Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 13

SAUL'S LEASE WAS UP FOR RENEWAL again when Lica returned to Paris, so he went to see an apartment at the elegant Beresford on Central Park West, though he immediately ruled it out because the Upper West Side was a foreign territory. Gigi had never liked Greenwich Village and often expressed the desire to return to the Upper West Side, where she had lived when she first arrived in New York, and on September 23, 1965, she moved there. After she became Saul's companion and while he lived in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Village, she gave up on the idea until they were driving home after Christmas with the Millers in 1964, when he said something that shocked her so much she began quietly to prepare herself to leave both him and her own apartment in the Village. Gigi asked Saul if he planned to marry her and let her have children. He told her, for the first of the many times he said it over the years, that he did not love her, and besides, Hedda was still his wife and even the thought of children was beyond the realm of possibility.

When she recovered from the shock, Gigi's first objective toward achieving independence was to get a job, which she did, in a design studio where she was mostly a.s.signed to do hand lettering on preliminary sketches and to draft layouts. The pay was certainly not enough to support her, so she remained financially dependent on Saul's largesse and stuck in the Village. When she complained once too often about how far Waverly Place was from her work and her cla.s.ses at Columbia, he told her to find an apartment wherever she wanted to live and he would buy it for her. She jumped at the chance to have a permanent home, mortgage-free and legally in her name, and chose one in a fine prewar building at 375 Riverside Drive, on the corner of 110th Street. It was on the second floor, where she could see the Hudson River only when the leaves were off the trees, and then only if she stood just so at the proper side of the large bay window in the light-filled corner room where she set up her drafting table, unpacked her books, and considered herself divinely happy. She lived there for the rest of her life.

Gigi kept busy on her own until the holidays were approaching, when she realized that it had been several months since she had seen Saul and made a note asking herself, "No Xmas?" She had been as social as he, renewing her friends.h.i.+p with Richard Fedem, a young instructor at Columbia who had married and divorced since their first encounter, and she became close to some of the neighbors in her building, particularly Jay Fellows, a young professor at Cooper Union, and his wife, Courtney. She also had several lovers, telling them all straightforwardly that she was the sometime mistress of Saul Steinberg and dependent on his support, and if he called she would have to leave to go to him. Most of her lovers still wanted something serious, among them "Bill," who told her a relations.h.i.+p could only be what she made it, and "Peter," who urged her to let him take their affair to a new level. As Christmas approached and she did not hear from Saul, Gigi was upset about being alone. She considered accepting Harriet Vicente's invitation to join her and Esteban in Prince-ton, but in the end she stayed on at Riverside Drive and waited for the phone to ring. When she sent her regrets to Harriet, she signed her name as Sigrid, and Harriet replied that she was glad to know her true name. It was the one decision Gigi was capable of carrying out alone, without Saul Steinberg's support or approval: from now on she wanted to be known as Sigrid Spaeth.

Meanwhile, Saul continued to make his social rounds and the rest of the time to stay alone in Was.h.i.+ngton Square Village. He renewed the lease for another year, until September 1966, because of lethargy over the thought of moving all the possessions he had acquired, from the "junque" he brought back from his travels to the large collection of art he was informally ama.s.sing. Bill de Kooning gave him a drawing and Sandy Calder exchanged a mobile for one of his drawings. When Sidney Janis owed him $400, Steinberg asked for a Magritte instead. Lacking energy to work, he mostly read, finis.h.i.+ng War and Peace and rereading Tolstoy's short stories. He marveled at Tolstoy's ability to write in what he was sure must have been a state of "ecstasy." Steinberg told Aldo that upon reflection, he could remember drawing in a state of "well-being" for two or three unspecified years, a satisfactory enough state until he realized that "well being doesn't count-what's needed is ecstasy." Thinking about it left him sadly convinced that he had never known creative ecstasy, which deepened his depression as the year ended.

He berated himself for being a semirecluse who worked sporadically and produced little of lasting importance Even going to Springs gave him no pleasure: "I seldom go to the country, alone I don't like it. Even the landscape is sad, trees with red leaves, like the painted old women of America." He had always liked to drive fast to East Hampton on the empty roads of wintertime, but this was no longer a thrill. Being alone in the house did not provide the same contentment as sitting alone in one room when he knew that someone else was in the next and available if he wanted her.

Quite simply, Saul Steinberg did not know what he wanted. He was fifty-one years old and at several crucial junctures in his life and work. Gigi, now known as Sigrid, was happy to be settled in an apartment of her own but nervously awaiting his summons to play out the next chapter of their relations.h.i.+p-to be dictated by him and complied with by her. He had brought in enough money to be so financially secure that he no longer had to work four to six months of every year to meet his responsibilities. There was enough money to work only when he wanted to, and only on what he wanted to do. He could buy anything that caught his fancy and still be generous to family and friends, especially Ada, whose sole support he had now become.

From the mid-sixties on, his commercial work-if it can be called commercial-was mostly for nonprofit organizations which he supported by donating drawings, or for individual friends who asked him to provide book jackets or ill.u.s.trations. In both cases, he sometimes designed posters, but here again he did the work in his own time and on his own initiative, and everyone had to take what he gave them. Even George Plimpton, who flattered him by asking him to "look around for something that might do for a Paris Review poster," had given up waiting for it by the time Steinberg finally got around to doing it. He did, however, manage to contribute a drawing in time for a benefit concert by a chamber music group with which Alexander Schneider was involved, perhaps as his way of responding to a harsh letter Schneider wrote that rankled deeply. Schneider was critical of the "new" Steinberg, who was so busy accepting invitations from the wealthy and privileged that he had no time to spend with the old friends who cared about the "man" Steinberg rather than about how the "artist" Steinberg could be used to enhance the dining and drawing rooms of the rich and famous.

Steinberg was never one to brood over snide comments, but he paid attention when Hedda sent one of her little unsigned squib notes saying much the same thing. He had gotten into the habit of telephoning her frequently, sometimes daily, and as it had been during their marriage, the conversation was always about him.

"Why do I feel the need to talk to you every single day?" Saul asked in one of their rambling telephone conversations. "Oh, that's easy," Hedda replied. "It's because we are the two people in the world who love you most."

Hedda always carried a tiny notebook in which she wrote snippets from her current reading or aphorisms and quotations from other writers and philosophers whose works she admired. Now her squibs were personal and sharply critical of how embarra.s.sed she was to see him succ.u.mb to "sn.o.b appeal." Coming from Hedda, who never criticized him, this was truly terrible, and he did not know what to do about it.

