Winding up like my parents

I see with terror that despite the progress, journeys, books, etc., I’m winding up like my parents, confused and fearful. What a shame … I remind myself that I’m seventy-one and that I’ve survived wars and disasters and that hypochrondria, too, will pass. Despite all the work he had done on the Springs house, it was old and in need of a constant succession of repairs and renewals, and this time they were all major. Starting with a new roof, the entire exterior needed replacing. The cedar shingles on the walls were smothered by an ancient tangle of ivy that had caused most them to rot and fall off. Roof and walls had to be stripped to bare boards, reinsulated, and then re-covered. As long as the workmen were there, Steinberg decided they might as well tend to the second-floor bedrooms; new windows and heating apparatus were installed, and the interior was painted. With all that under way, the first floor looked extremely shabby, so he had the walls covered with wood paneling, new windows put in, and interior painting done there as well. But before any of this could happen, the house’s entire electrical system had to be upgraded. The “mess” began in the winter of 1984 and was not finished until late summer 1985, all of it happening during a “rotten moment due to complications with Sigrid, the house, work.” Steinberg coped by practicing Zen to cultivate “the happiness of a stoic.” His outlook was reinforced by his new friend Joseph Heller, whose cheerfully ironic pessimism was just the kind Steinberg appreciated.

Just as the house renovations were getting started, his cousin Phil suffered a stroke and died. Although they had not spent much time together, their friendship had deepened through Phil’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness letters, which touched on everything from local politics to the satisfactions of work, the love of a good woman, and the importance of family ties. Phil was the only member of the extended Steinberg family with whom Saul felt real affinity, so his death was a serious loss, especially because it was so unexpected. What Saul found most unsettling about Phil’s death, however, was that he and his cousin were exactly the same age, seventy. This intimation of mortality hit far too close to home.

With Sigrid, the ups and downs continued despite their supposed once-and-for-all final separation and despite the kindness Saul dispensed during her convalescence. When she wrote another of her ongoing series of accusatory letters, he made an uncharacteristic attempt to mend the breach with a letter of his own. “We have to be careful,” he wrote, adding that he loved and missed her. But they were incapable of breaking their old patterns and could not be together for long without a major blowup. Silence once again dominated their interactions in the house, and they were back to communicating via written messages. Steinberg kept a huge supply of paper plates on hand, the ordinary white cardboard ones with fluted edges. He was fond of drawing on the dessert-sized ones, sometimes making masks with cut-outs for noses, other times making household lists or jotting down thoughts that might become drawings. Sometimes he would dash off a drawing pertaining to whoever was seated at his table, and many ended up as valued souvenirs of the people who received them. Sigrid had her own use for the paper plates, as informal bulletin boards on which to post her latest ultimatum, which she always left at his place so it would be the first thing he saw when he sat down to a meal.

And yet when they traveled together they were the most loving of couples. While the house was uninhabitable they took several trips, first to Martinique and Barbados and then to Sanibel Island, Florida, where they had been the year before. They rented the same apartment, on the fourth floor of a condominium that was a short walk from the ocean. Although it was luxuriously furnished and spacious, it forced them into closer proximity than they had in Springs, but they managed nonetheless to live in the peaceful harmony that eluded them everywhere else.

When the vacation was over they returned to their separate apartments, and Steinberg abruptly decided that he had to sell his and move. He knew he was behaving irrationally and he knew why: it was how he had reacted since Milan, when he had moved from one student hovel to another, thinking that the cure for his unhappiness would be a new place to live. He told Aldo that making changes to the Springs house whenever he felt the old restlessness brewing was not enough, and said that he was free to conclude— correctly—that he had “changed landlords” instead of changing his bad habits. For a week he attacked the search for a new apartment with the intensity of one of his Don Quixote figures girding to vanquish a pineapple, but after getting no further than reading the want ads, he gave up, and moving became something he only hinted at now and then. Instead of changing landlords, he changed locations through travel.

