Sadness like an illness

I’ve found and taken a good look at my childhood photographs and I look at myself as a passerby. I find no familiarity with that little boy. Lica’s death at the relatively young age of sixty-three came after a “difficult and frightening” lung operation that led to pulmonary complications, probably stemming from the dermoid cyst she had had since birth. Steinberg flew at once to Paris and was with her children and a small group of close friends when she was buried next to her husband and parents on July 18, 1975. He stayed in the Cachan house for several days before returning directly to Springs. Aldo wanted him to go to Milan, but he was too sad to see anyone then or even later, when he rescinded his invitation for Aldo to spend September and October with him. He begged Aldo to understand that he could not have visitors because his “sadness was like an illness, and very tiring.”

Conflicting emotions were only natural after the loss of the one person who had been dear to him far longer than anyone else. He told Aldo he had not been aware of how much he loved Lica until she was gone, when he realized that he would mourn her for the rest of his life. At her graveside, he wept for the first time since he was a boy in Romania, and when he tried to analyze why he sobbed so unrestrainedly, the very fact that he could cry was almost as shocking as the death that inspired his tears. When he was back in Springs, he was roiled by the same emotions as those he experienced during Lica’s last visit, when he was “depressed, scared in the morning, sad in the afternoon.” All the while she had been with him, he was forced by her state of mind—and Sigrid’s too—to play a role that was foreign to him, the strong male presence who provided calm reassurance for others. He was so accustomed to having women take care of him on every level from the physical to the emotional that he found it difficult to have to be the giver of strength and stability.

Sigrid had begun sustained psychotherapy after it appeared that she had inherited her mother’s clinical depression and become almost catatonic. She had tried one or two analysts in the past, usually for a few consultations which lasted several weeks at the longest. Her newest analyst became the first on the fairly long list of those she would consult and dismiss throughout the rest of her life, switching from one to another on what seemed little more than impulse or whim. When she became disillusioned with her current treatment or heard of a new therapeutic technique, she went eagerly to the next new thing, convinced that this would be the one to cure her forever. Sigrid perked up after finding an analyst who (according to Steinberg) featured an “anti-tears cure” that used a great many mood-altering prescription drugs to be effective. Knowing Sigrid’s proclivity for recreational drugs and basically unsure that any treatment would be successful, he was still willing to pay for whatever she thought might cure her. As her health was otherwise robust, he feared that she—and he as well, because he was so loyal—faced a long life of battling demons that were far more serious than anything he had thus far personally endured.

He did everything he could for Sigrid in the early years of her severe depression. If she felt the urge to visit Africa, he paid her way and sent her off for as long as she wanted to stay; if she thought she was well enough to work, he was discreet about asking friends in publishing to send commissions her way. A number of interesting projects resulted, among them the lettering for the cover of Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer. He stayed quietly aloof when she took her drawings to the Whitney Museum and asked to have them included in an exhibition or when she took them to downtown art galleries that specialized in emerging artists, knowing that her work was not good enough for either. Everywhere she submitted her portfolio, she was asked to return at some future time, when her “ideas were more developed.” Unfortunately, her moods fluctuated so unpredictably that she was never able to sustain equilibrium and capitalize on the periods when she was productive.

One year after Lica’s death, in 1976, Steinberg was in Cachan for the unveiling of the headstone on her grave. He realized that the date was July 9, the sixteenth anniversary of the day he met Sigrid, and he wrote a letter addressed to “Dear Papoose,” using the name of the cat they both adored, which had become their private symbol of tenderness. His letter was filled with more sentiment than he had expressed in all their years together and was exactly what she had long wanted to hear him say: “Of course I still love you and think of you as my dearest friend.” She was stunned when he told her that his gift for her birthday on August 9 would be the little cabin she used as a studio and all the land around it in the meadow, starting from a poplar tree she particularly liked and extending to the vegetable garden she tended so lovingly. Even more astonishingly, he told her that “the rest of the land will be yours after my end, of course. You know more and like it more and deserve it and enjoy it [more] than anybody.” In retrospect, looking at their later lives as their “thirty-five years’ war” played itself out with dramatic intensity, both his gift and his sentiments became tinged with the irony for which he was famous.

