Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  It was an unusually stressful time, and as usually happened when he was under stress, problems flared with his teeth. For several days before his appointment with the dentist, he girded for pain by drinking scotch more heavily than usual. He worried that he was drinking too much in general but did nothing to curtail it, as whiskey also kept him from worrying about time lost from work. It also helped him to cope with another major worry, this one that the editors of The New Yorker might be forgetting him.

  Although he had seldom shown up at The New Yorker’s weekly meetings of the art department, he thought it professionally expedient to make periodic appointments with the staff to keep his work in the forefront of their minds. Lately there had been ominous signals: Jim Geraghty had started returning many drawings as unsuitable. Steinberg had always tried to make his work serve a dual purpose, often selecting from those he had on file whenever he thought they would fit into advertising as well as in magazines, and now that he was under so much pressure, he was trying to make much more of his work do double duty. He chose, for example, drawings and cartoons that had appeared in The New Yorker and Harper’s to illustrate the small pamphlet ABC for Collectors of American Contemporary Art, and he sent others to E. H. Gombrich for his Bollingen book, Art and Illusion. Steinberg was plucking old work from his files for The New Yorker, and this was not working for Geraghty. It seemed especially important to drop in casually at his office and take him to lunch at the Algonquin, because Geraghty, who had always phoned Steinberg whenever he rejected a drawing, now began to send carefully worded letters like this one: “There must be an area where our demands coincide with your aspirations. This bunch of drawings is tantalizing, frustrating, infuriating, not to mention wonderful, amazing, and (to use a patronizing word) promising. The Magazine Steinberg and the Gallery Steinberg can’t be the same person and you shouldn’t ask that they be.”

  Steinberg accepted that Geraghty would not automatically buy anything he happened to have on hand, and he put a great deal of effort into getting back into the good graces of everyone he worked with at the magazine. It was frustrating to take time away from meeting other deadlines just to be seen walking through the hallways, but Steinberg did it, his mood always lightening when he stopped on the compositors’ floor and became deeply engrossed in technical conversations about layout and typography. He usually avoided the staff’s large cocktail parties, but he needed to see and be seen, so he went to one hosted by the writer Maeve Brennan and another by Ross’s ex-wife, Jane Grant. He was a frequent visitor at Geoffrey and Daphne Hellman’s, first when they were still married and later after they separated. He lunched frequently at the Algonquin with the editors William Shawn and Hawley Truax.

  He also began to frequent the gatherings at Benjamin Sonnenberg’s nineteenth-century mansion on Gramercy Park and at Dorothy Norman’s ultramodern town house on the Upper East Side, where he could count on chatting with New Yorker staffers. After Cartier-Bresson introduced him to Dominique de Ménil at Betty Parsons’s gallery, Steinberg spontaneously invited her to supper in the kitchen with him and Hedda; in return, she invited him to parties in her New York apartment and was soon an avid collector of his work. On one of his few excursions downtown he took Bill de Kooning to dinner at an Eighth Street restaurant, but he was much more comfortable in uptown venues and preferred to see people there. When Alberto Lattuada came to stay in the 71st Street house for several days in December, Steinberg took him to a party at Jane Grant’s and introduced him to writers who he hoped might promote his films. He entertained Lattuada every day with lunches or dinners, but they never went below 52nd Street.

  SAUL WAS NERVOUSLY AWAITING ALDO’S ARRIVAL in December 1953, mostly because he needed a foil between himself and Hedda. They had never really talked about most of the things they wrote in letters, particularly the fissures in the marriage caused by his relationships with other women. As there had been no discussion of the state of the marriage when he returned from Europe, there was no clarification about how his behavior was affecting it. Hedda continued to be the good wife who attended to all his household needs and desires, while he mostly came, went, and continued to do as he pleased. Hedda was shocked when Saul seduced the babysitter of Ad Reinhardt’s children: “The main thing about her was that she was foreign and exotic. They just had sex together.” Of another conquest, “she was my girlfriend first and then he had to seduce her because he always tried to seduce my girlfriends. With this one, we were good friends and managed to remain so.” And of still another, “she was one of those little duchesses he met in Europe and he brought her here to meet me. He always brought his girlfriends home. He needed my approval.” Hedda had given up trying to discuss the things that truly hurt her: “It was always difficult to have an argument with Saul. He could touch a nerve and make you hurt, but he was never intent on hurting you. Usually he would diffuse an argument by telling you something about his work or showing you some of it, and of course you could not resist it. After a while he made it seem ridiculous to argue with him.”

  The one part of each day they looked forward to was what they called “the second dinner.” No matter whether they held dinner parties at home or dined out together or separately, Hedda would cook a complete meal at midnight or later—a steak or chops, vegetables and salad—and they would pour wine and sit down together at the big kitchen table and eat and talk. The problem was, they never lacked for conversation, but it was always about other people or things they had done that day, their current work, or their plans for the following day. They never talked, as Hedda put it, “about the things we should have.”

