Starting again in the cartoons racket

I’ll have a hard time starting again in the cartoons racket especially if The New Yorker will go ahead publishing the old scrap of drawings made two years ago. Many soldiers stationed far from home had only to worry about surviving the war, but Steinberg had two other concerns that occupied him almost full-time: persuading Hedda Sterne to divorce her husband and marry him and promoting his promising career.

All the while that he was being shuttled from one European posting to another, he was also fulfilling commissions generated by the Civita brothers and assuaging the astonishment and horror of his New Yorker editors when they discovered that his agents took 30 percent of his earnings.

When Steinberg was drafted, he packed the few belongings in his Sixth Avenue hotel room, one small suitcase of clothing and several large boxes of his work, and took them to Hedda Sterne’s apartment. He had put her in charge of supervising all his affairs, particularly acting as go-between and dispensing the drawings according to his directions to Jim Geraghty, the art director at The New Yorker, and Victor Civita, his primary agent now that Cesar was in South America. Before he left, he introduced Hedda to everyone to make sure that they understood she would be making decisions on his behalf. At Civita’s, she and Gertrude Einstein, the administrative assistant who ran the office, took an instant liking to each other and formed a friendship that smoothed all of Hedda’s subsequent dealings with Victor. Saul left for China quite content that his best interests would be served by Hedwig Stafford, Hedda Stafford, or Hedwig or Hedda Sterne—whatever she was calling herself at that particular moment, to the confusion of those with whom she conducted his business.

While he left the bulk of his old work with Hedda for her to dole out whenever his military postings kept him from sending new work, he left another bundle of drawings with Victor Civita, who quickly got most of them published. As a way of keeping his lucrative client’s name in circulation, he hounded Steinberg repeatedly to send new ones, especially those he could sell to The New Yorker. When the mails delayed the sending or receiving, Hedda had to dig deep into her trove and Civita had to cull whatever he could find as well. Steinberg was not happy when Hedda sent him a copy of The New Yorker in December 1943 with “that horrible drawing of the big A letter at the optician.” It was one he had made at least two years earlier, when he was trying to make the transition from his European style to The New Yorker ’s, and to him “it sure is a very stupid drawing.” However, as he did for the rest of his time in the navy, he did not blame his agents for publishing work he was not proud of; instead he made allowances for them.

Even before Steinberg left New York, Civita was courting the publisher Duell, Sloan and Pearce, whose editors had expressed serious interest in a book of drawings. Steinberg spelled out everything he wanted in minute detail before he would agree to a book: “I want [to see] the proofs or Photostats of every page and drawing before printing and [he is] to do nothing without my ok or yours. Please keep an eye on him.”

He wrote this letter at the end of 1943, when The New Yorker had accepted some of his China drawings for publication in early 1944. He was passing through India at the time and while there made a dozen drawings for the magazine that departed from his usual style, quite pleased that he had done something he had never been able to do before: “I act like a photographer and sketch what I see.” In the past, he had insisted that he could create only in solitude, and he resented it when anyone tried to watch him at work. In India there was no possibility of tranquillity or privacy, so he learned to sketch contentedly, often in the midst of crowds that thronged to look over his shoulder. He ignored the jostling, pointing, and touching and was just happy that his new technique “works.”

While he busied himself creating enough drawings for a book that would tell the story of what a tourist—albeit one in the midst of a war—might see as he wended his way from China through India and Egypt to North Africa, another publisher expressed interest in a book. The initial inquiry did not come through Civita’s office but in a letter directly to Steinberg from a Miss Morrison who worked for Alfred A. Knopf. Miss Morrison told him she had seen his cartoons in The New Yorker and wanted to publish one hundred drawings consisting of a mix of old and new work. He did not reply to her immediately but wrote first to Hedda, pleading for information about the book Civita wanted to sell to “that triple name publisher.” Hedda did a little digging and discovered that Miss Morrison was a good friend of Jim Geraghty’s, who, because he was so frustrated by the way Civita dispensed drawings piecemeal, urged her to make an offer. When it came to Steinberg’s business interests, Hedda was astute, and she told Steinberg that whatever passed between Geraghty and Civita was “of no concern to us if they [Knopf ] offer a better contract.”

