Chapter twelve: the stranger she married

Steinberg arrived in New York: Jeanne Steig, quoting her late husband, William Steig, interview, May 19, 2007.

“where his services are desired”: ST, Officer Personnel File (OPF), National Personnel Records Center (NPRC), copies in SSF folder “War Service—Archival Documents.”

“the first of Saul’s phony documents”: HS, interview, October 11, 2007. By “phony documents,” she is referring to ST’s false diplomas and other official-appearing drawings.

“always made Saul weep”: Ibid.

“indispensible as a teacher”: Diary entry, n.d., following entry for June 4, 1991, YCAL, Box 75.

“de facto art director”: Yagoda, About Town, p. 106.

became one of Steinberg’s best friends at the magazine: Lee Lorenz, interview, September 12, 2007, recalled that “Saul loved Carmine. He was a kid off the street with no art training, but eventually became assistant to the layout guy and then he took over. Every time Saul came in, he would stop in the makeup department, which was on the floor below the art department. He loved Carmine and he loved it there.”

He and Saul bonded: HS, interview, October 11, 2007.

It was, in fact, such a deep friendship: Leo Steinberg, interview, October 31, 2007. The book was given to Perelman by Aline Bernstein and was signed by her as well. At his death, ST left the book to PC, who in turn gave it to Leo Steinberg, whose estate has it as of this writing. See also PC, “On S. J. Perelman,” The Company They Kept (New York: New York Review of Books, 2006), p. 179.

She spent the whole evening caressing: IF, interview, October 12, 2007; HS, interview, October 11, 2007. ST told this story to IF sometime after 1978.

Hedda thought he was like a little boy: IF’s remark, made during a discussion with DB of ST’s and HS’s memories of their wedding dinner, October 12, 2007.

“rather proud of himself”: HS, interview, September 9, 2007.

“idea of marriage”: HS, interview, October 24, 2007.

“To know Hedda through Saul”: IF, interview, October 12, 2007.

“ordinary superstitious Romanian fatalism”: IF, interview, October 12, 2007; AB, interview, June 19, 2007; Stéphane Roman, interview, January 12, 2008.

Saul told him fiercely: Norman Manea, interview, June 11, 2008, New York.

After he started to work: ST’s letters to AB throughout 1945 mention food, clothing, and sums of money that he has sent to him and Ada. On November 18, 1945, he promises to send food at least eight times per month and asks AB to give half to Ada. On January 26, 1946, he tells AB that Ada is now in Rome so there is no further need to divide the CARE packages with her.

“trained for a future overseas assignment”: ST, Officer Fitness File, NPRC, January 25, 1945, copy SSF. His fear of recall is also mentioned throughout the 1945 letters to AB.

“alive and well”: ST to AB, September 5, 1945.

Saul resumed contact with her: Internal evidence in her YCAL correspondence verifies the resumption of the correspondence, as does HS, interview, October 24, 2007.

“get up every morning”: ST to AB, November 18, 1945.

“Those were the years”: ST, diary entry, n.d. but following May 19, 1991, YCAL, Box 75.

“title for book”: ST, appointment book, January 7, 1945, YCAL, Sketchbook 3074. The page is reproduced in S:I, p. 238, n. 58.

Fan mail poured in to the magazine: Reader responses are in YCAL, Box 57, and TNYR, Box 62.

Steinberg’s success coincided: For descriptions of this historical moment at the magazine, see Smith, Steinberg at The New Yorker, pp. 19–20; Yagoda, About Town, pp. 168–81; Brendan Gill, Here at The New Yorker, pp. 167–68. My brief comments here rely on their full and authoritative discussions.

“wordless dispatches”: Smith, Steinberg at The New Yorker, pp. 19–20.

“may have been embarrassed”: ST to Kurt Vonnegut, n.d. but internal evidence shows that it was written in 1989, YCal, Box 94, folder “Correspondence 1989.”

