Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  Tina Brown was so intent on having Steinberg’s art appear within the pages of the magazine that she put Mouly in “personal charge” of him, warning that he could be “heavy furniture.” Brown, whose reputation was for brash and cocky self-assurance, took care to write Steinberg a personal letter explaining how she made editorial decisions and what she intended for the magazine to become under her leadership. She told him that she was well aware of the universally negative chatter about her, but what would sadden her most about “such absurd one-dimensional publicity” was if Steinberg were to let it convince him that all her choices were “suspect and exploitative.” She hoped to persuade him that when she expressed enthusiasm for his work, she was being sincere: “I want to put something on the cover because I love it, not because I am obsessed with sensation.” She hoped that over time he would believe that whenever she expressed approbation for his work, it was not an “irretrievable black mark” but rather sheer appreciation.

  Steinberg never changed his initial negative attitude toward Brown, that her emphasis was on “buzz” rather than thoughtful commentary, perhaps because he had been so close to Shawn and so respectful of the way he had run the magazine. Steinberg had a good relationship with Mouly, and as his love-hate relationship with the magazine continued, she became an acceptable stand-in for his earlier rapport with Carmine Peppe, Jim Geraghty, Shawn, and even Ross. When he had drawings he wanted to submit, he would invite Mouly to his apartment for long afternoon sessions of drinking espresso and slowly examining them one by one, all the while watching her face to gauge her response. As their formal and polite friendship developed, he counted Mouly as the one constant entity in his professional contact with a magazine that he thought had degenerated into a frenzied glorification of celebrities and glitz. Steinberg still had a few old friends on the staff with whom he socialized, among them Roger Angell and Brendan Gill, and also Joseph Mitchell, whom he never saw because he never set foot on the magazine’s premises and Mitchell never left his office.

  After Brown persuaded Steinberg to submit new work to The New Yorker, he wrote to Shawn to tell him he had done so. Shawn did not reply to his letter, so Steinberg reached out again when The Discovery of America was published by sending him a signed copy. Shawn did reply then, saying, “Whenever and wherever your work appears, all of us have reason to be grateful … I cherish your work whenever and wherever I find it.” His letter was mistakenly dated December 8, 1992, the day he died of a heart attack, but he had written it earlier, because Steinberg received it on December 5. Steinberg thought of it as a “merciful” letter of farewell that forgave him for the “hurt” Shawn must have harbored, even though the four covers were file drawings and Steinberg had not submitted anything new since Shawn had been fired.

  WITH SHAWN’S DEATH, THE OLD DAYS were well and truly gone, another indication that the world Steinberg knew was so changed that he was hard-pressed to find a place in it. In an attempt to raise his spirits, he set mental exercises to force himself to recall when he had been truly happy, and he concluded that the last time was June 15, 1960, when he had moved to Washington Square Village. He had to stop playing this mental game, because thinking about his first years with Sigrid made him sad to remember how long it had been since he had felt that “everything was possible.”

  Much of his unhappiness was caused by anxiety over Sigrid’s escalating erratic behavior. He always used the term remorse to describe his responses to it, and frequently he assessed the range of emotions that gripped him when she was in one of her frightening downward spirals by making lists of them. Some months earlier, after she had read Kate Millett’s The Loony-Bin Trip, she recorded her thoughts in one of the diaries she left behind in Springs so he would be sure to find and read it. Sigrid wrote of how Millett described “the awful helplessness of the ill person, not only in relation to what the world may do to her but what her own mind may do to her.” Then she wrote: “—if I let it.” Saul blamed himself for always giving in to Sigrid and letting her get her way through a kind of emotional blackmail, to which he always responded with “the same mistake.” In this case, it was giving in to her insistence that she should be allowed to come to Springs while he was there. During a long night of sitting in the lotus position, he listed what had become a ritualistic litany of his assessment of her mental instability and how he always dealt with it: “Postpone, delay, cover up, ignore, deny.”

