Classic symptoms

I’m a bit troubled and confused—all of a sudden I discover that the last fifteen years have gone by too fast. Classic symptoms. Steinberg had been at home for less than a month when the Jaguar arrived and gave him the excuse that he needed to go away again. He said it needed further breaking in, so he planned to drive across Pennsylvania to West Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though The New Yorker had not been interested in the drawings from his earlier trips to the South and Southwest, he hoped to interest the editors in the new ones. He sensed a new political urgency in American life and wanted to contribute something that would awaken readers, albeit quietly, to the social inequities and injustices. He wanted to see for himself “the ancestors of the Americans, the heroes of our best fiction,” and these included “cowboys, crooks, and country derelicts.” He went to company towns where coal miners lived and worked in dire poverty, to small towns where residents were both isolated from and deeply suspicious of the outside world and where rampant distrust of it made local prejudices harsh and threatening. He saw and drew a way of life so different from that in New York that it might have been a foreign country, one dominated by old-time religion and violence, where landscapes were despoiled by mining and commerce and daily life was as primitive as that in African villages. “Here’s where they ought to make a film,” he said of one urban landscape, but once again The New Yorker was not ready for it.

Hedda stayed behind in New York, where she was busy preparing for new exhibitions and taking care of last-minute details connected with several that were just ending. “I hear you are rich,” Saul teased, after she sold several large paintings through Betty Parsons and received commissions for several more following the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum. She had four new shows to prepare for throughout 1958 and had already received two more invitations to show in 1959. It was a period of surprising public recognition for an artist who was still entirely content to paint quietly at home and who would have been happy to do the work without showing or selling it.

An important reason for Hedda’s growing introspection was that it kept her from thinking about Elizabeth Stille. Their friendship had become so close that when the women came down with severe flu at the same time, they talked on the telephone several times daily to compare their cases. Saul was away, as he almost always was, but when he phoned Hedda, one of his first inquiries was usually about Elizabeth. Hedda’s antennae were alerted that Saul’s infatuation with Elizabeth was still strong when she noted how charmed he was by her tale of how Elizabeth was too sick to get out of bed to stop Alexander, then a toddler, from flushing a twenty-dollar bill down the toilet. Such excessive delight in a child’s doings was quite unlike him.

Saul’s restlessness was such that he could not bear to be at home any longer than absolutely necessary, because by staying he would have to face “doubts and complications.” He needed an excuse for his inability to concentrate, so he blamed the outsize Brussels murals for making it difficult to return to drawing on “the usual scale.” And as he dawdled, a number of commissions languished. He told Aldo that in the past, the moment he plunked his “ass on the chair” he could always focus on the project at hand, but it was not working this time. Still refusing to face the complications in his life, he insisted that all his anxieties were caused by his work, and if he did not have so many financial responsibilities he would give it up entirely. Deep down, however, he knew that he was kidding himself and would not change a thing because he liked success, the books, the temptations, and was afraid of missing out on something good.

TO PULL HIMSELF OUT OF MALAISE, he decided to get serious about a new book, envisioning a biographical exploration of “life … seen here like a voyage from birth A to the end, B.” When he was in Europe and pondering how he had changed from a transplanted Italian to a bona fide American, he thought about calling the book The Labyrinth, but after the driving trip, the content took a temporary detour to become something different and he gave it the working title “Steinberg’s America.” The basic premise was autobiography, but at the start he could not clarify the unifying idea that would let him emphasize either his inner life (that is, “Labyrinth”) or his life as an observer of the external world (“America”). He still owed the four publishers a book to make up for the aborted murals project, so every now and again, when nothing else commanded his attention, he gave thought to what a new one should be.

He was tending toward “Steinberg’s America” because he had just provided the cover drawing for Delpire’s publication of Robert Frank’s revolutionary photographs of everyday American life, so sensational in their ordinariness that every American publisher Frank contacted refused the book. Frank, a Swiss-born Jew, loaded his then wife, the artist Mary Frank, and their children into a shabby used car and drove randomly back and forth across the country, taking photos of the “easily found, not easily selected and interpreted.” Delpire recognized that the book, which he published as The Americans, was groundbreaking, but as Frank was unknown, he thought a Steinberg drawing would help to sell it. Both Robert and Mary Frank were good friends of Steinberg and Sterne, but as much as Robert admired Saul, he did not want a drawing on the cover of his book of photographs. Delpire, aware of Steinberg’s enormous popularity in France, insisted that his drawing would be a selling tool, and the book was published that way. When the matter was settled, Steinberg was sure he had found his next book.

