Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  THERE WAS A LOT OF WORK to finish before he went to Washington, and he concentrated on getting it all done. He also concentrated on teaching Hedda as much as he could about his personal relationships and business affairs so that she could intercede for him whenever it became necessary. He introduced her to Victor Civita, who had landed a prestigious and remunerative commission for Steinberg to design the jacket and create the illustrations for Chucklebait: Funny Stories for Everyone, a children’s book by the noted author Margaret C. Scoggin. Steinberg had commissions to fulfill for PM and The New Yorker, and he made a list for Hedda of the portfolio of cartoons he had amassed for them and other publications to draw on while he was away. Their editors liked the way he ridiculed bombast and gave a comic twist to the seriousness of war, as in his cartoon of an easily recognizable Hermann Göring, festooned in full Nazi regalia and covered with glitz that included flashing rhinestone swastikas on each epaulette. He was also preparing for the first American exhibition of his work, in April at the Wakefield Gallery on 55th Street in New York, where a young woman named Betty Parsons had taken an interest in his work.

  Steinberg and Sterne before he was sent to China. (illustration credit 9.1)

  As with so many other introductions to people with whom Steinberg formed meaningful friendships, the one with Betty Parsons came through Constantino Nivola. Steinberg was so close to the Nivolas that they were the first friends to whom he introduced Hedda Sterne, taking her to their apartment four days after he met her and urging her to value their friendship as much as he did. Hedda took to them at once and they became friends for life. Tino was the art director of Interiors, and through their welcoming hospitality at home, he and his artist wife, Ruth, were responsible for what would in later years be called networking: artists dropped in informally, as did gallery owners, museum curators, magazine editors, art historians, and book publishers. The New York art scene during World War II and the decade that followed was small enough that everyone knew everyone else, and the Nivolas could always be counted on to make something happen. Betty Parsons championed Steinberg and Nivola by giving them a dual show, and the reviews for “Drawings in Color by Steinberg, Paintings by Nivola” were favorable. Hedda was miffed that Betty took Saul’s work “more seriously” than her own, but not for long, because she recognized why: “Each week he was in The New Yorker brought him more fame. His rise was extraordinary.”

  Steinberg and Betty Parsons with two unidentified guests at the opening of his first gallery exhibition. (illustration credit 9.2)

  Saul introduced Hedda to Betty, and when Betty opened her own gallery, they both became her devoted clients. Through her they formed individual friendships with the glittering litany of painters whose work defined postwar American art, particularly Robert Motherwell, James Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Ad Reinhardt, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Theodore Stamos, Wilfred Zogbaum, and John Graham. John Graham introduced them to Elaine and Willem de Kooning, but Hedda and Saul soon had to limit their socializing: “Bill and Elaine lived at night and we lived in the daytime, so we had to stop seeing them. We didn’t have the stamina.” As for the other artists, they saw them on their own terms but “never at the Cedar Tavern. They were all changing partners down there and we never went in for that.”

  Hedda already had her own friendships among artists and took care to share them with Saul before he went overseas. She had known Peggy Guggenheim since the late 1930s, when Hans Arp saw her work in Paris and urged Victor Brauner to send it to Galerie Guggenheim Jeune in London. The war forced Peggy Guggenheim to relocate to New York, where she renamed the gallery Art of This Century. When Hedda arrived, she reintroduced herself, and Peggy became her “first friend” and included her in several important group shows. Like all the other “recent Americans, refugees all,” Hedda found herself swept into the whirl of parties that Peggy held every night in her large house on Beekman Place. There she formed friendships with other émigré artists, among them Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, and André Breton. By the time she took Steinberg to meet them, “all these male artists were calling me ‘one of us.’ ” She made the mistake of taking him to the kind of party he detested, one of Peggy’s bashes, where at least “four hundred to five hundred people, all the European intelligentsia, wandered through the house during the night.” Saul went with her to several more before he refused to go again. He disliked the large drunken crowds and particularly the French refugees, who he thought had no interest in anything American and were only in the United States until the war was safely over and they could go back to France. He, who had no real sense of himself as belonging to any patria, found that “back home for me is not very clear [because] I have many backhomes.” He was keen to understand his adopted country, particularly now that he was about to fight and perhaps die for it.

