Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  For all of these projects in 1944, Steinberg drew his creations on shoddy paper that came from Germany, paper so scarce that much of what he used was the blank back side of official military forms. He did MO work on the blank side, but he also embellished and embroidered the official side with his own fanciful creations, all of which showed the new turn his work had taken since he joined the 2677th MO: he had completely stopped drawing with pencil and now used only pen and India ink. There was a crisis when he lost the fountain pen Hedda had given him, which he had carried everywhere from China to Italy, but she sent a variety of others to replace it, and he liked and used them all.

  Around this time, he began to decorate his letters to her with some of the rubber stamps that became one of his favorite postwar devices, among them the fingerprint and the pointing finger with various admonitions (“rush,” “secret,” “confidential,” etc.). After the war he took delight in telling the apocryphal tale of how he used the pointing finger marked “secret” to identify his underwear when he lost the laundry marker that bore his name: “Then, when I was suddenly assigned home … I got all my laundry except the underwear marked Secret. I kept imagining this long grey underwear … wrapped up in a safe somewhere and guarded by MPs.” It made a whimsical story that he liked to tell to distract overzealous reporters who wanted to hear about his wartime adventures, but it wasn’t true.

  STEINBERG HAD SEEN MANY THINGS IN wartime that raised conflicting emotions, and he often could not decide whether to try to forget them or to immortalize them through drawing. One event that came to the forefront of his memory every time it rained was of a group execution he had witnessed in Kunming. Nine Chinese men on their way to be shot for theft were marched in a line with a rope around their necks tying them to each other, all of them goaded and prodded by Chinese soldiers holding rifles. Incongruously, the prisoners were allowed to carry umbrellas to protect them from the rain. Five of the nine were “real robbers,” but the other four were paid replacements for the actual thieves: “This is a law in Yunan province. A man condemned to jail or death can buy a poor man to die in his place. The poor man has reasons, he has a farm to buy for his family, or wants to improve life conditions for his father, so he cashes the money and goes to die happy. Life doesn’t mean much anyway.”

  In Italy, Steinberg saw a convoy of German prisoners, “just kids 16, 17 years old and as a group they don’t look at all like superior beings.” He, who had only experienced air raids or listened to the stories of soldiers returning from the front about the violence of battle, wondered how he could convey what they had experienced to a civilian population that had no comprehension of total destruction and annihilation. In the cities he saw crowds of many nationalities who had supported the Axis cause—all of whom were suddenly in crisp American uniforms bought on the black market and professing fidelity to the Allies. Even though he could appreciate the desire for survival at any cost, the cynicism of the turncoats was deeply upsetting. All the adult Italians he talked to were depressed; their only ambition was to get to America, and nobody wanted to stay and rebuild the country. He feared there would be a violent internal struggle once peace was declared, and indeed there was. When the Psychological Warfare Branch enlisted his services as an interpreter, he was dismayed by the attitude of a handsome and healthy boy of nineteen who told him that England and America had started the war and Mussolini was a great man who was betrayed by the traitors around him. Democracy may be all right in America, the boy said, but Italy needed order and somebody to give the orders. Steinberg feared that the Italy he knew and loved was lost forever.

  After the war, Steinberg wanted to draw this and the other things he had witnessed in the form of visual stories. While he was stationed in China, he had devised classes in which he tried to persuade some of the sailors to draw, because “everybody should know how, every child makes drawings.” The trouble with drawing, as he saw it, was that people grew up and thought they had to copy photographs, “with real proportions and prospective,” and he thought this was wrong because these “grown‑up drawings were just science, a trick.” He would tell the sailors, “Take it easy, here’s a sheet of paper and a pencil. Don’t worry about reality, make it wrong, make from memory a scene that impressed you and you remember well. Make details and keep working.” The sailors usually drew something about their hometown, their families, or events that had meaning for them, such as holiday parades and high school football games. Steinberg thought they were all “excellent” and “beautiful.” After the war he wanted to do more along these lines, “to pick up people and give them paper pencil colors and being my guests for a week or so with the obligation to work a few hours a day for me turning out artwork.”