Several months had passed since the end of 1943, when he had entrusted Hedda and Victor Civita to make selections from the drawings he left with them. It was in 1944 and just after he was sent to North Africa that he began to fear that if a book did come to pass, the publisher would send the photostats to his old APO address in China, where they might languish and never be forwarded. “Please be interested in me and my work,” he begged Hedda as he explained his uneasiness that Victor might not wait for his approval and just select old, outdated material for a book, which would make it difficult for Steinberg to resume a career at The New Yorker: “I’ll have a hard time starting again in the cartoons racket especially if The New Yorker will go ahead publishing the old scrap of drawings made two years ago when [Cesar] Civita was telling me that the only way of being able to publish something in New York is just lowering the standard, in other words make a vulgar ‘popular’ and photographic kind of drawing. I’ve never been able to make him happy about it but I tried anyway and I made a few very silly drawings I’m always ashamed to think about. It was the sad time of my residence in Santo Domingo and I didn’t have many hopes or aspirations.”

Steinberg was referring obliquely to the main feature of his work that Cesar Civita had told him he had to change when he was in the Dominican Republic, ill with malaria and too browbeaten to dispute. Cesar thought that the big bulbous noses on some of his cartoon figures were “too Jewish,” and he advised Steinberg to tone them down to make them more “mainstream” and thus more likely to be accepted by a magazine that was noted for its white, suburban, upper-middle-class subscribers. Saul told Hedda about Cesar’s advice shortly after they met, and how he had accepted it because “he thought he was only a greenhorn, and what did he know—what could he know, he who never set foot in New York!” She was outraged by what she insisted was Cesar’s pandering to anti-Semitism and was convinced that even though he was Jewish himself, he was still a “Jew hater.” This opinion caused one of Saul and Hedda’s first serious arguments and became a lasting difference of opinion between them. Hedda never changed her view of Cesar and Saul continued to defend him, but shortly after this his drawings took on a newer, sharper line, as did the noses on his figures.

After the war, when he was an established figure at The New Yorker, Steinberg used to say that the “US brand of anti-Semitism is a joke, but when you least expect it people will reveal themselves.” One who “startled him no end” was Harold Ross, who told him “here in the US, we don’t have noses like that.” Hedda said Steinberg told her he “knew anti-Semitism when he saw it, but he just bypassed it.” He was already a star who could draw whatever he wanted. And he did.

WHEN CIVITA TOLD STEINBERG THAT CONTRACTS were being prepared by Duell, Sloan and Pearce and that he should allow the book to appear under their imprint, he was ready to stop dealing with Miss Morrison of Knopf. Hedda told him not to cut her off completely, because she thought he could use Knopf’s interest to negotiate better terms with Civita and DSP (as they were now abbreviating the publisher’s name). Because Hedda was such an independent thinker and could not be swayed when she truly believed in something, Saul trusted her judgment almost as much as he trusted his own, which was why he gave her carte blanche to make the initial decision, not only about continuing to negotiate but also about what should appear in his all-important first book. However, after she made the initial selection, he was determined to be in complete charge of the project.

Steinberg believed that anything he published had to enhance his reputation, and he did not think it was asking too much of a publisher if the vagaries of wartime mail delivery might hold up production. His main directive was that Victor Civita should have nothing to do with the book, and he told Hedda that only after he had overseen the entire production process and the pages were ready to be printed would she have his permission to show the layout to Victor. No matter what Victor thought when he saw it, Steinberg intended to remain adamant: “If I like it, if it works, ok. If not, never mind the book.”

