Diane Arbus (37 page)

He had been going out with her for a couple of months when he discovered that Doon was “really pissed off at my dating her mother. Maybe it was because I’d known Doon first—Michael Smith had introduced us. Anyhow, she didn’t approve of me with Diane and she made that very clear to Michael, although she was always unfailingly polite with me.”

If Diane knew how Doon felt, she never mentioned it to Sainer. Photographer Bruce Davidson, who was seeing Diane at the time, says, “Diane would have to have known. I’ve never seen such a symbiotic mother/daughter relationship. They were intensely close—fascinated by each other and bugged by each other.” He goes on to say that he developed a powerful attraction to both women and believes they played up to that. At one point he even considered dating both of them, but decided against it. “That would have really caused trouble!” He went on seeing Diane for a while and still remembers the undercurrent of tension whenever the three of them were in a room.

Meanwhile Sainer continued inviting Diane to the theater. “I remember she asked me to take her to
Mother Courage
.”

Sainer, the poet Marvin Cohen, and the late John Putnam seem to have
taken turns walking with Diane around New York. Putnam recalled in an interview before his death in 1980 that he and Diane used to walk all the way down to Chinatown and the Bowery, “counting all the people on all the benches, counting all the screamers on the street.”

The gray, perpetually disheveled Putnam was art director of
Mad
magazine. He lived in the West Village and in his spare time he took photographs, sculpted, painted, and was in the midst of taping the memoirs of a high-class hooker he also happened to be in love with.

“Diane really dug that,” he recalled. “There I was, a divorced man in my mid-forties, father of three children, who was trying to cut loose with this completely zonked-out girl who had eighteen abortions. I’d gotten her completely dependent on me. I’d lend her money, get her out of jams, but I was nuts about her and fascinated by her sordid life.”

Putnam said, “I’d tell Diane how I’d once visited my hooker’s parents. They lived in a falling-down house somewhere in Queens—the walls were covered with color snapshots of genitalia. The father was a pimp, the mother was a prostitute. They were either yelling at each other or falling into abject silences. Diane was dying to photograph them, but somehow we never got around to it.”

July came and Doon and Amy went away for the summer and Diane was left alone in the Charles Street house. She rose early—at five a.m. Sometimes she might listen to the recording of Mozart’s
Requiem
which Howard had given her after their father died. Sometimes she invited friends over for breakfast, serving globs of cheese mix on bread. Or she’d hang on the phone with friends like Isabel Eberstadt, who was trying to arrange a sitting for her with Mrs. Dodge in the Fifth Avenue mansion where she lived with her fifty cats.

Diane was now starting to photograph teen-age couples—on the street, in Central Park, on the piers by the Hudson River. She was also photographing triplets in New Jersey. One of her most famous portraits from that period shows three identical sisters sitting on their beds. The style of the photograph seems almost flat, but the subjects suggest something extraordinary and paradoxical, all the more so when you know what Diane thought of the image.

“Triplets remind me of myself when I was an adolescent,” she said. “Lined up in three images: daughter, sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each with a tiny difference.”

Apart from triplets, she was continuing to photograph all kinds of people and places in New Jersey because New Jersey seemed to contain everything: hermits, burlesque houses, nudists, reclusive gypsy fortune-tellers,
magicians, Princeton, inbred mountain people who spoke in strange tongues, Kenneth Burke, black gangsters, and the Palisades, which to her resembled mythic prehistoric mountains. New Jersey was a treasure trove, and she went there as often as she could.

But New Jersey or the “mud shows,” second-rate little circuses in Pennsylvania—that was about as far as Diane wanted to travel, and then only for a couple of days at the most. She hated being away from New York for long; she seemed to have no desire to see the rest of the world. And Howard was the same way. He would appear at a poetry reading in Boston or even as far away as the Iowa Writers Workshop, but he would always try to catch a plane back to Bennington the same night. Occasionally he’d spend a weekend in New York. On his last visit Diane had taken him with her to Hubert’s and introduced him to the man who ate lightbulbs and the midget who did impressions of Marilyn Monroe. Howard remembers “that a snake charmer wrapped her snake around my neck and I just stood there, damned if I was going to let my little sister know I was scared shitless.”