  SHORTLY BEFORE ALDO ARRIVED, STEINBERG MADE a curious doodle at the back of his 1953 datebook. He was a constant doodler on all the pages of his daily calendars, using colored pencils or ballpoint pen to create elaborate geometric constellations of circles, squares, and triangles, of flags, banners, and exploding fireworks. Sometimes he drew faces and figures, but not often. In this instance he drew a heart that enclosed the face of a man with a disgruntled expression, whose features resembled his own. He had another habit of making odd jottings in his datebooks, of several words or phrases that might be the genesis of an idea for everything from an individual drawing to a series or a complete book. In this particular one, he filled the next several pages with comments about two subjects: his perceptions of architecture and the situation of the contemporary artist.

  Architecture was very much on his mind, not only because of his friendships and collaborations with Alexander Girard, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames, and Dione and Richard Neutra. Steinberg followed the debates and controversies about Eero Saarinen and his floating, flamboyant commissions, and when he moved to New York with his writer wife, Aline, Steinberg was their frequent guest. He had friendly arguments with Bernard Rudofsky about everything from the design of private homes to the planning of entire cities, and he had recently accepted a commission from Ernesto Rogers to make the drawings for a “children’s labyrinth” that Rogers’s firm was to construct in 1954 for the tenth annual Milan Triennial, the showcase of the best of Italian architecture and design. It was an important commission for Steinberg, because it would be on view before so many of his teachers and fellow students at the Politecnico. While working with Girard in Detroit, he had been dubbed “the draftsman-laureate of modernism,” and it was a title he was especially anxious to live up to in front of his Milan colleagues.

  He thought long and hard about the role of architecture in modern life and the artists who created it. Although what he wrote in this particular datebook seems to be a collection of random jottings without an orderly progression toward coherent thought, taken all together they do give an indication of what he was thinking and feeling.

  Geraghty had identified only two categories into which to divide Steinberg’s work, “the Magazine Steinberg and the Gallery Steinberg,” but there were numerous others as well, the most obvious being the work-for-hire that consumed the major portion of hi
s time (which Geraghty might have been including in the Gallery category). The notes Steinberg made in the datebook address these splits in his professional life and how—even if—they could be unified under the single heading of artistic identity. On the subject of architecture, his comments range from the awestruck to the sardonic, from “pure architecture is like playing the harpsichord” to annoyance with “the Mickey Mouse style” and the “amusement park quality of skyscrapers.” The two specific architects whose personalities fascinated him as much as their work inspired him were Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, with “their fantasy—articulate, aware.” As for the artist, he probably had himself in mind when he wrote, “There is a tendency to dismiss talent.” His final summation remains a mystery, because he carefully and thoroughly blacked out the last word of the sentence: “America is disarming—it finds the ‘gimmicks’ in the [word blacked out].”

  Steinberg and Buzzi at the 71st Street house. (illustration credit 15.1)

  HE WAS AT HOME ON 71ST STREET by November 1953, nervously willing himself to concentrate on work and trying to stay calm by playing billiards while he awaited Aldo’s arrival. He sent letter after letter going into minute detail about every possible incident that might arise, from what clothes to bring to the best brands of sleeping pills for the fourteen-hour flight. Hedda was amused by Saul’s nervousness but did “every crazy thing” he asked her to do to calm his nerves. She was not amused when she learned that he planned to take Aldo on a trip through the American Southeast just as soon as they rushed through all the things or places a first-time visitor to New York should experience.

  She was distressed because Saul was so eager to see his friend that he gave little consideration to leaving her alone again. Two years had passed since they had moved into the house in joyful anticipation of working together side by side, and she got a terrible shock when she added up how much of that time he had actually been gone; she forced herself to stop counting when she reached one full year. She knew that Saul’s calendar for 1954 was already full of new trips, and several more were planned for 1955.

  When Aldo arrived and they went away, Hedda sent a letter apologizing for how “sad, mixed up, scared” she had been when they said goodbye. She felt “terribly guilty” about accusing him of using absence as an excuse to run away from the reality of his life. She asked him not to “interpret wrong,” but she thought he should know: “Your principal fear, I think, is caused by your great talent—facility [her emphasis]—which becomes a burden (like too great beauty), particularly with a background that causes masochism, like feeling guilty.” She tried to explain that she was like many other women who desire to “keep their man” and how such women push their character and honesty into the background and make themselves “ready for compromises.” Such behavior crippled women, causing everything from “indigestion” to “spiritual troubles.” Both were very real, Hedda cautioned, and occasionally one would lead to a manifestation of the other. A woman had to know that these were possibilities, and to survive in such a marriage, she had to “take care of what is in our power to maintain, which is a way of life and health, to a certain degree.”

  In her indirect way, Hedda was asking Saul to understand her plight and to change, but he never responded directly to this letter, and she never pressed her point. He continued to go away from the dream house while she stayed at home and waited for him.

  CHAPTER 16

  BALKAN FATALISM

  I’ve had and still have problems in which I get involved for no reason, caused rather by the lack of reasons and by Balkan fatalism. Every year or two I’m obliged to clean the stable and I suffer.

