Diane Arbus Read Online Free PDF Page A

rich room.
    He bears a scepter, she a book;
    Their eyes exchange a serious look.
    High in a gallery above,
    Grave persons frown upon their love;
    Yonder behind the silken screen
    Whispers the bishop with the queen.
    These hold the future tightly reined,
    It shall be as they have ordained:
    The bridal bed already made,
    The crypt also richly arrayed.
    “The anecdote of the poem stressed the helplessness of these children under the traditional impositions of scepter and book, their fates already arranged by the parents (in the poem, the bishop, the queen).” Howard adds, “The poem ends with some considerable bitterness toward these grownups.”
    * To certain people Diane insisted she be addressed as Dee-ann, but she answered to “Dy-ann” as well. Howard shifted back and forth. In a letter he began “Diane— DEEANN?” Usually he called her “D.”

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    O N O CT. 13, 1928, when Diane was five and a half, Renée Nemerov, Diane’s younger sister, was born. As she had with her two previous children, Gertrude Nemerov delegated the care of this latest offspring to a nanny. Diane was very excited about Renee’s arrival. She began showering her with the affection she craved but had not found in her mother. At the slightest provocation she would pick her tiny sister up in her arms and rock her back and forth, kissing her over and over.
    Diane would always feel a special kinship with small children. She saw herself in them—isolated creatures, secretly raging. Some of her earliest and best photographs are of little boys and girls confronting their energy and despair. One of her most famous, entitled “Exasperated Boy with Toy Hand Grenade,” she took in Central Park in 1961, part of a series she planned on rich children “[since] I was a rich child more or less myself.”
    As time went by, Diane would accompany Renée and their nanny across Central Park, identifying trees and statues along the way. “Diane was my idol,” Renée says, “my point of reference for everything.”
    When Renée got older, Diane read her Grimms’ Fairy Tales, A Child’s History of the World, Gulliver’s Travels, Peter Pan, the Oz books, and especially Alice in Wonderland. Diane marveled over Alice as giant, Alice as midget, Alice fat and Alice thin, and she would often run to the bathroom and stare at her reflection in the glass. Am I really big…am I really small…am I in any way imperfect…am I just right? Like most children, Diane was fascinated by her mirror image.
    Meanwhile, Howard had taken up the piano and at home he practiced diligently. Diane (who’d refused to go on studying music after her brother started) would sometimes plop down next to him on the piano bench and correct him. “No, no, it shouldn’t be played that way but this way,” and she’d demonstrate, her fingers flying over the keys. Then she’d run off to fuss over Renée.
    Howard invariably dismissed Renée as “the baby,” but he seemedbriefly annoyed that Diane was no longer focusing her attention on him alone. For her part, Diane possessed a certain command over both her brother and her sister, making them do what she wanted, says a Nemerov cousin who used to observe them playing together.
    Since there was such an age difference, the siblings rarely went anywhere together except to the dentist. “There was this dentist—a friend—who’d come to Daddy with a hard-luck story,” Renée says, “a hard-luck story that his business was going bankrupt and he was so in debt he was going to kill himself. Daddy lent him money (as he often did with friends) and got him patients. He used to send Diane, Howard, and me to him constantly, almost every month for years. We were constantly being X-rayed, drilled, worked over, chiseled at… When we grew up, we all had terrible trouble with our teeth.”
    Howard writes: “It frequently crossed my mind that [the dentist] wanted my teeth to outlast me, that I was his monument, those fillings would still be there when