Hedda was worried about how Victor would deal with being shut out of the production process, because at the same time that negotiations for the book were under way, Steinberg had ordered her to bypass him and deliver the new drawings he was sending directly to Jim Geraghty at The New Yorker. Geraghty knew that Civita was Steinberg’s agent of record, so, quite properly, he sent the payment for every drawing he bought to the Civita agency, even though he and the other editors were appalled by the 30 percent commission Victor took; the usual agent’s fee was 10 percent, sometimes less. When the editors asked Hedda to explain why it was so high, Hedda said she couldn’t speak for Saul and they must ask him, which Geraghty did. Steinberg told Geraghty that he knew the agreement made no sense but he had agreed to it when he was a confused refugee in Santo Domingo and was unwilling to change anything while he was so far away. It was easier to be passive and follow “the policy of mañana and the garbage under the rug.” He had another reason, an active one that exemplified his character: he told Geraghty that Cesar Civita had helped him at a time when he would have “sold [his] soul for a ticket out of Italy” and he did not begrudge him one cent of the commission. Steinberg admitted that he felt differently about Victor now, but all he wanted for the time being was to let him “just cash the 30% and that’s all.” His extreme loyalty to the Civita family was only one of the many examples of his behavior toward anyone who ever helped him or showed any sort of kindness throughout his life. No matter how these people may have taken advantage of his goodwill or generosity in later times, gratitude dictated his actions, and he always found a way to forgive them so that he could continue to honor their initial kindness.

THE NEW YEAR LIMPED ALONG, and in February 1944 all Steinberg knew of the book’s progress came from Hedda’s infrequent letters, as none of Civita’s had reached him since the previous November. She relayed news of technical disputes with DSP, with whom Steinberg had now settled, and now that he wanted the book to be published, he was worried that the publisher might cancel it if he insisted during wartime on getting as close to perfection as possible. He wanted the drawings to be entirely of black ink on white paper, but the publisher wanted color, so he reluctantly agreed to it and to the eight-by-ten-inch page size DSP originally scheduled. But when the book was finally printed in 1945, he was delighted to learn that his wish for black-and-white drawings had been honored and that restrictions on paper had been lifted so that it appeared in the twelve-by-nine-inch page size he wanted. The publisher also had a title in mind, “Everybody in Line,” which would have multiple meanings; all the cartoons would be arranged chronologically, and many of the wartime drawings depicted soldiers in various kinds of lines and formations. Steinberg didn’t really like it but was trying to get used to it when Hedda wrote again to say that no one at DSP liked the word everybody, so they were still tossing ideas around.

Meanwhile, according to Civita, the cartoon Steinberg called “the horrible A drawing” was causing a flurry of fan mail at The New Yorker, and DSP was insistent that it had to go into the still unnamed book. Steinberg refused to believe it was anything more than a trick on Civita’s part to keep him working on “the kind of silly cheap stuff easy to sell.” Even if it was true that the cartoon was generating so much excitement, he refused to believe it or to churn out more of what Victor wanted, because the New Yorker editors were “getting madder and madder” about Civita. They had begun to send checks directly to Steinberg because they refused to pay the exorbitant commission. Steinberg was upset and did not know what to do.

He was further distressed when he saw the second set of proofs sent by DSP, this time a selection of approximately eighty drawings on a roll of microfilm. He did not blame Hedda, saying that it had happened because she was so “nice” (“nice” or “nice girl” being his pet terms for her), that she had allowed Victor to “influence” her in choosing “the worst drawings available.” He told Hedda, “I’ll write and tell him I don’t want the old stuff.” In one of the rare instances when he expressed his true opinion of how the Civita Agency’s representation had failed him, Steinberg called Victor “a bastard” who was “only interested in money.” The agency did not keep a record, “not even a scrapbook,” of his drawings, let alone of whether they were sold and where they were published. He blamed Victor for making a scattershot selection without thought of the book’s concept, but here again he gave him the benefit of the doubt: “I can’t blame him too much for that, I’ll have to take care of it sometimes.”

One month later, in April, there was still no contract from DSP and no response from Civita about Steinberg’s objections to the book’s content. The only topics Civita wrote about were offers from businesses and commercial firms to make drawings for advertisements, publicity, and promotions. At the time, this sort of work was “too far away” for Steinberg to consider.

