by Deirdre Bair
Thinking about himself as a link between the two worlds of painting made Steinberg want to define the cultural differences between the United States and Europe, especially Paris. He was serious when he argued that the first great “large scale American painter” was Tom Sawyer, when he painted the fence. To him, Tom’s fence was emblematic of the culture, for he believed that the premier school of American painting was not “the Academy,” but rather “the do-it-yourself House Painter school.” This was because American painters emerged from “peasant, proletarian, immigrant primitive sources”—so different from Paris, where painters traditionally came from “intellectual sources, polished by the academy, by fancy conversation, by friendships with other artists, poets and writers.” Steinberg was starting to think that he was no longer the lone link between these two worlds, because a whole new “third or fourth wave” was rising to dominate the American art world. It consisted of “strange artists coming from Nebraska etc. from universities, not artists but teachers and art historians.” He did not see this as a positive development, because they were “not true intellectuals” but were more interested in establishing fiefdoms and bureaucracies. He worried that they were the ones acquiring the important positions in museums, galleries, and the media, which gave them enormous influence and the power to dictate what artists needed to produce if they wanted to succeed. Steinberg believed this for the rest of his life, and in his last decade, whenever he passed a museum where the facade was festooned with a gigantic banner bearing an artist’s name, he insisted that “these are artists who confuse success fame fortune power with happiness (or what I call: to be content) just like their businessmen colleagues in Wall Street or Hollywood.” “What dishonor, in America!” he thundered, questioning the kind of power attained by those who flourished through art: “Power? For what. Impress head waiters.”
VERBAL ABILITY BECAME A MAJOR COMPONENT of Steinberg’s friendships, and next to that with Aldo Buzzi, his deepest one was with the writer and critic Harold Rosenberg. Harold and his wife, a sometime novelist who wrote as May Natalie Tabak, owned a house near Steinberg’s in Springs, where the two men met frequently for the one-on-one conversations they both relished. “He is perhaps the only friend I have here,” Steinberg told Aldo. “I can talk to him in the best way, that is, I have the possibility of thinking, I mean inventing, while I’m talking.” Harold called Saul “a writer of pictures, an architect of speech and sounds, a draughtsman of philosophical reflections” and said he was, in short, “aesthetically delectable.” Saul was often the only guest for dinners at the Rosenbergs’ because Harold instructed May not to invite the “Irish rabbis” (that is, their mutual friends and neighbors), who tended to “interfere with the rhythm of [Saul’s] style.” When Saul held forth, Harold listened “with total respect, admiration, and enjoyment—but not for long because he liked to do most of the talking. They enjoyed watching themselves perform.”
Saul Steinberg’s friendship with the art historian Leo Steinberg also always contained an aspect of performance. Most of their conversations were colored by the tone of their first meeting, at the Sidney Janis gallery sometime around 1960, when a friend who intended to be clever said, “Mr. Steinberg, I’d like you to meet Mr. Steinberg.” Leo Steinberg remembered feeling “suddenly trapped in the banality of a shared name,” but Saul Steinberg relieved the awkwardness: “Well,” he said, “it’s a very rare name in Indochina.” Although the Steinbergs shared a love of James Joyce, Leo found it next to impossible to discuss this work or any other with Saul because “the word my would always be there … It would be his Joyce, or what use he made of Joyce, never a discussion of Joyce’s work, or an exchange of ideas about it.” Leo found it particularly grating when Saul compared his drawing to the writing of Joyce and Nabokov and turned all their conversations about literature into conversations about his work.
Often Saul’s choice of literary topics veered into what Leo called “the strangely unguarded confession that led to revelations about his art that he might not have intended.” Leo told Saul that this was “exhibitionism, the need to expose coupled with the need to deny the exposure.” Saul bridled and asked for examples, and Leo offered the drawing of Saul standing next to the cardboard cutout of his portrait as a young boy, or his use of masks, which told so much about the person beneath even as they hid the face. When Saul did not reply, Leo offered the use of rubber stamps as another example, and Saul did reply to this, saying that he used stamps because they kept him from having “to show his hand.” When they talked of the “fake books,” the wooden replicas that Saul took such delight in carving, which were nothing more than blocks of wood with titles and the authors’ names, Leo told Saul, “You want us to know that these are the books you read, but that’s all you want us to know.” Saul replied that telling even that much was “enough.”
After a conversation with Leo Steinberg, Saul Steinberg often felt the need “to round things out” by talking to “the other Saul,” and he would telephone Saul Bellow. They had known each other casually since the early 1950s, but the friendship did not intensify until a decade later. Steinberg believed that Bellow had become “something of a relative to him—a kind of cousin.” But Bellow had a more guarded opinion of their rapport: he saw the friendship as one of “all good will and cordiality” but insisted that they were never close enough to exchange ideas in the same way that Steinberg did with Rosenberg. Steinberg disagreed, saying that he could begin a conversation with Bellow about any mundane thing at all, and from that would come an exchange of “discoveries, small epiphanies, unexpected connections, paradox, pun, nonsense, [everything] will advance the talk in a zigzag upside down or inside out manner that makes me stop and ask what are we talking about? Let’s remember what we started with. What was it?”
