by Deirdre Bair
He did everything he could for Sigrid in the early years of her severe depression. If she felt the urge to visit Africa, he paid her way and sent her off for as long as she wanted to stay; if she thought she was well enough to work, he was discreet about asking friends in publishing to send commissions her way. A number of interesting projects resulted, among them the lettering for the cover of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer. He stayed quietly aloof when she took her drawings to the Whitney Museum and asked to have them included in an exhibition or when she took them to downtown art galleries that specialized in emerging artists, knowing that her work was not good enough for either. Everywhere she submitted her portfolio, she was asked to return at some future time, when her “ideas were more developed.” Unfortunately, her moods fluctuated so unpredictably that she was never able to sustain equilibrium and capitalize on the periods when she was productive.
One year after Lica’s death, in 1976, Steinberg was in Cachan for the unveiling of the headstone on her grave. He realized that the date was July 9, the sixteenth anniversary of the day he met Sigrid, and he wrote a letter addressed to “Dear Papoose,” using the name of the cat they both adored, which had become their private symbol of tenderness. His letter was filled with more sentiment than he had expressed in all their years together and was exactly what she had long wanted to hear him say: “Of course I still love you and think of you as my dearest friend.” She was stunned when he told her that his gift for her birthday on August 9 would be the little cabin she used as a studio and all the land around it in the meadow, starting from a poplar tree she particularly liked and extending to the vegetable garden she tended so lovingly. Even more astonishingly, he told her that “the rest of the land will be yours after my end, of course. You know more and like it more and deserve it and enjoy it [more] than anybody.” In retrospect, looking at their later lives as their “thirty-five years’ war” played itself out with dramatic intensity, both his gift and his sentiments became tinged with the irony for which he was famous.
THE SUMMER WAS GRUELING AS HE moved out of the Union Square studio, which was far more complicated than going from one apartment to another. Before Anton could do the actual packing, Steinberg had to decide what to keep and discard, what to send to the country and what to keep in the city. As he sorted through everything from the lace bib his mother had made when he was born, to wartime souvenirs from China, to photos of himself, his family, friends, and lovers, he was haunted by the way Lica’s death had made him fearful of “the brutal image of the end of life.”
As he sifted and sorted his papers, he was coming across so many things from his past life (or lives, as he thought of his years of living in different places) that he dubbed himself his own “voyeur.” He realized that he had saved every scrap of information that pertained to his life and much else that pertained to his times, from movie ticket stubs and hotel bills to take-out menus from neighborhood restaurants, calling cards from countesses and dukes, business cards from his local dry cleaner, news clippings of current events, and obituaries of everyone from his friends to strangers whose deaths were bizarre or garish. Such intense immersion in memories exhausted him physically even as it made his mind race, energized by the curiosity to remember more.
He asked Aldo to send him a copy of their class photograph from the Politecnico, and he searched his own files for images of the places connected to his Romanian boyhood, even though he refused to return there because the country could not be magically transformed into the 1924 version he held in his mind. He asked anyone traveling to Bucharest to take photos of his house on Strada Palas and to bring him souvenirs, particularly old street maps or postcards showing street scenes. And yet he insisted that no aspect of his life in Romania had influenced his work. His poet friend W. D. Snodgrass, who went to Bucharest and took some of the photos Steinberg requested, raised an interesting question about the origins of his drawing. Fascinated by peasant clothing, especially the black embroidery on white coats, Snodgrass wondered if the quality of Steinberg’s line might have been heavily influenced by it. Steinberg emphatically dismissed the possibility. Even so, Bucharest became ever more prominent in his memory, and a quarter century later he was avid to collect images of how it had been in the 1920s. Each time he spoke of his collection of things Romanian, he called it “an emotional orgy, exhausting,” but he was happy every time he went through “this secret life.”
BY OCTOBER 1975, THE MOVE FROM Union Square was over, and Steinberg was in the country and reluctant to return to the city and his life there. He stayed in Springs until the end of November, and while he was there, letters of condolence came in steadily from friends all over the world, every one of them deeply touching in their concern for him. There were also many from friends in New York, which was why he stayed away: it would have been too difficult to accept condolences in person without becoming emotional.
Ada’s letter was especially poignant, as she had known Lica since they were young girls; now she tried to cheer him up with a diversion, telling how she had become an old but still pretty woman and coyly inviting him to come and see for himself. Ada had also written a touching letter when Ennio Flaiano died, which struck him with her ability to convey exactly the sentiment he needed to hear. He realized that she had always done this, and also that she had become almost (but not quite) as necessary to him as Hedda. Ada had been the companion during his formative years, and those were now the source of most of the memories that engulfed him. With Lica gone, he drew closer to Ada, because she was one of the few people who had known Lica since her first visit to Milan when Saul was a poor student; they had corresponded over the years off and on and had a genuine friendship based on their love for “Sauly” (Lica’s affectionate nickname) and “Saulino” (Ada’s “mio olino caro”).
