Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 14

LIVING IN THE PAST.

I work and see few people, of my mafia, a sign of advanced age. I live twenty years or more in the past.

Steinberg was in New York for one month before the urge to travel struck again, but he had no one to travel with, because Sigrid was in Paris. She told him to invite Aldo to spend the summer, but instead he began to collect want ads and hired a real estate agent to show him apartments, this time concentrating on the Upper East Side, in the same neighborhood where Hedda lived. He was still in real estate limbo at the end of the year when he invited Sigrid to go to Mexico, where nothing was the same as he remembered it from his 1948 trip with Hedda and the Cartier-Bressons. "Things change," he concluded, and he began to think about making some of his own changes at home. He decided to put an addition on the Springs house that would give him a large ground-floor workroom with a bedroom behind it, and he also decided to find studio s.p.a.ce in the city that would include living quarters so that he could leave Was.h.i.+ngton Square Village. Once again time pa.s.sed, he dawdled, and he did nothing concrete except renew his lease.

In April 1968 it was almost as if the perfect studio s.p.a.ce dropped into his lap without any effort on his part. When he heard that the eleventh (and top) floor was available in the building at 33 Union Square, near 16th Street and Broadway, he acted quickly and secured the lease on 4,500 square feet of raw s.p.a.ce. It was in an office building, but the view was so beautiful and filled with light from windows that looked out on the Consolidated Edison Building's famous clock tower that he wanted to live there. He secured permission to use part of it for his residence and planned to move in the following spring, which would allow time for a leisurely departure from his apartment. His intention was to build walls for a bedroom and kitchen in the part of the loft that already held a staircase leading to a small tower room overlooking Union Square. It reminded him of "a pavilion, a kiosk with windows halfway between Turkish and Venetian," and he planned to use it to sit and think and to gather ideas from watching the street life down below. "Isn't it sumptuous?" he asked all visitors who toured his raw s.p.a.ce before he took them to lunch at one of his favorite neighborhood places, Max's Kansas City. His building took on extra glamour when he learned that Andy Warhol's Factory was three floors below his studio, although it was disappointing never to see Warhol or any of his regulars in the elevator because they did not keep the business hours that he did.

Before he could move in, there was much to be done to make the s.p.a.ce livable. He got as far as making a list of tradespeople whom he asked for plans and estimates, but mostly he left the s.p.a.ce in the condition he found it in while he spent the summer dealing with adjunct events that arose from the numerous exhibitions held that year in Europe, South America, and the United States and preparing for the two important ones the following year at the Parsons and Janis galleries. In Springs he was content to work and see old friends like the Rosenbergs and Hedda, who had her own house nearby, on Hog Hill Road. He had renewed his friends.h.i.+p with Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, a wealthy woman whom he met when she worked at MoMA and who invited him to her salons in the city, and during the summer he accepted numerous invitations for dinners at her house in Wainscott. Occasionally he visited Betty Parsons in Southold, where she had a house on the beach, and he and the Nivola family were casually back and forth across Old Stone Highway.

Friends on Steinberg's porch: left to right: the Nivola family (Claire, Ruth, Tino, Pietro), Evelyn Hofer (seated on porch), Saul Steinberg, Dore Ashton holding her daughter. (ill.u.s.tration credit 33.1) It was a low-key life, and as summer lengthened into fall, the country was so pleasant that he stayed on longer than usual. Sigrid was with him occasionally, happy to be there to harvest her garden and take care of "the little house," a small cabin similar to the early cabin motels that used to dot Long Island highways. Steinberg had bought it for her as a birthday present and had it moved onto the property just below his house. It was a simple wooden sh.e.l.l of four walls and a roof, without utilities or facilities, but she loved it and planned to use it as her studio. "We're going through a nice period," he told Aldo, "maybe because we're both learning to be less testardi [stubborn]."