Meanwhile, at The New Yorker, Harold Ross had become directly involved in the ongoing controversies with Civita, starting with the DSP book. Steinberg tried to mediate by offering a solution to the problem of how to eliminate the old drawings he no longer liked. His idea was to put together a collection of what he was loosely calling “war drawings,” with a working title for the book of “Soldiers & Civilians.” Of the eighty or so that Civita had chosen, Steinberg thought only twenty-six were worthy of inclusion, and he had his doubts about at least ten of those. His China drawings had been published and been so successful that despite the shortages of paper and the compressed wartime size of the magazine, Ross had them offprinted as a small booklet for Steinberg to send to friends and relatives.

After the success of the China drawings, Ross scheduled a four-page layout of North African scenes for the magazine. Steinberg also had at least fifteen more drawings from Italy that he thought were very good, and Ross took those as well. All told, Steinberg thought the three segments would provide the foundation for an excellent book: he already had twenty from China and planned to draw five or six more, he had fifteen from Algiers, thirty from Italy, and wanted to add at least a half dozen each from India and Egypt. To round out the book, he thought of making twenty more new drawings of “captionless stuff,” because he was convinced that his work was now firmly anchored in a realm where the image was so immediate and intense that words were no longer needed.

He was indirectly hoping that by dealing directly with Ross, he would nudge Civita away from his lackadaisical attitude toward the DSP contract, which was still not finalized, so he dangled the threat that he was entrusting Ross to find a new publisher or “eventually [the] same one.” When Civita did not respond, Steinberg did send the drawings to Ross—directly.

Civita did not reply to Steinberg’s concerns about the book until June 1944. By then Steinberg was adamant that it should consist only of the war drawings and should have a new working title, “something like ‘c/o Postmaster.’ ” Civita disagreed and insisted that such a book was not viable and would have to be interlarded with “the usual cartoons.” Steinberg was tired of the book and ready to abandon it and Victor Civita as well. Hedda had written a letter criticizing the way Victor was handling (actually, neglecting) his affairs, and he had to agree with her: “He is what he is and you are right when you say that charity is to be done for better purposes.” As Steinberg was sure that he would soon be shipped back to New York, he decided to wait until he got there to remedy the situation in person. He had signed the contract with Civita in May 1942 and it was to expire in July 1944, but he didn’t know the exact dates because he never received a copy.

Steinberg was depressed by the difference in the way Geraghty and Civita handled his affairs. Geraghty was so eager for some of his wartime drawings to appear in every issue that he figured out how to send telegrams that reached Steinberg in two days, while Steinberg sometimes had to wait a month or more for Victor Civita to address a pressing problem through regular APO mail. Shortly before he was sent back to New York, his attitude hardened. He continued to express the usual sentiment, that he dealt with Victor only because of his “debt of gratitude” to Cesar, but now he let his resentment show: “Let him make the book if still actual. I don’t consider him much like my agent—I never did—he’s getting 30% without doing a thing.” However, it was too difficult to change anything through the mail, so once again he resigned himself to the status quo until he could deal with it directly. At that point all his worries were concentrated on Hedda, who had gone to Reno in April for the required six weeks of residency before her divorce became official. He had finally convinced her to marry him, and he was eager to get home before she changed her mind.

DIVORCING FRED STAFFORD (AKA FRITZ STERN) was not a decision Hedda made easily. From her first meeting with Saul Steinberg, the woman who favored reason over emotion was embarrassed to admit that when she was around him, the objective, dispassionate, coolly appraising Hedda who saved all her feelings for her painting became a blushing schoolgirl swept away by sexual passion. When she was alone, she cringed to recall how she surrendered all judgment when he was with her. Even though she was smitten, she recognized a womanizer when she saw one, but Saul was so charming and had such charisma that she was almost able to persuade herself it didn’t matter.

At one of their earliest meetings he told her about his “very lovely true girlfriend,” Ada, and her unfounded jealousy. Hedda asked for examples, and Saul told her of a day they had gone to a Ligurian beach where there were many other attractive women. Hedda knew she was in for big trouble if she let the relationship continue, because “his eyes lit up thinking about the bathing beauties; he forgot that he was telling me this story in connection with Ada’s jealousy and he got carried away by his memories of other women.”

