by Deirdre Bair
SUCH CRITICISMS MADE STEINBERG EVEN MORE reclusive and introspective, but rather than focusing on them, he tried to concentrate on the upcoming Paris exhibition. He started by making lists of tentative titles that the installers could use to identify the drawings, only some of which he ended up using. As he doodled with pen and paper, he indulged in reflections that became a guarded appraisal of where he found himself at this stage of life; he titled them “Notes on Writing.” He began with a general, nonspecific observation that “writing in order to define oneself” was like mapping out territory he already knew in order to explore what lay outside it from different angles. Such reflection had a purpose: “To be one’s own witness.”
It made him think of “Wife and property or Real Estate, Love and Money.” He gave himself advice: “Keep my money in the belt. Keep my wife in the belt. Whenever in doubt I refer it to money.” After several further musings about money, he changed direction and wrote a phrase he did not explain: “Wife not pregnant this year.” It led to musings about dogs, “miserable creature … lacks the duplicity of the man he imitates.” In a musing about laughter, he put it “in the family of hiccups—fart, belch—therefore not respectable.” “The trouble is,” he concluded, “that I give too many clues. Less clues, more chances for inventing—for creating—for taking over.” Ultimately, his question to himself was whether to pay attention to those who cared deeply for him and whose concern was genuine. And if he did, what could he—or would he—do about it?
CHAPTER 31
THE DESIRE FOR FAME
I was doing so well—playing the gentleman, drawing only as I pleased, and now once again I’ve got the desire for Fame and to compete with the other jackasses. A mystery, this wish to go against myself and court danger.
In terms of the evolution of Steinberg’s oeuvre, 1966 was a watershed year. His subject matter took several interesting new turns as he used themes and ideas that had been successful in the past to create new work of a more philosophical nature, work that he said was “camouflaged as a cartoon” but did not really belong in that category. He wasn’t worried that it would not suit The New Yorker, because he and the editors had reached an agreement several years previously: “They only want me to be sure that I myself know what it means. They want to be more in the position of a reader who is puzzled and intrigued than of an editor who wants to judge it.” The editors knew that whenever he submitted a drawing, it was with the intention of making readers sense that there was “something else beyond the [initial] perception,” and that he wanted them to share “the voyage between perception and understanding.”
As a way of keeping ideas fresh for the drawing table and of jogging his memory later, he did a lot of doodling, calling it “a form of brooding of the hand [that] contains no reasoning.” Among some of the many doodles he made during this frenzy of creativity were lists of titles for groupings, which he separated into general categories such as “the Hyphen,” “the Accent,” and “The Dominant Species.” Occasionally he wrote commentaries that were meant to be explanations of a personal credo or instructions for what to aim for in future work, such as “say something interesting about Religion becoming autobiography.” After this he wrote “Tillich?” but did not clarify whether he was referring to the theologian Paul Tillich or to himself. Religion and autobiography were two subjects uppermost in his mind, two parts of a puzzle that engrossed him as he thought about an important new project.
The philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen had been asking Steinberg to provide drawings for a volume by Paul Tillich for the better part of a year, even before Tilllich’s sudden death from a heart attack in October 1965. Steinberg vacillated, because he was busy fulfilling other commitments but also because accepting the project would require him to think about himself as much as about Tillich’s personal credo. He had met Tillich in East Hampton shortly after he bought the Springs house, and in the years since had enjoyed discussions over the good dinners served by Tillich’s wife, Hannah. Steinberg almost never held the floor when he was with Tillich, for he preferred the role of “first-class observer” as he studied how Tillich’s unwavering spirituality and religious beliefs governed his every action. These were alien topics among most of his other friends, particularly the artists, and were hardly ever subjects for dinner-party conversation. Still, being with Tillich made Steinberg, who had always pondered questions about his cultural identity as a Jew, think about his heritage and how he expressed it (or not).
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an editor as well as a philosopher, and before Tillich’s sudden death she had commissioned his volume for the series she founded and directed. The overall title, Credo Perspectives, reflected her special interest, the relationship between self-knowledge and the meaning of existence. Anshen’s contributors to the Credo series came from many different walks of life; among them the art historian Sir Herbert Read; Pope John XXIII; Harvard president James Bryant Conant; and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. All were asked to write intellectual and spiritual autobiographies that would explain the creed by which they lived, how it related to their creative activity, and what aspects of their personal life had contributed to its formulation. Tillich was well suited for the series, and he gave her one of its most popular selections with My Search for Absolutes. The text was ready for publication before he died and lacked only illustrations.
Tillich died without suggesting an artist, but Anshen had two reasons for asking Steinberg. The first was that she discerned the philosophical musings in his earlier drawings and believed he was perfect for a biographical essay that focused on religious beliefs. Her second and more important reason was that she wanted to entice Steinberg into contributing a volume of his own to the series. He was perfectly willing to give Anshen a generous supply of drawings for Tillich’s book, but he was not sure he wanted to—or even could—contribute a volume of his own. It took him the better part of a year to accept the Tillich commission, because the very idea of a book of his own induced an almost irrational fear of what he would have to face and might unwittingly reveal if he tried to write about himself. Even if he only submitted drawings without text, he worried that they alone would give away far too much personal information. With great reluctance, he allowed Anshen to announce on the jacket of Tillich’s book that his own was forthcoming, but he found repeated excuses to postpone it, and eventually the series came to its natural end without his contribution.