HE STAYED ON IN SPRINGS THROUGH the early winter, content to spend his days sorting through his boxes of papers when not actively creating new work. He was mostly alone now that the friends he saw regularly in the Hamptons had gone back to the city, so he got into the habit of fixing simple solitary suppers at the end of his workday. The meals reflected his Romanian heritage and the foods of his Italian years: peasant breads and cheeses, scallions to dip in good olive oil, zesty olives to nibble before the main course of grilled vegetables or pasta with simple sauces. The only part of his diet he worried about was his tendency to drink too much, mostly the expensive French white wines that he ordered by the case.
After dinner he tried to relax for sleep by reading voraciously, always on the lookout for something that would not intrigue him enough to stay awake. He followed Aldo’s suggestion to indulge in harmless thrillers like Dashiell Hammett’s, saying that he knew Hammett’s widow, “who keeps writing wonders about him.” Referring to Lillian Hellman allowed him to avoid commenting on the fiction itself. His taste in literature was more cosmopolitan, and if he wanted a thriller, he preferred a writer like Manuel Puig, whom he called “Joyce’s illegitimate son.”
He often recommended writers to friends, particularly to Claire Nivola, with whom he had carried on an intellectual correspondence since her Harvard student days. His recommendations often came in the form of something whimsical or charming, such as the multicourse “Literary Menu” he drew for her “degustation.” The “antipasto” featured selections that ranged from Victorian explorers (Burton, Gordon, Kitchener, etc.) to Kropotkin’s autobiography, while the “soup” course offered a biography of Charles XII of Sweden, “boring [but] worth reading.” The “entrée” was serious nonfiction: Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Delacroix’s journals, Herzen’s autobiography (all “6 or 8 volumes”), books about Lawrence of Arabia, a biography of Dostoevsky, and Enid Starkie’s Rimbaud and Richard Ellman’s James Joyce. For “dessert,” he recommended Norman Douglas—not the Old Calabria he loved but rather Looking Back—and Nabokov’s Gogol, which he thought “one of the best things written.” They were both fond of Tolstoy, and after each read Henri Troyat’s biography, Steinbe
rg said they must find another that was “more contemporary and more historical,” because Troyat’s was too full of “anecdote and quotation.” His most recent suggestion was for them both to read Roland Barthes, whose writings they occasionally talked about during the next several years.
Because the Skira book was still unwritten and long overdue, Steinberg told Aldo to read the biography of Courbet he had discussed with Nabokov on his last visit to Montreux. Steinberg found the disconnections between the artist’s dysfunctional life and his art endlessly fascinating, and he said that when he and Nabokov talked about Courbet, they agreed that biographies of artists were often unsatisfactory because biographers understand “only other writers (as shown in diaries, letters, etc.).” This assertion led him to Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, in which he heavily annotated the passage about how Flaubert would not allow illustrations in his novels. Flaubert believed they limited the reader’s imagination and offered the example of how a drawing of a woman would render the text “closed, complete, and every sentence becomes useless, whereas the written woman makes one dream of a thousand women.” Steinberg’s problem was the opposite of Flaubert’s: he made drawings whose interpretations were legion, whereas if he wrote about what he drew, he would be the one rendering his work “closed, complete, and useless.” He had to think about this.
Several months later, the Skira book (for he refused to call it by the despised title given by the publisher, Table of Contents) was still going nowhere and he needed an excuse to explain why, not only to others but also to himself. Even though he read constantly and liked almost everything he read, he told anyone who asked that he had “completely lost faith, enthusiasm and respect for books.” It was only a matter of time until he gave up entirely on the project. Meanwhile, he insisted (and it was true) that the only thing that gave him genuine unalloyed pleasure was what he dubbed “the exercise” that he set for himself every day, of turning out drawings with alacrity for The New Yorker. After not having a single cover in 1973 and 1974, he had four in 1975, and Parsons and Janis were planning a large exhibition for 1976 that featured many of his “old cartoons.”
Now that he had his studio in the country set up as he wanted it and as it would remain for the rest of his life, he found that he did his best work there. He papered the end wall with page after page of drawings from his sketchbooks, which he mixed, matched, and shifted into “Manhattanite dystopias and memory-caricatures of Fascist-era Milan.” Glass sliding doors kept him in touch with the changing light, landscape, and wildlife he had come to love. Papoose was endlessly entertaining as he bravely swatted flies, stood up to the occasional fox, and actually chased the deer who ambled up to eat the flowers just off the porch. Tranquillity came through painting watercolors and crafting collages; a new pleasure came through arranging the ordinary objects that gave him pleasure in his daily life into whimsical still lifes, such as the blue-and-white Chinese vase or the mushroom and pistachio cans on his large kitchen table. He took renewed pleasure in sketching his friends in what he called dal vero, as he captured Sigrid in the act of reading a newspaper or Harold Rosenberg holding forth as he emoted from his favorite chair.