  He wanted to write about all these things as well as to draw them, but he worried that whatever form his effort took, the result would be “too simple.” He poured out his emotional reactions to the war in letters to Hedda and found it “curious, how no ideas remain in my mind but only facts, only things connected with life and especially my life. My memory simply refuses to take care of general truth found now and then in people’s words.”

  The memories of Steinberg kept by those who served with him covered a range of emotions. Barbara Lauwers remembered how much fun he was; he would sneak up behind her and put his hands on her hips, calling her by her nickname, Zuska, drawing it out in his pronunciation as “Zoooshka!” “Give me all your Tootsie Rolls for my hot date tonight,” he would cajole, and of course she would. He was always ready to take her and anyone who wanted to join them to see “the real Rome, off the beaten track.” Lauwers never got over his “off-the-center vision.” After the war she lived in Greenwich Village for a few years, during which she saw him fairly often. One night at dinner in an Italian restaurant, a man came to the table soliciting donations for charity. Those who gave dropped their money into the slit in an empty can of peaches. “Now how the hell did he get the peaches out?” Steinberg wanted to know. Lauwers cited it as an example of “the kind of thing he was always wondering about in Italy.”

  Peter Sichel was the MO financial officer, and because of his job was the recipient of much of the group’s personal and privileged information. He thought Steinberg was “a strange and private man” who went out of his way to avoid telling even the most ordinary fact about himself. Sichel wondered how much of his behavior was due to Steinberg being a naval officer bewildered by being plunked down in the midst of an army unit, never mind that he was also a foreigner who had to learn all things American by instinct.

  Others, such as Edward Lindner, thought that his behavior might have had something to do with his being anti-military in general. Lindner remembered how Steinberg hid under a desk when an admiral came to visit the unit so he would not have to salute him. Lindner also saw Steinberg in New York for the first few years after the war and corresponded with him in the last decade of his life. His lasting impression was that Steinberg “had a lot of Weltschmerz” and was “bitter about the purpose and result of the war,” with “an acute sense of futility about it all.” He quoted a phrase Steinberg repeated many times after the war, that “it was all for nothing. Everything we did was worth nothing.” Steinberg reserved his particular bitterness for the Holocaust and how little was done to prevent or stop the murder of six million Jews. For him, everything about the war was “too little, too late.”

  The colleagues who retained the happiest memories of their friendship with Steinberg were the men who served with him in China, where he seems to have formed his deepest friendships and his own happiest memories. After he left China for Italy, he corresponded with most of them, nostalgic for the work of “the Miles organization,” which he found as dangerous and fascinating as ever. The affection he felt for the men with whom he served in China is evident in the drawings he chose to include in his first book, All in Line, published the year after he returned to civilian life. Under the section titled “War,” Steinberg included vignettes from each of the theaters in whic
h he served, but only China has groups of sailors engaging in communal activities, from buying souvenirs in village stores to eating with chopsticks in a Chinese restaurant (this became his first cover for The New Yorker). Sailors have smiles on their faces when mail call brings them letters and they sit dejectedly when none come for them. Steinberg treats the Chinese with affectionate respect, even those who have to carry the heavy Americans in sedan chairs. All the other wartime theaters—India, North Africa, Italy—depict scenes a tourist might see with only a solitary soldier or two, or occasionally a WAC, sitting bored and tired in front of them. In Italy he tried to draw convoys scaling hillsides in preparation for battle or village squares with their ubiquitous monuments, but these drawings are ordinary and without the wit and bite of most of his others.