Others criticized him as well. Dore Ashton was "shocked" by his response when she asked him to introduce her to Eugene Ionesco while he was in New York. When Ashton told him she wanted to interview Ionesco for an article she planned to write, Steinberg "gave way to [his] essential voyeurism" by suggesting that there were reasons other than professional in her request. He insisted that he had to be present to observe the chemistry between them. Ashton told Steinberg that this was just another in the succession of times when he had not treated her with the respect a professional woman deserved; he had hurt her feelings deeply, and now it was time for her to tell him what she thought of him: "I feel I should give way to my own a.n.a.lysis of you as you have never hesitated to do with me. Saul, you do not love women. What you love is your reaction to them. They are merely another stimulant to your ravenous imagination. As for me in relation to you, I have indulged your att.i.tude and cherish you for what you are. But I well know that deep sentiment is alien to you, that somewhere you are lamed, and that secretly you are afraid of and despise love. You give yourself to no one but take ... Why are you like that?" She ended with asking him to let her be the "faithful old friend (how you detest 'old' friends!) that I am."

SUCH CRITICISMS MADE STEINBERG EVEN MORE reclusive and introspective, but rather than focusing on them, he tried to concentrate on the upcoming Paris exhibition. He started by making lists of tentative t.i.tles that the installers could use to identify the drawings, only some of which he ended up using. As he doodled with pen and paper, he indulged in reflections that became a guarded appraisal of where he found himself at this stage of life; he t.i.tled them "Notes on Writing." He began with a general, nonspecific observation that "writing in order to define oneself" was like mapping out territory he already knew in order to explore what lay outside it from different angles. Such reflection had a purpose: "To be one's own witness."

It made him think of "Wife and property or Real Estate, Love and Money." He gave himself advice: "Keep my money in the belt. Keep my wife in the belt. Whenever in doubt I refer it to money." After several further musings about money, he changed direction and wrote a phrase he did not explain: "Wife not pregnant this year." It led to musings about dogs, "miserable creature ... lacks the duplicity of the man he imitates." In a musing about laughter, he put it "in the family of hiccups-fart, belch-therefore not respectable." "The trouble is," he concluded, "that I give too many clues. Less clues, more chances for inventing-for creating-for taking over." Ultimately, his question to himself was whether to pay attention to those who cared deeply for him and whose concern was genuine. And if he did, what could he-or would he-do about it?

CHAPTER 31.

THE DESIRE FOR FAME.

I was doing so well-playing the gentleman, drawing only as I pleased, and now once again I've got the desire for Fame and to compete with the other jacka.s.ses. A mystery, this wish to go against myself and court danger.

In terms of the evolution of Steinberg's oeuvre, 1966 was a watershed year. His subject matter took several interesting new turns as he used themes and ideas that had been successful in the past to create new work of a more philosophical nature, work that he said was "camouflaged as a cartoon" but did not really belong in that category. He wasn't worried that it would not suit The New Yorker, because he and the editors had reached an agreement several years previously: "They only want me to be sure that I myself know what it means. They want to be more in the position of a reader who is puzzled and intrigued than of an editor who wants to judge it." The editors knew that whenever he submitted a drawing, it was with the intention of making readers sense that there was "something else beyond the [initial] perception," and that he wanted them to share "the voyage between perception and understanding."

As a way of keeping ideas fresh for the drawing table and of jogging his memory later, he did a lot of doodling, calling it "a form of brooding of the hand [that] contains no reasoning." Among some of the many doodles he made during this frenzy of creativity were lists of t.i.tles for groupings, which he separated into general categories such as "the Hyphen," "the Accent," and "The Dominant Species." Occasionally he wrote commentaries that were meant to be explanations of a personal credo or instructions for what to aim for in future work, such as "say something interesting about Religion becoming autobiography." After this he wrote "Tillich?" but did not clarify whether he was referring to the theologian Paul Tillich or to himself. Religion and autobiography were two subjects uppermost in his mind, two parts of a puzzle that engrossed him as he thought about an important new project.

The philosopher Ruth Nanda Anshen had been asking Steinberg to provide drawings for a volume by Paul Tillich for the better part of a year, even before Tilllich's sudden death from a heart attack in October 1965. Steinberg vacillated, because he was busy fulfilling other commitments but also because accepting the project would require him to think about himself as much as about Tillich's personal credo. He had met Tillich in East Hampton shortly after he bought the Springs house, and in the years since had enjoyed discussions over the good dinners served by Tillich's wife, Hannah. Steinberg almost never held the floor when he was with Tillich, for he preferred the role of "first-cla.s.s observer" as he studied how Tillich's unwavering spirituality and religious beliefs governed his every action. These were alien topics among most of his other friends, particularly the artists, and were hardly ever subjects for dinner-party conversation. Still, being with Tillich made Steinberg, who had always pondered questions about his cultural ident.i.ty as a Jew, think about his heritage and how he expressed it (or not).

Ruth Nanda Anshen was an editor as well as a philosopher, and before Tillich's sudden death she had commissioned his volume for the series she founded and directed. The overall t.i.tle, Credo Perspectives, reflected her special interest, the relations.h.i.+p between self-knowledge and the meaning of existence. Anshen's contributors to the Credo series came from many different walks of life; among them the art historian Sir Herbert Read; Pope John XXIII; Harvard president James Bryant Conant; and Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas. All were asked to write intellectual and spiritual autobiographies that would explain the creed by which they lived, how it related to their creative activity, and what aspects of their personal life had contributed to its formulation. Tillich was well suited for the series, and he gave her one of its most popular selections with My Search for Absolutes. The text was ready for publication before he died and lacked only ill.u.s.trations.

Tillich died without suggesting an artist, but Anshen had two reasons for asking Steinberg. The first was that she discerned the philosophical musings in his earlier drawings and believed he was perfect for a biographical essay that focused on religious beliefs. Her second and more important reason was that she wanted to entice Steinberg into contributing a volume of his own to the series. He was perfectly willing to give Anshen a generous supply of drawings for Tillich's book, but he was not sure he wanted to-or even could-contribute a volume of his own. It took him the better part of a year to accept the Tillich commission, because the very idea of a book of his own induced an almost irrational fear of what he would have to face and might unwittingly reveal if he tried to write about himself. Even if he only submitted drawings without text, he worried that they alone would give away far too much personal information. With great reluctance, he allowed Anshen to announce on the jacket of Tillich's book that his own was forthcoming, but he found repeated excuses to postpone it, and eventually the series came to its natural end without his contribution.

