THE PLACE TO GO 2 страница

The relationship between Saul and Ada was intense from the beginning; it developed in fits and starts all rife with passion and was punctuated by drama, fueled by both their deceptions, large and small. Meanwhile, Saul’s money problems continued, until Bruno Leventer grew tired of listening to his woes and gave him a push to do something about selling his drawings.

WHILE SAUL AND HIS FRIENDS WERE spending the 1936 summer vacation in Bucharest, a new satirical newspaper called Bertoldo made its Milan debut, on July 14. The publisher, Angelo Rizzoli, thought there would be a market for a paper that toed the Fascist line but occasionally flirted with censorship by poking fun at the regime and making people laugh. It was patterned after a similar paper in Rome, Marc’Aurelio, but instead of pitching it toward the working class, Rizzoli aimed for a solidly bourgeois readership. Leventer was a fan of Marc’Aurelio, and one morning shortly after the fall term started, he was lazing about and reading Bertoldo. After listening yet again to Saul bemoaning his poverty, Leventer forced his reluctant roommate to gather up some of his drawings and take them to one of Bertoldo ’s two editors, Giovanni Mosca. “I remember how stubborn you were and how you were firmly against going to Mosca, but fortunately, you eventually gave in,” he later recalled during a conversation with Steinberg.

Giovannino Guareschi was the managing editor and Carlo Manzoni a staff writer, and both were in the office on the day Steinberg walked in. Manzoni saw “a young man with a blond mustache and glasses” who stepped up to Guareschi’s desk carrying a large portfolio: “He puts the portfolio on the table and pulls out a paper with a drawing of a little man, a cartoon cloud exiting from his mouth: ‘I would like to illustrate a short story by [Giovanni] Mosca,’ says the cloud.”

Guareschi barely glanced at the artist or his submissions as he gave Steinberg his standard answer for would-be contributors: to leave the drawings along with his name and address, and he would show them to Mosca when he arrived. Manzoni overheard “the young blond man” say his name was Saul Steinberg and he was an architecture student living in the student residence.

Mosca liked what he saw, and on October 27, 1936, a Steinberg drawing under the pseudonym Xavier (chosen for the “absurdity of the initial”) appeared in Bertoldo. The reader response was immediate and positive, and the editors asked for more, telling Steinberg to sign his own name from then on. Steinberg was astonished by his success: “I only discovered my talent when my first drawing was published … It took me ten minutes to do, but when it appeared in the paper, I looked at it for hours and was mesmerized.”

In the cartoon entitled “Barbe” (“Beard”), a dandy who wears a top hat, carries a cane, and sports an enormous black beard is leaning against a Corinthian column. Behind him is a similar male figure, disproportionately large compared to the small horse on which he is riding. Behind the rider are two barren twiglike trees (or perhaps flowers), stuck in urns in the middle of a small plot of grass encircled by bricks. One of the twigs sports a singing bird. The dandy leaning against the column has one hand beneath the beard that drops almost to his waist and in the caption berates himself for having forgotten to wear a tie. It was the first of more than two hundred drawings Steinberg would publish until June 1938, when the racial laws imposed by Mussolini forbade Jews, particularly foreign Jews, to work in Italy.

Steinberg and Bertoldo were a perfect fit. Under Mosca’s editorship, the paper aimed for “a public that almost immediately was in on our game of allusions … once Italian readers, especially the young ones, became aware of fascist ‘speech,’ they saw its ridiculous side. Bertoldo, a mischievously comic paper, became a school for gravity.” The poet and writer Attilio Bertolucci noted how Steinberg’s mature “fabulous graphics that are the extreme results of the most advanced humor today” might have originated in his apprentice years at Bertoldo during the most troubled period of Mussolini’s regime.