ONCE STEINBERG WAS BACK IN TOUCH with Ada, her attitude toward him veered quickly from what he wanted, a warm friendship based on a shared past, to her desire for a renewal of the intense sexual passion they had enjoyed before the war. He was a little frightened by her love letters and blatant overtures on the telephone, but at the same time he wanted—indeed, needed—to see her. He flew to Milan “first class TWA” and checked into one of the best hotels in the city, where Aldo and Bianca met him for dinner that night. The next day he went to Erba and spent the afternoon with Ada before going to Turin to see Consolata Solaroli, a graphic designer he had known and liked for many years, despite her penchant for using green ink, which gave him shudders. On a whim, the day afterward he flew to Zagreb and then to Zurich before returning to Milan to spend his final afternoon with Ada and his last evening with Aldo. He and Ada had come to an understanding that there would always be a very special intimacy between them but that it would be a shared memory and no longer sexual. The next day he flew to Paris for three days of pure holiday, and then back to New York.

WHEN HE ARRIVED, HE WAS STILL under “the beneficent illusion of travel, the illusion of liberty,” but the freedom was short-lived: “The mail was waiting, the telephone, and other chores are already closing in.” As the new year, 1985, arrived, he settled into his well-heated apartment and seldom went out, and when he did, it was usually for long walks along the avenues and streets of the Upper East Side. Steinberg tried but could not keep himself from falling into a profound “melancholy,” his euphemism for periodic bouts of serious depression. This one found him constantly replaying scenes from his past life and immersing himself in reading as a way of coping with angry thoughts about his past humiliations. Books he had once loved were now merely “clever,” and if they did help him to sleep, it was only for a few hours, after which he would wake up agitated and fixating on things from the past he had all but forgotten or other “oddities” he was at a loss to explain. “We are the victims of childhood for too long,” he said, as he was suffused with inexplicable nighttime anxiety and terror. Despite all the sophistication he had acquired and all the admiration and affection that had been lavished on him since he had left Bucharest, he feared there was no way to avoid “winding up like my parents, confused and fearful. What a shame.”

All winter long, as he stayed in the warmth of his apartment, he immersed himself in reading everyone from Tolstoy to Primo Levi; from L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between to Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. He boasted of reading every writer from Gadda (in the Milanese dialect) to Gaddis to William Gass, but nothing helped. When summer came, he spent it quietly in the country, sitting in the sun and watching as the last of the work was done by a young and cheerful construction crew, enjoying the days, which he thought spawned the “excellent, pleasurable, sometimes ecstatic insomnia” that gripped him all night long. He coped with his wakefulness by sitting (the term he always used for meditation) for long hours several times each night.

Sigrid caused much of his anxiety, as her behavior veered toward the dangerous, not only to herself but to others as well. She was almost always high, but that did not stop her from driving with reckless abandon. He made the mistake of asking her to pick up his car after routine servicing at a West Side garage and deliver it to his apartment. On the way she went through a red light on Riverside Drive and 89th Street and hit another car head-on. Neither she nor the other driver was hurt, and Steinberg’s large Chevrolet sedan had “only a dent.” Sigrid found it amusing that the other car, a tiny sports model, was (in her words) “smothered.” She was blasé about it when she described the accident over the phone, blithely reporting how relieved she was not to get a summons and how, still in a stupor, she had gone to her apartment, got Papoose the cat, and taken off for the country—not the apartment where he was waiting. It was not fair, she told him when she phoned from Springs, that after escaping so many serious consequences, she got a speeding ticket on the Montauk Highway.

Through Evelyn Hofer, a staunch believer in Jungian psychology, Sigrid had begun analysis with Dr. Armin Wanner, who would become the last and longest-lasting of her many therapists. Occasionally she thought she was well enough to see Wanner once a week, but most of the time she had twice-weekly sessions. As time went on, she was often in such distress that she saw him every day, not only for sessions in his office but also for long walks, visits to museums, and other meetings that were more social than clinical. Wanner had her keep a dream journal, writing what she remembered about her dreams of the night before. Instead she was much more engrossed in keeping a detailed diary of her life with Saul Steinberg, and around 1985–86 the dream journals became sporadic as she filled tablets and notebooks with angry outbursts that described each ultimatum he issued and each outrageous retort or response they inspired from her. One of her diary entries describes the general pattern of most of them: “Basically while we did talk, we found no solution, made no decisions except that he won’t go with me anywhere here, chez people, for dinner, etc, so I am stuck.” Angrily she added, “Better start looking for new friends, maybe among the other losers in my neighborhood, among the local bums.”

