What the memory accumulates

Nothing is lost of what the memory accumulates, an immense computer that continues to register and classify data that are used only in a minimal proportion for conventional and monotone life. Life in this sense is like a huge ocean liner in which only one cabin is used. While he was caught up in the media excitement generated by the Whitney retrospective, Steinberg received a letter, via The New Yorker, from a man in Arizona named Phil Steinberg, who said he was the son of Moritz Steinberg’s brother Beryl and therefore Saul’s first cousin. Phil Steinberg had read the glowing profile in Time and decided to get in touch with his famous cousin. His letter came totally out of the blue, for Saul had never been in contact with the Arizona contingent of his family. He and his uncle Martin in Denver, and later Martin’s son, Charles, wrote from time to time about providing support for the relatives in Israel, but his only fairly regular correspondence was with Charles’s daughter, Judith Steinberg Bassow. It was a pleasant exchange, with Judy sending news of her doctor husband’s work and her quest to balance her work as a lawyer against the needs of her two daughters, whom Saul occasionally entertained in New York when they were attending eastern universities. He usually wrote short notes to accompany frequent gifts of art to the Bassows, and when they came to New York, he enjoyed their company. He formed a close friendship with Judy when they exchanged information and cooperated on a Steinberg family geneology.

The letter from Phil came as a shock, not only because of the eloquent simplicity of Phil’s life story but also because he enclosed a photograph of himself, and when Saul looked at it, it was as if he were looking at himself. Phil was his age, had been in the Marines, and had seen heavy fighting during the battles for Guam and Iwo Jima. When he came home, he married Rita, an Irish girl originally from New York, and like his father and uncles before him, worked as a typesetter until he taught himself to build and repair radios, televisions, and other electronics. He opened a small shop and did as much work as he needed to do to support his modest lifestyle; when he retired, he bought a house trailer where he and Rita lived, sharing a passionate love for motorcycles and roaming together throughout the Southwest on his enormous Honda. Phil’s letter was an honest and straightforward account of a life satisfied with the simplest of pleasures, and he told his newfound cousin that he was sorry to say that he had great difficulty understanding Saul’s work. Phil hoped Saul would come to Tucson, because he would never go back to New York. Saul was captivated by “the mysterious cousin,” and even though he had just returned from a trip through the western states, he had such “a powerful desire to meet a cousin whom I’m not ashamed of” that he went west again, to Arizona, in November.

PHIL’S LETTER CAME AT AN INTERESTING time in Steinberg’s professional life, when the idea of family and its effect on the individual was uppermost in his mind. “These days,” he told Aldo, “I’m drawing my aunts and uncles from photographs, and I recognize (scrutinize them as real people for the first time) parts of myself: an ear, an eye. Archeology!” He had conceived the idea of creating mythical family groups that were loosely based on portraits of his own relatives and on some of the paintings and photographs he had observed in foreign cultures, particularly Russia, where family photographs were still taken in the old-fashioned tradition, “where dignity was the most important thing.” Over the years he had amassed a large collection of such photos, starting with his own family and then with those he picked up in flea markets and his beloved “junque” shops. When he started to tinker with them, he began by making totally new drawings, which he intended to turn into easily recognizable parodies, until one day he discovered that by applying a thin overlay of black enamel paint to the photographs themselves, he could turn them into perfect imitations of old-time photography, “as varnished as the painting of Ingres that were their models.” Eventually both his new drawings and the transformed photographs became two thematic portfolios for The New Yorker called “Uncles” and “Cousins.”

The fixation on family marked the start of Steinberg’s increasingly introspective vision, as he plumbed his own life to convert it into the pictorial autobiography that became one of the dominating motifs, if not the dominating motif, of his last two decades. “Nothing is lost of what the memory accumulates,” he wrote in one of the many notes he made on this subject. The question he pondered repeatedly was how to reveal these memories so they transcended the personal and became universal, which in his worldview always became drawings suitable for The New Yorker. How it rankled when he tried to explain what he wanted the portraits to convey to Bernard Rudofsky, who cut him short by asking, “Are you working or only selling?” “He thinks he’s funny,” said Steinberg, who thought this was a truly “nasty” comment.

