Saul Steinberg

by Deirdre Bair

  Steinberg believed that working in wood brought him closer to “the rather animal world of painters.” As he watched the carpenters, and as he took over to contribute his vision to the raw shapes he asked them to cut, it gave him the only “pleasure” he could find within his work: “The mind is at rest, it’s the happiness of a horse … it makes me work and even dream that I’m working.”

  “I think there were many too many [tables], but he just loved the idea of them,” van Dalen recalled after Steinberg hired a carpenter, Sig Lomaky, to do the actual construction. He himself may have been unable or unwilling to learn carpentry, but even before the wood was touched, he always knew what it should become. “He was all about ideas,” van Dalen said, and Pulis agreed: “He could make it look like I did it, when really it was all his own doing.”

  One of the earliest tables, entitled “Politecnico,” was a precisely arranged collection of objects that hinted at Steinberg’s past experiences as a student in Milan. Pencils, an old-fashioned straight pen, and a ruler frame the other objects on the table; at the bottom, varnish smoothes and blurs three photographs just as memory might do, while above them, a languid landscape is populated by rubber stamps of human figures, with one of Steinberg’s fake seals hovering in the sky above as if to bestow authenticity on the scene below. On each side of the landscape he arranged two small plywood wedges carved and striated to represent receipt tablets. At the top of the tableau, a piece of thin wood colored and scored to resemble an etching plate provides architectural detail, as it depicts a mythical building in the brutal style so popular in Mussolini’s Italy when Steinberg studied there.

  He began to make the tables, both the flat tabletop assemblages and the three-dimensional stand-alone pieces, in the early 1970s and continued until the last three years of his life. If all his work was an autobiography of sorts, the tables are among the most teasing, as they conceal even as they reveal. Steinberg called one of the most intriguing (and possibly concealing) “Furniture as Biography.” It was one of the three-dimensional pieces which he chose not to sell and kept in the basement at Springs for years, although he allowed it to be shown late in his life, in 1987, under a different title (“Grand Hotel”); once again he refused to sell it, and finally he partially disassembled it. On this table was a collection of furniture of the size usually associated with dollhouses— chairs, tables, beds, dressers, armoires, and chests of drawers. Many were three-dimensional replicas of furniture that was loosely reminiscent of the hotel rooms he stayed in during his travels, a lot of which he drew in his sketchbooks. Whether he referred to them or drew from memory is not known, because he worked on the furniture alone, with no help from Pulis. When the table was finished, Pulis posits, Steinberg thought it too crudely assembled to let it be seen; Hedda Sterne thought it was because it might have brought back too many memories that he decided were best left in the past.

  One of the most revealing wooden constructions is the one he called “Library,” a high, spindly, and large-as-life bookcase-cum-secretary on which two shelves resembling a wooden crate hold a collection of some of his favorite books, all ornamented with his lettering and cover drawings. His taste in literature was eclectic and occasionally surprising. While he raved about Richard Hughes’s novel The Fox in the Attic and recommended it to all his friends, he chose instead to commemorate another of Hughes’s novels, In Hazard, which he liked less. He loved anything Italian or about Italy; Norman Douglas is there with Old Calabria, and he honored his friends Aldo Buzzi and Ennio Flaiano along with Kipling and Jack London in the Italian translations in which he read them. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Gogol, and Nabokov are on his shelves, as are Jules Verne and Dostoevsky in the Romanian translations he read as a schoolboy. Curiously absent is his all-time favorite novel, James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, Steinberg enjoyed a Joycean in-joke when he included a book whose author’s name suited his subject: W. M. Oakwood’s Carpentry and Cabinet Making. As he played with wood, he marveled over everything about it, telling Aldo that he was so captivated that “in fact, I’m preparing a show for Maeght in October [1973] all tables.” Working with wood was akin to a miracle: “Who would have said old Saul would be revived and obsessed by work!”