EVEN THOUGH HEDDA WAS CONTENT TO spend the summer of 1958 in the city because of all the work she had to do, Saul was itching to let the Jaguar take him somewhere else. In July, saying that he needed more drawings for the “America” book, he imitated Frank’s car trip, but unlike Frank, he drove with purpose in mind. He filled a sketchbook with drawings from cities like Aberdeen, Maryland; South Hill, Virginia; Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Athens, Georgia; Middlesboro, Kentucky; Williamson, West Virginia; and Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

The trip did little to relieve the anxieties that beset him when he started out, and he returned from it “a bit troubled and confused,” saying only that “the last fifteen years have gone by too fast.” By the autumn he was looking for someplace else to go when an invitation conveniently arrived from Denmark, one similar to so many that he had always declined in the past but that this time he decided to accept. Piet Hein, the Danish poet and mathematician, who was a fan of Steinberg’s work and with whom he had exchanged several letters, invited him to meet the filmmaker Carl Theodore Dreyer, to discuss the possibility of Dreyer’s filming several of Faulkner’s novels. Steinberg was intrigued by the proposition because he admired Faulkner’s fiction and had gone to Mississippi several times, thinking that seeing the state would help him understand why its people thought as they did. He brought home numerous souvenirs of Oxford, and on one of his trips stole a phone directory because he was fascinated by the “many Faulkners and Falkners” who were listed in it.

He decided to make Denmark the first part of a business trip that would continue with a visit to Rowohlt’s headquarters in Hamburg, then on to Paris to talk to Delpire, and at the end the obligatory visit to his family in Nice. He arrived in Copenhagen on December 3, 1958, and was immediately certain that going there had been a big mistake. He was the celebrity of the moment, a hapless being who felt as if he had been dropped smack in the center of a bowl of monkeys who were all yammering and picking at him to explain his work. He bore it stoically, saying that it was fortunate he could not read Danish and therefore could not understand what they wrote about him.

His hosts pulled out all the stops in order to give him one solid week of activity, festivity, and adulation. A welcome dinner was scheduled only hours after his plane landed; a meal of many courses (each with appropriate wines) that ended with a dessert served on a tray with exploding firecrackers, preceded by a violinist playing a spirited march. Afterward there was coffee and brandy, but it was still not over: another course followed, of smoked fish, caviar, and aquavit. After all the food and liquor, he thought he was hallucinating when he finally got to his room, looked out the window, and saw a monument to the Viking explorers that featured sailors blowing horns while carrying wounded boy trumpeters, a bear fighting a bull, and a musk ox fighting a giant fish (or perhaps it was a dragon; he was never certain). He was so tired that he was unable to sleep, but he had to get up early for several days in a row for endless rounds of speeches, lunches, and dinners with various local “bigwigs.” They took him to Elsinore Castle, to all the museums, on a tour of the countryside, and then on a walking tour of Copenhagen. He liked the city and told Hedda they ought to come as private tourists, but only in the summertime.

Carl Dreyer took him to see the work of an “interesting insane Dane-painter,” and Steinberg thought the topic of “another normality—that of the neurotic or insane”—worth pursuing if the book’s content became more “Labyrinth” than “America.” He had time to think on the day-long journey to Hamburg by train and ferry, much to the amusement of his German contacts, who had expected him to fly there in an hour. He spent his single day in Hamburg soothing his editors with promises that a book would soon be ready. After another mammoth meal, he had his first good night’s sleep since leaving New York. He was well rested when he flew to Paris, where he needed all the energy he could muster for his first order of business: to find Lica and Rica, who had made a sudden decision to move there permanently.

Armed with a huge supply of mechanical toys from Germany, he found them living in “Raskolnikoff quarters” in the run-down working-class seventeenth arrondissement on the northwest outskirts of the city. The children were happy in school and ecstatic with the new toys, but Lica looked “pathetic” and Rica was exhausted from the only job he could find, going door-to-door trying to sell typewriters. Rica Roman was a cultured, sensitive man, who bore quietly the shame of his family’s total dependence on his wife’s little brother, as when he wrote to express it: “Dear Sauly, we live in the ‘City of Lights,’ but the life is tough and you need a lot of art and power to stay out of the darkness.”