Uncharacteristically, in the late summer of 1963 Diane, encouraged by Marvin Israel, took a two-week trip across the United States on a Greyhound bus. She was elated by the prospect, because the trip would enable her to complete her Guggenheim project of photographing ceremonies: pageants, festivals, contests, family reunions, baseball games…

Once on the bus, she lost herself in the vast landscape of America, surrendering her gaze to millions of new images. She could compose a new world with every blink of her eye. There were glimpses of orchards heavy with fruit, there were endless rolling hills, rusting automobile graveyards, neon-bright motels. There were factories and slums and funeral parlors and schools and zoos and gas stations, and women in soiled housedresses wearing vivid Cleopatra makeup. In a bar the wavery image of President John F. Kennedy shouted,
“Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Along the way Diane sent cryptic little postcards to childhood friends like Phyllis Carton, who’d accompanied her on her first adventures into the unknown, and to another friend she wrote: “Everything is superb and breathtaking. I am crawling forward on my belly like they do in the movies. This may sound nutty but I have discovered that life is really a melodrama.”

Afterward Diane implied that terrifying things had happened to her on that cross-country trip—experiences she would never describe. Danger stimulated her and she always associated taking risks with pleasure. She disliked compromise. She might strike up a conversation with somebody quite dangerous in order to take the consequences. And why not? It was
only through some violent initiation that one could really learn to “see” and “feel.” Diane believed very strongly that as long as she had her cameras to shield her, nothing bad could ever happen to her. Nothing real. She was, she told someone, only afraid for the inside of herself. Never the outside. Outside things could never touch her.

Later Doon wrote that all she knew about that trip was that at a rest stop in Arizona her mother missed the bus and “burst into tears” saying she needed to get back to New York to pick up her eight-year-old daughter, Amy, from summer camp. “Finally somebody took pity on her and drove her at breakneck speed to catch up with the bus.” When she returned home Diane felt this trip “had been her proving ground, and having survived it, she knew she could go anywhere.”

In the fall of 1963, Marvin Israel arranged with Bea Feitler and Ruth Ansel (who were now art directing
Bazaar
together) to run another portfolio of Diane’s pictures in the December issue. This one was entitled “Auguries of Innocence” and it featured portraits of children (two were of Amy). The images are soft, misty, romantic, and captioned by various riddles (both Israel and Diane loved riddles). One of her favorites, from Lewis Carroll’s
Alice,
ended the four-page spread.

Then someone came to me and said

The little fishes are in bed…

I took a corkscrew from the shelf:

I went to wake them up myself.

And when I found the door was locked,

I pulled and pushed and kicked and knocked

And when I found the door was shut,

I tried to turn the handle, but—

“Is that all?” Alice timidly asked. “That’s all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Good-bye.”

(Carroll’s blend of humor, horror, and justice always appealed to Diane; indeed, her own “adventures” with hermits, nudists, carnival geeks, and midgets sometimes seemed almost inspired by Carroll.)

That same fall Joseph Mitchell began getting regular phone calls from Diane again. “She called one morning I had a hangover and asked me how I was, and I answered, ‘Suicidal.’ She asked, ‘Have you ever felt like killing yourself?’ and I said, ‘Well, most people have,’ and she said, ‘I’m not
asking about most people, I’m asking about you.’ So I answered, ‘No, I don’t think so except that when I’m in high places I have the inclination to jump.’ ”

Diane went on to say that she thought people should have a choice about killing themselves; it was their right, and someone needn’t be thought of as unbalanced or psychotic to kill himself. “We talked a great deal about suicide that morning,” Mitchell says, “but in the most clinical, academic sense. I’d done a story once on various types of suicides—I’d worked with the police on it—and they had special terms for different kinds of suicides: the gas route, the dry dive (jumping out a window). Diane liked those expressions, but the one that really fascinated her was ‘the hesitation cut.’ Apparently people who consider killing themselves often give themselves ‘hesitation cuts’ on the wrist with a razor.

“Diane told me she wished she could have photographed the suicides on the faces of Marilyn Monroe and Hemingway. ‘It was
there.
Suicide was
there,’
she said. Then she got depressed and asked, ‘What is the point of life?’ I quoted something from Robinson Jeffers which ends, ‘Discovery is the world to live in,’ and I said to Diane, ‘That’s what you’re doing,
discovering
—that’s the point of your life.’ She said she disliked Jeffers’ poetry but appreciated the idea that perhaps she was discovering something.