  CHAPTER 35

  UP TO MY NOSE IN TROUBLE

  All’s well here. Up to my nose in trouble. How have I managed to fall into the usual traps (at which I’ve been barking for years)?

  The show, yes, it went well and I made the usual trillion,” Steinberg said when the tables were first shown at the Parsons-Janis exhibition in February 1973. He liked the way they were displayed and was elated when audiences found them enthralling. When the reviews came, Steinberg dismissed them as “vulgar compliments,” but he still thought they were good enough to send to Aldo. The kind of reception he wanted came from other artists, prominent among them Philip Guston, with whom he was sharing an increasingly close friendship through letters that dealt with what they were striving to attain in their work and hoping to convey to audiences. Guston said he was “utterly captivated and excited” by the tables and understood that they were “all about art and your adventures in art—your autobio.” Steinberg could not have asked for more.

  Shortly after, The Inspector was published, to decent critical response but not the raves Steinberg wanted or needed to help generate sales. He blamed the lukewarm reception on his new publisher, the Viking Press, which positioned it as a gift or coffee-table book and priced it at ten dollars, a hefty sum at the time. When taken as a whole, all the responses to the book were much the same as those to the rest of Steinberg’s professional undertakings—successful—and success in work was sweet after such a long period of being down in the doldrums. It made him full of energy and ready to tackle “the boring problems” that he had put aside for the past several years.

  Suddenly he decided that it was “important to get out of the Village, more than anything else,” and he made his first major decision by not renewing his lease. He had never really liked living in Greenwich Village, and now that his sixtieth birthday was approaching, he was uncomfortable being surrounded by the young and the hip and wanted to return to the staid Upper East Side. He found what he wanted almost immediately, a duplex apartment at 103 East 75th Street, “close to the old neighborhood” on 71st Street where he had lived with Hedda, “expensive,” but he could easily afford it.

  As with all co-op apartments in New York, he had to pass board inspection, and that required letters of reference. Marcel Breuer, John de Cuevas, and Betty Parsons all attested that (as Parsons wrote) he was “a talented, charming, reliable man, who fulfills his obligations in every way.” The letter that probably carried the most weight, however, was from his accountant, Martin H. Bodian, who stated that Steinberg’s earned income for the past several years had been “in excess of $75,000” and that his net equity in real estate, marketable securities, and bank accounts was “in excess of $250,000”—a veiled way of saying that he was a millionaire several times over. His application was approved, and he was given a certificate attesting that he owned 180 shares in the building’s corporation. It resembled all too closely one of his false documents, which may be why he stashed it in the folder where he kept all his other “honorary” memorabilia, including his “Kentucky Colonel” certificate and a letter telling him to pay his long-delinquent dues to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts or he would be removed from the membership rolls (he didn’t pay). It also included copies of his letter of resignation from the Century Association, whose members were distinguished authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts. His dues were in arrears there as well, so he paid up and sent a letter announcing his “friendly resignation.”

  New York is really a collection of small villages, and the natives are not prone to go outside them. Steinberg became a walker in his part of town, often encountering old friends and casually joining them for something informal. Leo Steinberg invited him for a meal, and when Saul ran into Niccolò Tucci th
ey would walk along together and then often dine. His new and stylish address garnered invitations to glamorous benefit dinners such as one for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Heinz II, (“Jack and Drue,” who were collectors of Steinberg’s work). He was on the guest list that included George Plimpton, Diana Vreeland, Brooke Astor, and Arthur Schlesinger. “Everyone … looked fabulous,” wrote “Suzy” in the New York Daily News, “especially Saul Steinberg who arrived in a deerstalker.”

