Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  STEINBERG RETREATED TO SPRINGS, where he rented a house for the summer of 1978 while contractors installed French doors and more large windows in the studio. He did not want to be alone, especially in a rented house, and he begged his nearest and dearest to visit, starting with Aldo, whom he invited to stay for a month or longer. Lica’s son, Stéphane, and his wife, Danielle, were living and working in Africa. Steinberg offered to pay for everything if they would only come visit, but they were unable to do so. He also invited Daniela Roman, but at a different time from her brother because he thought they reverted to their childhood relationship when they were together for too long. He liked it at first, but as he was not used to being around children and did not appreciate how they re-created their earlier rapport, it quickly wore on him. He wanted Aldo’s company most of all, and he sent a sizable check to make up for income Aldo would lose from not working and to pay for his travel expenses. He sent more than enough and told Aldo to give at least $1,000 of it to Ada, who was the only close friend he did not invite to Springs. Although she had made several trips to the United States in recent years, Steinberg always managed to be in Europe when she passed through New York, and he preferred to keep her safely sequestered in Italy.

  While he was waiting for Aldo’s arrival, the only activity that brought him pleasure was working on drawings for The New Yorker. Lee Lorenz and William Shawn were greatly relieved to see so much productivity, for they had feared that the retrospective might have created the equivalent of a writer’s block that would greatly hamper his output. Instead he created a series of portfolios, two- to four-page spreads of everything from his own dreams to interpretations of classic Japanese art and American public architecture, to whimsical maps of his own creation. While he was involved in all this, he followed his usual custom of making notes to himself in his pocket diaries or some of the datebooks he kept sporadically. In 1978, one of the questions he pondered was the “influence of subway on Dubuffet. He thought of making drawings of Rimbaud and Verlaine that would show “how the true influence is hidden.” He quoted Harold Rosenberg on Céline: “An evil man cannot be a good writer.” Perhaps considering subjects for future New Yorker spreads, he wrote “Summer—baseball, winter—football.” And perhaps when he wrote “Ideal vs. Survival” he was writing about himself and what he was going to do with the rest of his life, now that he had known so much professional closure and personal loss. Like Steinberg’s Don Quixote, who jousted at pineapples from his rickety horse or thrust his spear at the world from a quasi-safe perch within the open mouth of a crocodile, the two concepts would figure repeatedly in Steinberg’s ever-elusive quest for, if not happiness, then certainly satisfaction.

  CHAPTER 38

  WHAT THE MEMORY ACCUMULATES

  Nothing is lost of what the memory accumulates, an immense computer that continues to register and classify data that are used only in a minimal proportion for conventional and monotone life. Life in this sense is like a huge ocean liner in which only one cabin is used.

  While he was caught up in the media excitement generated by the Whitney retrospective, Steinberg received a letter, via The New Yorker, from a man in Arizona named Phil Steinberg, who said he was the son of Moritz Steinberg’s brother Beryl and therefore Saul’s first cousin. Phil Steinberg had read the glowing profile in Time and decided to get in touch with his famous cousin. His letter came totally out of the blue, for Saul had never been in contact with the Arizona contingent of his family. He and his uncle Martin in Denver, and later Martin’s son, Charles, wrote from time to time about providing support for the relatives in Israel, but his only fairly regular correspondence was with Charles’s daughter, Judith Steinberg Bassow. It was a pleasant exchange, with Judy sending news of her doctor husband’s work and her quest to balance her work as a lawyer against the needs of her two daughters, whom Saul occasionally entertained in New York when they were attending eastern universities. He usually wrote short notes to accompany frequent gifts of art to the Bassows, and when they came to New York, he enjoyed their company. He formed a close friendship with Judy when they exchanged information and cooperated on a Steinberg family geneology.

  The letter from Phil came as a shock, not only because of the eloquent simplicity of Phil’s life story but also because he enclosed a photograph of himself, and when Saul looked at it, it was as if he were looking at himself. Phil was his age, had been in the Marines, and had seen heavy fighting during the battles for Guam and Iwo Jima. When he came home, he married Rita, an Irish girl originally from New York, and like his father and uncles before him, worked as a typesetter until he taught himself to build and repair radios, televisions, and other electronics. He opened a small shop and did as much work as he needed to do to support his modest lifestyle; when he retired, he bought a house trailer where he and Rita lived, sharing a passionate love for motorcycles and roaming together throughout the Southwest on his enormous Honda. Phil’s letter was an honest and straightforward account of a life satisfied with the simplest of pleasures, and he told his newfound cousin that he was sorry to say that he had great difficulty understanding Saul’s work. Phil hoped Saul would come to Tucson, because he would never go back to New York. Saul was captivated by “the mysterious cousin,” and even though he had just returned from a trip through the western states, he had such “a powerful desire to meet a cousin whom I’m not ashamed of” that he went west again, to Arizona, in November.