  She arrived by bus on Monday afternoon, June 10, and by evening he had consumed more white wine than he had drunk in a very long time. He was so alarmed by her condition that he invented excuses to be away from the house each day she was there, even something so uncharacteristic as “walking for two hours in foolish shops” on the streets of East Hampton to kill time after his car had been serviced. When he was in the house, things were so tense between them that when it was time for her to leave, on June 16, he took her to the Hampton Jitney even though he knew he would be driving into the city the next day for more of his ongoing dental surgery. While he was there, she went back to Springs to stay alone, and on June 27 managed somehow to get herself to the Southampton Hospital emergency room, where she asked to see a psychiatrist who could help her cope with “acute depression.” She did not tell the physicians there that she was under the care of Dr. Armin Wanner in New York and left the hospital, apparently with a new prescription, to return to the house in Springs.

  By July 5, Saul was back in the country and planning to spend the rest of the summer recuperating from several tooth extractions, which were followed by the first stages of implants. Sigrid was still there too, keeping to her quarters on the second floor, occasionally walking down to her “little house” studio, but mostly just sitting quietly outside in the sun. On July 13, when she felt so tormented that she thought she could not go on living, she went to her bedroom, swallowed a bottle of sedatives, smoked what she thought would be her last cigarette, and fell asleep. When she woke up, she was once again in Southampton Hospital, this time having her stomach pumped.

  CHAPTER 44

  AFFIRMATION OF THINGS AS THEY ARE

  Something else, too, came to me from my illness. I might formulate it as an affirmation of things as they are: an unconditional “yes” to that which is, without subjective protests— acceptance of the conditions of existence as I see them and understand them, acceptance of my own nature, as I happen to be.

  Steinberg found Sigrid in the upstairs hallway on the night of July 13, 1992. The sedatives she had taken put her into a restless sleep and she awakened in the haze of a nightmare, confused by loud sounds of banging, clanging, and smashing, all coming from the kitchen below her bedroom. Dreaming that she was a child in wartime Trier, she stumbled into the hallway to call for her father to end the noise and come to comfort her. When she tried to turn on the light, her fingernail caught in the switch and she called out in pain for her papa. The pain became so severe that it shocked her into momentary consciousness and she realized where she was and cried out for Saul. The next thing she remembered was “waking with his name in my mouth.”

  At first he thought she was merely high on drugs and booze, but then he took her back to her bedroom and saw the suicide note propped on the bedside table. In it, she asked him to forgive her “for doing this awful thing to you (and to myself ). I can’t go on.” Sigrid’s note explained that she had taken the overdose in the house because it was the only place she felt safe and she did not want to die in New York City. She implored him not to blame himself, for everything was all her fault, and without him she would have “perished long ago. Though you don’t believe me, I loved you more than you know. Now I just want to sleep. It’s too late.” Her last sentences conveyed both astonishment and relief: “I finally did it. I can’t believe it.”

  An ambulance took her to Southampton Hospital, where her stomach was pumped and she was kept under constant watch. Steinberg called her New York physicians, the psychopharmacologist Dr. Arnold Rosen and the Jungian psychotherapist Dr. Ar
min Wanner. There was some discussion about transferring her to a New York facility, but when the Southampton doctors determined that she was unlikely to make another attempt, everyone agreed she should stay there. “It’s rather nice and beats the Hamptons parties,” she wrote to Steinberg on July 17, even though a psychiatric ward was “a strange place to be on Quatorze Juillet.” She told him she could go on and on describing the “fascinating patients,” but she wouldn’t because he would probably think she was “insane.”

  Several days later she was discharged into Steinberg’s care and allowed to return to Springs until she was well enough to travel to the city. He did not want to send her off to be alone in her apartment and invited her to stay in the house, mainly so he could keep alert for further signs of trouble. She declined his offer because she was practically frantic about the need to see Dr. Wanner, whom she wanted to appoint as her proxy for health care. Once back in the city, she and the doctor signed a living will wherein he agreed to honor her wishes to have a “DNR: do not resuscitate.” She settled into her apartment and resumed her therapy sessions with intensity, at first three to five times weekly, then gradually weaning herself to once, sometimes twice. Wanner told Sigrid that she must not discuss her treatment with anyone, particularly Saul. This worried Evelyn Hofer enough to tell him of her concern.

