Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  WHEN HIS WORK WAS FINISHED, he told Hedda he wanted to go to Bergamo to have lunch with Aldo’s mother and then go directly to Venice for several days to decompress after all the work and socializing. He said he planned to see no one and have several days of the privacy that he had been without since leaving New York, but he did not tell her his real reason for going to Venice: that he needed to sort through the welter of emotions that came from seeing Ada again. For the past several years, besides regularly sending her money, he had managed to see her on most of his trips, and when he was in New York he telephoned regularly for long, secretive, and rambling conversations. However, once he resumed their liaison, he was so embarrassed that he kept it secret even from Aldo.

  There had been three previous postwar encounters between them before this one, and all had ended badly. She felt the first went poorly because of “insincerity” on both their parts, the second because he cynically made fun of her extreme neediness, and the third because he told her he had to flee from her excessive passion and if she had any pride left at all, she would disappear from his life forever. Ada’s letters were a case study in self-contradiction. If she responded at first with histrionics, insisting that brain cancer would be preferable to the emotional torment and suffering he caused, which made her so ill she would soon die of whatever disease it caused, she would then swiftly become compliant and pacifying, with her next sentence, meant to be soothing, saying that all she wanted was to spend time with him, not necessarily in bed, just in his company; to be “maternal” rather than sexual. All she needed from him was “for the phone to ring,” but when he did call, he had to listen to a series of elaborate dodges that she invented, claiming they were necessary to keep the affair hidden from her husband.

  While he was working on the mural, even on the days that he was sick, he managed to slip away to meet her secretly. She still traveled a lot, always being careful never to specify the reasons, and when she was in Milan, she lived once again with her husband in an apartment on the Viale Misurata, not far from where Steinberg was working. She arranged for them to meet halfway in between, in an apartment belonging to the girlfriend who had provided cover for them before the war. Ada was content with this arrangement, having accepted that Saul was married and so was she. She assumed that when he came to Milan they would resume their affair as if no years had intervened since he had been a student at the Politecnico, and when he left, each would return to their legal partner. This was easier for her than for him because she claimed never to have loved her husband, whereas despite his constant infidelity, he truly did love Hedda.

  By the time he left for Bergamo and Venice, he was in an emotional turmoil because of everything that had happened during his time in Milan. Ada left him reeling; he had been affronted by the former colleagues who mocked his Americanness and by the two-faced behavior of his former professors, who now claimed they had known all along that he was a genius. Most troubling of all was his own shame about the duplicity of his relationship with the wife he professed to love above all others and the lover on whom he placed all the blame for luring him into bed each time he saw her. He could not help but contrast the two women.

  When Hedda wrote letters, they were always on two levels. Hedda was a voracious reader, and she generally began with a philosophical interpretation of passages from books that she thought had relevance to their lives. Often she used them to launch into news of household happenings or of social occasions with their friends or events in the art world, because so many of their friends were artists. When Ada wrote, it was usually to tell him that he had left her in such a state of orgasmic ecstasy that she was having difficulty returning to married life with her dull husband. Her letters were blunt recapitulations of their time in bed, which almost always ended with how his departure left her ill and unable to work. She never asked directly but always implied that being unable to work meant that she sure could use some money. Ada was adept at blithely telling contradictory lies one after the other and getting Saul to accept them unquestioningly. First she told Saul that she was in such dire health from an undiagnosed illness that her husband, who “knows the cure for my ailment” (that is, Saul), actually took pity and guided her to the post office so she could mail a letter to him. In the next sentence she told Saul that mailing the letter immediately cured her, and as an aside told him to use her maiden name and a post office box number so her husband would not find out they were having an affair.

  Saul hoped that several days alone in Venice would help him decide what to do about Ada, especially whether to end the affair permanently before it became a public embarrassment. He decided not to tell her that he had to return to Milan for a number of public events scheduled to conclude all the necessary dealings with the mural and let her think he was going directly to France and England and then home to New York. However, Milan was a small town, and it was not difficult for Ada to find out that he had been there. It made her furious even as it made her more determined than ever to stay in his good graces. In a series of letters, she first told him that she was working as a teacher but did not specify where, only joking that the work made her eyes so weak that she had to buy new glasses, which made her feel not only “old” but also “ridiculous [to be] still in love.” As soon as she told him she was a teacher, she changed her story in the next letter, saying that she had joined the theatrical company Senza Rete (Without a Net) and would be on tour in Padua, Florence, Naples, and Rome until the end of the year. After these illogical contradictions, she lapsed into fury, berating him for being his “usual pig” self, afraid to let anyone see him with her. She knew he had returned to Milan, not only because of the publicity surrounding the children’s labyrinth but also because the writers for the theater company knew of their relationship and took delight in teasing her about how they had been with him and she had not. She demanded to know if he was afraid of the gossip that might have reached Hedda if they were seen together—or was it something more serious, that he did not want to see her anymore? “I can’t help but tell you that you are”—and here she left a blank space before concluding that it was such “an ugly word” that she was unable to write it. Instead of ending the letter with her usual effusive phrases of love straight out of a romantic nineteenth-century Italian novel, she signed it with what was for her a cold snub, a simple “Ciao.” A postscript offered another contradiction, as she instructed him to write to her in care of yet another new post office box so her husband would not discover they were back in touch.

