Saul Steinberg: A Biography Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Deirdre Bair

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Book design by Pei Loi Koay

  Cover art: Untitled (from the Mask Series with Saul Steinberg), 1962. Photograph by Inge Morath © The Inge Morath Foundation/MAGNUM PHOTOS. Mask by Saul Steinberg © The Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARS, NY

  Cover design by Emily Mahon

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Bair, Deirdre.

  Saul Steinberg: a biography / Deirdre Bair.—First edition.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. Steinberg, Saul. 2. Artists—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  N6537.S7B35 2012

  741.092—dc23

  [B]

  2011050601

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53498-7

  v3.1

  For Aldo L. Bartolotta

  (who never had a bad day)

  I don’t quite belong to the art, cartoon, or magazine world … they just say “the hell with him.” They feel that he who has wings should lay eggs.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chapter 1 THE AMERICANIZATION OF SAUL STEINBERG

  Chapter 2 A DECIDEDLY PECULIAR PLACE

  Chapter 3 A WUNDERKIND WITHOUT KNOWING IT

  Chapter 4 A SECURE TRADE

  Chapter 5 THE PLACE TO GO

  Chapter 6 THE BETRAYAL

  Chapter 7 TO ANSWER IN ENGLISH—A HEROIC DECISION

  Chapter 8 IN A STATE OF UTTER DELIGHT

  Chapter 9 GOING OFF TO THE OSS

  Chapter 10 MY HAND IS ITCHING FOR DRAWINGS

  Chapter 11 STARTING AGAIN IN THE CARTOONS RACKET

  Chapter 12 THE STRANGER SHE MARRIED

  Chapter 13 SLAVING AWAY WITH PLEASURE

  Chapter 14 THE ONLY HAPPILY MARRIED COUPLE

  Chapter 15 THE DRAFTSMAN-LAUREATE OF MODERNISM

  Chapter 16 BALKAN FATALISM

  Chapter 17 SOME SORT OF BREAKDOWN

  Chapter 18 A DEFLATING BALLOON

  Chapter 19 A GRAND OLD-FASHIONED JOURNEY

  Chapter 20 COVERING 14,000 MILES

  Chapter 21 SIX PEOPLE TO SUPPORT

  Chapter 22 A BITING SATIRE OF AMERICAN LIFE

  Chapter 23 CLASSIC SYMPTOMS

  Chapter 24 THE THIRTY-FIVE YEARS’ WAR

  Chapter 25 CHANGES AND NEW THINGS

  Chapter 26 I LIVED WITH HER FOR SO LONG

  Chapter 27 BOREDOM TELLS ME SOMETHING

  Chapter 28 THE TERRIBLE CURSE OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FAME

  Chapter 29 AUTOBIOGRAPHY DOESN’T STOP

  Chapter 30 I HAVE TO MOVE

  Chapter 31 THE DESIRE FOR FAME

  Chapter 32 SUCH A DIDACTIC COUNTRY

  Chapter 33 LIVING IN THE PAST

  Chapter 34 FURNITURE AS BIOGRAPHY

  Chapter 35 UP TO MY NOSE IN TROUBLE

  Chapter 36 SADNESS LIKE AN ILLNESS

  Chapter 37 THE MAN WHO DID THAT POSTER

  Chapter 38 WHAT THE MEMORY ACCUMULATES

  Chapter 39 THE DEFECTS OF THE TRIBE

  Chapter 40 THE PASSION OF HIS LIFE

  Chapter 41 “STEINBERGIAN”

  Chapter 42 WINDING UP LIKE MY PARENTS

  Chapter 43 THE LATEST NEWS

  Chapter 44 AFFIRMATION OF THINGS AS THEY ARE

  Chapter 45 WHAT’S THE POINT?

  Chapter 46 NATURE’S CHARITABLE AMNESIA

  Chapter 47 THE ANNUS MIRABILIS OF 1999

  Epilogue THE UNCERTAINTY OF HIS PLACE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  INDEX

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Like many other Americans in the last half of the twentieth century, I grew up eagerly awaiting the arrival of The New Yorker each week. Back when there was no table of contents, I think a lot of people must have done as I did, flipping through the pages to scan the titles of articles and glance at the end to see who wrote them while reserving my initial attention for the drawings and cartoons. And from the quantity of fan mail the magazine received, I don’t think I was the only one who stopped fanning the pages to study whatever Saul Steinberg contributed to an issue. His work always got my attention, and nine times out of ten, my first response was the same puzzled question: Just what did he mean by that? All those numbers, letters, squiggles, and curlicues; those funny animals and ferocious figures; the brutalist buildings, tranquil landscapes, and chaotic street scenes—what was he getting at? And as for that poster, the iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” dubbed by me and countless others “The New Yorker’s View of the World,” I am sure I was among the first delighted buyers who rushed to the store on Madison Avenue for a copy, which has hung in every house I’ve lived in since then.

