Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  All that changed after Saul was safely on board ship for the Americas. As neither Ada nor Aldo was receiving mail from him, each contacted the other routinely to see if anything had arrived. Gradually strained conversation led to easy conviviality and then to unexpected intimacy. Ada told all this to Saul in the hope that it would be the end of his endless demands for her to rehash the details of the affair. She hoped he would soon tire of brooding so they could put it behind them, but his very next letter asked her to describe yet again every intimacy that had transpired. She begged Saul to realize how lonely she had been after he left and how she simply lost control of herself momentarily. She was not seeking to absolve herself of blame, but she wanted him to stop picking at the scab of something that should be allowed to heal: “You are making a big deal out of it, and you hurt me by dwelling on it.” Still, he was unable to let it go; “I have to vent,” he declared. Whatever he did to assuage his anger seems to have worked: several days later, when Ada sent a photo from Genoa of herself with her husband and dog, he merely commented that he had received it.

  The photo did not come as a surprise, for Saul had known since the early days of their relationship that Ada was married. He simply didn’t care, and apparently neither did she. From then on her letters referred casually to her husband, never by name but always as he or him, and how he was waiting for mobilization, and how she would sell his house to finance her move to the United States once Saul was safely ensconced there. At one point she even told him of an abortion— cryptically, because censors read the mail: “That which we had hoped for when you were here has happened, but now was not a good time.”

  Saul’s thinking about Ada fluctuated daily, if not hourly. On any particular “today” he was seriously thinking of marrying his beloved Adina, whereas on various “yesterdays” he never wanted to see her again. He went back and forth in this fashion for the remainder of his stay in Santo Domingo, but most of the time he yearned for her and she was his “poor dear Adina” who “writes beautiful things, she loves me, my dear Adina.” When he wrote in his diary that “I really am thinking of marrying Adina,” it was one of the very few times that he ever made such an admission. After the Pearl Harbor attack, when it seemed likely that mail service to Europe would be suspended, he had the recurring dream that he lost her somewhere in Milan and was chasing through the streets looking for her: “Dear Adina, poor little thing. The good times are over, Adina, dear and good with me.”

  He may have been pining for his lost love, but that didn’t keep him from being with other women. When he wasn’t sitting in the dentist’s chair for the escalating problems with his teeth, he had to find another doctor, “in great fear because of a pimple near my dick. Fortunately, it was nothing.”

  ONCE HE HAD MOSTLY RECOVERED FROM the malaria and a head cold that hung on for weeks, he moved from the hotel to his first set of furnished rooms. A child next door cried so constantly that he could neither sleep nor work, so he moved again several months later to an apartment where things were more tranquil. He had been on the island for a little over six months and was desperately trying to recover from the topsy-turvy life his illness had foisted upon him, realizing that he needed to focus on the two things that mattered: trying to work, and finding a way to get himself to the United States. The Civitas were continuing to send commissions his way, one of them being a book jacket for Simon & Schuster. He was also finishing the Valentine’s Day spread for Mademoiselle, but otherwise there was ominous “silence from New York,” much of it due to the interruption of mail service after most of the Americas entered the war. The Civitas had raised his monthly stipend to $70, but it was often delayed. “I continue confusedly my work … because I’m almost penniless now,” he told the Dansons, and he was grateful for the three pairs of shoes and the $50 they sent at Christmas. To keep himself busy, he began to paint and entered three pictures in the annual exhibition sponsored by the local Museum of Fine Arts. He was pleased with his success but somewhat puzzled to find out that he had been labeled “a surrealist.”

  Things picked up after the New Year, as Civita sold drawings and cartoons to the newspaper PM, the magazines Liberty and The American Mercury, and once again to The New Yorker. In January 1942, Steinberg told the Dansons, “Is a pity I’m not in New York. I have a lot of goods ideas for cartoon, but when they arrive at New York they are too old or not interesting yet.” By March his frustration was mounting: “It’s a pity I’m not in America now, it’s the moment all magazines and papers needs cartoons.” He was not working well “without stimulant [stimulation]…day after day I’m waiting for some good news, with little hope.” His attitude had changed since he first arrived, when he was “so happy to be free here, after Italy and so on, but now I really need New York.”