WHEN WINTER FINALLY ARRIVED, IT WAS a brutal "Romanian winter" that seemed unlikely ever to end and brought illness and depression with it. Steinberg, who liked to think of himself as "healthy as a crocodile," caught a grippe that would not go away, and with it came uncharacteristic migraine. On top of the headache, there were ongoing problems with his teeth and another onslaught of dental appointments. When he finally conquered everything that he lumped into the single word ailment, all he had left was "the fear," his name for free-floating anxiety. While he lingered on in the country, being alone there gave him so much time to brood intensely that the physical symptoms caused by worrying made him give up his customary daily bottle of white wine and several scotch whiskeys. However, he intensified his smoking to several packs a day. "I function poorly these days," he told Aldo, "because I have doubts and uncertainties that leave me paralyzed."

His sleep was interrupted, so he spent long nighttime hours rereading Joseph Conrad (an old favorite) and books that Hedda recommended: a biography of Richard Wagner ("written for those who know music") and the memoirs of the revolutionaries Aleksandr Herzen and Pyotr Kropotkin. The only way he could alleviate his stress was to work, and he kept himself busy preparing for the two New York exhibitions and making what was for him a veritable deluge of drawings for The New Yorker. He thought it ironic that by presenting the magazine with so many offerings he was "sabotaging the show and art with a capital A, maybe so as to free myself from that commercial world."

STEINBERG MADE OCCASIONAL TRIPS INTO THE city as fall turned to winter, going mostly back and forth between the studio and the apartment. With each trip the stress mounted as he saw the work piling up in both places and knew he could not handle it. He was not good with his hands, so there was no one to take care of mounting and framing the drawings for the exhibitions. His correspondence was a mess, as letters remained unopened and dunning letters warned of bills seriously overdue. An occasional series of part-time secretaries came and went with swift regularity, overwhelmed by the mess of so many papers. He had better luck with a studio a.s.sistant when he found the Dutch artist Anton van Dalen, who stayed with him for thirty years. Steinberg was walking down 57th Street on his way to his galleries when he pa.s.sed van Dalen and asked if he knew anyone who was looking for work. "Why not me?" van Dalen asked, and the partners.h.i.+p began.

Steinberg was greatly admired in Holland, and van Dalen had been one of his fans while growing up there. They met for the first time in September 1965, on van Dalen's second day in New York, when he found Steinberg's number in the phone book and called to ask for a meeting. Steinberg said he was busy and asked van Dalen to phone again in two weeks. When he did, Steinberg invited him to the apartment, where they talked about art for more than two hours. When they met again on 57th Street and Steinberg told van Dalen how much he needed help now that he had a studio, van Dalen offered to begin work the next day.

Anton van Dalen and Steinberg in the Union Square studio. (ill.u.s.tration credit 33.2) To van Dalen, Steinberg was a man "who lived largely in his own head [and] was really not good with his hands. He was of the society where to work with your hands meant you were of the laboring cla.s.ses, and he thought himself above that. He would watch me carefully, fascinated by simple things like mounting his artwork on boards, or gluing strips of wood together."

The gratefully relieved Steinberg called van Dalen "Saint Anthony," and once he was on board, their way of working fell into a pattern. Van Dalen went to the studio every Wednesday and did whatever needed to be done that day. Sometimes Steinberg would ask him to go to the downtown galleries or the uptown museums to see and report on shows he did not want to attend himself. When he became intrigued by an idea, such as the shape and color of New York taxicabs, he sent van Dalen out on the streets to "just snap pictures," after which he used what he wanted. Steinberg asked van Dalen to walk the entire length of Ca.n.a.l Street and take photos of buildings and people. When Steinberg saw a tree growing in the most unlikely s.p.a.ce outside a Chinese dry cleaner's on 75th Street, he made van Dalen photograph it at every season of the year. "He seemed always to be trying out things," van Dalen remembered. "I had to pay very close attention to everything he did in order to figure out what it was that I was supposed to do." Steinberg was fascinated by some of van Dalen's tools, particularly a chisel that allowed him to cut wood in forms that resembled books. He raved about it to Red Grooms and Mimi Gross, two friends whom he saw a lot during his early days on Union Square and who shared his fascination with tools as toys. When Gross bought a glue gun, Steinberg insisted that Grooms had to demonstrate it, and together they built an arch out of Styrofoam blocks. And when Steinberg discovered the Staedler eraser, he bought one for Gross, who told him truthfully that it was one of the greatest presents he had ever given her. It pleased him more than any of the compliments she paid when he gave her presents of his own creation.

Very quickly van Dalen observed that despite such working friends.h.i.+ps, Steinberg was an extremely private man who expected him to be the same. If anyone talked in the studio, "it was usually Steinberg, in a monologue; my job was to listen and not interrupt. The only time I could ask questions was if they were perfectly phrased for what I needed to find out, and if they were minimal, brief, short." Steinberg's favorite topics of conversation were the books he read and the movies he saw. He also liked to talk about his sister, Lica, and much of what he said was to marvel over the joy she expressed now that she was exposed to the Paris art world and exploring new directions in her own work. Sometimes he would leave van Dalen alone while he kept a luncheon engagement or dropped in at another artist's studio, often that of Mimi Gross, who worked nearby. He would stand quietly and patiently observing whatever she was doing, and if she was impatient with something difficult, Steinberg usually made the same response: "The true artist never takes any shortcuts. You deal with the work no matter how hard it is until you get it right." In his own studio, he exhibited the same sort of patience with van Dalen, who learned early on to hide any frustration he might have felt.

One very important part of Steinberg's day was his telephone conversation-and sometimes multiple conversations-with Hedda Sterne. Usually they talked about the books each read, with Hedda being the one most likely to recommend the writings of a little-known philosopher or the memoirs of revolutionaries. She kept up with the literature of their native Romania, and despite Saul's supposed disinterest, she pa.s.sed it along to him and he read it, so that even though he never spoke of contemporary Romanian culture, he was well informed about it. Van Dalen learned to keep busy in another part of the studio while Saul and Hedda talked, as their conversations could last a very long time.

Mostly, despite Steinberg's love of music and van Dalen's wish to hear it, they worked in companionable silence. Steinberg had an "old-time record player" but seldom used it, he kept his violin in the studio but seldom played it, and he never talked about music. A major part of van Dalen's job became keeping order in Steinberg's life. He made the phone calls to set up appointments with workmen and tradesmen, he settled the overdue bills, and he spoke to the near-hysterical pet.i.tioners who wanted something from Steinberg, everything from accepting an advertising project to selling a particular drawing that the person wanted to buy. Even though Steinberg appreciated what van Dalen did, he was still uneasy about having someone in his works.p.a.ce: "It was very hard for him to have people around him. He wanted his own s.p.a.ce, his solitude." Van Dalen noted how this att.i.tude dominated Steinberg's "arrangements" with women, not only Sigrid and Hedda but the constant procession of others as well: "He saw them in his own time, on his own terms. They were never a daily part of his life."

AFTER "SAINT ANTHONY" TOOK OVER, Steinberg thought his life was in good order at last. The dunning letters from Sam Flax, the Union Stamp Works and Printing Company, Kulicke Frames, and Mourlot Graphics stopped, as Anton wrote the checks with regularity and Steinberg duly signed them. He was well taken care of in the city, but there were still problems at the house in the country. It needed a new water pump and well, and the expense of a new roof was looming. He spent so much time there that although he no longer had sufficient work s.p.a.ce, the studio addition had to wait because so much needed to be done to the existing structure. Money became a concern again, although not nearly to the degree it had been when Steinberg's parents were alive, but he still kept a separate daily calendar to list his income and earnings.

He had been a prudent investor from his first stock purchases in the 1940s, and his blue chips brought steady returns over the years. He had three covers on The New Yorker in 1969, and there were other individual drawings and portfolios in the magazine as well. He invested a good part of everything he earned at the magazine in its "partic.i.p.ation trust," and was pleased to see its value increase steadily in each quarterly statement. There was also a steady income from reprints of his drawings in books and magazines, royalties from his fabric designs, and sales of his work by Parsons, Janis, and his foreign galleries. All told, his taxable income totaled $64,000 and he paid $18,000 in taxes. He had more than enough to take care of his self-imposed responsibilities: monetary gifts to Hedda, his regular support of Sigrid and Ada, and generous gifts to Lica and her children. After all this, there was still more than enough to pay all of Aldo's expenses and invite him to spend the summer in Springs once Steinberg decided he could not go to Paris and Milan.

