by Deirdre Bair
Saul did not respond to her letter until he phoned at Christmas in a frightening fury. All she recorded of their conversation was “no food money.” On New Year’s Day 1970, she wrote another letter to say she was sorry that all he felt for her was “hate and disgust.” She told him that she could not undo her affair, but he might be able to consider it “less horrible” if it led to some improvement in their relationship. She told him she would go back to him if he wanted her, because once again she had discovered that her “(so dubious) loyalty” was to him. Even so, she was both hesitant and afraid to resume their relationship: “You have been putting me down and calling me names for such a long time. I can’t stand to hear you insult me, and hate me, and it makes me want to hate back and I don’t want to do that ever.”
Saul let his anger fester until January 7, when Sigrid received a “mad call from S. to throw R. out.” When she didn’t do it, he demanded to see her, and on January 13 he issued an ultimatum: if Reesom did not leave, they were through—but only emotionally and not financially, for he would honor his commitment to support her until she could take care of herself. Reesom did move out, not because of Saul’s threat but because he was spending the next semester in Europe and had to leave anyway. Sigrid and Saul met again, a “sad meeting” on the eighteenth when he told her that he was going to Africa in ten days and he expected her to be waiting—alone—when he returned. Sigrid did not obey, and a week after Saul went to Africa, she followed Reesom to London. Together they went to Spain for a month, then back to London, where she stayed until mid-March, even though Saul returned to New York in February. When she recorded this period in her datebook, she gave no details of her life with Reesom, only a vague itinerary of their travels; what she wrote instead was about Saul: “Not with S. almost 4 months (later), painful.”
STEINBERG HAD WANTED TO RETURN TO Africa ever since his visit to the central part of the continent in 1963. This time he decided to make Kenya his headquarters but to take a roundabout way of getting there. First he made his usual circuit of Paris and Milan, and then he revisited Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. From there to he flew to Nairobi, then to Murchison Falls in Uganda before making his second visit via Addis Ababa to Sandro Angelini in Lalibela, Ethiopia. He was not looking forward to the rest of the trip, knowing in advance that it would be “a disaster” to make his first visits to cities in the newly independent nations: Lagos, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; and Dakar, Senegal. Ghana was “the armpit of the world”; Dakar was beautiful but full of rude and arrogant people taking advantage of their “recent independence to give you trouble at customs, in hotels, etc.” He had a basic hatred of the Arab world that dated from his Romanian childhood, and it intensified when he revisited the places in Morocco where he had been stationed during the war—Marrakesh, Casablanca, Fez, and Rabat. On this trip he was especially irritated by “too many people who follow you around, offering things, begging, they touch you. I was never left alone.”
In later years Steinberg always joked that he went to Kenya to meet a “crocodile man [who] thought he was going to have a nice crock talk with me.” He was speaking of Alistair Graham, a distinguished biologist who studied crocodiles for the Kenya Game Department at Lake Rudolph. Graham urged Steinberg to go to Lake Rudolph to see them for himself, but Steinberg was set on going to Murchison Falls and did not make the trip, promising Graham that they would go together when he came again the following year.
Before he went to Africa and while he was corresponding with Graham, Steinberg went to Brooks Brothers to get himself fully outfitted in the clothing he assumed all white men wore on safari. On his first day in Nairobi, he was a vision in khaki as he sauntered down the street in a bush jacket of many pockets, shorts, knee socks, sturdy boots, and a pith helmet. He even had a swagger stick, which he left in his hotel room after the first time he ventured out, when he saw that no one else was dressed as he was except for—“of all people,” as he later expressed it—Saul Bellow. Neither man knew the other was in Africa, so the meeting came as a complete surprise to both. When Steinberg told Bellow that he was on his way to Entebbe, Uganda, as the jumping-off point for a visit to Murchison Falls, they decided to join forces and go together. From this point on, their accounts differ greatly.
In an article Bellow wrote after Steinberg’s death, he described a booze- and drug-fueled trip in which everyone was high on hashish, including the “madly happy” Steinberg. Bellow claimed that hashish made him “deeply depressed,” so he stopped using it, but he implied that Steinberg continued to take it and to drink heavily throughout the trip, not resuming his “regular, orderly, non-narcotic life” until it was over. This seems highly unlikely, for whatever Steinberg’s behavior might have been in private, in public he was impeccably circumspect, the very model of discretion and correct social behavior. Also, at a time when Idi Amin was not yet in full power but was already dictating public conduct and cruelly punishing anyone who did not adhere to his puritanical standards, it is highly unlikely that Saul Steinberg would have risked calling attention to himself by the egregiously bad behavior that Bellow described.