Steinberg reveled in spontaneity that revealed something unexpected, and as the conversations continued over the years, they sometimes inspired him to draw something and send it as a memento, while Bellow got into the habit of sending some of his work in progress and asking for comments and criticisms. Among Steinberg’s archives, various drafts of Bellow’s typescripts show corrections or questions in Steinberg’s hand, many of which Bellow then incorporated into his subsequent writing. Bellow may have dismissed himself as a “sort of kinsman from the urban wilds of Chicago,” but their friendship was mutually enriching. He used Bucharest as the setting for The Dean’s December, and the personality traits he assigned to his main character might well be those he attributed to Steinberg several decades later, in the twilight of both their lives, when questions of artistic vision and identity were among those they tossed back and forth in the long telephone conversations Steinberg initiated when their friendship had attained its highest level of truth and intimacy.
Steinberg’s friendship with Vladimir Nabokov developed slowly, even though they had known each other since 1947, when Alexander Schneider gave a dinner for Véra and Vladimir Nabokov and invited Steinberg and Sterne to meet them. Shortly after the great success of Lolita in 1955, the Nabokovs left the United States to live in Montreux, Switzerland, which Steinberg visited whenever he had the opportunity. On the Nabokovs’ rare visits to the United States, they made a point to see him, and Steinberg was prominent on the guest list when the Bollingen Press honored Nabokov for his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. As the two couples (Saul was with Gigi) walked together afterward toward home and hotel, Nabokov asked his wife to show Steinberg what she carried in her tiny beaded evening bag. Véra Nabokov opened it to reveal a dainty Browning handgun, meant to be reminiscent of the one in Pushkin’s famous duel. Steinberg was astonished by the casual way she carried the gun and thought the gesture “ripe with symbolism.”
Although they saw each other seldom and the correspondence they exchanged tended to be formal, their friendship was grounded in literature. Steinberg was fascinated by all of Nabokov’s writing, but the text that resonated most strongly was the extraordinary “biography” of Nikolai Gogol tha
t was more about the biographer Nabokov’s quirks, qualms, and prickly foibles than the writer’s life. Gogol was a writer Steinberg reread whenever he needed an example or an analogy, particularly his two favorites, the novel The Overcoat and the short story “The Nose.” The story was especially resonant for Steinberg, whose sense of smell was so intense that he used verbal descriptions of how something or someone smelled almost as often as he used visual imagery to convey how it looked.
In his own art, there are numerous references to smell and even more examples of noses, with quite a few exploring or explaining Gogol’s influence. Steinberg called a drawing he made for Location, the literary magazine cofounded by Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess, his “version of the nose problem” and the “equivalent in drawing of Gogol’s treatment of the same problem in literature.” In real life, olfactory sensations served Steinberg as an aide-mémoire, something akin to Proust’s madeleine. Of Betty Parsons, for example, he said, “She left a very good taste, like something good you smelled or tasted or saw that increased in importance in memory.” Even his sister Lica acknowledged his fascination with noses when she described her first impression of the move to Cachan in a phrase he would appreciate, as being “surrounded by [Armenian] noses, one bigger than the other.” Images of noses fill his sketchbooks, and in one, a man sits on a chair with a small table between him and another chair on which sits a gigantic nose. He called it “I talk to my Nose about Childhood.”
Like much of Steinberg’s art and Gogol’s prose, Nabokov’s so-called biography was a slightly off-kilter look at life. He begins not in the traditional manner, with Gogol’s birth, but with his death, when doctors applied half a dozen slimy black leeches to his long nose in an attempt to cure the disorders of his stomach. Poor Gogol spent his dying moments desperately trying to pull off the “slimy, creeping, furtive things,” which is how Nabokov segued into crediting Gogol’s actual “long sensitive nose” for the “nasal leitmotiv” that pervades his fiction. Nabokov concluded that “it is hard to find any other author who has described with such gusto smells, sneezes, and snores,” and he found the same gusto in Steinberg, who was his favorite contemporary artist. What Nabokov liked best about Steinberg was how he “could raise unexpected questions about the consequence of a style or even a single line, or could open up a metaphysical riddle with as much wit as an Escher or a Magritte and with far more economy.”
STEINBERG WAS LEFT TO FEND FOR himself during the last months of the 1962 summer, while Gigi was still on her European vacation. He chose to stay in Springs, where he found himself truly alone because the Nivola family was in Tino’s native Sardinia and there were no sounds of children or the informal running back and forth across the road from house to house that usually punctuated his days. He swam or fished at Louse Point and pedaled slowly up and down the country roads on his bike, but mostly he sat on the front porch and read. In his semi-isolation, a novel that resonated deeply was Richard Hughes’s The Fox in the Attic, about a fairly clueless upper-class Englishman who visits his German cousins in their Bavarian castle between the two world wars and observes Hitler’s rise to power. Steinberg was struck by Hughes’s ability to convey the “sadness or despair that we’re familiar with,” which he was feeling too, but “rarely and for a short time.”