Sigrid was noticeably absent that summer, as another troubled period between them had begun. In a datebook/diary she wrote, "July 24: S. hits me." Several weeks later she went alone to Wyoming, but not before writing pathetic letters begging him to let her make one final visit to "the little house." He retreated into silence and did not reply, so she went away until late summer. When cla.s.ses began at Columbia, she enrolled for several at the last minute, having nothing better to do. In November she met a new lover, Reesom, an African foreign student whom she told friends was an "Ethiopian prince." He was twenty-five, ten years younger than she, and besides being beautiful, she found him to be kind and gentle. She knew the relations.h.i.+p did not have a future, but within weeks she was deeply in love and so happy for the first time in years that she invited him to move into her apartment. In early December she sent Saul a letter explaining how surprised she was by "such an extreme and extravagant change" in her life, "to have found someone to be with and like, who likes me." She told Saul it was a relief not to be "drifting around bars, lonely and desperate, or sick alone at home, or begging [him] to be nice." She thought he would ignore Reesom, as he had all of her previous lovers, because his enormous successes of the past several years had made him even more remote than usual, so that, poignantly, "It didn't seem to matter what I did or what became of me."

Saul did not respond to her letter until he phoned at Christmas in a frightening fury. All she recorded of their conversation was "no food money." On New Year's Day 1970, she wrote another letter to say she was sorry that all he felt for her was "hate and disgust." She told him that she could not undo her affair, but he might be able to consider it "less horrible" if it led to some improvement in their relations.h.i.+p. She told him she would go back to him if he wanted her, because once again she had discovered that her "(so dubious) loyalty" was to him. Even so, she was both hesitant and afraid to resume their relations.h.i.+p: "You have been putting me down and calling me names for such a long time. I can't stand to hear you insult me, and hate me, and it makes me want to hate back and I don't want to do that ever."

Saul let his anger fester until January 7, when Sigrid received a "mad call from S. to throw R. out." When she didn't do it, he demanded to see her, and on January 13 he issued an ultimatum: if Reesom did not leave, they were through-but only emotionally and not financially, for he would honor his commitment to support her until she could take care of herself. Reesom did move out, not because of Saul's threat but because he was spending the next semester in Europe and had to leave anyway. Sigrid and Saul met again, a "sad meeting" on the eighteenth when he told her that he was going to Africa in ten days and he expected her to be waiting-alone-when he returned. Sigrid did not obey, and a week after Saul went to Africa, she followed Reesom to London. Together they went to Spain for a month, then back to London, where she stayed until mid-March, even though Saul returned to New York in February. When she recorded this period in her datebook, she gave no details of her life with Reesom, only a vague itinerary of their travels; what she wrote instead was about Saul: "Not with S. almost 4 months (later), painful."

STEINBERG HAD WANTED TO RETURN TO Africa ever since his visit to the central part of the continent in 1963. This time he decided to make Kenya his headquarters but to take a roundabout way of getting there. First he made his usual circuit of Paris and Milan, and then he revisited Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. From there to he flew to Nairobi, then to Murchison Falls in Uganda before making his second visit via Addis Ababa to Sandro Angelini in Lalibela, Ethiopia. He was not looking forward to the rest of the trip, knowing in advance that it would be "a disaster" to make his first visits to cities in the newly independent nations: Lagos, Nigeria; Accra, Ghana; and Dakar, Senegal. Ghana was "the armpit of the world"; Dakar was beautiful but full of rude and arrogant people taking advantage of their "recent independence to give you trouble at customs, in hotels, etc." He had a basic hatred of the Arab world that dated from his Romanian childhood, and it intensified when he revisited the places in Morocco where he had been stationed during the war-Marrakesh, Casablanca, Fez, and Rabat. On this trip he was especially irritated by "too many people who follow you around, offering things, begging, they touch you. I was never left alone."

