard had been romantically attracted to the Air Force, and then the romance had turned to horror at war’s bloody atrocities. In his first book, The Image and the Law (published in 1947), poem after poem draws the same conclusion: that death in war is usually casual, accidental, and always horrific.

  You watch the night for images of death,

  Which sleep in camera prints upon the eye.

  Fires go out, and power fails, and breath

  Goes coldly out: dawn is a time to die.

  Poetry criticized Howard’s “lack of style” and “conceptual confusion,” and he was angered and upset.

  His friend Reed Whittemore thinks that “the legacy of modernism…was part of [our] writing consciousness and it gave us depressingly conflicted instructions about what we should do with our writing lives. It instructed us to cultivate and preserve our isolation (else we would turn into stockbrokers and the Word would not be saved); but it also instructed us with great ambiguity in all the lessons of the thirties…lessons about commitment and the dangers of commitment—lessons that tended to cancel each other out, but still lessons… We worked too hard. We were uptight. I remember a dreadful summer when Nemerov was in the living room trying to write a novel and I was in a bedroom trying to write a novel and on weekends there would be other writers, there would be wives and guests and partying, but also the typewriters sat there making their demands. They were vicious, those typewriters.”

  By this time Howard had used up all his savings. He didn’t know how he was going to support himself—he would certainly never turn to his father for money. Then a friend suggested he apply for a position at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, which he did. He got a job at $3000 a year teaching literature, and he and Peggy packed up and left Manhattan.

  “Howard really started to educate himself after he became a teacher,” Peggy says. “In spite of his Harvard degree, he felt there were great gaps in his knowledge and he determined to fill them. I’ve never seen a man study so. He read Proust, Auden, Yeats, Shakespeare, Montaigne, he reread Thomas Mann, Kierkegaard, Freud.”

  Privately he’d committed himself to writing, and he adopted impossibly high standards for himself, measuring both his prose and his poetry with stern self-criticism against what he read. From time to time he contributed essays to magazines such as the Partisan Review, but he was never part of the “Jewish Jesuits”—Delmore Schwartz’s description of the critics Lionel Abel, Harold Rosenberg, and Philip Rahv.

  Diane grew irritated by her brother’s dazzling ability to criticize and analyze and boast. He once cornered someone in the Arbus apartment, declaring, “I’m going to be the greatest novelist in the world!” and then he kidded Alex Eliot: “I’ll criticize your writing only if you criticize my painting.” (Howard couldn’t paint.) He was prodigiously ambitious.

  He stayed only two years at Hamilton, telling his old teacher Elbert Lenrow, “The place is like a country club.” In 1948 he and Peggy moved to Bennington, where they remained for more than two decades.

  Most of his colleagues remember him as a “solitary man,” immersed in his work and so fearfully shy his hands shook; in public he’d start perspiring. Nobody got to know him well; it only came out years later that his family owned Russeks—then people speculated that he must be rich. (He dressed quite elegantly. “I thought he was White Russian royalty,” a fellow teacher says.) However, he and Peggy lived simply; their house in the college’s orchard was, said someone, “almost shabby.” Howard was the first faculty member to own a TV set, which was both envied and looked down upon. Howard explained it away by saying that his parents had given it to him and he couldn’t decline it.

  He was considered by some to be a difficult teacher—“baroque, secretive, self-deprecating, although his erudition was intimidating,” a student said. When nervous (“I’m always nervous,” Howard says) he would start whistling during a student conference or in the middle of a faculty meeting, and it could be disconcerting. “I always got the feeling he was whistling away evil spirits,” says Bernard Malamud, who also taught at Bennington.

  “He seemed driven to excel,” his friend and colleague, the distinguished poet Ben Belit, says. At one point he recalls Howard publishing his own magazine at Bennington “with nothing but Nemerov in it—poems, essays, short stories…”

  ”Howard knew it was going to be a long, hard road,” Bill Ober says. “He refused to follow trends; he was never a joiner and he wouldn’t logroll or go along with current cant—his work as it evolved was all about the excellence of art.”

  In 1949 Random House published Howard’s novel The Melodramatists, a satiric family saga rife with sex and black magic. The major theme: the disaster that occurs when romantics (melodramatists) start facing reality. The heroines are two sisters, one of whom tries to find her identity in a totally unsatisfying exploration of her own sensuality. The father in the story is a dogmatic tyrant who goes mad and spends the last part of his life sitting in a bathtub.

  At a noisy, drunken book party given by Alex and Anne Eliot in New York, which Diane and Allan attended, several of their friends murmured among themselves that the book was “too personal.” Although Howard maintained that the characters he’d written were Boston aristocrats, “one of them sounded like a merchant prince to me,” Arthur Weinstein says. The New York Times called The Melodramatists “gifted—perfectly written.” Diane admired it and gave several copies to friends.

  The good reviews didn’t help Howard’s relationship with his parents; he still felt uneasy whenever he visited them in their Park Avenue apartment. “I don’t think they read my stuff—if they did, they didn’t comment.” He remained preoccupied with his guilt over being “a bad son.” He remembers dropping by Russeks and being embarrassed by a photograph of himself on his father’s desk. “One’s photographed face appears singularly vulnerable and without defense.” He was sure David Nemerov wished he would change his mind and help him run the store (now that Max Weinstein had died, Nemerov was the new president of Russeks)—he was sure his father was very disappointed in him.

  Howard remembers only one conversation with his father sometime during
the 1950s, when Nemerov asked him to accompany him to temple on Yom Kippur and Howard said he’d rather not. To which his father replied vehemently, “I don’t blame you,” adding suddenly, “I always hated my father and his religion.” For a few moments they were close—then the feeling passed. “We had very few exchanges,” Howard says. “We were both such uptight guys.”

  With Diane it was different; she and her brother spoke on the phone, and they corresponded. The year after his first son was born, Peggy and Howard went up to Cape Cod and stayed with Diane and Allan, and “Diane took a wonderful picture of little David wrapped in a towel which Howard had tacked up on his bulletin board for years.”

  Howard and Peggy also came down to New York for Frank Russek’s funeral, which took place at Temple Emanu-El in December 1948. Earlier, everybody had to sit shiva at the funeral home and “Diane became convulsed with laughter and made all of us laugh,” her sister, Renée, says. Diane said, “My relatives looked so serious; it struck me as excruciatingly funny—I mean, there was this living corpse out there and everyone was so serious.”

  Howard also joined Diane and Allan for the opening of the latest branch of Russeks in downtown Philadelphia. The opening came at a time when most store owners were planning branches in the suburbs. “So I’m either going to be the biggest genius or the biggest fool,” David Nemerov warned at one of the Friday-night dinners. He confided that the new store was costing a million dollars in Renaissance décor alone. There would be gorgeous replicas of Cellini mirrors—there would be a refrigerated, fireproof vault big enough to store fifteen thousand fur coats.