Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  All winter long, as he stayed in the warmth of his apartment, he immersed himself in reading everyone from Tolstoy to Primo Levi; from L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between to Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. He boasted of reading every writer from Gadda (in the Milanese dialect) to Gaddis to William Gass, but nothing helped. When summer came, he spent it quietly in the country, sitting in the sun and watching as the last of the work was done by a young and cheerful construction crew, enjoying the days, which he thought spawned the “excellent, pleasurable, sometimes ecstatic insomnia” that gripped him all night long. He coped with his wakefulness by sitting (the term he always used for meditation) for long hours several times each night.

  Sigrid caused much of his anxiety, as her behavior veered toward the dangerous, not only to herself but to others as well. She was almost always high, but that did not stop her from driving with reckless abandon. He made the mistake of asking her to pick up his car after routine servicing at a West Side garage and deliver it to his apartment. On the way she went through a red light on Riverside Drive and 89th Street and hit another car head-on. Neither she nor the other driver was hurt, and Steinberg’s large Chevrolet sedan had “only a dent.” Sigrid found it amusing that the other car, a tiny sports model, was (in her words) “smothered.” She was blasé about it when she described the accident over the phone, blithely reporting how relieved she was not to get a summons and how, still in a stupor, she had gone to her apartment, got Papoose the cat, and taken off for the country—not the apartment where he was waiting. It was not fair, she told him when she phoned from Springs, that after escaping so many serious consequences, she got a speeding ticket on the Montauk Highway.

  Through Evelyn Hofer, a staunch believer in Jungian psychology, Sigrid had begun analysis with Dr. Armin Wanner, who would become the last and longest-lasting of her many therapists. Occasionally she thought she was well enough to see Wanner once a week, but most of the time she had twice-weekly sessions. As time went on, she was often in such distress that she saw him every day, not only for sessions in his office but also for long walks, visits to museums, and other meetings that were more social than clinical. Wanner had her keep a dream journal, writing what she remembered about her dreams of the night before. Instead she was much more engrossed in keeping a detailed diary of her life with Saul Steinberg, and around 1985–86 the dream journals became sporadic as she filled tablets and notebooks with angry outbursts that described each ultimatum he issued and each outrageous retort or response they inspired from her. One of her diary entries describes the general pattern of most of them: “Basically while we did talk, we found no solution, made no decisions except that he won’t go with me anywhere here, chez people, for dinner, etc, so I am stuck.” Angrily she added, “Better start looking for new friends, maybe among the other losers in my neighborhood, among the local bums.”

  Saul told her the one constant she could depend on from him was what she called “the money question.” In 1987 he gave her $31,200 for that year’s living expenses and expected her to supplement it with interest from her savings account and money market fund. If he also hoped it would inspire her to seek work, he did not say. Instead of calming her financial concerns, his stipend filled her with rage and resentment. She took one of his best drawings, a gift given at a happier time, to Sotheby’s, where it fetched $86,985 at auction. She told him what she had done in a letter, boasting that she had had to do it because he had left her with nothing, not even Papoose, who now lived mostly with him. “Go fuck yourself,” she wrote. “I have nothing left but money and I will take it and run.”

  Her behavior was fast becoming a public embarrassment, as she did not stop with the Sotheby’s auction; she took another of his gift drawings to Arne Glimcher, who quickly sold it for what it was worth, just under $10,000. She thought it should have brought more and wrote Glimcher an angry letter saying that he had taken advantage of her straitened circumstances and had left her no choice but to accept it. She told everyone who knew Steinberg that Glimcher had gypped her, knowing full well how mortified Steinberg would be when the story eventually got back to Glimcher through the art-world rumor pipeline. Then she went through an “I’ll show him [Saul]” phase when she took her portfolio to every gallery in the city, from the high-end uptown establishments to the downtown storefronts and alternative spaces. She did not help her presentation by wearing her most bizarre outfits, and her hair was often dirty and unkempt. Most gallerists would not even look at her work, using the standard excuse that they were not taking any new artists just then. She knew museums had their own publications staff, but she went anyway to beg for a job doing the most menial hand-lettering or book design. They all knew who she was, and she enjoyed watching some of them squirm in embarrassment as they turned her away. Many of Steinberg’s friends were so concerned about her disheveled appearance and unstable behavior that they wrote cautious letters hinting that something was very wrong with her. Unfortunately, no one, starting with him, knew what to do.