Even though it was the dog days of summer and he was virtually hiding out in the country, the offers of commercial work still came in the usual flood of letters and telephone calls. He ignored them, because he was taking a one- to six-month respite from projects that came with stipulations and deadlines, and from his own creative work as well. He knew he was in a mood where nothing he did would please him: “Work derives from work and that has to be avoided … What used to be excitement once, it’s no more so.” He estimated that he had enough money to take time off from everything connected with art, commercial or personal, and still be able to meet his self-imposed responsibilities. Lica and Rica were both working, but they depended on his large contributions. He continued to send regular payments to his Aunt Sali and her children in Israel, and he always responded to the occasional requests for help that came from his other cousins. His largest expense was Gigi, for he had become her sole support, and it took a lot of money “to get her out of granny dresses and keep her in couture and jewelry in the style of Marilyn Monroe,” but he was determined to do it. He also had to find a discreet way to funnel money to Aldo, who had been desperate after The New Yorker rejected a hastily written memoir of their trip to the American South. Aldo needed money to pay the expenses of an “Anne” as well as to contribute support to Bianca Lattuada and her two daughters, and his financial distress threw him into a depression that left him nearly incapacitated. Steinberg’s problem was to find the way to offer money and persuade him to accept it without wounding his pride. Also, Ada chose the moment of his deepest concern for Aldo to dump a new load of financial troubles onto her “Olino Caro,” whom she knew would always come to her rescue. In frustration, he begged Aldo to see her and learn the truth of the matter.
WORK AND TRAVEL CAME TOGETHER IN an intriguing manner while Steinberg was alone in Springs, despite his intention not to accept any commercial proposals for the next several months. Dino De Laurentiis had wanted to work with Steinberg for years, and to entice him into finally agreeing, he phoned repeatedly to dangle an invitation for him to collaborate on a new screenplay that he wanted to film, written by Mario Monicelli, one of the most distinguished proponents of commedia all’italiana. Steinberg had long admired De Laurentiis’s talent for producing a string of award-winning successes, among them Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and La Strada, each of which won him an Oscar, and the possibility of working with Monicelli was irresistible.
As Steinberg was mulling over the proposal, an offer to design a mural arrived. Murals were not as intriguing as film, but this one promised a great influx of cash and he felt he had to consider it. It was never realized, but it gave him the excuse he needed to travel to Rome, as it was to be built there. He had had enough of tranquillity and was bored by his bucolic solitude, and he wanted company and needed pampering; he planned to spend the last two weeks of September at luxurious Italian resorts, where he all but begged Aldo to join him. Then, just as he was writing to various Italian friends to set up appointments, a totally unexpected invitation arrived. The Israeli shipping firm Zim asked him to create a mural for one of its passenger ships and proposed to pay his expenses for a visit to Haifa at his earliest convenience.
STEINBERG HAD A GOOD TIME IN ITALY, despite the fact that De Laurentiis was mysteriously unavailable and the Monicelli project withered and died without his ever knowing why. He declined the Rome mural project in short order and then concentrated on having a happy vacation for the two weeks he was there. Aldo and Bianca were his guests at several posh resorts on the coast above Rome, and he went alone to La Spezia, Naples, and Iscia, where he enjoyed “beach fronting.” One of his most pleasurable meetings was his lunch in Rome with Nicola Chiaromonte, one of his oldest and most respected friends, to discuss various ways in which his work might appear in Tempo presente, the publication Chiaromonte coedited with Ignazio Silone.
On October 1, Steinberg flew to Tel Aviv, ostensibly “to work” and primarily “to doubt,” but to his astonishment, everything about Israel struck him as a delightful surprise. Before he was invited to visit, he had not thought about the country as anything other than the place where a slew of relatives had settled among many others from his old neighborhood in Bucharest (which may have been why Israel was never high on his list of places to see). However, once he landed in Tel Aviv, the sheer beauty of the landscape was almost overwhelming. As he traveled to Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem and after he visited a kibbutz, he was assaulted by a series of unexpected sensations. Israel was composed of “the poetic, romantic…of the ancient, medieval, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian places.” In short, it brought back memories of his native Romania with its similar layers of settlement and the same “odors and perfumes
.” What he liked even better than observing the landscape was how easily he was able to glide into conversations with ordinary citizens as they went about their daily life. He could not wait to write to Hedda to tell her how calm and happy it made him, to be “surrounded by Jewish faces,” with whom he felt very much at home, and how the sight of so many “Jewish noses” almost made him cry out with joy. Everywhere he went, he was accepted as a lanzmann, and he told Aldo that it made him almost delirious to find he could talk to people so easily and “immediately, in the most subtle way.”