Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  The Royal College of Art in London made him an honorary doctor at the 1988 convocation, a quiet and low-key ceremony compared to the one at Yale the following June, when he was awarded another honorary doctorate. He was about to decline it when Arne Glimcher insisted that he had to go, and not only that, he had to go in style: Glimcher chartered a small plane to fly Steinberg from Springs to New Haven, a twelve-minute flight, as opposed to the more than two hours it would take by ferry and highway. A limousine met the plane and took him to the Yale campus to meet his hosts, John Hollander and his wife, the sculptor Natalie Charkow. Steinberg broke his ban on being seen in public with Sigrid by inviting her, and since he was allowed as many guests as he wanted, he invited quite a few to the ceremony.

  Steinberg was delighted to be in the company of the other honorees, who included Isaiah Berlin, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Stephen Hawking. He went through the ceremony in a daze, accepting “demonstrations of affection from substantial people,” and was relieved when it ended and he could board the plane for the short flight back to Springs. The experience was so emotionally exhausting that he fell sound asleep on the flight, and when he woke up, he reminded himself that “the pleasures of vanity are poisonous.”

  Granted, he was in a deep “melancholy” two years later when he recorded his official version of the event in a diary he had begun to keep, but what he described in 1991 was far from his earlier memory or from those of the people who were with him on that day in June 1989. Everyone else remembered a slight man of impeccable manners, dress, and demeanor who was quietly pleased to wear an academic robe and have a great fuss made over him. But when he summarized the event for the diary, he wrote: “How monstrous. Nervous hosts … Tension of academics.” As for the event itself, “Secretly I thought it was a demeaning honor. Best part the small plane ride pilot and fat girl copilot.” His enthusiasm for participating in the fellowship activities of Yale’s Morse College was over: “Bedraggled New Haven, dangerous town.”

  THERE WERE FOUR MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF Steinberg’s work as the 1980s came to a close, the first at Galerie Maeght Lelong in 1986, followed in 1988 by one at the Galerie Adrien Maeght. Both shows received good sales and positive reviews and were accorded the same enthusiasm that had characterized all of Steinberg’s European appearances. In the catalogue for the first, he gave a long, thoughtful interview to Jean Frémon, and the second featured an essay by Eugène Ionesco, his fellow Romanian and good friend. Ionesco was a respected denizen of the literary avant-garde, and his praise was welcome to an artist who sometimes feared that his work was considered mired in a now passé tradition.

  When Steinberg showed his work in Nuremberg at the fourth Internationale Triennale der Zeichnung in 1988, he joked that it was “a kind of personal payback for 1939,” as a way to gird against too-high personal expectations. However, essays by Italo Calvino and the museum’s director, Curt Heigl, enhanced the catalogue and the show received rave reviews in the German press, further adding to his always positive reception by the German public. It helped some, but not entirely, to mitigate the shock he had received the year before, when he showed his newest work at the Pace Gallery and John Russell wrote a snide, tongue-in-cheek assessment similar to the one of a decade earlier written after the Whitney retrospective. Russell’s second damn-with-faint-praise dismissal was unexpected after so many years of nothing but fulsome critical praise, and it was therefore shocking not only to Steinberg but to all his friends. To head off their many attempts to console him, he phoned one after the other to say, “Wow! I’ve survived,” and to tell them that the review didn’t matter. Again and again he repeated, “I’m all right,” as they railed against Russell. This was unusual behavior for him, as in the past he had always read reviews carefully and usually had something nasty to say about critics who did not praise his work wholeheartedly.

  THE INTERVIEWERS WHO CAME TO TALK to Steinberg now were more interested in assessing the place he would hold in perpetuity than in the immediacy of whatever work he was exhibiting at the time. He was often curt and dismissive with art historians or cultural critics, because he thought they were shortsightedly assessing his canon as final and finished while he was busy all the time with new work. Despite the Russell review, he did not think his best work was behind him; nor did he think he was merely producing more of the same old tried-and-true. He sincerely believed that he was creating something new each time he put pen to paper.

  Steinberg was only interested in talking to interviewers who would let him hold forth about the themes, events, and ideas that engaged him as the decade of the 1980s wound down. He had not given many interviews for the past several years because the press had pretty much left him alone until the recent spate of exhibitions brought him back into their ken. Now that there were new requests to talk to him, he was beset by the same sort of shudders he had felt after the Whitney retrospective, and just as he had refused then to collect, collate, and preserve his past, he insisted on doing the same now.

  His resentment against becoming “an acquisition” for collectors intensified, but once his work was sold, there was little he could do to control what became of it. He railed against pressures from all those in the art world “who understand nothing but profits and sniff them out. Still upset over “the famous poster,” he was further outraged when The New Yorker “published an ugly book” that included seventy of his covers, “poorly printed, shrunk down, mixed in with vulgar stuff.” In this instance, the magazine owned the rights and did not even notify Steinberg, “so I’d better defend myself,” he concluded. What he meant was that he needed to take an active role in overseeing anything about his work that was being put into print.

  He moved immediately to take a commanding role when two of his most astute buyers, Jeffrey Loria and his then wife, Sivia, decided to produce a book of their collection in connection with its exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. The Lorias both had backgrounds in the art world and were perceptive about what would be important and lasting, so they purchased accordingly. In Steinberg’s case, they were interested in the chronological development of the artist’s oeuvre and especially how a drawing came into being, so they bought early versions of work in progress as well as the finished drawings. Their collection (to name only some) ranged from Steinberg’s 1940s Manhattan taxis to some of his various Main Streets to several series of studies: “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” “The American Corrida,” and “Lexington and Wilshire.”

  With his semi-antagonistic attitude toward collectors, Steinberg resented having his work presented in book form by someone other than himself and wanted as much control over the project as he could claim. The Lorias were delighted to have his participation, as it gave a special imprimatur to the book, even though they were aware from the beginning of how stubborn he could be about its appearance. Jeffrey Loria asked the distinguished book designer Nathan Garland to be in charge of the project and told him when he signed on that Steinberg would be “a definite problem.” Loria told Garland to “be firm,” and Garland did try, “but in the end, Steinberg got almost all of what he wanted.” Garland thought that many of Steinberg’s ideas about book design were the insights of a “genius, but in many others, he was just wrong. I deferred to him always but it was really wrong to let him get away with it.”

  In the end, Steinberg groused about the book but was also pleased with it. He told John Updike that his introduction made him “happy to be taken seriously by a man whom I admire,” but he arrived at this opinion only after a fairly extensive exchange of correspondence concerning the rewriting of “sensitive spots” where he thought Updike was “over-nationalizing [his] art as the product of a Romanian looking at the U.S.” Updike explained that “the title and drift” of the book had led him to this emphasis, but he was happy to revise and eliminate as much “discomfort” as Steinberg wanted. Steinberg was more swiftly satisfied with Jean Leymarie’s “appreciation,” which had not required as much rewriting. Where
as Updike praised Steinberg for his vitality in conveying “national symbols,” calling him a “visual philosopher who continues wonderingly to trace our tribal markings,” Leymarie acknowledged Steinberg’s affinity with Joyce and Nabokov, saying that he shared their “cult of style, and predilection for parody, as well as an ambition for the universal and a quest for the autobiographical.”

  This was exactly the “context” Steinberg wanted for his work, and he could not have said it better himself. But by the time this generous praise came, his “melancholy” had become crippling depression and he was unable to appreciate it.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE LATEST NEWS

  What I do these days is to review the past, revive the past.