  Hofer had been Wanner’s patient, and she had recommended him to Sigrid shortly before she ended her own treatment. She told Steinberg that she feared Wanner was isolating Sigrid from the people who loved and wanted to help her, since he had also ordered her not to see Hofer and the several friends who lived in her apartment building and who routinely checked to see if she was all right. Wanner insisted that his request was merely part of the normal confidentiality between doctor and patient, but Hofer called it unnecessary isolation and “secrecy.” She said that as Sigrid would no longer see or speak to her, it was up to Steinberg to do something. As Sigrid obeyed Wanner completely, all Steinberg could do was to support her treatment by paying her bills.

  Now more than ever he was engulfed in all sorts of variations on his usual “remorse,” particularly his knee-jerk responses of “delay, cover up, ignore, deny,” which he had been invoking for the better part of the past year. To them he added unfocused anxiety and a great deal of fear and worry over what Sigrid might do next. In April, several months before the July suicide attempt, she had sent him a copy of a letter she had written to Arne Glimcher six years earlier when she gave him one of Steinberg’s drawings to sell, one of the most meaningful gifts he had ever given her, which she sold to spite him. In the letter, she told Glimcher not to fear that she would make a public scene about her dissatisfaction with the price he obtained, because there was nothing she could do about it. Then she changed the subject and drifted off into talking about Africa, warning him that Africans have a saying, “Elephants and women never forget.” Telling him that in Africa time and money do not have the same fixed meaning as in Western societies and that unresolved issues do not go away, she launched into what had been festering within her for years, her perception that Glimcher had such disregard for her that he ignored her completely and was unaware that she even existed. She was only writing to remind him that she did exist, and that he would never hear from her again. The letter was typed to this point, but she ended with a handwritten scrawl: “I had lots of fun writing this letter—I seem to enjoy writing crank letters.”

  She also enjoyed writing unsettling messages on the white fluted paper plates, such as the one she left lying on the kitchen table shortly after she sent Saul the copy of her letter to Glimcher. On it she wrote three words: “Reproche [sic], Remove, Revenge.” A great deal of the last sentiment colored her behavior in the months leading up to the suicide attempt. She felt that she had been deeply hurt, snubbed, and humiliated by many of Saul’s friends, and she wanted them, but especially him, to feel some of this same pain. He was shocked and in despair when she took a Giacometti drawing he had given her to Christie’s and sold it for $70,000. It had been a gift to him from the artist, his dear friend, and he had given it to Sigrid because he was reluctant to express deep emotion openly and wanted to show that he loved her without having to put it into words, and he wanted her to have something he truly loved. Her share of the sale was $64,100, but such a large check did not stop her from inflicting more pain. She sent him color photocopies of two more of his drawings she had just sold, along with a note saying that as her demands were increasing, she should probably sign her name to this letter as James Joyce’s spendthrift wife, Nora Barnacle, who, no matter how much she had, always wanted something more.

  Sigrid blamed Saul for not using his influence to help her in the art world, and she was always frustrated by her inability to earn money, so she added up her total income for the year and left it where he could find it: “From Steinberg: $30,000, bank interest $873.68. That’s all.” Then she listed her medical expenses, a grand total of $30,279.17. She had Blue Cross insurance, which paid for $22,718.33, leaving her to find the remaining $7,520.84. Without comment or criticism, he paid, as he always did. Then she made another list, of all the things she had bought during her “depression and recent hypo/manic episode,” a spending spree of $14,300 charged to credit cards issued in the name of “Mrs. Steinberg” and billed directly to him. She had charged new linoleum in her apartment and payment to the carpenter who put it down, a wheelchair that she needed after her back surgery, mirrors, other decorative objects, and— ominously—a coffin. Saul paid those bills too, without comment, and that made her even angrier, because he responded to everything with perfect equanimity and she could not provoke a rise.