Steinberg was struck by how much Tillich's essay resonated personally, and his earliest ill.u.s.trations were as much about himself as about Tillich. The essay reminded him of his own quest for autonomy, particularly in the years when he left Romania for Italy and then Italy for the United States. He worried that he was revealing too much with "this game of autobiography," but he could not keep from playing it and wondered if his interest in himself came from having read too many "biographies written by biographers-mediocre works really-where life is justified constantly by obvious causes, more like alibis."

In the past, Steinberg's wry and whimsical drawings had often disguised the seriousness of his inquiry (sometimes to his dismay, as when readers saw only the surface humor in his New Yorker cartoons and drawings), but the technique of whimsy was a perfect foil for Tillich's profundity. Anshen described Steinberg's playfulness as his innate understanding of life's ambiguities and of how, "in what might be called a negative myth, [he] draws attention to the phenomenon of contemporary existence."

Steinberg used many of his iconic figures light-handedly and lightheartedly, and yet each drawing compels the viewer to stop and ponder, to think not only about what there is to see on the page but also to consider the deeper meaning that lurks beneath the laughter. The viewer's first response may be to smile, but almost always it is followed by emotions that might begin with perplexity but ultimately lead to the recognition of something personal. Steinberg plays with the question of existence in everything from the hand that holds the pen and draws the artist who wields it to the mazes, question marks, and the words yes and no in various ramifications. Evoking Descartes, he posits existence by poising a man on the edge of a large cube in the middle of an imaginary landscape, with a faithful dog sitting attentively behind him. The man's head (both a caricature of Steinberg's own and his usual version of Everyman) has a thought bubble above it that reads "Dubito Ergo Sum"-"I doubt, therefore I am." It is Steinberg's response to Descartes's certainty that if one thinks, one exists, "Cogito Ergo Sum," and it offers a perfect parallel to Tillich's a.s.sertion that the tragic history of the twentieth century forced him and his colleagues out of the academy and "far closer to the reality" of the external world than their forebears ever were.

As Tillich plumbed his own life for the experiences that led him to create a system of absolutes, Steinberg provided him with expressive examples of deeply personal meaning for both the writer and the artist. Steinberg depicts the existential anxiety of every stage of life from infancy to old age by showing men, women, and children climbing staircases or ladders or standing on a seesaw that has one side firmly grounded on land and the other teetering on the edge of a precipice. Everything in life is a balance, and some of his figures are more successful in achieving it than others: Steinberg's iconic figure of the artist holds a palette in one hand and a brush in the other as he draws the staircase on which he mounts steadily upward-until he reaches the top and finds that he has drawn himself inside a closed box. Boxes figure in the drawings, as do other geometric shapes that reflect the society in which his people live; buildings loom ma.s.sively, overwhelming the phalanx of rubber-stamp figures that march in tandem beneath them-all except for a single figure who sports a thought bubble that depicts another self marching in the same direction as the others. Is Steinberg asking whether this is the beginning of ma.s.s man's search for individuality? Tillich certainly asked the question.

Everything Steinberg drew for Tillich's book was a veiled "confession" about his own life as well, which may have been why not all of his drawings were what Hannah Tillich had envisioned. She sent a letter saying that although she found them "strong and penetrating," she needed to muster "courage (without wild onrushes of stubbornness)" to tell Steinberg that she had qualms about how he interpreted some of her late husband's beliefs. She thought of "Paulus," as she called him, as a bridge between outmoded systems of belief and the new one he promulgated, and she urged Steinberg to portray this literally: "Draw me one bridge (across the enigmatic question-marker monsters and cat-ghosts)." He gave Hannah Tillich the ladders and staircases that he thought reflected the text, but he drew no bridges. Mrs. Tillich was also insistent that the book jacket should feature a line drawing of her husband's head, and she did not want Steinberg to draw it. Nor did he want to: Ruth Nanda Anshen had specifically asked him when he accepted the commission, and he had most emphatically refused. When Anshen sent Steinberg a copy of the finished book, she apologized for a jacket that was not in keeping with his drawings, insisting that the only thing that mattered was the "superb" content: "You and Paulus in the diversity of your unity."

STEINBERG WAS WORKING ON HIS NEW book during the time he worked on Tillich's, and when he finally settled on The New World, he called it "a great t.i.tle which says nothing." That may have been true, but the content was something else altogether. He meant this book to have a strong, serious, and unified theme, to be a collection of metaphysical drawings that represented problems and situations in life, "like a novel with a beginning, a development, an ending, and an epilogue." After the modest success of his previous books-or, in his mind, the lack thereof-he wanted this one to achieve the sales and reviews usually a.s.sociated with blockbuster bestsellers, despite the fact that 133 drawings had already appeared in The New Yorker, so that his biggest audience might not be willing to rush out to buy a book they had, in effect, already read. Still, he worked harder on this book than he had on any of the others, for he was used to adulation and was determined not to settle for anything less. Also, there were three exhibitions on the horizon, at Maeght, Parsons, and Janis, and he wanted the book to create an audience and a market for the drawings on display.

In preparation for the book's launch, Steinberg gave a series of interviews to his friend Jean Stein in the summer of 1965, where he explained his work with far more honesty and openness than he had ever done before. There were other writers and critics who pursued him during this period, when he was in the public eye to a degree unprecedented in his past, but he chose Stein to convey his creative truths and Life magazine to be the venue for their widest possible dissemination. For those who might be newcomers to his work, and for those who were already familiar with it as well, he went through The New World with Stein, drawing by drawing, intent to explain how he himself interpreted his work. It was uncharacteristic for him to speak so freely about it, especially because he was working on the Tillich book at the same time and was often filled with panic and terror at the thought of having to contribute his own autobiographical volume to Anshen's Credo series. What makes the conversations with Stein extraordinary is that Steinberg spent so much of his life using casual evasion or outright deception to lead astray critics, art historians, and especially would-be biographers. Now he made the conscious decision that he was willing to lift his curtain of privacy in the quest for, at the very least, recognition, and at the most, fame.

One of the most personally revealing drawings in The New World is "the biography of a man, a famous man," who walks briskly along a path, followed by a hyphen that precedes the numbers of his birth year, 1905. Steinberg called this drawing "the monumentalization of people, this freezing of life," and with an almost sly relish told Stein that "anybody who is clever destroys fame or tries to mislead his admirers and biographers by being unpleasant or unreliable." Any "good man" who did this and got away with it was "a skunk," and Steinberg gleefully counted himself among them.

The t.i.tle page featured the drawing that he called the "motto" for the entire book, one of his chubby little middle-aged men with pointed nose and chin, this one in profile, with hands in his pockets and a thought bubble that reads "Cogito ergo Cartesius est." In Steinberg's translation, it meant "I reason-so it must be true that Descartes exists." His little man was a "symbol drawing" that could be used to explain every drawing in the book: A "symbol drawing [means] that what I drew is drawing. The meaning in terms of my work-my drawings-is that drawing is drawing. It's not a reality."

Steinberg with Papoose, the cat he loved as his best companion. (ill.u.s.tration credit 31.1) He explained further by using as an example his most important symbol drawing from the beginning of his career, and one which remained the most important until the end: the line, the straight flat line that "never makes any pretense of being anything else but a line." The line was the central component of almost every drawing in The New World; anything that appeared on or near the line, from shadows or flowers to trees or buildings, had no importance to or influence on the line itself, which was "a form of art criticism, a satire on drawing." The first full-page drawing in the book exemplified the importance of the line, where a man is poised at one end of a seesaw that is balanced by his drawing of spirals and doodles on the other end. Steinberg called this quest for balance a recurring motif in his art, that of "the relations.h.i.+p between a man and his work." The seesaw tilts slightly toward what the man has created, because "the work is his platform and the work is heavier than he." Steinberg meant for this man to be seen as an artist, and the work was "probably the only form of altruism the artist has. It's through his work where his arrogance and self-centerism stops."

Numbers appear throughout the book, and Steinberg uses them to combine "an illusion of reality with an abstraction." The number 4 was especially interesting because it offered the opportunity to include one of his real-life pa.s.sions, cats. He had them when he lived with Hedda and he became enamored of one of Sigrid's, which he named Papoose, a black-and-white, intensely curious cat who figured prominently in many of his drawings. Four was a number he particularly liked because it could "arouse the curiosity of a cat," and indeed he drew a generic cat peering into a 4. He dismissed the number 8 as too visibly closed, and therefore "a cat has no business to look inside"; cats should peer into something that is "a little bit open, a mystery." Three was too "obvious" to elicit much interest; and the number 1 was a "nothing." A 5 is "maybe more intriguing," but only a 4 is "perfectly designed."

Another of his iconic totems, the crocodile, makes an appearance as "a monster-a dragon-who is the real essence of beauty." The crocodile had fascinated Steinberg since his trip through Africa, and he tried to describe it to Grace Glueck, saying that he was frustrated by wanting to get "some sort of idea of what a crocodile looks like, and I didn't." A surprised Glueck replied, "But you know what a crocodile looks like." Steinberg said, "I know, and I don't know ... The main thing is to find out what sort of technique the crocodile is employing to show itself."

By the time of Stein's interview, the crocodile had become a recurring symbol, and in this book he depicts it as an "ambiguous line" in which the creature's backbone becomes "the horizon line on which a gooey, disgusting, so-called beautiful landscape appears with all the elements of beauty: moons.h.i.+ne, moon, clouds, palm trees reflected in the calm water, a swan-the true elements of beauty." That may be, but Steinberg meant the drawing to convey a sarcastic message: "Beauty is crocodilian."

He returned to a theme from the Tillich book when he pictured people coming up from somewhere underground to find themselves adrift in a landscape. He called this "a sort of s.a.d.i.s.tic play on perspective," because the people cannot locate themselves in s.p.a.ce and therefore have to learn how to become located in time. "Time," said Steinberg, "is much quicker and plays tricks with us. s.p.a.ce is more reasonable; it has to be accounted for; it has to be logical."

He returned to the subject of the individual adrift in the middle of life when he placed two drawings facing each other on adjacent pages. In the first, a man walks on a horizon line toward a tree, a house, a windmill, and other objects denoting civilization, while behind him the line that was the horizon curls into a spiral. This was "his past; there is nothing; it's completely canceled." The man is walking toward his future, but the past is following dangerously closely in order to "eat him up." In the facing drawing, the man cannot look to the future to keep himself alive because he is inside the spiral of the past and it threatens to engulf him. "This is a sort of frightening drawing," Steinberg concluded. It represented "the expressionist who lives by his own essence ... unconnected with the political and moral life of people or of the artist."

He returned to the sadness of people who are unable to communicate when he represented several conversations "in a stenographic way." On a sofa and several chairs he seats a "fuzzy" spiral, a "boring labyrinth ... with a hysterical line," a "giggling, jittery bit of calligraphy," and several comic-book symbols for speed, noise, and confusion. When Steinberg lost his usual precision and drifted into a convoluted explanation of the many meanings a spiral could have, Stein asked if this was because he saw himself in any of the stenographic figures. "No," he said emphatically, "no place."

Various kinds of drawings representing uncommunicative conversations follow, from thought bubbles with his unreadable false writing to the paper-bag cutouts of figures spouting maps of their travels. They all lead up to one of his most popular drawings of all time: a boss who sits behind a big desk, smiling s.a.d.i.s.tically at a timid worker while over the boss's head a huge NO looms, entirely filled with unreadable false writing. When it appeared in The New Yorker, so many people wanted to buy the original that it generated the most fan mail Steinberg had received in all his years with the magazine.

Stein wanted Steinberg to talk about the many drawings that featured question marks, but he cut her short: "Let's not talk about question marks; it's boring. They are obvious by now, I've made so many." He wanted to talk instead about three other drawings that he thought were vitally important for an understanding of the book's general thesis. The first was of another of his fear-inducing spirals, this one a "misleading" series of concentric circles in front of a man who holds a pen in his hand and is visible behind it. In a nod toward his architectural background and the riddle of spatial relations, Steinberg called this drawing "a form of perversion." Because the man behind the spiral is visible, "actually this s.p.a.ce does not exist ... This is a spiral line that contains an even ma.s.s of s.p.a.ce instead of opaque and transparent s.p.a.ce the way I indicate here." What he had done in drawing such a picture, he insisted, was beyond perversion: "It's a form of cruelty."

The second drawing depicted "a completely droll situation," an art lover standing in full emotional thrall in front of painting in a museum. Steinberg ridiculed viewers who gaze rapturously for long periods of time at art: "It's something intellectual that must be perceived in a fraction of an instant; the true lover of art going through a museum goes on roller skates and is extremely tired after five minutes."

