Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg was not prepared for critics who thought the tables were self-indulgent and sentimental, who could not understand the themes and ideas they were meant to convey, and who seemed resentful because the new work departed from the old and did not merely continue what had come before. Despite the muted critical reception, sales were good, but that was not enough to assuage his miffed feelings.

  A major purchaser was a Belgian art dealer and collector with ties to the New York art world, Serge de Bloe, who had become a trusted friend. Steinberg had occasionally used de Bloe as a conduit for sending money to Aldo and Ada, and now that became something he did fairly regularly. Although the Internal Revenue Service audited Steinberg’s tax returns with alarming regularity, he was never caught when he used de Bloe as his intermediary. Until now he had never volunteered money to Ada but only given when she asked for it, and she had routinely asked for money or goods several times each year (the latest request was for a television set). Now he worried whether he was “doing a good or bad thing” and asked Aldo for his “sage advice.” Whatever the advice, from here on, Steinberg included something for Ada whenever he diverted funds to Aldo.

  FOR A MAN WHO COMPLAINED THAT he was beset with depression and indecision, Steinberg managed to hide it from public view while being much in the public eye. At his opening reception in Paris, he had the opportunity to see many old friends whom he was often too busy to see individually. Mary McCarthy came, and he was so happy to see her that he danced her around the floor. The next day she sent a confidential letter that led to Steinberg’s behind-the-scenes but highly active involvement in the antiwar movement. McCarthy was trying to raise money for Chilean dissidents, particularly Carlos Altamirano, the man most wanted by the Chilean junta. An underground network had been established in Argentina to raise between $10,000 and $12,000, and she asked Steinberg to contribute whatever he could. He sent almost the entire amount, and McCarthy sent grateful updates about the progress his money was making for the remainder of 1973.

  He was generous with his work as well as with cash: during the 1972 presidential election he donated a painting to the McGovern-Shriver campaign, and he made a special lithograph for Spanish Refugee Aid, Inc., to raise funds for aging refugees of the Spanish Civil War. He was a generous contributor to local politicians and if he believed strongly in a candidate’s platform, as he did with Judith Hope, who was running for reelection to the town government of East Hampton, he created an original poster. He gave permission for the National Peace Action Coalition to use four pages of drawings, cartoons, and caricatures from The New Yorker free of charge for an antiwar anthology. There were organizations who wanted to use his name as well as his work and his money, among them the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, which asked him to sign a petition along with other artists who were concerned about freedom of expression and the protection of the Bill of Rights. Shortly after, the group asked him to create an original work for the twenty-fifth anniversary cover of its Bill of Rights Journal, an honor he willingly accepted. But when the National Lawyers Guild asked him to contribute money for the Attica Brothers Legal Defense Fund, he replied with a firm “NO.” That decision was based on his personal belief rather than political correctness, for he did accept a place on the honorary committee organizing a “salute to Charlie Chaplin.” It was not a politically correct thing to do in the early 1970s, but it affirmed his commitment to left-leaning and liberal politics and causes.

  His work had always been of interest to the scholarly community, mostly among editors who wanted to use it to illustrate books and articles, but now it had become the subject of theses and dissertations. Artists and art students who respected his work wanted to meet him. Among them were the graphic artist Tibor Kalman, who simply liked Steinberg’s work, and the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, then a graduate student at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, who offered to show Steinberg some examples of his syndicated Doonesbury cartoons. Steinberg’s work even penetrated the Romanian Iron Curtain: the country’s leading cartoonist, Matty Aslan (who published his work as Matty) so admired him that he risked censure and punishment by entrusting an American newspaper correspondent to deliver a gift of ethnic embroidery similar to that done by Rosa Steinberg. It was a deeply touching homage.

