by Deirdre Bair
Now that Saul had her safely situated at a distance, his primary emotion was relief. He was satisfied that he had been generous to her and therefore had every right to keep her at a safe remove. He was confident that if things remained amicable between them, there was no reason they could not be together on his terms. He traveled a lot during the fall of 1983, so there was no opportunity for disagreements to surface. When he returned, the holiday season had begun and her depression increased dramatically, as it did every year, starting at Halloween and not ending until after New Year’s. Her dislike of the festive season affected him too, and his “dread” made him morose and sullen. This year, in an attempt to stave off his annual melancholy, he refused to see her.
She was calm but still in dark despair when she sat down in early December to compose the letter that was meant to be her last will and testament. “If I should die,” she began, she wanted “my friend Saul Steinberg” and her sister Uschi “to take care of everything.” She would not mind “being burned,” but she hoped her ashes would be buried in the woods behind the house in Springs, where there was still a gravestone left from the colonial era, when that part of the property had been a cemetery. She was very specific about what she wanted: a plain wooden box that would be lowered into the grave by hands and ropes “(please no hydraulic devices and no artificial grass to hide the dirt).” She wanted wildflowers and, for music, the “lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem and the last movement of his Clarinet Concerto K.622. If, however, she died in Africa, she wanted to be buried there. She wanted her old Leica camera to be buried with her, or else given to “someone young and talented who’d appreciate it.” After dispensing with her personal effects (“most … belong to Saul, who gave them to me”) and her bequest to her sister, she divided the money she had in bank accounts in Germany, France, and New York between her brother’s four children and her sister and made small gifts to people who had been kind to her. She gave power of attorney to the CPA whom Steinberg had engaged to set her up in the apartment and dispense her monthly stipends. “If I die,” she concluded, she wanted it to be “without regret, as I would have liked to live.” Then, to make sure that her readers would know she was quoting Dostoevsky, she wrote by hand on the typed letter: “ ‘One moment of happiness,’ etc., from White Nights.” She filed the letter away very carefully, in her apartment and not in Springs, so that Saul could not find it until she was ready for him to read it. She wasn’t quite ready to die just yet, but she was preparing herself to be preemptive, just in case the time might soon be right.
Her life was “empty, boring,” and “harder” than she had thought it would be. “Oh well, too bad. And I had so many dreams and hopes.”
CHAPTER 41
“STEINBERGIAN”
A drawing from life reveals too much of me. In other drawings—those done from the imagination—I do only what I want and show myself and my world in the way I choose.
Steinberg began 1984 by avoiding “the racket, the hysteria” of Christmas in New York and “hibernating in the heat of home” in Springs. He had more important news than the weather to tell Aldo Buzzi: “Bulletin: I stopped drinking.” For an entire month he had not drunk wine or whiskey and so, just to prove to himself that he was not an alcoholic, he planned to enjoy an occasional finger of scotch or glass of wine. The act of abstaining from liquor made him “glad,” but even better was the feeling of “something like dignity” that bolstered his belief that he had done the right thing to separate from Sigrid. He no longer felt “oppressed” by “the threat of [her] tears and scoldings,” and best of all, he no longer fell victim to the “remorse” those episodes always produced. In fact, by exerting controls and sticking to them, he felt so good that he began to work again with real pleasure in the evenings after dinner, something he had not done “for many years (30?).”
He was also practicing another kind of control, a physical one that started when he had escaped for three days during the fractious month of August 1983 to hide from Sigrid’s erratic behavior. He had checked himself into a Zen temple in the Hudson Valley, where he practiced sitting in silence in the lotus position for four to five hours during each of the three days. Even though maintaining the lotus position that long played “havoc” on his seventy-year-old legs and feet, sitting was “a savage delight” that gave him a sense of accomplishment for being able to endure it “without weeping or running away.” Steinberg practiced sitting for the rest of his life, even going so far as to convert the small room that adjoined his studio in the apartment into a dedicated meditation chamber. To acquire knowledge through practice, he went to other Zen retreats, particularly the Zendo in Sagaponack, where the writer Peter Matthiessen was the roshi. Steinberg became such a convert to sitting and so convinced of its many benefits that he tried to enlist Hedda and Sigrid to join him. Hedda declined, saying that she was content with the forms of private meditation and the few yoga positions she had long practiced; Sigrid sometimes accompanied him to the Zendo, although she went mainly for his companionship and never practiced with anything like his diligence and dedication.
Zen had other beneficial effects on his daily habits. Steinberg’s sleep patterns had always been fairly consistent: if the work was going well and things were calm with Sigrid, five hours were restorative, but when he was unhappy or depressed, he would sleep for eight or nine hours at a stretch and when he woke up would lie abed with eyes tightly shut until he could no longer avoid facing the day. Insomnia tortured him in the last years of his life, but it was still mostly occasional when he began sitting in the mid-eighties. The physical conditioning Zen required gave him new mental energy, as did a mental exercise that he learned in one of his classes, to think of himself as being enclosed in a cylinder that prevented any outside ideas from entering his mind. Usually pretending to be encapsulated would put him to sleep within minutes.