The last one he wanted to discuss was the top one of two drawings on the same page, this one representing "the hero fighting a giant baby." On what appears to be an altar or the plinth of a gigantic monument, there stands one of his "mechanical" drawings, a doodled Don Quixote complete with s.h.i.+eld and spear who points his horse toward a gigantic upside-down baby that is balanced on top of the plinth by its wiry strands of hair. In one hand the giant baby dangles a kitty-cornered midget version of itself. Steinberg said there was a "key" to this drawing: "the dragon the hero picks out for himself to fight, and anybody who fights a giant baby is really a dragon; it's not a hero."

For the cover, he found a sheet of the marbled paper used on the inside covers of old books and created what could easily pa.s.s for a journal, ledger, or diary, a blank slate on which readers could affix their own personal meaning. Steinberg left the marbled paper plain and unornamented except for "real gummed labels." The one in the center of the page that bore his name and the book's t.i.tle could have graced any ordinary file folder. On the upper and lower edges he placed triangular blue protectors used to mount photos in alb.u.ms, and he ran a red leatherized protective strip down the length of the spine. When his publisher questioned why he used such things to make a simple cover for a complex book, Steinberg said, "I liked them and they stuck and that simplified the whole thing." Stein was also puzzled by the simplicity of the jacket, especially because it gave no indication of the often startling content within. She asked why he chose not to use a drawing that would immediately identify him as the book's author, as he had done on his previous books, especially The Labyrinth, the cover of which showed a drawing that became one of his most famous, the man with a rabbit inside his head. In The New World, this drawing appeared on the back jacket flap, which Steinberg defended by saying that he had "no business to put a drawing on the jacket of a book of drawings." He thought it best to leave the rabbit man where he was, where he would be the reader's last (and lasting) impression as he closed the book.

STEINBERG WAS PROBABLY WISE TO CHANGE the t.i.tle of the book from "Confessions" to The New World, for when the drawings are taken as a whole they create a very different impression from when they are viewed individually. Like the man with the rabbit in his head, the reader cannot help but wonder what was going on inside the head of the artist who produced them. The wit combined with seriousness that Steinberg portrayed so elegantly in the Tillich book is certainly present, but the overall message is darker, the tone harsher, and the subject matter progresses in almost unrelieved starkness. When taken all together, the words Steinberg used to explain the drawings become-to use his word for the "Gog" drawing-an "interesting" way of interpreting the book. He labels some of them "satire" and says they are "s.a.d.i.s.tic," "frightening," and "unconnected," with components that are "hysterical," "giggling," and "jittery." In the conversations with Stein, he uses the words destroy, destroying, and destruction repeatedly to describe what is happening within various drawings. He is pleased that a number are deliberately "misleading," and "cruelty" is a recurring and satisfying theme. In short, the drawings in The New World convey a far different message from that of the ill.u.s.trations in Tillich's Search for Absolutes.

STEINBERG'S EXHIBITION AT GALERIE MAEGHT WAS to open in March, and he went to Paris a month beforehand to oversee the work connected with it. Sigrid a.s.sumed that she would go with him and was stunned when he told her he planned to go alone. She flew into a rage when he refused to discuss his reasons, but when he stayed silent and would not engage in argument, she grew still herself. She was hurt, but she was also afraid of provoking him to an irreparable breach.

He went alone to Paris, where he burst into a flurry of activity, going every day to the printer in Levallois to oversee the production of Derriere le Miroir, the original lithograph for the exhibition posters, and the series of lithographs and prints that would be sold along with the drawings. Le Masque had become a much larger book than the one he had originally envisioned, but he was pleased with how it looked. He also liked the preliminary plans for the accompanying DLM and was content with the studio s.p.a.ce in the gallery that Maeght set aside for him, where he could work on his mural and the panels on which Inge Morath's photographs would hang. Everything conspired to give him pleasure, and he was surprised to discover that even though he was exhausted, the work made him happy. All around him were "tables, light, cabinets for drawing, all my familiar objects."

He had been living in a hotel but was tired of it, and Morath insisted that he move into her apartment when she and Arthur Miller returned to Connecticut. He was happy to be there after a full workday, when he was too tired even to go to the movies. He stayed in and read books about the Greek islands, because he had relented and wanted Sigrid to come to Paris and go there with him on vacation after the show was safely launched. "I'm happy," he wrote to her, enclosing a check for apartment expenses and an airline ticket, "NYParisNY." If she wanted to do him a favor before she came, she could buy a pair of his favorite English shoes at a Madison Avenue store, but she was not to bring "too much stuff" for herself, because he wanted to buy her whatever she needed in Paris.

Sigrid was wary of his sudden change of heart and did not join him in Morath's apartment. She booked a room at the Hotel d'Angleterre and said she would "show up at the opening for a moment." She a.s.sured him he would have "nothing to worry about. I don't expect you to stand there holding hands with me but I have to do what I consider right." In her last letter before her flight, she told him she was "very hysterical and full of anxieties," especially after the people she occasionally worked with at the design firm gave her tranquilizers as a going-away gift, and only half in jest. It was not the most soothing message he could receive on the eve of a reunion that was bound to be tense.

The exhibition opened to great success, with large crowds, good reviews, and excellent sales, especially to new collectors. All his friends were there, among them Helion, Geer van Velde, Matta, Ionesco, and Sandy and Louisa Calder. Lica came with her family, and Sigrid spent much of the evening standing quietly with them instead of near Saul. She was ill at ease, and he made it worse by simmering angrily over her lack of poise and self-confidence. Some years later, when she was trying to relive the events of their relations.h.i.+p in a journal meant to help her understand it, she wrote about the strain of this opening and others that followed: "I never fitted, never was quite at ease with his friends. I don't have enough manners, cla.s.s. And I don't have the clothes. I only embarra.s.s him and myself."

Sigrid stayed on in Paris after the opening, but things remained strained when they took their holiday in Athens, Salonika, and Crete. Afterward, Saul went on alone to Rome and Milan before returning to Paris and Morath's apartment, while Sigrid flew there directly and moved back into her hotel. Saul let himself be caught up in the whirl of Paris socializing and did all that he had been too tired to do before the opening, dining out every night with old friends and new, especially with Maeght and the flock of collectors who had purchased drawings from the show and wanted to be seen with the Paris art season's current sensation. Sigrid was mostly on her own until May, when she went to Trier to see her father for what turned out to be his last birthday (he died in September).

Things continued to deteriorate badly between them. In a cryptic entry in her journal jottings, Sigrid wrote the single sentence "This is when he hit me." She neither explained the comment nor referred to it ever again. Saul never did either. Whatever happened remains known only to the two of them.

