by Deirdre Bair
At the end of March, confident that he had earned enough to spend the next three to five months on his own work, Steinberg and Sterne boarded a transatlantic liner that took them to Italy. The filmmaker Carlo Ponti (not yet married to Sophia Loren) was on board and through a mix‑up ended up having to pay for a supper eaten by the three of them. Ponti insisted on a photograph of himself with Saul and Hedda as reimbursement for their share, and they obliged. They thought that would be the end of having to deal with Ponti, but on one of their first nights in Naples they met him by accident and he insisted that they dine together. They decided that he was not one of their favorite people, nor was Naples one of their favorite cities. They thought it was all robbery, graft, and “lousy food.” It was all “a little too much like Romania,” so they decided to head for someplace quiet where they had never been before and were unlikely to encounter anyone they knew.
Sicily offered the isolation and quiet they craved. They toured small towns and ruined temples for several days before settling in Palermo and setting up to work in a quiet hotel. For diversion they made brief forays or took longer ferry trips to the Italian mainland to explore southern Italian regions. In April they went to Florence, where their friend the American artist Richard Blow lent them the Villa Piazza Calda, a Renaissance structure he had bought and restored in 1927, where he had subsequently revived the art of pietre dure, the Florentine mosaic art that combined marble with colored stones. Steinberg thanked Blow for his generous hospitality with an especially fancy diploma that sported elaborate curliques and flourishes and a stylized green border similar to those that embellished stock certificates.
Steinberg and Sterne used Piazza Calda as the jumping-off point for short trips throughout central and northern Italy, often in the company of Aldo Buzzi, who was with them for several weeks. They went to Capri and San Remo, both of which were as beautiful as they had been touted, and then it was farewell to Aldo in Mantua as he changed for a train that took him home to Milan while they went on to France. Saul girded himself for visiting his parents in Nice by stopping first to gamble for several days at the casinos in Monte Carlo.
HEDDA MADE HERSELF A WILLING BUFFER in all of Saul’s dealings with Rosa and Moritz. She took care of fulfilling every need or desire (usually Rosa’s) conveyed in their letters. Hedda was not fond of shopping but spent countless hours and sometimes days looking for just the right winter coat or for stockings and underwear that fit Rosa’s exacting specifications yet never met them. She may have chafed at having to shop and then ship to Paris whatever Rosa wanted, as often as several times each month, but she kept her feelings to herself and took care of everything so that Saul seldom had to deal directly with his parents. However, he took an active role in trying to make sure that Lica and her family had the best chance of receiving the few things she requested.
The government of the PRR (People’s Republic of Romania) had instituted harsh new restrictions on gifts from relatives outside the country, so it became frustratingly difficult to help her. Each citizen was allowed to receive one package per month weighing one kilogram or less, which meant that most relatives no longer attempted to send goods but sent money instead. Funds had to be funneled through organizations that were supposed to be honest and reliable, but unfortunately, once the money crossed the Romanian border, this was often not the case. Frequently the amount was greatly reduced or, more often, never arrived at all; medicines, such as the ones Lica was desperate to have for her husband’s undiagnosed ailments and her small son’s scarlet fever, were never received.
The emotional travails of Lica’s family’s emigration swooped up and down like a roller coaster with no end in sight. There was a brief moment of hope when Lica received notice that her house had been officially allocated to another family, which in Romanian terms meant that her family had been cleared for a departure that could come at any time. They prepared to go by packing the few possessions they would be allowed to take and giving away many of their furnishings and most of their winter clothing, for Lica was certain they would be sent to Israel. When several months passed without official notification and no one came to claim their house, once again they resigned themselves to staying. “We are extremely stressed out by this way of departing,” she told her brother.
Rosa continued to make her usual peremptory requests, all conveyed in the most wheedling and irritating letters. Hedda shopped a number of times to try to find the right winter coat and then shipped several, but none pleased Rosa. Fearing her son’s ire over her pickiness, she changed tack and asked first for a new house in Nice, then adjusted her sights to a new apartment, and then decided to settle for household things, starting with a new refrigerator. Saul did what he always did: he fired off a check. What he dreaded most about the coming visit was answering the questions he knew Rosa would ask about what he was doing for his many relatives, both those waiting to leave Bucharest and those already in Israel. It was already a subject of general conversation in the immediate family, with Lica stuck in Romania and worrying about how much her brother had to earn to support them and their cousins as well, who were asking for money and then complaining about the amount they received.
The pleas for help took many forms and also came from relatives who had made it to Israel. One well-off cousin hid his money in high-interest European accounts and claimed he did not want to use it because the exchange rate was unfavorable, so could Saul please send him “a donut maker, a refrigerator, and some radios”? All these were to be a loan until the exchange rate stabilized, but until then he preferred to use Saul’s money rather than his own. Another cousin asked for enough to buy a truck, a taxi, or enough laundry machines to open a laundromat. Most of the others simply asked for gifts of money in heartrending letters that described poverty, illness, and deprivation. Saul Steinberg honored every request, sending enough goods or money to fulfill each request entirely or to come as close to it as he could. And if people asked a second or third time, he sent even more than they requested.
