A deflating balloon

I was his long-suffering, uninterruptedly betrayed wife with a few honeymoons thrown in. The best one was when he sent for me to come to Paris. As soon as Saul had the security of knowing that Hedda was coming to Paris, he was able to revert to his rigidly focused concentration on work, this time on hers as well as his own. Hedda’s paintings were included in “Fifty Years of American Art from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York,” a huge exhibition that filled the Musée National d’Art Moderne and brought in record crowds throughout the month of April 1955. Steinberg was determined to promote Sterne as the star of the show and to secure future solo exhibitions for her in Paris, preferably at Galerie Maeght. He was pleased to see how well placed her paintings were in the main room, where they were “certainly one of the best if not the best.” As for the show itself, he dismissed it as “a little like [Alfred] Barr, prudent, pansyish fear of showoff, something like a bookkeeper’s honesty.” He was cognizant of the postwar shift of dominance in modern art from Paris to New York, and because he was always assessing how his own work was received in Europe and how its reception there might differ from that in the United States, he scoffed at Barr’s selections, saying they were tinged with “the fear of Oncle (France).” He accused MoMA’s illustrious director of unconsciously kowtowing to the French, which resulted in a selection of the mostly tried and true in American art, and ultimately the safe and boring.

Steinberg used Sterne’s inclusion in the Paris show to try to persuade Louis Gabriel Clayeux, the gallery’s artistic manager, to give her a solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght. Clayeux was not enthusiastic, but he hesitated to offend Steinberg, one of the gallery’s most popular artists, so he used the polite excuse that he was away from Paris and would not return in time to see the “Fifty Years” exhibition before it closed. He suggested that Sterne should try to be included in the Salon de Mai but did not offer to use his influence to help secure a place for her in the invitation-only show. Steinberg was not pleased when Clayeux said the only venue in Paris where anyone could enter a painting without an invitation was the Salon des Indépendants. There were approximately four thousand entries in 1955, but Steinberg planned to see the show and assess the quality of the submissions before deciding if it would be worth Hedda’s while to enter in future years.

He was spending a great deal of time negotiating on her behalf, everything from persuading Alberto Giacometti to see the show and tell his friends to do the same to taking the art collector James Thrall Soby there in the hope that he would swing his significant patronage behind Sterne. Steinberg did all this on his own, without Hedda’s knowledge. He did not tell her until after he did it, for she had little interest in promoting herself and never shared his drive for fame and success. All she wanted was to be with him and paint in the solitude of their home.

Besides Clayeux’s refusal to give Hedda a show, there was another unpleasantness surrounding his affiliation with Galerie Maeght, and he did not know how to counteract it. “How horrible the mud splashes people around,” he complained, as he tried to find out who started the rumor that the only reason Aimé Maeght had given him the 1953 solo exhibition was that he had paid for it. He thought this “bit of gossip” probably originated with Stanley William Hayter, whose techniques of etching and lithography Steinberg had observed in New York. He seldom joined the international coterie of poets, writers, and artists that congregated informally every night in Hayter’s Rue Cassini atelier because he knew that Hayter was a great gossip, quite cheerful about adding color to existing rumors and making up new ones. Very few of Hayter’s guests held his wicked tongue against him, but Steinberg saw it differently. “Hayter—Hate. When he laughs it’s frightening. His eyes remain steely and mean, a bit crazy, too.”

Steinberg always ignored gossip about his personal life, no matter how vicious it was, but when anything impinged on his profession, he dealt with it ruthlessly. Too many American painters hung out at Hayter’s for him to ignore the gossip, even though they were only “small fry abstracts” whose names he could not bother to remember. “They do nothing because they feel that being here is enough,” but they still managed to spread the rumor far and wide, all the way back to New York. He found it impossible to squelch, and it plagued him on and off for the next decade.