  AS SAUL’S RUSH TO TIE UP loose ends before leaving New York intensified, Hedda played an increasingly important role in his life. Remembering Saul at that time, she reflected that he always required someone to look after him, and “there was always someone, always lots of people who took care of Saul, helped him out, made things easy for him.” She listed all those in Italy who had helped him escape, all the Romanian refugees in Santo Domingo whom he had known from childhood and who made him part of their families, all the relatives who pooled their money and influence to get him to New York, and all the professional contacts who kept him out of the army infantry and saw to it that he was a commissioned naval officer in the fortunate position of being able to continue to practice his civilian profession while serving in the military. She was impatient whenever she listed this huge collection of people who loved and cared for Saul only to have him reject it and insist that he had no one to catch him when he fell through the cracks, as he was sure he would do at any given moment. He became angry when Hedda passed this off as his “Jewish fatalism, Romanian superstition,” and he refused to accept her rational dismissal of feelings that were deeply imbued in him.

  He needed someone to provide a buffer and support, and he decided that Hedda was the one to do it. He reflected upon his relationship with Ada, who had done all sorts of favors and services for him despite her mysterious comings and goings, especially in helping him to leave Italy, but he insisted that she had never been “truly there” in the sense of devoting her life to fulfilling his needs and wants. Saul believed that Hedda could do this, and that her most important quality was to make him feel solidly grounded for the first time in his life. It was something she found both puzzling and amusing for the rest of hers.

  “I was always overly protected,” Hedda remembered. “Someone always took care of me. I never did a tax return, paid a bill. I suppose I was able to take care of Saul because Fred [Fritz Stern] Stafford took care of me.” The security that her marriage to Fritz provided allowed her to keep “Saul’s neurotic needs” in perspective, but more important, permitted her to keep an emotional distance from him and from them: “When he was in the navy and before we were married, there were no promises between us. I was still married. We were not engaged. And I had a big affair while he was away.”

  Despite Hedda’s extremely independent lifestyle, which she never tried to modulate or hide, Saul convinced himself that she was as besotted with him as he was with her and that she would give up her independence in a minute to take care of him. Without asking, he put her in charge of everything he wanted or needed, from shopping trips to buy more India ink and drawing tablets to preparing herself to take over all his dealings with Victor Civita and various magazine publishers. There was also a new possibility in the works when the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce wanted to collect all Steinberg’s drawings and cartoons for a book because of the success it had just had in publishing a work by another New Yorker cartoonist, William Steig’s The Lonely Ones. Steinberg had never heard of the publisher, but in early March he told Civita to proceed with negotiations but to confer with Hedda in every instance. He prepared to leave
for Washington, thinking that the contract would be settled before he finished Officer Candidate School and pleased that everything was in Hedda’s capable hands. This led to their first major quarrel, during which they sat in silence over cocktails at the Beekman Tower Terrace on a dreary Sunday afternoon. She objected to the way he was using her, and he agreed that she was right to blame him, but as usual he had an excuse: it was the beginning of springtime and he was always unhappy at that time of year, and besides, he “was leaving and didn’t know how to take it, things were happening too fast.”

  IN WASHINGTON, HE DID NOT GO through OCS as he had expected, because the length of time it would take for “such training would hamper and restrict the war effort.” He remained as uninformed about and unfamiliar with naval practices and procedures as he was in New York when he had to ask the sailor to teach him to salute. He was assigned instead to a “specialized billet” at the Interior Control Board, where he was supposed to use his “specialized skill or knowledge” to “prepare equipment needed for artwork on psychological warfare.” He was billeted in a hotel apartment, where the other residents were as closemouthed as he was about what they were doing, so he made no friends and was often lonely. Every day he reported for duty at Morale Operations, much as if he were going to work in a nine-to-five civilian business office. His training consisted of learning about different kinds of propaganda and different kinds and qualities of paper and ink, and listening to general lectures on the psychology of the native populations and occupying armies in the different theaters of war. Mostly he learned about the kinds of printing facilities he could expect to find, supply links for products he needed, and how his group was to communicate and cooperate with other MO facilities.