What he did while at Murchison Falls was far from drunken carousing. He spent long days accompanying an English biologist who was following the same lines of research on crocodiles that Graham was undertaking in Kenya. Steinberg observed how the biologist killed and dissected crocodiles to find out what they ate, watched while he cooked and ate some of their flesh, and politely declined to share the feast, as the thought of eating such meat “disgusted” him. Steinberg was fascinated by the crocodile’s behavior—the way it could lie in the mud like a dead log and then suddenly flash into action to devour unwitting prey. Most of all he was mesmerized by the “toothpick bird” who sat inside the crocodile’s open mouth, unconcernedly pecking its food off the gigantic teeth: “Nobody in the world is as safe as that bird in the crocodile’s mouth. They have an understanding, a pact between them, a deep relationship between two systems.”
He saw the crocodile not as a reptile but as “a study in camouflage disguised as a crossword puzzle, all dark green, light gray, and sepia, alternating in a vertical and horizontal system of words, a magic animal with riddles and puzzles on its sides.” The only thing more powerful than itself and the only creature the crocodile feared was the fat and placid hippo, “who can hit him with its head and cut him in half.” Steinberg “hated” the crocodile, because it was “obviously part of the primitive system of nature where certain privileges were given unevenly to different species … the son of a bitch is vicious, has terrific teeth, is a great swimmer, and on top of it he’s armored. So he’s got everything, and this is why I think he is of the nature of the dragon.” He also thought the mythical dragon “had too many advantages,” and that was why he used the two interchangeably in his art. Both symbolized “the monster, the political life of administrations, of power, and just like the crocodile, power has too many advantages. It spits fire, swims well, and has terrific teeth and is armored. It’s corrupt and wicked; it’s impossible to have power with equity and modesty and nonchalance.” For him, the crocodile symbolized any “administration in evil form, political power in general, specifically economic, artistic and cultural. Anything you want—it’s a crock.”
ALTHOUGH STEINBERG INSISTED THAT “traveling is not for picking up an idea” but rather to be used as an “intermission or a time out,” he still returned to New York full of ideas and eager to try them. The sheer size of the Union Square studio gave him the sudden desire to experiment with “big things,” and he took up oil painting with gusto, working on some of the landscapes and rubber-stamp collages that would eventually become part of his next book, The Inspector. He had accepted an extremely lucrative commission from the art publisher Harry Abrams for a series of lithographs and had conceived “a series of riddles” for The New Yorker. The Abrams deadline loomed, but he was captivated by playing with a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus that he had torn out of a French newspaper in Paris; when he got ho
me, he could not stop superimposing his rubber stamps of the praying couple onto the various photocopies he had made. Steinberg had van Dalen work diligently to pack and send the works for his two solo exhibitions in 1970, one at the Kiko Galleries in Houston, the other at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles. He was more lackadaisical with organizations such as the Carnegie Institute Museum in Pittsburgh, to which he had promised four paintings for an international exhibition, and which started to make repeated demands in June, when he was almost six months late in delivering them for a show that autumn. At the same time, the Spectra Media Corporation of Hollywood wrote and phoned repeatedly to beg him to “enter into investigative discussions” about a television special or series. He eventually sent the paintings to Pittsburgh, but he ignored the group from Hollywood. Van Dalen also had to take care of Steinberg’s donations to various institutions and organizations, everything from a watercolor for the Palm Springs Desert Museum to a poster designed specifically for the East Hampton Guild Hall’s fundraising.
Requests from the world of politics intruded as well. Lica had become politically active in France and wanted him to sign a petition prepared by a group of Maeght’s artists who were against the Vietnam War and wanted artists throughout the world to boycott all cultural programs sponsored by the American government. Steinberg was against the war but thought the petition went too far by inadvertently penalizing those who made their living through the arts and refused to sign it. He did, however, contribute to the manifesto entitled “The Demands of Art Workers’ Coalition to the Galleries,” and when the Fellowship of Reconciliation invited him to Nyack to meet Danilo Dolci, he accepted with alacrity.
DESPITE ALL THE ACTIVITY THAT SURROUNDED HIM, Steinberg insisted that he lived “closed up … into my shell like a turtle.” Most of his feeling of isolation came from yet another estrangement from Sigrid. He was enraged not to find her in New York when he came back from Africa, and when she returned, he would not take her phone calls or answer her letters. Despite his silence, she sent postcards to express how much she wanted to reconcile, such as one that featured two cuddling lion cubs from the Zurich zoo. She begged him to take her back, but he maintained his usual stony silence. He did agree to let her stay in the Springs house in May, but only because he was not there himself. She left a letter on the kitchen table for him to find when he returned, telling him that she was “less lonely here alone than with you.”
It had been ten years since they began their relationship, and Sigrid analyzed it from her perspective: “We were never a couple … What you need (and got finally) is not a woman but a sidekick … What really was there between us in the last (how many) years? Some dirty pictures and lots of pulling and pushing and tension. You made me into a lonely old maid. Yes, Mr. Steinberg, you don’t know how to be close, only in the mind. But I am human not an idea and the caress of a bum at the right moment when I needed it was more assuring than all your words.”