  In truth, he was so frightened that his own health was affected. He told Aldo that her suicide attempt had raised such powerful emotions within him that he “reflected the entire drama like a mirror.” He thought he was having a stroke and rushed to Dr. Morton Fisch, his trusted internist of more than twenty-years, for tests. Dr. Fisch told him that people don’t die of “powerful emotions.” Often they died of blocked arteries, but Steinberg’s were clear, his pulse was strong, and he was in excellent health everywhere but his teeth. He accepted that “nobody dies of heartbreack [sic]. They have a sick heart waiting for a strong emotion.”

  Still, he could not stop worrying, because Sigrid continued her ominous brooding. She became obsessive about collecting obituaries of people who committed suicide and articles that gave all the gory details of how they had done it, or of people whose lives ended at fifty-eight, the same age she was. On a photo of the novelist Sigrid Undset, she wrote that Undset was fifty-eight when she died, and next to it she added, “I am the same age as Lincoln when he died.”

  She continued to see Dr. Wanner, who was most likely responsible for her sudden intensive study of Jung’s writings, which she also left lying about where Saul could find them. She photocopied many pages from Jung’s letters, including one in which he counseled an anonymous patient whose life was made miserable by depression. Jung’s advice for the letter writer was to seek one or two persons whom she could count on, to raise animals and plants and find joy in caring for them, to surround herself with beauty, and to eat and drink well. In summation, Jung advised “no half-measures or half-heartedness” in confronting depression head-on. The letter was important to Sigrid, for she followed every bit of Jung’s advice, and by December she was euphoric.

  Saul was in the city and she was alone in Springs on the six-month anniversary of the suicide attempt. She wrote a letter to tell him “how extraordinary” it was in the depths and darkness of winter to feel “wonderfully happy” with “blissful moments, just being alive.” She wondered if her well-being was due to the heavy medication prescribed by Dr. Rosen, and she asked him whether her depression was “a biochemical deficiency … like diabetes” that could be controlled by treatment. Dr. Rosen told her that she should face reality and prepare herself to revert at some point “to being like before.” She was not ready to accept this verdict, because th
e medications were working so well and seemed to have no side effects. She did not feel “medicated” or anything other than “normal,” and the inference in her letter was that she would accept her “problem” and then hope for the best. She just wanted Saul to know how “glad and grateful” she was to be alive, and to thank him for saving her.

  Sigrid wrote about her feelings in one of the notebook jottings she made from time to time, this one perhaps for Wanner, perhaps for her own understanding of her fluctuating moods. “Everything is going so well it is almost frightening,” she wrote, adding somewhat defensively that feeling good was her long-overdue reward for having “fought for it through superhuman efforts to do it all.” Nevertheless, she was frightened that she “might not have the faith to enjoy it all.”

  As Dr. Rosen had predicted, the euphoria gave way to unfocused anxiety. As the winter ended, so too did her well-being. She sent another worrisome signal when she clipped a newspaper letter to the editor written by a Harvard professor who was commenting on the brightness of some of Mark Rothko’s last paintings; Sigrid underlined the passage “beware … of depressed people who [appear to] recover suddenly … and who assume a calm and settled purposefulness. Not a few have decided to die.” Next to it she attached an article about Cézanne in Aix, again underlining a passage: “For me, what is there left to do … only to sing small.”

  STEINBERG REMAINED “CONSTANTLY WORRIED” ABOUT SIGRID, which impelled him to try to fathom what she was thinking in an effort to help her stave off another depression. Even though she kept insisting that she was so much better, he could not accept it, because when she was with him she was “removed from life,” remote, uncommunicative, and lost in thought. He saw the books she left lying around, deliberately placed where he could find them, especially Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. He decided to read them all, even though he disdained psychotherapy for himself and now, because of his concern about Wanner’s therapeutic methods, for her as well. As Steinberg read Jung’s life story, the pages that resonated most were those where he wrote of himself in old age as he was recovering from a serious accident.