WHEN HE RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES, Steinberg holed up in the country, spending the summer and early fall hard at work on the Parsons and Janis exhibitions, which loomed in November "like an exam in a French Lycee." He knew from the start that the joint show was "going to generate a lot of interest and excitement" because it came on the heels of the French one and was his first American exhibition in thirteen years. The year 1966 had indeed been a memorable one, overwhelmingly full of new experiences generated by the two successes, the exhibition in France and the publication of The New World in the United States. Both gave him a huge boost of self-esteem; as he said tongue-in-cheek to Aime Maeght, "Seeing the book always makes me realize how great I am."

He used this combination of arrogance and self-confidence to deal with the onrush of reporters and photographers who clamored to interview a suddenly newsworthy artist who had just received two exceptional honors: he was about to become the first ever artist in residence at the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres of the French government. The medal was conferred in September at a ceremony in the French emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton, where Steinberg's "embarra.s.sment" was eased by the French cultural counselor Edouard Morot-Sir's "very nice speech" about him. The Smithsonian appointment was widely viewed as "another medal of honor," which Steinberg was to earn by spending two to three months in Was.h.i.+ngton, beginning in January 1967. He had to begin to think about the details involved in making the move as he juggled all the work for the joint exhibition and a host of other projects. Steinberg told Aldo that he was "in that state of trance of soldiers or actors who must do something without any longer knowing why."

On top of the work connected with the gallery shows, he was overseeing the curators who were installing some of his other work in several museums. Maeght moved most of the Paris drawings and murals to St.-Paul-de-Vence, where his Fondation Maeght hosted another show after the one in Paris closed, and the Museum of Modern Art in Brussels planned to show the mural panels from the 1958 World's Fair. The Cincinnati Art Museum exhibited several of the murals Steinberg had made for the restaurant in that city and wanted to know if he would consider making several others. He sent a telegram saying, "My fee today would be seventy-five thousand dollars," and there the matter rested.

Money was pouring in from the sale of his drawings and the reprints that he had authorized as ill.u.s.trations for books and articles. One of the many buyers was the Hamburg, Germany, newspaper Die Welt, which used them to ill.u.s.trate John Steinbeck's article "America Today." Steinberg was pleased to be a.s.sociated with such a distinguished writer and gave permission readily.

With all these requests came a new series of legal concerns. Steinberg objected that he would have no control over the drawings sold in the Parsons-Janis exhibitions, as the owners would normally have the right to do whatever they pleased with them. He wanted the same agreement with the galleries that he had always insisted on with publications, that he sold the drawing for one-time use but all rights of reproduction remained with him. This was fine for periodicals but was not usually the case with gallery sales. Alexander Lindey told him that copyright was "a complex subject that resists simplification" and his only option would be to rely on "statutory copyright" if he insisted on retaining all other rights. He advised Steinberg to draw the standard symbol for copyright (the letter c in a circle) somewhere on each drawing, and to photograph every one, making sure that the symbol showed clearly. He also advised him to make a rubber stamp reading " 1966 by Saul Steinberg. The sale of this drawing covers only the physical drawing itself. The artist reserves all other rights in it, including copyright." And he warned Steinberg to make sure that the catalogue was copyrighted in his name and not in the names of the galleries.

In retrospect, Steinberg was wise to retain control of his drawings, for the works in the Parsons-Janis shows sold even better and for much higher prices than those at Maeght. He bragged about it to Aime Maeght: "I sold eighty pictures at respectable prices-even more and at higher prices than Paris. Naturally, this gives me great pleasure." He told Aldo it gave him "paternal satisfaction" to watch his drawings being "sold at high prices." Even the articles and reviews gave him pleasure, particularly two he singled out for their "high quality," Vogue and the New York Times.

By the time of the American exhibitions, the publicity bandwagon was clipping along at an astonis.h.i.+ng speed. Journalists were first alerted to the possibility of a good story when Time and L'Express wrote about the Maeght exhibition. Time described crowds who rubbernecked, chuckled, and occasionally snorted, saying that the scene was "ready-made for a Saul Steinberg cartoon." The article also noted that Steinberg was "breaking a 13-year self-imposed ban on exhibitions," and journalists lined up to find out why. When Pierre Schneider took Steinberg on a walking tour of the Louvre and published their conversation as "an unsettling trip through art history," the flood of requests took off like one of Steinberg's cartoon rockets. Many interviewers came from Europe, and before the year ended Steinberg had been filmed for programs dedicated to his life and work on German and Italian television networks, and others were in the works. In the United States, in the heyday of magazine popularity, some of the leading cultural critics ensured that he was everywhere: Jean Stein's long article appeared in Life, he was photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, Hilton Kramer wrote about him in the New York Times, and Harold Rosenberg published one of their conversations in Art News. He was actually disappointed when the Times story did not feature him or his work on the cover, as he had been led to believe. Rosenberg commiserated, but only slightly: "Congratulations on your non-appearance on the cover of Times. By this time you must be sick of this whole business of appearances and realities."

Steinberg was not actually sick of the publicity merry-go-round, but it was a mixed blessing. He was no longer just an artist whose work was easily recognized on sight (primarily by readers of The New Yorker); he had become famous and he was a celebrity. On the popular television program College Bowl, contestants were asked to identify "the line philosopher-artist-cartoonist." Without even seeing a drawing, they all answered, "Saul Steinberg."

Everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece of him. Groups and organizations that recognized the cachet of using his name invited him to lend it; others simply wanted to welcome him among them. The Romanian Socialist Republic requested his company after the opening of the eighteenth session of the United Nations General a.s.sembly; he was horrified by the invitation and ignored it. SACO (the Sino-American Cooperative a.s.sociation), the organization of those with whom he had served during the war, invited him to the annual reunion; he never joined, never paid dues, and ignored this one too. Those he did not ignore tended to be political, but he was cautious about how he showed his support. A committee known as Angry Arts, whose members included David Dellinger, Paul Goodman, Grace Paley, and Robert Nichols, invited him to join a protest against the Vietnam War by appearing in support of those who planned to burn their draft cards in Central Park. He supported the protest but did not attend, and when this same group wrote to Pica.s.so to ask him to withdraw Guernica from the Museum of Modern Art, Steinberg offered vocal support for that as well, but he did not sign his name to the letter. He had never hidden his support for civil rights and was pleased when a drawing he donated to support the Southern Christian Leaders.h.i.+p Conference in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., was put on view in the Museum of Modern Art; when the Congress of Racial Equality asked him to join other artists in donating one of his works to raise funds, he sent a drawing of a knight on a horse aiming his spear at a tiny alligator. His support for Jewish organizations was always unwavering, and when Brandeis University's Women's Committee asked him to contribute to its annual auction, he sent ten signed catalogues of the Maeght show, which they estimated would bring in a minimum of $500, a substantial sum at the time.