Sarcastically, she berated him for not wanting a flesh-and-blood woman but only an audience of one, avid to scoop up his every golden remark and precious idea. He might have thought that he was wasting his words on her, but probably not, she concluded, because “you don’t really waste much, sooner or later you exploit everything and make it pay.” Sigrid was sure that he would find a way to turn whatever unhappiness he was currently feeling into something that would bring further fame and fortune, and that he would use any brilliant or cute remark that seemed wasted on her on more appreciative audiences.
Steinberg ignored her letter, and when he broke his silence, it was to tell her that they were never going to be together again. She was devastated and so distraught that Mimi Gross feared she might be suicidal. Gross and Grooms were so concerned that they invited Sigrid to spend the summer with them in Provincetown. Being there seemed to lift her spirits, especially after she found a run-down shack and put her personal touches to the place. She even tried to work again by setting up a space where she contentedly painted watercolors with the intention of preparing a portfolio to take to galleries when she returned to New York. She also planned to get in touch with some of the publishers who had previously hired her to design book jackets to see if they would have work, and she was going to ask the design studio where she had worked part-time or freelance for something more permanent. “She was just getting used to being on her own,” Gross remembered, “and then he called and she ran back to him, leaving everything.”
The reunion lasted less than a month, and this time they both thought the separation would be forever. “It has been coming for a long time,” Sigrid wrote in what was to be her last letter to Saul for quite a while. She had returned full of hope, only to find that nothing had changed, and the ups and downs were incapacitating: “I just don’t think I can make it, and the more I get discouraged, the less I can cope.” She insisted that since Reesom had left, she had been faithful to Saul and not used drugs, staying straight and not cheating because she wanted to win him back. Saul was not swayed by her pleas, and once again his response was an impenetrable wall of silence.
He claimed that once she was gone, he deliberately restricted his social life to spend most of his time alone, but as always, his appointment calendar contradicts the assertion. It listed (among many others) novelist Anthony West, songwriter Adolph Green, publisher Roger Strauss, literary agent Candida Donadio, and gallery owner Xavier Fourcade. He was correct, though, when he said that he saw a lot of the old friends he called “my Mafia,” among them Betty Parsons, the Vicentes, and the Nivolas, because he was happy only when living twenty years in the past.
When he was in New York, he was reluctant to leave; when he went to Springs, he always stayed far longer than he intended. He compared himself to the turtle in his shell, because he was doing what he always did when he could not arrive at a decision, tucking in his head to “pretend the problem does not exist. Or,” he added, “rather several problems.”
For years he dithered about whether to live permanently in the city or in the country, in the United States or Italy or France, but now he was in the sad state of “inevitable confusion … three houses, not to mention the three girl friends, etc.” He wondered if he should give up both the apartment and the studio when the leases expired. If so, he would have to buy a bigger house in the Hamptons or else put a huge addition on the house in Springs to hold all the treasures he had accumulated over the years. As for the women, even when things were fine between him and Sigrid, he indulged in ongoing long-term liaisons with several married women in New York, two off-again, on-again married lovers in Paris, Ada and another occasional lover in Milan, and still another in Turin, all of whom he saw regularly for copulation without constraints on either side. Sigrid used to mock him for “looking absolutely silly performing for those cold fish, the tall blond American college girl type,” whom he pursued openly in every social situation, to the embarrassment of his friends and the amusement of those who saw “the ridiculous aspect” of his pursuit of younger and younger women.
In all situations he excused himself by saying that he could not make decisions on his own and was “waiting for a deus ex machina.” One quiet Sunday afternoon when he was alone in the city apartment—the first time he had been there in seven months—he dreamed for a brief moment of walking away from everything and moving into one room to live like a student. Swiftly he dismissed the idea as “a fantasy” and concluded that the only decision he could make was to make no decision at all. “Meanwhile,” he decided, “confusion is an excellent climate for working,” and working was his only “area of calm, a refuge.”
CHAPTER 34
FURNITURE AS BIOGRAPHY
I got to work as though out of remorse and work has become a vice.
Here I’ve spent five days in a beautiful prison,” Steinberg wrote to Aldo Buzzi in February 1971 from Zurich, Switzerland. He had checked himself into the Privatklinik Bircher-Benner on the advice of Vladimir Nabokov, to see if he could stop smoking, cold turkey, through
a regime of controlled starvation. There were also medical tests, examinations, and massages, but unfortunately the hunger treatment did not work, and he continued to smoke his several packs a day for another year or so.
He liked Zurich, a “clean and orderly city.” The clinic stay was actually a side trip tacked on to an exhibition of his work at Maeght’s Swiss gallery after it closed in Paris. It was one of his two solo exhibitions that year, the other at the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, and he was in three group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. He had submerged himself in his own work with such a passion that his interests spilled over into activities within the art world and he became a more public artist. He was a judge for the American Institute of Graphic Arts show, chaired that year by Milton Glaser, and because of his friendship with Donald Barthelme (they met through The New Yorker), he donated the drawing “Two Women” to a show called “She” at New York’s Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery.