by Deirdre Bair
AND NOW HE HAD TO FACE another unpleasant truth: “I’m terrorized about going to Nice, but I have to.” To prepare himself, he planned to play tourist as he passed through the small Italian towns of Macerata, Fabriano, and Recanati, but he could not enjoy the sights because of his wildly fluctuating moods. He decided he had had enough of solitude and on the way to Viareggio made appointments to see Nicola Chiaromonte, Carlo Levi, and Aldo when he got to Milan. Once in Viareggio, he checked into the only hotel open out of season, the dumpy third-class Astor, and spent most of his time reading in bed. He had bought a lot of novels along the way, casually and with no purpose in mind but to kill time. With the exception of Alberto Moravia’s Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon) and Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di Uccidere (The Short Cut), he left them unnamed but told Hedda how strange it was that they all seemed to be about his personal problems. He thought the resonances were most likely due to “my mind see[ing] things now.”
For the next few days, while he stayed in bed to read, he also made pencil drawings of his hotel room and the view directly outside. Being alone in tranquillity provided the clarity to see himself as “unbalanced and too sensitive for the wrong reasons.” It also made him realize how much he missed Hedda. He told her so but insisted that he was not trying to blackmail her into returning his affection. “I’m secure with you, protected probably. I don’t know if this is the normal condition of marriage. I don’t know anything any more.” For the first time since he left New York, he ended the letter with “I love you.”
SEEING TORTORETO MUST HAVE DONE SOME GOOD, even though he did not openly admit it. He stopped overnight in Milan, where he initiated a meeting with the publisher Mondadori to confirm future collaborations and possible publications. He accidentally ran into Gian Carlo Menotti and had lunch with him, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Shippers. He wandered through the Galleria, where he was happy to see copies of his books lavishly displayed, and afterward meandered among the street stalls and bought books about architecture. He also indulged himself with a manual of instructions for playing the Milanese mandolin, which he decided to learn, and spent the rest of a peaceful afternoon at Tamburini, the art supply store that carried a particular brand of pencil he could get only in Italy. He was in a mood of such exhilaration that he confessed to Hedda that he went to Ada’s apartment to see her “for a moment.” He explained apologetically that he went because Ada was sick and needed financial help, which he gave, and that he felt good about seeing her. He told his diary something different: that Ada confronted him about his “failure” as an artist and theirs as a couple. Her mere use of the word failure depressed him once again.
He left Milan thinking that at least one of the many issues troubling him, his relationship with Ada, had been resolved. She begged him to believe that her feelings were no longer those of a lover but were rather strictly maternal. They would always stay in touch, she said, implying that if she were now the mother, he as the child owed support to her as the parent. It led to a recapitulation of all the other problems still hounding him: “I feel fine but tonight I am going to feel the least free man in the world, full of worries, responsibilities, duties.” He did not mention guilt, which he felt on so many different levels for so many different things, even for having escaped from Europe unscathed while everyone from his pre-American life had suffered in one way or another. Fleeing from Tortoreto for the second time and being back in many of his old haunts in Milan may have triggered something, for as if on cue, that night he had another nightmare. In this one he was running through a dark alley trying to reach a light so bright at the far end that it blinded his eyes. The image was so intense that he used his new pencils to draw it.
EVENTUALLY HE HAD TO GO TO NICE, but he never went directly there if he could help it, always stopping first somewhere pleasant to prepare himself. This time he chose Genoa, which he had never actually seen during the frantic years when he passed through in transit between Milan and Lisbon. The nightmare of the dark tunnel still troubled him, but he was able to maintain his good mood despite having to take long late-night walks if he wanted several hours of restless sleep. He took the train to Nice, and after three days with his parents, his emotions were so frazzled that he could barely control them long enough to write a short note to Hedda, apologizing for the long letter he had torn up because he was too embarrassed to send her all his “moaning, sobbing.” Being with Rosa and Moritz turned him into “a mess” at his “lowest ebb.” He was about to flee again, but first he had to try to tell Hedda why.
Rosa met him with her usual litany of slights, woes, and wrongs. After listening to her recitation of her troubles and everyone else’s, he assumed his usual Santa Claus role, and without telling his parents, he bought a refrigerator to replace their leaking icebox. It was noiseless, shiny, and as big as those found in American houses, overwhelming in a tiny French kitchen. The sight of it made Rosa “sick with fear as usual,” while Moritz remained “without sufficient life to be scared.” Rosa complained nonstop about how much electricity it would cost to run a refrigerator, even though Saul told her repeatedly that he would increase their monthly stipend to cover the minuscule rise. It made him physically ill to think of their parsimony, for he knew that the minute he left, they would unplug it and continue to use the leaking icebox. He called their behavior a “sickness” and blamed them for the origin of his own stubborn and selfish behavior and irrational superstitions and fears. Fleeing from Rosa and Moritz was really the only way to flee from the memory of what he had been when he lived in their home. He was afraid that if he stayed longer, he might resume what he called the old and despised Romanian habits and attitudes of his youth, of fear and distrust of anything new or anyone outside the household.
