Diane Arbus (6 page)

In general, when she was a little girl, Diane’s affinity to painting drew her to Nemerov, who had secret dreams of becoming a painter himself. (He always took a sketch pad with him to Europe when he covered the collections for Russeks, and he would fill it with his visual impressions of Paris—the streets and the kiosks and cafés.) He was proud and protective of her ability, and when he could, he gave her special attention (“Diane was definitely his favorite child,” her cousin Helen Quat says). Sometimes he would take her along on his rare weekend expeditions to museums or galleries. Gertrude did not enjoy staring at paintings.

For several summers the Nemerovs rented houses in Deal, New Jersey, the so-called “Jewish Newport,” where families like the Guggenheims and the Strausses owned sumptuous mansions and gardens landscaped like Versailles. (Elaine Dundy, whose parents also summered in Deal, recalls being brought to the Nemerovs’ lavish home and watching Diane frolic barefoot on a wide, rolling green lawn. Behind her, Howard stood very stiffly, conducting an imaginary orchestra.)

Every August until the outbreak of World War II, David and Gertrude Nemerov traveled to Paris and the south of France, so during much of
their adolescence the three Nemerov children were sent away to camp. Howard enjoyed going to the mountains, where he swam and played tennis; Renée says she was “always homesick.”

Diane’s experiences in camp were fraught with savagery and drama; these were some of the first adventures she ever had. They remained vivid memories to her and she would occasionally re-create them for friends—how, for example, at Camp Arden in Maine the summer she was fourteen she had staged a veritable revolution against the older campers and in the process had been beaten up and had fainted for the first time in her life.

After that she had remained aloof from the other girls, although she hiked with them through the pine woods, played tennis and went swimming in the lake—she loved swimming because it was a mysterious activity and faintly sinister. Toward the end of summer she found one girl she thought she could trust—a girl rather like herself, shy, imaginative, who hated camp as much as she did. In between basketball games and flag ceremonies they would sit under the trees and tell each other how unhappy they were. Theirs was the paradox of being both spoiled and ignored by their parents, leaving a residue of anger and giving them a sense of omnipotence.

They spoke haltingly of their futures—could they possibly be devoted wives and mothers? How many children should they have? (Diane wanted at least four.) They had been taught to be compliant and ornamental, so they had little sense of self—they were valued for their looks and charm, for their ability to please their fathers, their beaus. But a tiny secret part of them longed to discover and assert themselves, and when they alluded to that yearning (Diane shyly confided she “dreamt and wished” she could be a “great sad artist”), nothing seemed good enough for them—nothing could fill their huge, undefined capacities. Somehow, somewhere, there must be a way to satisfy those inchoate adolescent longings.

And Diane would ask questions of this girl in a confidential whisper—she wanted to know
exactly
how she
felt
about everything, and she made the girl feel important because she seemed so interested in her. And finally Diane liked her “very much, even though every so often I would feel something she said rub against me. She seemed a little afraid of liking me and I was so unafraid I acted as if I liked her much more than I did. Because she held part of my secret and I couldn’t bear that.”

When the girl left two weeks early, Diane cried, but in her teen-age autobiography she confided she “almost hated her because she was too much like me. We both wanted to tell and neither one of us wanted to hear…”

I
N THE FALL
D
IANE
returned to Fieldston School, which she attended from the seventh through twelfth grades and which to some extent shaped her life. (Fieldston is located in the wooded Riverdale section of the Bronx, just off the Henry Hudson Parkway; it is the continuation of the two Ethical Culture elementary schools: the midtown school on Central Park West, which Diane had attended, and the Fieldston lower school.)

At the time, in the mid-1930s, ethical orientation was a big part of the curriculum, and Fieldston had inspired teachers like Algernon Black, a fierce, handsome man who believed that humanity was at once civilized and primitive. To illustrate philosophical points that had ethical consequences, he would recount symbolic anecdotes from Dante, Homer, the Greek myths, and Shakespeare to his students. He was a dynamic storyteller and Diane developed a crush on him.

