Saul Steinberg: A Biography

by Deirdre Bair

  In one of their earlier conversations, Evelyn Hofer had tried to explain Jung’s theory of individuation, but she did not express herself clearly and Steinberg wasn’t interested enough to ask her to explain further. He did not understand what she was trying to tell him until he read the several pages of Jung’s autobiography where he described how he had slipped on the ice and fallen, been hospitalized with a broken leg, and then been beset by a life-threatening illness. When he recovered, he began his most “fruitful period of work” and wondered what had happened to provoke such a torrent of writing. He concluded that he was somehow responsible for the accident, and in its aftermath he had had to recognize himself for what he was—“my own nature, as I happen to be.” Jung had to accept that he was fallible, could make mistakes, and when certain things were beyond his control, he could not control the outcome. What he learned was that an individual could control one thing only: to “forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensive things happen, an ego that endures, that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate.” Reading Jung’s text provided Steinberg with relief and absolution: he wanted to believe that he had done everything in his power to ensure Sigrid’s mental health and stability; he needed to believe that he was not responsible for her behavior, and that her inner conflicts were far beyond his control.

  Jung never became one of the philosophers Steinberg quoted, nor did he discuss Jung’s writings with Hedda Sterne, who shared his disdain for most psychoanalytic theory, or with Aldo Buzzi, the faithful sounding board who always responded to everything Steinberg told him with insight and understanding. These several pages of Jung’s were the only ones that resonated deeply enough for Steinberg to photocopy and highlight, and to place in a folder where he could easily find and reread them. Through Jung, Steinberg learned that “one does not meddle inquisitively with the workings of fate,” but it was not something he accepted easily, if at all.

  STEINBERG WAS STILL COMPLAINING ABOUT HOW The New Yorker had changed and railing against what he thought it had become: flashy, trendy, and dedicated solely to making money. And yet he could not let it go: “I can’t. It’s my magazine. I played a major role in creating it.” He was glad Shawn was not alive to see what it had become. He clipped articles that criticized Tina Brown’s stewardship and highlighted the parts with which he agreed, as he did with the writer Jack Miles’s “endpaper” in the Los Angeles Times. Miles wrote that the magazine had stopped being a “calm” publication that reflected and shaped “a broadly American and democratic culture” and had become “increasingly anxious … buying and selling the buzz.” Steinberg put this piece into his “America’s Book” file, along with a host of other articles that responded to the New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s frequent use of the phrase “the dumbing down of America.” Just as bad as its dumbing down was the magazine’s new “shoddy” design, and on the rare occasion when it contained an article Steinberg thought lived up to its past standards, he called it “fine wine in an ugly filthy glass.”

  His irritation with The New Yorker and his general malaise were symptoms of his usual wintertime blues, always compounded by the barren and dismal countryside. He felt isolated when bad weather confined him to the house, but because of what he now referred to as “the incident of last year,” he did not like to be there at all. He was uneasy in the country, so he passed most of each day working lackadaisically in the studio for the mere experience of doing something rather than doing it for satisfaction, let alone pleasure. Instead of creating new work, he drew portraits of friends and people he knew, either from life or from photographs. He drew his old friend Joseph Mitchell because “he’s one of those people who already looks like he was drawn by me,” and he drew quite a few of a casual friend to whom he had recently become close, the poet Charles Simic. He felt an affinity with Simic, a Serb who came to America as a teenager and, like Steinberg, “remembers everything about the earlier days.”

  Steinberg was musing on the concept of fame as he made the portraits or the book-shaped blocks of wood that became a deliberately unreadable library when he drew only the authors’ names without any of their titles. The wooden books constituted a game similar to one he liked to play when he made portraits, drawing some as caricatures and making others in the style or manner of different schools of drawing. Playing with portraits and blocks of wood were two diversions from the nagging fear that most of the other work he was doing was disappointing and of doubtful value.

