by Deirdre Bair
The Knopf contract made no mention of such a concept, but it did insist that the book had to be published by November 1992 to attract the holiday book-buying public. It was also specific about what the content should be: a showcase of Steinberg’s unique vision of America, in which he was free to portray any aspect of the country and its culture. The publisher hoped that he would create all new drawings but did not insist on it, and if he chose to use some he had on hand, he was to use only those that had not been published elsewhere. The only exception was those that had appeared in The New Yorker, for there was a large audience always eager to see them again in a more permanent form.
Steinberg’s previous books had never sold well and his advances had been small, so this whopping offer came at the perfect time to help him over the “galloping pessimism,” the gloom that always beset him when he thought about the intense work preparing a collection entailed. This particular task was more difficult than previous ones, because it came just as he was vigorously cleaning out his studio in the country and his office in the city, throwing away enormous amounts of work, convinced that there was very little worth saving. None of his drawings gave him pleasure anymore, not even “the famous ones” he had once admired.
As always happened when he became involved in a new project, once he got started on the new book, Steinberg became as fascinated with processes as with ideas. The color Xerox delighted him as he played with different sizes, parts, perspectives, and shadings of the same drawing. Aldo was alarmed by the uncertainty attached to the outcome of such games, but Steinberg assured him that the book would only be “50% in color or even less. Don’t worry.”
He was in constant contact with Aldo about the book’s content, but Aldo was worried about something that coincided with his letters: Steinberg’s embrace of the long-distance telephone to call him and Ada several times each week, sometimes on a daily basis. Steinberg boasted that his monthly bill was never less than $400, and when Aldo admonished him, Steinberg dismissed all his reservations by saying that the temptation to talk about possible selections instead of writing was too strong to resist. He did not tell Aldo the most important reason he phoned: that he could not bear the silence of being alone so much and his need to hear another human voice had become as strong as his need to write. He insisted passionately that their correspondence was the oldest, most lasting, and most important part of his life, and despite laziness and fear of senility, he implored Aldo to keep it going.
Steinberg’s loneliness eventually bred disinterest in the book, but he forced himself to do some work every day, even though much of it gave him little or no pleasure. Another ailment joined his growing list, as his eyes were beginning to develop cataracts and the resulting strain left him bleary-eyed and fatigued at the end of a long day of drawing. Often he collapsed in his favorite chair while the television droned on as he snored with his mouth open; when he woke up, he reminded himself of his father in old age.
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA WAS THUS a book created in loneliness, anger, depression, and outrage. The emotions that beset Saul Steinberg were so intense that they frightened him, and in the hope of controlling them, he used his diary as an account of his emotional ups and downs. “What mistake the book!” he wrote in one of his earliest entries, as he blamed it for all his unhappiness. He recorded how his insomnia was so pronounced every night that for every eight hours he spent in bed, he had to get up several times to sit in the lotus position for two to three hours at a stretch. Nothing gave him pleasure, not even using the hitherto enjoyable practice of Zen to concentrate his full and loving attention on preparing his simple evening meals.
He thought the original working title of the book might be “My Biography,” then “Biography,” or “A Biography,” depending on whether he was in an open and expansive mood or one in which he was overcome by some of what he called the “secret paranoias” that had arisen to the forefront of his consciousness. Ever since December 1989, when he had sat for hours in front of the television and watched, grimly mesmerized, as the punitive regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu came to an end, whole days had passed when he was gripped by thoughts of the psychic damage done to him by the country of his birth. Scant relief came when his friend and fellow Romanian E. M. Cioran told him that all his fears, regrets, and miseries were definitely caused by being born Romanian. It helped to find a countryman who had also re-created himself as a Western man, who thought “in the same surprising way” as Steinberg, and who had a “similar” biography.
He told Aldo about his similarities with Cioran in a letter he wrote on Yom Kippur, the day on which he always fasted, even though he never attended religious services. It was his way of “showing respect for my tribe, but it’s for me alone.” He had never come to terms with the grim childhood memories of “national horrors [and] Jewish superstitions” and in old age found himself unable to stop reliving them. As he could not dissolve the almost physical pain they made him suffer, one of the ways he compensated was by being an overly generous cultural Jew.
Steinberg received a confidential letter from the American Jewish Congress describing a dangerous similarity between the attitudes that led to the persecution and slaughter of European Jewry and the worrisome rise of such beliefs in America. He was among a select number of prominent Jewish artists and intellectuals who were invited to a private dinner with Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who, along with several of his colleagues, wanted to develop strategies to counteract what they saw as a dangerous trend. Steinberg was asked for his support and gave it generously. Quietly and usually anonymously, he supported Jewish candidates for office, among them Elizabeth Holtzman, who was running for Congress. Without being asked, he donated another selection of drawings to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, bringing his total to fourteen and complementing a large number of others given in his name by Sasha Schneider.
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA WAS THE MOST autobiographical of all Steinberg’s books, and by his own admission an “uneven book.” In a sense, he had three identities competing for primacy during the several years he made the drawings and wrestled with the selections, and he was aware of it. There was the Romanian boy who was ashamed of his birth country, the young man who became a stateless Jew when the Italy he had embraced rejected him, and the cultural American who loved his adopted country even as he cast a cold eye on every single one of its faults and foibles and revealed them for everyone to see. By the time he collected all the drawings and photocopies he wanted to use, he put them into one large folder with the new title he had decided on: “America’s Book.” A little later he changed it to its final, more autobiographical title, one that reflected his personal discovery of his homeland.
When the book appeared, the first thing most reviewers noticed was how Steinberg’s vision of America had become “tougher, grittier, darker.” He still portrayed America with a sense of humor, but more often than not, it was through drawings that “make you suck in your breath sharply rather than let it out with a laugh.” The reviews were generally positive, and one of the most perceptive was by Red Grooms in the New York Times Book Review. It was a review written by an insider, someone who knew that the artist’s life story was only slightly hidden within the pictures. Grooms had been a friend and observer of Steinberg’s life since the long-ago summer in Provincetown when he and his then wife, Mimi Gross, took Sigrid in to help her deal with the first breakup. Grooms recognized that Steinberg’s first book in fourteen years required the viewer to look at the work as an expression of his life, “a kind of autobiography that leaves the reader intrigued and searching … a kind of running commentary by the artist on his art and us.”
Grooms worked his way through the litany of Steinbergian icons, warning that even though the drawings were all designed to produce a smile at first glance, the viewer should be prepared to confront the “anger” that lay within them. Like Picasso in his later career, Grooms thought, Steinberg created “many monsters.” He wrote of the rage that lay b
ehind the initial wit in Steinberg’s drawings of women; he appraised the depiction of American architecture as a “great comedy” that exposed all its pretentious imitations of past styles and motifs; he observed quietly how, in contrast to the buildings, Steinberg’s portraits of people dissolved into “indistinct things, jots in a whole landscape.” He called Steinberg “the smartest person around in art,” who with this book had become “a great visual artist almost in spite of his analytical intelligence.” For Grooms, Steinberg was “in a sense like a superb writer; he can sit down in front of a clean sheet of paper and go absolutely anywhere he chooses to—and take us along with him.”
This was how Steinberg wanted his work to be judged, and he certainly would have appreciated it if he had been in a better frame of mind. Another critic who appraised these drawings when they appeared in the Pace exhibition that was concurrent with the book’s publication unknowingly interpreted Steinberg’s vision in art in a way that could have explained his attitude toward life: “However playful, clever, and funny the pieces of Steinberg’s puzzle are, he has a morbid, existential, peculiarly tragic vision of America.”
IF THE GENERAL RECEPTION OF THE book cheered Steinberg out of his melancholy, it did not last long. Sales were (with the most positive spin) tepid at best: 7,360 copies were sold, and the book was soon remaindered. Although the art critic Arthur Danto’s introduction was praised by all who read it, Steinberg was close-lipped and noncommittal when asked what he thought of it, so if he had objections, he kept them to himself. He was famed for writing letters of complaint to his editors and publishers about every aspect of a book’s production and final appearance, starting with Cass Canfield; continuing through Christopher Sinclair Stevenson at his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton; the soothing and patient Elizabeth Sifton, who was famed for her ability to calm emotional writers; and Peter Andersen, who kept him calm at Knopf. In the aftermath of the publication of The Discovery of America, Steinberg was dissatisfied with everyone and everything, and he wanted to make a change—any change. Since he could not change his landlord (as he did in his student days in Milan), he changed his agent. Wendy Weil had represented him since 1967–68, but in 1992 he allowed Sandy Frazier and Arne Glimcher to persuade him to leave her for Andrew Wylie.
Weil was clearly hurt by Steinberg’s decision, which he delivered as a fiat in a short phone conversation. She summed it up almost two decades later as Steinberg’s “way of going always to the ones who were eager to bring in the money. He had a way of going to more and more competitive representation.”
STEINBERG SAID HE STOPPED TRYING TO write a diary because doing it made him get used to being happy and he didn’t like the feeling. He preferred to complain about “real sorrows and some imaginary ones,” listing a few but not specifying which was which. He was becoming even more “cantankerous (bisbetico, the dictionary says).” The voices he overheard grated, and he hated “gabbing people, the type who use you know or sort of.” He could not stand the smell of perfume, so he went out of his way to avoid elevators and would not take buses. Not until the dreaded Christmas holidays were upon him and he was alone in Springs did he admit the real reason behind his “kvetching” (a Yiddish word he much admired but seldom, if ever, used in writing or in public): “Every now and then I’m afraid of finding myself alone, without any real family, my friendships distant or neglected or purely social.”
A friendship that developed slowly but became important in his final years was with Prudence Crowther, whom he first met in 1984 when she contacted him about the collection of S. J. Perelman’s letters that she was preparing for the Viking Press. She wanted to know if it was true that Perelman had been so touched by Steinberg’s gift of a large collage that in exchange he had given Steinberg his copy of the first edition of the book that was “his bible, Ulysses,” knowing that it was Steinberg’s favorite novel as well. Steinberg told her the story was true and invited her to dinner. It was pleasant to find someone who had been close to his beloved old friend Sid and who could join him in recalling his wit and his skewed and quirky insights into the world he wrote about. Steinberg remembered how reading Perelman’s stories in The New Yorker when he was a newly arrived immigrant provided “an invaluable shortcut to the clichés of American culture.” When Prudence began to send Saul clippings from newspapers and magazines, he learned that she shared his and Sid’s predilection for news of the offbeat, the weird, and the silly, and it cheered him to read the comments she made on the small notes or Post-its that she sent with them.
Saul discovered that he was comfortable in Prudence’s company, and he enjoyed her friendship so much that once he had made the ritual (and almost desultory) pass and been gently rebuffed, he was content to let her become a boon companion and caregiver, but he no longer felt the need to seduce her. They saw each other sporadically until the mid-1990s, sometimes only several times in a single year. When he began to see her more frequently, he told Aldo that he was surprised by the realization that she was the “only” female friend with whom he had not had a sexual involvement, which was a demonstration of his “evolution.” It followed naturally that he would want to introduce her to Hedda.
Prudence believed that what Saul especially liked about her was how completely separate she was from the small circle of people he considered his close friends, but the most important quality she represented for him was that he saw in her someone in whom he could confide other than Hedda. He could tell Hedda anything and he did, but there were times when her unremitting honesty was not what he wanted to hear. Prudence was nonjudgmental and seemed to be able to cope with whatever came her way, but he was careful about what he confided to her. Increasingly he needed a buffer of protection and comfort, and that is what she provided. He wanted to share his new friend with Hedda, but also he wanted (perhaps unconsciously) for Prudence to learn about him through someone else’s perspective, without his having to tell her directly about his personal life.
At their first or second meeting, Saul told Prudence that Sigrid was his “well—[pause]—fiancée.” She remembered it as his “attempt to find a gracious way to acknowledge the attachment … without getting into a complicated story he saw no need to narrate.” When she and Hedda became friends, she often learned more about Sigrid from Hedda than she did from Saul, for “he trusted Hedda to explain the sentimental arrangement of his life in a way that was fair to all of them, and if it wasn’t, well, he accepted that possibility, too. Hedda was entitled to her judgments.”
Saul attempted to work out what he felt for Prudence in a conversation with Hedda when he sat in her kitchen on a summer Sunday afternoon. He began by trying to explain the general “remorse” that gripped him, telling Hedda that it was a “constant thing in my relationship with P” and it stemmed from “the old remorse-revenge thing” that colored so many decisions he made within his other personal relationships. He wrote in the diary that being with Prudence offered a chance to make “a change, a real change in my life that implies many other changes: honesty, sobriety, and prudence,” using the lowercase letter to indicate the trait and not the person. After that, he wrote two words he did not explain further: “Work. love?”
The conversation with Hedda that began about Prudence moved naturally to Sigrid, and although they seldom talked about her except for generalities about her health or activities, Saul launched into details of their recent disagreements. This led Hedda to chastise him for a litany of accusations about who was the guilty party in their ongoing “war.” As soon as she began, he realized that opening up to her was “a mistake: facts become gossip. Everybody, victim & judge show the worst of themselves. Hedda contaminated becomes petty.” He felt “stupid, ugly, etc.” and left as soon as he could get away.
STEINBERG WAS ALWAYS PROUD OF HIS membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters (“only 200 members,” he told Aldo), but he was inordinately proud when he was inducted into the smaller, elite American Academy, boasting that he was now one of “the crè
me de la crème, numbering only 45.” Being elected to the seat held by the late Isaac Bashevis Singer filled him with “surprising, unexpected, and innocent enough pleasure,” but he still managed to put a morbid twist onto the “affection” the members showed by his election, claiming that nowadays “fear” was the only emotion he routinely inspired.
Another mixed pleasure came when his first cover in five years appeared on The New Yorker on January 13, 1992, “to universal surprise and astonishment.” It showed a woman standing on a pedestal holding a violin aloft in one hand and a bow in the other, her wrists shackled with handcuffs from which broken chains dangled. It was one of the drawings he had made some time before and was followed by three more covers that year, all gleaned from the files, all fairly calm and traditional, in the Steinberg style that readers had come to expect. When Tina Brown replaced Robert Gottlieb as editor and appointed Françoise Mouly as art director, the covers took on the edginess and buzz that characterized Brown’s tenure at the magazine. She selected one drawing for a cover in 1993, of a woman’s face as a high-heeled shoe, that would qualify neatly to slot Steinberg into an affinity with Picasso’s late “monsters.” When he succumbed to Brown’s peace entreaties, three more covers followed in 1994. After that, whenever he felt he had something for the magazine, he either submitted new material or pulled old drawings from his files, but by then everything had become (again in Grooms’s description) “tougher, grittier, and darker” on its own, without Brown’s prompting.