Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  On October 1, Steinberg flew to Tel Aviv, ostensibly “to work” and primarily “to doubt,” but to his astonishment, everything about Israel struck him as a delightful surprise. Before he was invited to visit, he had not thought about the country as anything other than the place where a slew of relatives had settled among many others from his old neighborhood in Bucharest (which may have been why Israel was never high on his list of places to see). However, once he landed in Tel Aviv, the sheer beauty of the landscape was almost overwhelming. As he traveled to Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem and after he visited a kibbutz, he was assaulted by a series of unexpected sensations. Israel was composed of “the poetic, romantic…of the ancient, medieval, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian places.” In short, it brought back memories of his native Romania with its similar layers of settlement and the same “odors and perfumes.” What he liked even better than observing the landscape was how easily he was able to glide into conversations with ordinary citizens as they went about their daily life. He could not wait to write to Hedda to tell her how calm and happy it made him, to be “surrounded by Jewish faces,” with whom he felt very much at home, and how the sight of so many “Jewish noses” almost made him cry out with joy. Everywhere he went, he was accepted as a lanzmann, and he told Aldo that it made him almost delirious to find he could talk to people so easily and “immediately, in the most subtle way.”

  Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth: “He’s aFreud she’s too Jung for him!” (illustration credit 27.1)

  Until he went to Israel, Steinberg’s Jewishness had been cultural rather than religious. He did not attend services regularly, but if he heard of a particular rabbi whose ideas interested him, he would go to the temple just to hear the sermons. If a certain synagogue was noted for its music, he would go to hear it as if he were attending a concert. Most of all, if there was a political underpinning to the service, he could be counted on to attend, and whenever a Jewish group, cause, or organization asked for a contribution, he sent whatever it wanted, be it money or art. It was interesting, however, that despite the distance he maintained between himself and any practice of the Jewish religion, he always fasted on Yom Kippur.

  STEINBERG DECIDED NOT TO MAKE THE mural for the Zim ocean liner, and it was just as well, for shortly after, the company decided that airline travel had made passenger service unprofitable and ended it. It made him determined to resist all further “work on command,” no matter how tempting the project might seem. As the year ended, when he drew only what he wanted, he found himself unable to concentrate long enough to produce anything worth keeping. It was difficult to sit at his work table for the long periods of time that had in the past made him feel that he was working happily and well. His disposition was not helped by a new spate of troubles with his teeth, which kept him seated in the dentist’s chair several times each week for a series of appointments that lasted almost two months.

  Everything, it seemed, was giving him trouble. He was fed up with the Jaguar, which was in the repair shop more than it was on the road, so he sold it and bought a Buick. He was beset by unexplained “terrors,” and the only way he knew to rid himself of them was to draw them “in a comic way, in the manner of savages.” Everything he drew became “part of a diary,” and he filed the very few drawings he kept under the word Confessions. For a time he thought this would become the title of the book he was forcing himself to work toward, but he so disliked what he saw that he stopped drawing and tried to write instead. “This is a sad but very human story,” he began, quite ordinarily, before trying to imitate some of the wordplay associated with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “Blue of spirit … a middle-aged introvert has been contemplating the problems of a union with a red-blooded, cigarette addicted, lush young moll. He’s aFreud she’s too Jung for him!”

  He was writing about his relationship with Gigi, who was happy in her studies at Columbia, where she had met many people her own age and befriended quite a few, including a student from Ethiopia who insisted he was a prince of royal blood and with whom she was having an off-again, on-again affair. Steinberg still had a retinue of women with whom he slept routinely, but unlike Gigi, several were married, and all the others had independent lives and professions so they were not dependent on him, as she was. When his other women were otherwise occupied, Steinberg was often alone, and his way of overcoming loneliness was to immerse himself in literature. He reread all of Chekhov’s work that was translated into English and countless “random biographies of obscure people.” He did enjoy Enid Starkie’s life of Rimbaud, who was one of his favorite writers, but it took several years before his imagination allowed him to construct “Rimbaud’s Lost Diary,” a document that looked so authentic that he actually fooled some friends into thinking it was.

  In January, to get away from the cold and to cure himself of depression, he took Gigi to Key West for the month, but he was not happy when they had to return so she could start the new semester. The cold weather in New York made him feel “sadder still.” He withdrew in boredom from the constant round of socializing but then could not stand the solitude, so he invented excuses to phone people whom he knew he could trust to accept him unquestioningly. Harriet and Esteban Vicente were two he counted on for frequent invitations to their home in Princeton, and he often made the trek to Penn Station “if only to have an hour’s train ride in the evening.”

  Gigi told him she wanted to go to Europe again as soon as the spring term ended, and she had an ambitious itinerary: she planned to start in Paris with shopping and sightseeing, then continue on to Trier, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Istanbul, and Samsun, with one or more stops in St. Tropez to rest up for successive stages of her journey. She wanted to be away for two and a half months or maybe longer. He told her to do whatever would make her happy and said he would meet all her expenses.

