Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Hedda wanted to be able to share her innermost thoughts with Saul, but she never succeeded in doing so. “In all the years of our relationship, we never talked about my problems or my ideas. I was not a weeper and I never complained; I never threw tantrums or made demands, so he assumed there was nothing that ever bothered me. We only talked about him.” In the beginning, that did not stop her from trying to talk about the issues and ideas that mattered to her, especially her attitude toward art in general and her own in particular. She usually tried to express her views when she wrote about current exhibitions and the people she saw when she attended openings or visited museums and galleries. She reported news, trends, and gossip in equal part, and she clipped articles from magazines such as Art News and Art Digest that she thought would interest him. In 1943, after she officially adopted Hedda Sterne as the name by which she would henceforth be known, her painting career seemed poised to put her at the forefront of modernism. She had been included in several important group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and was given her first solo exhibition by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery. Through them she met the artists who would become her friends (and Steinberg’s), all luminaries in abstract expressionism. All this activity led to a stunning realization that she wanted to share with Saul: that she was content to sit in her studio all alone except for her cat and to paint nonstop for ten or twelve hours every day, but only for herself. She confessed that “after the show, a lot of things became clear to me, among them that there is practically no vanity left in me—and very little ambition, too.”

  Hedda Sterne, Untitled [Circus], 1945. (illustration credit 11.1)

  Hedda Sterne, New York, NY, 1955. (illustration credit 11.2)

  Hedda Sterne, Antro II, 1949. (illustration credit 11.3)

  Saul never responded to this; instead, his next several letters gave her new instructions about how to deal with Victor Civita.

  Hedda was not yet ready to abandon her desire to talk about art, so she changed her focus to talking about his. She began with her thoughts about what constitutes “good” art. To her, he was a great rather than a good artist because there was a “seductive” quality to his vision that made people willing to ponder difficult concepts or spend time analyzing something ordinary that he had depicted within an extraordinary setting or in an unusual manner. She believed that he entranced people into doing so “without their even knowing it.” What she was striving to do in her own work was to rid it of a “certain ‘joli,’ ‘pleasant’ [quality] I’ll probably never loose [sic]—because I am nothing much really.” She wanted her painting to take on attributes of Monteverdi’s music, to become austere, measured, and with all emotion “sublimated and unrecognizable, humble, like the Middle Ages monks.” But she was veering into dangerous territory and that was enough about her, so she returned to a discussion of his work: “You have all the qualities of the great, really great artist—I know it … you achieve without efforts for which others have to work years. There is a free flow between your ideas and your pen.”

  When Hedda wrote this, it was to encourage him to hold strong to his vision for the book. At that time she was still engaged in contractual discussions with Miss Morrison, who was now talking directly to Victor Civita, and Hedda relayed the unsettling information that Victor and Miss Morrison agreed that new drawings should be more “imitative” of the early work that Steinberg was trying to put behind him. What they really wanted was cartoons with captions, and when Hedda told him that, he channeled all his energies (and Hedda’s) into a book for DSP where he would have more control over the content. At the same time, Geraghty had posed a new and fascinating idea that Hedda thought Saul should consider. Geraghty showed a great number of Steinberg’s drawings to Ludwig Bemelmans, the artist-illustrator and writer who created the Madeline books for children and was a regular (and popular) cover illustrator for The New Yorker. Geraghty wanted to nurture and promote Steinberg’s talent and sought Bemelmans’s opinion of his “eventual development.” Bemelmans was intrigued by Steinberg’s vision, so he studied the drawings and some of the letters Steinberg wrote to describe them. He said he was sure that Steinberg would eventually become a writer, and he told Geraghty to encourage him to go in that direction. Bemelmans and Geraghty both agreed that there was “something about [Steinberg’s] way of using absolutely simple daily words and giving them certain new sense and charm” in his letters, and that this, in concert with the drawings, could lead him to excel in any number of genres. Hedda said Saul probably thought this “improbable,” but to her it was “just normal.”

  BY THE EARLY SPRING OF 1944, when she was allowing herself to be persuaded that she should go to Reno for a divorce, Hedda worried that it would be wrong to be away from New York if Saul managed to get the long-delayed furlough he thought was due. While she vacillated, he wrote letters about how he wanted to live once the war was over: “All I desire now from life is to stay with you and make drawings. Let’s forget about complications, let’s ask things from life and people instead of being surprised when things happen or feeling like not deserving them. The war experience made me a bit more realistic.” He wanted their life to be boring, because he needed boredom “in order to make something good,” and he was specific about where he wanted to make that something good: “in a studio with a big soft rug to walk around barefooted … we’ll make a long table for drawing, about 12 ft long, with pen & ink section, tempera and watercolor section. Then we’ll buy from some café or restaurant a small table with marble to make drawings on thin paper over the marble surface, the pencil is really sliding, the ideal surface for pencil drawings.”

