by Deirdre Bair
In his almost frenetic search for pursuits to pass the time, he agreed to take a winter vacation in February 1980 with “la Sigrid,” as he had begun to call her when he wrote or spoke of her to mutual friends. She wanted to go to Mali, but when Saul refused to go that far, she settled for Guadeloupe, first because it was French and then because he insisted he would only go somewhere “not yet cursed with poverty or political strife.” He loved to travel and was always ready to go at a moment’s notice, but his preference was for cities where he had a network of friends with whom he could eat a pleasant meal and have a meaningful conversation, or find shops where he could buy such things as a brand of ink or a kind of eraser he could not get in New York, or where he could have clothes made to order by tradespeople who were delighted to fit fine fabrics to his exacting specifications. In recent years this had meant making the circle of Milan (and sometimes Rome), Paris, and London and nowhere else. Going to a resort gave him a “horror of hotels and restaurants and tourists.” Sitting on a beach was “inertia, indolence, and sloth—the anticipation of death.” But Sigrid liked that kind of vacation, so Saul allowed her to drag him along on “whimsical trips, almost always good despite my grumbling.”
Despite his hesitation, he did have a good time on Guadeloupe. They left New York in a snowstorm and he had a bad case of flu, but the warm weather soon cured it, and he spent a lot of time floating in the deep blue water or sitting on the beach reading Babette’s Feast and Out of Africa. What he remembered best about these readings was his single meeting with Baroness Blixen in New York toward the end of her life, when “her stockings hung in folds.”
Still, even after all this pleasant activity, Steinberg retreated into one of his increasingly frequent “periods of paranoia,” when he compared himself to a tortoise or an armadillo to insist that, despite all his activities and the quantity of work he published and the even larger quantity that he left in his carefully saved but unpublished files, he could not write, work, or read. He was bitter that his drawings were not being bought by people who took simple delight in them but rather “by people with money, as an investment.” He groused about this adjunct of fame, that it forced too much responsibility on him to have to decide every time he put pen to paper whether he wanted “riches or the ruin of widows and orphans.” Where, he asked himself, was the wisdom that came with age? If it was true that wisdom was indeed a benefit of age, he was hard-pressed to find it. While he was visiting Phil in Tucson, he went to an afternoon “blue movie” and was insulted when the youngster at the cash register sold him a senior citizen’s ticket without his asking for it. It made him feel old, and he hated the feeling. There were new problems with his teeth, and at times he measured out his life not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in weekly or even daily dental appointments. It helped him to be able to turn to writers whom he identified with old age, such as Giuseppe Pontiggia, whose “greedy, avaricious characters” in the short stories reminded him of “Checkhov [sic] as influenced by Gogol, in that the essential is masked by secondary issues.”
Was that what he was doing, he asked himself—masking the essential with the secondary? And if so, what was essential and how could he identify it? On every level, this was the question that permeated Steinberg’s life at the start of the new decade.
CHAPTER 39
THE DEFECTS OF THE TRIBE
I realize that for many years I’ve encountered only celebrities and admirers … I haven’t gotten to know anybody … with the exception of celebrities or waiters, porters, drivers, and other indifferent people.
The only person Steinberg thought might be capable of understanding the curious emotions that were now besetting him was Aldo Buzzi. He had always confided the daily facts and events of his life to Aldo, but now he unleashed his deepest feelings. “It’s clear that the desire for stamps and seals is not only a visit to the past, but to the country I have avoided since I left it,” he wrote of his newest passion, stamp collecting. Steinberg believed that one of the best ways to determine the things that matter most in adult life was to revisit the important memories of childhood, in his case what it was like to be ten years old in the Romania of 1924. He believed this was one of the most “essential” periods of his life, and the memories of it produced a confusing surge of emotions that he was at a loss to interpret. One of the first was his adult “mania” for postage stamps that were issued in 1924. As a poor Romanian boy, he had had no access to real collectibles, so his acquisitions were limited to the stamps that came through his family’s mailbox or to those his kind neighbors gave him. Once he had collected all that were issued, his interest waned and he drifted to other pursuits, but now, when he happened upon some of the stamps he remembered from boyhood, he was overcome by a feeling so “powerful, confused,” that he could not decide whether it was happiness or pain.
As was his habit with every new interest, he pursued this one with relentless intensity. He read all the material in the Amagansett Library, went to auctions, made friends of dealers and collectors, bought catalogues, and even tried unsuccessfully to buy a very expensive album that contained an important collection of stamps issued between the mid-nineteenth century and 1924. This long-dormant “passion” was “re-emerging with such alarming force” that he thought it was a sign of one of two things: “an interesting and lively senility” or the deep need to “return” to the Romania of his childhood.
Aldo had always been his sounding board, but now they became even closer, because Saul was going through a serious change in his relationship with Hedda. He was somewhat reluctant to involve her in the search for his past as he stood on the cusp of old age and was slightly embarrassed by his deepening introspection. He hesitated to confide in her, because even though they were both scrupulous about never discussing his relationship with Sigrid, he feared she would interpret this serious change in his habits as something caused by Sigrid’s increasingly erratic behavior.