  Even before she left, he knew he needed to fill his life with some sort of work, no matter what it was, and as he could do none that he thought worth keeping, he began to experiment to see how well he could copy other artists: he made “cubist collages” in the style of Braque and Gris and painted a “very elegant collection of Mondrians,” all of which he framed and hung in the house in Springs. He was proud that no one recognized them as fakes. Then he busied himself in physical work without thought by painting the interior of the Springs house, with all the walls white and the floors gray.

  When he did think, it was only to arrive at the same sad conclusion: “I don’t like being alone anymore.” In the past, when he was unhappy with his life, he had always found a way to flee from it. Travel was the great eraser, and for the next several years he seized on it with a passion.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE TERRIBLE CURSE OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FAME

  Impossible to recount things … As always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things … Also coming home and finding myself no longer the same.

  I’m not working,” Saul told Aldo as June became July 1963 and all he could do was make collages in Braque’s 1912 style. He was mired in an “unhappy period—but not even unhappy, intense rather, but not bad.” He defined his malaise as stemming from a desire for “absolute happiness (who knows what it is)” and the resulting “confusion, which comes from not following the highest ideals.” He moped around until August, when Gigi’s return from her triumphant tour of Europe made things brighter. To celebrate her homecoming, he did something he detested: he drove to Idlewild Airport to surprise her by meeting the plane. And he did something else he disliked almost as much: he planned and organized a surprise party for her August 9 birthday, inviting everyone he knew to join them at Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton.

  The party was an extravagance, for he was preoccupied by money and the fear that he did not have enough of it. He had wanted to go to Europe with Gigi and make the trip a truly grand tour that she would never forget, but he sent her alone when his income tax bill wa
s much higher than expected. Shortly after, he learned that his 1961 return was being audited because the IRS wanted a dollar value for each of the eleven paintings he had contributed to the Library of Congress. He assessed the lot at a modest total of $2,000 and it was quickly settled, but he was still shaken by the experience. Although he had been in the United States for two decades, his initial reaction to any contact with authority aroused the same fear he had felt as a Jewish boy in Romania, always on the alert for arbitrary government persecution.

  By the autumn his money worries had lessened, and he was in a slightly better mood after two covers on The New Yorker drew a large volume of fan mail. His satisfaction was enhanced when the critic Herbert Mitgang asked to buy a drawing of the Galleria Umberto I in Naples, where he had been stationed as a correspondent for Stars & Stripes during the war. Steinberg was further delighted when Mitgang described a visit to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Rome apartment, where he saw one of Steinberg’s drawings hung prominently among others by Klee, Kandinsky, and Morandi. Mitgang told Steinberg that when he saw where Antonioni placed it, he understood what he aimed for in all his films; when he told this to Antonioni, he replied with one word: “Exactly.”

  Steinberg’s usual retainers brought a new influx of cash, starting with the annual $20,000 from Hallmark, and a new spate of litigation brought more before the year ended. Life and Time had infringed his copyright by using full-page ads drawn by M. Lado that depicted a wife drinking coffee while staring at a statue of her husband at the other end of the table. It was so close to one of Steinberg’s that had been in The New Yorker ten years earlier that Alexander Lindey agreed he had been “substantially injured” and brought suit and won.

  Steinberg’s talents permitted him to straddle numerous areas within the art and design worlds, and this polymorphism often led diverse professional organizations to invite him to share his expertise. He was flattered but he usually refused the invitations, such as those to be the featured guest and principle speaker at conferences of the California Council of the American Institute of Architects and the California Eyes West group. Both were significant honors, which he declined because he did not consider himself qualified to dispense information to those whose work lay entirely within specific areas which he occasionally visited but did not fully inhabit: “I don’t quite belong in the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn’t quite know how to place me.” He believed such honors contributed to “monumentalizing” the artist and carried the “terrible curse of the consciousness of fame.” To accept would have meant the difference between being an “Artist, with a capital A”—that is, one who made a living by assuming an aura of expertise—and being an “artist with a small a”—that is, one who went about his own work and left it to others to judge and evaluate it.

  At the same time as these genuine honors came, there was also a fairly dubious one that marked a major change in his public image: he was no longer just an “artist,” who could count on being reviewed or written about every time he sold a painting, published a book, or held an exhibition; he was now a public figure, recognized as a bon vivant and man-about-town. The editors of the Celebrity Register, published by Cleveland Amory and Earl Blackwell, asked him to submit “another glossy portrait” because the one they had published in the first issue was “unsatisfactory.” Steinberg was flattered by the request, but as he had not given them the first photo, he ignored the request for the second.

  THE BARRAGE OF FAN MAIL STILL poured in for several months after The New Yorker featured Steinberg’s dual versions of the letter E on the May 25 cover. It was another of the captivating drawings that signaled a shift in his subject matter, one that fell into the category of the quasi-philosophical drawings that left readers pondering and puzzling over his contributions to the magazine during the past year or so. His “strange, silent world” had been identified a decade earlier by Alexey Brodovitch as “peopled with chinless, blank-faced men, beady-eyed women with monstrous headdresses, precocious animals, and weird architectural fantasies,” but viewers mostly attributed it to a “comic technique” that raised many laughs but few questions. In the 1960s, when his letters, numbers, and punctuation marks either took on insistent anthropomorphic qualities or reflected the existential situations in which animals, little men, and disparate women find themselves, the influx of fan mail from the magazine’s readers burgeoned.