  Enough time had passed that he could start the New Year by trying to get a place in the Romanian quota, but once again, just as in Lisbon, he feared the specter of the “other, Communist” Steinberg. Saul Steinberg was afraid to go to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Trujillo because he feared the authorities might ask him if he had ever been deported from the United States. While he was being held in Ellis Island, his English was so poor that an Italian interpreter was assigned to take his information for immigration officials. In the process, the interpreter asked a routine question about why he had been sent back from Lisbon, and Steinberg thought he had to explain about the confusion with the “Communist Steinberg” that had sent him back to Italy, which he equated with deportation. The interpreter stressed that if he had indeed been deported, he could not apply to reenter the United States for a full year. Somehow Steinberg confused this conversation with a deportation from the United States, and after so many months he could not remember how he had answered the interpreter’s question. All he remembered was that when the ship bringing him to Santo Domingo had docked in Puerto Rico, the crew had confined him to his cabin and he had overheard the guards outside his door describing him as a “dangerous deportee.” He was convinced it had something to do with the Ellis Island questioning, which might have raised red flags in his immigration file. Now that he could speak passable English, he wanted to know if he should try to explain the situation to the U.S. consul or just keep quiet and worry about what to answer if anyone asked the question.

  Also, his application for the Romanian quota required that he submit forms in both Washington and Ciudad Trujillo. Since he could not go himself, he painstakingly prepared an English curriculum vitae in a letter to Harold and Henrietta Danson, which listed his birth date, residences, and education for Harry Steinberg to use when he made the trek to D.C. on Steinberg’s behalf. Steinberg described his work experience first as an “architect designer” and then as a “publicist” for Bertoldo and Settebello, but he cautioned the Dansons to tell his uncle “is better don’t mention any my work in a wartime Italy.” He did say, however, that when anti-Semitic laws prohibited him from working after 1939, “I published [just] the same without signature.”

  Another possible glitch arose when he tried to obtain the Dominican certificate attesting that he had been in residence there. To get it, he had to provide his “born certificate” and two police certificates—one from Romania, the other from Italy—establishing that he did not have a criminal record. He could not attain any of them, and his only hope was to garner enough positive testimonials from United States citizens that consular officials might say “Never mind.”

  Indeed, many people were working diligently and were eager to testify on his behalf. Cesar and Victor Civita collected letters from editors at Esquire, The American Mercury, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, and PM, all affirming that they had bought his work in the past, assumed that he would continue to do good, if not better, work in the future, and believed that he possessed admirable personal qualities. Civita also furnished a statement of Steinberg’s earnings as proof that he had every likelihood of continuing to support himself, and handsomely at that.

  Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., who was now a
major in military intelligence stationed at the Metropolitan Military District in New York, directed his letter to a high-level contact in the Department of Justice’s Immigration and Naturalization Service. Vanderbilt pulled out all the stops as he described Steinberg’s “considerable reputation” in Europe and then went on to speak of how Life called him “one of the foremost European caricaturists.” Vanderbilt described how “partly through my interest,” Steinberg was able to get to the Dominican Republic and submit work to other American publications: “I have seen his work on the editorial pages of PM, where on many Sundays he has had cartoons that satirically struck at our enemies…[Others] have been accepted by Liberty, The New Yorker, Mademoiselle, Harper’s Bazaar, and The American Mercury.” Vanderbilt concluded with a statement that showed how remarkable Steinberg’s nine-month sojourn in the Dominican Republic truly had been: “This is an extraordinary record for an artist who has not yet seen our country and yet has captured the interest of the editors of these great magazines.”