  Much of the time he spent sitting in the corridor outside the office of Kay Halle, who worked in Morale Operations and thought Donovan must have forgotten all about Steinberg moments after he recruited him. “What are you doing?” she asked him one day. “Nothing,” he replied, so she put him to work creating cartoons that were subsequently distributed in Germany and Italy. When he drew a uniformed Nazi, it was with the head of an animal with a pointed snout and lizardlike tongue, and his Japanese soldier’s head was a crocodile with vicious teeth who wore a baseball cap and little round eyeglasses. It was one of his earliest drawings of what became a totemic animal.

  On weekends he took the train to New York, passing the time by reading magazines and making his own drawings on top of articles and pictures in Life, Time, or the Saturday Evening Post, his favorite because of its many illustrations. Sometimes Hedda went to Washington to spend a week. During the day, while he went to the office, she went to museums or spent rainy afternoons tucked up in bed drawing or reading. When he came home, there was always “scotch & wine & apple pie,” foods he remembered while he was overseas and which for the rest of his life always made him think of her.

  The spring passed pleasantly enough, and the work he was doing made the war seem far away and distant. One of his most enjoyable assignments was illustrating a pamphlet the OSS distributed to all new recruits. The pamphlet covered everything from how candidates were chosen to what they should take with them to foreign lands, how they should expect to live while there, and, most of all, how they should keep their mouths shut about the work they did and where they did it. Steinberg created an homage to Hedda with his illustrations. For the first one, “You Are Chosen,” he drew easily recognizable cartoons of the two of them preparing to throw objects at maps of Germany and Japan, he a book titled Background and Research and she a larger-than-life fountain pen with a wickedly sharp point. Under “Packing and Shipping,” he has them up to their necks in boxes festooned with shipping labels, and under “Learning to Live with Next to Nothing,” he drew their heads emerging from thimbles.

  Saul thought of Hedda always, and it gave him pleasure to insert something of her into his work. Having her in his life, the routine of his weekday work, and the weekend train trips back to his old life in New York all lulled him into a false sense of complacency. If this was war, it was not so bad. Thus on April 18, he was completely unprepared for the change-of-duty orders that fatally disrupted his easy life. He was given eight days to prepare to fly to San Francisco, where he would board a ship that would not be identified until the proper time came for him to depart for the long, roundabout journey to China.

  The pamphlet he illustrated with drawings of him and Hedda took on fresh new meaning, not just to remind him of her but also to help him get through the bureaucratic rigmarole that was about to begin. The pamphlet advised:

  Let this be your stock answer to any leading questions:

  I haven’t any idea where I will be stationed.

  I am going to be doing some background and research work for the war effort. I understand, but I don’t know anything about the details.

  I haven’t the faintest idea where I am going.

  CHAPTER 10

  MY HAND IS ITCHING FOR DRAWINGS

  Lt. Steinberg states that MO personnel were completely misunderstood and misemployed by commanding officers who could see no direct use for their work. Therefore they were assigned all sorts of tasks for which they were not particularly suited, and in fact some of the Colonels seemed to think that Lt. Steinberg’s function was merely to draw dirty pictures which they could put up in the villas.

  Steinberg flew to San Francisco on May 1, 1943, and reported directly to the Twelfth Naval District headquarters, where he was told that the Dutch ocean liner Nieuw Amsterdam, commandeered as a troop ship, was leaving the next day and he would be one of the seven thousand men on it. He thought himself fortunate to share a cabin with only five roommates, especially during the first few days, when he was felled by “a very unromantic sickness.” The Nieuw Amsterdam was big and slow and lumbered across the equator twice without encountering the enemy. Some of the officers passed the time by creating a shipboard newspaper, for which Steinberg drew the “funnies on Sundays.” They stopped in Wellington, New Zealand, long enough to parade “with music and people cheering and old ladies crying” and then did the same in Perth and Freemantle, Western Australia. By the time Steinberg left the ship on June 4 at Colombo, Ceylon, he had lost all his money playing cards and gambling. He partied there for several days and thought it was a paradise compared to his next stop, Calcutta, India, which he reached on June 11 after five days on a small and dirty train; he was distressed by the poverty and filth he saw at first hand. By the eighteenth he was moving from one base to another toward his eventual destination, Chungking, but he was still in India on the twenty-ninth. He compared being stuck there to being in a doctor’s waiting room, passing the time reading old, bedraggled magazines and hoping his turn would soon come.