ONCE STEINBERG WAS BACK IN NEW YORK, there was no escape from what he described to Aldo as “the usual. I see too many people and talk too much, but for real or invented reasons I don’t have the courage to change.” An onslaught of commercial requests was awaiting him, all of which required decisions, which, in his usual manner, he ignored. A more pleasant barrage was the fan mail that greeted his third New Yorker cover when it graced the January 17, 1959, issue. The magazine was not yet ready for the literal reality of the life Steinberg saw in his journeys around America, but the editors were delighted with his allegory of “Prosperity,” or “The Pursuit of Happiness.”

Steinberg drew a multileveled pedestal upon which a collection of men and symbols shared the spaces that normally held statues. Uncle Sam shared the base of the pedestal with Uncle Tom, while the two most influential characters in American culture were at the top: Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud. The cover caused a sensation, and fan mail flooded in. Stanley Marcus bought the original drawing as soon as he saw it but continued to pester Steinberg for an explanation of the dichotomy represented by the pairs of men, while Steinberg evaded his questions. A housewife in Berkeley, California, said that if the Nobel Prize were given for magazine covers, Steinberg would surely get it. A professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business asked for oversized copies to display in the school’s entrance, because Steinberg’s “wonderful anachronisms … deserve more attention from thinking men.” An owner of the Farmers’ Hardware Company in upstate New York represented dozens of so-called ordinary readers who asked Steinberg to tell him what it meant, as did a student at Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln High School, whose POD (Problems of Democracy) class got into such a spirited debate about what the cover meant that they decided to ask Steinberg if he “would be so kind” as to tell them. In Philadelphia, a grandmother had the cover framed, not only because it amused her but also “as a sort of time capsule” for her grandchildren: “One day when and if they become thinking adults, they may say ‘this is a time that tries men’s souls,’ but then, having studied your cover, they may take heart and realize that the sophistry, demagoguery, social, political, and economic ills which beset their times are nothing new, but were rampant and recognized in 1958.”

THE NEW YORKER COVER MARKED THE beginning of Steinberg’s new relationship with the magazine, one that lasted for the rest of his life. Within his American patria, The New Yorker became his professional homeland as his status rose to an iconic level. It helped that his work was now selling for impressive prices in galleries and private collectors were buying it for themselves or to give to museums. It made him less dependent on commercial propositions and placed him in the fortunate position of being able to concentrate on honing his vision for drawings that would appear in what he believed was the most intelligent mass media publication in the country. He did continue to work for a few other publications, but it was The New Yorker for which he mostly tailored his vision.

Because the magazine, from this moment on, almost always published everything he sent the editors and exactly as he wanted it to be seen, an apocryphal story grew up: that if the editors rejected his drawings and sent them back through the mail or by messenger, he would simply put them in a new envelope and resend them exactly as they were, first to Jim Geraghty and after he retired to Lee Lorenz, both of whom would get his message and quietly accept them. Even though Hedda Sterne insisted the story was true, others had firsthand knowledge that it was not. Roger Angell and his wife, Carole, who worked in the art department, became Steinberg’s good friends and saw in person how he was always ready to change a questionable submission and how he was constantly revising his work, even after he handed in drawings that were deemed print-ready by others. Lee Lorenz said that the apocryphal story “was just not in his character. He was not a prima donna like some of the artists. He did not mind suggestions but they were rarely offered. By the time he sent in his work, it was ready to go.” Frank Modell, one of the editors who often worked with Steinberg, recalled how he was “very particular about his drawings. When he turned them in they were ready to print. We would think it through, maybe make suggestions to change the size, perhaps adapt something. Maybe we might have thought once in a while that it was still a little rough so we’d send it back, but he was always very anxious to do the best he could, so he’d cooperate.” Modell noted that Steinberg “usually didn’t deal with other editors, though. He went right to Geraghty.” Everyone else thought Steinberg went directly to the editor in chief, William Shawn, who usually met him for lunch at the Algonquin so that Steinberg was not often in the magazine’s offices.