Almost immediately Steinberg was caught up in the excitement of journalism. The paper appeared twice each week, so two deadlines loomed, and he was expected to present a large selection of new drawings at each. The editorial committee met in one of the upstairs rooms of the Bar del Grillo, where Saul waited as they perused his drawings. They paid on the spot for those they took. Aldo waited downstairs in the bar: “If Saul got money, we would eat. At first all the money went for food, because he was a poor student and the drawings gave us a good dinner. Sometimes he sold so many that we would take the money elsewhere and then we dined first-class.” Steinberg enjoyed the life of a boulevardier. He updated his wardrobe, treated his friends to drinks and meals, and passed the time leisurely in the Galleria’s restaurant, Biffi. His weekly submissions provided the rare, beautiful pleasure of “making money out of something I enjoyed doing and then spending it as soon as I made it,” he recalled.

Soon after his earliest publications, Steinberg was given pride of place on what the editors called “the interior page,” one devoted solely to cartoons. Not only was it the place to be, but often there were no other drawings but his. Suddenly Saul Steinberg was a recognized name and a well-known figure among the glitterati of Milan’s chattering classes. He formed friendships with the Bertoldo writers and editors and was soon spending his days bantering with them, either in the Bar del Grillo or in their offices. He befriended Cesare Zavattini and Achille Campanile, who had come to Milan from Rome to coedit the rival humor newspaper, Settebello, and the designer Bruno Munari, who was their friend and frequent contributor. That led to an important friendship with Cesar Civita, who was then working as an editor for the esteemed publisher Mondadori. Steinberg became as popular among all these journalists and writers as he was among his classmates at the Poli, and he grew accustomed to being hailed by strangers in the bar or on the street who wanted to offer suggestions for drawings or cartoon captions. However, even though he had become a celebrity, success did not change his demeanor. He remained coolly polite and observant, distant and slightly detached from the banter of those around him, although he liked the attention and, even more, the security that came with being paid regularly for his work. Having money provided a kind of security he had never before enjoyed.

Steinberg still shared a room with Leventer, who was about to graduate because he had taken all his examinations in a timely fashion and who was looking forward to beginning his practice in Bucharest. Aldo often spent time in their room, where Saul had commandeered the only large wall for his Bertoldo drawings. Aldo studied them, “in wonder, as one idea led directly to another, and then to another, and so on, and so on. Saul liked to review the evolution of his characters, his subjects. He needed to see the chronology of what he had already drawn as his ideas unfolded. He liked to see how he changed things as he went along. No, he actually needed to see how he changed things as he went along.”

Steinberg’s rise as one of the cartoonists whose work readers could expect to see each week within Bertoldo ’s pages coincided with the leading role the publisher’s son, Andrea Rizzoli, played in its editorial direction. Rizzoli assigned most of the topics for the cartoons and the punch lines or captions, which were usually arrived at during the biweekly editorial sessions. Steinberg normally sat in a corner, quietly sketching, often ignoring the assigned theme as certain typical figures and motifs began to recur in his work.

One of his most successful creations was Zia Elena (Aunt Helen), a battle-ax of a woman who resembled a combination of Mussolini and his mother. She often appeared at the center of a topsy-turvy landscape littered with partial body parts or pieces of statuary (depending on how the viewer saw them), sporting butcher knives in her waistband, flowers and flags spewing out of her hair, and with cowering animals hiding beneath her floor-length skirts. The landscape behind her owed much to the influence of Giorgio de Chirico, whose paintings draw the eye upward and outward, to slanted horizons and vistas different from but as symbolically important as the main theme at the bottom of the canvas. Readers related to Zia Elena, as Steinberg used her to poke fun at Mussolini’s edicts, family relationships, and the stresses of modern life.

Readers also learned to recognize a Steinberg cartoon at first glance because of the recurring motifs. Among them were Corinthian columns and Ionic flutes, small architectural renderings of ornate public buildings, unfurled banners of all sorts and sizes, and geometrical backgrounds that might be heavily patterned wallpaper or floor tiles. There were objects everywhere, either relating directly to the subject or else put there just for the whimsy of it. Statues and monuments were almost always objects of satire and ridicule; in Steinberg’s world, horses rode men and men whose lives were not large enough to be commemorated by one grand monument were often given two tiny ones, with half their body mounted on each. He sometimes used collage, and Aldo attributed at least part of his interest in the technique to a French book that he urged on his friend, mistakenly attributing it to “the neoclassical Picasso” rather than to Picasso’s various phases of cubism. It marked the beginning of Steinberg’s fascination with Picasso as a draftsman-artist and would eventually lead to his assertion that he and Picasso were the two greatest artists of the twentieth century.