From Black she learned that myths are not invented but inspired; that they come from the same source as dreams, below the level of consciousness. A dream is personal, Black said; a myth is a dream of society and concerns the mysteries of life. You can’t interpret images concretely—if you try, you’ve lost their significance. Certain myths concerning heroes and quests belong to nearly all societies.

For the rest of her life, Diane savored words like “quest,” “aristocracy,” “rituals,” “legends,” “kingdom,” and she began to view the world in mythic terms. Later she would see the ritual, the myth, in visual spectacles such as parades, contests, circuses, dances, and weddings, and such backgrounds would be a source for her photography. And as she pursued her dwarfs and giants, her eccentrics and extremes, she would explore the winding paths of self-dramatization, contradiction, and ambivalence in her subjects—between what men and women are and what they wish they could be.

Sometimes on a school field trip to a museum or a zoo she identified with
Alice in Wonderland
(a favorite book about growing up which she would read and reread as an adult, having memorized the riddles, the
endless kingdoms of freaks). Like Alice, Diane constantly wondered what was normal? What was not? What was animal and what was human? What was real or make-believe? She was never quite sure.

She couldn’t understand why when she and her class visited the Ethical Culture settlement house (an immaculate building set amid decaying slums) they weren’t allowed to speak to the outcasts and derelicts who lounged in the doorways while mangy cats skittered across garbage-strewn sidewalks. Diane longed to talk to these strange people—find out their thoughts. She sensed that the cultural gap between them and herself was enormous, but still she identified with these strange, sad people’s isolation—their aloneness. They were the same in some basic way—exactly the same.

Years afterward she confided, “One of the things I suffered from as a kid was I never felt adversity. I felt confirmed in a sense of unreality which I could feel as unreality, and the sense of being immune was, ludicrous as it seems, a painful one.”

The secret pain of being kept immune stayed with Diane until she began photographing experimentally by herself in New York during the 1950s. Throughout her adolescence her immediate frustrations centered on the fact, as far as she was concerned, “the world seemed to belong to the world. I could learn things, but they never seemed to be my own experience.”

To counteract this, she and Phyllis Carton would periodically create little adventures for themselves. They would ride all over the subway system, observing the strange passengers—the albino messenger boy, the little girl with the purple birthmark. These were visual, sensual experiences for Diane, and they frightened and pleased her just as later on photographing freaks and extremes frightened and pleased her, too.

Often she and Phyllis would get off the subway “impulsively—in the Bronx or Brooklyn or the Lower East Side—we never planned anything,” and would simply follow a person who interested them. It could be someone like an old lady, barefoot but otherwise dressed in bedraggled finery, and they would trail her for blocks, watching terrified and fascinated as she rummaged through garbage cans, babbling to herself, before she disappeared into a tenement building’s dark hall. Diane would have noted that the old lady’s ankles were swollen and red but that she had a tiny diamond in her ear—she was undoubtedly a countess in disguise. But what was it like inside her tenement building? Diane would wonder. She was dying to explore the old lady’s room.

Finally, just as it was growing dark, she and Phyllis would drag themselves back to the subway and home to their luxurious, gloomy
apartments on Central Park West. Later they might phone each other to go over again what they had seen and experienced that day. “Because
everything
in life was extraordinary to Diane,” says Phyllis, “even the most ordinary details. She would use the word ‘extraordinary’ to describe the old lady,” but she would use the same word to describe the way her mother played cards. Most afternoons the shuffling sound of cards echoed through the ornate living room. “I got the feeling that Diane was as terrified of reentering the bourgeois world of her parents as she was of exploring the world of freaks and eccentrics. Both worlds fascinated her because they seemed one and the same to her.”

Diane’s clique lived near one another on Central Park West, so they took the bus, and then the subway up to Fieldston School in Riverdale in those early mornings. “We’d crowd into the Eighth Avenue express sharing chewing gum and secrets,” Hilda Belle Rosenfield says. “Stewart and Phyllis and I talked a lot more to Diane than she did to us—often she seemed far away.” “And so beautiful!” Stewart Stern adds. “I was madly in love with her, but she never knew.”