Meanwhile, he had real work to do and kept himself busy overseeing the various stages of what became the 1956 Dessins, published by Gallimard. The book was a compilation of drawings from his three previously published books, and his task was to select those that would resonate best with a European audience. Making the selection created the first disagreement, for he originally wanted sixty and Gallimard only thirty. While choosing them and working on the layout, he was “horrified” by every single one, dismissing them as the work of the “clever little monster” he had been when young. At the same time, Robert Delpire wanted to publish a separate collection for a book whose working title, “Labirinte [sic],” was so appealing that Steinberg used the English version, Labyrinth, several years later for an entirely different kind of book. Delpire was the founder of the arts magazine Neuf, and later the promoter of photography as an art form and the publisher of important works about the genre. He was famous for always championing the unusual, if not the outré, and he planned to issue his selection of Steinberg’s drawings in the unusual format of a dépliant, with the book’s pages unfolding like an accordion.

“There may be trouble here,” Steinberg worried, and indeed there was. He was never satisfied with the quality of the reproductions, no matter how many times they were redone, nor did he like the way they looked when the pages unfolded. He was “furious and confused” when both Delpire and Gallimard used the excuse of expensive publishing costs to cut his royalties, saying sarcastically, “Because, of course, I don’t need money!” He was determined to finish both books despite the insult to his income and the technical problems involved in the visuals, if only to “honor” the drawing table he had bought and installed in his hotel room. After several months, when it became clear that no matter how much Mrs. Jennie Bradley intervened there would be no resolution in his favor, he made two decisions. Gallimard was the most prestigious publisher in France, so despite the cut in royalties he would not sever his ties there and would let the company publish Dessins; but despite his need for the money the Delpire book would bring, he made Delpire cancel it, because it would never meet his high standards.

The French publishing situation was insulting, especially after the previous two years, when he had enjoyed extraordinary attention and praise within the international art world. His reputation was in the ascendant, and his sales burgeoned after nonstop solo exhibitions in galleries and museums. He was the subject of articles and reviews in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television shows. Critics vied to dub him a cultural commentator, a visual historian of contemporary culture, and an authority on everything from the iconic to the ordinary. His work was seen in Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Basel, and throughout Germany in cities like Dortmund, Hanover, Lübeck, and Frankfurt. In the United States, there were solo shows in Chicago, Richmond, Washington, Dallas, and Santa Barbara. Steinberg’s style was so well known that the adjective Steinbergian was coined, shorthand for a new, unusual, and slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.

For Steinberg, it was wonderful indeed to be recognized for the sheer hard work he had put into creating, organizing, and occasionally helping to promote his drawings. On the one hand he took his reputation as his just reward, while on the other he blamed it for the turmoil and exhaustion that made him want to flee from everything he had worked so hard to create. The problem was that whenever he thought he could relax and enjoy the accolades and financial rewards, somebody needed something that only he could provide, and because of his overdeveloped sense of responsibility, he did what he could to help.

Just when he thought he was well under way to regaining the equilibrium he had gone to Europe to find, events conspired to throw him off track once again. Parsons and Janis were pleading with him to send more drawings for shows that would enable them to capitalize on the momentum of his European reception. Requests were coming from other galleries, such as the one from Elodie Courter, who organized traveling shows for the Museum of Modern Art and who was pestering Hedda to get Saul to participate. Courter wanted to include his work in an exhibition that would take recent American art to cities where it had not yet been shown and would not accept his refusal. Saul deputized Hedda to go in person before she left for Paris and repeat to Courter what he had already told her in letters and cables: “I don’t want to be shown with just a few drawings … I hate group shows. I dislike humour in large doses and I refused constantly to participate in anthologies or cartoon festivals.” “You don’t have to feel responsible,” he instructed Hedda. “Just tell her NO. ”

THE SUDDEN SPURT OF WORK WAS once again turning him into the “deflating balloon” he had been at the beginning of his European wanderings. He was having second thoughts about staying in “the misery that Paris has become” but had made too many appointments to leave. The main reason he could not leave was that the “Lica troubles” were starting up again. The Romanian government had relaxed restrictions slightly, allowing a larger quota of Jews to immigrate to Israel, and once again it seemed that the Roman family might be among them. Steinberg learned of this in a roundabout way when an official from the American embassy left a brusque message for him to appear at the Israeli consulate early the next morning. Fearful that his insomnia would cause him to miss the appointment, he took a strong dose of sleeping pills and went to bed early. He still slept so fitfully that he was groggy throughout his appointment.