Flush with success, Steinberg felt that 1936 was his year of “paradise,” and so too were 1937 and the beginning of 1938. Ada still came and went in her mysterious way, but there were other admiring and available women, and he kept busy socializing with his interesting new friends in journalism. He did not often go to classes, nor did he do much about taking exams. He found it far more exciting to observe Italian attitudes and behavior and then convey them with everything from whimsy to satire in the newspaper than to seclude himself in the Poli to slog away at architectural drawings and renderings. In 1938 he was in the fifth year of a five-year program leading to his degree, but he still thought he had all the time in the world to take the qualifying exams. He thought it more important to keep his ties to Bertoldo, even though worrisome political pronouncements were intensifying.

In June 1936, the Italian government department that oversaw propaganda became the formal Ministry of Popular Culture, charged with regulating the media. It generally left publications alone, as long as they did not stray too far from the official Fascist line, until January 1937, when a more stringent set of “guidelines” was imposed. General news publications were directed to “satirize attitudes and political mentalities that go against Fascism, such as Bolshevism, liberalism, societarianism [that is, the League of Nations], parliamentarianism, and so on,” and they were expected to express their criticisms in language the public would swallow whole. Publications that specialized in humor and satire were given greater leeway for exaggeration and were instructed to “fight racial hybridism” and “target all attitudes that do not harmonize with the way of life taught by Fascism.”

Bertoldo certainly did its part to follow all the Fascist directives from the very first issue—so closely, in fact, that it “carried errors, bad taste, venial and mortal sins” throughout the two years before the 1938 racial laws were enacted. The editors freely chose to print cartoons that featured anti-Semitic stereotypes until 1938, after which reporters and columnists regularly wrote strident articles and short stories that mocked or defamed Jews. Still, in the paper’s defense, the editors did print far more material that managed “to walk the thin line between compliance and satire” and to assert that it was not “a pedantic Fascist newspaper, nor, least of all, anti-Fascist. It was an Italian newspaper for young and not so young people, in an era where Italians had much to cry about, and for this very reason needed a good laugh.” Like so many other individuals or entities in the prewar years, Bertoldo never fully compromised its integrity, but neither was it entirely unimpaired.

Saul Steinberg never commented publicly on his association with Bertoldo or with its chief competitor, Settebello, which he started working for in 1938. His cartoons were mostly apolitical, and on the rare occasion when they did touch on politics, it was usually to mock Mussolini, his minions, or one of his directives vaguely and indirectly. However, almost half a century later, when the son of his friend Sandro Angelini wanted to publish a doctoral thesis that dealt with Steinberg’s creative output during his Italian years, he prevailed on the young man not to do so. Steinberg called it “a terrible idea, blackmail, revelations … who knows what dark horrors will surface?” It would have been embarrassing to have to explain how, as a young Jewish artist, he had worked so successfully for newspapers in Fascist Italy. He was able to evade this question in the United States because so few Americans knew anything about Italian culture; the only reason he ever had to give for not permitting reproduction of the Italian cartoons (and one that was easily accepted) was that they were juvenilia and unworthy of notice.

However, as 1938 unfolded, Steinberg would have continued to draw cartoons for Bertoldo if a better offer had not come his way. When the publisher Alberto Mondadori bought Settebello and appointed Steinberg’s friends Cesare Zavattini and Achille Campanile as coeditors, they invited him to join the board of directors. It was an excellent offer and he was happy to take it, especially after they dangled the plum of a feature in every issue. It meant a larger income and greater exposure to bolster his growing reputation. Once again he planned to let his examinations wait for another year. Bruno Leventer had just graduated and like Perlmutter (who was there only briefly) had gone home to Bucharest, so Steinberg was totally without Romanian support for the first time since 1933. His original reason for leaving Romania was that he feared he could not “accomplish anything extraordinary,” and it certainly seemed that he had been right to do so, as he was now well on his way to becoming enormously successful in Milan. He had become settled in Italy, at ease with the language and culture, and was sure his future lay there. He was confident that he would eventually finish his studies, gain his degree, and forge a prosperous career that would allow him to combine art with architecture. And then, in the space of a few months, everything changed, when Mussolini set forth a series of decrees that forbade Jews, Italian or foreign, to work in Italy.