  When I became a university professor, my office bulletin board was festooned with Steinberg’s covers, most of them the ones containing words that I used to try to inspire my students to think. There was the one that showed a man standing between two signs, one pointing to “before” and the other to “after.” There was the one with all versions of the verb to be, and the one that proclaimed “I do,” “I have,” and “I am.” And whenever assignments were due and I knew I’d be deluged by requests for extensions, I’d send my students a message by posting one of my favorite cartoons on the office door, of a man who sits behind a desk beaming as the word NO floats above his head and over to the deflated supplicant who sits in front of him.

  In my home office, ever since I was a graduate student in Paris years ago and I went without lunches to buy it, a Steinberg print has hung on the wall where my eyes naturally gravitate when I raise them from my work. It has floated above every desk since the days when my ancient typewriter gave way to a succession of computers, because I always found something soothing in it during my daily search for whatever words or thoughts were eluding me. I still don’t know what there is about this print, one of his landscapes from the era of The Passport, that is endlessly fascinating. It just is.

  That vague generality pretty much characterized my overall response to Saul Steinberg’s art until early 2007, when I saw two exhibitions of his work, at the Morgan Library and Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. I spent so much time studying the drawings and trying to puzzle out what inspired him to create them that the friends who were with me grew tired of waiting and were about to leave without me when I rushed to tell them how I thought I’d found what I’d been missing all those years. I had just read a caption that quoted Steinberg as having said, “I am a writer who draws.” That was it, of course, the elusive key that opened the first of the many doors that led me to spend three magical years searching for an understanding of his oeuvre.

  On my way out of the Morgan Museum, I bought the book that accompanied the exhibition, and when I got home, I put it beside the four books of his drawings that were already on my library shelves. One by one I took them down again, once more finding puzzle and pleasure in equal part. Several months later, when I was packing books and files for a household move, I came across a huge folder left over from my teaching days that contained all the Steinbergiana that had adorned the walls and bulletin boards of my various offices. For the first time I was a
ware of the variety of his output, from New Yorker covers to product advertisements. I had saved an old Hallmark calendar and one leftover Christmas card from those he drew for the Museum of Modern Art. There was even a photo of a funny-looking fellow with a mustache and black-framed glasses holding a tiny brown paper mask over his nose, who I now knew was Saul Steinberg himself. How many years had I saved all this? It was hard to remember when I started, or even why. I knew nothing about the artist’s life when I collected all these things and until that moment had never considered finding out who he was, where he came from, or why he made such an impact on his culture and society. At that time I really believed that I would never write another biography, but thoughts about Saul Steinberg persisted, and almost before I could verbalize what they were, I knew that I wanted to write about him. One thing led to another, and that was the start of this biography. Four years later, the end result is here.

  2007–2011

  New Haven, Connecticut

  CHAPTER 1

  THE AMERICANIZATION OF SAUL STEINBERG

  Saul Steinberg’s Italian diploma in architecture stated clearly that he was “of the Hebrew Race,” which meant he was forbidden to work in Milan in 1940. He was a Romanian citizen, but his passport had been canceled, making him a stateless person bound to be rounded up by Mussolini’s Fascist police and sent to an internment facility, the Italian version of a concentration camp. Although he was well known for his satirical drawings and cartoons in two of Milan’s leading humor newspapers, he lived for several months as a hunted man and never stayed long in any one place.

  His Italian girlfriend hid him in her room and her friends hid him in theirs; his classmates from school did the same. But Milan was really a small town and difficult to hide in for long. It was only a matter of time until he would oversleep and be arrested in one of the daily 6 a.m. sweeps through the poorer parts of town, then be loaded onto a train with others who had run afoul of the Fascisti and sent to an internment facility. Those on the run heard rumors that suspects who surrendered voluntarily were treated better than those who were caught in the daily raids, and so, on the advice of his friends, Steinberg turned himself in at the neighborhood police station. Shortly after, he was indeed shipped off to an internment facility, Tortoreto.

  The train ride to Tortoreto was the start of a long series of peregrinations that eventually took him from Milan by plane to Lisbon (twice), to Rome by train, to New York via ship, and then to four days in a holding pen on Ellis Island until the ship that took him to exile in the Dominican Republic was ready to sail. A year later, through the intercession of everyone from Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt to his American uncles and cousins, to several international publishers and agents and the editors of The New Yorker, he was finally admitted to the United States. He took his first legal footsteps on American soil in Miami and from there he took a Greyhound bus (one of his favorite modes of travel) to New York.

  Several months later, in one single day, Saul Steinberg became a United States citizen, a commissioned officer in the United States Naval Reserve, and, via the Office of Naval Intelligence, a member of the fledgling OSS (later the CIA) under the auspices of Wild Bill Donovan, who wanted him despite the fact that navy doctors who had examined him declared him both physically and psychologically unfit for service.

  Ensign Saul Steinberg, USNR, was sent to Washington, D.C., for a brief period of training in psychological warfare to prepare for an overseas posting where his considerable knowledge of languages would complement his artistic abilities. Fluent in his native Romanian and Italian, with excellent French and good German, able to get by in Spanish, and with a smattering of Portuguese and comprehensible English, he was sent by his superiors to be a spy in inland China.