Hedda’s conduct toward him never changed: she continued her custom of copying interesting sayings and pithy aphorisms onto the pages of her little tablets and mailing them along with articles and photos she thought would either amuse him or trigger the urge to draw. As he became obsessed with aging, he stopped trying to hide his pathological interest in death and dying from her, so she sent everything from respectful obituaries of their friends to bizarre accounts of how perfect strangers had died, the latter in the hope that he would find something comic to cheer him up. They spoke on the phone almost every day, sometimes more than once, and she continued to be ruthless in telling him exactly what she thought, always restricting her criticisms to his art and almost never mentioning his life. He respected her judgments and usually heeded her advice, but most of all he counted on her for the constant warm bath of unconditional love and approval he knew she would wash over him, no matter how silly he was or how stupidly he behaved. Sigrid, on the other hand, screamed at him for looking ridiculous as he squired the steady succession of “thin blonde WASP women who get younger every year,” whom he either seduced or tried to, but Hedda always welcomed them to her house: “He brought his girl friends home to show off to me what good lookers he could get. Usually, after he finished with them, they still came to see me and became my good friends.”
Saul had no qualms about letting Hedda see him with other women, but he was reluctant to talk about anything even vaguely connected to their shared Romanian origins. He often felt inferior or inadequate when he compared her privileged upbringing to his modest one, and even though Hedda would never have been judgmental, he felt more comfortable confiding the emotions aroused by his country’s anti-Semitic attitudes to Aldo. He was not embarrassed to tell Aldo about anything connected with Romania, especially how “hungrily” he read stamp catalogues, or to talk about the sheer joy he felt when he looked at stamps on old envelopes and saw them with entirely new eyes. When he bought a “Venetian-Austrian [envelope] with stamp in relief,” it marked the start of his purchasing a collection, slowly, usi
ng astuteness more than money. It was a game he enjoyed, because the stamp dealers he dealt with in New York exhibited the same behavior that he remembered from 1924: they may have loved stamps, but they were still vulgar and cruel. It was fun to toy with them now that he was an adult with money and discernment. “They are pimps,” he concluded, and the game they played was “archeological pornography.” Still, collecting stamps let him meet new people and go to new and different places, and with these experiences came the startling insight that for years he had not formed any new and meaningful relationships. The only new people he met were celebrities or his fans, all of whom made him feel inauthentic, phony, and lacking in any admirable quality. The vast majority with whom he interacted were waiters, porters, or chauffeurs, all of whom were polite because they were paid to be. He did not tell the people he met in the stamp world that he was the famous artist but pretended instead that he was a simple retiree who was beginning a new hobby. Whether or not they knew of his reputation, he hid behind the false persona, because he feared that if he told the truth, he risked revealing too many emotions that should remain private. “In general they treat me as a fool,” he told Aldo. “Maybe they are right.”
As his interest in postmarks and envelopes intensified, he thought of his large personal collection of old postcards. He brought them out of their boxes and filled the horizontal surfaces of his house with them. As he looked at them with the new eyes he had earlier brought to stamped envelopes, he found different subsets among them, such disparate things as reflections in water or nude women reflected in mirrors. Many of these were on the cards he had bought in Russia, which led to musings on the Russian national character and the study of Cyrillic handwriting, which in turn led him to study all the cards and ponder the sender’s obvious and perhaps hidden meanings. It drew him back to his own boyhood and young adulthood and reflections about what he might have intentionally concealed and inadvertently revealed.
Perusing the postcards led him to the collection of family photos that he had filed in a folder titled “Romania.” He embellished almost every one, usually by superimposing various versions of his older self upon the younger: in a studio photo in which he wears a sailor suit and stands stiffly posed between his parents, he disfigures himself with a beard, mustache, glasses, and a large and pointed nose; in another of himself wearing the same sailor suit and pushing a hoop, he drew the large table in the Springs kitchen with the iconic blue-and-white Chinese vase on it that he used repeatedly in other drawings.
STEINBERG WAS SPENDING SO MUCH TIME in the country that he instructed his housekeeper, the “Majorcan Pearl, Josefine,” to redirect all his New York mail, visitors, and phone calls to Springs. Sigrid went back to Africa in early January 1981, leaving him “as usual, full of qualms, doubts, fears,” and it was easier to deal with them in the country. His relationship with Sigrid had reached such a low point that he allowed her to come to the house only when he was absent, but he had relented at Christmas and for two days they had been able to “love one another” as they had not been able to do throughout the previous year. In keeping with his new openness to Aldo, he described their difficulties as “symptoms similar to those of Pirandello’s pedestrian wife,” a cryptic allusion to the mental problems presented in a “scary” biography of the author that Steinberg read mainly for its depiction of the troubled marriage. “Me, too,” he told Aldo as he described his own depressed state, “the usual moments of melancholy, or worse.”