Steinberg had always been a serious reader whose main interest in the ideas of others was to see how he might relate them to his own personal experience. From Gogol’s nose to Joyce’s peripatetic Leopold Bloom to the many philosophers whose aphorisms Hedda Sterne sent his way, Steinberg always found something he could use. When he read Proust (whom he thought boring and never finished), the one idea that resonated for him was how certain scents or objects could serve as lifelong triggers of memories. It was, therefore, a “wild” experience when the curators for the retrospective uncovered some of the drawings he had made thirty years earlier and not seen since, thus assaulting him with memories long forgotten. He felt that looking at these old drawings was akin to playing a game he named “First and Second Class Reality,” where the artist looking at his art engages in “a sort of voyeurism that probably interferes with life, a truly unnatural act.” He had always made the occasional jotting in the past, but after the retrospective he started to make more frequent and far more detailed notes about his thoughts and experiences, especially as he tried to recapture the emotion he had felt at the time he created the work. The two portfolios for The New Yorker became, like so many other photographs he agonized over, a serious search for the truth of himself and the essence of his being.

One of his most famous first- and second-class realities is a photograph taken by Evelyn Hofer, of the adult Saul Steinberg standing in the middle of the immense Persian rug that filled his studio floor, which appeared from time to time in his drawings, holding the hand of a life-size cardboard cutout of himself as a boy of six or eight. Both the cardboard boy and the real adult look steadily at the camera, as if in all seriousness they are inviting the viewer to join them in playing a game to find the reality.

Saul Steinberg holding the hand of his eight-year-old self, 1978. (illustration credit 38.1)

STEINBERG WENT TO TUCSON AT THE end of October to visit Rita and Phil Steinberg. During the fourteen years they had lived in a trailer park out in the country, they had watched as the city encroached until it surrounded them with suburban clutter. Steinberg had a difficult time fathoming this new relative, especially when he saw the elderly childless couple, Phil and Rita, set out on their motorcycle surrounded by a phalanx of other old people on theirs. He was grateful that their trailer was so small that he did not have to risk offending their hospitality by staying in a hotel, and he managed to invent reasons to keep himself occupied during the day so that he only spent evenings in their company. Anything more would have been too emotionally exhausting, for simply being with his cousin gave Steinberg an image of the person he would have been “without education, without success.” He left Tucson with deeply divided emotions, aware that he could not understand living the life of a man like Phil and that he would never grasp how anyone could be satisfied with it. He made a comparison unflattering to himself: that Phil was indeed “an authentic person,” whereas he was not.

BACK IN NEW YORK, HE WENT immediately to the country, where he was happiest and could do his best work. He was in another of the recurring daydreams about living there permanently when the phone rang, abruptly summoning him back to the city because his apartment had been burgled. A thief had entered through a courtyard window and made off with gold cuff links that had been a gift from Hedda during their marriage. This distressed him deeply. Also stolen were the various medallions Steinberg had been awarded during his career, which turned out to be real gold and not imitations, as he had thought. Losing the medallions did not upset him nearly as much as losing the cuff links, but what upset him most of all was the loss of his “tranquillity.” His first impulse was to move to a different apartment, claiming that he had never liked the one he was in because it was too dark. In the end he stayed there, after installing a security system and renting a warehouse where he could store his work, the many souvenirs of his travels, and his beloved “junque,” all of which was crowding him out.

