Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Suddenly he was able to work again, and getting down to it lightened his mood. He made one still life after another of ordinary household objects; he delighted in making woodcuts and a host of small wooden objects, which included a bed, an easel, chairs, tables, and vases with flowers. He also made more of the large tables and was engrossed in a series of drawings that he called variations on the Japanese printmaker Hiroshige’s bridge in a rainstorm. They, like so much else that was connected to the quest for the “essentials” of his past, appeared in one or more of the portfolios he contributed to The New Yorker between 1978 and 1985. He even made architectural drawings in the manner he had been taught in his Politecnico courses, using as models some of the post offices and federal buildings in his postcard collection. He spent the rest of the summer making what he called “sample cases and boxes for necessaries, compasses, jewelry, etc.,” then wondered if he was doing it because he wanted to re-create his father’s professional experiences in making cardboard boxes. He stopped trying to analyze why the process of creating all these objects made him so extremely happy; he just kept making as many as he wanted, even though his shop assistants told him timidly that they worried he might be flooding his own market. He also spent whole days making drawings based on the extemporaneous sketches he had been instructed to draw as part of his training at the Politecnico, where an instructor would point abruptly at something and tell the students to draw it quickly. “Who would have thought it?” he asked himself as he admitted that trying to relive his architectural training had become yet another “obsession.”

  The autobiographical imperative was strong in the summer of 1981. When he was not trying to re-create his past through memories of the Politecnico years, he was teaching himself to speak fluent German. He studied texts on grammar and built his vocabulary by reading the dictionary, but his real motive for wanting to speak fluent German was to be able to recall his Yiddish without having to resort to hiring a teacher. The need to re-create the “intimate language” of his parents became another “essential,” not so much for the words “but more than anything else, sounds, cries.” When he said the Yiddish words, the memories of family life returned, bringing “pleasure and surprise.” Once again he used the phrase “archeological discoveries” to explain the reward that plumbing the depths of his early life gave him.

  While he was deep into relearning Yiddish, Lica’s daughter, Dana, came to visit. Having her there, a young woman who reminded him so much of her mother, took him back to Romania and the days of “regression, childish rages, commotion, feelings I had forgotten, healed forever. Instead, no, nothing ever vanishes. I contain all the defects of the tribe.” It appeared that no matter how much pleasure he felt when he began the various explorations into his past, the conclusions he reached would not be entirely positive. He invariably found that the “defects” were in him and not in the exercise or activity, that there was something in his character or personality that made him unable to be genuinely happy and left him melancholy, if not actually depressed.

  STEINBERG GOT SMALL COMFORT FROM KNOWING that some of the most interesting people in the worlds of arts and letters and international society found his company so highly desirable that he was regaled with invitations for every day and night of his life. He chose instead to concentrate on the negative, brooding that these people were mere acquaintances and that he had no real friends with whom he could converse comfortably about the things that mattered to him. Since Harold Rosenberg’s death, he watched his world become increasingly constricted as illness and death took one friend after another. Aimé Maeght died of cancer in September 1981; Betty Parsons had a debilitating stroke in November and died in the summer of 1982; his longtime and long-suffering lawyer, Alexander Lindey, died that same year. Steinberg’s collection of obituaries that he or Hedda cut out of newspapers and magazines grew steadily, and most were of people he had known and usually known well. There were also too many sad tales about the infirmities and indignities of old age from friends such Jean Hélion, who confessed with some embarrassment that he could no longer paint because he was going blind and who timidly asked Steinberg to help him find a buyer for the beloved country estate he could no longer afford. Among the few old friends who remained active and healthy, some unpleasant changes were happening as well. Leo Steinberg sent a caustic, backhanded invitation for Saul to come to dinner with him and his then companion, Phoebe Lloyd, saying that it would have to be just the three of them as Saul had behaved too badly the last time they had been together in a larger group, when he had let everyone know he was miffed because they were all having such a good time conversing that they did not allow him to be the center of attention.