Sigrid’s depression, like Antonietta Pirandello’s, took several forms. Sometimes it made her so angry that she acted out in public with outrageous behavior; at other times she threw things and threatened bodily harm to herself and injury to others; and at still others (mostly when she and Saul were alone in Springs) she was catatonically silent and still. He was terrified about what she might do to herself, particularly after the night he accepted an impromptu invitation to an early dinner at his friend Ellen Adler’s apartment. As they exchanged greetings, Adler mentioned casually that she had just seen Sigrid (whom she had not invited) wandering aimlessly outside her building. The two women had known each other since Sigrid had been involved with Joe Rivers, and over the years they had forged what Adler called a “very complicated friendship.” Thus she was not overly concerned when she met Sigrid, disoriented and muttering that she never should have had the abortion as she would at least have a teenage child to comfort her in the loneliness of her middle age. Adler mentioned seeing her to Saul offhandedly because she knew that Sigrid’s “suicidal depressed moods” could lighten in an instant. He, however, bolted for the door as soon as she said it, calling over his shoulder as he ran to the elevator, “This is the tragedy—she can’t fit in anywhere.” He did not return for dinner that evening.
ALTHOUGH SAUL BEGGED SIGRID NOT TO go to Mali, she left as scheduled in January but returned in haste two weeks later, frightened by the tense political situation. While she was away and for the next several months, Steinberg’s solitary nightly consumption of scotch and wine interfered with his ability to work, and he realized that he had to stop drinking. He found that with mineral water he could still become “drunk out of habit, but in a happy manner, minus the torpor and nastiness.”
There was so much going on in Steinberg’s professional life and so much work he had to deal with that he needed to keep his wits about him. He had just finished making complicated arrangements to close up the house while he went to Los Angeles. Going to California was one way to get away from having to deal with the phone calls and letters that interrupted his concentration every day, as everyone seemed to want or need something. Among them were his dear friends Jean Hélion, who, old and ill, begged Steinberg to help promote his retrospective exhibition, and Ray Eames, who asked him to make a mural for the building she and Charles were designing for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. He offered to attend Hélion’s opening but declined to help publicize it, and he also declined the Eameses’ invitation. No matter how highly he regarded his friends, he still declined to work on commission unless the spirit moved him, and in these instances it did not.
He planned to stay in Los Angeles for the month of February, making his headquarters the printmaking atelier Gemini G.E.L., where he wanted to learn what he called incisioni, the Italian term for all intaglio prints. While he was there he planned to check into “a kind of Überlingen,” the Pritikin clinic in Santa Monica, where he expected diet and exercise to rid him of the paunch that came from too much rich food and good wine. Steinberg was as fastidious about his body as he was about the clothing that covered it, and his fussing over his appearance stopped just short of hypochondria. His checkbook stubs list the names of one doctor after another and his calendars record appointments with specialists ranging from dentists to dermatologists, primary-care physicians to podiatrists. The only specialists whose names never appeared were mental health professionals, for he did not believe in analysis for himself, even though he always paid without question the increasingly expensive bills in Sigrid’s ongoing quest for the analytic experience that would heal her.
In Los Angeles he took what he wanted from the Pritikin experience, which meant that he did a few exercises but otherwise did not follow the program. He did, however, throw himself enthusiastically into work at Gemini, where he managed to make “Two Women,” the first print of the half dozen or so that he made during the next several years whenever he returned to work there. He enjoyed the processes but preferred to do them alone rather than in collaboration with others, as he told a reporter a decade later: “I do wish I had been more stoic and more craftsmanlike in order to be able to work together with the printers, with the fellows who lift lithographic stones, not to mention the acid people and the other difficult and dramatic professions. And signing and numbering, all the Zen fuss about packaging. These things are beautiful and I’m very sorry I haven’t been able to reach that state. The truth is, I probably get intimidated by the contrast between my modest contribution and the giant
effort done around me. I feel uneasy; I feel guilty about it, and in no time I escape.” The problem, as he explained why he could not enjoy the experience, was that his mind was “working all the time,” busy performing “a form of autobiography—very complex, not a two-dimensional or one-idea affair.”
ONCE HE RETURNED TO SPRINGS IN APRIL 1981, “various woes” were among the major and minor problems that kept him from doing the work he wanted to do. He ended negotiations for two large exhibitions with museums he identified only as “Middle West, Japan, etc.” He found the courage to cancel the show Sidney Janis had scheduled for the fall, and exactly one year later, in April 1982, he left Janis “due to his avarice, which came to him as part of advanced age, minus the wisdom.” Steinberg had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and making changes or cancellations was not easy for him. In the process he offended “some respectable people” in the museum world, but he nevertheless believed that he had spared them from the even “worse things that would have happened further down the road.”
Just as he thought things had calmed down and he could get back to work on his own, a series of “small disasters” struck. Sigrid fell off a horse and cracked several ribs, and shortly afterward he fell off his bicycle and injured a knee. The Nivola house was struck by lightning during a summer storm and “everything—telephone, tv, electricity—was destroyed.” The house itself was not damaged, but the immense fir tree outside Claire’s bedroom window was decimated, with wood chips flung far and wide from where it had stood. Across the road at Steinberg’s house, only the television and the septic system were hit. “Saved by a miracle,” he rejoiced, as all the damage was covered by insurance. He planned to make an ex-voto in gratitude.