CHAPTER 6

THE BETRAYAL

I didn’t want to accept the reality, the betrayal, the way dearest Italy turned into Romania, hellish homeland. How lucky I was to be saved! Until late 1937, Mussolini mocked the German idea of racial purity and held a “sovereign contempt for Nazi racial doctrines.” It was not until after the conquest of Ethiopia, when his military forces were burdened with obsolete arms and equipment and his currency and foreign exchange severely straitened, that he discovered what a useful political tool anti-Semitism could be to persuade ordinary citizens to accept a severe austerity program that would let him prepare for war.

Starting in 1938, new laws came thundering down upon the heads of the 40,000 to 70,000 Jews who had lived in Italy since the Roman Empire. Early that year, the Ministry of Popular Culture began a harsh campaign instructing the press to publish articles about how Jews had insinuated themselves into influential positions and professions at every level of public life, thus destroying the purity of traditional Italian life and work. The general public did not pay much attention to this campaign, because Jews in Italy had been highly assimilated for several centuries. Thus, when the Manifesto della Razza (Manifesto of Race) was proclaimed in July and state-sponsored anti-Semitism began, most Italians were at first puzzled, then dumbfounded by all the new laws.

Intermarriage between Jews and “Aryans” (as Mussolini now proclaimed Italians to be) had long been commonplace, but henceforth such marriages were forbidden. Jews who had become citizens after 1919 were stripped of citizenship. Jews could not own land or hold property above a certain value and could not employ Aryan domestic help. All foreign Jews except those over sixty-five or those already married to an Aryan Italian had to leave the country within the next four months or face expulsion by force, and this included foreign students like Saul Steinberg.

The educational system was in chaos as Jewish faculty members were fired, Jewish students were forbidden to attend public schools, and textbooks by Jewish authors were banned. Jews were expelled from the military and forbidden to practice professions unless their clients and patients were also Jews. In November, Jews were banned from membership in the Fascist party, and the following year they were forbidden to work in journalism. Widespread puzzlement gave way to panic as one confusing and contradictory edict followed another, and Steinberg was caught in the thick of it.

On August 6, 1938, the Ministry of National Education declared that, starting in September of the academic year 1938–39, all Jewish students, even those previously enrolled in universities, would be forbidden to attend classes. One month later, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs partially reversed the decision, decreeing that foreign Jewish students who had been enrolled for the previous academic year could continue their studies until they earned their degrees. There were several months of confusion until January 1939, when the Ministry of National Education took charge once again and amended the law to allow foreign students to stay in Italy until they completed their degrees; the hitch was that those who were behind would not only have to catch up, they would have to finish by the end of that academic year. For Steinberg, it was a staggering problem of nearly insurmountable proportion.

Since 1936, when he began to draw for Bertoldo, he had done what Ada called “the usual: delaying until the future.” He had stopped studying and going to any classes that were not required and had taken (and passed) only one of the seventeen necessary examinations, which meant that if the government enforced the most recent law, rather than allowing it to be ignored, as so many of the previous ones had been, he had exactly one year to take and pass sixteen examinations, get his degree, and get out of Italy. Coupled with the problem of earning the degree was the impossibility of earning money: his last signed cartoon appeared in Settebello in September 1938, just after Jews were forbidden to work in journalism. Once again, except for the occasional loan of a few lire from Aldo, an infusion of cash from Ada, or an under-the-table commission sent his way by friends, he was almost entirely dependent on his parents.