It was a total frustration, a bureaucratic formality of filling out thirty new forms with the same facts he had been attesting to for years. After he verified his income and raised his hand to swear financial responsibility for the Roman family, the Israelis told him to go home and await further notice, while the Americans shrugged dismissively, implying that there was nothing more they could do. It was another stress-inducing runaround, but if this one held the possibility that his sister’s family might actually emigrate, he wanted to be in Paris, where it was easier to leave at a moment’s notice if the Israelis granted the visa that would let him shepherd them from Bucharest to Israel.

Hedda had dropped everything to come to Paris, and now it appeared that he might have to leave her alone yet again. He considered it one more depressing example of how external realities hindered him from having what he wanted, in this case the “Paris Honeymoon” he was counting on. What angered and frustrated him most was the way intimations and influences of Rosa and his Romanian upbringing surfaced during these times of stress— especially Rosa’s maxims to keep his head on his shoulders and keep making money. Moritz added to Saul’s confusion when he wrote that Rosa was having a serious nervous breakdown and making him ill with her negative thoughts and changes of mind. Saul’s comparison of his own erratic behavior with his mother’s was unavoidable.

The only time he felt “a wave of warmth and security” was when he was drawing for his own pleasure, and once again pleasure was eluding him. He complained that whenever he had to draw to make money, there was “displeasure that can last for many months, linger like an illness.” Now he refused to see anything good in work that had originally pleased him, and to prove his point he made a list of all the projects that he claimed were responsible for making him impossible to live with. When he and Hedda had spent the summer in Vermont, he blamed the “cute mural for Bonwit Teller.” Hollywood was “hell” because of the need to earn money by decorating a swimming pool. Stonington was “silly” because he resented having to work alongside Jerry Robbins in the same room, claiming he was “never able to work properly” unless in his own work space.

Brooding over the conflicting claims on his time and energy led him to seek the company of Alberto Giacometti. The artist lived and worked in an atelier that was one step removed from a hovel, and despite the money his sculpture was commanding, he had no desire to live elsewhere. The best part of his life was his work, and he communicated that joy to Steinberg, who after one of their evenings would spend the next day exclaiming, “I want to become a clochard ” before fretting over the impossibility. “I don’t want to be what I was but how can I change? I have to make money.” He decided that one way to lighten his load would be to enlist Hedda’s help, which he had never done before for several reasons. Hedda was “never one of those artists’ wives who make a profession of promoting their husbands.” She already had her own esteemed professional life when Steinberg met her, and throughout their marriage, he respected her need to practice it. However, the main reason he never asked for her help was that he needed to be in total control of every aspect of his work. He found it impossible to delegate the authority to anyone else—not even Hedda, the person he trusted most—to make decisions on his behalf. These shifting attitudes collided when he told Hedda that as soon as she arrived, she would have to concentrate on helping him learn to live in such a way that he would not have to do any work but his own. Almost immediately he changed his mind, and for the first time he worried that he was not taking her needs into consideration, asking, “What about you? Do you want to live with [such a] monster?” He apologized for all the moaning and complaining he had done in the past several months, saying that he was embarrassed because he had done nothing for her while she was always so kind and reassuring toward him.

Even though he was still “a bit insane” in the midst of so much indecision, he resorted to the animal imagery he often used to describe their intimate relationship. “Rabbit” was his favorite term of affection for Hedda, and he called himself a “crocodile,” both of which became iconic images in his drawings. Continuing with animal metaphors, he told her he was sure that in a few days his struggle to be either “worm or butterfly” would be over, and if she wanted him back, he would fall into her lap as her “old messy crocodile, loving and sedate.”