Steinberg went into the city for New Year’s and left it in a slightly better mood after several weeks of being warmly welcomed by his many friends, who were genuinely glad to see him. Sigrid was in Africa again, Cameroon this time, and because she and Steinberg were on the outs, she left Papoose with a cat sitter to spite him. The cat misbehaved, the sitter resigned, and Steinberg took Papoose to where both were the happiest, Springs, where he had the tranquillity to work and Papoose could chase everything from birds to foxes.
He was productive during the winter despite his depression, although he was worried enough about it to try to alleviate it on his own. His first action was to stop drinking except for an occasional glass of wine when he dined out or when he had a visitor, when he sipped just enough to keep company. His relationship with Tino Nivola was in one of its quietly companionable periods, and he accepted more invitations to dine with him and Ruth than he had for a long time. No one could understand why Saul Steinberg had a tendency to tease, taunt, and even belittle his old friend, but he departed from his usual impeccably polite behavior to do it to Tino, even in front of others, and no one ever questioned or upbraided him. While Ruth seethed—mostly to herself, because her husband forbade her to engage in rebuttal—Tino usually smiled and shrugged off the barbs as just “Saul’s way” and not worth fussing about because his mood was bound to change momentarily. The Nivolas knew how stunned Saul had been by Lica’s death and how unnerved he was by Sigrid’s depression; they worried that he brooded when alone, so they invited him to dine casually and often. There was the excuse that they needed him to help eat the squid Tino bought directly from the fisherman who caught it, then grilled lightly and served with salad from their garden and boiled local potatoes. Tino invited Saul to help him hunt for mushrooms and rejoice in the cache of porcini they found behind the house, which were then cooked to perfection by Ruth.
The meals served by the Nivolas in their welcoming kitchen were also triggers for pleasant memories of past culinary pleasures. Steinberg told Aldo they reminded him of some of the first pasta dishes he ever ate, the rigatoni “in boarding houses in Milan, made with mysterious sauces of leftovers and stuff from the day before.” One of the things he liked best about Colette’s fiction was her description of village markets, particularly the cheese stalls; one of the things he liked least about Tolstoy was in the novel Family Happiness, because he was “outraged” that Tolstoy wrote a lengthy description of the conversation at a dinner party “with no mention of food. Gogol would have.”
The exchanges about food began toward the end of 1976, during a time when Aldo was especially worried about Steinberg’s depression. For five months he had not received a single one of the chatty letters Steinberg usually wrote several times each week. When Aldo probed for his reasons, Steinberg attributed his inability to write to “laziness or worse.” Aldo was so worried that he lectured him about taking better care of himself and sent actual menus for him to cook, eat, and report back on. “I’m following your advice to count my blessings,” Steinberg wrote, describing his previous night’s dinner, a cutlet prepared in the Italian style and an eggplant appetizer that was pure “Romanian food.” To thank Aldo for his concern, he sent a copy of The Joy of Cooking and, as an “hors d’oeuvre,” two drawings for L’uovo alla kok (The Perfect Egg), the book Aldo was writing, for which Steinberg volunteered to provide illustrations. He was engaged by a text that, even though “disguised as a cookbook,” fell somewhere between philosophy and the novel, and he thought it deserved translation into English, which he was unable to make happen.
Still, it was difficult for Steinberg to be cheerful, and his correspondence remained sporadic. “I’m a little depressed,” he confessed, as he told of waking up every day “at 3:30 full of terrors, regrets—the usual suffering.” Even though he was in the country with the “delightful” Papoose, who walked beside him like a companionable dog when he went into the woods, and even though Sigrid was now well enough to make the occasional weekend visit without its ending in her tears and his silence, he could not force himself to be happy or even to be content with his lot. He was embarrassed to think he was becoming like his father and all his other Romanian Jewish male ancestors, something he had long vowed never to do.
BUT HE WAS VERY GOOD ABOUT creating excuses to justify himself, to himself as well as to others, and all too quickly he found quite a few “excellent reasons” to explain why he was entitled to this depression. He blamed it on the overwhelming workload as he prepared for the Parsons and Janis dual “cartoon” exhibition and for the 1977 retrospective Maeght was determined to have. He was also drawn into the commotion connected with the ending of the two-year-long retrospective that began in Cologne in 1974 and was just now ending in Vienna. Despite his best efforts to stay aloof, the show garnered so much publicity as it
traveled that he was roped into granting print interviews to European publications and being filmed for German television. Aimé Maeght shrewdly appraised the steadily mounting enthusiasm as the show traveled, and despite Steinberg’s insistence that he would not cooperate on a retrospective, Maeght insisted that his next exhibition had to be one and had to be ready by November 1976. That was too soon for Steinberg, who cabled “next year with pleasure,” all the while plotting how to postpone any exhibition for as long as possible.
Maeght surprised him by moving with such alacrity that members of his exhibition staff were in New York within the week of Steinberg’s cable. Maeght instructed them to go to Springs and make Steinberg work with them every day during the month of October to prepare the catalogue and the content for the show, which he insisted on calling “The Retrospective.” Steinberg picked up the phrase and grudgingly began to call it “the retro show,” even though it was a difficult concept to accept. He told Aldo he wanted a “less posthumous” title and asked for suggestions.