Steinberg was struck by how much Tillich’s essay resonated personally, and his earliest illustrations were as much about himself as about Tillich. The essay reminded him of his own quest for autonomy, particularly in the years when he left Romania for Italy and then Italy for the United States. He worried that he was revealing too much with “this game of autobiography,” but he could not keep from playing it and wondered if his interest in himself came from having read too many “biographies written by biographers—mediocre works really—where life is justified constantly by obvious causes, more like alibis.”
In the past, Steinberg’s wry and whimsical drawings had often disguised the seriousness of his inquiry (sometimes to his dismay, as when readers saw only the surface humor in his New Yorker cartoons and drawings), but the technique of whimsy was a perfect foil for Tillich’s profundity. Anshen described Steinberg’s playfulness as his innate understanding of life’s ambiguities and of how, “in what might be called a negative myth, [he] draws attention to the phenomenon of contemporary existence.”
Steinberg used many of his iconic figures light-handedly and lightheartedly, and yet each drawing compels the viewer to stop and ponder, to think not only about what there is to see on the page but also to consider the deeper meaning that lurks beneath the laughter. The viewer’s first response may be to smile, but almost always it is followed by emotions that might begin with perplexity but ultimately lead to the recognition of something personal. Steinberg plays with the question of existence in everything from the hand that holds the pen and draws the artist who wields i
t to the mazes, question marks, and the words yes and no in various ramifications. Evoking Descartes, he posits existence by poising a man on the edge of a large cube in the middle of an imaginary landscape, with a faithful dog sitting attentively behind him. The man’s head (both a caricature of Steinberg’s own and his usual version of Everyman) has a thought bubble above it that reads “Dubito Ergo Sum”—“I doubt, therefore I am.” It is Steinberg’s response to Descartes’s certainty that if one thinks, one exists, “Cogito Ergo Sum,” and it offers a perfect parallel to Tillich’s assertion that the tragic history of the twentieth century forced him and his colleagues out of the academy and “far closer to the reality” of the external world than their forebears ever were.
As Tillich plumbed his own life for the experiences that led him to create a system of absolutes, Steinberg provided him with expressive examples of deeply personal meaning for both the writer and the artist. Steinberg depicts the existential anxiety of every stage of life from infancy to old age by showing men, women, and children climbing staircases or ladders or standing on a seesaw that has one side firmly grounded on land and the other teetering on the edge of a precipice. Everything in life is a balance, and some of his figures are more successful in achieving it than others: Steinberg’s iconic figure of the artist holds a palette in one hand and a brush in the other as he draws the staircase on which he mounts steadily upward—until he reaches the top and finds that he has drawn himself inside a closed box. Boxes figure in the drawings, as do other geometric shapes that reflect the society in which his people live; buildings loom massively, overwhelming the phalanx of rubber-stamp figures that march in tandem beneath them—all except for a single figure who sports a thought bubble that depicts another self marching in the same direction as the others. Is Steinberg asking whether this is the beginning of mass man’s search for individuality? Tillich certainly asked the question.
Everything Steinberg drew for Tillich’s book was a veiled “confession” about his own life as well, which may have been why not all of his drawings were what Hannah Tillich had envisioned. She sent a letter saying that although she found them “strong and penetrating,” she needed to muster “courage (without wild onrushes of stubbornness)” to tell Steinberg that she had qualms about how he interpreted some of her late husband’s beliefs. She thought of “Paulus,” as she called him, as a bridge between outmoded systems of belief and the new one he promulgated, and she urged Steinberg to portray this literally: “Draw me one bridge (across the enigmatic question-marker monsters and cat-ghosts).” He gave Hannah Tillich the ladders and staircases that he thought reflected the text, but he drew no bridges. Mrs. Tillich was also insistent that the book jacket should feature a line drawing of her husband’s head, and she did not want Steinberg to draw it. Nor did he want to: Ruth Nanda Anshen had specifically asked him when he accepted the commission, and he had most emphatically refused. When Anshen sent Steinberg a copy of the finished book, she apologized for a jacket that was not in keeping with his drawings, insisting that the only thing that mattered was the “superb” content: “You and Paulus in the diversity of your unity.”
STEINBERG WAS WORKING ON HIS NEW book during the time he worked on Tillich’s, and when he finally settled on The New World, he called it “a great title which says nothing.” That may have been true, but the content was something else altogether. He meant this book to have a strong, serious, and unified theme, to be a collection of metaphysical drawings that represented problems and situations in life, “like a novel with a beginning, a development, an ending, and an epilogue.” After the modest success of his previous books—or, in his mind, the lack thereof—he wanted this one to achieve the sales and reviews usually associated with blockbuster bestsellers, despite the fact that 133 drawings had already appeared in The New Yorker, so that his biggest audience might not be willing to rush out to buy a book they had, in effect, already read. Still, he worked harder on this book than he had on any of the others, for he was used to adulation and was determined not to settle for anything less. Also, there were three exhibitions on the horizon, at Maeght, Parsons, and Janis, and he wanted the book to create an audience and a market for the drawings on display.