  His meticulous description of how they would work was not exactly what she wanted to hear, especially when he told her that he thought she should postpone the trip to Reno and stay securely married to Fred Stafford for the indefinite future. Instead of getting his furlough, he was being shunted from one posting to another, from North Africa to southern France and Italy, so near the fighting that he worried he might be killed and she would have given up financial stability for naught. Hedda thought he might be trying to tell her that he had stopped loving her, and she tried to imagine how she would react if it were true. In an eerie prefiguration of how she actually did behave throughout the many years she was married to Saul Steinberg, she imagined herself as “trying to be very ‘good and heroic’…I always try to be civilized and things like that make me want to convince myself that this is the way I would act.” She seemed surprised by the conclusion she arrived at: “I love you. Really. I don’t know very well why.”

  FRED STAFFORD WAS AS WORRIED ABOUT Hedda’s security as Steinberg was, but by the middle of May they all three agreed that Steinberg was likely to survive the war and that Hedda should go to Reno. Fred told her that he hoped marriage to Saul would be lasting and happy but she was not to worry if it were not, because he would always provide for her. He was as generous and gracious about the divorce as he had been during the marriage, and Hedda was in Reno on May 23, assured that Fred would cover all her expenses.

  The divorce was final at the end of June, and on July 5 she left by train to spend the summer painting with Betty Parsons in Provincetown, where she promptly caught the flu. The only bright spot was five letters from Saul and a photograph of him with a “too little moustache.” He acknowledged receiving all her V-mail letters, but he wrote nothing about her desire to talk to him about things that really mattered to her. After reading his letters, she replied, “I feel lousy. I’ll write more when I feel different.” It might have been the flu speaking, but it might have been other nagging worries as well.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE STRANGER SHE MARRIED

  Steinberg arrived in New York on a parachute with no credentials but he made quite a personage of himself in a very short time. He knew how to make his way in the sophisticated world and was very good at it.

  The plane that carried Saul Steinberg home was based at the Patuxent River, Maryl
and, naval station, and it landed there on October 4, 1944. His orders were to report directly to the OSS Naval Command in Washington, “where his services are desired in connection with the operations conducted by this agency.” He reported just long enough to ensure that the paperwork for his furlough was in order and to let his superiors know that he would be back when it ended on October 25. He went to New York to make arrangements for an immediate wedding, and on October 11 he and Hedda went to City Hall to begin the process. A kindly clerk waived the waiting period and married them that very day. The marriage license was filled out by someone who was Spanish and illiterate in English and who wrote illegible English answers to the questions. Hedda called it “the first of Saul’s phony documents, maybe.”

  The suddenness of finding themselves married was so unexpected that neither Saul nor Hedda had planned anything to do, so they bought a bottle of champagne and went home to drink it. Hedda had one glass and promptly got so sick that she vomited all night long. “Subconsciously,” she recalled, “I think I knew it was not going to last. The problem was that from the first day I expected it to end.”

  Despite her qualms, Hedda was radiant with good health and brimming over in equal parts with relief that Saul had survived the war and happiness that they were together. Beside her he seemed wraithlike, his mustache not the only part of his body that was diminished. He was so thin as to be emaciated, his digestion ruined by so many army rations, his health depleted by months of malaria and diarrhea. None of his clothes fit, and he had to shop for new ones in the boys’ department for a child’s size 14.

  Harold Ross insisted on giving Saul and Hedda a wedding dinner and asked them whom to invite. Hedda left the guest list to Saul, and the single name he mentioned was S. J. Perelman, who “always made Saul weep with laughter.” Even before he came to New York, Steinberg had studied Perelman’s “satires of, let’s say, Hollywood conversations” as a way of teaching himself how to avoid the gaffes of clichés in English. To him, Perelman was “indispensable as a teacher of pitfalls, common wisecracks, a hint of the fairly high level of popular sophistication.”

  Perelman and his wife, Laura, graced the dinner, as did Eva and Jim Geraghty, the New Yorker’s cartooning couple Alan Dunn and Mary Petty, and Carmine Peppe, the makeup editor and “de facto art director,” who became one of Steinberg’s best friends at the magazine. Ross was then married to his much younger third wife, Ariane Allen, whom he placed next to Saul, while he sat at Hedda’s left and placed Sid Perelman on her right. When Sid learned of her friendship with Victor Brauner, he became the life of the party, and everyone hung on his tales of how he formed his surrealist underpinnings during the 1920s when he was an expatriate in Paris. The guests sat spellbound as Sid improvised examples of surrealism’s influence, such as the one he swore best contrasted the American and British approaches to art: elbow patches on tweed jackets. He and Saul bonded over the shared opinion that what to the British was only a way to repair worn-out clothes and make them last longer had become in American hands a symbol of high style when Brooks Brothers sewed the patches onto brand-new and expensive tweed jackets. Quirky and offbeat, it was just the sort of story that sparked the imagination of the two men, whose friendship lasted for the rest of their lives. It was, in fact, such a deep friendship that Perelman later gave Steinberg his first-edition copy of Ulysses, signed by James Joyce, who was Steinberg’s favorite author.