Steinberg seldom went to the weekly art department meetings, where everyone from the editorial and production departments to the artists gathered to go over the content of the current and coming issues. When he did visit, it was most often to the production floor, where the magazine was actually made up. He was intrigued by the various processes by which raw drawings became images on the printed page and was curious to learn as much about them as he could. Steinberg, who was compulsively neat in his own working space, loved what Lee Lorenz called the “noise and confusion, the old-fashioned character and the idiosyncratic cast” who worked in the makeup department: “There was paper all over the floor; the place was in a constant uproar as we tried to meet our deadlines.” Mostly, however, he conducted his business with the magazine over the telephone, and if he went to the offices, his real destination was Shawn’s office, as he became the central figure for the remainder of Steinberg’s long association with the magazine.

Shawn was quick to recognize that Steinberg and The New Yorker were, as Roger Angell recalled, “a perfect fit, entirely right for each other. Saul brought class, pleasure, honor, to the magazine. He was an elegant dandy, perfectly dressed, beautiful manners, exquisite behavior … Shawn really appreciated Saul and was very aware of Saul’s originality.” Each, in his polite and private way, became a good friend to the other.

STEINBERG’S MOOD WAS GREATLY LIFTED BY the enthusiasm that surrounded the “Prosperity” cover after it appeared, and it was further buoyed by his own sudden prosperity. There were several unsettling situations connected with his finances, one that brought money and one that did not. The latter concerned a promotional booklet commissioned by the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency for Lincoln automobiles. Steinberg pocketed a sizable fee for the drawings he made for the booklet but was incensed when the agency used one of them on the mailing envelope as well. He complained that the purchase order made no mention of a “direct mail piece,” which he believed the envelope to be, and that by sending it out as a mass mailing, the agency implied that Steinberg was personally endorsing the car. “It is repugnant to me to have my name linked with a deception,” he wrote, as he instructed Alexander Lindey to begin litigation. Lindey cautioned that no matter what “ethical considerations” Steinberg felt had been violated, there was not enough “reasonable probability” for a legal claim to succeed. He reminded Steinberg that a court case would seriously impair his lucrative advertising commissions, because “advertising agencies don’t like to deal with troublemakers.” Steinberg was disgruntled, but he accepted his lawyer’s advice and did nothing.

In another instance he did not follow Lindey’s advice. This one was more delicate, because it involved Hallmark, his cash cow for more than a decade. Besides the usual stipend for cards, Steinberg agreed to design calendars for an additional annual fee of $20,000. For the calendars—unlike the cards, for which he had to surrender the copyright—he expected Hallmark to honor the same arrangement he had with The New Yorker, paying to use the drawings but designating that all other rights and ownership of the originals were his. Hallmark disagreed, saying that it had bought both the drawings and the rights. Steinberg argued that they had not compensated him for the drawings’ true value, which he set separately from the original fee-for-use at a minimum of $5,000 each. However, his strongest objection was not the extra money but the possibility that Hallmark “could authorize anyone—say a beer concern, a shoe manufacturer,” to use the drawings without his consent and without paying him for the additional use. “This is unfair and I cannot agree to it,” he insisted. After several rounds of increasingly tense negotiation, Hallmark withdrew its claim of ownership and the matter was settled in Steinberg’s favor.

SUDDENLY FLUSH WITH MONEY, HE THOUGHT it was time to be serious about buying property away from New York. Hedda liked Cape Cod and would have been content to spend the summers in Wellfleet; Saul thought it pleasant enough but was not sure it was the ideal place. It was a haven for many of their friends in architecture and design, including the Breuers and György Kepes, and the summer home of a large community of writers, everyone from Edmund Wilson to Alfred Kazin and Ann Birstein, Mary McCarthy, and the Philip Hamburgers. Steinberg found himself increasingly drawn to the company of writers and became interested in exploring the genre himself. He went so far as to promise Kepes that he would write an article for Daedalus magazine, and Kepes began hounding him to finish it. Steinberg was stymied by his search for words to express the visual images he wanted to convey: “I find it impossible to write sentences containing ideas without their being mysteries that I’m the only one to understand.” It was much easier to draw what he meant and leave the multiplicity of interpretations his drawings inspired up to his viewers. As for writing, he decided to “give it up,” and at the same time he decided to give up on Cape Cod as well.

