Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Saul told them all to think seriously about moving to Paris, where Rica had a better chance of finding work, where Lica could return to her painting, where the children would receive a better education, and where he would be better able to buy a house large enough for them all to live in, his parents separately from the Romans but still together. For the rest of the year, the family drama consisted of anguished letters about whether they should move or not, whether they should all go or just the Roman family. He left them to sort it out and prepared to return to New York.

  As he left Nice, he realized that he had made several important decisions, starting with the one that he would not allow his family to join him in New York. France or Israel, he didn’t care; it just could not be New York. An equally important decision was the one not to live in Italy. Having made these two, he felt such elation that he swore he was no longer depressed. He drove back to Paris, arranged to ship the Jaguar by boat, and flew to New York on May 21, confident that he could face whatever was waiting for him.

  CHAPTER 23

  CLASSIC SYMPTOMS

  I’m a bit troubled and confused—all of a sudden I discover that the last fifteen years have gone by too fast. Classic symptoms.

  Steinberg had been at home for less than a month when the Jaguar arrived and gave him the excuse that he needed to go away again. He said it needed further breaking in, so he planned to drive across Pennsylvania to West Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though The New Yorker had not been interested in the drawings from his earlier trips to the South and Southwest, he hoped to interest the editors in the new ones. He sensed a new political urgency in American life and wanted to contribute something that would awaken readers, albeit quietly, to the social inequities and injustices. He wanted to see for himself “the ancestors of the Americans, the heroes of our best fiction,” and these included “cowboys, crooks, and country derelicts.” He went to company towns where coal miners lived and worked in dire poverty, to small towns where residents were both isolated from and deeply suspicious of the outside world and where rampant distrust of it made local prejudices harsh and threatening. He saw and drew a way of life so different from that in New York that it might have been a foreign country, one dominated by old-time religion and violence, where landscapes were despoiled by mining and commerce and daily life was as primitive as that in African villages. “Here’s where they ought to make a film,” he said of one urban landscape, but once again The New Yorker was not ready for it.

  Hedda stayed behind in New York, where she was busy preparing for new exhibitions and taking care of last-minute details connected with several that were just ending. “I hear you are rich,” Saul teased, after she sold several large paintings through Betty Parsons and received commissions for several more following the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum. She had four new shows to prepare for throughout 1958 and had already received two more invitations to show in 1959. It was a period of surprising public recognition for an artist who was still entirely content to paint quietly at home and who would have been happy to do the work without showing or selling it.

  An important reason for Hedda’s growing introspection was that it kept her from thinking about Elizabeth Stille. Their friendship had become so close that when the women came down with severe flu at the same time, they talked on the telephone several times daily to compare their cases. Saul was away, as he almost always was, but when he phoned Hedda, one of his first inquiries was usually about Elizabeth. Hedda’s antennae were alerted that Saul’s infatuation with Elizabeth was still strong when she noted how charmed he was by her tale of how Elizabeth was too sick to get out of bed to stop Alexander, then a toddler, from flushing a twenty-dollar bill down the toilet. Such excessive delight in a child’s doings was quite unlike him.

  Saul’s restlessness was such that he could not bear to be at home any longer than absolutely necessary, because by staying he would have to face “doubts and complications.” He needed an excuse for his inability to concentrate, so he blamed the outsize Brussels murals for making it difficult to return to drawing on “the usual scale.” And as he dawdled, a number of commissions languished. He told Aldo that in the past, the moment he plunked his “ass on the chair” he could always focus on the project at hand, but it was not working this time. Still refusing to face the complications in his life, he insisted that all his anxieties were caused by his work, and if he did not have so many financial responsibilities he would give it up entirely. Deep down, however, he knew that he was kidding himself and would not change a thing because he liked success, the books, the temptations, and was afraid of missing out on something good.

  TO PULL HIMSELF OUT OF MALAISE, he decided to get serious about a new book, envisioning a biographical exploration of “life … seen here like a voyage from birth A to the end, B.” When he was in Europe and pondering how he had changed from a transplanted Italian to a bona fide American, he thought about calling the book The Labyrinth, but after the driving trip, the content took a temporary detour to become something different and he gave it the working title “Steinberg’s America.” The basic premise was autobiography, but at the start he could not clarify the unifying idea that would let him emphasize either his inner life (that is, “Labyrinth”) or his life as an observer of the external world (“America”). He still owed the four publishers a book to make up for the aborted murals project, so every now and again, when nothing else commanded his attention, he gave thought to what a new one should be.