  THE FEW DAYS STEINBERG SPENT IN Venice before he went back to Milan were disappointing, as he did not resolve his emotional confusion. The weather was disagreeable and the food not to his liking, and once his work was finished in Milan and all the celebrations were over, he could not return to New York without making the obligatory visit to his parents in Nice. It was, as usual, “horrible.” His father was slowing down, but his mother had deliberately lost weight and was in fighting trim to harass him more than ever. He planned to get through the visit by giving them money and behaving, “as usual, like Santa Claus.” This did not assuage Rosa, who spent her time with him listing all her friends who had died since his last visit and all the family disasters in Israel. His father couldn’t get a word in edgewise. The only time Rosa was happy during Saul’s visit was when she read and reread the first letter Lica’s son, Stéphane, wrote to her, saying that he was well and his baby sister, Daniela, “eats carrots.” Always before when Rosa talked about Lica and her family, her mood improved, and Saul had a brief respite from her dire accounts of gloom and doom. This time was different, as Rosa berated him for not telling her about things Lica had told him, which Lica had asked him not to reveal to their mother and then over time had inadvertently revealed herself.

  Lica was understandably depressed by not being able to leave Romania, where her life was far from easy. Her husband had a series of undiagnosed illnesses and his job was in jeopardy; she herself had been ill and was worried about losing her job. St
éphane had had a serious case of scarlet fever, and now, with a second child, Lica was worried about basic issues of survival. She told one sad story after another of her own family’s misfortunes as well as those of their various relatives and former neighbors. They all begged her to ask her rich American brother for help, and she did. She was still angry over one particular incident that had taken place two years earlier, when she asked him to send medicines via American Jewish agencies to “the daughter of the cardboard maker on Strada Palas.” When they never arrived, she accused him of doing nothing: “If you could’ve helped her and you didn’t do it, then you committed a crime against her.” Lica told Saul she was still so bitter that it was difficult to return to thinking of him “with love and admiration.”

  Lica’s charge was unjust, for he had sent both money and medicines to her and the others every time she asked. When Rosa learned of it, she changed tack and scolded Saul for trying to send money directly to Lica, since other efforts made through relief agencies had failed, and now her Communist bosses were threatening to fire her after they learned that she had rich relatives in America, which made her untrustworthy. As far as Rosa was concerned, it was all Saul’s fault. Rosa was crafty enough to know that her letters upset him so much that he seldom answered them, so when she wanted money or goods, she wrote directly to Hedda, often giving the names and addresses of all their relatives and friends in Israel with instructions about how much financial help to send to each. Hedda told Saul she was disgusted and stopped replying. Saul told her that the house in Nice was flooded with six years’ worth of letters from him and Lica that his parents insisted on reading and rereading aloud every time he visited. It was no wonder that he cut this visit as short as all the others, once again inventing urgent reasons that he had to go Paris, England, and then home.

  The Passport, his “third, most overstuffed and diverse” collection of drawings, appeared in New York in October. He had indeed crammed all the drawings he wanted into the book, and every edition contained them all, including last-minute additions like the March 20 New Yorker cover. The book was another of his autobiographies, which he told through drawing rather than writing. There were false documents, diaries, and journals, and photographs real or invented, all doctored to make them as elusive as the documents. Several pages featured an artist drawing himself, with squiggles above his head or surrounding his torso. He used fingerprints to create human bodies and little birds with sticklike beaks and legs on graph paper. Cats tumbled freely about and crowds gathered to watch parades and festivals that featured flags, floats, and his iconic drum majorettes, whose legs ended in dangerous stiletto boots. There were couples in which he made either the man or the woman the dominant figure and cocktail parties where people talked past each other, always on the lookout for someone more interesting than the person they were with. He drew pages of riders on horseback, of cowboys and equestriennes. Musicians played before backgrounds of musical paper while dancing couples moved about on white space vacant of any other scenery. All the railway stations, bridges, and buildings that had fascinated him in England were there, as were French Métro stations and elegant Parisian buildings and monuments. Two shadowy men played billiards and shot pool; scenes of domestic life showed women dining with statues rather than real men; children in Victorian dress posed in front of houses straight out of Charles Addams’s cartoons. Several iconic drawings appeared here as well—the sign painter whose final k drops off the word Think; an artist who sits before a blank sheet of paper with only an ink bottle beside him. Another drawing features the objects that cluttered Steinberg’s real-life desk: an empty Medaglia d’Oro coffee can, a tin of Altoid mints, a bottle of India ink, a postage scale, and a packet of Philip Morris cigarettes. Two trees of life depict the lives of a man and woman who advance from infancy to adulthood and then decline into old age. Street scenes from Paris, Nice, Istanbul, Venice, and Los Angeles are interspersed among the individual drawings. Steinberg’s keen eye takes note of some important postwar changes in American life: a couple stands proudly in front of a Levittown house that is dwarfed by its garage and the gigantic car beside it. He reveals the expansion of supermarkets and strip malls and the architectonics of the new skyscrapers, particularly the ugliness of brutalism. Streets are torn up and shadowy blobs represent the human figures who here and there dot them.