HEDDA ARRIVED ON MAY 3, 1955, and moved into his room at the Hotel Pont Royal. Saul was sick of hotel living, and when their friend the painter Roberto Matta told him of an apartment at 26 Rue Jacob, he rented it sight unseen. In a spurt of happiness, they moved to what was then a shabby street on the Left Bank. They were several doors away from Natalie Clifford Barney’s extraordinary house in the courtyard of no. 20 and the building of the same number in which Ellen and Richard Wright had an apartment. Hedda was fascinated by all the existentialists, members of the haut monde, and beatniks she saw coming and going at no. 20, but Saul told her they had friends enough already and she should concentrate on them, him, and her painting. However, for the next two months they led a highly social existence, their calendars filled with luncheon and dinner dates. They saw a great deal of Germana and Roberto Matta, and Saul went alone to visit Geer van Velde at his home in Cachan, outside Paris. Janet Flanner invited them to dine with her and the visiting James Thurber. On a single day they had drinks with Eugène Ionesco and his wife and dinner with the Giacomettis, and capped off the evening with a late-night viewing of La Ronde. Sonia Orwell demanded their presence at several dinners, and they went along cheerfully because they were amused by her imperious manner. Among the writers they saw were Georges Bataille and André Breton, who along with Matta introduced them to the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Eugène Ionesco introduced them to the aged Tristan Tzara, who liked them so much that he invited them to lunch several days later. He also introduced them to Stéphane Lupasco, the Romanian-born logician and philosopher whose dense and elliptical writings fascinated them both, but especially Hedda, who puzzled over them for years afterward. They spent a great deal of time with the photographers Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, and Steinberg dined alone with Paul Rand and later with Le Corbusier.

Wedged into their social program were several visits to Hedda’s mother and brother in Paris and an overnight visit to Nice to see Saul’s parents, which was all they could tolerate. At the same time, several of Lica’s “heartbreaking” letters reached Saul. Hardships and restrictions had made her “mean and ugly,” and she did not know how much more she could stand. Between her anguished letters and his mother’s hysterical ones, he was feeling suffocated by half-truths, and the two women chose this moment to introduce a new wrinkle. Under the Romanian Communist government, the only acceptable destination for any Jew who wanted to leave was Israel, and the only acceptable reason was to reunite with family already there. Since Lica’s parents were in France, the government now wanted to know why the Romans had not applied to go to Israel, although of course they would not have been permitted to go there if they had. “On top of that, they are in Bucharest—a complete family with children of their own,” the government decreed, and therefore they had no valid reason for emigrating. Most damaging of all in the government’s view was Lica’s rich brother, who lived at the epicenter of decadent Western civilization and who had already corrupted them by sending luxury goods and money on a regular basis (less than half of which ever reached them).

“I don’t know what to do,” Saul said, fearing that he was running out of options. He contacted “Rothschilds, Romanians, Israeli Consul,” and then asked Maeght and other “art people” to use their influence with influential Jewish philanthropists and benefactors of Israel. He left nothing untried, in the hope that someone could open useful political doors. As he was working to secure the Roman family’s passage to Israel, Lica dropped another bombshell, telling him for the first time that despite his years of efforts to get her family to Israel, what she had really wanted all along was to come to France. She sent frantic appeals for him to get them a French visa, and this, he said, was “after I troubled the whole Palestine, consuls, etc.” Embarrassed by all his earlier efforts to enlist the help of influential Jewish advocates for Israel and not knowing whom to ask for France, he turned to Hedda’s brother for advice.

As if on cue, Rosa chose this moment to vent her frustration over Lica’s troubles by chastising Saul for buying such an expensive refrigerator, laying all the blame on Moritz as the one who put him up to it. She saved a portion of her ranting for Hedda, blaming her mother for “hiding” her and Saul in Paris and selfishly refusing to let them go to Nice. Whatever Saul did, he knew it would always be “the wrong thing” for Rosa, and of course it was. When he stopped on the street to watch a funeral procession pass by, he “envied for a moment the principal.”