In later years Steinberg always joked that he went to Kenya to meet a "crocodile man [who] thought he was going to have a nice crock talk with me." He was speaking of Alistair Graham, a distinguished biologist who studied crocodiles for the Kenya Game Department at Lake Rudolph. Graham urged Steinberg to go to Lake Rudolph to see them for himself, but Steinberg was set on going to Murchison Falls and did not make the trip, promising Graham that they would go together when he came again the following year.

Before he went to Africa and while he was corresponding with Graham, Steinberg went to Brooks Brothers to get himself fully outfitted in the clothing he a.s.sumed all white men wore on safari. On his first day in Nairobi, he was a vision in khaki as he sauntered down the street in a bush jacket of many pockets, shorts, knee socks, st.u.r.dy boots, and a pith helmet. He even had a swagger stick, which he left in his hotel room after the first time he ventured out, when he saw that no one else was dressed as he was except for-"of all people," as he later expressed it-Saul Bellow. Neither man knew the other was in Africa, so the meeting came as a complete surprise to both. When Steinberg told Bellow that he was on his way to Entebbe, Uganda, as the jumping-off point for a visit to Murchison Falls, they decided to join forces and go together. From this point on, their accounts differ greatly.

In an article Bellow wrote after Steinberg's death, he described a booze- and drug-fueled trip in which everyone was high on has.h.i.+sh, including the "madly happy" Steinberg. Bellow claimed that has.h.i.+sh made him "deeply depressed," so he stopped using it, but he implied that Steinberg continued to take it and to drink heavily throughout the trip, not resuming his "regular, orderly, non-narcotic life" until it was over. This seems highly unlikely, for whatever Steinberg's behavior might have been in private, in public he was impeccably circ.u.mspect, the very model of discretion and correct social behavior. Also, at a time when Idi Amin was not yet in full power but was already dictating public conduct and cruelly punis.h.i.+ng anyone who did not adhere to his puritanical standards, it is highly unlikely that Saul Steinberg would have risked calling attention to himself by the egregiously bad behavior that Bellow described.

What he did while at Murchison Falls was far from drunken carousing. He spent long days accompanying an English biologist who was following the same lines of research on crocodiles that Graham was undertaking in Kenya. Steinberg observed how the biologist killed and dissected crocodiles to find out what they ate, watched while he cooked and ate some of their flesh, and politely declined to share the feast, as the thought of eating such meat "disgusted" him. Steinberg was fascinated by the crocodile's behavior-the way it could lie in the mud like a dead log and then suddenly flash into action to devour unwitting prey. Most of all he was mesmerized by the "toothpick bird" who sat inside the crocodile's open mouth, unconcernedly pecking its food off the gigantic teeth: "n.o.body in the world is as safe as that bird in the crocodile's mouth. They have an understanding, a pact between them, a deep relations.h.i.+p between two systems."

He saw the crocodile not as a reptile but as "a study in camouflage disguised as a crossword puzzle, all dark green, light gray, and sepia, alternating in a vertical and horizontal system of words, a magic animal with riddles and puzzles on its sides." The only thing more powerful than itself and the only creature the crocodile feared was the fat and placid hippo, "who can hit him with its head and cut him in half." Steinberg "hated" the crocodile, because it was "obviously part of the primitive system of nature where certain privileges were given unevenly to different species ... the son of a b.i.t.c.h is vicious, has terrific teeth, is a great swimmer, and on top of it he's armored. So he's got everything, and this is why I think he is of the nature of the dragon." He also thought the mythical dragon "had too many advantages," and that was why he used the two interchangeably in his art. Both symbolized "the monster, the political life of administrations, of power, and just like the crocodile, power has too many advantages. It spits fire, swims well, and has terrific teeth and is armored. It's corrupt and wicked; it's impossible to have power with equity and modesty and nonchalance." For him, the crocodile symbolized any "administration in evil form, political power in general, specifically economic, artistic and cultural. Anything you want-it's a crock."

