Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg was unable to secure the May 7 passage he wanted and had to wait until the fourteenth, when the only space available was a cabin on the Queen Mary that he had to share with a quiet businessman, who used the room only to sleep and had no interest in pursuing a friendship with the famous artist. Steinberg was jubilant that the crossing would take a swift five days and put him in Cherbourg on May 19. He worked furiously to tie up all the loose ends in New York, but there was also a lot of socializing, as everyone wanted to wish him bon voyage. Monroe Wheeler invited him to dinner with two other good friends, Russell Lynes and Loren McIver, and Sasha Schneider gave a dual farewell party, because he was leaving on a concert tour. After a dinner at the home of the architect Ben Baldwin, Saul was able to give Hedda the good news from Betty Parsons, who was another guest, that two of Hedda’s large paintings of agricultural machines had been selected for a national tour of museums and for the prestigious exhibition of American painting at the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh. “Very important,” Saul declared. Parsons gave him the even better news that she had just sold one of Hedda’s larger canvases for a good price. “Congrats, Pig, and worst,” he wrote, using one of his pet names for her (“Rabbit” was the other) and taking care to avoid the evil eye by invoking the Romanian custom of wishing the worst of luck instead of the best. He told her he would bring her some fine brushes that Leo Lerman sent as a gift so that she could keep on working.

  Hedda had been staying with her brother and his family in Paris, but once Saul arrived they wanted to rent an apartment that was big enough to work in, and Schneider thought he had the perfect solution. He wanted them to exchange apartments with Agnes Capri, a multitalented actor, singer, and theater producer, who had a stunning duplex on the Quai Voltaire, overlooking the Seine and the Louvre. At first the idea excited Saul, but the more he thought about it, the more it upset him. He did not know Agnes Capri, and even though her apartment was spectacular and she was vouched for in the highest terms by his trusted friend, Steinberg’s paranoia came to the fore and he rejected the exchange. He told Hedda he could not bear to think of a stranger prowling among their things and possibly laughing at their possessions or sneering at their way of life.

  He did, however, make one significant rental when Schneider agreed to take the Packard convertible for $100 a month. Saul was ecstatic, because he loved the car and didn’t want to sell it, but he was even happier when Igor Stravinsky (who had come to Schneider’s dual farewell party) agreed to sell him a Cadillac convertible he no longer needed, as he and his wife were going to California. Saul couldn’t wait to get to Paris, but he was already anticipating coming home and taking his first road trip in the Cadillac.

  IN HIS LAST LETTER TO HEDDA before he sailed, Saul wrote that he could not bear to think of being separated from her ever again, and once they were together he was going to tell her all the intimate things he had been unable to say since they were married. He wanted to take her “on the biggest and noisiest honeymoon, in France (or maybe go somewhere else, we’ll see).” The Berlin airlift had begun, and Hedda wrote back that she was terrified the Russians would start bombing and something would happen to him on the voyage to France or to her if she got on a ship to return to New York. She was sure there would be a nuclear war, but Saul told her not to worry because wars always started in the fall and they might as well enjoy a Paris honeymoon before then.

  In Paris they stayed in a hotel on the Boulevard Raspail rather than an apartment, just long enough to visit the galleries, where Steinberg thought “a lot of bad art [was] running around.” He called it “the famous artistic climate of Paris, shit that makes good lettuce grow.” He would have stayed longer if Aldo had been able to come (he sent money for him to make the trip), but Aldo and Bianca were working in Mantua on one of Lattuada’s films, so Aldo suggested that Saul visit him instead. Saul and Hedda started out in a rental car for Italy via the French Jura and Geneva, but the fog was thick and the mountains frightening, and it took them several days to get there. After a few days they left the car and took a very slow train that meandered through Provence to Toulouse and finally Biarritz, where Saul felt “indifferent and stupid.” The town and the people made him want to find someplace ugly where he could work, but first he had to go back to Paris to await his parents’ arrival.