  Other collectors of Steinberg’s work wanted him to grace their tables, and Sigrid was usually included in the invitations. More often than not, Saul did not tell her she was invited, and most of the times when he did, she refused because she was uncomfortable in such settings. Apocryphal stories, always of their bad behavior, abounded about them both. Sigrid was reputed to have deliberately vomited on a society hostess’s dinner table because she was bored by the company; at another dinner, when Saul was allegedly disgusted with the superficial conversation, he rose from the table and threw down his napkin, saying, “This can only get worse” as he stomped out. The most oft-repeated story of their bad behavior concerns a Giacometti painting that hung over the toilet in the powder room of a Park Avenue apartment. Sigrid emerged from the room and in her raucous voice announced what she had seen to all the guests in the very large drawing room; Saul said it was an insult to a great artist, grabbed her arm, said, “We’re leaving,” and off they went. An entire mythology grew up about the bad behavior of Saul Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth, much of it probably stemming from hearsay about their fractious personal relationship. But very little of what they were alleged to have done in public was actually true, and almost none of it could be verified.

  ONCE THE APARTMENT WAS HIS, STEINBERG made changes to it over the next several years. He hired the architect Ala Damaz to alter the layout, calling her back several times until he had the spaces exactly as he wanted them. He wanted the public areas to be on the entry floor, where he had a separate kitchen and a combination living and dining area that could hold a table as big as the one he already had in Springs and as big as Hedda’s, which he remembered sitting at with great affection. There was also a maid’s room and bath behind the kitchen area, which he used for art storage, as his housekeeper came in daily and he never had houseguests. His private quarters were on the floor above, where he had his bedroom, bath, and a large studio. There was also a small room which became the sanctuary where he kept his meditation cushion and did his yoga sitting, which he had recently taken up and which he practiced faithfully for the rest of his life.

  The apartment was in such a state of disrepair when he bought it that he was unrealistic to think it could be completely remodeled in the short time before his lease ended and he had to move. He ended up living through the “horror” of renovating the kitchen and bath and having all the rooms painted and refurbished, but he left the details of clearing out his Village apartment to “Saint Anthony” and counted on him to “perform a miracle,” which he did. Anton did the packing, sorting, and tossing of rubbish and discards; he arranged for the movers, oversaw their work, and made sure that everything arrived safely and was installed where Steinberg wanted it, all without fuss or bother on Steinberg’s part.

  Once Steinberg was committed to buying the city apartment, it was as if a barrier had given way and he found it fairly easy to make another decision he had been worrying about and postponing for the past several years: to add a studio onto the country house. At first he wanted only one large room leading off the kitchen, but he soon realized that he would need far more storage space than even an extremely large workroom would provide, so he asked the architect to dig down and make a full cellar under it. To secure the necessary building permits, he had to go before the various town boards, and in his case many more times than was usual. As he did with catalogues, books, and exhibitions, he kept making changes to the architect’s plans, and every change was major enough to require repeated appearances, thus delaying the start of construction. Finally everything was settled and approved, and one brisk November day found him out of bed uncharacteristically early as he got up to watch every move the carpenters made when they began to build the wooden framework over the big concrete hole that had been dug for the cellar.

  THE TWO HOUSING DECISIONS WERE MOMENTOUS, and as soon as Steinberg made them, his euphoria was overwhelmed by “doubts.” After thirteen years downtown, he was finding it difficult to settle uptown, for 75th Street was in a far more elegant and formal neighborhood than Washington Square, and even walking the streets or shopping in stores was different enough to make him feel as if he had moved to an entirely new city. Starting with the uniformed doorman and the hushed hallways in his building, everything about the apartment took some getting used to, and it didn’t help that he remained uneasy about whether building the country studio was the right thing to do. Once the exterior was finished and the carpenters were putting the final touches on the interior, Steinberg was embarrassed by the size of it. He thought the addition dwarfed the original house and reviled it as “architecture for the poor but built with lots of money.”

  That was in February 1974, when everything was bleak and cold and the studio was so empty that the slightest sound created a booming echo. By June, when grass was growing around the exterior and chipmunks were already living under the new porch, and after he had moved in many of his treasured objects, set up his work tables, and put things on the walls, he changed his mind and thought it was “turning out nicely.” Still, it had been a tremendous change to go from being a renter to an owner in the city and to having more than twice as much room in the country house. He could not make himself move beyond feeling that his new life was “temporary … improvised” and blamed himself for the irrational “fear of the definite” that he could not keep from consuming him. As he did with so many other thoughts or feelings he was ashamed of, he blamed all his insecurities and uncertainties on his upbringing as a Jew in Romania, “fucking patria who murdered millions, who never accepted me.”