IT WAS EASTER AND NICE WAS FILLED with German tourists for whom he had scathing regard, so he decided to “run away” from them and from his parents. He went first to Tarascon, then to Nîmes and Avignon, but they were all filled with “German tourists shouting out loud all over, spending like hell the bastards, and their fat wives, horrible faces.” He knew he could not stay there, but he needed an infusion of cash to leave and the banks were closed for the holiday. He threw a loud and noisy tantrum until the hotel manager cashed a check for just enough for a train ticket to Paris. On board the train, he found a seat and fell into a deep sleep, not waking until he was shaken by a conductor checking the compartments before the empty train was shunted to a siding. It had arrived in Paris several hours earlier, and Steinberg had slept right through.
His luggage was gone, and he was certain it had been “stolen by Algerians, etc.” The police detained him in the Gare de Lyon for well over an hour as he filled out forms to establish his identity and claims for his luggage. He was not released until one of the custodians came running in from the lost-and-found with his old brown suitcase, everything in it intact. A porter escorted him to a taxi, which took him to the Hotel Pont Royal, where he was given his “old noisy room.” He got right into bed and started to read, finishing Henry Miller’s two Tropics, Cancer and Capricorn, Vasco Pratolini’s Metello, and George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air. He did not leave the room for several days, until he regained enough equilibrium to walk the streets of Paris as comfortably as he did in New York.
In a very real sense, he felt at home in Paris and it was good to be there. It was also time to face the facts that he had been trying to avoid for almost four months. He decided to start with Hedda and their marriage. If the separation had taught him one thing, it was that he loved her “as much as I can love.” But at the same time, being on his own and having to fend for himself had given him the freedom he craved. When she told him she was thinking of going to a Caribbean island for warmth and sun, and to think things through, he replied in a snit, demanding to know why she was not content to stay at home and wait for him. He told her he was still “half in doubt,” but he invited her to come to Paris anyway, where they would rent an apartment big enough for both to work in and spend the summer
on neutral ground while they (actually, he) sorted through their emotions and analyzed their thoughts about the state of their marriage.
In her customary way, Hedda gave careful and thoughtful analysis to her decision, and as always she could interpret the personal situation only by turning it into a universal. She cited literary examples such as D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, which she and Saul had both read, finding “affinities” between him and Lawrence’s male characters, misogynists who are unable to love women freely and completely. Throughout Saul’s absence, Hedda’s primary concern had been to reassure him that she could cope if he did end their marriage: “I am living in a kind of atmosphere of emergency. I summoned all kinds of formulaic faculties that have served honorably before, and from this point of view I tell you it is not kind to pity me.”
The New York “gossip vultures” had been out in force since he had left, but she had not allowed them to disturb her equilibrium. She saw only her few trusted friends, among them Richard Lindner, Vita Peterson, Leo Lerman, and a group of transplanted Romanians whom she described collectively as “the ghetto group.” If she did accept invitations, it was only to parties where it was professionally important to see and be seen; otherwise, she stayed at home and painted fourteen or fifteen hours each day. If she worried about anything, it was that her eyes were giving out. That, and that alone, “terrified” her.
She told Saul that when she received his “half in doubt” invitation to come to Paris, she had already squarely faced her own doubts about whether the marriage could or should continue. She realized that the possibility of his leaving raised an abject fear of which she was deeply ashamed, and after she struggled to find her balance, his halfhearted invitation for her to join him aroused that fear anew. Again she juxtaposed literary and philosophical allusions with her personal emotions, settling on Aldous Huxley, whose novels of manners, behavior, and society (Crome Yellow, Point Counterpoint, Brave New World) she and Saul had read and discussed avidly. When he asked her to tell him her honest feelings, she answered that they mattered little, “unless you are Huxley?” The important facts were that she loved him more “with each meal I cook for you, with each night I spend with you.” As far as she was concerned, these were truths that needed no analysis: “To be with someone to whom you have already given love is partly being true to yourself. I do also love you because I loved you.”
Referring to his fear that wanting her back was based on “inertia,” she told him that she had just read a biography of the British prime minister H. H. (Henry Herbert) Asquith and had been struck by a similarity that might explain why Saul thought he needed her: “He [Asquith] seemed to get more and more fond of people he was used to.” She had also been reading Jules Renan, where she found another correspondence that gave her pause: Renan was known as “the sweetest of cruel men.” She told this to Saul, with only one comment: “Hmmm!!!”
Hedda did include one bit of “[self ] analysis” by reminding him of the punch line in a joke he liked. A man asking for directions on a city street was told “first you pass the man standing on the corner.” Saul was Hedda’s “man on the corner,” her “only determining point,” her “patria.” She believed that everything in her life that mattered began with him, and this conclusion brought her deeply hidden anger to the surface: “Your letters come and I react exactly as you want me to, and that’s that! Hedda la complaisante sans caractère.” She wanted him to grasp the seriousness of her situation, so she listed all the things he wanted her to be. She began with “Saul wants her independent, so independent she becomes.” She tried to list other examples, but after realizing that her accusations were liable to create a chasm, she stopped after only one other: “Saul wants her [to]…” She could not go on. Even thinking about what he wanted made her “terribly tired.” She stopped writing and went to bed.