Saul told her the one constant she could depend on from him was what she called “the money question.” In 1987 he gave her $31,200 for that year’s living expenses and expected her to supplement it with interest from her savings account and money market fund. If he also hoped it would inspire her to seek work, he did not say. Instead of calming her financial concerns, his stipend filled her with rage and resentment. She took one of his best drawings, a gift given at a happier time, to Sotheby’s, where it fetched $86,985 at auction. She told him what she had done in a letter, boasting that she had had to do it because he had left her with nothing, not even Papoose, who now lived mostly with him. “Go fuck yourself,” she wrote. “I have nothing left but money and I will take it and run.”

Her behavior was fast becoming a public embarrassment, as she did not stop with the Sotheby’s auction; she took another of his gift drawings to Arne Glimcher, who quickly sold it for what it was worth, just under $10,000. She thought it should have brought more and wrote Glimcher an angry letter saying that he had taken advantage of her straitened circumstances and had left her no choice but to accept it. She told everyone who knew Steinberg that Glimcher had gypped her, knowing full well how mortified Steinberg would be when the story eventually got back to Glimcher through the art-world rumor pipeline. Then she went through an “I’ll show him [Saul]” phase when she took her portfolio to every gallery in the city, from the high-end uptown establishments to the downtown storefronts and alternative spaces. She did not help her presentation by wearing her most bizarre outfits, and her hair was often dirty and unkempt. Most gallerists would not even look at her work, using the standard excuse that they were not taking any new artists just then. She knew museums had their own publications staff, but she went anyway to beg for a job doing the most menial hand-lettering or book design. They all knew who she was, and she enjoyed watching some of them squirm in embarrassment as they turned her away. Many of Steinberg’s friends were so concerned about her disheveled appearance and unstable behavior that they wrote cautious letters hinting that something was very wrong with her. Unfortunately, no one, starting with him, knew what to do.

WHILE ALL THIS WAS GOING ON, Steinberg was besieged by death on all fronts, starting with the news that his mother’s sister and the aunt he loved most, Sali Marcovici, had died in Israel at the age of ninety-one. He had sent regular support to her since he first earned money after the war, and he continued to send the same stipend for the rest of his life to her daughter, a cousin he remembered as “thin and whining,” whom he had not seen since 1930. From the American Academy of Arts and Letters he received a stack of notices of the deaths of members during the previous year, and he spent far too much time shuffling them as if they were a deck of playing cards and obsessing over how old the people had been when they died. Some were people he thought had died long before, so that seeing their names revived them eerily in his mind. “Too late,” he concluded, mimicking one of his most famous word drawings, in which Sooner and Faster aim for the stratosphere while Too Late sinks into a murky pond. Rodica Ionesco sent news of Mircea Eliade’s death, and Steinberg mourned the news of his passing and Primo Levi’s, a new friend whom he had not had enough time to get to know. Two days before he died, Bernard Rudofsky, one of the first friends Steinberg had made in America, asked him to come to the hospital; Rudofsky told Steinberg that despite Steinberg’s lifelong “indifference,” he loved and admired him. Steinberg was shocked because he had no idea Rudofsky felt that way about him. Another death that inflicted strong emotion was that of Jean Stafford, a friend and neighbor in Springs who always delighted him when he saw her running down Fireplace Road toward his house, ready to use her “very unexpected and complicated mind to such devastating advantage.” Other neighbors who were old friends died, among them Jimmy Ernst, at whose home Steinberg often ate his Thanksgiving dinner in the company of “all the other doddering old painters, all hard of hearing,” and about whom he groused, albeit fondly.

As his collection of newspaper obituaries grew thicker, small comfort came when Brendan Gill advised him not to die on a Friday or a weekend, because it was “poor timing for obits in the Times. ” Another small comfort came from an article in the New York Times about how new therapies were helping men overcome impotence. He underlined the sentence “people realize that you should, if you want it, have a satisfactory sexual relationship into your 90’s.”