  Steinberg wore his Navy uniform after the war. Shown here with Tino Nivola and Aldo Bruzzichelli in Springs, New York. (illustration credit 10.3)

  STEINBERG LIKED THE NAVY AND WAS proud to be in “the society service.” After the war, even though he was earning good money and could afford to buy the finest civilian clothes, when he dressed casually he continued to wear his navy-issue khaki trousers, shirts, and web belt with the brass buckle (which he kept polished). As for the army (especially the units with which he served), that was quite another matter. On November 8, 1944, several days before Steinberg received orders to return to Washington and was released by the 2677th MO, he was interviewed by an intelligence officer in the OSS. He began the interview by saying he did not think it was “fair play” to discuss the troubles he had encountered, but he did speak briefly of being assigned to tasks for which he was unsuited, including drawing “dirty pictures” that senior officers could put up on the walls of commandeered villas. He told the interviewing officer that he found very little tangible value in the work he did as a morale officer: “SO [Special Operations] and SI [Special Intelligence] have something to show for their work, that is, you can see a bridge before and after it is blown up, and an SI man can present a current list of intelligence reports.” As for MO, “there is no way of measuring the effectiveness since the work which is accomplished is done without visible or measurable results, hence, we can never tell how much MO influenced the enemy.”

  The interviewing officer asked how Steinberg thought MO officers should work in future times, and his reply could have been the description of how twenty-first-century terrorist cells should operate. He thought MO workers should be “extremely intelligent and crafty minded,” but they should be recruited long before any war began and sent to live in the country where they would work. They should become completely integrated into the area where they are stationed, and because their work is so dangerous, there should be no communication between the operatives and their handlers: “They have their directives and they know better than the people outside do what is going on in the region where they are working … They know the best way they can poison the minds of the population.”

  AFTER THE INTERVIEW, AND AFTER MORE than a year of being attached to the army in Europe and Africa, Steinberg was on his way back to Washington and duty with the OSS Naval Command. True to his love of “junck,” he shipped boxes of it back to Hedda. Besides her letters and the books and papers he had collected, he shipped a German helmet, cap, hood, cartridges, gun holster for a Colt automatic pistol, New Testament, French horn, whisk broom, several boxes of miscellaneous souvenirs, and “one book of cartoons” that would mostly go into All in Line. He also shipped “drawers and undershirts, wool,” and like everything else, it arrived safely at Hedda’s in good time.

  Steinberg may have dismissed his work as unimportant, but he kept the things he brought back from the war for the rest of his life, and he used many of them in his art. He made photocopies of his dog tags and official ID card; of the fingerprint he affixed to his commission and discharge papers (on which he embellished flourishes and fake writing); bills from the hotels he stayed in, such as the Great Eastern in Calcutta, complete with flourishes and symbols; and foreign currency, particularly Chinese. Some of the elaborate engravings of steam trains, buildings, and the people on paper currency and the pagodas, flowers, and trees on coins all found their way into his drawings in years to come, as did a faded yellow paper entitled “Chinese Lesson,” with characters, phonetic pronunciation, and English translation.

  He had served in three theaters of war, the Asian Pacific, European, and American, and he was authorized to wear the appropriate medals, including the Victory Medal. These too appeared in various guises in drawings throughout his long career, but after the war he put them away, never wearing them and seldom looking at them. He was in New York on a thirty-day leave at the end of November 1944 when he received a letter from Eugene Warner, the chief MO officer, who was still in Rome, expressing his great pleasure at being able to forward a commendation from General Donovan to “Each Member of the MO Branch, 2677 Regiment, OSS.” Donovan praised them all for their “splendid teamwork and high morale in the face of hardships,” which he enumerated: “inadequate equipment and transportation, insufficient number of trained personnel, security restrictions, and a rapidly changing tactical situation.” Steinberg filed it away with all the rest of his war souvenirs.