HE HAD A GOOD EXCUSE NOT to stay long with his parents in Nice: he had to go to London to meet Roland Penrose for discussions about a solo exhibition of his work that was scheduled for one year later at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Penrose had founded the ICA in 1946, along with Herbert Read and several others who wanted to offer the British public something different from the traditional kinds of art anointed by the Royal Academy. He was an early booster of Picasso and Jackson Pollock and featured both in one of the ICA’s first shows; he was a friend of Max Ernst, Henry Moore, and Joan Miró, all of whom he featured soon after and whose work he collected in his own impressive private collection. Penrose was married to Lee Miller, the American model who became an avant-garde photographer before distinguishing herself as a fearless war correspondent. They had just bought Farley Farm, 120 acres in a small village in the same area of Sussex where Virginia Woolf made her last home, and they invited Steinberg to come for the weekend.
Steinberg took an immediate liking to Miller and Penrose, and they to him. Penrose could not find enough superlatives to praise Steinberg’s talent and was eager to boost his reputation and make him feel welcome in England by introducing him to other artists and writers. Miller had been in Romania just after the war, and Steinberg listened avidly to the few things she told him about her experiences. Being at Farley Farm was a magical time for Steinberg. It was a house “filled with art and crammed with crazy people,” where he got fresh air and exercise, drank too much liquor and ate too much food for the good of his digestion, and observed with slight puzzlement the constant parade of exotic bohemian guests who drifted casually in and out. It might have been better if he had ended his tour of the British Isles there, for then he might not have taken away such a negative impression of most of England, Scotland, and the two Irelands.
His first impression of London was from one of the city’s red double-decker buses, where everything looked “trim and shining,” with no remaining vestiges of the war’s ravage
s. A side trip to Brighton and Rye reminded him of an “old fashioned Coney Island.” After eight hours on a train to Edinburgh, he could not wait to leave one of the “corniest” cities he had ever seen, full of “King Arthur, legendary heroes, fake castles, etc.… Roman temples made out of asphalt.” He promised himself to “think of the good parts of Edinburgh some other time.” He took the train to Glasgow, the ferry to Larne, and the train to Belfast, which he liked best, until he realized that as it was Sunday and raining too heavily to leave the hotel, he had nothing to do because all the pubs were closed.
His next stop was Dublin, where his first night was passed at a B&B filled with Irish Americans or the English, who came to gorge on eggs and butter. The next day he decamped for the Shelbourne, Dublin’s best hotel, and the day after that he took the ferry to Liverpool and went back to London. He stayed there for several days, determined to visit London’s eighteen railway stations, all of which he deemed “beautiful.” He went to the theater to see A Winter’s Tale, and although he was never a fan of Shakespeare, he was surprised by how much he liked both the play and the theatergoing experience. On his last day in London he went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he was entranced with the various sorts of “junque” that always appealed to him—best of all, “Queen Victoria’s banquet printed and embossed on silk.” The weather had turned so tropically hot that he drank beer to keep himself “alive.” As for the food, it was “so bad I can hardly touch it.” He had had enough of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, and it was time to go.
He went to Brussels for a few days, eager to put the British Isles behind him. Dublin and Belfast had reminded him of “the Eastern-type poverty” of his native Romania, and the only reason he stayed as long as he did in Edinburgh was “out of perversity … to see how it’s possible to build in such an ugly and stupid way.” The more he traveled around the British Isles, the more he realized how much he loved Italy. From then on he visited Britain only in connection with exhibitions of his work.
AFTER BRUSSELS, HE TOOK THE TRAIN to Paris, where he helped Hedda pack up for the boat trip home, including the new trove of rubber stamps he had picked up in his travels throughout Italy, France, and England. It wasn’t the happiest of his transatlantic crossings, for he was despondent throughout the voyage over having surrendered the Central Park South studio as an economy measure. He and Hedda had spent more money than he expected, and he knew he had to start earning as quickly as possible, so he fretted that it would take a month or longer to find a new workspace. This worry paled the minute they landed in New York, when a threatening crisis presented itself: the navy wanted to recall him to active duty because of the Korean War, and he was ordered to go to Washington. “I’m putting up a fight,” he told Aldo, and apparently he was successful, for he was not recalled, although he was not officially discharged from the Navy Reserve until three years later, on October 15, 1954.
By the end of October 1951, he had been working steadily from the apartment and was so tired that he needed another vacation, which he simply could not afford to take. One of the more intriguing invitations for commercial work came from the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who wanted him to design sets for a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine. To prepare himself, he went to one ballet performance after another. Otherwise, everything had fallen into its usual pattern: “I smoke, I drink and work. I don’t even know if I’m happy.” He got what he thought would be the vacation he needed in late December through early January 1952, when he went to Palm Beach, Florida, to make drawings for Life and The New Yorker. He thought it was “frightful in its ugliness, stupidity, and vulgarity,” and disliked intensely having to draw “ugly things” that were akin to “pornography.”
