Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  MOST OF STEINBERG’S FRIENDS DID NOT understand his desire to leave New York so soon again, especially for a rambling drive across the United States, which, as far as they were concerned, had no real purpose. He and Hedda were ready to go by the end of May but hung around until June because they wanted to see Aldo Buzzi as he passed through New York on his way to Mexico to work on a film with Alberto Lattuada. Steinberg promised Buzzi to try to time his driving for a visit to the Mexican location before the film wrapped. By the nineteenth, he and Hedda were finally ready to go, and he made the last entry in his datebook until their return on August 16: “Left by car.”

  For Hedda, driving across the country made real most of the dream she had envisioned of what their marriage should be; although they were not working together in a room, they were at least alone together in a car. For her, the trip was “the beauty of an eventless life…quiet working and real understanding.” At the time of her marriage, Hedda had believed that happiness came from being with Saul in “some room, any room…forgetting about the other for half an hour and then coming back and seeing you and remembering reality: that you are right there and are going to be there and were there before—and it’s just too wonderful.” She thought they were like-minded, that Saul hated “lies and over-statements and sentimentality (not sentiment)” as much as she did. Hedda was sure that an “understanding between [two] people is possible, and real friendship and complete relationship and mutual confidence.” Now, a decade later, she wanted to persuade Saul that such a relationship could exist between a man and a woman, even if they happened to be married, and even if the man held what she gently accused him of having: “a rather bad attitude about women.”

  In the car, with just the two of them driving for long days, it was much the same as being alone in a room together. They talked constantly, each saying whatever came to mind without fear of offending the other. They had no set itinerary, and everything about the trip was spontaneous and subject to change at a moment’s notice. As they drove along one of the main highways, a mere twist of the steering wheel might take them onto a dirt road just because it looked interesting. A sign pointing to a place with an unusual name they never heard before was one that simply had to be investigated.

  On their way through the northern mountain states en route to the West Coast, they saw a sign for a Native American reservation, so they made an impromptu detour and went to see it. The tribe was not one that catered to the tourist trade but consisted of poor people who were not used to seeing other Americans, let alone those with foreign accents whose big car had a backseat filled with enough equipment for two artists to set up easels whenever the urge struck. To get there, they had driven down a rutted, rock-strewn road that was little more than a path, so far out in the middle of nowhere that the tribal elders insisted they had to spend the night for their own safety. When they left the next morning, it was with the certainty that they had experienced something profoundly spiritual and moving. As they drove on, Hedda tried to put the experience into philosophical perspective by entertaining Saul with tales from the writings of Lin Yutang, Confucius, and several New Age lecturers whose talks she had heard and books she had read. They both vowed to investigate Native American myths as soon as they returned to New York

  They had the same sort of reaction when they drove through British Columbia to reach the boat that would take them to Alaska. Ever since they left New York, Saul had been filling the car with the “junque” that always caught his fancy. In the Pacific Northwest, masks and totems joined the other purchases, with everything from the cheapest roadside souvenirs to examples of arts and crafts from galleries and museum shops. In Alaska he photographed all the local objects he saw, from kitsch to high culture, and much of what he saw later found its way into his drawings, the ones in which seemingly random objects—a blue-and-white Chinese vase, a can of pistachio nuts, a paper bag mask, a tin of tea, or a telephone—originated in a personal biographical moment that resonated in a multiplicity of meanings for those who saw it.

  Driving down the California coast led to inevitable conversations about the place of pure art in a philistine culture. There were long conversations wherein Saul and Hedda swapped stories about their relationships with their artist friends. Saul spoke of Joseph Cornell, who preferred to talk about esoteric eighteenth-century French writers rather than make observations about daily life on the magically named Utopia Parkway, the street where he lived in the borough of Queens. Saul said that like Cornell, he relished conversations about literature, but he was more interested in “direct experience, and spontaneous inventions of the moment.” Hedda was closer to Mark Rothko than Saul was, and they had had many intense conversations when Saul was away and Rothko dropped in unannounced to stay for casual suppers in her kitchen. Rothko’s insistence that he painted himself with blanked-out eyes because he was not “visual” puzzled her as she filtered his perceptions into her own thoughts about portraiture, particularly when she painted Annalee and Barnett Newman. Hedda made Annalee larger than life to fill a long narrow canvas that showed a strong, beautiful woman in command of the world before her; she painted Barney (whom Annalee supported until his work began to sell) smaller and seemingly crouched at the bottom of the canvas, the space above him largely white and open. Hedda had enjoyed the challenge of conveying the individual personalities and circumstances in each portrait, and the mutuality of the relationship when they were viewed together.