  Both Hedda and Saul took another memory of lasting resonance from their wedding dinner, albeit of a different kind. All was not well in the Ross marriage, and although everyone at the table imbibed freely, the liquor affected Ariane Allen more than the other guests. She spent the whole evening caressing Saul’s thigh under the table, most of the time not bothering to hide what she was doing. Hedda was aghast, but Saul enjoyed being the object of a young and attractive woman’s attention. Hedda realized that what she feared most about her new husband was true: he enjoyed being “a real success with women” because “he just loved women.” Hedda thought he was like a little boy wanting any woman’s praise and attention because “he thought it built him up in my eyes.”

  Several weeks later, the Steinbergs were still learning how to live and work together in Hedda’s apartment on 50th Street when a WAC who had worked with Saul in Europe came to visit. Passing through New York on her way home, she was visibly pregnant and therefore had been discharged, as women were at the time. Hedda welcomed her, and when she went into the tiny kitchenette to prepare refreshments, she could see Saul and the WAC in a passionate, bent-over-backward kiss. Saul was not embarrassed but “rather proud of himself,” even though Hedda was “heartsick. It was a disaster to have to see this after two or three weeks of marriage.”

  Hedda was trying to come to terms with this stranger she had married, the civilian husband who had replaced the passionate wartime lover whose every letter pledged undying love, adoration, and above all fidelity. The lover wanted nothing more than to be cloistered with her in a room where they could make art side by side. Now she found herself living with a husband whose “idea of marriage was that he should be free, free, free, and not one bit guilty because of a girlfriend, or actually, a lot of girlfriends.” When they packed one small valise for an overnight outing and Hedda found inside a long, still unfinished love letter he was writing to Ada, she was terrified that she had given up a loveless but secure marriage to Fred Stafford for one that might be predicated on Saul Steinberg’s whim of the moment, fraught with every kind of insecurity from emotional to financial.

  Many years later, Ian Frazier, a trusted friend to both Saul and Hedda, tried to explain the complexity of their relationship as he, the outsider, observed it. “To know Hedda through Saul would be to underestimate her,” he said. “She is so remarkable you have got to give him credit for having chosen her.” The obverse is true as well. Both had come to the United States eager to throw off their embarrassing Romanian antecedents and to become as fully American as they could, with every nuance the adjective implied. Both were nourished by the American society that gave them refuge, and both were eager to get to work and find happiness and prosperity within it.

  There were several niggling wasps in this fragrant ointment, and one of the largest was Saul’s suspicion that disaster of every sort lurked just around the corner, waiting to sting him. Frazier wondered how, during the early years of his American life, he controlled the rampant paranoia that intensified as he aged. When asked if Steinberg had been this fearful and superstitious in Italy before the war, Aldo Buzzi just laughed, shrugged, and spread his hands in a gesture of hopelessness, unable to explain why his friend believed that at any given moment he could lose everything for which he had worked so hard. Steinberg’s nephew, Stéphane Roman, described it as the “ordinary superstitious Romanian fatalism that is impossible to overcome, no matter how long you are away from the country.” Hedda and Saul seldom compared their adopted country to the one of their birth, and even though they had many Romanian friends, they never reminisced. But when Norman Manea came to New York, Saul told him fiercely to embrace being American and never to be frightened or ashamed of it.

  IN THIS ATMOSPHERE, AND IN THE not very large apartment on 50th Street, the two people who wore so many different metaphorical hats—among them newlyweds, artists, naturalized U.S. citizens, and friends to an ever-growing number of New York’s cultural elite—set up their worktables and got on with their life. For Steinberg, this meant solidifying his role at The New Yorker and accepting as many of the commercial commissions that were being offered as he could. He was eager to pay back everyone whose earlier generosity had helped him to leave Italy, especially the Civitas, Aldo, and Ada. After he started to work in 1945, he sent regular money and CARE packages to Aldo and Ada throughout Italy’s long postwar recovery.

  First and foremost, however, there was his family to support, which, besides his parents, now included Lica and her husband and their newborn son, Stéphane. It was still difficult to establish direc
t contact with them, and here he was helped by his uncle Harry, who diligently explored every channel through which Saul could funnel money, clothing, medicine, and anything else that the Soviet-dominated Romanian government permitted its desperate citizens to receive from foreigners. Saul had to do all this while commuting to Washington, where he was still on active duty with the OSS.

  The navy authorized him to commute to New York on weekends while wearing his uniform but did not grant travel or per diem expenses, which meant he had to find more and more work to pay for everything. In Washington he did whatever the OSS assigned, but it was easily and quickly finished, leaving him lots of time to devote to his own projects. His days were uneventful until he saw his latest fitness report, with the unnerving statement that he would be “trained for a future overseas assignment.” The uncertainty that such an interruption could bring to the new life he was busy crafting was a specter that haunted him until May 1945, when he was transferred permanently to New York and the Training Literature Field Unit at One Park Avenue. There he made drawings for posters and brochures until December, when he was discharged from active service. Until his final discharge from the Naval Reserve, in 1954, his major worry was the fear of being recalled to active duty, especially during the Korean War, but fortunately he was not. His major irritation was being required to notify the Third Naval District of the dates every time he left and returned to the country, which he dutifully did.