  Concurrent with these requests were many from people Steinberg hardly knew as well as from friends he did not think he could turn down. He had met Susan Sontag only in passing and did not know her well enough to be asked to contribute to the appeal for funds made by the Partisan Review editor William Phillips after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but he still sent a $200 check. He provided the jacket drawing for John Hollander’s Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, not only because of his friendship with Hollander but also because the publisher commissioned Sigrid Spaeth to design the cover. Atheneum Publishers offered a $100 pittance for an original drawing for the cover of Howard Moss’s book of poetry A Swim Off the Rocks, and Steinberg accepted because he liked Moss, who was the poetry editor of The New Yorker. When Nora Ephron, then an associate editor at Esquire, asked him to contribute two pages of flag drawings for a planned bicentennial issue, he paused long enough before he accepted to send a copy of her letter to Lee Lorenz, asking if The New Yorker would be interested (it was). He had his loyalties and was careful to nurture them.

  AS THE ONSLAUGHT OF REQUESTS GREW in seemingly exponential fashion, and as he was trying to fulfill most of them from the new studio in the Springs house, he complained to Aldo about what it was like to live in an art colony: “And the telephone rings and letters arrive asking for donations in money, drawings, lithographs, for the benefit of museums, nations, Indians, etc. etc.” It was a barrage he could barely handle, and Aldo chose this moment to introduce another factor, which left him totally flummoxed.

  Because Steinberg was having so much trouble formulating a text for the Skira book, he had hit on the idea of doing it in collaboration with Aldo. His plan was to have taped conversations with Aldo about his most important influences, after which Aldo would select the most revealing remarks and prepare a transcript. Some of the examples that came immediately to Steinberg’s mind were Romania and everything connected to his life there, and painters such as Van Gogh and Courbet, whose lives he studied avidly in order to understand their work. Most recently he and Nabokov had disagreed strongly about Courbet, and he was eager to talk about the artist with Aldo. Steinberg agreed that with the give-and-take of this sort of collaboration, “maybe it could be done.”

  But Aldo did the flummoxing when he introduced something else he thought should go into the book: extracts from every one of Steinberg’s letters, all of which he had kept from the first year of their friendship, when Steinberg had gone home to Bucharest for summer vacation, and then from the year that he left Italy for good. Steinberg was stunned to learn they were extant, and when Aldo sent copies, he was unable to read beyond the first five pages. He was so emotionally paralyzed that a month passed before he could even skim the rest to craft a reply. He said it took “courage” to reread what he had written throughout the past thirty years, and he had needed the one-month hiatus before he could face himself when younger. The time off gave him the distance to declare them “indeed good and moving because it really shows the development in a clinical fashion,” but they did create a new worry: that he might become “artificial” when he wrote to anyone in the future. He put the worry aside to insist that Aldo come for the summer, to see the new addition and to work on the proposed book. Aldo agreed, and he and Bianca came in August 1974, as Steinberg’s guests and with all their expenses paid.

  STEINBERG WAS HONORED TO BE ELECTED to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1968, and since his induction he had participated fully in the academy’s events and activities. He took the responsibilities of membership seriously and gave great care to nominating likely candidates, putting up many of his friends, writing fulsome letters of recommendation, and actively networking with other m
embers to secure their admission. Awards and accolades from other institutions were offered to him almost every year throughout the 1970s, and he accepted most while carefully refusing others. By 1976 he was confident enough to decline the gold medal of the National Arts Club in New York, because it had become “impossible to witness and listen to speeches praising me,” especially “if my presence is necessary.” But in 1974 he was pleased to be present when the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the Gold Medal for Graphic Art. Philip Johnson was the presenter, and his statement raised many of the same questions that Steinberg had recently asked himself, particularly when working with Aldo for the Skira book.

  Johnson prefaced his remarks by asking not who but “what is Saul Steinberg?” Johnson noted that Steinberg’s gold medal was being given for his ability as a graphic artist, but wasn’t he also a satirist, and wasn’t he also a painter? To corroborate the latter, he noted that Steinberg’s work had been shown at MoMA as long as thirty years before, but—again a qualification—wasn’t he also a humorist, and wasn’t he also an architect? When it came time to determine Steinberg’s place in contemporary art and culture, Johnson metaphorically threw up his hands over the impossibility of the task: “With the twentieth-century insistence on careful categories, our academic enthusiasm for dichotomy and definitions betrays us: we cannot pigeonhole Saul Steinberg.”