  WHILE ALL THIS WAS GOING ON, Steinberg was besieged by death on all fronts, starting with the news that his mother’s sister and the aunt he loved most, Sali Marcovici, had died in Israel at the age of ninety-one. He had sent regular support to her since he first earned money after the war, and he continued to send the same stipend for the rest of his life to her daughter, a cousin he remembered as “thin and whining,” whom he had not seen since 1930. From the American Academy of Arts and Letters he received a stack of notices of the deaths of members during the previous year, and he spent far too much time shuffling them as if they were a deck of playing cards and obsessing over how old the people had been when they died. Some were people he thought had died long before, so that seeing their names revived them eerily in his mind. “Too late,” he concluded, mimicking one of his most famous word drawings, in which Sooner and Faster aim for the stratosphere while Too Late sinks into a murky pond. Rodica Ionesco sent news of Mircea Eliade’s death, and Steinberg mourned the news of his passing and Primo Levi’s, a new friend whom he had not had enough time to get to know. Two days before he died, Bernard Rudofsky, one of the first friends Steinberg had made in America, asked him to come to the hospital; Rudofsky told Steinberg that despite Steinberg’s lifelong “indifference,” he loved and admired him. Steinberg was shocked because he had no idea Rudofsky felt that way about him. Another death that inflicted strong emotion was that of Jean Stafford, a friend and neighbor in Springs who always delighted him when he saw her running down Fireplace Road toward his house, ready to use her “very unexpected and complicated mind to such devastating advantage.” Other neighbors who were old friends died, among them Jimmy Ernst, at whose home Steinberg often ate his Thanksgiving dinner in the company of “all the other doddering old painters, all hard of hearing,” and about whom he groused, albeit fondly.

  As his collection of newspaper obituaries grew thicker, small comfort came when Brendan Gill advised him not to die on a Friday or a weekend, because it was “poor timing for obits in the Times.” Another small comfort came from an article in the New York Times about how new therapies were helping men overcome impotence. He underlined the sentence “people realize that you should, if you want it, have a satisfactory sexual relationship into your 90’s.”

  ALL STEINBERG’S MOORINGS WERE COMING UNDONE, and he felt adrift and unable to tether himself to anything solid. For years he had proudly used the stationery of The New Yorker for his correspondence, often embellishing the letterhead with the same kind of fanciful drawings he had used earlier to decorate the Smithsonian stationery. Now, for some vague reason he could not define, the magazine that was so vital to his existence had become a less important presence in his life. Searching for the reason why it happened, he compared his changing feelings about the magazine with the death of his Aunt Sali, equating the loss of his professional patria with the loss of people he loved. But then he dismissed this as “exaggerating, perhaps to avoid frightening myself.” He thought his drawi
ngs were “no longer right for the magazine,” and even more alarming was the knowledge that “the idea of making them has no attraction for me.” He thought it might have begun when the magazine was sold to Advance Publications, as he shared the view of the majority of the staff artists and writers that the moment the Newhouse family bought it, The New Yorker became “a more vulgar thing, adapted to making a profit.” Still, no one expected the shattering announcement that the venerable (and venerated) William Shawn, aged seventy-nine, would be fired with the utmost public humiliation after S. I. “Si” Newhouse offered his job to Robert Gottlieb, who accepted it.