  PHIL’S LETTER CAME AT AN INTERESTING time in Steinberg’s professional life, when the idea of family and its effect on the individual was uppermost in his mind. “These days,” he told Aldo, “I’m drawing my aunts and uncles from photographs, and I recognize (scrutinize them as real people for the first time) parts of myself: an ear, an eye. Archeology!” He had conceived the idea of creating mythical family groups that were loosely based on portraits of his own relatives and on some of the paintings and photographs he had observed in foreign cultures, particularly Russia, where family photographs were still taken in the old-fashioned tradition, “where dignity was the most important thing.” Over the years he had amassed a large collection of such photos, starting with his own family and then with those he picked up in flea markets and his beloved “junque” shops. When he started to tinker with them, he began by making totally new drawings, which he intended to turn into easily recognizable parodies, until one day he discovered that by applying a thin overlay of black enamel paint to the photographs themselves, he could turn them into perfect imitations of old-time photography, “as varnished as the painting of Ingres that were their models.” Eventually both his new drawings and the transformed photographs became two thematic portfolios for The New Yorker called “Uncles” and “Cousins.”

  The fixation on family marked the start of Steinberg’s increasingly introspective vision, as he plumbed his own life to convert it into the pictorial autobiography that became one of the dominating motifs, if not the dominating motif, of his last two decades. “Nothing is lost of what the memory accumulates,” he wrote in one of the many notes he made on this subject. The question he pondered repeatedly was how to reveal these memories so they transcended the personal and became universal, which in his worldview always became drawings suitable for The New Yorker. How it rankled when he tried to explain what he wanted the portraits to convey to Bernard Rudofsky, who cut him short by asking, “Are you working or only selling?” “He thinks he’s funny,” said Steinberg, who thought this was a truly “nasty” comment.

  Steinberg had always been a serious reader whose main interest in the ideas of others was to see how he might relate them to his own personal experience. From Gogol’s nose to Joyce’s peripatetic Leopold Bloom to the many philosophers whose aphorisms Hedda Sterne sent his way, Steinberg always found something he could use. When he read Proust (whom he thought boring and never finished), the one idea that resonated for him was how certain scents or objects could serve as lifelong triggers of memories. It was, therefore, a “wild” experience when the cur
ators for the retrospective uncovered some of the drawings he had made thirty years earlier and not seen since, thus assaulting him with memories long forgotten. He felt that looking at these old drawings was akin to playing a game he named “First and Second Class Reality,” where the artist looking at his art engages in “a sort of voyeurism that probably interferes with life, a truly unnatural act.” He had always made the occasional jotting in the past, but after the retrospective he started to make more frequent and far more detailed notes about his thoughts and experiences, especially as he tried to recapture the emotion he had felt at the time he created the work. The two portfolios for The New Yorker became, like so many other photographs he agonized over, a serious search for the truth of himself and the essence of his being.

  One of his most famous first- and second-class realities is a photograph taken by Evelyn Hofer, of the adult Saul Steinberg standing in the middle of the immense Persian rug that filled his studio floor, which appeared from time to time in his drawings, holding the hand of a life-size cardboard cutout of himself as a boy of six or eight. Both the cardboard boy and the real adult look steadily at the camera, as if in all seriousness they are inviting the viewer to join them in playing a game to find the reality.

  Saul Steinberg holding the hand of his eight-year-old self, 1978. (illustration credit 38.1)

  STEINBERG WENT TO TUCSON AT THE end of October to visit Rita and Phil Steinberg. During the fourteen years they had lived in a trailer park out in the country, they had watched as the city encroached until it surrounded them with suburban clutter. Steinberg had a difficult time fathoming this new relative, especially when he saw the elderly childless couple, Phil and Rita, set out on their motorcycle surrounded by a phalanx of other old people on theirs. He was grateful that their trailer was so small that he did not have to risk offending their hospitality by staying in a hotel, and he managed to invent reasons to keep himself occupied during the day so that he only spent evenings in their company. Anything more would have been too emotionally exhausting, for simply being with his cousin gave Steinberg an image of the person he would have been “without education, without success.” He left Tucson with deeply divided emotions, aware that he could not understand living the life of a man like Phil and that he would never grasp how anyone could be satisfied with it. He made a comparison unflattering to himself: that Phil was indeed “an authentic person,” whereas he was not.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, HE WENT immediately to the country, where he was happiest and could do his best work. He was in another of the recurring daydreams about living there permanently when the phone rang, abruptly summoning him back to the city because his apartment had been burgled. A thief had entered through a courtyard window and made off with gold cuff links that had been a gift from Hedda during their marriage. This distressed him deeply. Also stolen were the various medallions Steinberg had been awarded during his career, which turned out to be real gold and not imitations, as he had thought. Losing the medallions did not upset him nearly as much as losing the cuff links, but what upset him most of all was the loss of his “tranquillity.” His first impulse was to move to a different apartment, claiming that he had never liked the one he was in because it was too dark. In the end he stayed there, after installing a security system and renting a warehouse where he could store his work, the many souvenirs of his travels, and his beloved “junque,” all of which was crowding him out.