  Even Hedda addressed his dismaying personal behavior by couching her observations obliquely through comments about his art. After one of their daily telephone conversations, during which he was more self-centered, bitter, and depressed than usual, she sent one of her undated, unsigned missives telling him that every time she talked to him it upset her so much that she had to pull out some of his past drawings and study them intently before she could get over her distress at what he had become. She asked him why he was wasting his time and energy on so many pointless diversions and what led him to have such “total disregard for [his] gift.” She wondered if it was because he operated within the public art world, where there was only “abeyant hostility,” which left him unable to separate how he acted there from how he behaved in his personal relationships. It seemed to her that instead of avoiding these unnerving encounters, he sought them out. This was still no reason for him to behave as he did toward her and others—“to reprimand & put down, to sting, to ‘give low marks,’ ” all the while insisting that he needed so much “to be loved.” Most puzzling of all was how completely he lacked any sense of humor or proportion: “You, of all people!” Clearly, when even Hedda, who loved him unconditionally, could not tolerate his negative behavior, it was time to make significant changes.

  HE MADE CHANGES BY REACHING OUT, mainly to writers with whom he forged some of the most meaningful friendships of the last decades of his life. One of the closest, probably because he saw him more than the others, was William Gaddis, whom he met through Muriel Oxenberg Murphy. When Steinberg moved to 75th Street, Murphy welcomed him with a “block-busting warming party” and made him a regular dinner guest at her New York salons and her house in Wainscott. Gaddis soon became one of Steinberg’s closest friends, although he was touchy and thus the friendship began cautiously. Gaddis was in a particularly morose period, dejected because his books were not widely read or reviewed and quietly resentful that he owed his comfortable lifestyle to Murphy’s largesse. Steinberg was pleased to befriend someone whose personality seemed similar to his own, for Gaddis could be dour and was often laconic. In Steinberg’s semidepressed state of mind, he found it comfortable to be with another man who did not speak until or unless he had something intelligent and interesting to say. He was, however, wary of what he assumed was Gaddis’s ferocious intelligence, because he had a great deal of difficulty whenever he tried to read one of the novels, none of which he had yet succeeded in finishing. When Gaddis sent him work in progress to ask for comments or critiques, Steinberg fell into the mental equivalent of a cold sweat and usually tried to find something inoffensive and innocuous to say that did not betray the galloping insecurities he felt every time. It was when they began to talk about politics and philosophy that the friendship flourished, and it flourished quickly when they discovered similar tastes in literature as well.

  Each man was aware of the discrepancies in their professional circumstances, and it sometimes caused an unspoken tension between them: the accessibility of Steinberg’s art, the positive public reception it received, and the huge income it generated were almost something to be embarrassed about whenever he compared it to the way the inaccessibility of Gaddis’s dazzling fiction brought him few readers and generated little income. But Steinberg was a generous friend, and one of the ways he d
ealt with the unease Gaddis instilled in him was to do everything he could to further his friend’s career. He was largely responsible for the novelist’s membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, acting as Gaddis’s sponsor and soliciting seconding letters from Saul Bellow and petitioning other members to support his candidacy. Steinberg was one of the background figures who recommended candidates for the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” grants, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that Gaddis got one. He never revealed his role in securing the grant but allowed Gaddis to take full credit for the generous anointment proclaiming him a genius worthy of half a million dollars.