He was tired of the peripatetic life, and tired of living in a small apartment without enough space for either himself or Hedda to work well. Since their stay at the Villa Piazza Calda and after his visit to Farley Farm, he was more insistent than ever that they needed to set up a permanent home. He had temporarily given up the idea of moving to the country, because of the sheer impracticality of living far from his major sources of income. Perhaps in the future they could think about a place for weekends and vacations, but what they needed now was something in the city with space enough for each to work, space for them to reciprocate the hospitality of their many friends, and space to welcome particularly Aldo (although he never came), whom Saul was eager to help professionally. Also, an increasing parade of strangers were being sent their way by European friends who thought they should all know each other. Penrose and Miller sent the prickly Sonia, widow of George Orwell, who spent the evening at a posh dinner party in high dudgeon after she learned that the Saul who sat next to her was not Bellow but only an artist she had never heard of named Steinberg.
AND SO SAUL AND HEDDA BEGAN to talk seriously about how much space they would need so that both could work at home. It would take a very large apartment to accommodate them, and soon they realized they would be better off in a house. When they examined their finances, it became clear that Steinberg, with all his obligations, could not swing the deal on his own. Fred Stafford, who was still hovering over Hedda to make sure that she was financially secure, stepped in and provided the money for them to buy a four-story town house at 179 East 71st Street. Steinberg was so eager to move in on January 31, 1952, that he cut the Palm Beach stay short by several days. He was excited about settling down for the first time in his life, looking forward to becoming a solid citizen of his adopted patria, a landowner and payer of property taxes.
The house was one in a row of brownstones on the north side of 71st Street, a quiet, tree-lined block between Lexington and Third Avenues. The first floor became their public area, a large room that combined a kitchen, dining, and living room. The focal point was a large oval table that could seat twelve comfortably and several more at a pinch. At the rear, French doors opened onto a walled garden. Two other points of interest were the large white porcelain sink and ruby-red enamel stove with two ovens; over each Hedda hung the two diplomas Saul made to proclaim her expertise in dishwashing and cooking. Throughout the next decade, Steinberg filled the room with the work of his friends, including a life-size white plaster nude by Tino Nivola, a Calder mobile, a painting by Josef Albers, two Giacometti drawings, a small dressmaker’s dummy, and some of his own “constructions” that resembled bits and pieces of pianos and clocks. They installed enormous flat wooden files to hold their work in an organized manner (the first time they had enough space for such a luxury), and on them they placed mattresses and pillows so they could climb up and lie down to nap or read after eating.
Saul took over the second floor, using the larger room at the rear of the house for his studio and keeping the one at the front for overflow storage until he found a billiard table that reminded him so much of the one he had played on at Il Grillo in Milan that he had to buy it. He thought he worked better once he was able to walk back and forth between the two rooms, alternating between playing billiards and making drawings. On the top floor, they kept the larger room at the rear of the house for their bedroom, because it was quiet, while Hedda crammed all her painting equipment into the smaller room at the front. It faced the sunny south, but she managed to work all day long despite the light that streamed in.
They were both proud of the house and wanted to show it to friends, so they began to give dinner parties once or twice a week, seating a dozen or more guests around the big oval table. Although the guests were an eclectic mix, most were what Hedda called “Saul’s New Yorker people,” and they were the ones most often invited. Saul was at his most relaxed and comfortable with James Geraghty, Joseph Mitchell, Geoffrey Hellman, A. J. Liebling, Niccolò Tucci, Charles Addams, Sam Cobean, and “their wives or girl friends.” Their other dinner guests were people they had known since their earliest days in New York, and unlike the glittering invitations from wealthy collectors and patrons of the arts that Saul was accepting more and more frequently, only their closest old friends
were invited to sit around Hedda’s kitchen table. From the performing arts, these included Sasha Schneider, Uta Hagen, and Herbert Berghof; from the art world, their closest friends were Richard Lindner and René Bouché, and after them Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, and Berte and Bernard Rudofsky. Iris Barry brought them news of film, while Louisa Calder and Denise Hare listened intently as Sandy and David entranced the company with talk about sculpture. During their summers in Wellfleet, Saul and Hedda had befriended Marcel and Connie Breuer, with whom they exchanged dinners there and in New York. There was never a lack of conversation at the table, but their favorite evenings were those when everyone sat around until the wee hours listening to Harold Rosenberg declaiming while his wife, May Tabak Rosenberg, acted as moderator between him and Steinberg. May liked best the dinners when it was just the four of them and Harold and Saul pontificated like “two Irish rabbis.”
Rosenberg was fast becoming the one friend whose “contagious intelligence” engaged Steinberg’s completely. Steinberg was enthralled by Rosenberg’s “rare gift for inventing and discovering ideas in your presence … Talking with him was always a surprise. One didn’t quite know what the talk was about, but it was extremely precise and efficient.” Rosenberg was a towering presence physically as well, over six feet tall and with a sweeping but awkward stride caused by “a leg that would no longer bend.” Steinberg, whose height was just below Rosenberg’s shoulder, would not let him begin to talk until he sat down, so they could have “a conversation of equals.”