The grit, determination, and overdeveloped sense of personal responsibility that was characteristic of the adult Saul Steinberg began during this year, as he focused all his energy and attention on two major tasks: attaining his degree and supporting himself. His friends were not about to let him go under, and they gave him work when they could. The aristocratic Erberto Carboni set him to making preliminary sketches for the Studio Boggieri design staff, sometimes preparing finished presentation drawings for clients, sometimes making precise mechanicals for printers. One project that survives is an advertisement for “Dynamin [gasoline], the Super Shell,” in the newspaper La Stampa.

Steinberg’s friends at Bertoldo and Settebello did not desert him either, as unsigned drawings and cartoons that appeared in both papers during the next several years bear his signature totems and subjects. He tried to draw constantly and studied only when not working to earn money. Even though he knew from the beginning that he “could never become an architect because of the horror of dealing with people that architecture involves,” he still felt the moral obligation to complete the degree, partly not to disappoint his parents but also because of his sense of responsibility about finishing whatever task he started. Steinberg took his exams at the last possible moment he could, and by the spring of 1939 he had taken and passed all sixteen. In the Italian university system during his student years, the highest passing grade was 30 and the lowest was 18. Steinberg’s grades were surprisingly good when the subjects centered on drawing, as in courses like Giò Ponte’s interior design and decoration (27) and scenography (26), but he barely passed when the courses were mathematical or scientific, and those grades lowered his final average to 20.5. It was the same when he took the esame di laurea, the qualifying exam before the doctoral thesis: he barely passed, with 65 out of 100.

The esame was a special project that had to be designed and built in four days, during which students were confined to a sequestered area of the school to live and work. If accepted, the esame became the basis of the tesi, or thesis. Steinberg’s subject was “Architectural and urbanistic organization of an urban center; Development of a representative building.” He designed and built a theater, but even for such a rigidly delineated academic endeavor with strict rules about what could be done, he could not resist adding a touch of the comic: on the drawing that showed the building’s entrance, he added a stick figure straddling a cow and holding in his outstretched hand a lance pointing to the building. When his examiners asked why it was there, he claimed he needed it to “indicate the proportions.” They accepted the project, stick figure and all, but his whimsy did not stop there. He made an even more grandiose—and illegal—gesture when he signed the official document declaring that he was now a doctor of architecture; instead of writing his full name, as required by law, he printed his last name only in large block capital letters, the signature he had used for all his cartoons. No doubt he was letting his professors know that the name they had seen many times in Bertoldo or Settebello was all he thought necessary for identification.

On March 1, 1940, he sent an exultant telegram to his parents: “I did well. I am an architect.” On March 5 he told them he was “officially and in the name of the King proclaimed a doctor in architecture.” He did not tell them how angry and upset he was to find that he had been given “a diploma of discrimination and prejudice.” Saul Steinberg, son of Moritz and born in Romania, was officially proclaimed di razza Ebraica (“of the Jewish race”), which rendered his diploma as worthless as “the fake Bodoni” typeface used to print “the fake parchment.” No matter that his degree was certified by Vittorio Emanuele III, “King of Italy and Albania, Emperor of Ethiopia”; as long as it said “of the Hebrew race,” he could not practice his profession in Italy even if he wanted to.

The insult rankled for the rest of his life. In 1985 he exchanged copies of their diplomas with Primo Levi, who said his own was “symmetrical to yours and just as anachronistic.” Steinberg told Levi that he had never, ever used the title doctor of architecture and had been lucky not to have worked in the profession: “The Kingdom of Italy? Finished! Albania? What a joke! Emperor of Ethiopia! What cruel and stupid times. All vanished.” Even “the doctor of architecture has vanished,” he concluded. “Only Saul remains, son of Moritz, of the Jewish race.”

