by Deirdre Bair
The next day was Sunday and even more boring as nothing was open. After walking to the banks of the Mississippi, Steinberg took a bus via Jackson to Vicksburg. Everything was closed there as well, so he went to the movies again and saw The Barefoot Contessa. He spent the next day walking all over Vicksburg or hiring taxis to take him to the Civil War monuments and the stern-wheel boats that used to ply the river. He took another taxi back to Jackson and caught a bus to Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, but he made no notes about anything connected with the writer. Again the only thing to do was to go to the movies, and this time he walked out after five minutes of Frank Sinatra’s singing. It was no better across the street, where he watched part of White Christmas with Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.
Early the next morning he walked around Oxford, bought a new shirt, and took a cab to the airport for a flight to Atlanta via Birmingham, with Tampa, Florida, as his final destination of the day. His late-night walking in Tampa took him past “loans, bars, pawnbrokers,” and somewhere in all this he must have encountered trouble, because he wrote the single word robbers in heavy black ink. The next afternoon, exhausted with walking and discouraged with Tampa, he went to St. Petersburg. There he was depressed by “old people, hearing aids, ambulance ads in movie house.” There was nothing to do there either except a movie, this one starring Alec Guinness. Afterward he bought a necktie he didn’t like and a silly hat with a compass on it. He had been gone only five days, but that was long enough, and he booked a flight back to New York.
Once he got there, he realized he was not rested, he had not rid himself of stress and anxiety, and his insomnia was worse than ever. When he tried to come up with an idea for drawings suitable for The New Yorker, his mind was a complete blank. When he was in transit, what had struck him most was the evidence of Jim Crow everywhere he went, of “colored” water fountains and restrooms, of African-Americans moving dutifully to the back of the bus, of segregated schools and restaurants. The magazine was not ready to publish pictures that would arouse political activism, and in truth, he had not yet identified segregation as anything other than an accepted way of life. He was certain that the entire trip had been a waste of time.
Several projects awaited him, and his spirits lifted slightly when he began to work on the first: Alfred Hitchcock had engaged him to create drawings for the title sequence in the film The Trouble with Harry, and after all the intense work of the previous year, it was “sheer fun.” The second project was to prepare some of his architectural drawings and false documents for an exhibition scheduled for March by his good friend Jose Luis Sert at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Sert was the dean. This project did require the intense concentration and meticulous attention to detail that Steinberg gave to exhibitions, and he forced himself to do it. By the time he had finished, he was so exhausted and unfocused that he was not sleeping at all and often broke down in bursts of sobs and tears.
Hedda was sick with worry and tried to get him to talk to about it, either to her or to a therapist. He resisted both ideas, especially therapy, which he dismissed as a waste of time and money but which in reality frightened him with the possibility that it would lead to self-knowledge that he was terrified to confront. Also, he feared that telling his most private thoughts to anyone would reveal him as a weakling, and he could not bear to lose face before another human being.
Eventually, however, he did talk to Hedda. She was stunned when he said that he didn’t think he loved her because he was not sure that he was constitutionally capable of loving anyone. He wondered if the intensity with which he had pursued her when he wanted to marry her had been honest love or merely a desire to acquire this incredible woman because of the qualities she possessed.
In her public life, Hedda was a beautiful woman and a respected artist warmly welcomed by her many friends within the artistic and intellectual life of New York; in their private life, she gave Saul the personal comfort that came from their mutual Romanian-Jewish heritage and that smoothed his entrée into this rarefied world. Being with Hedda provided all the trappings that enabled him to enjoy what he believed represented success and happiness within the ideal American life, as well as the personal security that came from being loved so unconditionally. “Love is the only thing that makes life bearable,” she told him.
Now, a decade into their marriage, all Saul felt was a tremendous desire to be free of everything in the life he had constructed with Hedda, starting with her and going on to the work he did for hire, all his financial obligations, and even America. He had an urgent, unfocused need to get back to Europe to see if he could find any trace of the self he had so eagerly discarded almost twenty years before, when the successful Italian cartoonist that he had been morphed into a stateless Jewish refugee totally dependent on the goodwill of others. He was not going to be the prisoner of a timetable on this trip; he would spend as much time as was necessary to roam from place to place throughout Europe until he could regain his equilibrium and find the stability and stasis that eluded him.
Hedda told him to go, saying that she could “easily” wait for him to return. Instead of soothing him, her serenity added to his general anxiety: he didn’t want to lose her, but he wondered if he had the right to keep her tethered to a relationship that might come to a shattering conclusion. He was frustrated because for the first time in their relationship, she refused to solve his problems. He decided that the major problem was one of “honesty or truth,” and that she had unwittingly helped to create it. They were so well suited to each other that it was difficult to sort out where she began or he left off within the marriage. He thought they were so “well mixed … that the truth becomes an animal with one foot size 5, one size 10½.” He blamed this for his loss of individualism, which allowed him to fool himself into believing that the savoir faire he adopted for his professional dealings was an acceptable substitution for the truth and honesty that was absent from his most important personal one, his marriage. Also, because he liked being accepted among the “the elegante welt,” as he called the social and intellectual circles Hedda had originally introduced him to, he accused himself of wasting the past decade putting on an elaborate front to keep himself at the top of it. In doing so, he had lost his identity to a collection of deeply unfocused fears, which he tried to bury by avoiding any occasion when his galloping insecurities might become exposed. Others often described his behavior in the social situations where he insisted on holding the floor as cold, rude, arrogant, and selfish, but it was merely his way of hiding his basic insecurity.