  Ostensibly he was to show other MO divisions how to set up and operate printing equipment, but in reality he did next to nothing because equipment was either hard to come by or lacking, and no one seemed to have any clear idea of what MO officers were expected to do even if the presses were up and running. The weather was hotter and more humid than in Santo Domingo, and left him too enervated to pass the time by making his own drawings. He thought Calcutta was “not a good place to live in, really too hot and too many people around.” He did have a private room in the officers’ quarters, but a continuous procession of cleaners, barbers, and salesmen invaded it, clamoring for attention, and there was no respite when he left because more vendors besieged him. In haste to elude them, he often stumbled and fell over sleeping bodies on the street. He did get to see several temples and was intrigued by the many monkeys and the overwhelming number of sacred cows, all of which he drew.

  A monthlong circuitous train journey finally ended at the air base in Chabua, north Assam, when he boarded a cargo plane on July 16 for the three-hour flight over the Hump to Kunming, China, not minding the extreme cold because of the clear sight of the Himalayas. He went directly to his base camp on the northeastern outskirts of Chungking, dubbed “Happy Valley” by those stationed th
ere. It took him four days to adjust to the heat, which sometimes reached 106 degrees and left him “perspiring like a waterfall” and gobbling salt pills and vitamins as if they were candy.

  Happy Valley was a small village surrounded by even smaller ones clinging to the hillsides that cradled it. All about the place there was “heat, dirt, discomfort, and discouragement,” but he liked China better than the “chic and comfort” of Calcutta.

  He was billeted in quarters that were more like Chinese houses than navy barracks. The furniture was primitive, but food was plentiful, even though there were only chopsticks with which to eat it. Water had to be boiled and drunk when still hot and tasted “like the rice paddy from which it comes.” Not surprisingly, all the sailors were felled from time to time by “the extraordinary Chinese diarrhea, a national malady that is cured with a medicine called ‘the cement.’ ” Malaria was rampant, and the mosquitoes were “like dive bombers asking for blood.” He was glad that he brought the extra netting Hedda had insisted on, even though the navy routinely equipped every bed with it. He was also grateful for her many gifts, for he would have been lost without the big black portfolio for drawings and the mirrored shaving kit that enabled him to be the only officer with a decent shave.

  Steinberg in China at his first wartime duty station. (illustration credit 10.1)

  He was among “some very nice fellows” who were billeted two or three to a room, and he drew his for Hedda, showing the mosquito netting enclosing the bed he had learned to make with navy-style square corners. He drew his desk, which held his framed photo of her and some of the decorative ivories and other small objects he had begun to buy on trips into town. One afternoon his roommate returned after an hour away and was surprised to find that Steinberg had covered one full wall with a mural of Manhattan featuring “a table, two chairs, a bottle of whiskey and two glasses, [positioned] near a window which looked down upon Times Square.” He also drew his commanding officer as he walked back to his quarters from the shower hut in his underwear, returning the salute of a Chinese soldier in full uniform. He made many more drawings of his fellow officers, but the one they liked best and remembered more than forty years later showed them relaxing in deck chairs all in a row, with their feet on the porch railing in front of them. They all stared off into the distance at the hillside villages with undulating rice paddies above and below them, while the little English bulldog one of them brought from Australia snored contentedly on the floor behind them. There was even a library of sorts, where Steinberg found and reread one of his favorites, Voltaire’s Candide. He told Hedda he had everything he desired but her and something he wanted even more: cold water.