  IN THE CITY THERE WAS A GREAT DEAL of the kind of entertaining he detested even though he went anyway, of visiting Europeans who were given large parties where recognizable American faces and names assembled to greet them. There were intimate expensive lunches and dinners at which he was the honored guest of those who wanted to use his art in some way and who thought wooing him with rich food and fine wine was the trick to persuade him to give them what they wanted. It was too much for Steinberg’s almost eighty-year-old digestion when Stefano, the “young and well-nourished son” of Umberto Eco, took him to such a lunch to persuade him to prepare a book of drawings about Italy. At first Steinberg equivocated, but as soon as he found out that Eco and his colleague, the poet Luigi Ballerini, wanted to “resuscitate” some of his Bertoldo and Settebello drawings, he ended the discussion and strictly forbade them to reprint anything connected to those years. Some weeks later he was invited to an elegant supper party for Umberto Eco “at the home of his publisher, many famous people.” It was a “horrible” evening, where so much “fame” struck Steinberg as “nothing but the maintenance and administration of a publicity campaign no different from commerce.” He liked Eco’s wife, but as for Eco, “that big beast of a husband knows everything about the art of celebrity.”

  Eco’s American editor was Drenka Willen, a Serbian like Simic, whose work she also edited. Steinberg had known Willen since he met her at Dorothy Norman’s in East Hampton in the early 1980s, and he liked to talk to her, because she edited distinguished European authors (Italo Calvino and Günther Grass, among many others) and routinely sent him copies of their books. She introduced him to Simic, and when Simic asked him for drawings to illustrate one of his books, Willen tried to pay the usual fees. Steinberg would not hear of it: they were all friends, and this was an act of friendship. He got into the habit of enjoying casual suppers at Willen’s Greenwich Village home, and when the Simics were in town, he invited her and them to his favorite neighborhood Turkish restaurant.

  Other supper parties that he did enjoy were given by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. They invited small groups of cultured and intelligent people to gather in their perfectly appointed dining room, to eat exquisite meals appropriate for elderly digestions, and to talk about literature, particularly Steegmuller’s new translation of the Flaubert–George Sand correspondence. Reading the book was one of the few experiences Steinberg enjoyed in that long and grim winter of 1993. He especially liked the way Steegmuller retained French phrases and expressions without translating them, thus ensuring that the book would remain “a cult item” that did not pander to “dumbing down” in English. One year later he had to write a condolence letter to Shirley Hazzard, telling her of his “loyal love for the man whose work gives me courage and normality” and of his admiration for Steegmuller’s “lack of interest in that debilitating passion, the maintenance and propagation of fame.”

  Steinberg, Priscilla Morgan, Peter Duchin, and Joan Mondale at the opening of the Isamu Noguchi Museum. (illustration credit 44.1)

  As the dreadful winter dragged on and spring seemed unlikely to come, Steinberg decided to try “an experiment.” He wanted to do something he had never done—to give a dinner party—and he asked his housekeeper, Josefine, to prepare her specialty, paella. He took such interest in the evening that he even shopped for “a couple of salads” and a “nice” cake. He planned to invite trusted friends, William Gaddis and Muriel Murphy, and “a civilized young woman named Prudence [Crowther].”
Gathering them at his table, he knew that he could count on an evening of good conversation without the background noise that made dining in restaurants unpleasant for elderly gentlemen such as Gaddis, who had trouble hearing. The evening was indeed a great success, but Steinberg never repeated the “experiment.”

  He read a great deal that winter, most of it English fiction, reveling in the discovery of Henry Green, whose elliptical one-word-title novels were full of “hidden surprises.” It made him go back to and finally finish Gaddis’s JR, because he thought Gaddis was of “the same family” as Green. Someone sent him a copy of Joseph Brodsky’s Watermarks, but he declined to read it because the critics lavished so much praise on it, and critical praise always made him “suspicious.” Evelyn Waugh was “a discovery” that surprised him. Another author who made him reach out in search of friendship was Alice Munro, whose stories he first read in The New Yorker. For the next several years, Steinberg sent Munro drawings, wood carvings, and other small tokens of his work to accompany his letters of praise; she replied to all of them with reserved pleasure and an air of slight surprise at being so singled out by an artist with such literary discernment.