ALL STEINBERG’S MOORINGS WERE COMING UNDONE, and he felt adrift and unable to tether himself to anything solid. For years he had proudly used the stationery of The New Yorker for his correspondence, often embellishing the letterhead with the same kind of fanciful drawings he had used earlier to decorate the Smithsonian stationery. Now, for some vague reason he could not define, the magazine that was so vital to his existence had become a less important presence in his life. Searching for the reason why it happened, he compared his changing feelings about the magazine with the death of his Aunt Sali, equating the loss of his professional patria with the loss of people he loved. But then he dismissed this as “exaggerating, perhaps to avoid frightening myself.” He thought his drawings were “no longer right for the magazine,” and even more alarming was the knowledge that “the idea of making them has no attraction for me.” He thought it might have begun when the magazine was sold to Advance Publications, as he shared the view of the majority of the staff artists and writers that the moment the Newhouse family bought it, The New Yorker became “a more vulgar thing, adapted to making a profit.” Still, no one expected the shattering announcement that the venerable (and venerated) William Shawn, aged seventy-nine, would be fired with the utmost public humiliation after S. I. “Si” Newhouse offered his job to Robert Gottlieb, who accepted it.

Gottlieb had been a brilliant book editor at Knopf, but he had no experience in magazine publishing, the point on which the magazine’s staff members focused their anger. The staff hastily called a protest meeting at which Roger Angell led them in composing a letter telling Gottlieb that he should not take the job, even though he had earlier made it clear that he would only serve as a “conservator” until a new and permanent editor was appointed. The letter was rightly deemed “an act of self-delusion performed by 153 people who had long spent their working lives in a protected singular world,” and when the writers asked longtime contributors to sign, John Updike was among those who acknowledged the hard reality of the changes installed by the new regime and refused. Among those who were upset at the passing of the old ways and who did sign were J. D. Salinger and Saul Steinberg. Like so many others, Steinberg was “sad, hurt, infuriated.” He asked rhetorically what would become of the magazine now that the new editor possessed “a punk sensibility, convinced that brutality is chic.” And then he sent Roger Angell a drawing on the magazine’s stationery, embellishing the letterhead by turning it into a factory, which is what he thought it had become.

STEINBERG WOULD BE THE FIRST TO say that any form of psychoanalysis was unlikely to lead anyone to startling new insights into his or her character, but in old age he never stopped analyzing himself, especially about why he was so prone to the increasingly frequent and increasingly long periods of “melancholy.” He admitted that whenever he was unhappy, he had doubts about everything and believed that nothing he did or said was good or right. Still, “unhappiness does not affect my reasoning my ideas my imagination,” he insisted. No matter how mean a gesture he made in life, nothing impaired his work. It was how he rationalized his increasingly rude behavior, which resulted in a terrible error of judgment sometime in the spring of 1985 that caused anguish and regret for the rest of his life.

No one is sure how it began or what exactly caused it, but sometime in 1985, Steinberg had a serious falling-out with Tino Nivola. It might have had something to do with an inexpensive Polaroid camera, which he insisted he had loaned to Tino, who failed to return it, while Tino claimed he had never borrowed it. No one who knew of this altercation can swear to any part of it with any certainty, but the story of the camera became the tentative explanation others offered after the two men fell into silence, stony on Saul’s part, sad on Tino’s. The change in Tino’s demeanor began in 1982, after he underwent radiation treatment for cancer and went into a remission that left him lethargic and subdued, no longer the cheerful, energetic friend who was always just across the road and ready to stop whatever he was doing whenever Saul wanted to see him. Tino had an “amazing reverence for Saul’s genius,” and he “utterly, utterly, respected and admired” him. That sentiment never changed, his wife and daughter attested, so that after the discord (whatever it was), there was no sudden break between them; it was more like Tino’s “slowly detaching himself from Saul’s orbit.” The silence continued for three years and was still in effect when Constantino Nivola suffered a fatal heart attack on May 5, 1988.