“the problem of identity”: Harold Rosenberg, “Saul Steinberg’s Art World,” HR/Getty; this was translated into French for “L’ ‘Art World’ de Steinberg,” in Steinberg: Le Masque: textes par Michel Butor et Harold Rosenberg; photographies d’Inge Morath (Paris: Maeght Editeur, 1966).

because the artists who were his friends: “The Rose Is from the Cabbage Family,” R & S Outtakes, copies at SSF and YCAL, Box 38.

“milk that huge cow”: Alain Jouffroy, “Visite à Saul Steinberg,” Opus International, December 1971, English edition, pp. 117–18.

“it contains the two most important”: ST, “Ginza 1964,” R & S Outtakes, copies at SSF and YCAL, Box 38.

“Owing to “political circumstances”: When the Romanian-Soviet armistice treaty was signed, Romania agreed to pay reparations of more than $300 million to bear all costs of the Soviet occupation. This followed the plunder and looting by the departing Germans so that the total amounted to three and a half times the national income from the last prewar statistics, gathered in 1938. See Jelavich, History of the Balkans, p. 320; Paul Lendvai, Eagles in Cobwebs (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1969), p. 245.

Neither money nor certified mail: Harry Steinberg to R. and M. Steinberg, October 2, 1945, Romanian letters, SSF.

Armed with the official approved list: ST to R & M Steinberg, June 7, 1946, Romanian letters, SSF.

When medicines were finally approved: ST to HS, February 2, 1947, AAA.

“he didn’t want them here”: HS, interview, March 29, 2007.

“No matter how much loneliness and suffering”: ST, diary, n.d. but following May 19, 1991, YCAL, Box 75.

Miller’s approach was to select artists: Dorothy C. Miller, “Foreword” to Fourteen Americans, pamphlet, pp. 7–8 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946): “The question of age was not considered, still it may be of interest to look at the exhibition from that point of view. Five of the fourteen are between twenty and thirty years of age, two of them under twenty-five … Youth happens to be in the majority.”

Steinberg was the only one of the fourteen: ST’s contribution appears in S:I, p. 112, as “Artist’s Statement for ‘Fourteen Americans,’ 1946, ink on paper, 3½ x 7¼ in. (9.5 x 20 cm.), formerly collection of Dorothy C. Miller, now private collection.

“to create a complicity”: ST to Katherine Kuh, November 9, 1961, YCAL, Katherine Kuh Papers, Box 2, Folder 28; published in S:I, p. 249.

“There is an inside discipline”: Newsweek, “The Job of Being Absurd,” July 5, 1945, p. 97.

“from the military point of view”: ST to AB, November 23, 1945, SSF.

At various times he gave them to friends: Some of his handwritings, pamphlets, and books are scattered throughout YCAL boxes; others are in the collection of books in his personal library that were given to Anton van Dalen. Some are shown in S:I, pp. 112–15. His letter from Primo Levi, July 18, 1985, is in YCAL, Box 38.

“a safe guess”: Howard Devree, “It’s Funny—But Is It Art?,” New York Times, September 8, 1946.

Glaser thought him the only visual artist: Robert Hughes, “The World of Steinberg,” Time, April 17, 1978, p. 96.

“He was somehow not treated”: Mary Frank, interview, January 25, 2009.

“felt safe with him”: HS, interview, March 29, 2007.

Steinberg had become an “AA” artist: S:I, p. 36.

Sam Cobean: ST was devastated by Cobean’s early death in an auto accident in 1950.

“different pay scales”: Lee Lorenz, interview, September 12, 2007.

When Steig learned of it: Jeanne Steig, interview, May 19, 2007; HS, interview, September 9, 2007; Lee Lorenz, interview, September 12, 2007; Frank Modell, interview, September 24, 2007.

“a quiet and elegant man”: ST, memorial tribute to Charles Addams, November 18, 1988, Tee and Charles Addams Foundation, Wainscott, N.Y., copy in SSF.