In early spring, Ruth and Tino Nivola invited Saul and Hedda to spend a weekend at their house in the Springs section of the township of East Hampton at the eastern end of Long Island. The Nivolas had been in Springs since 1948, when they had bought a run-down farmhouse with a barn and chicken coop on twenty-eight acres. In the decade since, they had created a comfortable home in the midst of landscaped gardens and what Tino called “open air rooms” that he designed to function as extensions of the house. Bernard Rudofsky contributed ideas for the exterior design, particularly the layout of the walkways and the placement of some of Tino’s sculptures on walls that were built for him to paint on and others that were stuccoed with abstract murals of his own design. Inside the house, Ruth Nivola designed jewelry that was as at home framed and hung on walls as it was being worn, while Le Corbusier decided that two large walls in the house needed a mural, so he painted one.

The Nivola household had become a gathering place for most of the poets, painters, writers, and artists who gravitated to the potato fields of eastern Long Island after Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner led the way. They lived nearby, as did many other artist friends of the Nivolas and the Steinberg-Sternes, among them Denise and David Hare, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Charlotte and James Brooks, and Carmen and Hans Namath. Architects who often came for weekend lunches included Bernard and Berte Rudofsky, Frederick Kiesler, and Paul Lester Weiner and his artist wife, Ingeborg Ten Haeff. So too did the photographer Evelyn Hofer and Humphrey Sutton; the philanthropist Dorothy Norman, who collected interesting people for her own gatherings; and May Tabak and her husband, Harold Rosenberg, who became one of Steinberg’s closest friends and to whom he turned increasingly for stimulating conversation and intellectual companionship.

On this particular weekend at the Nivolas’, Steinberg mentioned casually how easy it was to relax in the setting and wondered if he should think about buying property there. Ruth and Tino spoke almost in unison: “The house across the road might be for sale.” It was a run-down farmhouse at 433 Old Stone Highway and belonged to the keeper of the Montauk lighthouse, who was seldom there. Over the weekend there were many jokes about what it would be like for the Steinberg-Sternes to live across the road from the Nivolas, but on Sunday afternoon, when it was time to drive back to the city, Saul told Tino he was serious and asked him to get in touch with the owner to see if he wanted to sell. He did, and several days later Steinberg was contacted by the lawyer representing the owner, with an offer to help resolve the sale. Steinberg paid $12,500 cash, and the property became his on May 22, 1959.

“We’re neighbors now and have become closer friends,” he told Aldo when he thanked him for the Italian edition of Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard, which he passed along to Tino. Unlike the Nivola homestead, which was a constantly evolving artistic creation, Steinberg at first did nothing to his home, a simple house with two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a front porch. The house was “not beautiful,” but he thought it “smelled good inside” and would be “ideal when in the winter I’ll need a prison.” He enjoyed everything about being there, particularly the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the island followed by “the best pleasure, the first mouthful or noseful of cold clean air, a visit to the ocean—at night, with the waves illuminated by the headlights of the car.” A weekend was usually enough to satisfy him and make him eager to return to the city, where he could once again become an anonymous cosmopolite. And besides, he was used to city noises and streetlights, not the darkness of the country, where he slept badly because of the night noises.

BECOMING A HOMEOWNER WAS NOT ENOUGH to keep him settled, and to pass a restless summer he went often to the Bronx Zoo. “Too bad it’s full of children, and worse, parents,” he told Aldo. Still uncertain about which theme to pursue for the next book, he made repeated visits to draw monkeys, peacocks, vultures, and flamingos, and also to draw “Women—Portoricans [sic]—fighting in the Bronx.”

In August 1959 he was beset by such anxiety that he left again, this time to roam for two months through the western states by plane, car, and bus. He flew from New York to Salt Lake City, where he called briefly on friends but did not stay because their children had mumps. His next stop was Denver and a visit to his Steinberg cousins, the children of his father’s brother Milton. They took him to a Shriners parade, where he chuckled at the men in funny fezzes driving tiny cars, but most of all he liked the cowboys who sang songs for the Salvation Army. He rented a car and drove to Elko and Las Vegas, where he stayed in the Hotel Tropicana and was “disgusted” by everything he saw: “Even the cigarette machines are crooked … take money and give you nothing.” He drove to Los Angeles, this time “shook” by “the frightening desert.” He drove aimlessly for three days along back roads in the “most horrible landscape,” which made Monument Valley “seem like a bourgeois garden.” In Los Angeles, there was not much to see and no one he wanted to talk to, so he took a bus to Phoenix, where it was much the same. In a hurry, he flew to Tucson, where he was bored once again, and in an effort to stall, he continued on to El Paso by train. Suddenly ready to go home, he flew to San Antonio and then back to New York.