THE SUMMER WAS GRUELING AS HE moved out of the Union Square studio, which was far more complicated than going from one apartment to another. Before Anton could do the actual packing, Steinberg had to decide what to keep and discard, what to send to the country and what to keep in the city. As he sorted through everything from the lace bib his mother had made when he was born, to wartime souvenirs from China, to photos of himself, his family, friends, and lovers, he was haunted by the way Lica’s death had made him fearful of “the brutal image of the end of life.”

As he sifted and sorted his papers, he was coming across so many things from his past life (or lives, as he thought of his years of living in different places) that he dubbed himself his own “voyeur.” He realized that he had saved every scrap of information that pertained to his life and much else that pertained to his times, from movie ticket stubs and hotel bills to take-out menus from neighborhood restaurants, calling cards from countesses and dukes, business cards from his local dry cleaner, news clippings of current events, and obituaries of everyone from his friends to strangers whose deaths were bizarre or garish. Such intense immersion in memories exhausted him physically even as it made his mind race, energized by the curiosity to remember more.

He asked Aldo to send him a copy of their class photograph from the Politecnico, and he searched his own files for images of the places connected to his Romanian boyhood, even though he refused to return there because the country could not be magically transformed into the 1924 version he held in his mind. He asked anyone traveling to Bucharest to take photos of his house on Strada Palas and to bring him souvenirs, particularly old street maps or postcards showing street scenes. And yet he insisted that no aspect of his life in Romania had influenced his work. His poet friend W. D. Snodgrass, who went to Bucharest and took some of the photos Steinberg requested, raised an interesting question about the origins of his drawing. Fascinated by peasant clothing, especially the black embroidery on white coats, Snodgrass wondered if the quality of Steinberg’s line might have been heavily influenced by it. Steinberg emphatically dismissed the possibility. Even so, Bucharest became ever more prominent in his memory, and a quarter century later he was avid to collect images of how it had been in the 1920s. Each time he spoke of his collection of things Romanian, he called it “an emotional orgy, exhausting,” but he was happy every time he went through “this secret life.”

BY OCTOBER 1975, THE MOVE FROM Union Square was over, and Steinberg was in the country and reluctant to return to the city and his life there. He stayed in Springs until the end of November, and while he was there, letters of condolence came in steadily from friends all over the world, every one of them deeply touching in their concern for him. There were also many from friends in New York, which was why he stayed away: it would have been too difficult to accept condolences in person without becoming emotional.

Ada’s letter was especially poignant, as she had known Lica since they were young girls; now she tried to cheer him up with a diversion, telling how she had become an old but still pretty woman and coyly inviting him to come and see for himself. Ada had also written a touching letter when Ennio Flaiano died, which struck him with her ability to convey exactly the sentiment he needed to hear. He realized that she had always done this, and also that she had become almost (but not quite) as necessary to him as Hedda. Ada had been the companion during his formative years, and those were now the source of most of the memories that engulfed him. With Lica gone, he drew closer to Ada, because she was one of the few people who had known Lica since her first visit to Milan when Saul was a poor student; they had corresponded over the years off and on and had a genuine friendship based on their love for “Sauly” (Lica’s affectionate nickname) and “Saulino” (Ada’s “ mio olino caro ”).

HE STAYED ON IN SPRINGS THROUGH the early winter, content to spend his days sorting through his boxes of papers when not actively creating new work. He was mostly alone now that the friends he saw regularly in the Hamptons had gone back to the city, so he got into the habit of fixing simple solitary suppers at the end of his workday. The meals reflected his Romanian heritage and the foods of his Italian years: peasant breads and cheeses, scallions to dip in good olive oil, zesty olives to nibble before the main course of grilled vegetables or pasta with simple sauces. The only part of his diet he worried about was his tendency to drink too much, mostly the expensive French white wines that he ordered by the case.