  Now that Steinberg was fast becoming the darling of the intellectual world, these were the same questions—the same irritating questions—that he would be asked repeatedly as others strove to define him. Even worse, to his way of thinking, was that others would pose these questions and then wait expectantly for him to define himself.

  EVERYTHING WAS GOING WELL FOR STEINBERG in mid-1974. Sigrid was on one of her many solo trips to Africa, this time to Mali and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), and before she left, they had bid each other farewell in a desultory but basically fond fashion. They were in one of the periods when he was involved in a succession of casual flings and her attitude toward them was one of casual indifference. He was alarmed when one of the women threatened to want more than a brief affair and complained that he would never learn, as he landed up to his nose in trouble and became mired in one of the same old traps he had been baying at for years. At the age of sixty, he thought of himself as an old man, but even as he questioned his need for continual conquest, he had to admit that he could not help it that he still loved women, loved the foreplay of seduction, and loved most of the initial sexual encounters. Always in need of something to blame for his general melancholy, he focused briefly on his appetite for many women but soon discounted it to blame something else. “What does this sadness mean?” he asked rhetorically. He decided that it had to be “the nose speaking. It must be old age.”

  The sadness was mixed with a vague, unfocused fear of death and the actual deaths of friends and family. Nicola Chiaromonte had died in 1972, and Steinberg was reminded of the death when he deepened his ties to Mary McCarthy over their mutual opposition to the Vietnam War. He kept in touch with Chiaromonte’s widow, Miriam, whom he always visited in Rome and who sent him articles and homages to her late husband for many years. Ennio Flaiano, the Italian novelist whom Steinberg much admired, had died, and he regretted that he had not managed to know him better. His brother-in-law, Rica Roman, died that winter, a death not unexpected because of his years of ill health, but still the suddenness of it came as a shock. In accord with Jewish custom, Rica was buried the next day, and in a gesture that comforted all the family, in a grave abutting Moritz Steinberg’s. It was not possible for Saul to be there, but he planned to visit Lica as soon as he could arrange to get away, and he intended to persuade her to come for a long visit to Springs at the earliest possible moment.

  When nothing succeeded in helping him shake the doldrums, he scheduled another visit to the Buchinger Klinik in Überlingen in the hope that a stay in the sanatorium would alleviate his sadness. He had been suffused for years by malaise, melancholy, depression—whatever name he called it during the periods when he was enduring it—so these periods were nothing new, but this one was more alarming than usual. As it deepened, it reminded him of the kind of sadness that had often come over him in Romania when he was very young. “One is never saved,” he concluded, even as he hoped that several weeks of fasting in a spartan setting would raise his spirits. He put so much faith in the clinic because he had not smoked for the previous two years and was confident that another stay could cure anything, even depression. When it was over, he told himself and others that it had worked, but his letters to Aldo and the occasional jotting whenever he tried to keep a journal proved otherwise.

  LICA DID GO TO SPRINGS IN MAY 1975, to stay for a month. Steinberg gave her the happy news that the Association of American Artists had just agreed to purchase her edition of drawings that she called La Famille for the impressive sum of $1,400, but it was not enough to raise her spirits, which had been down since her husband’s death. She was more subdued than usual and wanted only to sit on the porch in the warm sun and browse her way through the huge pile of back issues of the New York Times that Steinberg had accumulated. Sigrid came on the weekends, along with her new cat, Papoose, whom Steinberg was convinced was far more intelligent than any human and whose antics he never tired of watching. He adored the cat, and throughout Papoose’s long life, if there was anyone or anything that could make him smile, it was he. But during Lica’s visit, even that respite was brief.