STEINBERG WAS AT LOOSE ENDS AS the seventies ended, alone in the country because of tension with Sigrid, whom he told to stay in the city. As he was without female company and because he could not read all the time, he was determined to find something other than his work to occupy his hands as well as his mind. For reasons he could not understand, let alone explain, he settled on wanting to play the violin again, something he had not done since his student days at the Lycée Basarab. Steinberg told Sasha Schneider, who immediately made him the gift of a good instrument, and he began to practice seriously, easily recalling some of what he played a half century before in the school orchestra. He liked “playing it loudly, out in the country; with no neighbors nearby, it is a pleasure.” To make sure he was playing properly, he began each session with simple warm‑up exercises he remembered from his youth, and later, when he progressed to playing actual music, he tape-recorded himself and then listened to the playback, mostly “with admiration.” Sometimes he taped himself accompanying recordings, but when he played the tape back, he discovered that fingering was “still difficult … but with time, perhaps …”

He had long had an important musical friendship with Sasha Schneider, but another was developing with Leo Treitler, the musicologist husband of his friend Mary Frank, whom he had known since she was Robert Frank’s young wife living in a 9th Street studio with rear windows that were directly opposite Bill de Kooning’s. Seeing her again brought back memories of how, depending on which of his two friends he was visiting, he could wave out the window to the other one. Mary Frank soon became an increasingly important friend. She was one of the few people whom he trusted enough to introduce to Lica on her last visit, and after Lica’s death, Frank realized how much he loved his sister when she tried to comfort him by saying that she thought she could understand his grief well enough to share it because of her daughter’s untimely death. He made no reply, but she intuited that a new level of unspoken closeness had grown between them.

Mary Frank played the recorder and “a very bad piano” and thought it would cheer both her and Steinberg to play duets. He refused at first, but she cajoled him into agreeing, even though they both thought that music for recorder and violin was not the best. After two or three such sessions Steinberg stopped, because “he could not stand that he played so badly in comparison to professionals. It was shaming for him; others could be amateurs but for him it was unbearable. It made him sad and angry.” He settled for hearing music played well at the Frank-Treitler home whenever they hosted one of the musical evenings at which Leo’s son, Max, a distinguished cellist, played.

Steinberg became especially unhappy with his own ability after Isaac Stern invited him to a recital and reception in his apartment. He was disgruntled all evening, calling Stern’s playing of Sibelius just “so-so” and Stern himself “flabby and surrounded by over-stuffed furniture that resembles him.” He went home intending to capture the evening in drawings that were initially “unkind,” but his inherent dignity made him abandon it as “too easy and not right.” Nevertheless, he continued to play the violin when he was alone and with more proficiency than he gave himself credit for, playing everything from “Johann Christian Bach (the Milanese Bach)” to Vivaldi, Mozart, and Haydn. He took lessons from a woman who taught at the Mannes College of Music, a Russian he called Sushanskaya whom he described as a martinet originally from Leningrad, who made him play “wicked, difficult exercises by the noted sadist Schradieck.” She insisted that he join two of her other pupils, talented schoolchildren who played piano and cello, for trios. This caused Steinberg more trepidation than if Isaac Stern had invited him to play, but once he joined the children, he delighted in the feeling of having “made progress,” even though it made him feel his “lack of talent acutely.”

AFTER HIS VIOLIN PLAYING BECAME SOMETHING he did routinely, he needed to create other diversions to fill his time. He took to visiting the many wooden churches on the east end of Long Island, where he drew them dal vero. He thought the structures were interesting because they were “architecturally sound,” whereas he disliked the many stone churches in the area because the proportions were all “built to the wrong scale.” Besides these renderings of buildings, he kept his hands busy with still lifes and portraits. The objects on his desk or dining table, the wooden sculptures he put together from bits and pieces left over from Gordon Pulis’s work on the tables, the iconic blue-and-white Chinese vase, were all turning up frequently. He caught Sigrid in many different poses but mostly in the quiet serenity that being in the country instilled in her. And of course there was his beloved Papoose, either captured on one of his stalking adventures or disguised as a caricature cat within other drawings that eventually appeared in The New Yorker.