  SINCE FEBRUARY HE HAD BEEN BRACING himself “for the big Romanian cloud” that he expected to envelop him and that made him, a true skeptic, think he needed to get himself “psychologized.” It reassured him to think he could always talk to a psychologist for those “moments when I feel really low,” but despite the worry about supporting so many people, he never fell that far down in the dumps. He told Aldo that “it’s no small matter, the thought and sight of five or maybe seven new dependents arriving from Romania.” Before he left New York, he had already been helping various Romanian refugees, either those he befriended in Santo Domingo or those from Bucharest who had come directly to the United States in the Romanian quota. He knew that they considered him a soft touch who could be counted on for financial help, but he never complained and gave generously, quietly, and willingly. Still, it got so that he hated to answer the phone, because so many times the caller greeted him in Romanian and he knew that a plea for money would follow. He was tired and depressed by the thought that once his family arrived, his burden of responsibilities would not only increase but also remain constant. To add to his depression, he was still tired from the frenetic work schedule he had kept in the first half of the year, and so it was probably not surprising that the joyous honeymoon he envisioned was less than satisfactory for either him or Hedda. By the time they left Biarritz, Saul was his usual intense, controlled, unemotional self, while Hedda continued to play her role of the agreeable and complacent wife. They were tanned but tired of killing time and eager to go home.

  THEY RETURNED TO NEW YORK IN October, on a good ship in a calm ocean, where they “ate bad meals on massive gold plates.” Using the Milanese variant of a vulgar Roman expression, Saul told Aldo that he had wasted enough time playing and if he hoped to lead a happy life next summer, he knew he had to dedicate himself to industry and commerce for the entire winter.

  His parents had arrived in Paris shortly after Christmas Day, his mother’s birthday. Hedda’s brother and his wife were both slightly overwhelmed by Rosa’s needy and demanding behavior, but they did everything possible to make her and Moritz comfortable and to keep the unpleasant details from Saul. He was relieved that their arrival, although “forced” on him, turned out to be straightforward and without complication and that all his fears were unfounded. He wanted to put off seeing them until the spring.

  Once he was back in the States, his work went well; he was “slaving away at it with pleasure,” particularly three new color designs for the Patterson Fabric Company, one of the best firms in the country, with which he had an ongoing commission until the mid-1950s. He began the new year, 1949, by looking for a new and larger studio, a single space where he could combine an office and a workplace, and he found a large room on the tenth floor of a building at 38 Central Park South that had impressive views overlooking the park. He did a series of drawings in preparation for the first large-scale work, a new mural called “An Exhibition for Modern Living,” curated by Alexander Girard for the Detroit Institute of Arts and later hung at the J. L. Hudson department store. As all the other architects involved in the project were exhibiting “the best design (in their opinion) of the past twenty years,” Steinberg decided to depict “all the ugly or stupid things that have been done.” He drew “the panorama of a whole city, with buses, stores, houses, cottages, skyscrapers, etc.,” as well as cross-sections of various buildings and houses that showed the different kinds of life that went on inside them. By the time he finished, he had twenty-four drawings, which were later put into a small exhibition at the art institute, where he hoped for a good sale. The show drew record crowds, but not a single one was sold. Girard was sorry to relay the bad news that
the people in Detroit did not understand “values.” Steinberg decided to concentrate on the positive: he had “a bunch of cartoons” in the works, mostly for The New Yorker, and was beginning to collect old material and make new drawings for a still untitled book commissioned by “a rich publisher.”

  All these projects made Steinberg realize that work was “therapeutic” for him, “but still more therapeutic are the money and success that come with it.” He told Aldo that he doubted he would have the strength to give up money and success, so what he gave up instead was the possibility of devoting himself purely to his art, especially to painting. If his own work did not actually take a back seat to commercial projects, it was certainly coequal with it until the early 1960s.