HE CONTINUED TO WORK ON GALLIMARD’S Dessins, going frequently to the print shop and fussing over every single detail as both the printer and publisher tore out their hair over the constant changes his meticulous demands necessitated. Even though he did whittle the book down by twenty-two drawings plus “cutouts,” no one was happy as he dragged the process on. Despite feeling that he was wasting his time, Steinberg still slogged away. “I’ll never learn,” he scolded himself each time he returned to the print shop. Eventually he and Gallimard agreed on a compromise: the publisher would agree to his final selection and allow him to paste the layout providing that he drew a new jacket and front and back covers. He agreed, and when the book was published, he was content that all his slogging had changed the “kind of anthology of old drawings” into a good book filled “with many new ones.”

WHILE HE WAS AWAY IN EUROPE, his friends at The New Yorker had not forgotten him. Shawn and Geraghty had both rejected his idea for drawings of the southern trip, but they had a more ambitious project in mind for him. They were trying to secure a visa from the Soviet Union for him to go there and prepare a significant collection of drawings based on whatever he saw as he traveled wherever the government would permit. He was excited by the idea and eager to go. Originally he thought the visa would come swiftly and easily, so he completed all the detailed paperwork at the American embassy in Paris, patiently doing it on top of all the forms he had to fill out for his sister there and at the Israeli consulate. He had not counted on all the bureaucracies moving in their own good time, which was at a glacial pace, and by the middle of June there was still no word about his visa. Confronted with bureaucratic slowness, worried about the need to bring in some cash, and not wanting to spend the summer in the heat of either Paris or New York, he sent Hedda home with instructions to rent a house on Cape Cod or anywhere else that had a sand beach but definitely “NO Stonington.”

He spent his last days in Paris adding up the money he had earned from gallery sales and book dividends, a grand total of $868.34, which he spent at Hermès buying farewell presents for his friends.

HE LEFT PARIS ON A HIGH NOTE. At least one of his two books—Gallimard’s—would turn out to be what he wanted, and despite canceling the other he still had cordial relations with Delpire, who was ready to publish another whenever Steinberg wanted. Most of his interaction had been with artists, and much of their talk had been about work. These conversations had given him some interesting new perspectives on his own work, and he thought about them on the flight home, but the one that resonated most had been with Geer van Velde. Steinberg was fascinated by the simplicity of van Velde’s modest little house in Cachan, saying that he lived a life that reminded him of Voltaire’s admonition to Candide to cultivate his own garden. As they talked after dinner, van Velde confessed that he was confused and troubled by the new direction his painting had taken, becoming stark, dark, and veering from abstraction toward representation. Van Velde thought it was changing spontaneously, without his being able to explain exactly how or why. Steinberg offered that it was moving from “pleasant semi-abstractions” to “things that are not pleasant looking.” Van Velde responded that he was struggling through his painting with issues in his life of “moral problems” and “truth.” Steinberg suggested that nonrepresentation was merely a way of “avoiding easy ways out (the old Jewish taboo of the human figure in art).” He offered the possibility that such struggles often led artists to “become inevitably Jews at heart and mind,” and thought that this might be happening to the Dutch Protestant van Velde. Their initial discussion ended unresolved, but the subject of morality and truth in art became one they returned to frequently whenever they met from then on. That night, when Steinberg returned to his hotel room, he made a cryptic entry in his datebook: “Note: alone, people will become Jews. Abstract painting. Jewish.”

He factored his thoughts about the exchange with van Velde into his recollections of the conversations he had had with other artists, writers, and filmmakers throughout his several months of peripatetic travel. Each social encounter usually included an exchange of information about current projects, often with details of new methods and techniques, which Steinberg digested to make them relate to and sometimes apply to his work. As he thought them through, he usually explained them in letters to Hedda before recording his thoughts in his pocket notebooks or making drawings in his sketchbooks.