  STEINBERG WAS AT LOOSE ENDS AS the seventies ended, alone in the country because of tension with Sigrid, whom he told to stay in the city. As he was without female company and because he could not read all the time, he was determined to find something other than his work to occupy his hands as well as his mind. For reasons he could not understand, let alone explain, he settled on wanting to play the violin again, something he had not done since his student days at the Lycée Basarab. Steinberg told Sasha Schneider, who immediately made him the gift of a good instrument, and he began to practice seriously, easily recalling some of what he played a half century before in the school orchestra. He liked “playing it loudly, out in the country; with no neighbors nearby, it is a pleasure.” To make sure he was playing properly, he began each session with simple warm‑up exercises he remembered from his youth, and later, when he progressed to playing actual music, he tape-recorded himself and then listened to the playback, mostly “with admiration.” Sometimes he taped himself accompanying recordings, but when he played the tape back, he discovered that fingering was “still difficult … but with time, perhaps …”

  He had long had an important musical friendship with Sasha Schneider, but another was developing with Leo Treitler, the musicologist husband of his friend Mary Frank, whom he had known since she was Robert Frank’s young wife living in a 9th Street studio with rear windows that were directly opposite Bill de Kooning’s. Seeing her again brought back memories of how, depending on which of his two friends he was visiting, he could wave out the window to the other one. Mary Frank soon became an increasingly important friend. She was one of the few people whom he trusted enough to introduce to Lica on her last visit, and after Lica’s death, Frank realized how much he loved his sister when she tried to comfort him by saying that she thought she could understand his grief well enough to share it because of her daughter’s untimely death. He made no reply, but she intuited that a new level of unspoken closeness had grown between them.

  Mary Frank played the recorder and “a very bad piano” and thought it would cheer both her and Steinberg to play duets. He refused at first, but she cajoled him into agreeing, even though they both thought that music for recorder and violin was not the best. After two or three such sessions Steinberg stopped, because “he could not stand that he played so badly in comparison to professionals. It was shaming for him; others could be amateurs but for him it was unbearable. It made him sad and angry.” He settled for hearing music played well at the Frank-Treitler home whenever they hosted one of the musical evenings at which Leo’s son, Max, a distinguished cellist, played.

  Steinberg became especially unhappy with his own ability after Isaac Stern invited him to a recital and reception in his apartment. He was disgruntled all evening, calling Stern’s playing of Sibelius just “so-so” and Stern himself “flabby and surrounded by over-stuffed furniture that resembles him.” He went home intending to capture the evening in drawings that were initially “unkind,” but his inherent dignity made him abandon it as “too easy and not right.” Nevertheless, he continued to play the violin when he was alone and with more proficiency than he gave himself credit for, playing everything from “Johann Christian Bach (the Milanese Bach)” to Vivaldi, Mozart, and Haydn. He took lessons from a woman who taught at the Mannes College of Music, a Russian he called Sushanskaya whom he described as a martinet originally from Leningrad, who made him play “wicked, difficult exercises by the noted sadist Schradieck.” She insisted that he join two of her other pupils, talented schoolchildren who played piano and cello, for trios. This caused Steinberg more trepidation than if Isaac Stern had invited him to play, but once he joined the children, he delighted in the feeling of having “made progress,” even though it made him feel his “lack of talent acutely.”

  AFTER HIS VIOLIN PLAYING BECAME SOMETHING he did routinely, he needed to create other diversions to fill his time. He took to visiting the many wooden churches on the east end of Long Island, where he drew them dal vero. He thought the structures were interesting because they were “architecturally sound,” whereas he disliked the many stone churches in the area because the proportions were all “built to the wrong scale.” Besides these renderings of buildings, he kept his hands busy with still lifes and portraits. The objects on his desk or dining table, the wooden sculptures he put together from bits and pieces left over from Gordon Pulis’s work on the tables, the iconic blue-and-white Chinese vase, were all turning up frequently. He caught Sigrid in many different poses but mostly in the quiet serenity that being in the country instilled in her. And of course there
was his beloved Papoose, either captured on one of his stalking adventures or disguised as a caricature cat within other drawings that eventually appeared in The New Yorker.

  To all this playful exploration Steinberg added photographic experimentation, first by capturing a person or an image on a Polaroid camera, then by making a drawing from the photograph. In the drawings he strove for the same “Courbet-style colors” that Polaroid photos usually became after they had been exposed to the light for a while. He played with postcards in much the same way, creating an original drawing and coloring them “Courbet-style” as closely as possible or drawing over the original and using it in collages. He liked to use airmail envelopes in collages and would send envelopes to friends and ask them to mail them back to him because he wanted the postmark.

  His favorite entertainments continued to be reading and going to the movies, and he did both avidly and voraciously. He was aware of the feminist movement and tried to educate himself by reading books written by women, but when it came to the proper role for women to play in men’s lives, he was still very much the traditional European gentleman and expected them to be submissive. After he met the journalist Shana Alexander and liked her, he read her books and articles with grudging respect, but he did not put her on his list of women who were “good writers.” Two who made it were Elizabeth Hardwick, for Sleepless Nights because he thought her plot mirrored his own depressive behavior, and Renata Adler, for Speedboat, which he liked because it was “a quasi novel in fragments.”