Claire Nivola phoned Saul to break the news of her father’s death. She remembered how he emitted a sound she had never heard before, a “pained cry” that was somewhere between a moan and a cry of anguish. “I’ll have to call you back,” he said, and hung up the phone. Fifteen minutes later he had gained enough self-control to call and ask for the details of his friend’s death. He listened carefully and told Claire to tell her mother that he would be just across the road if she needed him, but he could not be with her in person.

The Nivola family knew how deeply Tino’s death affected Saul, but several years had to pass before he was able to talk to Ruth about his feelings, and then he could do so only over the phone. He told her that it had felt like losing a brother when Ugo Stille died, but “Tino was more than a brother.” And then he made an admission that left Ruth at a loss for words, as he had never before revealed himself this way: “Since Tino’s death I have tried so hard to break through the asbestos that coats me. Inside, deep inside, I am soft, but I have this exterior coating of asbestos.” Ruth thought it was the most intimate and moving conversation she had ever had with Saul and recorded it in her diary.

Steinberg’s relationship with the Nivolas, who, after Hedda, Aldo, and Sigrid, were the people to whom he was closest, was always a curiously distant one. Even though there was a time when they all commuted into the city after every weekend, the Nivolas knew better than to ask him for a ride unless they had no other choice, because “it made him feel trapped into having to leave according to someone else’s schedule and it made him uncomfortable.” They knew that “he did not have natural kindly impulses,” but they excused him because “he knew it, and it gave him tremendous guilt and remorse.” They knew that he preferred to be generous with money and would always offer assistance, but only if he could do so from a distance, without personal involvement, for “doing that always made him feel incredibly good.” Now that the Nivola children were grown and had gone to pursue their own careers and start their own families, there was only Ruth across the road, and Saul called her “the sole person I know with whom I can commiserate.” He continued to accept her many kindnesses, but always on his own terms.

All their friends knew how close Saul had been to Tino, and many sent letters of condolence to him as well as to the family. Among the closest to both men was Henri Cartier-Bresson, who wanted Steinberg to know that he understood his sadness and shared it. Even so, these demonstrations of affectionate concern provided small comfort. Shortly before Saul made the remark that so stunned Ruth, he wrote a message on a sheet of blue-lined memo paper, folded it, and put it inside a file folder that he addressed to himself and sealed shut with folder labels. He affixed a twenty-five-cent stamp with the image of Jack London to it but never put it in the U.S. mail; instead he filed it carefully away among his other correspondence and never looked at it again.

The message was both sad and chilling:

“Dear SaulLove fromBut who loves you?” “NOW FOR SOME SENSATIONAL NEWS,” Steinberg told Aldo when his lawsuit against Columbia Pictures was settled in his favor in 1987. The decision gave him “true primitive pleasure” and was “the glorious dream of every humble individual persecuted by invisible forces.” He could not help but crow: “Vindicated in full. A triumph.” The lawsuit had dragged on for three long years, until the defendants made the mistake of arguing that their poster was based not on Steinberg’s drawing but merely on the same buildings he had used; however, as the buildings were from his imagination and not real, the case collapsed in judgment. After three years of endless meetings with his lawyers, which sometimes left him frightened, confused, and always resentful, he actually enjoyed giving his “endless and quite interesting” deposition. He received $225,858.49 in settlement of the case he called “ST vs. the Scoundrels,” and he promptly made photocopies of the checks and inserted them in his appointment diaries. He was so gleeful that he made photocopies of Judge Louis L. Stanton’s thirty-five-page decision to pass out among his friends, and he was quite pleased when Gaddis told him he was thinking of using the legal documents as a collage in his next novel.

The case generated a new friendship with Judge Pierre N. Laval, who sent him portions of the opinions in several similar cases and a postcard showing how the city of Edinburgh had copied the poster, hoping that since the case had been settled in Steinberg’s favor, it would amuse rather than upset him. Steinberg actually enjoyed it so much that he decided to collect the imitations of what he now always called “that famous New Yorker cover.” When friends sent versions from Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, and Jerusalem, he told Aldo, “Lo and behold, a pretext to travel to Europe. Or maybe not.”