After dinner he tried to relax for sleep by reading voraciously, always on the lookout for something that would not intrigue him enough to stay awake. He followed Aldo’s suggestion to indulge in harmless thrillers like Dashiell Hammett’s, saying that he knew Hammett’s widow, “who keeps writing wonders about him.” Referring to Lillian Hellman allowed him to avoid commenting on the fiction itself. His taste in literature was more cosmopolitan, and if he wanted a thriller, he preferred a writer like Manuel Puig, whom he called “Joyce’s illegitimate son.”

He often recommended writers to friends, particularly to Claire Nivola, with whom he had carried on an intellectual correspondence since her Harvard student days. His recommendations often came in the form of something whimsical or charming, such as the multicourse “Literary Menu” he drew for her “degustation.” The “antipasto” featured selections that ranged from Victorian explorers (Burton, Gordon, Kitchener, etc.) to Kropotkin’s autobiography, while the “soup” course offered a biography of Charles XII of Sweden, “boring [but] worth reading.” The “entrée” was serious nonfiction: Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Delacroix’s journals, Herzen’s autobiography (all “6 or 8 volumes”), books about Lawrence of Arabia, a biography of Dostoevsky, and Enid Starkie’s Rimbaud and Richard Ellman’s James Joyce. For “dessert,” he recommended Norman Douglas—not the Old Calabria he loved but rather Looking Back —and Nabokov’s Gogol, which he thought “one of the best things written.” They were both fond of Tolstoy, and after each read Henri Troyat’s biography, Steinberg said they must find another that was “more contemporary and more historical,” because Troyat’s was too full of “anecdote and quotation.” His most recent suggestion was for them both to read Roland Barthes, whose writings they occasionally talked about during the next several years.

Because the Skira book was still unwritten and long overdue, Steinberg told Aldo to read the biography of Courbet he had discussed with Nabokov on his last visit to Montreux. Steinberg found the disconnections between the artist’s dysfunctional life and his art endlessly fascinating, and he said that when he and Nabokov talked about Courbet, they agreed that biographies of artists were often unsatisfactory because biographers understand “only other writers (as shown in diaries, letters, etc.).” This assertion led him to Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years, in which he heavily annotated the passage about how Flaubert would not allow illustrations in his novels. Flaubert believed they limited the reader’s imagination and offered the example of how a drawing of a woman would render the text “closed, complete, and every sentence becomes useless, whereas the written woman makes one dream of a thousand women.” Steinberg’s problem was the opposite of Flaubert’s: he made drawings whose interpretations were legion, whereas if he wrote about what he drew, he would be the one rendering his work “closed, complete, and useless.” He had to think about this.

Several months later, the Skira book (for he refused to call it by the despised title given by the publisher, Table of Contents) was still going nowhere and he needed an excuse to explain why, not only to others but also to himself. Even though he read constantly and liked almost everything he read, he told anyone who asked that he had “completely lost faith, enthusiasm and respect for books.” It was only a matter of time until he gave up entirely on the project. Meanwhile, he insisted (and it was true) that the only thing that gave him genuine unalloyed pleasure was what he dubbed “the exercise” that he set for himself every day, of turning out drawings with alacrity for The New Yorker. After not having a single cover in 1973 and 1974, he had four in 1975, and Parsons and Janis were planning a large exhibition for 1976 that featured many of his “old cartoons.”

Now that he had his studio in the country set up as he wanted it and as it would remain for the rest of his life, he found that he did his best work there. He papered the end wall with page after page of drawings from his sketchbooks, which he mixed, matched, and shifted into “Manhattanite dystopias and memory-caricatures of Fascist-era Milan.” Glass sliding doors kept him in touch with the changing light, landscape, and wildlife he had come to love. Papoose was endlessly entertaining as he bravely swatted flies, stood up to the occasional fox, and actually chased the deer who ambled up to eat the flowers just off the porch. Tranquillity came through painting watercolors and crafting collages; a new pleasure came through arranging the ordinary objects that gave him pleasure in his daily life into whimsical still lifes, such as the blue-and-white Chinese vase or the mushroom and pistachio cans on his large kitchen table. He took renewed pleasure in sketching his friends in what he called dal vero, as he captured Sigrid in the act of reading a newspaper or Harold Rosenberg holding forth as he emoted from his favorite chair.