  Gottlieb had been a brilliant book editor at Knopf, but he had no experience in magazine publishing, the point on which the magazine’s staff members focused their anger. The staff hastily called a protest meeting at which Roger Angell led them in composing a letter telling Gottlieb that he should not take the job, even though he had earlier made it clear that he would only serve as a “conservator” until a new and permanent editor was appointed. The letter was rightly deemed “an act of self-delusion performed by 153 people who had long spent their working lives in a protected singular world,” and when the writers asked longtime contributors to sign, John Updike was among those who acknowledged the hard reality of the changes installed by the new regime and refused. Among those who were upset at the passing of the old ways and who did sign were J. D. Salinger and Saul Steinberg. Like so many others, Steinberg was “sad, hurt, infuriated.” He asked rhetorically what would become of the magazine now that the new editor possessed “a punk sensibility, convinced that brutality is chic.” And then he sent Roger Angell a drawing on the magazine’s stationery, embellishing the letterhead by turning it into a factory, which is what he thought it had become.

  STEINBERG WOULD BE THE FIRST TO say that any form of psychoanalysis was unlikely to lead anyone to startling new insights into his or her character, but in old age he never stopped analyzing himself, especially about why he was so prone to the increasingly frequent and increasingly long periods of “melancholy.” He admitted that whenever he was unhappy, he had doubts about everything and believed that nothing he did or said was good or right. Still, “unhappiness does not affect my reasoning my ideas my imagination,” he insisted. No matter how mean a gesture he made in life, nothing impaired his work. It was how he rationalized his increasingly rude behavior, which resulted in a terrible error of judgment sometime in the spring of 1985 that caused anguish and regret for the rest of his life.

  No one is sure how it began or what exactly caused it, but sometime in 1985, Steinberg had a serious falling-out with Tino Nivola. It might have had something to do with an inexpensive Polaroid camera, which he insisted he had loaned to Tino, who failed to return it, while Tino claimed he had never borrowed it. No one who knew of this altercation can swear to any part of it with any certainty, but the story of the camera became the tentative explanation others offered after the two men fell into silence, stony on Saul’s part, sad on Tino’s. The change in Tino’s demeanor began in 1982, after he underwent radiation treatment for cancer and went into a remission that left him lethargic and subdued, no longer the cheerful, energetic friend who was always just across the road and ready to stop whatever he was doing whenever Saul wanted to see him. Tino had an “amazing reverence for Saul’s genius,” and he “utterly, utterly, respected and admired” him. That sentiment never changed, his wife and daughter attested, so that after the discord (whatever it was), there was no sudden break between them; it was more like Tino’s “slowly detaching himself from Saul’s orbit.” The silence continued for three years and was still in effect when Constantino Nivola suffered a fatal heart attack on May 5, 1988.

  Claire Nivola phoned Saul to break the news of her father’s death. She remembered how he emitted a sound she had never heard before, a “pained cry” that was somewhere between a moan and a cry of anguish. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said, and hung up the phone. Fifteen minutes later he had gained enough self-control to call and ask for the details of his friend’s death. He listened carefully and told Claire to tell her mother that he would be just across the road if she needed him, but he could not be with her in person.

  The Nivola family knew how deeply Tino’s death affected Saul, but several years had to pass before he was able to talk to Ruth about his feelings, and then he could do so only over the phone. He told her that it had felt like losing a brother when Ugo Stille died, but “Tino was more than a brother.” And then he made an admission that left Ruth at a loss for words, as he had never before revealed himself this way: “Since Tino’s death I have tried so hard to break through the asbestos that coats me. Inside, deep inside, I am soft, but I have this exterior coating of asbestos.” Ruth thought it was the most intimate and moving conversation she had ever had with Saul and recorded it in her diary.