His thinking did not end there, for often traces of earlier conversations could be found years later in the random collections of pages that served in lieu of a formal diary or journal. In one such collection of notes, he titled a passage “What I learned from Artists.” He asked de Kooning, “How do you achieve this or that effect?” De Kooning replied, “All you need is a strong desire to achieve this or that and you invent it.” Barnett Newman gave him more practical advice: “Never laugh for photographers. Dress well, necktie. ‘They’ want to show that you are a regular fellow.” Marcel Duchamp gave the best advice of all: “Answer or throw away immediately all mail as soon as it arrives.” Unfortunately, this was advice Steinberg never followed. He did, however, follow the pattern of every other artist he respected, who, when asked to pass judgment on another artist’s work, would always reply, “Great!”

NOW, ON THE WAY HOME AFTER several months totally immersed in thinking about himself and his career, and with the Russian journey he hoped to make uppermost in his mind, he began to think of the months in Europe as a natural break that divided his career cleanly and sharply into two parts: drawings he had done “before” his abrupt flight away from New York and the life he lived there, and what he would go on to do “after,” when he intended to create both life and work anew.

When he thought about it, the divisions between his life in New York and his life in Europe were vast, with the major difference being work. When he was in New York, his main objective was to do enough commercial work to support himself and all his dependents during the several months when he would be in France or Italy doing only what he wanted to do. Also, his primary socializing was with a different sort of people in New York than those he saw in Europe. In New York, cocktail parties, dinner parties, gallery openings, and book launches were ubiquitous, and the guest lists were usually large enough to preclude anything but politely superficial chatter. In Paris, he was mostly with artists and writers, usually over dinner tables in their homes or in quiet restaurants where they were able to engage in serious conversation, more often than not about current work and ideas for future projects. On this last trip in particular he had been with so many other writers and artists that he could not help but think about his own way of life in relation to theirs. Even the artists who were financially comfortable, such as Giacometti and Miró, to give but two examples, lived far more quietly and simply than he did, and with a daily existence that centered completely on their work.

Steinberg was different from them in an important way. Although many of his friends on both continents were among the intelligentsia, his was a questing intelligence that was always on the lookout for whatever struck his offbeat vision and for new ways in which to use it. No matter how ordinary anything may have seemed to others—a street sign, a woman’s clothing, even an overheard conversation—Steinberg always found a way to make it new. Everything was grist for his creative mill, from the silliest movie to the most serious book. By putting his own particular spin on what he drew, he could turn his subjects into an “aha!” moment for those who beheld his work. “I am a writer who draws,” he said of himself, and he could legitimately have expanded this self-definition to include the social historian and cultural anthropologist.

From childhood, Steinberg was always a voracious reader, and he counted writers among his closest friends. If he read something he liked, he often wrote to the author, and inevitably friendships were created. His months alone had given him the opportunity to read widely and deeply, particularly in serious nonfiction. Like almost every other reader of Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” he used Berlin’s classifications to interpret himself. Steinberg saw Berlin’s hedgehog as viewing the world through a lens that restricted itself to a singular, fixed image, idea, or vision, while his fox drew on a large body of images and experiences in order to form an all-encompassing, all-inclusive worldview. In one of his brief notes Steinberg wrote, “In order to become a fox, I had to be a hedgehog for a long time. I can’t make distinction between what is right and what my mind tells me is right.”