There was another legal matter that needed attention, one that Hedda joking referred to as “when Saul and I divorced our money.” Although they remained married, they signed a legal document that “settled the rights and interests” of their money and property and gave them the right to dispose of individual assets however they wanted. At the time, Steinberg’s net worth was $4,669,000 and Sterne’s was $3,500,000. Shortly after, he made another legal decision, appointing Sigrid Spaeth to be his agent in a living will, as he “trusted [her] to do the right thing because she knows better than anyone else what I would do.”

STEINBERG WAS LEADING SUCH A QUIET LIFE that his cousin Henrietta Danson chided him for not keeping in touch with his family now that he had “dropped out of the limelight.” In the past she had been able to keep up with his doings by reading the newspapers, but now, if she did not hear from him directly, she knew nothing. His professional life was busy because of various awards, honors, and exhibitions of his work, all of which generated interviews, articles, and books, but when they were judged against the activity of earlier years, they added up to less.

The Royal College of Art in London made him an honorary doctor at the 1988 convocation, a quiet and low-key ceremony compared to the one at Yale the following June, when he was awarded another honorary doctorate. He was about to decline it when Arne Glimcher insisted that he had to go, and not only that, he had to go in style: Glimcher chartered a small plane to fly Steinberg from Springs to New Haven, a twelve-minute flight, as opposed to the more than two hours it would take by ferry and highway. A limousine met the plane and took him to the Yale campus to meet his hosts, John Hollander and his wife, the sculptor Natalie Charkow. Steinberg broke his ban on being seen in public with Sigrid by inviting her, and since he was allowed as many guests as he wanted, he invited quite a few to the ceremony.

Steinberg was delighted to be in the company of the other honorees, who included Isaiah Berlin, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Stephen Hawking. He went through the ceremony in a daze, accepting “demonstrations of affection from substantial people,” and was relieved when it ended and he could board the plane for the short flight back to Springs. The experience was so emotionally exhausting that he fell sound asleep on the flight, and when he woke up, he reminded himself that “the pleasures of vanity are poisonous.”

Granted, he was in a deep “melancholy” two years later when he recorded his official version of the event in a diary he had begun to keep, but what he described in 1991 was far from his earlier memory or from those of the people who were with him on that day in June 1989. Everyone else remembered a slight man of impeccable manners, dress, and demeanor who was quietly pleased to wear an academic robe and have a great fuss made over him. But when he summarized the event for the diary, he wrote: “How monstrous. Nervous hosts … Tension of academics.” As for the event itself, “Secretly I thought it was a demeaning honor. Best part the small plane ride pilot and fat girl copilot.” His enthusiasm for participating in the fellowship activities of Yale’s Morse College was over: “Bedraggled New Haven, dangerous town.”

THERE WERE FOUR MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF Steinberg’s work as the 1980s came to a close, the first at Galerie Maeght Lelong in 1986, followed in 1988 by one at the Galerie Adrien Maeght. Both shows received good sales and positive reviews and were accorded the same enthusiasm that had characterized all of Steinberg’s European appearances. In the catalogue for the first, he gave a long, thoughtful interview to Jean Frémon, and the second featured an essay by Eugène Ionesco, his fellow Romanian and good friend. Ionesco was a respected denizen of the literary avant-garde, and his praise was welcome to an artist who sometimes feared that his work was considered mired in a now passé tradition.

When Steinberg showed his work in Nuremberg at the fourth Internationale Triennale der Zeichnung in 1988, he joked that it was “a kind of personal payback for 1939,” as a way to gird against too-high personal expectations. However, essays by Italo Calvino and the museum’s director, Curt Heigl, enhanced the catalogue and the show received rave reviews in the German press, further adding to his always positive reception by the German public. It helped some, but not entirely, to mitigate the shock he had received the year before, when he showed his newest work at the Pace Gallery and John Russell wrote a snide, tongue-in-cheek assessment similar to the one of a decade earlier written after the Whitney retrospective. Russell’s second damn-with-faint-praise dismissal was unexpected after so many years of nothing but fulsome critical praise, and it was therefore shocking not only to Steinberg but to all his friends. To head off their many attempts to console him, he phoned one after the other to say, “Wow! I’ve survived,” and to tell them that the review didn’t matter. Again and again he repeated, “I’m all right,” as they railed against Russell. This was unusual behavior for him, as in the past he had always read reviews carefully and usually had something nasty to say about critics who did not praise his work wholeheartedly.