  Sigrid Spaeth and Papoose. (illustration credit 35.1)

  Steinberg blamed his sister’s lassitude on more than grief over her husband’s death. No matter how much he tried to reassure her, she was unable to accept that he would always provide the income she needed; nor could he persuade her of the value of her own art. He wondered if her low spirits were caused by “envy” or “stupidity,” but they were “real, nonetheless.” The only time they had fun together was when they recalled incidents from their childhood and laughed about their “comical parents.” When Lica returned to Paris in June, she went directly to her doctors, because it was clear that her problem was more than simple lassitude and something was physically wrong. Stéphane wrote twice, first to tell Steinberg that his mother had had an exploratory operation in early June and then again to say there were no tumors and nothing out of the ordinary had been found. When it appeared that Lica would soon be released from the hospital, Steinberg wrote to her on July 10 to say he was convinced the French doctors had not arrived at a diagnosis because she was suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever, as he was calling tick bites. He told her that Papoose brought ticks into the house, and he and Sigrid had to examine themselves and the cat constantly to be sure they were not infected. He filled the letter with chatty news, even enclosing a photo of the artist Syd Soloman, whose work he admired. He told Lica that he loved working in the studio now that he had so much light streaming through the new windows, and then, desperate to think of something she would care about, he told her that someone from the Smithsonian had visited and admired one of her portraits hanging in the studio. Steinberg said he hoped to persuade the museum to buy it. His biggest news of all was that in June he would give up the Union Square studio, and there would be a horrendous amount of work involved in deciding what to keep in the city and what to move to Springs. He closed by telling her that Sigrid and Hedda both sent warm good wishes, and he sent all his love to her and to Dana and Stéphane.

  Lica never read this letter. Four days after he wrote it, she died, on July 14.

  Saul Steinberg and Papoose. (illustration credit 35.2)

  CHAPTER 36

  SADNESS LIKE AN ILLNESS

  I’ve found and taken a good look at my childhood photographs and I look at myself as a passerby. I find no familiarity with that little boy.

  Lica’s death at the relatively young age of sixty-three came after a “difficult and frightening” lung operation that led to pulmonary complications, probably stemming from the dermoid cyst she ha
d had since birth. Steinberg flew at once to Paris and was with her children and a small group of close friends when she was buried next to her husband and parents on July 18, 1975. He stayed in the Cachan house for several days before returning directly to Springs. Aldo wanted him to go to Milan, but he was too sad to see anyone then or even later, when he rescinded his invitation for Aldo to spend September and October with him. He begged Aldo to understand that he could not have visitors because his “sadness was like an illness, and very tiring.”

  Conflicting emotions were only natural after the loss of the one person who had been dear to him far longer than anyone else. He told Aldo he had not been aware of how much he loved Lica until she was gone, when he realized that he would mourn her for the rest of his life. At her graveside, he wept for the first time since he was a boy in Romania, and when he tried to analyze why he sobbed so unrestrainedly, the very fact that he could cry was almost as shocking as the death that inspired his tears. When he was back in Springs, he was roiled by the same emotions as those he experienced during Lica’s last visit, when he was “depressed, scared in the morning, sad in the afternoon.” All the while she had been with him, he was forced by her state of mind—and Sigrid’s too—to play a role that was foreign to him, the strong male presence who provided calm reassurance for others. He was so accustomed to having women take care of him on every level from the physical to the emotional that he found it difficult to have to be the giver of strength and stability.

  Sigrid had begun sustained psychotherapy after it appeared that she had inherited her mother’s clinical depression and become almost catatonic. She had tried one or two analysts in the past, usually for a few consultations which lasted several weeks at the longest. Her newest analyst became the first on the fairly long list of those she would consult and dismiss throughout the rest of her life, switching from one to another on what seemed little more than impulse or whim. When she became disillusioned with her current treatment or heard of a new therapeutic technique, she went eagerly to the next new thing, convinced that this would be the one to cure her forever. Sigrid perked up after finding an analyst who (according to Steinberg) featured an “anti-tears cure” that used a great many mood-altering prescription drugs to be effective. Knowing Sigrid’s proclivity for recreational drugs and basically unsure that any treatment would be successful, he was still willing to pay for whatever she thought might cure her. As her health was otherwise robust, he feared that she—and he as well, because he was so loyal—faced a long life of battling demons that were far more serious than anything he had thus far personally endured.