  Indeed, before Steinberg ever set foot on American soil, his particular vision was capturing the tenor of the times in oblique and offbeat ways, so much so that James Geraghty, the art editor of The New Yorker, who had seen his work in other magazines, persuaded the magazine’s legendary editor, Harold Ross, that it was “very much to our interest that he come to New York, [where he would] become a major artist almost at once. I’m told he’s in his twenties, and a man of ideas.” Even better was the agreement Civita arranged on May 14 that The New Yorker would have the right of first refusal for all of Steinberg’s cartoons and other drawings.

  These testimonials paid off at the end of April, when Steinberg’s visa was finally granted. “I’m so happy, I can’t tell you!” he wrote to his Danson cousins. His application had been approved and he would soon be given his quota number, so that within two to three weeks at the most, he could leave for the United States: “New York at the end of May—I cannot believe it!” He had his visa in hand on May 16, but it arrived just in time for another round of worry and frustration.

  Civita and his relatives in New York decided that Steinberg should fly to Miami and could make his way to New York as he pleased, most likely by train. Gertrude Einstein (“Miss Einstein” to Steinberg then and for several years after) was put in charge of making the plane reservation for an open date, meaning that he could fly whenever a seat was available. The problem was that flights were limited and there was a long line of people with higher priority. With the open ticket, he assumed that all he had to do was go to the airport and wait for his name to be called, but he still had the nagging worry that when his turn to board the plane finally came, the confusion with the “other, Communist” Steinberg might keep him from realizing his dream “to be in New York, to work really.” He begged his uncle and cousins to tell him what he needed to do so there would be no trouble about what he had begun to call “my matter.”

  By the end of May, even though Harold Danson and Gertrude Einstein assured him that his ticket was on its way, it had not yet arrived via the mail. And even as he admitted that it was “stupid” to bore Harold Danson with more questions about “my matter,” he could not resist doing so. Danson seldom lost patience with anyone in the fairly emotional family he had married into, but he did so after one too many letters about “my matter.” He turned it over to Miss Einstein, who told Steinberg she was conveying a message from Danson “which sounds very sensible: he is a bit angry with you for talking so insistently about ‘your matter.’ There is no special ‘matter.’ You are just a normal immigrant and should not behave as if you were not, lest people start wondering.”

  After telling him that Civita had rounded up an Italian refugee to meet his plane and help him on his way, and that the New Yorker editors were also enlisting their own connections to help him, Miss Einstein ended her letter sweetly: “Don’t you think you should have sweet dreams now and stop worrying about self-made spectres?” But this wasn’t soothing enough for Steinberg, and she had to write again: “There is not the slightest danger that the events of Lisbon will again take place. I repeat what I said in previous letters: stop worrying, take the plane whenever Pan American Airlines will have a seat for you and come. You will see that everything is very easy with a regular immigration visa in your pocket.”

  AND SO, ONCE HIS TICKET WAS in hand, he spent the month of June going to the airport every day and returning to his furnished room every night. He was utterly frustrated: “I’m wasting my time here, I cannot even work, my baggages are made, ready to leave every day. I cannot say how much [longer] I’ll have to stay here waiting.”

  Every day he chatted with others who were standing in line and sweating in the summer heat. More people were leaving every day, but on flights to Haiti or to Maracaibo and other South American cities, where they hoped to find easier connections for Miami. Steinberg was being advised by them and by some of his American contacts to take his chances and go to Port-au-Prince, but he was afraid to do it for fear that by leaving the comparative safety of the Dominican Republic, he could land in a country where untold new troubles might arise to impede him. He apologized for complaining, but every day seemed to be forty-eight hours long: “Now I cannot do nothing but wait and smoke bad cigarettes.”

  Finally, on June 28, 1942, the long wait ended and his turn came to board a Pan American Airlines flight to Miami. Vittorio Nahum, the Italian refugee enlisted by Civita, met him at the airport and took him to the Embassy Hotel in Miami Beach. Steinberg spent one night in the hotel and the next morning went to the Greyhound bus station, where he bought a one-way ticket to New York.

