Read Diane Arbus for Free Online Page A

residual significance.
    Later, at Harvard, Howard toyed with the idea of converting to Catholicism (for “silly aesthetic reasons”). But he didn’t, and in his poetry * he frequently reaffirms his Jewishness. Perhaps his clearest statement is in the poem “Debate with the Rabbi,” part of which goes:
    Stubborn and stiff-necked man! the Rabbi cried.
    The pain you give me, said I.
    Instead of bowing down, said he,
    You go on in your obstinacy.
    We Jews are that way, I replied.
    Later Diane would take dozens of photographs of Jewish matrons in which she explored not only their collective memories but the relationship between role-playing and cultural identity. And she was to find an affinity with the famous fashion photographer Richard Avedon because his Russian immigrant father had also owned a Fifth Avenue dress shop; shewould laugh when she heard Garry Winogrand shout, “The best photographers are Jewish!”
    Still later she would go with Ben Fernandez to photograph the American Nazi Party in Yorkville. Loaded down with her cameras, she would listen while the leader of the party made vicious anti-Semitic remarks. She did not react; she just listened intensely—watching, watching. And she arranged to photograph the Nazis. And they were charmed by her.
    “To Diane the real world was always a fantasy,” said a friend.
    * Howard admits that some of his earliest poetry, which has a despairing, almost rabbinical quality, was probably inspired by his grandfather Meyer, whom he calls “one of the wisest men I’ve ever known.” Meyer Nemerov, the Biblical scholar who often wept when he read the Old Testament, instilled in Howard a love of and dedication to words.

4
    B Y THE AGE OF thirteen Howard was on his way to being a first-rate athlete—an excellent swimmer and tennis player and on the second-string football team. He was pursuing proper names—through bird books, flower books, tree books, star books—“to make some mind of what was only sense,” he recalled later. He was also discovering Freud by reading the entire Basic Writings in the Modern Library edition, “even though a friend of my mother’s told me ‘reading Freud will make you sick.’ ”
    He and Diane still took walks together and went to museums, but they no longer roller-skated since he’d been robbed by a group of toughs right across the street from the San Remo with Diane as terrified witness. Afterward Howard had tried to fight with the boys, which was difficult since he was on roller skates and Diane was, too, but she attempted to stop him “ à la Lillian Gish in some silent movie.” For several minutes they wheeled around on the sidewalk “like nutty performers.” Diane would repeat this anecdote over and over again to friends, and she was to have a nightmare about the experience; in fantasy it became a much more violent confrontation.
    Now Howard spent most of his free time with his schoolmate John Pauker, whose father, Edmond Pauker, was Ferenc Molnár’s agent. The Pauker home in Riverdale became Howard’s home away from home. Pauker, Sr., was deeply involved in show business. “He got every Hungarian artist a job in Hollywood,” John Pauker says, “including, I believe, Ernst Lubitsch.”
    Howard was intrigued by the energy and ebullience that radiated from the Pauker household, and John Pauker had it, too. Red-haired, pixie-faced, highly theatrical, he wore a green cape when he and Howard took their walks through Central Park singing, arguing, vowing to become “heroes.”
    For a while Howard toyed with the idea of becoming an opera tenor, but as his voice changed he realized he’d have to be “a basso if anything.” Then he thought that perhaps he’d be a psychoanalyst, until “Mommyridiculed me, saying, ‘How could you ever be an analyst when you’re incapable of talking with people!’ ”
    In 1934 Howard caught typhoid fever. He remembers he had “a nurse who taught me dirty songs… I am said to have been some