(Unbeknownst to her clique, Diane was forcing herself to observe the men on the subway who exposed themselves. Some sat quietly, newspapers covering their genitals. Others stood between the swaying cars opening and closing their coats quickly, convulsively, and Diane would catch a glimpse of pinkish-brown swollen flesh and she would force herself to stare very hard. Terror aroused her. Later she said, “I must have counted thirteen exhibitionists on the subway during high school.”)

Once on Fieldston’s grassy campus, the quartet of friends attended fire drills in the rain, they raced to history class or the library, and, along with the rest of the student body, they voted to discredit cheaters. And they went on field trips: to the coal mines of Pennsylvania, to the Taystee Bread factory near Newark. There was talk of inviting a few of the factory workers’ children to lunch at Fieldston, but Diane argued against it as “grotesque” and the plan was abandoned.

Later she auditioned for a school production of Shaw’s
Saint Joan.
Everyone said she had the perfect spiritual quality and she was sure she would get the part of the peasant girl—she saw herself leading armies, hearing voices. But the teacher gave the role to someone else—an earthy, voluptuous type. Diane was devastated—both angry and upset. If she had had any dreams about going on the stage, she now abandoned them.

She started devoting more time to art class. Friends remember her bold paintings, the confrontational way she sketched the naked models relaxing, smoking in life-study class. She also made bizarre little pencil sketches—caricatures of people she saw on the street. She helped Stewart
Stern complete a huge mural in the school dining room. Her advisor and art teacher, Victor D’Amico, encouraged her to think seriously about becoming a painter after she graduated.

“She had a talent and I think she was responding to it negatively and positively,” D’Amico says. “She found it both a burden and a blessing, but she was what she was. She was special. I remember her hands—she had powerful, capable hands with great manual dexterity—she could put puzzles together, build models, concoct
objets trouvés.
She particularly enjoyed working with clay because she could control the material—she would knead and push and change the shape and she could feel herself doing this. She liked working in creative situations where her hands
controlled
the result. Maybe that’s why she ultimately shifted to the camera. She could capture the unguarded naked moment quicker on film than with a brush.”

D’Amico recalls how often she would come to his little office at Fieldston to discuss something. “Maybe about Käthe Kollwitz, who was a favorite of hers—or Paul Klee. ‘May I talk to you, please?’ I can still hear her hushed little voice. She was always bursting with ideas. She had such a superior intellect it was sometimes hard to follow what she was saying, she thought so quickly—so imaginatively. I remember her participation on a student panel at the Museum of Modern Art along with Phyllis Carton and Stewart Stern where she talked about what it would be like if Goya painted in the Impressionist style—afterwards Alfred Barr said, ‘That girl’s mind is terrifying.’ ”

She would wince every time D’Amico called her talented. Phyllis Carton recalls, “We felt like phonies. We told each other we couldn’t be as talented as D’Amico said.”

Frequently in class Diane appeared catatonic. “Not for long periods. We all got used to it,” D’Amico said. “Diane would be talking about something and then pfft! she’d go off into a kind of trance. It was when an idea or image seized her—it was as if she’d stepped out of the room to glance into a book for research—then she was back with us, talking away as if nothing had happened. I never in all my seven years of teaching her found her melancholy. She was endlessly curious, funny, decent, good.”

Diane kept on showing her paintings to her father; he was impressed. Although he had mixed feelings about any of his children becoming an artist (“How can you make a living at it?” he would ask Howard, who was then thinking of a career as a tenor), he was still pleased that Diane and her brother were so “creative.” When Gertrude complained that the children were growing even more distant with her—that she simply could not talk to them and whose children were they anyway?—David would laugh
and say, “They’re
my
children, Buddy. They take after
me.
” After all, the Nemerovs were artistically inclined. His mother, Fanny, had done water-colors—and didn’t he have a fabulous sense of design and color? “I could be a painter,” he would murmur.