  NAVAL OFFICERS RECEIVE PERIODIC FITNESS REPORTS from their commanding officers, and their promotion is dependent on them. Because Steinberg was attached to the army for so long, the last one he received from the navy came from Milton E. “Mary” Miles, then his commanding officer in Chungking, on May 31, 1944. Miles described Steinberg as “excellent in intelligence, judgment, initiative, cooperation and loyalty,” but only “mid-range in Force and Moral Courage” and “low” in “Leadership.” Commanding officers were asked to provide “commentary” on these judgments, and Miles did so: “His specialty is cartooning in which field he is outstanding. His performance of duty has been very satisfactory. He is recommended for promotion when due.” But it was more difficult for the army to evaluate him a year later. At the end of 1945, he was adjudged “a difficult officer to appraise and impossible to compare with others.” The evaluating officer praised his “unique qualifications … in the special field of sophisticated cartoon and caricature art work,” dismissing it as a “talent he applies with great success in illustrating aviation training manuals.” He was strongly recommended for promotion, but only if his duties were “confined to his specialty.”

  The navy did recommended him for promotion, and after several bureaucratic snafus he was promoted to lieutenant. He was obligated to stay in the Naval Reserve until 1954, when he was finally and officially discharged. Until then, every time he left the country, he had to secure permission to travel and inform the commandant of the Third Naval District (New York) when he returned. It was a mere formality, but he fulfilled the obligation with personal dignity and respect for the institution.

  Meanwhile, in September 1944, he was terrified by the rumor that he would be given two weeks’ leave and then sent back to Rome. “I don’t want two weeks leave,” he wrote to Hedda. “I want to go home and stay there!” He wanted to get away from the war, get married, get his first book published, and solidify his working relationship with The New Yorker. To prepare her for the man she would soon see, one who had lost so much weight because of malaria, chronic diarrhea, and digestive distress, he enclosed a drawing of a small dog that resembled a spaniel trying to jump a fence. “Greetings,” read the caption. “This is me (I lost some weight).”

  Most of all, he wanted to sit in a room side by side with Hedda. “My hand is itching for drawings,” he told her. “I have a thirst for sitting on a tall chair at a drawing table covered with white-yellow paper as a background or cover, and then a book of white smooth paper, a bottle of Indian ink, colored ink, aniline, sharp pencils, small pens, brushes and quiet afternoon, and Hedda painting somewhere in the room.”

  He returned to New York on the first of October, and even though he had to report to Washington for duty with the OSS Naval Command when his on
e-month leave ended in November, his war was essentially over.

  CHAPTER 11

  STARTING AGAIN IN THE CARTOONS RACKET

  I’ll have a hard time starting again in the cartoons racket especially if The New Yorker will go ahead publishing the old scrap of drawings made two years ago.

  Many soldiers stationed far from home had only to worry about surviving the war, but Steinberg had two other concerns that occupied him almost full-time: persuading Hedda Sterne to divorce her husband and marry him and promoting his promising career.

  All the while that he was being shuttled from one European posting to another, he was also fulfilling commissions generated by the Civita brothers and assuaging the astonishment and horror of his New Yorker editors when they discovered that his agents took 30 percent of his earnings.

  When Steinberg was drafted, he packed the few belongings in his Sixth Avenue hotel room, one small suitcase of clothing and several large boxes of his work, and took them to Hedda Sterne’s apartment. He had put her in charge of supervising all his affairs, particularly acting as go-between and dispensing the drawings according to his directions to Jim Geraghty, the art director at The New Yorker, and Victor Civita, his primary agent now that Cesar was in South America. Before he left, he introduced Hedda to everyone to make sure that they understood she would be making decisions on his behalf. At Civita’s, she and Gertrude Einstein, the administrative assistant who ran the office, took an instant liking to each other and formed a friendship that smoothed all of Hedda’s subsequent dealings with Victor. Saul left for China quite content that his best interests would be served by Hedwig Stafford, Hedda Stafford, or Hedwig or Hedda Sterne—whatever she was calling herself at that particular moment, to the confusion of those with whom she conducted his business.