  He was satisfied with the American edition, but he wanted to make sure that the British edition being published by Hamish Hamilton was up to his rigorous standards. The book was being printed in Edinburgh, but Steinberg insisted on seeing the proofs before publication and was willing to take the time to go to a city he had not liked at all on an earlier visit. He traveled there by train in a sleeping compartment as antique as the publisher’s representative who went with him. The man wore “a striped suit and mellon [sic] hat,” and their compartment was made of “mahogany, brass, and ivory,” with a small compartment in the wall for the chamberpot. There was much fodder here for drawing, and he made note of it for future use. When he inspected the proofs, he did not make a single change; in fact, he thought the book looked better than the American edition.

  On his return to London he visited Victor Brauner and his wife, Jacqueline, who were living in straitened circumstances. It was depressing to see a mouse calmly staring at them from behind a broom in the corner. Brauner was old and unwell, and his wife had just returned from the hospital following her second major operation. Steinberg’s sadness deepened when he returned to the hotel to find a letter from Hedda telling him that his uncle Harry had died and to break the news to his parents and send condolences to his uncle’s widow. With illness, death, and suffering all around, he was more than ready to go home, but once again there were problems with the airlines.

  He could get to Paris but could not get a direct flight from there to New York. He did have to see Mrs. Jennie Bradley, so there was a legitimate reason to fly home from there. While he waited, he went to the movies (Pane, amore e…, Fantasia), read popular books (Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse), and spent a lot of time walking to American Express to see if there was mail. Nothing he saw inspired him to draw, not even the “passersby loaded with children and suitcases” or the “tourists, sailors, dogs, prostitutes” who interfered with “the café workers making their rounds, and the street workers who drilled the asphalt directly in front of motorcycles, buses, ambulances.” All of this would have been transferred to notebooks and turned into drawings had he been in a better mood, but he was tired and wanted to go home.

  He had even lost interest in writing to Hedda, which led to a flurry of telegrams to see whether something had happened to him. He was uncharacteristically sullen when he told her it didn’t matter if she didn’t write because her letters mostly consisted of news clippings or quotations and there was seldom anything personal. He had been alone far more on this trip than on most others, and he didn’t like the introspection that resulted. He realized that when he was the center of attention in social situations where he did all the talking, very little of what he said was “real.” Everything became formulaic because it was simplified chatter and therefore “seldom true.” He was full of self-pity and self-castigation for having let himself become a self-invented construct. His “Balkan fatalism” was overwhelming, and it was time to go home and sweep his stables clean.

  CHAPTER 17

  SOME SORT OF BREAKDOWN

  I’ve been an inflated balloon for years now and being alone it’s deflating. This is what I wanted but it’s hard.

  Steinberg returned to New York at the end of September 1954, anxious about another round of the dental appointments that almost always accompanied periods of extreme stress. There were two shows he needed to prepare for in November, one in Santa Barbara and the other in San Francisco, so he fluctuated between making careful lists of the drawings he wanted in each and listlessly rearranging them with halfhearted attention. The only point to which he gave full concentration was deciding on prices. He raised them
all, because his self-imposed burden of supporting family, relatives, and friends was so high.

  He began to suffer from insomnia and was unable to keep to his regular habit of going to bed shortly after midnight and waking ready to put in a full day’s work between seven and eight a.m. He was unable to sleep for more than one or two hours before he woke up with his heart pounding and his mind racing with thoughts of all the drawing he had to do to earn money and frustration over the creative work that he did not have the luxury of time for. However, such worries did not stop him from resuming the hyperactive socializing that filled the holiday season in New York. His pocket diary noted parties, dinners, theatergoing, concerts, and also, in brightly colored pencils or crayons, the first names of women or merely initials followed by numbers. By Christmas he was exhausted, his mind was empty, and he believed the only way he could save himself was to go away and think through the morass his life had become.

  With her usual willingness to put his needs before any she might have, Hedda accepted his wish to go somewhere alone to refresh himself physically while gleaning ideas for new drawings. His intention was to take a short trip that could be directly connected to his work and therefore put toward a useful tax deduction, and a series for The New Yorker was the first thing that came to mind. He was still intrigued by the American South, and there were many places he had not seen on his earlier trip with Aldo. A quick flight from New York would get him there quickly, so he decided to spend a week exploring them.

  On January 8, 1955, he flew via Washington and Nashville to Memphis, where he checked into the Peabody Hotel, dropped his suitcase, and spent most of the night prowling the city. His digestion had been in turmoil since he returned from Europe, and the sight of vulgar hotel bar patrons drinking beer directly from bottles was so offensive that he looked for a more refined place to dine. The local “candlelight restaurant” offered only huge slabs of steak, and to his surprise he enjoyed one without later distress. His late-night peregrinations took him through empty streets until he found the “dangerous looking Beale Street,” where nothing was open except a late movie showing of The Silver Chalice. As he was not sleepy and there was nothing else to do, he sat through it.