Addams helped Steinberg buy his first car: Smith, S:I, p. 35, writes that ST’s first car was a used Cadillac convertible bought from Igor Stravinsky, but HS, interviews, 2007, insisted that the Cadillac was their second car, bought after they sold the Packard; Ruth Nivola, interviews, 2007, agreed with HS. In the folder “Travel Related Items,” YCAL, Box 35, there is a New York State vehicle registration dated June 12, 1947, for a 1941 Cadillac. A bill of sale for the car dated the same month is in YCAL, Box 57. ST made a drawing of a Cadillac, reproduced in S:I, p. 35, original in SSF 4513.

“We went up there”: HS, interview, May 8, 2007; Ruth Nivola, diary, September 10, 1999, and interview, September 22, 2007. RN was the mother of a toddler, Pietro, and pregnant with her second child, Claire. ST made “Abcedarian(s),” alphabet booklets, for each child, choosing images and people that had personal meaning to represent each of the letters. In a telephone conversation, April 28, 2008, Claire Nivola said Pietro’s was “mostly political because he was born in 1944: A is for anarchy as one example,” while hers (born 1947, booklet made by ST in December 1954) was “more personal: H is a drawing of Hedda astride a horse and she is painting.” Originals in the ST collection of Claire Nivola.

“was a bad driver”: HS, interview, May 8, 2007.

In their many road trips: Alexander “Sasha” Schneider rented the Packard that summer, then later bought it. ST to HS, n.d., AAA.

“fine, fat, I eat”: ST to AB, November 23, 1945, SSF.

Once his position at The New Yorker was firmly cemented: HS, interview, May 8, 2009. Examples of all this work and correspondence relating to them are in the uncatalogued YCAL boxes at the Beinecke Library, and a still incomplete listing is in the “Features” section of “Selected Bibliography,” S:I, pp. 169–272.

“toward streamlined bad taste”: ST to AB, January 26, 1946, SSF.

Drawing for it made him feel: “The Rose Is from the Cabbage Family” and “Drawings for The New Yorker,” R & S Outtakes, YCAL, Box 38, and SSF.

“the absence of Fascism”: ST to AB, January 26, 1946, SSF.

“a clever pirate”: ST to AB, November 18 and 23, 1945, SSF.

“better than ever”: ST to AB, June 15, 1946, SSF.

Joseph Mitchell’s writing: ST to AB, January 26, 1946, SSF.

Most of all when he read: ST to AB, April 29, 1946, SSF.

“an old woman being decapitated”: Ibid.

In June, while spending the summer: ST to Bianca Lattuada, June 8, 1946, and ST to AB, June 15, 1946, SSF.

These were the years when every glittering name: ST’s calendars, datebooks, and address book are all in YCAL, Box 3.

a habitué at Del Pezzo: Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), p. 228.

He enjoyed conversations: ST shared Evans’s vision of postcards as “lyric documentaries.” In YCAL, Box 75, diary entry for May 29, 1991, after seeing Evans’s biographer, Belinda Rathbone, ST wrote of “postcards (love of) my connection with W.E. Postcards are haikus of geography.” See also Roberta Smith, “Main Street Postcards as Muse,” New York Times, February 6, 2009, p. C29.

Steinberg was entranced with the laconic: HS, interview, September 9, 2007; “The Rose Is from the Cabbage Family,” R & S Outtakes, YCAL, Box 38, and SSF. ST described Giacometti as “a dear friend whom I always enjoyed talking to. Until the end, he remained what I would call adolescent, meaning curious, free and easy.”

“Things never clicked for us with them”: HS, interview, September 9, 2007.

“the Jews had survived”: “The Rose Is from the Cabbage Family,” “Sartre” [AB #6], R & S Outtakes.

When they saw each other: HS, interview, September 9, 2007.

she should have snubbed Sartre: ST to HS, n.d., AAA.

“she figured it out”: ST to AB, August 22, 1946, SSF.

They resumed their affair: HS, interview, July 15, 2007.

“Goring and company”: ST to AB, August 22, 1946, SSF.