  After the appearance of the October 6, 1962, cover, featuring the numbers 5 and 2, readers demanded interpretations and answers to questions that became intense, urgent, and sometimes even angry. Basically, they were all asking, “What does it mean?” The scene is one of Steinberg’s traditional café tables, with a trim and tailored number 5 sitting confidently in a chair on the left, a thought balloon above its head brimming over with complicated mathematical equations and symbols. A highly ornamented 2 sits on the chair opposite, and if a number can be made to look dejected and depressed, this 2 certainly does, with its edges all frilled and furbelowed but with nary a balloon above it to show that it is capable of even the most ordinary thought.

  Steinberg talked about this cover when he sat for a far-ranging interview several years later with Jean Stein, calling it “a dialogue between a No. 5 and a No. 2 … who are both drinking and trying to figure out their relationship.” He described the 5 as “more solid looking, made out of straight, simple lines,” whereas the 2 “has frills and is sort of pinkish; it denotes a woman.” As the 2 looks at the 5, she tries to figure out their “potential combinings,” while at the same time the 5 is figuring out “the same geometrical, mathematical, or arithmetical possibilities.” Steinberg insisted that the drawing worked because of the numbers he had chosen; if he had chosen a 6 talking to a 9, it would have been “unprintable.”

  The love of numbers came from his childhood interest in typography, when he had played with the big wooden type that his father used to decorate mortuary wreaths. Throughout his life he remained “obsessed with the question mark, and numbers— one, two, three, four—big numbers.” The memory persisted of how, as a small boy, he held the oversized type his father used and how it comforted him. Steinberg was often asked about the many different ways in which he represented numbers, particularly the number 5, which he used so often. He depicted it lying in bed, wrapped erotically around a question mark, or wrapping itself like an oversized tuba around a little man who trudges disconsolately with the burden, or serving as the cupboard which a cat in search of food opens to find only apples and pears, which he cannot eat. Steinberg was uncharacteristically gleeful when he talked about the number 5, particularly the 5 as a cupboard. That one was “so simple—I even give hints. This is how children see the meaning of a number—as an abstraction: two apples and three pears make five—but five what?” By answering the question this way, Steinberg delighted in posing another, far more existential one. His questioner asked why the number 5 was always so predatory and unsettling. “Oh, that’s easy,” he replied as he leaned in conspiratorially to whisper, “You can never trust a 5.”

  His seven pages of question marks in The New Yorker on July 29, 1961, were meant to depict this particular punctuation mark as “a problem, a weakness, or a curiosity,” and ultimately an erotic dialogue. When he drew a triangle in bed with a fat question mark, Steinberg saw “a line making love to a mass … a liveliness being made love to by reason.” It represented “a very noble idea” for him, the idea “that love itself, including sex, is a continuation of a dialogue.”

  This series continued the trend toward the drawings that Joel Smith called “the serious core of this wordless comedy,” and the letter E on the May 25, 1963, cover was its next logical extension. Much of the fan mail about this cover’s meaning came from high school students, who spent their lunch hours in school cafeterias arguing about it. They wanted Steinberg to give them a solid explanation of what he meant, even as they offered their own interpretations and expected him to agree that they were right. One group thought it was simpl
y an exercise in typography, while another was certain that it was a pun on the old song about keeping soldiers down on the farm after they’ve seen “Paree.” Most of the mail, however, came from people whose initial was E and who wanted to buy the original, or those who sent their copy of the magazine for him to autograph. He enjoyed the many interpretations, because they represented viewers whose responses ranged across a spectrum from shock to admiration to uneasiness. Whatever the response, his viewers were all made slightly uncomfortable by what they saw, and this was exactly what Steinberg wanted, for he believed that the artist had the responsibility to “make people jittery by sort of giving them situations that are out of context.” When he told this to the critic Grace Glueck, she offered her own interpretation: “In other words, you don’t want to make them reason, but you want to shake them up a little bit.” Steinberg agreed, admitting that even as he wanted his readers to figure out what each drawing meant for themselves, “The most difficult thing in the world is to reason.”

  EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE GOING WELL as autumn lengthened. Gigi’s return had lifted his mood, as did another successful New Yorker cover on October 12, which provoked almost the same volume of fan mail as the earlier one in May. This one featured two of his spiky females with pointy features and garish red slashes for mouths and lips: one’s mouth spouts Steinberg’s version of a street map of Paris’s St. Germain-des-Prés, while the other’s spews a map of Sardinia. The women drink cocktails and boast of their travels, talking across each other without an inkling of true communication. Most of the mail for this one praised Steinberg’s comic vision, while his larger message of the women’s inability to communicate was not addressed. The cover’s overall effect was directly opposed to what he wanted: it made his readers laugh instead of making them jittery and unsettled. He took it personally, as another warning that he had grown stale and was not communicating with his audience. Whenever he felt this way, he knew he needed a change of scene, and that always meant taking a trip.