  And that, as he was fond of remembering, was the start of the Americanization of Saul Steinberg, and of his lifelong love affair with all things American.

  CHAPTER 2

  A DECIDEDLY PECULIAR PLACE

  Romania, a half civilized, semi-oriental, self-indulgent country

  Saul Steinberg always thought of his native country as a decidedly peculiar place, but he was convinced that the little town of Râmnicul-Sărat had been specifically invented for him to be born there. Even his birth date had a slightly surrealist tinge, for it changed according to which calendar was in use: it was June 15, 1914, in the Julian (then being phased out) but June 28 in the Gregorian (adopted piecemeal by different regions of Romania until 1920). His parents celebrated June 14, either because the calendar change confused them or because they simply lumped his birthday in with other historical events that happened on this internationally important political day. When he was an adult, his wife and friends often had to ask which day he preferred, as he kept changing his mind. For years he chose not to celebrate either one, preferring “Bloomsday,” June 16, the day James Joyce chose for the peregrinations of Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, one of his favorite novels, and a displaced Jewish wanderer like himself.

  Political events shaped many crucial developments in Steinberg’s life, which in later years he described as a parallel to the history of the twentieth century, an immense prank played not only on him but on all of humanity. On the birthday his parents celebrated, June 14 (June 28 in the modern calendar), 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, and in August World War I began. Exactly five years later and again on June 14, the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, was signed; it was a punitive agreement that had much to do with the instigation of the Second World War, the annihilation of European Jews, and Steinberg’s forced emigration to the United States.

  War, and particularly the two world wars, affected Steinberg’s life drastically, but even before the first one began, fractious politics caused major changes in his family’s life. Romania, then known to the world as Roumania, had been a country only since 1861, when the principalities of Walachia and Moldavia voted to unite and selected Colonel Alexander Ioan Cuza to lead them. Cuza proclaimed the founding of the “Roumanian nation,” adding that he feared the new country would not long be satisfied with him. He was right, and by 1866 the government was in such disarray that a delegation was sent to search for a foreign prince who could be persuaded to accept the newly created and highly unstable throne of a constitutional monarchy. They had no one specific in mind when the search began, but the main attribute they sought was a large private fortune, which they hoped would guarantee independence and distance from the many intrigues of the competing clans, political parties, and ruling classes.

  The younger brother of the king of Belgium was the Roumanians’ first choice, but he was so frightened by the internal politics of the country that he declined the offer. The committee moved on to Germany and another younger brother, Prince Karl of the Prussian royal house of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Karl was not exceptionally bright, but he liked the idea of having his own country and became the first prince of Roumania, crowned as King Carol I in 1881 when Romania became a monarchy. His reign lasted until his death in 1914 and was punctuated periodically by the same sort of boundary disputes and regional wars that had been fought ever since the Roman conquerors withdrew around A.D. 271–74, leaving behind their name and their language superimposed on that of the native Dacians, the indigenous tribe they had conquered.

  AN ETHNIC STEW OF A NATION began to bubble as soon as the Romans left. The Dacians were overrun consecutively by tribes of Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, and Magyars; in the Middle Ages Mongols arrived, only to be supplanted by Turks, who incorporated Romania into the Ottoman Empire. Russia and Austria challenged Turkey during the eighteenth century, as did the Greeks, whom the Romanians disliked more than the Turks but with whom they allied themselves until Turkey was in turn marginalized by the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29. All through these regional wars, certain parts of the country were spoils passed back and forth between neighboring Hungary, Bulgaria, and Russia. And just as the country’s boundaries were in constant flux, so too was the
language. Based originally on the Latin overlay on Dacian, the Romanian language swelled with additions from every conquerer, invader, and even the vanquished.

  Politics and language made it difficult to forge a Romanian identity, and that did not begin until Ioan Cuza united the two principal territories, Walachia and Moldavia (now Moldova) into what were essentially Russian protectorates. By the reign of Carol I, the country was dominated by nationalists, and Jews became scapegoats and victims. Christians (both Catholic and Orthodox) blamed the Jews for violence and turmoil but ignored the way the ruling classes plundered and pillaged the peasants. The upper classes benefited from anti-Semitic demonstrations and did nothing to rein in the violence.

  In 1907 the peasants were starving, and a revolt erupted that threatened to paralyze, if not destroy, the entire country. The Christian population looked for a scapegoat and found it in the Jews who acted as agents for the mostly absentee landlords, collecting rent and taxes and gouging the peasants in every possible way. Despite the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, when world opinion forced the Romanian government to give the Jews full rights of citizenship, successive governments ignored the treaty and persecution continued. Jews were not legal citizens of Romania and were therefore forbidden to engage in legitimate occupations, trades, or professions, so many learned to survive as moneylenders or stewards of the nobility’s extensive land holdings. The situation was so desperate in the last years of the nineteenth century that it led to what was later described as the forced emigration of Romanian Jews to the United States, and three of the six sons of Saul Steinberg’s paternal grandfather were among them.