  SIMON MICHAEL BESSIE WAS “the rich publisher” at Harper & Brothers who wanted a book of his drawings and cartoons, and who wooed him with fine lunches and dinners in order to persuade him to prepare one. Steinberg thought he had enough drawings among those he had published earlier, all of which he could reuse, because he always entered into the same agreement with other publications that he had insisted on from his earliest dealings with The New Yorker: he sold the rights for first-time reproduction but kept the originals and the right to use them as he wished. He had more than enough material ready to hand, and with some new drawings to unify them around a theme, he knew he had a book.

  The new book presented the same problem he had had with All in Line: coming up with a title. He thought about “Wrong Century, Maybe,” or simply “The Wrong Century,” but he decided that this was an important title that had to be saved for a good novel, as it could be better explained through a written story. For a short time he liked “Rapid Transit,” but after much “searching and indecision,” he settled on The Art of Living, chosen because it was “an old and honored title that means nothing (it makes me laugh).”

  Unlike the case of All in Line, the reception for The Art of Living was tepid. The book was published in early fall in an edition of 20,000 copies, but despite favorable reviews, by Christmas only 10,000 had been sold and Steinberg feared the book would be remaindered. All the reviews were positive and he thought some of them were “even intelligently written,” but he still found it “a mystery what makes a book sell.”

  True to his decision to favor money over art, he spent the winter concentrating on tried-and-true projects he could fulfill without having to think too much or too hard about them. He was now hiding from new work far more than accepting it, as he was reluctant to take offers from prestigious publications for which he would have to come up with something that consumed both time and energy. Carol Janeway at Harper’s Bazaar, Leo Lerman at Mademoiselle, and several editors at Knopf as well as other publishers and publications made offers. Art News hounded him with phone calls because he didn’t answer the editors’ letters, and worst of all, other artists, from college art students to wannabe illustrators, sent him their work or pounded on his door with portfolio in hand to ask for “the maestro’s” opinion. He complained of having to work like a businessman for eight to ten hours every day, especially after he had to hire a Miss Elinor to take care of much of the detail. He wasn’t used to having anyone in his studio while he was working, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t even like having to give her directions about how to respond to the many requests before sending her off to take care of them elsewhere. Miss Elinor didn’t last long, and over the years there was a succession of others, who didn’t last either.

  One of the few professional highlights of the early spring was the visit to New York of the Italian architect Ernesto Rogers, with whom Steinberg was delighted to renew a prewar acquaintance that became an abiding friendship, although a qualified one at the start. Steinberg thought Rogers was one of the tourists who went home and wrote a book about “Me and America” after three weeks in the country. He changed his mind as their first luncheon lengthened to fill five hours. When Rogers became intrigued by Steinberg’s description of Hedda’s latest paintings of machines and buildings, Steinberg took him to Betty Parsons’s gallery to see them. Rogers left with “great admiration” for Hedda and invited Saul to bring her to his home in Bergamo when they went to Italy in July. Yet again Saul was pleased to be married to an intelligent, talented, and beautiful woman and proud that others recognized her extraordinary qualities. He could tell her so in letters, but unfortunately he was unable to convey these feelings when they were alone together.

  She had gone to France again, and this time her reasons were far more serious. For the second year in a row, he wrote in letters what he simply could not say in person: “I made up my mind in your absence that I’m forever attached to you and all the talk about betrayal, not enough love, divorce, etc. was all nonsense, yours or mine, and it’s time to stop it.”

  He had plans to join her in early July but something tragic happened that made him forget his fear of flying and try to book passage in June on an Air France plane: Hedda knew she was pregnant when she left New York, and her reason for going to Paris was to sort out her feelings about what to do. In Paris, she discovered that the pregnancy was ectopic and she needed abdominal surgery to repair the damage it had caused. A flurry of telegrams ensued during the ten or so days she was in a Paris hospital, and when she left to convalesce on the Riviera, Saul wrote frantic letters. He told her he had consulted their family physician in New York for reassurance that the French doctors were giving her proper treatment, while she wrote from Juan-les-Pins urging him to stay in New York and finish his work because there was nothing he could do for her. She knew how many commissions he had and how difficult it would be for him to leave them unfinished, and also she knew by now that his work always came first.