THERE WERE “CRUEL AND STUPID TIMES” in 1940, but Saul still had to make a living while he plotted how to escape from Italy. “Dad writes that I’m avoiding his question, about what I will do after I receive my diploma,” he wrote to his parents, trying to evade a direct response to their uneasiness. However, he had to tell them at least part of the truth: “There is nothing certain and it’s hard to do what I would prefer,” which was to resume the life he had enjoyed as a successful cartoonist. After the ordeal of getting the degree, all he could do to recover was “to sleep and eat a lot,” but he could not afford to relax for long, because he had to pay the taxes that universities charged on top of tuition, as well as other taxes imposed directly by the Italian government. Moritz and Rosa sent one thousand lire, which was supposed to cover the taxes and leave enough for his living expenses until he found work, but he was still short and had to add the rest from his earnings. It was “pretty painful to have to part with 2,000 lire.” Still, he was blithe: “I have no money but I’ll get out of it.” Several weeks passed before he wrote to his parents again, saying he was still unsure about work and did not rule out returning to Bucharest. Whether he was telling the truth or providing a sop for their fears, he was never serious about returning to Bucharest, especially after he started to work again in Milan—surreptitiously, to be sure, but steadily.

He kept a partial list of the work he did between the spring of 1940 and the end of 1941, and it showed a variety of projects, including five cartoons sold to “other newspapers or magazines,” plus the “useless and ridiculous work” of submitting cartoons and captions directly to Bertoldo even though he was convinced the authorities would shut it down (which they did) after “one more issue and then that’s it.” Pietro Chiesa of the design firm Fontana Arte threw a commission his way to design something to ornament a piece of furniture, and he made “a nice drawing with bottles and flowers.” His friend Vito Latis, another Jewish architect constrained by the racial laws to work only for Jewish clients, was commissioned by a family named Sacerdotti to design a villa in Rapallo, which Steinberg dubbed “Milanese Bauhaus.” The commission Latis gave him was far more remunerative: to make a painting for a large wall in the house, of a typical Ligurian beachfront complete with restaurants and stores, strolling couples, and swimmers.

While Steinberg was working diligently to survive in Milan, he was also investigating various options for where to go when he could no longer stay in Italy. The country did not officially enter the war until June 10, 1940, and as his Romanian passport was not due to expire until November 29 of that year, he counted on having a brief margin of safety during which he would try to renew it. He never imagined that he would become officially stateless, but several weeks after Italy entered the war, Romania was sliced apart as Soviet forces occupied the Bessarabia region, Hungary tried to grab Transylvania, and Bulgaria wanted Dobruja. In September, King Carol II abdicated and fled, leaving his nineteen-year-old son, Michael, as king. That same month Michael was deposed when the Iron Guard, led by General Ion Antonescu, established the ultra-right National Legionary State and Antonescu declared himself conducător (Romanian for duce or führer). Antonescu ordered the guard to destroy opposing political parties, murder dissenting intellectuals, and launch punitive assaults against Romanian Jews. Praised by Hitler for his “glowing fanaticism,” Antonescu allied the country firmly with Nazi Germany, leaving Steinberg to fear that he was about to become both stateless and trapped.

He was frustrated and angry with himself for not leaving “a year, two ago, when everything was simpler,” and berated himself for the “big mistake” of not getting his degree sooner. His “biggest anguish” was that if he had taken the degree on time, he could have repaid his parents’ sacrifices by settling them in “a comfortable life, without worries or woe.” Another possibly dangerous complication arose when it appeared that he would have to return to Bucharest to serve in the Romanian army. His original military classification was with the “1914 contingent,” which until now had always been exempted from the draft, but with Germany dictating Romanian policy, there was some internal confusion about whether this ruling still held. A letter to his parents spelled out his hope of deferring military service as a means of prolonging his passport until February 1941, but he did not explain how he planned to do this, and there is no record that he ever tried. Instead he concentrated all his energies on getting out of Italy and started to think seriously about the United States.

The first person who encouraged him to make the move was his friend Cesar Civita, who worked for the publisher Arnaldo Mondadori throughout the 1930s as the editor of a literary magazine, Le Grandi Firme. Steinberg met him through two of Civita’s colleagues who were his friends, Cesare Zavattini and Gino Boccasile, the designer responsible for much of the magazine’s distinctive art. Cesar and his brother, Victor, were born into a wealthy Jewish family that had been in Milan for generations, and both wisely recognized the need to flee to Paris as soon as the racial laws were passed. They urged Steinberg to do the same, but he told them he was content in Italy and hoped to remain there.

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