  Steinberg and Saul Bellow had been good but casual friends for several decades until Bellow married his fourth wife, the Romanian scholar Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, and wanted to introduce his “Romanian friend” to his “Romanian wife.” Bellow told Steinberg that he was planning to visit her family in Bucharest, and Steinberg jumped eagerly to help him plan the itinerary, which included detailed instructions for the inspection of his boyhood home and haunts. Bellow’s Romanian trip eventually resulted in his novel The Dean’s December, which Steinberg read in manuscript. By 1982, Bellow was routinely sending manuscript copies of other writings and asking for Steinberg’s comments and corrections. Whether it was a philosophical/political essay or a work of fiction, Steinberg responded, engaging far more freely in a critical dialogue than he ever did with Gaddis. Each time Steinberg went to Chicago, he made sure that his activities would leave time for a long dinner with good conversation. Steinberg thought Bellow was one of the rare people who took friendship seriously, “even if his style is naturally witty and tongue-in-cheek.” They had a rich correspondence and talked often on the phone, but as Bellow was a political conservative while Steinberg was moving slowly from the far left toward the center, they never discussed politics per se; it was as if they realized their friendship would not withstand it.

  Gaddis and Bellow were Steinberg’s contemporaries, and the thought that he and they were old and growing older did not escape him. He deliberately sought to make friends younger than himself by starting with some of the writers he admired at The New Yorker. For several years he enjoyed the company of the fiction editor and satirist Veronica Geng, who had the reputation of being opinionated but whom he liked because she conjured up word games and images for his amusement. He liked to go to the movies with Geng, because her vision of what she saw on the screen could be offbeat but was always good for long conversations that could go on for hours. However, Steinberg could be dismissive, even cruel, when it came to tolerating the differing opinions of others. He was astounded when Geng voiced a positive opinion about an innocuous movie that he felt had no redeeming value, and he ended the friendship without a backward glance. And yet when she was dying of a brain tumor and Philip Roth was soliciting $5,000 from each of a group of friends to help her, Steinberg gave it at once.

  “He could do this, just cut people out of his life,” said Ian (“Sandy”) Frazier, another of his younger New Yorker friends. When Frazier asked Steinberg one day if he still saw Geng, he said as matter-of-factly, as if he were refusing a second cup of coffee, “No, I divorced her”— divorced being the word he often used to describe the way he severed a friendship.

  Steinberg contacted Sandy Frazier shortly after The New Yorker published his comic essay “Dating Your Mom.” He told Frazier he was a “fan” who thought the younger man “could do no wrong” with anything he wrote. The praise meant so much to Frazier that he showed Steinberg’s letter (“like a diploma!”) to all his friends. It would have meant even more if he had known at the time how competitive Steinberg was with younger men and how unusual it was for him to reach out to one, particularly one who was tall, good-looking, and talented. He had actively avoided befriending such men for most of his life, but whether old age had made him mellow or whether he found it irresistible that Frazier’s slightly off-kilter way of perceiving the world so matched his own, he instigated a friendship that flourished.

  He did the same with Donald Barthelme around the same time, when he started to go fairly often to the fabled apartment on 11th Street where Barthelme had lived for years, both alone and through several marriages. Steinberg had known Don for at least a decade, but it was not until Barthelme married his second wife, Marion, that he became a frequent dinner guest, perching on the edge of the sofa, holding forth and regaling the other guests with his stories. Art was a common bond between Steinberg and Barthelme, and although they talked often of collaborating on a project, they never did. Marion and Don moved to Don’s hometown, Houston, in 1980, and he died there of throat cancer in 1989. Long before that, Marion recalled, “Saul fell out of both our lives.” Although they both enjoyed and valued Steinberg’s friendship, there was not enough time to devote to the kind of intense friendship he required.

  It was different with Frazier, who was younger and single and who thought being with Steinberg was “totally magical.” Frazier thought it almost uncanny how “he could make something happen in the real world to confirm his vision.” He told the story of how Steinberg wanted to get rid of a dead pine tree on the property at Springs and said that he remembered enough about demolition from his navy years to set the explosives himself. Indeed, the explosives went off and the tree rose high into the air—only to come down to rest upright in the same spot it had earlier occupied. And after a restaurant meal when the two men wanted to share a dessert, Steinberg asked the waiter for “one dessert and a blank plate.” When they were delivered, he cut the dessert so artistically that “it was as if he had made a drawing out of the situation.” Frazier was learning Russian, and he told Steinberg that some of the Cyrillic letters looked “really weird.” No, Steinberg demurred, they looked like “sneezes.” He reached for his pen and drew them, and to Frazier’s amazement, “You could see that they did look like sneezes.” He and Steinberg discovered so many parallels in their intellectual curiosity, particularly in their perception of the otherness of the external world, that they eventually collaborated on the book Canal Street.