Among them were John Stanton: John Stanton to Simon Michael Bessie, January 20, 1955; forwarded by Bessie to ST, now in YCAL, Box 7, “Correspondence 1955.”

Otherwise, everything he saw: ST to AB, August 22, 1946, SSF.

“I was in Nuremberg”: ST to M & R Steinberg, November 21, 1946, Romanian letters, SSF.

“pointless misery and destruction”: ST to AB, September 26, 1946, SSF.

They had been in Europe for six months: ST to AB, January 15, 1947, SSF.

It was Aldo’s wife: HS, interview, July 15, 2007. She added, “There were often substantial sums of money given on a fairly regular basis, whenever Aldo was in a spot of difficulty.” Letters throughout various boxes at YCAL bear out her contention. When I asked directly about “the intensity of the friendship and the possibility of homosexuality” between AB and ST, HS said, “I am too discreet to go any further.” In my research, I found no evidence that it was anything other than a close friendship.

He was a guest at the elegant Gramercy Park mansion: Benjamin Sonnenberg, e‑mail to DB, November 2, 2007. At the time, ST was making a life drawing of Sonnenberg, Sr., for Geoffrey Hellman’s TNY profile, which eventually appeared on April 8, 1950, and that and others are probably those found in SSF 5154. Sonnenberg Jr. added, “When [ST] was doing my picture in January 1991, he showed me the several life sketches of my father which he’d done in preparation for the New Yorker caricature. They were altogether naturalistic and they showed my father as humane, approachable, even charming, which he certainly could be. By contrast, the New Yorker drawing shows a man totally preoccupied with his objects, his clothing, his public presentation.”

At their first meeting they discussed: One drawing of a man holding his detached nose appears in The Inspector; a series of drawings featuring the nose in various manifestations is in Le Masque, both unpaginated; a brown-paper-bag figure holding a detached nose is on the 1969 poster ST created for the Spoleto Festival at the request of his friend Priscilla Morgan.

“wonderful Saul Steinberg”: Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 511–12. For a special issue of TriQuarterly, April 1969, celebrating Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, ST contributed a diploma, p. 332.

“much bigger and more serious”: ST to AB, August 4, 1947, SSF.

He made a preliminary visit: ST, datebook for 1946, YCAL, Box 3; HS, interview, March 29, 2007, said, “It was no picnic to drive that big thing; it was hard work.”

Aldo declined: ST to AB, May 29, 1947. When finished, the mural was 80 feet long.

The industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss: The murals were featured in an article in Interiors, December 1948. A caption read: “Reproduced on Varlar, a formidable product developed by the United Wallpaper company, the murals will undoubtedly outlast the ships, come sea, lipstick, or alcohol,” which they did. ST created murals for four ships which, some years later, were sold by American Export Lines. Henry Dreyfuss and ST were both members of the Century Assocation, and Dreyfuss gave the club the original book that contained a page about ST’s murals plus the separate blueprints pertaining to them. In 2007, when the Century was deaccessioning the materials, they were given to me, and I in turn gave them to SSF. Serendipitiously, at the same time, one of the ships was scuttled outside Galveston, Texas, where it was subsequently used as a training facility for the Texas Maritime Academy. The mural was still intact as of 2012.

“The trouble is that these things”: ST to AB, August 4, 1947.

As was usual with Steinberg, however: ST to AB, December 5, 1947,

the Russians were threatening to close: ST to AB, December 5, 1947, and February 24, 1948; Lica Roman to ST, February 19, 1950, Romanian letters, YCAL, Box 56, copy in SSF.

He was in such a bad mood: ST to HS, partial letter, n.d. but internal evidence suggests end of 1947 or January 1948, AAA.

He told Aldo that it was no small matter: ST to AB, February 24, 1948. For a time there was the possibility that one of ST’s aunts and her son might go with Moritz and Rosa, but in the end they decided to go to Israel instead.

“always looked for ways to escape”: ST to AB, December 17, 1955, after spending Christmas with Sandy and Louisa Calder at their home in Roxbury, Connecticut.

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