THE INTERVIEWERS WHO CAME TO TALK to Steinberg now were more interested in assessing the place he would hold in perpetuity than in the immediacy of whatever work he was exhibiting at the time. He was often curt and dismissive with art historians or cultural critics, because he thought they were shortsightedly assessing his canon as final and finished while he was busy all the time with new work. Despite the Russell review, he did not think his best work was behind him; nor did he think he was merely producing more of the same old tried-and-true. He sincerely believed that he was creating something new each time he put pen to paper.

Steinberg was only interested in talking to interviewers who would let him hold forth about the themes, events, and ideas that engaged him as the decade of the 1980s wound down. He had not given many interviews for the past several years because the press had pretty much left him alone until the recent spate of exhibitions brought him back into their ken. Now that there were new requests to talk to him, he was beset by the same sort of shudders he had felt after the Whitney retrospective, and just as he had refused then to collect, collate, and preserve his past, he insisted on doing the same now.

His resentment against becoming “an acquisition” for collectors intensified, but once his work was sold, there was little he could do to control what became of it. He railed against pressures from all those in the art world “who understand nothing but profits and sniff them out. Still upset over “the famous poster,” he was further outraged when The New Yorker “published an ugly book” that included seventy of his covers, “poorly printed, shrunk down, mixed in with vulgar stuff.” In this instance, the magazine owned the rights and did not even notify Steinberg, “so I’d better defend myself,” he concluded. What he meant was that he needed to take an active role in overseeing anything about his work that was being put into print.

He moved immediately to take a commanding role when two of his most astute buyers, Jeffrey Loria and his then wife, Sivia, decided to produce a book of their collection in connection with its exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. The Lorias both had backgrounds in the art world and were perceptive about what would be important and lasting, so they purchased accordingly. In Steinberg’s case, they were interested in the chronological development of the artist’s oeuvre and especially how a drawing came into being, so they bought early versions of work in progress as well as the finished drawings. Their collection (to name only some) ranged from Steinberg’s 1940s Manhattan taxis to some of his various Main Streets to several series of studies: “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” “The American Corrida,” and “Lexington and Wilshire.”

With his semi-antagonistic attitude toward collectors, Steinberg resented having his work presented in book form by someone other than himself and wanted as much control over the project as he could claim. The Lorias were delighted to have his participation, as it gave a special imprimatur to the book, even though they were aware from the beginning of how stubborn he could be about its appearance. Jeffrey Loria asked the distinguished book designer Nathan Garland to be in charge of the project and told him when he signed on that Steinberg would be “a definite problem.” Loria told Garland to “be firm,” and Garland did try, “but in the end, Steinberg got almost all of what he wanted.” Garland thought that many of Steinberg’s ideas about book design were the insights of a “genius, but in many others, he was just wrong. I deferred to him always but it was really wrong to let him get away with it.”

In the end, Steinberg groused about the book but was also pleased with it. He told John Updike that his introduction made him “happy to be taken seriously by a man whom I admire,” but he arrived at this opinion only after a fairly extensive exchange of correspondence concerning the rewriting of “sensitive spots” where he thought Updike was “over-nationalizing [his] art as the product of a Romanian looking at the U.S.” Updike explained that “the title and drift” of the book had led him to this emphasis, but he was happy to revise and eliminate as much “discomfort” as Steinberg wanted. Steinberg was more swiftly satisfied with Jean Leymarie’s “appreciation,” which had not required as much rewriting. Whereas Updike praised Steinberg for his vitality in conveying “national symbols,” calling him a “visual philosopher who continues wonderingly to trace our tribal markings,” Leymarie acknowledged Steinberg’s affinity with Joyce and Nabokov, saying that he shared their “cult of style, and predilection for parody, as well as an ambition for the universal and a quest for the autobiographical.”

This was exactly the “context” Steinberg wanted for his work, and he could not have said it better himself. But by the time this generous praise came, his “melancholy” had become crippling depression and he was unable to appreciate it.

CHAPTER 43

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