by Deirdre Bair
He factored his thoughts about the exchange with van Velde into his recollections of the conversations he had had with other artists, writers, and filmmakers throughout his several months of peripatetic travel. Each social encounter usually included an exchange of information about current projects, often with details of new methods and techniques, which Steinberg digested to make them relate to and sometimes apply to his work. As he thought them through, he usually explained them in letters to Hedda before recording his thoughts in his pocket notebooks or making drawings in his sketchbooks.
His thinking did not end there, for often traces of earlier conversations could be found years later in the random collections of pages that served in lieu of a formal diary or journal. In one such collection of notes, he titled a passage “What I learned from Artists.” He asked de Kooning, “How do you achieve this or that effect?” De Kooning replied, “All you need is a strong desire to achieve this or that and you invent it.” Barnett Newman gave him more practical advice: “Never laugh for photographers. Dress well, necktie. ‘They’ want to show that you are a regular fellow.” Marcel Duchamp gave the best advice of all: “Answer or throw away immediately all mail as soon as it arrives.” Unfortunately, this was advice Steinberg never followed. He did, however, follow the pattern of every other artist he respected, who, when asked to pass judgment on another artist’s work, would always reply, “Great!”
NOW, ON THE WAY HOME AFTER several months totally immersed in thinking about himself and his career, and with the Russian journey he hoped to make uppermost in his mind, he began to think of the months in Europe as a natural break that divided his career cleanly and sharply into two parts: drawings he had done “before” his abrupt flight away from New York and the life he lived there, and what he would go on to do “after,” when he intended to create both life and work anew.
When he thought about it, the divisions between his life in New York and his life in Europe were vast, with the major difference being work. When he was in New York, his main objective was to do enough commercial work to support himself and all his dependents during the several months when he would be in France or Italy doing only what he wanted to do. Also, his primary socializing was with a different sort of people in New York than those he saw in Europe. In New York, cocktail parties, dinner parties, gallery openings, and book launches were ubiquitous, and the guest lists were usually large enough to preclude anything but politely superficial chatter. In Paris, he was mostly with artists and writers, usually over dinner tables in their homes or in quiet restaurants where they were able to engage in serious conversation, more often than not about current work and ideas for future projects. On this last trip in particular he had been with so many other writers and artists that he could not help but think about his own way of life in relation to theirs. Even the artists who were financially comfortable, such as Giacometti and Miró, to give but two examples, lived far more quietly and simply than he did, and with a daily existence that centered completely on their work.
Steinberg was different from them in an important way. Although many of his friends on both continents were among the intelligentsia, his was a questing intelligence that was always on the lookout for whatever struck his offbeat vision and for new ways in which to use it. No matter how ordinary anything may have seemed to others—a street sign, a woman’s clothing, even an overheard conversation—Steinberg always found a way to make it new. Everything was grist for his creative mill, from the silliest movie to the most serious book. By putting his own particular spin on what he drew, he could turn his subjects into an “aha!” moment for those who beheld his work. “I am a writer who draws,” he said of himself, and he could legitimately have expanded this self-definition to include the social historian and cultural anthropologist.
From childhood, Steinberg was always a voracious reader, and he counted writers among his closest friends. If he read something he liked, he often wrote to the author, and inevitably friendships were created. His months alone had given him the opportunity to read widely and deeply, particularly in serious nonfiction. Like almost every other reader of Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” he used Berlin’s classifications to interpret himself. Steinberg saw Berlin’s hedgehog as viewing the world through a lens that restricted itself to a singular, fixed image, idea, or vision, while his fox drew on a large body of images and experiences in order to form an all-encompassing, all-inclusive worldview. In one of his brief notes Steinberg wrote, “In order to become a fox, I had to be a hedgehog for a long time. I can’t make distinction between what is right and what my mind tells me is right.”
When he had been a hedgehog, one single idea had dominated his thinking and behavior: the need to make money and the concurrent responsibility to support others. During his years in Milan, when he was a poor student, he had to sell his art in order to supplement the meager financial aid his parents could afford to send. When he was in Santo Domingo, in order to support himself he had to tailor his work to create a desire for it in American media. After the war, he needed to provide financial stability for himself and his wife, his parents, his sister, and his numerous other relatives. He also felt the need to help his friends, sending money to Aldo on the frequent occasions when he needed it and a monthly stipend directly to Ada’s bank. By the time he ran away to Europe in 1955, he had been on a proverbial treadmill for almost two decades, during which he had been a hedgehog with a single fixed idea: to be successful as an artist in order to acquire money. And when fame came with it, he reveled in it, even though it meant he had to run harder, faster, and longer.
The time he spent in Europe encouraged him to think he could still fulfill his responsibilities while branching out to become Berlin’s fox, one who knew many things and had many ideas. While in Paris he did buy a hedgehog’s drafting table for his hotel room, but he also bought a fox’s white parasol, easel, and blue artist’s coat, all for painting outdoors, which he had earlier given up because it took too much time away from paid projects. If he retained anything from his hedgehog years, he convinced himself that it was how to use his commercial work in ways that would continue to bring in the much-needed income while allowing his private creative vision to be like a fox’s, multifaceted and ready to explore many different avenues of expression.