  Sometime in mid-June 1989, the cat Papoose disappeared, and Steinberg and his friends and neighbors spent the next two weeks combing the area as they tried unsuccessfully to find him. Saul was alone in Springs, so he phoned Sigrid in New York and she came at once, distraught and weeping. Papoose was fifteen and, though not in obvious bad health, had been noticeably slowing down for some time. Saul thought he had become “Sigrid’s cat” as he aged, following her everywhere and walking slowly like the old men Saul remembered trudging along on Mexican roads. He didn’t realize the intensity of his own attachment until the cat was gone, when he enumerated Papoose’s human qualities, “courage, grace, and dignity, a true man.” Many months later, when he could not stop mourning, he told Hedda that of all the people he loved who had died, he missed Papoose the most. And then he corrected himself to say that he still missed Lica just as intensely, even though she had been dead for sixteen years.

  For the entire month of July, Saul and Sigrid and the others searched the surrounding roads and woods, and in late August, Gordon Pulis found Papoose’s body. Saul and Sigrid buried him with the full dignity they believed he deserved. Hidden in the trees behind the house was the remnant of a Revolutionary War cemetery, with one tombstone still standing over the solitary grave of a young girl. It seemed a fitting spot, and Sigrid told Saul that when she died, if she could not buried in Africa, she wanted to lie next to the cat, but to make sure she was facing east, toward the continent she loved so much. He told her she would have to make her own arrangements, as he was much older and would be the first to go.

  Steinberg with Papoose. (illustration credit 43.1)

  With the death of Papoose, the most important of the few remaining bonds that held them together was severed, but they still could not separate entirely. Several months later, Sigrid was back in New York, begging to be allowed to come to the house and medicating herself far more heavily than before, while Saul was stubbornly solitary in Springs and starting an antidepressant regimen that lasted the rest of his life. He began with Prozac, then changed to Zoloft, and after that he took Librium. The depression that began after the cat died was different from previous ones, in that every peripheral thing irritated and upset him.

  When Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker in October 1992, Steinberg was still so incensed over Shawn’s dismissal that he refused all her overtures to persuade him to submit new drawings. He called S. I. Newhouse “a perfect shit” and threw out his stash of the magazine’s stationery because the content had become “stupid” and he no longer wanted to be associated with it. “Who would have thought it?” he asked—“a real divorce, which should have happened years ago.” It was wrenching to cut himself off, and it left him unmoored and adrift, asking rhetorically where his real patria was and whether he still had one. His refuge was no longer the magazine, nor was it the Pace Gallery; Sigrid and Papoose had been his anchors for years but “less now,” he concluded sadly.

  HE WOULD NOT LET SIGRID COME to Springs and he could not stand to be alone in the house during the winter because bad weather made everything “disappear.” He hastened to the city and decided that all he had left to hold on to was “75th and Park and my apartment.” He made a series of drawings of his neighborhood, one of which eventually became a New Yorker cover, a simple collection of white street grids with yellow squares for the buildings, a red X carefully marking the location of his. By the 1990s, Lexington Avenue, where he had enjoyed walking, daydreaming, and window-shopping since his earliest days in New York, had become dark, frightening, and infested with aggressive beggars. Homeless people slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk directly opposite his building, some of them covered incongruously in colorful silk or velvet rags they had pulled out of dumpsters. “How frightening! Baghdad!” he declared as he drew chaotic cityscapes to capture the impression. There was a citywide strike of all the workers in apartment buildings and tenants had to take over the maintenance; Steinberg was assigned a day of “desk duty” to answer the phones and monitor the traffic in and out of the building. Mostly he read the papers and hoped he would not have to interact with his neighbors, particularly the “slightly unbalanced” woman who lived above him, who was “the daughter of Somoza, the old butcher of Nicaragua.” His once vibrant neighborhood reminded him of Russia and was “as dead as Wall Street.”