She was struggling over what to do the next morning, when she began a new letter to try yet again to explain how she felt. She said it was not really a letter but a random collection of thoughts that she jotted down on the tiny sheets of notepaper she favored for literary quotes and philosophical maxims. She wanted him to acknowledge her as “a loving, respecting [her emphasis] wife” despite his insistence that he was incapable of love. She was determined to make him understand “the kind of friendship and intimacy that has to do with being a woman with a man but with no game or fight involved … like walking hand in hand in complete trust all the time, feeling the yearning for and the presence of ‘something bigger than both of us.’ ” She sincerely believed that “all of this can be debunked but life does not offer anything better.”
Knowing that he would probably scoff at such an open display of emotion, she admitted that she probably should not mail the letter, but she sent it off anyway. Then she renewed her passport; made arrangements for Richard Lindner, who loved their cat, to take care of it; closed up the house and left the key with their devoted cleaning woman, Eleanor. And then she went to Paris.
CHAPTER 18
A DEFLATING BALLOON
I was his long-suffering, uninterruptedly betrayed wife with a few honeymoons thrown in. The best one was when he sent for me to come to Paris.
As soon as Saul had the security of knowing that Hedda was coming to Paris, he was able to revert to his rigidly focused concentration on work, this time on hers as well as his own. Hedda’s paintings were included in “Fifty Years of American Art from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” a huge exhibition that filled the Musée National d’Art Moderne and brought in record crowds throughout the month of April 1955. Steinberg was determined to promote Sterne as the star of the show and to secure future solo exhibitions for her in Paris, preferably at Galerie Maeght. He was pleased to see how well placed her paintings were in the main room, where they were “certainly one of the best if not the best.” As for the show itself, he dismissed it as “a little like [Alfred] Barr, prudent, pansyish fear of showoff, something like a bookkeeper’s honesty.” He was cognizant of the postwar shift of dominance in modern art from Paris to New York, and because he was always assessing how his own work was received in Europe and how its reception there might differ from that in the United States, he scoffed at Barr’s selections, saying they were tinged with “the fear of Oncle (France).” He accused MoMA’s illustrious director of unconsciously kowtowing to the French, which resulted in a selection of the mostly tried and true in American art, and ultimately the safe and boring.
Steinberg used Sterne’s inclusion in the Paris show to try to persuade Louis Gabriel Clayeux, the gallery’s artistic manager, to give her a solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght. Clayeux was not enthusiastic, but he hesitated to offend Steinberg, one of the gallery’s most popular artists, so he used the polite excuse that he was away from Paris and would not return in time to see the “Fifty Years” exhibition before it closed. He suggested that Sterne should try to be included in the Salon de Mai but did not offer to use his influence to help secure a place for her in the invitation-only show. Steinberg was not pleased when Clayeux said the only venue in Paris where anyone could enter a painting without an invitation was the Salon des Indépendants. There were approximately four thousand entries in 1955, but Steinberg planned to see the show and assess the quality of the submissions before deciding if it would be worth Hedda’s while to enter in future years.
He was spending a great deal of time negotiating on her behalf, everything from persuading Alberto Giacometti to see the show and tell his friends to do the same to taking the art collector James Thrall Soby there in the hope that he would swing his significant patronage behind Sterne. Steinberg did all this on his own, without Hedda’s knowledge. He did not tell her until after he did it, for she had little interest in promoting herself and never shared his drive for fame and success. All she wanted was to be with him and paint in the solitude of their home.
Besides Clayeux’s refusal to give Hedda a show, there was another unpleasantness surrounding his affil
iation with Galerie Maeght, and he did not know how to counteract it. “How horrible the mud splashes people around,” he complained, as he tried to find out who started the rumor that the only reason Aimé Maeght had given him the 1953 solo exhibition was that he had paid for it. He thought this “bit of gossip” probably originated with Stanley William Hayter, whose techniques of etching and lithography Steinberg had observed in New York. He seldom joined the international coterie of poets, writers, and artists that congregated informally every night in Hayter’s Rue Cassini atelier because he knew that Hayter was a great gossip, quite cheerful about adding color to existing rumors and making up new ones. Very few of Hayter’s guests held his wicked tongue against him, but Steinberg saw it differently. “Hayter—Hate. When he laughs it’s frightening. His eyes remain steely and mean, a bit crazy, too.”
Steinberg always ignored gossip about his personal life, no matter how vicious it was, but when anything impinged on his profession, he dealt with it ruthlessly. Too many American painters hung out at Hayter’s for him to ignore the gossip, even though they were only “small fry abstracts” whose names he could not bother to remember. “They do nothing because they feel that being here is enough,” but they still managed to spread the rumor far and wide, all the way back to New York. He found it impossible to squelch, and it plagued him on and off for the next decade.