  “Traveling by bus, if you manage to sit in the first row, you enjoy the ideal view, the rarest and most noble one,” he later said. And that was how he got his first view of the American Dream as the bus wended its way up the Atlantic seacoast.

  CHAPTER 8

  IN A STATE OF UTTER DELIGHT

  Who the hell knows where my home is … I didn’t have the time to know New York and love it.

  The first thing Steinberg noticed about New York was its architecture, particularly the impact of cubism. He trained his European eye on the urban landscape and decided that the dominant influences were “Constructivism,” “Cubism,” and “Fernandlégerism.” Despite wartime rationing, restrictions, and blackouts, everything he saw or experienced left him “in a state of utter delight.” The “Cubist elements” that became his lifelong totems assaulted his eye everywhere he looked, and everything he saw became grist for his artistic mill, from the gleaming Chrysler Building, where “Art Deco was merely … Cubism turned decorative,” to the sensuous plastic curves and neon-bright colors of larger-than-life jukeboxes, to women’s dresses (short, to conserve fabric), shoes (usually high, with platforms and stilettos for heels), hairdos (upswept into elaborate rolls and curls), to men’s neckties (large and bright, splashed on colorful zoot suits in rebellion against drab khaki uniforms). Taxis provided fascinating bursts of color in shiny enamel, particularly the sleek flowing lines of the Pontiac sedans, which sported a hood ornament that he thought resembled “a flying Indian that derived directly from Brancusi and his flying birds.” He marveled particularly at “the sort of red that is obtained only on metal, many coats & laquer, the illuminated taxi sign on top rendered even more clearly the jukebox origin of the car.” Billboards were a revelation in text and type. English as spoken by “Noo Yawkahs” was a foreign language. The noise, dirt, traffic, confusion—everything that jumped out at his senses in the New York of 1942 was part of “a very American world,” and in his opinion, one that was so “very optimistic” that he had trouble assimilating it. In later years, he regretted that he had only sketched and not made “large paintings” of all that he saw then, of “diners, girls, cars, an America I believe myself the first to have discovered, or at least to have sketched.” To him, America was “disarming,” always looking for “gimmicks,” and with “amusement park qualities” defining its skyscrapers.”

/>   He went about the business of observing daily life in New York with what others thought was quiet reserve and dignity but in reality was the shy silence of someone whose English was not very good and who preferred not to expose himself to embarrassment or ridicule by trying to speak it: “Speaking primitive English was not my style.” It was also a cover‑up for the depression caused by feelings of confusion and displacement, an ambivalence inspired by the city he had yearned to live in for so long. “Who the hell knows where my home is?” Steinberg wrote a year later as he reflected on his earliest days in the city and “the empty stupid life” he led there. “I hated New York. I didn’t have anything to do with that place, and I still hate to think of Times Square like a Luna Park, and Sixth Avenue busy and strange.”

  The Steinbergs, Dansons, and Civitas (via Miss Einstein) eased his entry into city life by having a room waiting for him in a Greenwich Village hotel, the Adams, on the corner of 11th Street and Sixth Avenue (now the Avenue of the Americas), the first street he knew in the United States. “Sixth Avenue was very luminous then,” he recalled years later: “mostly brownstones, cheap jewelry, army & navy stores, used books, loans for guitars and cameras. Joke stores (rubber fried eggs, etc)…In summer Sixth Avenue had the looks of a Canaletto, the pink gold brown the even light of the houses bordering the Gran Canal.” He was captivated by “the great American aroma in summer—a combination of Cuban tropical and drugstore, chewing gum spearmint, Soap, the new and rare smell of air conditioning, healthy and clean sweat.” It was a relief after the “Dominican street smell [of] sweat, starched suits, waxed tiles, carrots, Cremas [strong Dominican cigarettes].”