To all this playful exploration Steinberg added photographic experimentation, first by capturing a person or an image on a Polaroid camera, then by making a drawing from the photograph. In the drawings he strove for the same “Courbet-style colors” that Polaroid photos usually became after they had been exposed to the light for a while. He played with postcards in much the same way, creating an original drawing and coloring them “Courbet-style” as closely as possible or drawing over the original and using it in collages. He liked to use airmail envelopes in collages and would send envelopes to friends and ask them to mail them back to him because he wanted the postmark.

His favorite entertainments continued to be reading and going to the movies, and he did both avidly and voraciously. He was aware of the feminist movement and tried to educate himself by reading books written by women, but when it came to the proper role for women to play in men’s lives, he was still very much the traditional European gentleman and expected them to be submissive. After he met the journalist Shana Alexander and liked her, he read her books and articles with grudging respect, but he did not put her on his list of women who were “good writers.” Two who made it were Elizabeth Hardwick, for Sleepless Nights because he thought her plot mirrored his own depressive behavior, and Renata Adler, for Speedboat, which he liked because it was “a quasi novel in fragments.”

In his almost frenetic search for pursuits to pass the time, he agreed to take a winter vacation in February 1980 with “la Sigrid,” as he had begun to call her when he wrote or spoke of her to mutual friends. She wanted to go to Mali, but when Saul refused to go that far, she settled for Guadeloupe, first because it was French and then because he insisted he would only go somewhere “not yet cursed with poverty or political strife.” He loved to travel and was always ready to go at a moment’s notice, but his preference was for cities where he had a network of friends with whom he could eat a pleasant meal and have a meaningful conversation, or find shops where he could buy such things as a brand of ink or a kind of eraser he could not get in New York, or where he could have clothes made to order by tradespeople who were delighted to fit fine fabrics to his exacting specifications. In recent years this had meant making the circle of Milan (and sometimes Rome), Paris, and London and nowhere else. Going to a resort gave him a “horror of hotels and restaurants and tourists.” Sitting on a beach was “inertia, indolence, and sloth—the anticipation of death.” But Sigrid liked that kind of vacation, so Saul allowed her to drag him along on “whimsical trips, almost always good despite my grumbling.”

Despite his hesitation, he did have a good time on Guadeloupe. They left New York in a snowstorm and he had a bad case of flu, but the warm weather soon cured it, and he spent a lot of time floating in the deep blue water or sitting on the beach reading Babette’s Feast and Out of Africa. What he remembered best about these readings was his single meeting with Baroness Blixen in New York toward the end of her life, when “her stockings hung in folds.”

Still, even after all this pleasant activity, Steinberg retreated into one of his increasingly frequent “periods of paranoia,” when he compared himself to a tortoise or an armadillo to insist that, despite all his activities and the quantity of work he published and the even larger quantity that he left in his carefully saved but unpublished files, he could not write, work, or read. He was bitter that his drawings were not being bought by people who took simple delight in them but rather “by people with money, as an investment.” He groused about this adjunct of fame, that it forced too much responsibility on him to have to decide every time he put pen to paper whether he wanted “riches or the ruin of widows and orphans.” Where, he asked himself, was the wisdom that came with age? If it was true that wisdom was indeed a benefit of age, he was hard-pressed to find it. While he was visiting Phil in Tucson, he went to an afternoon “blue movie” and was insulted when the youngster at the cash register sold him a senior citizen’s ticket without his asking for it. It made him feel old, and he hated the feeling. There were new problems with his teeth, and at times he measured out his life not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in weekly or even daily dental appointments. It helped him to be able to turn to writers whom he identified with old age, such as Giuseppe Pontiggia, whose “greedy, avaricious characters” in the short stories reminded him of “Checkhov [sic] as influenced by Gogol, in that the essential is masked by secondary issues.”

Was that what he was doing, he asked himself—masking the essential with the secondary? And if so, what was essential and how could he identify it? On every level, this was the question that permeated Steinberg’s life at the start of the new decade.

CHAPTER 39

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