  Steinberg’s relationship with the Nivolas, who, after Hedda, Aldo, and Sigrid, were the people to whom he was closest, was always a curiously distant one. Even though there was a time when they all commuted into the city after every weekend, the Nivolas knew better than to ask him for a ride unless they had no other choice, because “it made him feel trapped into having to leave according to someone else’s schedule and it made him uncomfortable.” They knew that “he did not have natural kindly impulses,” but they excused him because “he knew it, and it gave him tremendous guilt and remorse.” They knew that he preferred to be generous with money and would always offer assistance, but only if he could do so from a distance, without personal involvement, for “doing that always made him feel incredibly good.” Now that the Nivola children were grown and had gone to pursue their own careers and start their own families, there was only Ruth across the road, and Saul called her “the sole person I know with whom I can commiserate.” He continued to accept her many kindnesses, but always on his own terms.

  All their friends knew how close Saul had been to Tino, and many sent letters of condolence to him as well as to the family. Among the closest to both men was Henri Cartier-Bresson, who wanted Steinberg to know that he understood his sadness and shared it. Even so, these demonstrations of affectionate concern provided small comfort. Shortly before Saul made the remark that so stunned Ruth, he wrote a message on a sheet of blue-lined memo paper, folded it, and put it inside a file folder that he addressed to himself and sealed shut with folder labels. He affixed a twenty-five-cent stamp with the image of Jack London to it but never put it in the U.S. mail; instead he filed it carefully away among his other correspondence and never looked at it again.

  The message was both sad and chilling:

  “Dear Saul

  Love from

  But who loves you?”

  “NOW FOR SOME SENSATIONAL NEWS,” Steinberg told Aldo when his lawsuit against Columbia Pictures was settled in his favor in 1987. The decision gave him “true primitive pleasure” and was “the glorious dream of every humble individual persecuted by invisible forces.” He could not help but crow: “Vindicated in full. A triumph.” The lawsuit had dragged on for three long years, until the defendants made the mistake of arguing that their poster was based not on Steinberg’s drawing but merely on the same buildings he had used; however, as the buildings were from his imagination and not real, the case collapsed in judgment. After three years of endless meetings with his lawyers, which sometimes left him frightened, confused, and always resentful, he actually enjoyed giving his “endless and quite interesting” deposition. He received $225,858.49 in settlement of the case he called “ST vs. the Scoundrels,” and he promptly made photocopies of the checks and inserted them in his appointment diaries. He was so gleeful that he made photocopies of Judge Louis L. Stanton’s thirty-five-page decision to pass out among his friends, and he was quite pleased when Gaddis told him he was thinking of using the legal documents as a collage in his next novel.

  The case generated a new friendship with Judge Pierre N. Laval, who sent him portions of the opinions in several similar cases a
nd a postcard showing how the city of Edinburgh had copied the poster, hoping that since the case had been settled in Steinberg’s favor, it would amuse rather than upset him. Steinberg actually enjoyed it so much that he decided to collect the imitations of what he now always called “that famous New Yorker cover.” When friends sent versions from Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, and Jerusalem, he told Aldo, “Lo and behold, a pretext to travel to Europe. Or maybe not.”

  There was another legal matter that needed attention, one that Hedda joking referred to as “when Saul and I divorced our money.” Although they remained married, they signed a legal document that “settled the rights and interests” of their money and property and gave them the right to dispose of individual assets however they wanted. At the time, Steinberg’s net worth was $4,669,000 and Sterne’s was $3,500,000. Shortly after, he made another legal decision, appointing Sigrid Spaeth to be his agent in a living will, as he “trusted [her] to do the right thing because she knows better than anyone else what I would do.”

  STEINBERG WAS LEADING SUCH A QUIET LIFE that his cousin Henrietta Danson chided him for not keeping in touch with his family now that he had “dropped out of the limelight.” In the past she had been able to keep up with his doings by reading the newspapers, but now, if she did not hear from him directly, she knew nothing. His professional life was busy because of various awards, honors, and exhibitions of his work, all of which generated interviews, articles, and books, but when they were judged against the activity of earlier years, they added up to less.