HE RETURNED TO NEW YORK AT the end of June but stayed only long enough to pack summer things before joining Hedda in Wellfleet, where she had rented a house through early September. He liked it there well enough to think that Massachusetts might be the place to buy a second home, but he was still eager to get back to New York and resume his frenetic socializing, as if there was nothing more important to do in life. Much of it was with friends from The New Yorker. Jim Geraghty took him to lunch at the Algonquin, where they plotted strategies for securing the Russian visa; he shared Charlie Addams’s love of gambling and accepted all his invitations to play poker; and he even allowed Brendan Gill to take him to lunch at the Century Association as a prelude to proposing him for membership. He went to Geoffrey Hellman’s large and boozy parties and lunched alone with St. Clair McKelway or Joe Mitchell, both of whom were writers he much admired.
He spent weekends with Mary McCarthy and her husband, James West, and he and Hedda made the trek to Utopia Parkway in Queens to see Joseph Cornell. But all the while he was out and about, he had not forgotten his European good intentions. He went often to Wittenborn, the shop of the New York dealer in rare art and architecture books, and added to his growing collection. He was still thinking about the self-knowledge he had gained during his time abroad and he continued to make self-referential notes that might translate into drawings. He was exploring his own “vices,” both “good,” which he defined as his love of drinking fine scotch whiskey, and “bad,” which he equated with his tendency toward “avarice.” To him, this meant the lust to make money and rake in as much as he could amass, greedily buying expensive clothing in greater quantities than he needed, and the need for se
x with almost every woman he met. He was discreet about several French encounters, one of which remained an occasional liaison for years afterward; and when he returned to New York, the coded initials, times, and addresses continued to clutter his appointment books.
As he thought about himself, he was also collecting ideas for drawings that related to the larger world: women in mink coats were equated with “schmaltz,” while the president of Liberia lent himself to caricature because he “will not be seen without a top hat.” In another encoded “note to myself” he described how an artist “becomes one (after 20) because he has the temperament of one.” Several days later, he took mescaline for the first time and made notes while under its influence. He liked drugs because he thought they expanded his creative energies, but he never made them a daily habit like the whiskey and cigarettes he thought he could not live without. He used drugs socially, mostly marijuana, on and off for years afterward and was fortunate that he never had a bad reaction and all his experiences were pleasant.
The year 1955 was ending, and he was not too happy to look back on it. On the one hand he had made money, paid his bills, and survived a desperate personal crisis; on the other hand he had learned much about himself and was determined to put the knowledge to work as soon as the new year began. He still had not heard about his Russian visa, but his sponsors at The New Yorker assured him that it would come any day and that he should prepare to go at a moment’s notice. It finally arrived in early December, two months before he was to depart. There was so much to do, and the first thing he did was to buy a larger-than-usual notebook and write on the first page in large block letters “CARRY NOTEBOOK EVERYWHERE.”
CHAPTER 19
A GRAND OLD-FASHIONED JOURNEY
I’ve made a grand old-fashioned journey. Leningrad, Moscow, Odessa, Tiflis, Tashkent, and Samarkand!
There was much to do before February 14, 1956, the date of his departure. Besides the official documents and certificates from both governments, he needed a letter from Harold Ross verifying that he was a reporter for The New Yorker and traveling on official magazine business. The letter had to be notarized, and while he was in the notary’s office, Steinberg remembered the document “dazzlers,” the array of stamps and stickers lavished upon even the most ordinary letters by the Romanian and Italian governments, so he asked the clerk to affix his notary seal wherever he thought it might enhance Steinberg’s legitimacy. There was a lot to buy as well, from drawing supplies to heavy winter clothes. He started with rubber stamps that read “all rights reserved. S St,” which was the signature he thought he would use on this trip, and he also needed special pens with ink that would write in low temperatures, a stack of drawing tablets and notebooks, and a large supply of colored pencils. He went to Brooks Brothers to buy a heavy overcoat and gloves and to Bloomingdale’s for a large green duffel bag to hold the overflow from the ancient brown suitcase that had been everywhere with him since he had sailed from Lisbon during the war. The duffel bag would turn out to be more trouble than it was worth, but he didn’t know that until he was well under way. The last task was to call a bank in Philadelphia where he held several accounts and ask it to send traveler’s checks and a fairly large amount of cash. Then he got a pedicure and was ready to go.
To enter Russia, he had to fly to Moscow from Stockholm or Helsinki, so he decided to stop first in Paris for two days of business. Winter weather delayed the flight from New York, and engine trouble forced an emergency landing in Gander, Newfoundland. When the plane finally reached Paris, reporters swarmed to interview Leslie Caron, who was on the same plane as Steinberg, “the cruelest humorist in the world, celebrated for the most bitter and bitingly delirious exuberance of these traits.” When they tried to take his photograph, he forbade them, “growling” that the caricature of his work was more than enough.