Hedda made no comment when Saul’s Italian reverie ended and his thoughts returned to her. He mistook her composure for a lack of feeling, and her absence of jealousy drove him wild with desire and made him even more determined to marry her. She urged him to go slowly and think rationally: “When he was in the navy, there were no promises between us. I refused to become engaged to him—how could I—I was still married.” But other thoughts nagged at her: “While he was away, all the while he was telling me how he loved me he was sleeping with other women whenever he could.” Saul never deviated from what he told Hedda at their first meeting: “He wanted to get married, but this was not my idea. It took eighteen months before he wore me down and I said okay.”

Their courtship by mail gradually eroded Hedda’s “mountain of doubts.” When he was sent overseas in mid-1943, her letters were more friendly than loving as she filled them with quotes from writers like Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde and long disquisitions on “the ideas of other people including [Aldous] Huxley who’s too intelligent and has the right ideas always and it’s true what he says.” Hedda wanted to engage Saul in discussions about ideas and philosophies that might provide evidence of things they had in common, but he objected: “I want to know what you say or think with your words.” All he wanted, he insisted, was “a good healthy love letter.” Six months passed, and by January 1944 he was still miffed: “I never got one and I wrote you many.”

Hedda wanted to be able to share her innermost thoughts with Saul, but she never succeeded in doing so. “In all the years of our relationship, we never talked about my problems or my ideas. I was not a weeper and I never complained; I never threw tantrums or made demands, so he assumed there was nothing that ever bothered me. We only talked about him.” In the beginning, that did not stop her from trying to talk about the issues and ideas that mattered to her, especially her attitude toward art in general and her own in particular. She usually tried to express her views when she wrote about current exhibitions and the people she saw when she attended openings or visited museums and galleries. She reported news, trends, and gossip in equal part, and she clipped articles from magazines such as Art News and Art Digest that she thought would interest him. In 1943, after she officially adopted Hedda Sterne as the name by which she would henceforth be known, her painting career seemed poised to put her at the forefront of modernism. She had been included in several important group shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery and was given her first solo exhibition by Betty Parsons at the Wakefield Gallery. Through them she met the artists who would become her friends (and Steinberg’s), all luminaries in abstract expressionism. All this activity led to a stunning realization that she wanted to share with Saul: that she was content to sit in her studio all alone except for her cat and to paint nonstop for ten or twelve hours every day, but only for herself. She confessed that “after the show, a lot of things became clear to me, among them that there is practically no vanity left in me—and very little ambition, too.”

Hedda Sterne, Untitled [Circus], 1945. (illustration credit 11.1)

Hedda Sterne, New York, NY, 1955. (illustration credit 11.2)

Hedda Sterne, Antro II, 1949. (illustration credit 11.3)

Saul never responded to this; instead, his next several letters gave her new instructions about how to deal with Victor Civita.

Hedda was not yet ready to abandon her desire to talk about art, so she changed her focus to talking about his. She began with her thoughts about what constitutes “good” art. To her, he was a great rather than a good artist because there was a “seductive” quality to his vision that made people willing to ponder difficult concepts or spend time analyzing something ordinary that he had depicted within an extraordinary setting or in an unusual manner. She believed that he entranced people into doing so “without their even knowing it.” What she was striving to do in her own work was to rid it of a “certain ‘joli,’ ‘pleasant’ [quality] I’ll probably never loose [sic]—because I am nothing much really.” She wanted her painting to take on attributes of Monteverdi’s music, to become austere, measured, and with all emotion “sublimated and unrecognizable, humble, like the Middle Ages monks.” But she was veering into dangerous territory and that was enough about her, so she returned to a discussion of his work: “You have all the qualities of the great, really great artist—I know it … you achieve without efforts for which others have to work years. There is a free flow between your ideas and your pen.”