Steinberg went into the city for New Year’s and left it in a slightly better mood after several weeks of being warmly welcomed by his many friends, who were genuinely glad to see him. Sigrid was in Africa again, Cameroon this time, and because she and Steinberg were on the outs, she left Papoose with a cat sitter to spite him. The cat misbehaved, the sitter resigned, and Steinberg took Papoose to where both were the happiest, Springs, where he had the tranquillity to work and Papoose could chase everything from birds to foxes.

He was productive during the winter despite his depression, although he was worried enough about it to try to alleviate it on his own. His first action was to stop drinking except for an occasional glass of wine when he dined out or when he had a visitor, when he sipped just enough to keep company. His relationship with Tino Nivola was in one of its quietly companionable periods, and he accepted more invitations to dine with him and Ruth than he had for a long time. No one could understand why Saul Steinberg had a tendency to tease, taunt, and even belittle his old friend, but he departed from his usual impeccably polite behavior to do it to Tino, even in front of others, and no one ever questioned or upbraided him. While Ruth seethed—mostly to herself, because her husband forbade her to engage in rebuttal—Tino usually smiled and shrugged off the barbs as just “Saul’s way” and not worth fussing about because his mood was bound to change momentarily. The Nivolas knew how stunned Saul had been by Lica’s death and how unnerved he was by Sigrid’s depression; they worried that he brooded when alone, so they invited him to dine casually and often. There was the excuse that they needed him to help eat the squid Tino bought directly from the fisherman who caught it, then grilled lightly and served with salad from their garden and boiled local potatoes. Tino invited Saul to help him hunt for mushrooms and rejoice in the cache of porcini they found behind the house, which were then cooked to perfection by Ruth.

The meals served by the Nivolas in their welcoming kitchen were also triggers for pleasant memories of past culinary pleasures. Steinberg told Aldo they reminded him of some of the first pasta dishes he ever ate, the rigatoni “in boarding houses in Milan, made with mysterious sauces of leftovers and stuff from the day before.” One of the things he liked best about Colette’s fiction was her description of village markets, particularly the cheese stalls; one of the things he liked least about Tolstoy was in the novel Family Happiness, because he was “outraged” that Tolstoy wrote a lengthy description of the conversation at a dinner party “with no mention of food. Gogol would have.”

The exchanges about food began toward the end of 1976, during a time when Aldo was especially worried about Steinberg’s depression. For five months he had not received a single one of the chatty letters Steinberg usually wrote several times each week. When Aldo probed for his reasons, Steinberg attributed his inability to write to “laziness or worse.” Aldo was so worried that he lectured him about taking better care of himself and sent actual menus for him to cook, eat, and report back on. “I’m following your advice to count my blessings,” Steinberg wrote, describing his previous night’s dinner, a cutlet prepared in the Italian style and an eggplant appetizer that was pure “Romanian food.” To thank Aldo for his concern, he sent a copy of The Joy of Cooking and, as an “hors d’oeuvre,” two drawings for L’uovo alla kok (The Perfect Egg), the book Aldo was writing, for which Steinberg volunteered to provide illustrations. He was engaged by a text that, even though “disguised as a cookbook,” fell somewhere between philosophy and the novel, and he thought it deserved translation into English, which he was unable to make happen.

Still, it was difficult for Steinberg to be cheerful, and his correspondence remained sporadic. “I’m a little depressed,” he confessed, as he told of waking up every day “at 3:30 full of terrors, regrets—the usual suffering.” Even though he was in the country with the “delightful” Papoose, who walked beside him like a companionable dog when he went into the woods, and even though Sigrid was now well enough to make the occasional weekend visit without its ending in her tears and his silence, he could not force himself to be happy or even to be content with his lot. He was embarrassed to think he was becoming like his father and all his other Romanian Jewish male ancestors, something he had long vowed never to do.