  There was a momentary lull in Steinberg’s self-pity when Saul Bellow came to town and invited him to meet Janice, his newest wife. It was the second pleasing event in a row, for the previous night he had dined with President Vaclav Hável of Czechoslovakia, who flattered him with such a fulsome declaration of “devotion” to his books that the “depressed state of [Steinberg’s] soul” was momentarily raised. Otherwise, he was beset by “the dark winter, some rotten accurate news [about the Persian Gulf War], other stuff like my teeth, which make my life ridiculous and destroy my appetite.” Extractions and implants made eating a chore, but even worse, they reduced his stamina so that he could not work for the same length of time or with the speed and precision of his younger days. He experienced “drowsiness, ill temper, doubts about everything.” He still could not get over how much he missed Papoose and how the cat continued to be “an important character” in his life. Sigrid was hurting too, but Saul was worried about something other than how she was dealing with the cat’s death.

  After Sigrid told him that every time she went to Mali she was sexually involved with a tribal leader she called an “African prince,” Saul scheduled AIDS tests for them both. There was a momentary scare when his physician requested an additional blood sample, but in the end both he and Sigrid were declared “negative for antibody to HIV-1.” Although he continued to collect articles explaining how men could enjoy sex well into their nineties and pamphlets that showed the positions they should use after hip replacement surgery or back injury (some of which he attached to the AIDS test results), by the time of the tests in February 1991, his sexual relationship with Sigrid was virtually over and he looked for partners elsewhere. Whether it was the specific idea of her being with an African or whether it was his general uneasiness because she was twenty-two years younger than he and at fifty-five still yearning for a committed relationship, he simply could not deal with the fact of her sexuality.

  Meanwhile, at seventy-seven he was sexually active whenever the opportunity presented itself, and he intended to be so for the rest of his life, even though he complained bitterly about the bed partners with whom he had had ongoing dalliances for anywhere from twenty to forty years. He grumbled that they still expected him to woo them first with dinner and then to perform vigorously after he had ruined his stomach with the bad wines and dreadful food most of his neighborhood restaurants served, which he described as one step up from indigestible “chicken nuggets and French fries.” He wondered how he could possibly be expected to “make it, full of white wine and restaurant food.” Always before, no matter how estranged he and Sigrid had been, one or both could count on good sex to bring them back together (albeit temporarily, and they both knew it), but by 1991 those days were well and truly gone.

  STEINBERG WAS FOND OF GIVING ALDO “the latest news” in the style of a flashy headline. His big announcement in April 1991 was that he was finally over the “melancholy” that ha
d all but crippled him for the last nine or ten months. He was so full of energy that he was enthusiastically practicing the simplification of Zen to declutter his two homes. He threw away huge numbers of drawings and objects in both places, and because it made him feel so good, he began to keep a diary of everything he thought or did, “every day, long or short.” For two months, from April 25 to July 5, he described what he wrote as “talk in shorthand,” a collection of brief notations he probably intended to use to jog his memory at some future date. Clearly he intended the diary to be a document he could refer to, for he noted ideas for visual drawings, lists of words that might lend themselves to word drawings, and musings gleaned from his readings that might translate into single-subject portfolios. He was also playing with one of his new toys, a color Xerox machine, and he arranged pictures into a dummy that he thought might become a book, although he still needed time to think about whether he was ready to take on another one.

  When he finally got under way with The Discovery of America, Steinberg insisted that it had never been his idea, and he convinced himself during one of his “melancholies” that it originated with others who were only out for money. He blamed the book on pressure from his agent, Wendy Weil, and his dealer, Arne Glimcher, claiming that they were unnecessarily worried that by refusing to submit new work to The New Yorker he was removing himself from the public eye and thus beginning a slow slide toward public indifference that would harm his reputation and their income. They were entreating and he was resisting when “complications” arose in the form of an offer from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for the then astronomical sum of $100,000 as an advance against royalties. It left Steinberg astonished, his agent delighted, and his dealer “aroused [with] jealousy” as he prepared to schedule an exhibition to publicize what Steinberg called his “personal nightmare, a Christmas Gift book.”