  He was tending toward “Steinberg’s America” because he had just provided the cover drawing for Delpire’s publication of Robert Frank’s revolutionary photographs of everyday American life, so sensational in their ordinariness that every American publisher Frank contacted refused the book. Frank, a Swiss-born Jew, loaded his then wife, the artist Mary Frank, and their children into a shabby used car and drove randomly back and forth across the country, taking photos of the “easily found, not easily selected and interpreted.” Delpire recognized that the book, which he published as The Americans, was groundbreaking, but as Frank was unknown, he thought a Steinberg drawing would help to sell it. Both Robert and Mary Frank were good friends of Steinberg and Sterne, but as much as Robert admired Saul, he did not want a drawing on the cover of his book of photographs. Delpire, aware of Steinberg’s enormous popularity in France, insisted that his drawing would be a selling tool, and the book was published that way. When the matter was settled, Steinberg was sure he had found his next book.

  EVEN THOUGH HEDDA WAS CONTENT TO spend the summer of 1958 in the city because of all the work she had to do, Saul was itching to let the Jaguar take him somewhere else. In July, saying that he needed more drawings for the “America” book, he imitated Frank’s car trip, but unlike Frank, he drove with purpose in mind. He filled a sketchbook with drawings from cities like Aberdeen, Maryland; South Hill, Virginia; Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Athens, Georgia; Middlesboro, Kentucky; Williamson, West Virginia; and Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

  The trip did little to relieve the anxieties that beset him when he started out, and he returned from it “a bit troubled and confused,” saying only that “the last fifteen years have gone by too fast.” By the autumn he was looking for someplace else to go when an invitation conveniently arrived from Denmark, one similar to so many that he had always declined in the past but that this time he decided to accept. Piet Hein, the Danish poet and mathematician, who was a fan of Steinberg’s work and with whom he had exchanged several letters, invited him to meet the filmmaker Carl Theodore Dreyer, to discuss the possibility of Dreyer’s filming several of Faulkner’s novels. Steinberg was intrigued by the proposition because he admired Faulkner’s fiction and had gone to Mississippi several times, thinking that seeing the state would help him understand why its people thought as they did. He brought home numerous souvenirs of Oxford, and on one of his trips stole a phone directory because he was fascinated by the “many Faulkners
and Falkners” who were listed in it.

  He decided to make Denmark the first part of a business trip that would continue with a visit to Rowohlt’s headquarters in Hamburg, then on to Paris to talk to Delpire, and at the end the obligatory visit to his family in Nice. He arrived in Copenhagen on December 3, 1958, and was immediately certain that going there had been a big mistake. He was the celebrity of the moment, a hapless being who felt as if he had been dropped smack in the center of a bowl of monkeys who were all yammering and picking at him to explain his work. He bore it stoically, saying that it was fortunate he could not read Danish and therefore could not understand what they wrote about him.

  His hosts pulled out all the stops in order to give him one solid week of activity, festivity, and adulation. A welcome dinner was scheduled only hours after his plane landed; a meal of many courses (each with appropriate wines) that ended with a dessert served on a tray with exploding firecrackers, preceded by a violinist playing a spirited march. Afterward there was coffee and brandy, but it was still not over: another course followed, of smoked fish, caviar, and aquavit. After all the food and liquor, he thought he was hallucinating when he finally got to his room, looked out the window, and saw a monument to the Viking explorers that featured sailors blowing horns while carrying wounded boy trumpeters, a bear fighting a bull, and a musk ox fighting a giant fish (or perhaps it was a dragon; he was never certain). He was so tired that he was unable to sleep, but he had to get up early for several days in a row for endless rounds of speeches, lunches, and dinners with various local “bigwigs.” They took him to Elsinore Castle, to all the museums, on a tour of the countryside, and then on a walking tour of Copenhagen. He liked the city and told Hedda they ought to come as private tourists, but only in the summertime.

  Carl Dreyer took him to see the work of an “interesting insane Dane-painter,” and Steinberg thought the topic of “another normality—that of the neurotic or insane”—worth pursuing if the book’s content became more “Labyrinth” than “America.” He had time to think on the day-long journey to Hamburg by train and ferry, much to the amusement of his German contacts, who had expected him to fly there in an hour. He spent his single day in Hamburg soothing his editors with promises that a book would soon be ready. After another mammoth meal, he had his first good night’s sleep since leaving New York. He was well rested when he flew to Paris, where he needed all the energy he could muster for his first order of business: to find Lica and Rica, who had made a sudden decision to move there permanently.

  Armed with a huge supply of mechanical toys from Germany, he found them living in “Raskolnikoff quarters” in the run-down working-class seventeenth arrondissement on the northwest outskirts of the city. The children were happy in school and ecstatic with the new toys, but Lica looked “pathetic” and Rica was exhausted from the only job he could find, going door-to-door trying to sell typewriters. Rica Roman was a cultured, sensitive man, who bore quietly the shame of his family’s total dependence on his wife’s little brother, as when he wrote to express it: “Dear Sauly, we live in the ‘City of Lights,’ but the life is tough and you need a lot of art and power to stay out of the darkness.”