BUT HE WAS VERY GOOD ABOUT creating excuses to justify himself, to himself as well as to others, and all too quickly he found quite a few “excellent reasons” to explain why he was entitled to this depression. He blamed it on the overwhelming workload as he prepared for the Parsons and Janis dual “cartoon” exhibition and for the 1977 retrospective Maeght was determined to have. He was also drawn into the commotion connected with the ending of the two-year-long retrospective that began in Cologne in 1974 and was just now ending in Vienna. Despite his best efforts to stay aloof, the show garnered so much publicity as it traveled that he was roped into granting print interviews to European publications and being filmed for German television. Aimé Maeght shrewdly appraised the steadily mounting enthusiasm as the show traveled, and despite Steinberg’s insistence that he would not cooperate on a retrospective, Maeght insisted that his next exhibition had to be one and had to be ready by November 1976. That was too soon for Steinberg, who cabled “next year with pleasure,” all the while plotting how to postpone any exhibition for as long as possible.

Maeght surprised him by moving with such alacrity that members of his exhibition staff were in New York within the week of Steinberg’s cable. Maeght instructed them to go to Springs and make Steinberg work with them every day during the month of October to prepare the catalogue and the content for the show, which he insisted on calling “The Retrospective.” Steinberg picked up the phrase and grudgingly began to call it “the retro show,” even though it was a difficult concept to accept. He told Aldo he wanted a “less posthumous” title and asked for suggestions.

To Steinberg, a retrospective held the specter of another kind of death: of a career that had reached its zenith and was all but over. Since his sister’s death, he had certainly been in almost constant biographical reflection, especially about “the brutal image of the end of life.” Now he would have to reflect on personal brutal images as he sorted out which works belonged to each of the “lives” that represented Milan, Santo Domingo, New York, and the places where he had been stationed during the war. It meant dividing the work into geographical as well as chronological periods and setting up categories within each. It meant finding terms and titles to define various works and periods and perhaps disputing the terms and definitions critics and scholars applied to it.

He had to make the initial selection of works to be shown, and in some cases he and those who worked with him had to track down works that he had given away or his galleries had sold. He had to become the scholar of his own life, and as Maeght’s staff took over to scrutinize what he selected, they naturally disputed the facts and events of it. There were the ongoing questions of how other artists influenced him and corrections for all the biographical obfuscations and falsehoods he had given out to interviewers over the years. There were the apocryphal stories to deal with, such as how Steinberg often wore one of his paper-bag masks to cocktail or dinner parties just to draw attention to himself while pretending to be doing just the opposite. And there were the by now boring arguments about how to categorize his work, whether he was a cartoonist, a magazine illustrator, or a museum-worthy artist. All this had been reported or debated in so many articles and interviews that he was sick and tired of it. He did not want to do the external work that a retrospective required, and he was not sure that he was strong enough to face everything internal that he would have to dredge up and relive. It was almost too staggering to contemplate.

THE YEARS 1974–76 HAD TRULY BEEN watershed years in Saul Steinberg’s life. He thought of them as a time of life-changing events, the two most meaningful being the death of his sister, Lica Steinberg Roman, and the coming into his life of the beloved cat Papoose. Such a linkage may have struck others as falling somewhere between the shocking and the superficial, but he spoke of it with such seriousness that no one dared to question it, at least directly to him. There were other changes as well, but perhaps with hindsight they were not so much changes as solidifications of his interactions with others. Sigrid’s role as the principal creator of Sturm und Drang intensified, while Hedda’s role as the level-headed sounding board who told him the worst about himself but loved him the best held steady. Ada remained her lusty, cheerful self in the face of constant adversity (always needing money, seeing doctors for one ailment after another, having to move house often); she reminded him of how lovable he had once been as her youthful olino caro and of how much she still loved the sad older man he had become. But instead of cheering him up, all this attention and affection made him feel old, especially when he discovered that it was getting harder to lure nubile young women into his bed for the brief flings he still needed and wanted. He still had his steady bed partners in every one of his cities—New York, Paris, Milan—but even that was depressing. It convinced him that there was diminution on two important fronts, his creative powers and his sexual prowess. All he had to look forward to was gradual death, his own and others’.