There were too many invitations, and because he still did not have a gallery a.s.sistant to help with the work or a full-time secretary to help with correspondence, he tended to ignore anything he did not want to do. A committee that included Philip Pavia and Lester Johnson felt the need for a new place where artists could gather and invited him to join the Second Street Workshop Club (formerly the 8th Street Club). He did not respond. When he ignored a letter from the Guggenheim Museum inviting him to lecture on his affinity with Paul Klee-a facile a.s.sociation that was beginning to irritate him more and more, and one that he did not want to promote-he not only ignored the initial letter, he also ignored the several that followed.

Everything went well in 1966, and 1967 augured to be much the same. "I go on working (like the winners of lotteries)," he told Aldo, "recognizing that it's the only valid pleasure." To Aime Maeght he described what he would be doing next: "I'm going to live in Was.h.i.+ngton for three months, in grand style in an elegant house, with a Chinese cook, etc. etc. Come see me!" He was not as welcoming to Sigrid, telling her to stay in New York and keep herself busy, as he would not have time for her. This time she did not confront him but confided her anger and dismay to a collection of diary jottings.

Her insecurity pervaded what she wrote about how he had dictated every aspect of the relations.h.i.+p and she had gone along with whatever he wanted just so it would continue. Now she found "the constant fear of insults ... unbearable." It was "amazing" to see how unkind he could be, but she warned that if he continued to be so cold and undemonstrative, he would have no problem getting rid of her: "I may be slow and sticky, but even I slowly acc.u.mulate enough resistance to resign myself ... As long as I am with you, I am dependent and my misery is at least partly your responsibility." She blamed him for "getting me down, putting me down, and making me miserable." Their relations.h.i.+p had disintegrated into "a constant watch on either side, for the offense from the other, or ..." Unable to finish her thought, she left it there.

She was alone on New Year's Eve and saw very little of him before his departure on January 25. By February, even though there had not been anything like a separation, she was begging him to take her back, telling him she was "down" and not sure she should be writing at all: "Don't mind my vocabulary. I'll never be a pleasant or elegant letter writer-or probably person-for that matter." When he did not respond, she tried a different tack. As he was in Was.h.i.+ngton, she asked, "How does the whole Viet Nam story look from there? Here it becomes more and more unbelievable. Maybe everybody including me should do something." He did not respond to that either. He was conscious that he was not American by birth and careful not to make any overt gesture that might bring criticism. He had been reading Henry James and found a quote that he particularly liked: "It is a complex fate to be an American." It came to mind often during his three months in Was.h.i.+ngton.

CHAPTER 32.

SUCH A DIDACTIC COUNTRY.

The Was.h.i.+ngton experience is over now and I see it's left me with a bad taste. It's my fault. I went there to meet the chic, political world, a world I already knew to be a fake but which awed me. Now, having overcome the monster, it's not that I feel better. But I worked well, or at least a lot.

Ah, America-such a didactic country!" Steinberg said this every year when he was summoned like clockwork for jury duty in East Hampton as well as in New York. It was a blessing to be excused in 1967 when Charles Blitzer, the director of education and training at the Smithsonian, wrote a letter attesting that he was on "official duty" at the inst.i.tution.

The Smithsonian took care of all Steinberg's arrangements for the move. His stipend for the three months was a handsome $25,000, with an extra $3,000 for the "unavoidable expenses of relocation." In an article about local celebrities, the Was.h.i.+ngton Post featured his gla.s.ses (but not his full face) and said that he would live in the grand Georgetown mansion of Mrs. Harold Coolidge. As soon as word got out that he was coming, requests of every kind flooded the Smithsonian's publicity office, all from local organizations and individual taxpayers who thought they were ent.i.tled to get something for their money from Steinberg.

These were in addition to the requests from the local media and those in even greater number from international correspondents, who were delighted to have something other than politics as usual to write home about. A recalcitrant artist like Steinberg was grist for their mill, and the chase was on. The reporters' letters literally begged him for interviews, and he declined them all. A headline in the Was.h.i.+ngton Star described their frustration: "Smithsonian's Steinberg: An Artist Not-in-Residence." Technically, he had no duties at the inst.i.tution; he was simply to be there and do his own work, with the hope (but not the promise) that he would consent to give some sort of public program during his tenure, of his own choosing and in his own time. He was quite within his rights to ignore all the requests except for one that he could not legitimately refuse, from Mary Krug, the managing editor of the museum's house organ, the Smithsonian Torch.

With the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, Steinberg was "an easy interview...quotes just spilled out of him," but it took several months of Krug's reminding him firmly and persistently that he was "a subject of interest to Smithsonian personnel" before he would talk to her. Steinberg was capable of exuding tremendous charisma whenever he wanted to charm someone, but if he did try to impress Krug, she did not fall under his sway. She barely hid the tension between them in an article bound to raise the hackles of everyone who read it, including Steinberg. Krug called him "the Steinberg enigma" and quoted what the New York Times said about his place in the art world: that there were "mixed feelings about him among his colleagues, even among his friends. Some ... consider him a major artist; but a few will not concede that he is an artist at all."

They met in the Coolidge residence, a detached four-story mansion, "one of the elite of the elite in that high rent district [Georgetown]," where all Steinberg's needs were catered to by four Chinese house servants, a couple and their two daughters-who were asked by the neighbors to go through his trash and give them anything with his writing or drawing on it. Steinberg called the house something akin to a "Norwegian Palace," as it belonged to the widow of a zoologist who had specialized in "large anthropoid apes." The library had an excellent collection of zoology books, cla.s.sics, and many nineteenth-century travel writings, and the voracious Steinberg read his way through most of them. As for the Chinese servants, the husband "cooks pretty badly," so Steinberg survived on boiled eggs and toast when at home, which was seldom, because he dined out every night and most days for lunch. The high living took a toll on his digestion, and he had to consult a doctor, who put him on a strict 2,000-calorie-a-day diet that he did not follow until he returned to New York.