Steinberg in full biking regalia. (illustration credit 41.1)
Another physical exercise he used to tire himself out and help him sleep was riding his bicycle on country roads. He bought a first-class racing bike and rode it every day into Amagansett, where he stopped to buy the newspaper, then pedaled happily home along a road that paralleled the ocean while allowing his mind to free-associate. Going into town entailed a strenuous uphill climb, but the return was fast and fun as he whizzed along downhill all the way. Even in bike riding Steinberg expressed his sartorial elegance, enjoying outfitting himself as much as he enjoyed the actual experience of riding. He decked himself out in a helmet, goggles, leather riding gloves, black spandex tights, and a professional red-and-black jersey like those worn by champion Italian riders. “I am an amazing sight,” he crowed, boasting that he cut “quite a spectacle.” He found such euphoria in riding the bicycle that he wrote a paean to it, “The Bicycle as a Metaphor of America.”
STEINBERG’S RITUALISTIC DAILY ACTIVITIES HELPED TO free his mind to roam through the thoughts and ideas they generated during the 1980s. Practicing Zen offered ways of thinking about how to withdraw from the constant influx of demands on his person and his time, as he learned how to be “inside with oneself in silence, an escape from the constant chatter of introspection and conversation.” It was in this period that Zen became one of the many “elective austerities” he practiced in his personal life so that he could concentrate all his energies on creative activity.
He still traveled as much as before, usually finding a way to relate his journeys to work and often adding something pleasurable along the way. After he went to Chicago in early 1983 for the opening of his works on paper and wood at the Richard Gray Gallery, he went to Las Vegas to indulge one of his long-standing passions, gambling at the casinos. He was an uncanny gambler who could have been a pro, but this time he had to settle for ultimately losing his winnings, so that “only the pleasure of having won remains.”
Steinberg “sitting.” (illustration credit 41.2)
As he spent more and more time in the country, he took pleasure in cooking sim
ple meals for himself. He, who had always needed the stimulation of company and had gone out almost every night to find it, was now content to spend his evenings listening to music, reading, and drawing. His creative output during this period was just short of astonishing, as the decade from 1978 to 1988 saw his largest and most sustained contribution to The New Yorker and several publications and major exhibitions. He made many drawings that could not be slotted into portfolios or other categories, which he called “ex votos,” saying that they were inspired by biographical reminiscences from either his recent or the far distant past. He compared their genesis to “film exposed sixty years ago and only now developed and printed.”
He had no fixed schedule for working but could sometimes start early in the morning and continue off and on until the night, so that friends who lived nearby and wanted to see him knew better than to drop in. They learned to phone first and to stay away when he used his standard expression, that he “could not make plans at the moment.” However, when he did want visitors, he suddenly became “a person of impulse” and would insist that they come at once for everything from late-morning coffee to afternoon tea or an early evening drink. But he never invited guests to dinner, for if he ate with others at that meal, he preferred not to entertain but to be entertained by them. On the rare occasion that he initiated an evening meal, he took his guests to restaurants, unless it was during one of his good periods with Sigrid, when she was there to cook.
Steinberg balanced turning inward toward a simpler way of life by deliberately turning outward for the intellectual sustenance he needed, finding it through actively nurtured friendships with writers. He began a correspondence with Sandy Frazier, who had moved to Big Fork, Montana, which was as satisfying as the letters he exchanged with Aldo Buzzi. He and William Gaddis had a standing date to meet at one of several different East Hampton restaurants every week, and whenever Muriel Murphy had a dinner party, there was always the possibility of a new friendship with someone interesting, such as Joseph Heller, whom he met at her table He had always kept a respectable distance from most of the artists of his generation, and few were still alive. He was one of the few trusted friends permitted to visit Bill de Kooning, but it always made him sad to see his old friend’s steady decline into senility. Every witty letter from Philip Guston reminded him of how much he missed Ad Reinhardt’s caustic postcards. Guston always invited Steinberg to visit his farm in upstate New York, but he never went. He did go to Vermont to see Jim Dine, whose “windowless studio, noisy electrical lighting and unimaginable chaos” were so overwhelming that he had to escape into Nancy Dine’s beautifully kept house. Dine was one of the few artists Steinberg liked to talk to, because they always conversed “with pleasure about professional matters, like schoolmates.” He liked being in the company of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell when they were together during their marriage and separately after they divorced, but it was usually they who initiated the contact, and it was almost always in an East Hampton gathering where conversation was difficult. Most of the old friends from the worlds of commercial art and graphic design had either died or moved away, and as Steinberg had not made close friends among the younger generation, he was able to regard this area of art and culture as he perched outside— or perhaps above—the fray. From there, he instigated several important shifts in how he would present his work in the future.
A few years earlier, as the decade began, Steinberg was grudgingly cooperating with galleries and museums that wanted to capitalize on the success of the Whitney retrospective by mounting the same sort of show. Once he became engulfed in the frenzies related to picking and choosing work to exhibit, he realized that he did not want to waste valuable time becoming the chief archival authority of his past, because he had so many ideas for future work. He objected to the canonization of his oeuvre as something fixed and final and would not engage in any activity that even hinted at the closure of his career. Saul Steinberg decreed that there would be no more retrospectives and he would concentrate on what he wanted to do rather than on what he had already done.