  He and Hedda had never really discussed the idea of having children. It was unspoken between them that Saul was the equivalent of their child and all their energies and attentions were to be focused on him. He thought they were complete as a couple and did not need the distraction of a child, and besides, children irritated him. When he was forced to be around them, he did not know how to behave. Hedda remembered when the proud mother of a newborn took them into the nursery during a dinner party, insisting that they admire her sleeping baby. Saul rubbed his shoe back and forth on the carpet, then touched his finger to the baby’s nose to produce an electric shock. The child woke up screaming, the mother was upset, and Saul (innocently and truthfully) said all he wanted to do was to create a situation where the child would always remember him. He didn’t understand his friend Tino Nivola, who had bought an old farmhouse in the village of Springs in eastern Long Island, where “he works three hours a week and the rest of his time brings up his children.” Saul’s incomprehension of Tino’s deep and loving attachment often resulted in cutting remarks that were hurtful to his old friend, who always ignored them and forgave him.

  Hedda was thirty-nine in 1949, a time when most women had their children in their early twenties, and thus she was more of an age to be a grandmother than a mother. She and Saul had never really discussed the possibility that they might become parents, and once the pregnancy ended and the scare over her health was gone, they treated it as if it were akin to a ruptured appendix and just got on with their lives.

  STEINBERG DIDN’T WANT TO TAKE THE time to go to Europe, nor did he want to spend two or three months there. He was worried about The Art of Living and used it as an excuse to delay the trip and evade his real reason for not wanting to go, the first face-to-face meeting with his parents since his 1944 furlough in Bucharest. “I brace myself for seeing [my] parents,” he told Hedda, knowing that no matter what he did or said, it would offend them. He was so afraid of lashing out that he told Hedda he could not see them unless she was with him to act as the go-between: “I can’t talk my mind to them because they are able to understand but they’ll refuse to. If I’ll break down and tell them my mind it’ll be a real breakdown for me.” Hedda told him that every time she saw Rosa there was constant prying, as Rosa tried to find out how often Saul wrot
e to each of them. He replied that the best way to distract Rosa was for Hedda to buy her something, preferably a sewing machine. “If it were not for the parents,” he concluded, “I’d write you to come home. I wouldn’t even go to Europe.”

  Work was piling up to the point where he would have to take it with him, even though he badly needed a break. For the first time in his life he suffered from insomnia and found himself drinking scotch heavily in order to relax and get to sleep. The increasing amount of business-related details made him realize he would have to find a lawyer he could put on retainer, adding one more person to his professional payroll.

  He wasn’t thinking clearly when he decided that the best way to avoid or evade all his work and responsibility was to leave New York. “We really have to move to the country,” he told Hedda, and this became a recurring theme in his letters. The Nivolas invited him to spend a weekend in their farmhouse in the Springs section of Amagansett; Saul was the only guest, and he spent the time enthralled by Claire, their “really beautiful” daughter, while ignoring her brother, Pietro, “a very dignified little child.” The next day he visited Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in their “curious old house and a barn where he paints on the floor. She paints, too, things that look like labels on trunks that have traveled a lot.” He told Hedda that they might think of renting a house in Springs for several weeks in September but that Long Island was not for them, because there were too many artists and they needed to be “not near painters.”

  In a spurt of energy after his Long Island weekend, Steinberg hired Alexander Lindey as his lawyer and made an agreement with Betty Parsons that allowed her to sell his work directly from her gallery for a 25 percent commission, with the rest coming to him. There followed a “very trying evening” with Cesar Civita, who was in New York ostensibly on other business but mostly to persuade Steinberg to renew his contract. Steinberg resisted and went home dead tired to drink a lot of scotch to get to sleep.