He met so many people that he had to keep a notebook of their names and jot brief descriptions to help remember who they were. Senator Edward Kennedy was "Teddy K-no gossip." Other political luminaries included Averell Harriman, William Fulbright, and Eugene McCarthy. He liked "Mrs. Longworth: 83 yrs dtr of Roosevelt." From the press, he met "Kay Graham, pub Wash Post," "Herb Block [Herblock]," and "Scottie Lanahan, Scott Fitz daughter." Gore Vidal rated only his last name without a capsule description, but Joe Alsop did better, earning a parenthesis: "(good food, sn.o.b)." Steinberg drew an arrow from the names of "Polly & Joe Kraft" to the word "HORRIBLE!" He renewed his friends.h.i.+p with the heiress Kay Halle, whom he knew from his navy days in Was.h.i.+ngton, and he also met a number of eligible and attractive women, whose names were on the list with no other identification, except for one who had a "bed w[ith] bells."

He did not meet President Lyndon Johnson, but Vice President Hubert Humphrey took him to a recital at Const.i.tution Hall, where he met "the famous daughters," Lynda Bird and Lucy Baines. Every emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton had him on the guest list, and he made false doc.u.ments or diplomas for many of them, including the Venezuelan amba.s.sador, who thanked him effusively for "the most admired diploma from the great philosopher, architect, and social critic, Saul Steinberg." He did not meet any of the Supreme Court justices, but he went to the Court to sit in the gallery and sketch. He made a list of the justices' names, collected their photos and signatures, and used some of both with only slight changes for his imaginary writings and doc.u.ments.

The one doc.u.ment that truly spurred his imagination was the Smithsonian stationery, which featured an engraving of the 1855 building known as the Castle, a huge red sandstone pile built in the late Romanesqueearly Gothic style of the twelfth century, tailor-made for Steinberg's imagination. By the time he left Was.h.i.+ngton, he had made countless drawings that incorporated the logo, but he left only thirty-six for the museum's collection. He included the logo on drawings of teapots, dinner plates, and a drafting table; in another drawing, a dog stands on the edge of a cliff and dreams of it in a thought bubble above his head; in another, it graces a moons.h.i.+ne jug, top-heavy on a spindly table; and in still another, the logo adorns a bottle of India ink.

All these drawings were play, as was the thirty-foot-long scroll whose inspiration Steinberg thought might have come from his daily contact with the Chinese house servants. He called it "a diary in drawings" on which he recorded the events of each day, working faithfully until he realized it had "enslaved" him. He abandoned it when he thought he had ruined it by "trying to make it too beautiful.

All the reporters who denounced the "artist not-in-residence" might have been kinder had they known how hard he worked every single day. His output was steady, especially when juxtaposed with the constant socializing, which started in the afternoon and ended every evening with him in formal dress. And just because he was in Was.h.i.+ngton, it did not mean that he had left behind all the work that originated in New York. He had to put the finis.h.i.+ng touches on the drawings for the Tillich book and deal with the details for the Brussels exhibition and the subsequent shows when it traveled to Holland and Germany. There was the usual flood of requests from publishers, corporations, and cultural inst.i.tutions, which he had to ignore or reject, and the preliminary negotiations for agreements pertaining to an exhibition in Venezuela the following year, and several others in the year after that. He was also working on a vast new project, four curtains for Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat commissioned by the Seattle Opera Company. Steinberg was captivated by the task, because it was for a traveling company that performed in "remote fis.h.i.+ng, lumber, and farm communities," and he had fond memories of seeing some of them firsthand when he was in the northwestern states. He was quite pleased with the project and boasted of it in his interview with Mary Krug, telling her that "nothing is ever created in Was.h.i.+ngton except in a political sense" and that painting the opera curtains was the first boon of his residency: "In the short time I've been in Was.h.i.+ngton something has been created here."

WHEN STEINBERG WENT TO WAs.h.i.+NGTON, he and Sigrid had not been together for months. She was still attending cla.s.ses at Columbia, working sporadically for a design firm, and occasionally doing the lettering for a book jacket. She continued to have relations.h.i.+ps with other men which she initiated, then ended, and then usually resumed, almost lethargically and almost always in tandem with the ups and downs of her emotional state. Saul arranged for money to be deposited in her bank account at regular intervals, and he also paid the many bills sent directly to him by Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's, incurred by "Mrs. Saul Steinberg," as her name on the charge accounts read.

He planned not to return to New York until his residency ended, but he had to make an abrupt trip when his accountants advised him to protest another IRS audit. The bureau claimed that he owed an additional $5,956.02 for the years 1964 and 1965, which meant that he and Hedda had to appear at a hearing on a weekday. He did not want Sigrid to know he was in the city, but he feared that someone would see him and tell her, so he broke his silence and sent a polite letter telling her he was well and well looked after and that he might have to return to New York for a short time. She replied swiftly, but not until after she tried to phone and could not reach him because he had given her the wrong number. It was a disjointed letter in which she first asked if she could come to Was.h.i.+ngton for a weekend and then crossed out her next sentence: "Maybe I should take the hint and leave you alone." She ended with the hope that she would hear from him again and with the poignant observation, "There isn't anything else I can do." A pattern of behavior was forming between them: whenever she was depressed or her mood swings made her act out in unseemly behavior, he always responded with alacrity to try to get her back onto an even keel. In this instance he phoned and told her that a ticket was waiting and she should fly down for the weekend. She was ecstatic.

The only part of the weekend when they had "a good time together" was when they were "hiding under the blanket." She found his affection "rea.s.suring" and looked forward to his visit to New York the following weekend. Unfortunately, when he was there she asked him to clarify their status, and a violent argument ensued. Sigrid began by saying that since he was in almost daily contact with his accountants and his lawyer, and since he would be in Hedda's company because of the audit hearing, she thought now was the time for him to ask Hedda for a divorce so he could marry her. She was thirty-one years old, she was tired of being his "sidekick," and she wanted to have children. To calm her down, he told her that divorce would not be a simple matter, not only because of the laws in New York State but also because of the complexity of his and Hedda's financial ties. He told Sigrid that he would have to consult the head of Neubauer and Berman, the firm that handled his investments, to see if divorce would be possible. It provoked her to rage: "Why do you behave like a hysterical old woman and go hiding behind Neubauer? Why do you have to tell me what he thinks and sort of add that's what you feel, too? Why can't you be straight ever like a man!"

He returned to Was.h.i.+ngton after the audit hearing, and except for the occasional letter or phone call, there was no real contact between them until he was back in New York at the end of April, and even that was usually only when she needed to discuss money.

WHILE STEINBERG WAS IN WAs.h.i.+NGTON, he had a ringside seat for the controversy over Vietnam. He had been against the war from the start and quietly, gradually, met other people who shared his view. There were certain homes where they gathered to talk about what they might do, and there was such a feeling of hiding out in the face of danger that it brought back memories of "the way we met in air-raid shelters during the war."

The first major battle of th