  Steinberg took Frazier to meet Hedda, who liked him at once and whose devoted friend he became. He had heard there was another ongoing, if not permanent, relationship in Steinberg’s life, but he was not introduced to Sigrid until later. It was the architect Karen van Lengen whom he thought of as “Steinberg’s girlfriend,” because Steinberg made no secret that they had begun an affair, and he often took her to Frazier’s loft or she joined them for dinners. At the time she was working in the offices of I. M. Pei, and in the style of the times she wore her blond hair long, straight, and with bangs, which led Steinberg to make jokes about his “Blonde Chinese.” It was evident to Frazier that Steinberg “never took her seriously or gave her the recognition she deserved,” and when they became friends, both van Lengen and Frazier agreed not to take offense when Steinberg became “very airy about people,” particularly women. In a time of increasing political correctness, whenever anyone objected to his dismissive comments about women, he would say, “Yes, yes, it’s not important” and wave away the criticism. Hedda told them it was ingrained in him to treat women as all the men did in Romania, “like garbage.” They all regretted that he thought less of women than they would have preferred but agreed that overall “he was still a really good judge of people” and could recognize excellence when it mattered. After van Lengen won an important international competition and began receiving both brickbats and accolades fast and furiously, Steinberg celebrated her success with the drawing of a statue in which a man was falling off his pedestal. He interpreted the drawing, she recalled, “as telling me what I already knew, that the building would never get built. But then he said, ‘Don’t ever forget that you won this.’ ”

  LIKE FRAZIER, VAN LENGEN KNEW OF Sigrid long before she met her: “He kept her in a place where he could have total freedom, but still, he could not separate from her.” She mostly observed the relationship from afar but believed that Steinberg’s behav
ior was a combination of the intense physical relationship he had with Sigrid when they were together (which he did not hide from her) and, even more, that it was due to “the loyalty issue—he could never abandon her.” She knew that Steinberg had long-term, ongoing sexual relationships with other women and that he had one-night stands with others as often as he could arrange them. She also knew that he invited other women to join him and Frazier for dinner, but Sigrid was never one of them. Frazier thought it “kind of strange” that, on the rare occasion when he was invited to Springs, there were signs everywhere of Sigrid’s presence, even though she was never there.

  Sigrid was a shadowy background figure in Steinberg’s friendships with Frazier and van Lengen, both of which deepened over the years and lasted until the end of his life. They seldom saw Sigrid and then it was only in passing, and when she made her first attempt at suicide, in 1981, they were totally unaware of it. So too were the few people to whom Sigrid was, in her strangely distant way, close. Evelyn Hofer, Dore Ashton, the Nivola family—no one was aware that she had tried to end her life, let alone of the method that she used. Only once did Steinberg speak of it, when he told Mimi Gross many years later that he was “embarrassed” by what Sigrid had done. By the time he made this casual remark there were vague references by others to “the time before,” but by then there had been several other times before, and no one was sure which one was being talked about.

  “Poor Sigrid,” Aldo said as he tried to comfort his friend Saul, who had taken to phoning rather than confiding his worries to letters. Every time the telephone awakened him at some ungodly hour, Aldo knew that Sigrid had done something upsetting. The only comfort he could offer was to tell Saul that it was too bad that he and Sigrid could not live in friendship, for there did not seem to be any other way they could be together. From time to time the few other persons who were privy to Saul’s private life wondered if his obsessive concentration on hobbies or his ongoing need to experiment with new techniques for conveying his art might be strategies to distance himself from his troubled companion. If they were, they were seldom successful.