  When Hedda painted the Newmans in 1952, she was torn between wanting to do more portraits and doing none at all. This conflict led to discussions in 1956 as she and Saul talked at length about what they wanted to achieve in their art, and if they were at cross-purposes on any subject at all, it was what they expected from their work: she insisted that she had no ego and no ambition for public recognition, while these things governed everything he did. Her recent painting had evolved to the point where she believed there was no “vanity” to be seen in it, no personal, social, or political agenda, and nothing that could call attention to the glamorous woman and brilliant artist who created it. With her large-scale machines and spray-painted cityscapes, she had removed everything pertaining to her biography from the viewer’s consideration. Her semi-abstractions were raw and brutal, far different from, say, the color fields of Helen Frankenthaler or the big blowsy blobs that Joan Mitchell slapped onto huge canvases in thick layers and wedges. Hedda Sterne believed that something “interesting” had happened to her personally that was responsible for the departure of vanity from her paintings; “very little ambition” remained in her, and she was no longer interested in scrambling for success. Saul could not understand her indifference to showing or selling her work, but as no agreement seemed possible they did not dwell on the subject.

  On the other hand, Hedda spoke often about Saul’s work, usually claiming that she could write the definitive book on it. She thought his type of humor, which she called “mostly comic,” was different from others because of how he “deflavourized” emotions, ideas, and situations. She equated his “humour” (she always used British spellings) to “poetry” because of his ability to bring “a tender smile upon things one never looks twice at.” Steinberg brought “magic” instead of taking it away by making viewers see the world as he did. “The humour is in the line [her emphasis], and most of all, the love that transfixes your affirmative attitude, accepting good and bad of life never as one assuming the right to judge.” Hedda found “one and the same attitude toward life” in all his drawings, what she called the “deeply intelligent and understanding” ability to make his point “in the simplest and best way and impose [his] point of view without violence but with force and grace.” For lack of a better phrase, she called it his “sense of humour,” which she insisted was evident in his drawings but “not in what I know of you as a person.” This too was a subject they did not dwell upon.

  They did not stay long in Southern California and made no attempt to see the many friends who lived there. It was
as if they did not want outside influences to spoil the purity of their intensely personal experiences. They dashed across the southwestern desert states into northern Mexico but were too late to connect with Aldo and the film crew, so they meandered back through the southern states and eventually headed for the mid-Atlantic coastline, New Jersey, and New York.

  BACK ON 71ST STREET, THERE WAS an inevitable feeling of letdown after two months of getting up every morning with a sense of urgency to get started on whatever the adventures of the day would bring. They were tired from the constant movement and New York was still hot, so they decided to spend the next few weeks in Wellfleet. Hedda liked Cape Cod well enough for vacations but was not enthusiastic about buying property there. Neither was Saul, but somehow he managed to persuade himself that it was the thing to do. He found a house on the outskirts of Wellfleet and impulsively decided to buy it, making a significant nonrefundable deposit and then hiring a team of house inspectors from Hyannis to make a report. Because he had locked himself into an iron-bound contract to buy the property, it was a shock when the report came back showing that the property was “a disaster—everything was in poor shape, no direct access to the house except through someone else’s property, termites, etc. etc.” Lindey engaged a local law firm to handle the matter, even though Steinberg claimed he didn’t want to know anything about the deal except that Lindey had gotten him out of it. The Massachusetts lawyer told Lindey that they were “charming clients really in need of the protection you requested we give them,” and “it was a relief to know that they had decided after all not to buy trouble and expense.” However, it still took both lawyers to get Steinberg out of the mess.

  Meanwhile, Louisa and Sandy Calder invited them again for Christmas, and they went, sending a huge ham before them as their gift. Steinberg, who had never really liked Connecticut, now decided that Roxbury would be a fine place to buy a house and asked Calder to help him find one. Calder said they never knew of houses until they were already sold and told him to engage a realtor and take several days to look at properties. Steinberg declined, and the idea of living in Roxbury fell by the wayside.

  Tino Nivola heard of Steinberg’s quest for a country home and told him of a house in Springs, near his, that was for rent. Again acting impulsively, Steinberg rented it. It turned out to be a good decision, and everything about the place made him happy. He liked the two-hour drive across Long Island to get there, which was then mostly along an easy highway bordered by potato fields and the occasional farmhouse. He liked the physical activity of country living: “I enjoy chopping wood for the fireplace, and once I’ve made this effort and the wood has been burned I go back to New York.” There was a whole colony of artists and writers in what was loosely called “the Hamptons,” among them Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, and May and Harold Rosenberg. The Nivola house was the gathering place for every visiting or transplanted European, and the warmth and vitality of the Nivolas’ hospitality was always available to Saul and Hedda. Even though Saul had told Hedda the last time they had been weekend guests of the Nivolas that he could never live in the Hamptons because there were too many artists there, he changed his mind and was relieved to think that he had finally found the perfect location for a second home. He planned to look seriously for one to buy, but this happy prospect was still not enough to keep his galloping insecurities at bay, and he did nothing about it just then.

  By the end of the year he was in a “bad mood because I’m dissatisfied with my work and also my behavior or whatever it is. During the night I think of what I’ve said or done during the day and it doesn’t seem true to me.” Shortly after the 1957 New Year, everything he did was “a great waste of time, with people who are indifferent or worse, but they’re around.”

  It was time to go traveling again, and this time he planned a complete vacation, no work at all, and he asked Hedda to choose where they should go. She suggested Spain because neither of them had been there, and by April they were on their way.