His close friend Sandy Calder died suddenly in November, the day after they had dined together at one of their favorite hangouts, Joe’s Italian restaurant on Macdougal Street. When Steinberg was notified, he went immediately to give what comfort he could to Louisa and the two daughters, Sandra and Mary. He spent the entire day with them, all the while trying not to let them see the “many emotional reactions” that engulfed him. The primary one was how difficult he found it to accept his friend’s death without the finality of a religious ceremony. As Steinberg had aged, his Jewish identity had become stronger and his thinking of himself as a religious Jew had deepened. He always honored Passover quietly and alone, preferring not to participate in a seder. He went to temple on Rosh Hashanah and fasted at Yom Kippur. Although he did not formally sit shiva for his friends, engaging in the funeral obsequies had come to be the most important part of his acceptance of the death of a dear one, so he was dismayed to learn that there was to be no religious ceremony for Calder, only a memorial service at the Whitney Museum of American Art several weeks after his death.

As one of Calder’s dearest friends of longest duration, Steinberg was invited to speak. He recalled the happy weekends and holidays at the house in Roxbury, when there was music and laughter and everyone danced, especially Sandy, who would dance with a chair or his Labrador retriever if there was no other partner. Steinberg told of an evening when the noise level was so high he had to bend down to hear what Calder, sitting in a chair, was saying. To hear him, Steinberg “comfortably and naturally” sat on Calder’s lap, and he thought afterward that it had been sixty years since he had sat on a man’s knee.

After he spoke, he was relieved to find that he had delivered his oration without “getting tongue-tied, fainting, laughing hysterically, etc.” He was happy that he had finally overcome his shyness at having to stand before a microphone in front of a large crowd and a phalanx of reporters. He called it a combination of “duty and age” but it served him well once he decided that it was akin to religious expression and all he had to do to get through it was to bear down and speak. When it was over, however, he had to retreat to the country to deal with the pain of this newest terrible loss.

IT WAS NOT THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAY SEASONS, and to get over it, he made a hasty trip to Paris at the start of 1977, to tell Maeght that he could not face a retrospective but would help the staff mount an ordinary exhibition. Maeght more or less accepted his decision but still called the show “The Retrospective,” which it was. Maeght also insisted that Steinberg had to meet Italo Calvino, whom he had asked to write a critical essay for the catalogue because he wanted Steinberg to be elevated to the pantheon of European intellectual thought and he wanted Calvino to do it. Steinberg had forgotten that they had been introduced ten years previously, but Maeght, who was determined to bring these two iconic figures together, reminded him. Steinberg was irritated and puzzled by Calvino’s desultory conversation until he suddenly blurted out that he wanted very much to write a preface and was volunteering to do so. It made Steinberg wonder if his initial response to such a respected writer might be due to his increasing intolerance for meeting new people. He thought Calvino’s preface was “not bad,” mostly because it was filled with quotations about Galileo, Michelangelo, and other luminaries but, most important of all, because he was “not praised directly.”

The show was to open on May 11, 1977, and he planned to be there for the opening before taking his niece, Dana, to visit a cousin in Israel whom he did not know and “who rather scares me.” Still, he liked being in Israel, where he was comfortable surrounded by people whom he thought he resembled and whose lives reminded him of his Romanian youth. He never passed up a chance to go there.

DESPITE STEINBERG’S APPREHENSION, IF NOT REVULSION, over the idea of a retrospective, he could not avoid the one proposed for New York in 1978, which seemed a natural outgrowth of the 1977 show in Paris. Harold Rosenberg and Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, were the instigators of the American show, which gave Steinberg such “big worries” that he delayed for several months before eventually allowing them to persuade him that he had to do it, although he was perturbed that the “damned flatterers and confounded old men” would get their way. Astonishingly, they were all younger than he, and he was not at all happy about being “venerable.”

It took the always succinct and direct Alexander Lindey to put the occasion into the proper perspective: “A retrospective usually comes toward the twilight of an artist’s career. In your case it has occurred at a time when you are at the height of your creative powers. What a happy circumstance!” Steinberg wasn’t so sure about that, but it was always difficult to refuse Harold Rosenberg, who recognized his old friend’s deepening depression and saw the retrospective as a tremendous opportunity for personal and professional renewal. Steinberg remained convinced that it was just the opposite, downhill all the way. In that glum mood, he began one of the hardest-working, most grueling years of his life.

CHAPTER 37

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