“During another conversation she told me she was Howard Nemerov’s sister. I was very surprised. I knew Howard through Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, who had an office at the
New Yorker,
but I wondered why Howard hadn’t ever mentioned that he had a photographer sister named Diane Arbus.” During that same phone conversation Diane mentioned that Howard’s latest project was an autobiography, a kind of self-investigation which he was calling
Journal of the Fictive Life.
He hoped it would serve to release him from the block he had about writing fiction because he desperately wanted to write more novels.

It was astonishing that she told Mitchell as much as she did. She rarely admitted even to
having
a brother (let alone a sister), although she was very proud of Howard. She read all his work, attended every reading he gave at the 92nd Street “Y”—even the seminar on modern poetry at which he debated Allen Ginsberg and James Dickey, and which the critic John Simon artfully moderated. She would refer to “my brother’s and my long but infrequent conversations” as “absolutely terrific.” Although she complained that her own thoughts were “so personal and limited and exclusive and feminine, whereas my brother has a body of knowledge that is totally unpersonal and [totally] intellectual.” In the
Journal
Howard cries out, “I hate intelligence and have nothing else.” In the
Journal
he tries to confront his greatest fears, his most shameful feelings. Always he sees
himself as “a stranger, a mystery, which brings me to search in a spirit of guilt and isolation.”

Throughout one section he digs far back into his memory: “A dream of many years ago. Two women, fairly young in…special motoring costumes from the twenties. They stand on the steps of a grey stone house, under a porte-cochère, and a voice outside this picture said: They do not know that they were both killed in an accident the same afternoon.”

He writes that this dream “connects itself with a vague memory that my mother used to drive a car when I was very young, but later gave it up…the image of the two women, and what the voice said of them, has long been to me an emblem of the mystery and terror of time. I don’t know why I suddenly recollected it again while thinking of the portrait of [Diane] and myself, and of the two children [Diane and myself] in the poem [“An Old Picture”] (who are supposed…to be betrothed royalties)…

“Something I remember being told in childhood: My mother pretends, for a home movie, to make love to another man. I threaten to kill him.

“The connexion, again, is
picture.
We have the portrait, the poem about a portrait, the photograph of the two women in the dream, or daydream, and now this home movie. My vocation as a grownup has to do with making images, but I have never much cared for photographs. The same sister [Diane] is a professional photographer, whose pictures are spectacular, shocking, dramatic, and concentrate on subjects perverse and queer (freaks, professional transvestites, strong men, tattooed men, the children of the very rich). Thou shalt make no graven image. Unlike a great many people, I do hot keep pictorial representations of my family on the walls, on the desk, in the wallet (but this does not seem to be a strong prohibition; just now a photograph of my son at about the age of seven done by [Diane] is tacked to my bulletin board next to a photograph of Willie Mays given me by my son.)… So the portrait has reached out to draw to itself a cluster of notions relating to visual imagery; representation, likeness…

“People, tourists, say, who habitually respond to a sight by photographing it, appear to me very defensive about life. As though they wished to kill reality in order to guarantee it, as though only the two-dimensional past were to have a real (a historical) existence.” He adds that “the camera’s initial lie” is the phrase “The camera cannot lie” or a similar phrase, “One picture is worth a thousand words.” The camera, a product of a materialistic civilization, only reports the surface of things “in ‘simple location in time and space’ (Whitehead)… Language, on the contrary, constantly asserts reality to be secret, invisible, a product of relations rather than things. The camera, whether in the hands of reporter or
scientist or detective, pries into secrets, wants everything
exposed
and
developed
… The camera wants to
know.
But if my hypothesis is correct, this knowledge is dialectically determined to be unsatisfying, so that there can be no end to the taking of pictures… Everything known becomes an object, unsatisfactory…hence to be treated with contempt and forgotten in the illusory thrill of taking the next picture.” Howard finished by saying that this “critique of photography (my sister’s art) is quietly but quite specifically intended to be set against writing (my art) as guilt against innocence. The statement, for example, that ‘language constantly asserts reality to be secret, invisible, a product of relations rather than things,’ may be aesthetically very intelligent, but is noteworthy on less attractive grounds as well. That is, by identifying myself with language, as against photography, I covertly seek to exculpate myself from any charge of having spied on my parents; their doings are still ‘secret, invisible.’ ”