Diane Arbus (16 page)

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.

Roy Sparkia, who accompanied Renée to the debut of this newest edition of Russeks, recalls from his journal: “Feb. 1949—the latest Russeks is a disaster. Crimson carpeting, pink walls, chandeliers and fluorescent lighting so everyone who walks into the place looks sick and drained…there was piped music and champagne and models showing off the latest fashions…” Diors with big, rustling skirts containing up to fifty yards of fabric—dark crêpe dresses, white tulle, lots of gray jersey, taffeta scarves, navy-blue coats with gold buttons.

Buyers and friends of the family were everywhere. Nemerov cousins, Russek uncles and aunts and children, and finally, Roy writes, “We wander up to the executive offices and sit around pretending we own the place…Diane is prowling around…I remember Allan reciting Shakespeare into the intercom—he sounded like John Barrymore—God, he had a beautiful voice.”

They returned to the main floor of the new Russeks just in time to see poor shoe tycoon Meurice Miller fall on his face over a fashion mannequin’s pointed slipper while the Nemerovs stood by in shock. “Nobody knew what the hell to say,” Roy says. “We all knew it was a fiasco. The store stayed open until 1956, but the Russek family lost millions.”

Driving back to New York, “Allan suddenly began talking about the negative and positive aspects of sexual freedom between married couples,” Roy goes on. “Renée and I were very possessive about each other and Allan kidded us about that. I got indignant because he said something like ‘You two behave like newlyweds—you’d have to get permission from each other before you were unfaithful.’ It all stemmed from the fact that Renée had wanted to have a drink with an old boyfriend and I’d told Allan I wouldn’t let her.”

Then the two couples started talking about what happens to a marriage after ten years, when some of the emotional adventure is gone. What
do you do? Play around? And if so, do you hide your affair or reveal it? “You’ve got to remember this was 1949—” Ray goes on. “Everybody was very uptight about sex—nobody talked openly about adultery, let alone illicit sexual pleasure. Diane had always been influenced by Allan in everything. His interest in sex got
her
interested in sex. We talked about sex—marital and otherwise—all the way home.”

Months afterward Diane reminded her sister of their conversation in the car and confessed that she’d slept with Alex Eliot a couple of times and Allan had known about it. It wasn’t meant to be serious, she said; it was for pleasure and to try and transcend possessiveness, and while she was deeply fond of Alex as a friend, she never felt so much as a twinge of the yearning anguish she associated with love.

She and Allan
really
loved each other, she said—would never stop loving each other. Theirs was romantic love. She believed implicitly in romantic love—in passion and a quickening of the blood. But she couldn’t reconcile the perpetual conflict in herself between love and lust, between need and fear.

Sex was very important to her. She bragged that she and Allan “made love all the time.” She had a growing curiosity about what other married people did in bed, and she had begun to ask friends intimate questions about their sex lives.

But the photographer Frederick Eberstadt, who used to run into the Arbuses in Central Park, thinks her interest was never prurient; rather, it was clinical. “Diane was just as fascinated by sexual duality and sexual conflict and ambiguity—sexual role-playing—as she was in sexual intercourse.” And she was reading lots of books on the subject. She told Cheech that she believed “masculine” and “feminine” were transcendent realities; sex differences were mysterious, unfathomable to her.

On another level, however, Diane’s sexual fantasies were dark and perverse. She once confided that she envied a girlfriend who’d been raped. She wanted to have that punishing, degrading experience, too. She could almost imagine it was like a murder—the murder of a woman’s nature and body—though the woman lived to tell the tale.

B
Y 1950,
A
LEX SAYS,
“Diane was pulling away from me.” She was committed to Allan, and the affair was incidental to her life, an experiment, and she didn’t bother to examine the relationship except in those terms; such things didn’t interest her. It was enough that when they were alone together her trancelike spirit might be suffused with a trembling vitality, an uncanny strength, and these occasions belonged to another plane—a friendly, enjoyable-enough plane that lay between their oh-so-different marriages.

Then they stopped being lovers. There was never any discussion, it was simply understood. Was she bored? Exhausted? Anxious in some way? Alex never knew, but he remembers their last time together and he insists he was not hallucinating. “It was late afternoon. We were on a high floor, so the blinds were drawn; the light was eerie. I was gazing down at her when suddenly her face became a death’s head. The flesh decayed and fell away from her cheeks and I distinctly saw the shape of her skull. And the eye sockets—black hollows behind those glorious green eyes. I was terrified and lay there not moving. Diane didn’t move either. I think she must have known what was happening. After a few moments the flesh swam back and covered her skull, forehead, and nose. My heart pounded very loudly on the pillow as I watched her hair—I used to call it smoky hair—burst out thickly and cover her bald head.”

From then on Alex threw himself into his job at
Time;
he interviewed Picasso and Matisse in the south of France—he ground out cover stories, among them “Photography, the Number One Hobby in America.” Subsequently he and his wife decided to separate and divorce, but “Diane had nothing to do with our break-up.” Anne had been frail and ill for years; now her drinking and depressions had increased and she was spending more and more time in hospitals.
*

After her mother and father separated, nine-year-old May Eliot boarded with various family friends—among them the Arbuses, with whom she lived for six months during 1950. She remembers very little about the period except that she was “fat and clumsy” and Diane and Allan were exceedingly gentle with her. She noticed they no longer sprawled on the mattress in the living room with her parents; now the two couples no longer saw each other and separately they often wore frowns on their faces, and Diane in particular seemed eerily detached. But she took being May’s godmother very seriously. “She was always
there
for me, a nurturing, magical force.” May grew up maintaining a closeness to both her father and her mother, but she always loved Diane in a special way. “We never referred to her affair with my dad, but it was like an unspoken connection between us. And I couldn’t hold it against her, because I knew she could never do anything intrinsically wrong. She was a wonderfully free spirit who had her own code of morality—she would never consciously hurt anybody. My mother stayed bitter, though, because she and Diane had been really good friends. She had liked Diane, so she was very hurt.”

May was “unhappy” at the Arbuses’. She felt uprooted, lost, cut off from her family, her home. Every so often she tried to express some of the anger and confusion that bubbled inside her to Diane. “Afterwards she would always say something soothing. I invariably felt better after talking to her,” May says.

Diane and Allan were listening to Alex a lot, too. After only a short hiatus he’d started dropping by their apartment again.

He could not stop seeing Diane and Allan—not completely. As far as he was concerned, the affair had been a “minor aspect” of their friendship, although “inevitable” from his point of view. But “we were creative souls in the making,” he would write some thirty years later—“we merged together now and then…and loved each other truly, not just with an itch.” Still, meetings proved uncomfortable for a while because “Allan seemed angry and he hadn’t seemed angry while the affair was going on.” Usually when he was with them Alex would lie on the couch talking about his latest
Time
assignments or the future of his daughter, May. Every so often he would start to laugh. “That was my way in those days—I tried not to let anything get to me—I laughed because I was so miserable and confused.” For diversion Diane and Allan would take photographs of him looking very hung over. Alex used one rather sinister close-up, blurry with cigarette smoke, on his first book jacket. “That’s the way Diane and Allen saw me then—as a boozer and a carouser, which I guess I was.”