  ROMANIA WAS ON HIS MIND WHEN his niece, Dana Roman, now a young woman, came to visit in the summer of 1973. Dana was quick, self-confident, and often peremptory, and having her in the Springs house made him aware that it had been some time since he had lived with anyone on a daily basis, even Sigrid. He wondered if his disposition would have been different if he had lived within a family’s confines rather than having been so much alone. Temporarily, however, he was part of a couple, because things with Sigrid were “in harmony for the moment.” She loved to be in the country and oversee the household, freeing him to concentrate on work, where he had much to do.

  First on his agenda was finishing the tables for the Maeght exhibition by early summer so they could be shipped in time for the October show. He used the tables as the excuse to drop the Skira book, which had become “a nightmare.” He was unsure of his ability to write the text, but was too embarrassed to admit it, so he used the excuse that he was too busy with other work, and to divert himself of anxiety, he concentrated on the tables. Maeght had asked the philosopher Hubert Damisch to write the catalogue essay. At first glance Damisch, who was a philosopher specializing in theories of aesthetics and the history of art, seemed to be among the best-qualified French intellectuals to write about Steinberg’s “biographical” tables. However, when Steinberg read Damisch’s essay, he thought it “depressing, disaster,” too heavy on theory and too little about what Steinberg called the biographical impulse from which the tables sprang. But the catalogue was in production, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  French audiences were not as captivated by the tables as the Americans had been, nor were the critics. Edith Schloss, the reviewer for an important arbiter of European taste, the International Herald-Tribune, thought they had none of Steinberg’s sharp and precise irony or inventive wit. She dismissed his latest work as a rehash of the old, and said that, having come full circle, it was “biting its own tail.” She heaped the most scorn
on the table Steinberg was proudest of, the “Politecnico,” and in summation said all the tables were “prevented by their own irony from expressing more than an abstract argument.”

  Steinberg was not prepared for critics who thought the tables were self-indulgent and sentimental, who could not understand the themes and ideas they were meant to convey, and who seemed resentful because the new work departed from the old and did not merely continue what had come before. Despite the muted critical reception, sales were good, but that was not enough to assuage his miffed feelings.

  A major purchaser was a Belgian art dealer and collector with ties to the New York art world, Serge de Bloe, who had become a trusted friend. Steinberg had occasionally used de Bloe as a conduit for sending money to Aldo and Ada, and now that became something he did fairly regularly. Although the Internal Revenue Service audited Steinberg’s tax returns with alarming regularity, he was never caught when he used de Bloe as his intermediary. Until now he had never volunteered money to Ada but only given when she asked for it, and she had routinely asked for money or goods several times each year (the latest request was for a television set). Now he worried whether he was “doing a good or bad thing” and asked Aldo for his “sage advice.” Whatever the advice, from here on, Steinberg included something for Ada whenever he diverted funds to Aldo.

  FOR A MAN WHO COMPLAINED THAT he was beset with depression and indecision, Steinberg managed to hide it from public view while being much in the public eye. At his opening reception in Paris, he had the opportunity to see many old friends whom he was often too busy to see individually. Mary McCarthy came, and he was so happy to see her that he danced her around the floor. The next day she sent a confidential letter that led to Steinberg’s behind-the-scenes but highly active involvement in the antiwar movement. McCarthy was trying to raise money for Chilean dissidents, particularly Carlos Altamirano, the man most wanted by the Chilean junta. An underground network had been established in Argentina to raise between $10,000 and $12,000, and she asked Steinberg to contribute whatever he could. He sent almost the entire amount, and McCarthy sent grateful updates about the progress his money was making for the remainder of 1973.