In preparation for the book’s launch, Steinberg gave a series of interviews to his friend Jean Stein in the summer of 1965, where he explained his work with far more honesty and openness than he had ever done before. There were other writers and critics who pursued him during this period, when he was in the public eye to a degree unprecedented in his past, but he chose Stein to convey his creative truths and Life magazine to be the venue for their widest possible dissemination. For those who might be newcomers to his work, and for those who were already familiar with it as well, he went through The New World with Stein, drawing by drawing, intent to explain how he himself interpreted his work. It was uncharacteristic for him to speak so freely about it, especially because he was working on the Tillich book at the same time and was often filled with panic and terror at the thought of having to contribute his own autobiographical volume to Anshen’s Credo series. What makes the conversations with Stein extraordinary is that Steinberg spent so much of his life using casual evasion or outright deception to lead astray critics, art historians, and especially would-be biographers. Now he made the conscious decision that he was willing to lift his curtain of privacy in the quest for, at the very least, recognition, and at the most, fame.
One of the most personally revealing drawings in The New World is “the biography of a man, a famous man,” who walks briskly along a path, followed by a hyphen that precedes the numbers of his birth year, 1905. Steinberg called this drawing “the monumentalization of people, this freezing of life,” and with an almost sly relish told Stein that “anybody who is clever destroys fame or tries to mislead his admirers and biographers by being unpleasant or unreliable.” Any “good man” who did this and got away with it was “a skunk,” and Steinberg gleefully counted himself among them.
The title page featured the drawing that he called the “motto” for the entire book, one of his chubby little middle-aged men with pointed nose and chin, this one in profile, with hands in his pockets and a thought bubble that reads “Cogito ergo Cartesius est.” In Steinberg’s translation, it meant “I reason—so it must be true that Descartes exists.” His little man was a “symbol drawing” that could be used to explain every drawing in the book: A “symbol drawing [means] that what I drew is drawing. The meaning in terms of my work—my drawings—is that drawing is drawing. It’s not a reality.”
Steinberg with Papoose, the cat he loved as his best companion. (illustration credit 31.1)
He explained further by using as an example his most important symbol drawing from the beginning of his career, and one which remained the most important until the end: the line, the straight flat line that “never makes any pretense of being anything else but a line.” The line was the central component of almost every drawing in The New World; anything that appeared on or near the line, from shadows or flowers to trees or buildings, had no importance to or influence on the line itself, which was “a form of art criticism, a satire on drawing.” The first full-page drawing in the book exemplified the importance of the line, where a man is poised at one end of a seesaw that is balanced by his drawing of spirals and doodles on the other end. Steinberg called this quest for balance a recurring motif in his art, that of “the relationship between a man and his work.” The seesaw tilts slightly toward what the man has created, because “the work is his platform and the work is heavier than he.” Steinberg meant for this man to be seen as an artist, and the work was “probably the only form of altruism the artist has. It’s through his work where his arrogance and self-centerism stops.”
Numbers appear throughout the book, and Steinberg uses them to combine “an illusion of reality with an abstraction.” The number 4 was especially interesting because it offered the opportunity to include one of his real-life passions, cats. He had them when he lived wi
th Hedda and he became enamored of one of Sigrid’s, which he named Papoose, a black-and-white, intensely curious cat who figured prominently in many of his drawings. Four was a number he particularly liked because it could “arouse the curiosity of a cat,” and indeed he drew a generic cat peering into a 4. He dismissed the number 8 as too visibly closed, and therefore “a cat has no business to look inside”; cats should peer into something that is “a little bit open, a mystery.” Three was too “obvious” to elicit much interest; and the number 1 was a “nothing.” A 5 is “maybe more intriguing,” but only a 4 is “perfectly designed.”
Another of his iconic totems, the crocodile, makes an appearance as “a monster—a dragon—who is the real essence of beauty.” The crocodile had fascinated Steinberg since his trip through Africa, and he tried to describe it to Grace Glueck, saying that he was frustrated by wanting to get “some sort of idea of what a crocodile looks like, and I didn’t.” A surprised Glueck replied, “But you know what a crocodile looks like.” Steinberg said, “I know, and I don’t know … The main thing is to find out what sort of technique the crocodile is employing to show itself.”
By the time of Stein’s interview, the crocodile had become a recurring symbol, and in this book he depicts it as an “ambiguous line” in which the creature’s backbone becomes “the horizon line on which a gooey, disgusting, so-called beautiful landscape appears with all the elements of beauty: moonshine, moon, clouds, palm trees reflected in the calm water, a swan—the true elements of beauty.” That may be, but Steinberg meant the drawing to convey a sarcastic message: “Beauty is crocodilian.”