When Hedda wrote this, it was to encourage him to hold strong to his vision for the book. At that time she was still engaged in contractual discussions with Miss Morrison, who was now talking directly to Victor Civita, and Hedda relayed the unsettling information that Victor and Miss Morrison agreed that new drawings should be more “imitative” of the early work that Steinberg was trying to put behind him. What they really wanted was cartoons with captions, and when Hedda told him that, he channeled all his energies (and Hedda’s) into a book for DSP where he would have more control over the content. At the same time, Geraghty had posed a new and fascinating idea that Hedda thought Saul should consider. Geraghty showed a great number of Steinberg’s drawings to Ludwig Bemelmans, the artist-illustrator and writer who created the Madeline books for children and was a regular (and popular) cover illustrator for The New Yorker. Geraghty wanted to nurture and promote Steinberg’s talent and sought Bemelmans’s opinion of his “eventual development.” Bemelmans was intrigued by Steinberg’s vision, so he studied the drawings and some of the letters Steinberg wrote to describe them. He said he was sure that Steinberg would eventually become a writer, and he told Geraghty to encourage him to go in that direction. Bemelmans and Geraghty both agreed that there was “something about [Steinberg’s] way of using absolutely simple daily words and giving them certain new sense and charm” in his letters, and that this, in concert with the drawings, could lead him to excel in any number of genres. Hedda said Saul probably thought this “improbable,” but to her it was “just normal.”

BY THE EARLY SPRING OF 1944, when she was allowing herself to be persuaded that she should go to Reno for a divorce, Hedda worried that it would be wrong to be away from New York if Saul managed to get the long-delayed furlough he thought was due. While she vacillated, he wrote letters about how he wanted to live once the war was over: “All I desire now from life is to stay with you and make drawings. Let’s forget about complications, let’s ask things from life and people instead of being surprised when things happen or feeling like not deserving them. The war experience made me a bit more realistic.” He wanted their life to be boring, because he needed boredom “in order to make something good,” and he was specific about where he wanted to make that something good: “in a studio with a big soft rug to walk around barefooted … we’ll make a long table for drawing, about 12 ft long, with pen & ink section, tempera and watercolor section. Then we’ll buy from some café or restaurant a small table with marble to make drawings on thin paper over the marble surface, the pencil is really sliding, the ideal surface for pencil drawings.”

His meticulous description of how they would work was not exactly what she wanted to hear, especially when he told her that he thought she should postpone the trip to Reno and stay securely married to Fred Stafford for the indefinite future. Instead of getting his furlough, he was being shunted from one posting to another, from North Africa to southern France and Italy, so near the fighting that he worried he might be killed and she would have given up financial stability for naught. Hedda thought he might be trying to tell her that he had stopped loving her, and she tried to imagine how she would react if it were true. In an eerie prefiguration of how she actually did behave throughout the many years she was married to Saul Steinberg, she imagined herself as “trying to be very ‘good and heroic’…I always try to be civilized and things like that make me want to convince myself that this is the way I would act.” She seemed surprised by the conclusion she arrived at: “I love you. Really. I don’t know very well why.”

FRED STAFFORD WAS AS WORRIED ABOUT Hedda’s security as Steinberg was, but by the middle of May they all three agreed that Steinberg was likely to survive the war and that Hedda should go to Reno. Fred told her that he hoped marriage to Saul would be lasting and happy but she was not to worry if it were not, because he would always provide for her. He was as generous and gracious about the divorce as he had been during the marriage, and Hedda was in Reno on May 23, assured that Fred would cover all her expenses.

The divorce was final at the end of June, and on July 5 she left by train to spend the summer painting with Betty Parsons in Provincetown, where she promptly caught the flu. The only bright spot was five letters from Saul and a photograph of him with a “too little moustache.” He acknowledged receiving all her V-mail letters, but he wrote nothing about her desire to talk to him about things that really mattered to her. After reading his letters, she replied, “I feel lousy. I’ll write more when I feel different.” It might have been the flu speaking, but it might have been other nagging worries as well.

CHAPTER 12

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