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Time and Space
Lives overlap in odd museum
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Published: September 21, 2008
HUBERT'S FREAKS: The Rare Book Dealer, the Times Square Talker, and the Lost Photos of Diane Arbus. By Gregory Gibson. Harcourt. 288 pages. $28.
Gibson is no Tom Wolfe, but he has a story and a cast of characters here worthy of the master. The nonfiction tale is told in three time lines, one with Diane Arbus, an iconoclastic woman who, as much as anyone, made photography into a gallery art form. Perhaps her focus on the quirky and the bizarre was less historically important than the work of the great women social documentarians of the Great Depression such as Dorothea Lange, but her intimate studies of New York's 1960s transvestites, dwarfs, giants, prostitutes and other sub-class citizens salved a sore spot in the literati of the Warhol generation New York. While Lange and Margaret Bourke-White specialized in depicting the vanishing real America to the educated city class, by the late 1960s, the literate class was so divorced from the working poor, it had lost any sense of proletarian identity, and was to be titillated only by images of the degenerate, the crippled and the freakish. Arbus capped her legend by committing suicide in 1971.
On that same day, July 26, 1971, a random hippie, Bob Langmuir, was briefly flying through the air in Vermont, having been launched out of a speeding van. His flight lasted only a few seconds, and ended badly, in a pile of rocks, leaving Bob with serious injuries. This experience somehow led Langmuir into the Merchant Marines and then to the rare-book market, in and around Philadelphia.
His eccentric charm and dogged application made Langmuir a fixture in rare-book circles and eventually he came into ownership of a quaint bookstore on Rittenhouse Square in the better part of the City of Brotherly Love.
Meanwhile, a few decades before, Arbus had gained a reputation, gallery space and entrée into a survivor of the old weird New York, Hubert's Museum, an indoor sideshow, a relic of the days of Barnum's American Museum. There was a flea circus, odd and assorted exhibits including "pickled punks" (anatomical oddities in glass jars, usually fake) and a freak show in the basement, with the typical Fat Lady, Tattooed Man, Jungle Savage and other human oddities, also usually fake. The MC of this tawdry slice of show biz was Charlie Lucas, a talented and personable black man whose prospects were limited by lack of education and several addictions.
How these three threads wove together, providing the art world with a new sensation, and Langmuir with the trove of a lifetime and a nervous breakdown, are all told by Gibson with warmth and flair, producing an interestingly ironic narrative. There are poignant observations on class relations in respect to race and art, intercut with crisp portraits of off-center strivers, depicted with grace and charity.
The reviewer was surprised and pleased with the humanity and depth of this slim volume, and the close and accurate observation. A fine read for leisure time, at the very least.
■ Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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