The lost time truncated Steinberg’s layover in Paris, and severe jet lag led him to keep only the most important appointments and cancel the rest. When he boarded the plane for the flight to Stockholm, he found himself seated next to a “quiet Englishman” who eventually initiated a stilted conversation. After an hour, when they had moved on to “animated talk and fast friendship,” Steinberg introduced himself and the man replied, “Graham Greene.” By the time the plane landed, they had developed a “pleasant friendship.” Steinberg had to stay overnight in Stockholm, but he had lost all concept of time and was still too jet-lagged to sleep. Despite the luxury of his hotel room, he was so cold that he went out the next morning and bought a fur hat, which he credited with saving his life once he got to Russia.
He was also thankful that he had prepared for the cold by wearing almost every article of warm clothing he had brought for the trip, because for the first of several times the green duffel bag was lost. When he reached Leningrad, so too was the old brown suitcase, which arrived one full day after he did. He was assigned a woman guide in Leningrad, Zina, who took him on a tour of the city by car and only reluctantly allowed him to get out and walk when he insisted on seeing the Finland Station, which he had wanted to do since reading Edmund Wilson’s book of the same name. The brief walk taught him that his mustache was a good indicator of how long he could stay outside: when it froze, he knew he had to rush inside. After that he created consternation in Zina as he dashed abruptly from the car whenever it paused in traffic to run into bookstores and buy books about Russian architecture in the Cyrillic alphabet, which he marveled at but could not read. He was sure his movements were being monitored, particularly after Zina taught him how to use the bus and subway but would not allow him to take them without her. She took him to the Hermitage and to the ballet Taras Bulba, complete with “three horses galloping through the stage, smoke or fire, very impressive.”
Steinberg in Russia. (illustration credit 19.1)
Steinberg expected to be subjected to the crushing restrictions and regulations his sister had suffered under the Romanian Communist government, but except for someone always directing his movements, there was none of it for coddled VIPs such as he. He knew it would be a challenge to get off the tourist path and experience the daily life of ordinary people, and as Zina remained firm while he was in Leningrad, he went nowhere on his own. They visited a monastery that had a splendid courtyard and ruined cemetery, walked on the Nevsky Prospekt, and toured the city museum. The closest he came to ordinary people was in the museum cloakroom, where he watched them as they sat eating their greasy bag lunches in the midst of the checked coats. Out on the snow-covered streets, where shapeless human forms moved listlessly, he was reminded everywhere of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. One night he went to a ballet at the Kirov Theatre, this time Don Quixote, with a real donkey and horse and a surrealistic “giant spider, trap apparition, knife dance.” He noticed that all the men seated around him had cotton in their ears and wished he had some too, as the music was so loud.
On his last day there Zina finally let him walk alone, but he had to scramble into the car that slowly dogged his footsteps whenever his mustache froze. She had prepared a packed lunch, which they ate while their driver let the car idle in a park where Steinberg could watch people and draw. He was supposed to go from Leningrad to Kiev, but with the excuse of the still-missing duffel bag, he persuaded the Intourist officials to change his itinerary and let him go first to Moscow and stay there for three days. They agreed but escorted him off the plane and directly to the American embassy, where he wasted the morning filling out endless forms to try to trace the bag. At this point he didn’t care if he ever saw it again, for he had indulged his passion for buying souvenirs and tchotchkes in Leningrad, so many that he had to pay hefty excess baggage charges there and would have to do so for the rest of his travels—and this was exacerbated by the difficulty of finding porters to carry everything.
While on the plane to Moscow he had sketched the Russian airmen who filled every seat, all of them freezing and then sweating as the temperature fluctuated wildly. A “young girl” guide met him and made the drive
r take him past the Kremlin and St. Basil’s, with their “enormous scale piazzas” which were overwhelming to him in his exhausted state. She installed him in the main hotel for tourists, the Metropole, and he was finally ready for an early night’s sleep, but the guide, whom he disliked and called “an automat delivering lessons,” insisted on escorting him to his room, where she made him listen to yet another lecture before he could enjoy his first full night’s sleep since leaving New York.
The next day she continued to pontificate on the glories of the state as she took him to the university on Gorky Street, a collection of nondescript buildings he had no interest in, before dropping him at the American embassy to spend the rest of the day. The building was decrepit and reminded him of the more dismal army camps he had seen during the war. He met the ambassador, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, and his wife, Avis, and most of the staff and the “lonesome American correspondents” who “only see each other and were glad to see somebody new.”
No matter where he went, Steinberg could not escape the ballet, and his first night in Moscow found him at the Bolshoi for The Nutcracker Suite. This time the only histrionic on the stage was an enormous puppet. Everything in Moscow was “enormous,” especially Red Square, the Kremlin Museum, and all the exhibits in it. He persuaded his guide to take him on the subway and got dizzy on the almost vertical escalator that took them down to it. Afterward he tried to persuade her to let him walk on the streets and take shortcuts whenever he saw something interesting. She agreed until he asked two curious waiters who came out of a restaurant to stare at the foreigner if they spoke English; seeing the guide, they said in loud English meant for her that they did not, then turned and ran back into the building. After that, the guide made sure there was no more straying from the beaten path.