  Brian Boyd’s biography of Steinberg’s friend Vladimir Nabokov gave him hours of pleasure, even though each tome of the two volumes was so heavy he could not hold it to read in bed. He dipped into the biography off and on for well over a year, a bit miffed that he was mentioned only once, when Nabokov wrote to a friend that he had just had a “marvelous visit with the marvelous Steinberg.” He wondered how Boyd could have overlooked Nabokov’s statement in the introduction to his novel Bend Sinister that Steinberg was the artist and “rivermaid’s father” who drew “the urchins in the yard” in chapter 7, or how he could have missed Nabokov’s in-joke when he added that “the other rivermaid’s father” was James Joyce. However, his main reason for rereading the biography was that he found so many correspondences in their lives: Nabokov had suffered from troubles with his teeth and had also consulted a long list of physicians who treated his various ailments, and he too had had ongoing “struggles with editors, publishers, lawyers, biographers, relatives.” Steinberg was amazed at Nabokov’s productivity and saw himself in comparison as “extremely lazy, my biggest flaw.” It was probably the most inaccurate self-appraisal he ever made.

  AS SPRING 1993 APPROACHED, THE URGE to travel returned. Dr. Fisch told Steinberg that hypochondria was what kept physicians in business, but Steinberg was still convinced that he had all sorts of genuine maladies and made a reservation to go to the Überlingen spa in April for his usual cleansing and purifying rituals. This time, however, he wanted to be somewhere warm and sunny, so he went to the branch clinic in Marbella, Spain, instead of the main facility in Switzerland.

  He flew to Paris first, staying in the high-rise PLM–St. Jacques Hotel, where he could see much of the city from his room on the fifteenth floor. He did not tell anyone he was there and walked familiar streets “blessed with invisibility…avoiding the damn sycophants.” He went to Cachan to visit his niece, Dana, who was living with her husband and children in the house he had bought for his sister many years before. The next day he and Dana rambled around Paris like two sightseers, and when they got to the Place des Vosges, Steinberg felt the urge to visit Victor Hugo’s house. At the ticket window he asked for a ticket for an ancien combatant (senior citizen), and the attendant demanded to know his age. When Steinberg told him quatre-vingt (eighty), the man was so surprised that he told the two of them to go in for free. It was a nice boost, since Steinberg was leaving the next day for the clinic and in anticipation had begun to feel as old and crotchety as someone twice his real age.

  The stay at the Marbella clinic was not the pleasant experience he had hoped for but one he summed up as “the rich live badly and pay through the nose.” The beach was “miserable black slime,” so he spent most of his time in his room, making notes about the fasts he endured, the people he met, and his ruminations on all sorts of things that struck his fancy. Throughout the notes there were tinges of the depression he had gone to the clinic to avoid. Harking back to 1924, the watershed year when he was ten and began to realize the awful reality of daily life for a Jew in Bucharest, he searched for a good memory to dispel the black mood that such reveries induced. He remembered that his first responses to art were emotional, and whenever he looked at colors, read a book, or went to the movies, he equated everything with “sadness.” As an afterthought, he added that “maybe all emotions” were connected to sadness. He made several charts, one of the births and deaths of “great people” and their ages when they died and another that he called “biography” for some of them: Corot was “tall,” Delacroix was “the illegitimate son of Tallyrand,” Ingres was “a Chinese in Athens,” and the British historian Peter Green was an “Aristotle who looked like the young Disraeli.” For each he gave height, weight, and “head and foot size.” He also made lists, such as the one for “simple and strong words (composite),” which featured (in his orthography) “icebox, jukebox, shithouse, badass, kneehigh, lardass, junkyard.”