When he had been a hedgehog, one single idea had dominated his thinking and behavior: the need to make money and the concurrent responsibility to support others. During his years in Milan, when he was a poor student, he had to sell his art in order to supplement the meager financial aid his parents could afford to send. When he was in Santo Domingo, in order to support himself he had to tailor his work to create a desire for it in American media. After the war, he needed to provide financial stability for himself and his wife, his parents, his sister, and his numerous other relatives. He also felt the need to help his friends, sending money to Aldo on the frequent occasions when he needed it and a monthly stipend directly to Ada’s bank. By the time he ran away to Europe in 1955, he had been on a proverbial treadmill for almost two decades, during which he had been a hedgehog with a single fixed idea: to be successful as an artist in order to acquire money. And when fame came with it, he reveled in it, even though it meant he had to run harder, faster, and longer.

The time he spent in Europe encouraged him to think he could still fulfill his responsibilities while branching out to become Berlin’s fox, one who knew many things and had many ideas. While in Paris he did buy a hedgehog’s drafting table for his hotel room, but he also bought a fox’s white parasol, easel, and blue artist’s coat, all for painting outdoors, which he had earlier given up because it took too much time away from paid projects. If he retained anything from his hedgehog years, he convinced himself that it was how to use his commercial work in ways that would continue to bring in the much-needed income while allowing his private creative vision to be like a fox’s, multifaceted and ready to explore many different avenues of expression.

HE RETURNED TO NEW YORK AT the end of June but stayed only long enough to pack summer things before joining Hedda in Wellfleet, where she had rented a house through early September. He liked it there well enough to think that Massachusetts might be the place to buy a second home, but he was still eager to get back to New York and resume his frenetic socializing, as if there was nothing more important to do in life. Much of it was with friends from The New Yorker. Jim Geraghty took him to lunch at the Algonquin, where they plotted strategies for securing the Russian visa; he shared Charlie Addams’s love of gambling and accepted all his invitations to play poker; and he even allowed Brendan Gill to take him to lunch at the Century Association as a prelude to proposing him for membership. He went to Geoffrey Hellman’s large and boozy parties and lunched alone with St. Clair McKelway or Joe Mitchell, both of whom were writers he much admired.

He spent weekends with Mary McCarthy and her husband, James West, and he and Hedda made the trek to Utopia Parkway in Queens to see Joseph Cornell. But all the while he was out and about, he had not forgotten his European good intentions. He went often to Wittenborn, the shop of the New York dealer in rare art and architecture books, and added to his growing collection. He was still thinking about the self-knowledge he had gained during his time abroad and he continued to make self-referential notes that might translate into drawings. He was exploring his own “vices,” both “good,” which he defined as his love of drinking fine scotch whiskey, and “bad,” which he equated with his tendency toward “avarice.” To him, this meant the lust to make money and rake in as much as he could amass, greedily buying expensive clothing in greater quantities than he needed, and the need for sex with almost every woman he met. He was discreet about several French encounters, one of which remained an occasional liaison for years afterward; and when he returned to New York, the coded initials, times, and addresses continued to clutter his appointment books.

As he thought about himself, he was also collecting ideas for drawings that related to the larger world: women in mink coats were equated with “schmaltz,” while the president of Liberia lent himself to caricature because he “will not be seen without a top hat.” In another encoded “note to myself” he described how an artist “becomes one (after 20) because he has the temperament of one.” Several days later, he took mescaline for the first time and made notes while under its influence. He liked drugs because he thought they expanded his creative energies, but he never made them a daily habit like the whiskey and cigarettes he thought he could not live without. He used drugs socially, mostly marijuana, on and off for years afterward and was fortunate that he never had a bad reaction and all his experiences were pleasant.

The year 1955 was ending, and he was not too happy to look back on it. On the one hand he had made money, paid his bills, and survived a desperate personal crisis; on the other hand he had learned much about himself and was determined to put the knowledge to work as soon as the new year began. He still had not heard about his Russian visa, but his sponsors at The New Yorker assured him that it would come any day and that he should prepare to go at a moment’s notice. It finally arrived in early December, two months before he was to depart. There was so much to do, and the first thing he did was to buy a larger-than-usual notebook and write on the first page in large block letters “ CARRY NOTEBOOK EVERYWHERE. ”

CHAPTER 19

Дата добавления: 2015-10-30