He told Hedda that two of his three most crushing fears were about her: that he wasn’t sure he was capable of loving her, and that she only wanted to stay married to him because of inertia. These were certainly valid fears, but the biggest fear of all was that he had made a terrible choice by sacrificing creativity for the need to make money, which he described quite simply as “I lost twenty years.” He was forty-one years old and was so depressed that he insisted he had done nothing to be proud of since coming to America, that none of his drawings, books, exhibitions, or awards had given him any true pleasure: “My preoccupation has been success, probably. I need it, but very much the way I need whiskey.” And so, he asked himself, if success was merely a palliative, where did personal satisfaction lie, and how would he find it?
Hedda agreed that he should go away to anywhere he wanted for as long as he needed. He decided to start with Paris, where he had pressing business, after which he would go wherever impulse took him. She intended to send him off with her usual stoicism, but when the time came for him to leave and he told her that “it may be for good,” his words shocked them both. She could not stop crying and said that she could not forgive herself for sending him off with such a memory. He replied that he recognized how “horrible” her fears must be, for he could not get the image of what he had done to her out of his mind. He did not sleep on the long overnight flight, and spent his first twenty-four hours walking in the unseasonable cold or
pacing in his room when he could no longer stand to be outdoors. “Now I understand insomnia,” he wrote. “One blames the outside reasons but sleeplessness is inside.” He tried to calm himself with his usual late-night recourse of going to the movies and saw Diabolique, which relaxed him but not enough to sleep.
In Paris there were things he had to do and people he had to see, starting with Mrs. Jennie Bradley, who had a slew of offers from galleries, museums, and publishers for which he had to make decisions. Aimé Maeght invited him to a private three-hour lunch at his home, where they ate multiple courses of “all sorts of sea monsters and mostly garlic.” It made Steinberg literally sick, but he was actually grateful that this time his upset stomach was due to rich food rather than “bad conscience.” Maeght had an ulterior reason for the lavish meal, to try to persuade Steinberg not to exhibit at the Berggruen Gallery, as he had promised, but to agree to a larger show the following year at Galerie Maeght. Steinberg didn’t think he could be ready for a show anywhere and tried to stall for time. He had an appointment with Gallimard to oversee the imminent publishing of Dessins, a compendium of drawings from his three American books, and Robert Delpire wanted to discuss a proposal for his firm to publish another book, but it was not realized at the time. Steinberg was unable to concentrate on either project. As always, the one person in whom he could confide was Hedda, but she was not providing answers. He told her that even though he was in Paris, staying in a good hotel and being wined and dined, it still felt like a concentration camp. After writing that letter, he went to the movies and saw Gina Lollobrigida, whose voluptuous pulchritude made him feel slightly better, but he still couldn’t sleep.
He spent the weekend walking around, particularly at the Bird Market on the Quai de la Mégisserie, where he relaxed slightly by thinking of his beloved cat at home while petting the strays that lurked around the cages. By Monday morning he knew that he had to get away, because being in Paris meant business as usual and he needed to avoid people. Except for the appointments he had to keep, he did not go anywhere that he might be recognized, avoiding the Left Bank arrondissements where most of his friends lived and eating in obscure restaurants. And yet being alone did not have the soothing effect he sought: once he had the solitude to think about himself, he didn’t like the self-portrait he created. He compared himself to an inflated balloon that was slowly deflating: “This is what I wanted, but it’s hard.” On the spur of the moment he decided that the only way to seek what he was now calling his “true identity” was to return to the places that divided his life from its first half—the one provided by his parents, which he had unquestioningly accepted from earliest childhood—and the life he had created since coming to America. He decided to go to Italy, expressly to return to Tortoreto and revisit his incarceration. “It’s not a ham gesture,” he insisted. “It’s as good a place as any to spend a few days quiet, no smoke, no drink … I’m waiting for sanity to come back to me.”
THREE DAYS LATER, ON MARCH 23, he was in Pescara, which he believed was the terminus of his original railroad journey from Milan to Tortoreto. He arrived there after a full day in a slow train from Rome, where he had flown from Paris in order to see Aldo and have dinner with him and Bianca: “It was bad. I was tired. We talked nonsense.” The next morning he realized that the evening had been unsuccessful because he had wanted to confide in them and ask their advice but did not know how.