  CHAPTER 21

  SIX PEOPLE TO SUPPORT

  Latest news: sister out of Romania, finally … A nightmare, six people to support.

  The trip to Spain was just short of disastrous. The cities were clogged with tourists, the food was appalling, and Saul complained that it took two days to digest a meal. The only beauty was at the seaside, where dilapidated grand hotels in Anglo-Arab style fronted deserted beaches. The scenery was not enough, however, to make up for the hassles involved with the two accidents Steinberg had while driving his brand-new “never-seen-before Citroën DS19,” a car that drew crowds and made him and Hedda objects of curiosity wherever they went.

  They bought the car in Paris in early April 1957 and drove fairly uneventfully to Nice, where they spent several days paying brief duty calls on Rosa and Moritz before escaping to nearby villages to recover from Moritz’s silence in the face of Rosa’s nonstop complaining. When they could no longer endure Nice, they drove through northern Italy to Milan for a brief visit with Aldo. Then they headed directly toward Spain and were between Parma and Genoa when the first accident, a collision with a Fiat, happened. The other car was only slightly damaged, but the Citroën lost the left headlight, fender, and front bumper, and they had to wait several days for replacements to arrive. Once they reached Spain, they were engulfed by hordes of curious Spaniards, who surrounded the car just to touch it or climb on it and who made driving through narrow village roads and city streets difficult. In early June they arrived in Madrid, where the second accident occurred. “A gentleman of Madrid” who was trying to park scratched and dented the entire left side of the Citroën, causing an extraordinary amount of damage.

  On their way home, they drove the car slowly and carefully to Paris, where Steinberg sold it and was happy to be rid of it. They were back in New York and settled in by the end of June. To recover from Spain, they planned to spend the rest of the summer in the quiet and empty city.

  IN HIS LATER LIFE, STEINBERG DESCRIBED the way each year unfolded as either “important” or “obscure.” He placed 1957 in the latter category, claiming it had been an “obscure” year whose events he had trouble trying to remember. “What happened?” he asked himself twenty years later, unable to recall anything of lasting importance, but whether he wanted to admit it or not, things of lasting importance actually did happen.

  For the most part it was a quiet summer with a number of interesting proposals awaiting his consideration. James Ivory asked about the possibility of a film project. There was a request from the Juilliard School for him to design the decor for a production of the Rossini opera Count Ory, and Life wanted him to go to Belmont Park to make a series about horse racing along the lines of the highly successful baseball drawings.

  Otherwise Saul and Hedda saw friends with whom they were comfortable and relaxed, among them two Greenwich Village couples whose homes had become informal salons: the artist Ingeborg Ten Haeff and her architect husband, Paul Lester Weiner, and photographer Evelyn Hofer and her then husband, Humphrey Sutton. The Nivola household in Amagansett was, as always, the center of hospitality for Italian expatriates who lived and worked in New York, and Saul and Hedda quickly became mainstays at many gatherings. A friendship with Ugo and Elizabeth Stille blossomed so rapidly that they became frequent visitors to the Stilles’ Greenwich Village apartment. After an evening of spirited dinner-table conversation that covered everything from international politics to literature and music, both Hedda and Saul found it “difficult to wind down and go to sleep,” and the conversation would often continue into the wee hours once they were back home on 71st Street. Personal interactions often added an extra tension to the Stilles’ table, as guests with strongly held views sometimes carried their arguments over into flirtations, casual flings, or serious affairs.

  The two couples, the Stilles and the Sterne-Steinbergs, developed an intense friendship that found them on the phone to each other every day whether or not they were going to see each other
that night. Throughout Saul and Hedda’s marriage, their custom had been to form separate friendships with couples or individuals. Richard Lindner, for example, went to the Metropolitan Opera with Hedda and to the movies with Saul. When Katherine Kuh and Janet Flanner were in New York, they had casual suppers with Hedda in her kitchen if Saul was away, and if she was unavailable, he took them to dinner in one of his favorite neighborhood restaurants. If either Saul or Hedda simply didn’t want to go somewhere, the other went alone, such as to the cocktail parties given by the wealthy art collector Edgar Kaufmann (Saul) or the art director of Mademoiselle, Leo Lerman (Hedda).

  But the friendship with the Stilles was different, because it was the first time that Hedda and Saul were so closely involved in a two-couple friendship. They were both so entranced by the Stilles that it was almost as if they were competing over who could become closest to them. The friendship began because of a natural affinity between the two men: Ugo Stille began life as Mikhail Kamenetzki, a Jew born in Moscow whose family fled persecution to live in Italy. Stille was educated at the University of Rome during the same years that Steinberg was at the Politecnico in Milan, and afterward they worked in journalism in their different cities. They had many friends and experiences in common, but what united them most was the disorientation they had experienced when racial laws forced them to give up the strong Italian identity each had forged. Each man had to learn how to re-create himself in a third language, culture, and society, but they did so in very different ways. Steinberg never gave up his love of the Italian language and spoke it whenever he had the opportunity, while Stille spoke it only professionally and refused to speak it at home to his wife and children.