  After three months in Aldo’s company, Saul tried to get down to work, but he didn’t find it easy. Aldo was there from November 1953 to the end of March 1954, and most of the time passed in a re-creation of their carefree student lives, only this time they had a lot more money with which to do it. They played billiards, but on Steinberg’s private table, whenever they wanted and without having to wait their turn in a public bar. They did not have to be content with reading about boxing matches in the newspapers as they had done on long-ago lazy afternoons in Il Grillo; now they went to the arenas and sat in the best seats. If they wanted to see two movies on a single day, interspersed with a good meal in a chic restaurant, they did it. They saw Broadway plays and heard Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic. Just for fun, they were among the first flyers on New York Airways, “the first scheduled helicopter passenger service in the world.” And when they traveled throughout the southern states, they flew to major cities, rented comfortable cars, and stayed in the best hotels. They were fascinated with what they saw in the Jim Crow South and read some of the novels of William Faulkner while they were there. Seeing segregation at first hand was a shocking reminder of Steinberg’s life in Europe before the war and marked the beginning of his interest in civil rights and his later quiet activism on behalf of African-American causes.

  Aldo’s departure left him at loose ends. Steinberg had hardly worked at all during the visit, other than to choose drawings for his new book, The Passport, often amusing himself by dipping his fingertips in ink and using the prints as faces. When he bought a fingerprint kit to make the process slightly neater and cleaner, it was the only work-connected event significant enough to record in his daily diary. He had selected the book’s title and most of the content well before Aldo arrived, so he had a fairly firm idea of how he wanted it to look. He gave 241 drawings to the publisher, Harper & Brothers, and envisioned a book of 160 pages, which was more than they wanted or could use, but he was insistent, offering a halfhearted apology that there was “too much stuff in it but it’s too late to change.” Actually, he wanted to include more drawings, but he was unable to focus on selecting them, so he put the book aside to oversee the last-minute details of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. As he was so unsettled, he decided to go to the opening. He was not closely involved in the show, because it was the same exhibition that had originated at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and would go after Dallas to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. All he needed to do was to specify the order in which he wanted the works hung and then affix prices, in this case ranging from $250 to $500.

  When he returned to New York, he could not avoid The Passport any longer, so he selected forty-nine additional drawings and sent them to his editor, Simon Michael “Mike” Bessie. Steinberg didn’t like conflict of any kind, even genteel discussions about how to arrange the drawings or which could legitimately be cut, so he didn’t stay around long enough to settle anything over one of the lavish lunches arranged by his Francophile, bon vivant editor. He was delighted to have a valid excuse to leave New York when Life magazine invited him to spend several weeks covering the Milwaukee Braves baseball team. However, before he could do this, he had to learn what “America’s pastime” was all about, and he needed to educate himself fast.

  STEINBERG HAD BEEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND American culture and society from the first day he set foot on American soil. From the bus that took him to New York from Miami, to the cross-country trips by bus, train, and car, to the Alaskan cruise he took with Hedda and the journey to the Deep South with Aldo, he had been eager to see everything, to bring his memories and souvenirs home with him, and to turn them into trenchant observations in drawings that inspired a shock of recognition in everyone who saw them.

  He expressed his interest in all things American through his personal library, which grew to include histories of the United States (particularly of the Civil War) and iconic fiction ranging from Melville, Poe, and Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, John P. Marquand, and John Dos Passos. After every trip his postcard collection burgeoned with photos of everything from county courthouses to Civil War monuments, motel cabins, fast-food stands built in the shape of foods they sold (the Long Island Duck was a leading example of the genre), wild animals in zoos, pinup girls, the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls, and even
the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Steinberg at the Long Island Duck. (illustration credit 16.1)

  “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” said the cultural critic Jacques Barzun, but sports, particularly organized sports, was probably the only aspect of American life that Steinberg had not yet investigated; with the exception of boxing (which he had learned to like in Italy), he knew nothing about any of them. When he told this to Dorothy Seiberling, the art editor of Life, she told the journalist Clay Felker that they had to take Steinberg to Yankee Stadium. As the game progressed, they tried to explain to their befuddled guest what was happening on the field, and when it was over, they asked what he thought of it. “It just confirmed my suspicions,” he replied, leaving them to ponder “a remark that remains to this day undecoded.”

  The first thing he did on his own after accepting the Milwaukee assignment was to walk over to his favorite newsstand on Lexington Avenue and buy every sports magazine and baseball manual, and all the daily newspapers just so he could read the sports pages for the first time ever. He took them home, spread them out, and studied them. Every so often Hedda could hear him muttering to himself in Italian, then repeating words and phrases in English. When a game was broadcast on television he would sit without moving, staring intently at the screen and repeating words after the announcers: “A called third strike … a line drive down the right field line …” All of this remained a foreign language to Hedda, while to him it became a familiar part of American English. When the game was over, he would consult his ever-growing stash of baseball magazines to look up biographies and statistics for the players whose names he had heard that day. He even taught himself how to score a game and often exclaimed out loud as he wrote the symbols for the player who got on first base with a bunt and the one who stole second.