His rambles may have seemed without purpose, but he knew what he was doing, and why: “Traveling has been for me a gift for avoiding solutions … I was traveling to forget! And I knew it but it was such a pleasure.”

In New York, he found he could not settle down to work. All he could manage was to “continue to see people, to talk and drink.” He needed to unburden himself but was unable to do so, not even to Aldo, his most trusted confidant. He could only confess that he had “lost hope of having what you call character but maybe something sui generis can be saved.” The major cause of his anxiety was the unsettled relationship with Elizabeth Stille. Speculation and gossip about what it was—a full-blown affair or a flirtation, true love or mere infatuation—whatever he and she felt for each other, it was threatening to explode and shatter the marriages of the two couples and destroy their friendship with one another.

If the memories of the last living spouses who participated, Hedda Sterne and Ruth Nivola, were true to the events as they happened, during the second half of 1959 the behavior of Saul and Elizabeth became too obvious for others to ignore. Hedda confirmed that she encouraged Saul to make the trip to the western states to give him and Elizabeth time to think about the consequences for the four adults and the two Stille children if their affair became public, and of the dual divorces that would certainly follow. But when Saul returned, neither he nor Elizabeth had come to any conclusion except to resume the relationship. It created a tremendous personal crisis in Elizabeth’s life and led both her and Saul to consult analysts. Hedda, as was her wont, ignored the resumption of the affair and went on with her painting. Ugo Stille seems not to have known about it until later, when it caused a severe marital crisis. However, as none of the principals took precautions to hide it, gossip among others was rampant.

Ruth Nivola, who cared deeply for the two couples, felt that she could not stand by and watch two marriages fail, nor could she bear to have any of the parties suffer the gossip of outsiders. She confronted Saul and Elizabeth separately but directly, and they admitted their passion for each other and their inability to decide what to do. Both told Ruth that they loved their spouses and did not want to hurt them. Saul’s solution to their problem was for him and Hedda to live with Elizabeth and her children, a relationship that could be lived openly in the Springs house and more discreetly when they were in the city in their individual residences. He was confident that Hedda would agree to this arrangement, because she had learned to cope with and accept all his other infatuations, affairs, and one-night stands. He gave no indication that he was aware of the suffering it caused her.

Ruth was horrified when she heard his plan and told Elizabeth and Saul that she would give them two choices: they could end the affair and she would say nothing; if they did not, she would tell their respective spouses before some unkind gossip did. If they forced her to do the latter, they must take the consequences. Apparently they did not end the affair, for Ruth did tell Hedda, who never forgave her for meddling.

The year 1959 ended in a haze of uncertainty, of little work, little thought about the new book, and more aimless drifting. Elizabeth Stille disappeared from Saul Steinberg’s life quietly, without fuss or fanfare, and she and Ugo Stille remained married to each other for the rest of theirs. Although he saw Ugo from time to time, Steinberg had no meetings with Elizabeth until a chance encounter happened in 1984, when he was on his way to a dental appointment and she was walking down the same street: “She calls out to me. Unrecognizable. Fat face of businessman. Cruel. Talks about my fancy 75th Street [apartment].” He often wrote about the other women with whom he was involved in the many biographical jottings he made later in life, but this was the only time he mentioned Elizabeth Stille.

Hedda, after the separation from Saul. (illustration credit 23.1)

A NUMBER OF NEW INITIALS, dates, times, and addresses filled Steinberg’s appointment diaries, but otherwise he read constantly because he could not concentrate on anything else. He was happy to discover that he liked Colette, but mostly he reread Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which he was happy now “to understand—in part. A great loss of time not to have understood it years ago.” He went alone to concerts of avant-garde and abstract music and was upset by “the impossibility of understanding” it. It made him feel like “an ape reading the newspaper.”

Just after the start of the new year, 1960, he wrote to Aldo that “for some time I’ve been drawing up a balance sheet of lost years, mistakes, wrong paths, connivances, etc. etc., an endless list.” He did not write again until August, when he told his friend, “I haven’t written you in all this time because I’ve been too busy with the changes and new things in my life.”

It had been a busy eight months: during the hiatus in their letters, Saul Steinberg left Hedda Sterne because she “kicked him out.” He moved to a new apartment, found a new companion, and settled in for what Hedda called “the thirty-five years’ war.”

CHAPTER 24

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