He began to put this decree into effect after he allowed himself to succumb to Arne Glimcher’s abilities and charms, and especially to his promise of higher prices and better sales through the Pace Gallery. Glimcher reminded Steinberg “perhaps a bit too garishly” of the late Aimé Maeght, but he was also “an excellent person, concise, rapid, even intelligent,” and Steinberg knew he could count on Glimscher for “a capable job.” His first show at Pace in 1982 did indeed command higher prices and sold so well that it pulled him out of the financial hole he claimed to have been in since 1978.
The exhibition featured new drawings and some of his wooden constructions, and it was an energizing experience to see them so well received. The positive feeling was bolstered when two books appeared in 1983 to confirm that the work he had been doing over the past several years was well received by a public who had not seen it in book form since The Inspector a decade earlier. Both books contained texts provided by distinguished scholars, the critic Roland Barthes for the French All Except You and the poet John Hollander for the American Dal Vero.
Steinberg and Barthes had known and respected each other’s work since they had begun a cordial but formal friendship in the late 1950s in Paris. Barthes was well equipped to analyze Steinberg’s drawings because Steinberg had been explaining them since 1967, when Barthes had asked about the children’s labyrinth at the Milan Triennale and the mural in the courtyard of 5 Via Bigli. Steinberg said they were best understood by first considering the line of “rope” (echelle) or “string” (ficelle), for he intended the line to be the internal guide that showed the viewer how to navigate the maze. He asked Barthes to note how the rope became something different as it passed across the changing horizon, veering in some places from being water on the ground to a ladder reaching toward a ceiling or an arrow pointing at the sky. He insisted that the artist’s ultimate task was to ensure that the viewer needed to make only a minimum effort to grasp and absorb the entirety of the labyrinth, and to realize that everything seen individually is but one of the many elements within the total illusion.
Barthes wrote his essay in French, but from the beginning the book bore the English title All Except You. Throughout, he tried to arrive at an overview of the many meanings each individual drawing inspired and to ask what a viewer’s lasting impression might be, but however much he wanted to “chase after the being of [Steinberg’s] art,” it remained elusive. The drawings remained “a mirage … whose deceptiveness is always put off until later.” Barthes called this the true definition of reading, a conclusion that must have delighted Steinberg, the self-described “writer who draws.”
The idea for the American book originated with Brendan Gill, Steinberg’s friend at The New Yorker, on behalf of the Whitney Museum. Each year a writer and an artist were invited to collaborate on a book that was privately printed as a gift for the select list of donors known as the Library Fellows. Gill asked Steinberg to make the drawings and he in turn asked John Hollander to provide the text. Steinberg told Hollander that he had “a collection of drawings that were unique” for him because they were from “Dal Vero, á la verité,” a genre he had consciously avoided publishing as much as possible. He wanted this group of around twenty or twenty-five drawings to be published, but he worried that they were too personal and therefore not what the book’s audience would be expecting from the usual Steinberg, which they could recognize even before they saw his signature. He also worried that because they were all informal sketches from life, they might not be of the same quality as those he had been presenting to the public throughout his career.
Steinberg was a true perfectionist, famous among his friends for discarding and sometimes destroying almost as much of his work as he actually kept. His studio assistants remember how he studied each finished work with scrupulous intensity before agreeing to let it leave his studio, peering closely as he turned it this way and that, looking at it
upside down and sideways; his friends remember how diligent he was about destroying his discards so that it would not be worth the trouble for an unscrupulous scavenger to try to fish something out of his trash can.
Steinberg thought he was taking a huge risk by exposing deeply personal matter. He had always taken pains not to let the public see the people, places, and things he cared about most, and drawing from life made him fear that he was revealing “certain parts” of himself, “areas of vulgarity where I don’t tell the truth, making use of what I already know, commonplaces.” He was frustrated when “things don’t end up the way they should—the results don’t live up to the promise.” It was the opposite of drawing from the imagination, when, in the guise of the protagonist, he always knew when the work was final and finished, ready to leave his studio and be sent out into the world. But this was the work that made him happy and satisfied, and this was what he wanted to publish. His worry was eased by the thought that he would be working with John Hollander.
Steinberg had known Hollander since the late 1960s, when they were often invited to the same events in New York, and as they both owned houses in Amagansett, seeing each other there as well. It was in Springs that Hollander got the title for one of his books of poetry, Blue Wine, when he visited Steinberg and watched him fill wine bottles with an unidentifiable blue substance. He had written about Steinberg in magazines such as Commentary and The Listener and he had written the introductions to the catalogue for Steinberg’s Smithsonian exhibition and the new edition of The Passport. The two men had many discussions of Steinberg’s art throughout the collaboration on Dal Vero, but some years after it was published, they talked more fully about it in a conversation that Hollander remembered long after.