  ONCE STEINBERG WAS BACK IN NEW YORK, there was no escape from what he described to Aldo as “the usual. I see too many people and talk too much, but for real or invented reasons I don’t have the courage to change.” An onslaught of commercial requests was awaiting him, all of which required decisions, which, in his usual manner, he ignored. A more pleasant barrage was the fan mail that greeted his third New Yorker cover when it graced the January 17, 1959, issue. The magazine was not yet ready for the literal reality of the life Steinberg saw in his journeys around America, but the editors were delighted with his allegory of “Prosperity,” or “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

  Steinberg drew a multileveled pedestal upon which a collection of men and symbols shared the spaces that normally held statues. Uncle Sam shared the base of the pedestal with Uncle Tom, while the two most influential characters in American culture were at the top: Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud. The cover caused a sensation, and fan mail flooded in. Stanley Marcus bought the original drawing as soon as he saw it but continued to pester Steinberg for an explanation of the dichotomy represented by the pairs of men, while Steinberg evaded his questions. A housewife in Berkeley, California, said that if the Nobel Prize were given for magazine covers, Steinberg would surely get it. A professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business asked for oversized copies to display in the school’s entrance, because Steinberg’s “wonderful anachronisms … deserve more attention from thinking men.” An owner of the Farmers’ Hardware Company in upstate New York represented dozens of so-called ordinary readers who asked Steinberg to tell him what it meant, as did a student at Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School, whose POD (Problems of Democracy) class got into such a spirited debate about what the cover meant that they decided to ask Steinberg if he “would be so kind” as to tell them. In Philadelphia, a grandmother had the cover framed, not only because it amused her but also “as a sort of time capsule” for her grandchildren: “One day when and if they become thinking adults, they may say ‘this is a time that tries men’s souls,’ but then, having studied your cover, they may take heart and realize that the sophistry, demagoguery, social, political, and economic ills which beset their times are nothing new, but were rampant and recognized in 1958.”

  THE NEW YORKER COVER MARKED THE beginning of Steinberg’s new relationship with the magazine, one that lasted for the rest of his life. Within his American patria, The New Yorker became his professional homeland as his status rose to an iconic level. It helped that his work was now selling for impressive prices in galleries and private collectors were buying it for themselves or to give to museums. It made him less dependent on commercial propositions and placed him in the fortunate position of being able to concentrate on honing his vision for drawings that would appear in what he believed was the most intelligent mass media publication in the country. He did continue to work for a few other publications, but it was The New Yorker for which he mostly tailored his vision.

  Because the magazine, from this moment on, almost always published everything he sent the editors and exactly as he wanted it to be seen, an apocryphal story grew up: that if the editors rejected his drawings and sent them back through the mail or by messenger, he would simply put them in a new envelope and resend them exactly as they were, first to Jim Geraghty and after he retired to Lee Lorenz, both of whom would get his message and quietly accept them. Even though Hedda Sterne insisted the story was true, others had firsthand knowledge that it was not. Roger Angell and his wife, Carole, who worked in the art department, became Steinberg’s good friends and saw in person how he was always ready to change a questionable submission and how he was constantly revising his work, even after he handed in drawings that were deemed print-ready by others. Lee Lorenz said that the apocryphal story “was just not in his character. He was not a prima donna like some of the artists. He did not mind suggestions but they were rarely offered. By the time he sent in his work, it was ready to go.” Frank Modell, one of the editors who often worked with Steinberg, recalled how he was “very particular about his drawings. When he turned them in they were ready to print. We would think it through, maybe make suggestions to change the size, perhaps adapt something. Maybe we might have thought once in a while that it was still a little rough so we’d send it back, but he was always very anxious to do the best he could, so he’d cooperate.” Modell noted that Steinberg “usually didn’t deal with other editors, though. He went right to Geraghty.” Everyone else thought Steinberg went directly to the editor in chief, William Shawn, who usually met him for lunch at the Algonquin so that Steinberg was not often in the magazine’s offices.

  Steinberg seldom went to the weekly art department meetings, where everyone from the editorial and production departments to the artists gathered to go over the content of the current and coming issues. When he d
id visit, it was most often to the production floor, where the magazine was actually made up. He was intrigued by the various processes by which raw drawings became images on the printed page and was curious to learn as much about them as he could. Steinberg, who was compulsively neat in his own working space, loved what Lee Lorenz called the “noise and confusion, the old-fashioned character and the idiosyncratic cast” who worked in the makeup department: “There was paper all over the floor; the place was in a constant uproar as we tried to meet our deadlines.” Mostly, however, he conducted his business with the magazine over the telephone, and if he went to the offices, his real destination was Shawn’s office, as he became the central figure for the remainder of Steinberg’s long association with the magazine.

  Shawn was quick to recognize that Steinberg and The New Yorker were, as Roger Angell recalled, “a perfect fit, entirely right for each other. Saul brought class, pleasure, honor, to the magazine. He was an elegant dandy, perfectly dressed, beautiful manners, exquisite behavior … Shawn really appreciated Saul and was very aware of Saul’s originality.” Each, in his polite and private way, became a good friend to the other.