The mornings when he woke up alone in a hotel were terrible, because he was tempted to cable Hedda and ask her to come and rescue him; the nights were worse, because he had nightmares and could not sleep. Although Steinberg had no faith in psychoanalysis and did not believe that talking to an analyst would alleviate the various traumas that increasingly beset him, he had a deep and abiding interest in dream analysis and often kept detailed diaries of some of his most troubling dreams. On this trip, he no sooner fell asleep at night than he was jolted awake by dreams of someone pounding on his door. The setting was always his New York bedroom, because the knocks were always accompanied by Hedda’s screams. They would wake Moritz, who was also in the house and who ran up and down the four stories of the steep front and back staircases. This caused Saul to jump out of bed in alarm, fearing that his father would suffer a fatal heart attack if he could not catch and stop him. Saul attributed these nightmares not only to his “sense of guilt” but also to “something worse.” As much as he felt he needed Hedda if he were ever to sleep again, he begged her not to come to Italy to rescue him but to stay where she was and “please worry about me.”
To divert himself from his anxieties, he returned to a theme he had been expressing since he first met her, that everything would be fine if they could just buy a house away from New York, where he could hole up and work. This time he thought perhaps the Adriatic coast or Paris. But even as he wrote this he knew it was mere talk, because he was “confused as usual and postponing.” He brought the letter to an abrupt end by admitting, “I think I had some sort of breakdown a few days ago and I’m recovering.” Then he concentrated on getting himself dressed, packed, and ready for the pilgrimage to Tortoreto.
A slow train took him to Tortoreto, where he left his luggage in a dreary tavern so he could walk through the village. Nothing in the town looked familiar, but he was sure that was because he had seen it only when he was one in a long chain of prisoners being herded to the villa on arrival and departure. The town was small, but he thought he found the building where he had been incarcerated. It had been repaired and repainted and looked inhabited, so he did not enter through the large iron gates, not wanting “to get silly with strangers.” He was filled with emotion as he walked back and forth in front of the house, and yet the only things that looked truly familiar were the few trees on the grounds. He was irritated to think that he had lost the memories of a place that once meant so much to him, so he decided to take a walk on the beach, because the prisoners were never permitted to go there.
For the next three hours he walked, enveloped in a dense white fog that the natives swore was highly unusual, but to him it was “one of the most pleasant things I did ever.” Afterward, damp but happy, he went into a bar, had a beer, and wrote Hedda a lighthearted letter describing the villa as “a castle, a true romantic prison,” and the town as “a summer resort for the poorer tourists.” He described the local color, how fishermen fixed their nets, dirty children followed him and asked for handouts, and dogs barked at him. He was pleased with the adventure—until he got on the bus to leave the town behind.
As the bus belched its smoky way into the hills above Tortoreto, Steinberg chanced to glance out the window at the very moment the bus was passing the villa in which he had actually lived. “There are—I didn’t know—two Tortoretos, and I had gone to the wrong one!” He made the driver stop the bus and jumped off in “the right one,” Tortoreto Alto, where he walked around “recognizing with horror every house, shop, tree, stores, types of people, dogs.” The villa where he had lived had been badly bombed and was abandoned in total disrepair. All the palm trees around it had been burned and were dead, and the town itself was filthy. He was lucky to find a taxi driver willing to take him to the next village, San Benedetto del Tronto, where he could wait for another slow train to take him as far away from the real Tortoreto as he could go.
That evening, from a hotel in Ancona, he described for Hedda all the emotions that beset him as he sat on the railway station bench. He was able at last to confess the real reason for all the traveling he had done during the past several years: that it enabled him to evade what his life had become. Constant traveling did not allow much time to think about his own needs or desires; frenetic movement was his way of coping with the things he needed to do to maintain his expensive way of life and to forget momentarily all the financial responsibilities he had willingly chosen to accept. He was able to hint that such behavior was probably cowardly or immature but stopped short of describing it as such, saying that he had forced himself to return to Tortoreto because he
thought it would give him “proof of maturity or courage.” He was not amused by his “curious mistake of unload[ing] my feelings on the wrong and pleasant Tortoreto.” Instead, it made him so angry that even though he wanted to forget it had ever happened, he had to admit that the incident could stand as a metaphor to describe his life: “The truth is that I ran away as soon as I looked at the real one.”
Hedda told him that she found it “strange, that a place can mean anything in itself, without recapturing the mood, situation.” In two of her letters she made it clear that she had given his Tortoreto experience a great deal of thought before she addressed it directly. She called what happened to him “a sign,” explaining her view that when people go through a period of “self-analysis, self-accusations,” it is because they are unable to confront the real issues that trouble them: “They invent a guilt (edited, formulated in words) in order to camouflage the one that really bothers them, which is not quite clear possibly, or lacking glamour. There is some kind of narcissism, self-indulgence, to begin with, that causes our concern with our image, as it appears to ourselves, which also blurs the truth. We select the sins that we admit out loud and never would we subject ourselves to any penance. We have no standard that we would not adjust here and there, if it interfered too much. We have moral problems, when, and as long as we choose only!” Calling her thoughts “probably white beardish and confused,” she searched for an analogy that would lighten the appraisal she knew would upset him and found one in the popularity of jazz bands playing spirituals in nightclubs. She used the rest of the letter to tell him of the invitations that poured in despite his absence, reverting to the tried-and-true behavior that she always used when she needed to mollify him.