  IT WAS A RELIEF TO GO HOME and find that Sigrid’s condition had not worsened. He knew that he would have to face further drastic situations, but for the time being he could avoid them. He rejoiced in his own good health and “the companionship with one’s selves that is essential, the ancient friendship with one’s memory, senses, and instincts.” His birthday was always a movable celebration, and that year he chose June 28 instead of June 14 or 15. Hedda sent a note asking him please to advise her on what day she should extend congratulations, and what about Joyce’s “Bloomsday,” June 16—had he given it up, or did he still celebrate that date as well?

  The summer in the country was “paradise” until late August, when Hedda, aged eighty-four, fell in her house and broke her hip. As her husband, Saul was the first person the hospital notified, and he rushed to the city to take charge of everything. Hedda was both grateful and amused when he arrived at the hospital “so worried and caring that all the nurses thought he was the ideal husband. It was the first and last time he behaved like that.” He was proud of himself as he organized her hospital stay with daily visits and a retinue of private nurses, whose chief responsibility was to keep the rubbernecking friends at bay—from him as well as from Hedda. When it was over, he complained that all this unusual activity left him bored and exhausted. He told Hedda that it was lucky that they had money “and the other important thing, friendship and love.” Once he was certain that she would be properly cared for at home with round-the-clock nursing, physical therapy, and her books and other diversions, he went back to Springs. They resumed their daily telephone conversations, but this time “with added intensity,” because Hedda, “who used to be the mama, now becomes the daughter, too.”

  STEINBERG MADE CERTAIN TO LEAVE TIME to be with Sigrid, and in February 1994 they went back to St. Bart’s, where they had always been happy together. He noted how well she seemed when she had tasks to perform that kept her from brooding about herself, and as she always coped well with administrative details, he put her in charge of making travel arrangements and supervising their activities once they arrived. As her usefulness made her feel confident and secure, he relaxed and enjoyed the vacation. Afterward, he relived it in his mind. “My happy memory of St Barth remains and grows,” he told Aldo.

  In March and April there were two shows in New York, “Major Works” at the Adam Baumgold Gallery and “Saul Steinberg on Art” at Pace. Bernice Rose curated the Pace show, and Steinberg praised her for “understand[ing] drawing (a rarity because most curators devote themselves solely to painting and sculpture).” He had three covers on The New Yorker in 1994 and some drawings inside, and he selected a number of black-and-white drawings for his friends Barbara Epstein and Robert Silver to use in the New York Review of Books. For a time he thought he could re-create the relationship that he had had with The New Yorker with the Review, but although it was always cordial, it never matched the one
he remembered with such fondness. He could not live without at least some connection with the magazine, so he grudgingly “made peace, more or less,” and began to submit drawings with some regularity.

  Always intrigued by imaginary maps, he had a new idea when he saw a zip code map of Manhattan and converted it to a map in which parts of the city corresponded to parts of Israel: Riverdale became the Golan Heights, the East Side was the West Bank, and all the territory below Houston Street was Gaza. The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens became Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, while the northern tip of Staten Island became Egypt. “Of course Tina wants it for the noise,” he wrote to Saul Bellow, “as the zip zones become symbols of the balkanization of everywhere.” He sent a photocopy to Bellow with the instruction “SECRET EYES ONLY,” asking for his judgment as “friend, artist, and rabbi.” He was well aware of how many groups the map would offend, everyone from Jews to Arabs, African-Americans, Israelis, and residents of the boroughs, “and of course the selfrighteous [sic] and stupid.” Hoping to mitigate at least part of the anticipated protest, he removed the two things he thought the most controversial: the Metropolitan Museum as Jerusalem and Zabar’s as Tel Aviv. He told Bellow that making the map inspired him to create another one, of how Europe would probably appear in the year 3000, and he would send it as well. Bellow advised caution, which made Steinberg even more uncertain about publishing than he had been, and after protracted wavering by Brown, he withdrew both pieces. He had already been paid $10,000 for each one, and he sent both uncashed checks back to Françoise Mouly, asking her to “return to me all photocopies of the magazine—it may fall into the wrong hands.”