ALTHOUGH STEINBERG INSISTED THAT "traveling is not for picking up an idea" but rather to be used as an "intermission or a time out," he still returned to New York full of ideas and eager to try them. The sheer size of the Union Square studio gave him the sudden desire to experiment with "big things," and he took up oil painting with gusto, working on some of the landscapes and rubber-stamp collages that would eventually become part of his next book, The Inspector. He had accepted an extremely lucrative commission from the art publisher Harry Abrams for a series of lithographs and had conceived "a series of riddles" for The New Yorker. The Abrams deadline loomed, but he was captivated by playing with a reproduction of Millet's Angelus that he had torn out of a French newspaper in Paris; when he got home, he could not stop superimposing his rubber stamps of the praying couple onto the various photocopies he had made. Steinberg had van Dalen work diligently to pack and send the works for his two solo exhibitions in 1970, one at the Kiko Galleries in Houston, the other at the Felix Landau Gallery in Los Angeles. He was more lackadaisical with organizations such as the Carnegie Inst.i.tute Museum in Pittsburgh, to which he had promised four paintings for an international exhibition, and which started to make repeated demands in June, when he was almost six months late in delivering them for a show that autumn. At the same time, the Spectra Media Corporation of Hollywood wrote and phoned repeatedly to beg him to "enter into investigative discussions" about a television special or series. He eventually sent the paintings to Pittsburgh, but he ignored the group from Hollywood. Van Dalen also had to take care of Steinberg's donations to various inst.i.tutions and organizations, everything from a watercolor for the Palm Springs Desert Museum to a poster designed specifically for the East Hampton Guild Hall's fundraising.

Requests from the world of politics intruded as well. Lica had become politically active in France and wanted him to sign a pet.i.tion prepared by a group of Maeght's artists who were against the Vietnam War and wanted artists throughout the world to boycott all cultural programs sponsored by the American government. Steinberg was against the war but thought the pet.i.tion went too far by inadvertently penalizing those who made their living through the arts and refused to sign it. He did, however, contribute to the manifesto ent.i.tled "The Demands of Art Workers' Coalition to the Galleries," and when the Fellows.h.i.+p of Reconciliation invited him to Nyack to meet Danilo Dolci, he accepted with alacrity.

DESPITE ALL THE ACTIVITY THAT SURROUNDED HIM, Steinberg insisted that he lived "closed up ... into my sh.e.l.l like a turtle." Most of his feeling of isolation came from yet another estrangement from Sigrid. He was enraged not to find her in New York when he came back from Africa, and when she returned, he would not take her phone calls or answer her letters. Despite his silence, she sent postcards to express how much she wanted to reconcile, such as one that featured two cuddling lion cubs from the Zurich zoo. She begged him to take her back, but he maintained his usual stony silence. He did agree to let her stay in the Springs house in May, but only because he was not there himself. She left a letter on the kitchen table for him to find when he returned, telling him that she was "less lonely here alone than with you."

It had been ten years since they began their relations.h.i.+p, and Sigrid a.n.a.lyzed it from her perspective: "We were never a couple ... What you need (and got finally) is not a woman but a sidekick ... What really was there between us in the last (how many) years? Some dirty pictures and lots of pulling and pus.h.i.+ng and tension. You made me into a lonely old maid. Yes, Mr. Steinberg, you don't know how to be close, only in the mind. But I am human not an idea and the caress of a b.u.m at the right moment when I needed it was more a.s.suring than all your words."

Sarcastically, she berated him for not wanting a flesh-and-blood woman but only an audience of one, avid to scoop up his every golden remark and precious idea. He might have thought that he was wasting his words on her, but probably not, she concluded, because "you don't really waste much, sooner or later you exploit everything and make it pay." Sigrid was sure that he would find a way to turn whatever unhappiness he was currently feeling into something that would bring further fame and fortune, and that he would use any brilliant or cute remark that seemed wasted on her on more appreciative audiences.

Steinberg ignored her letter, and when he broke his silence, it was to tell her that they were never going to be together again. She was devastated and so distraught that Mimi Gross feared she might be suicidal. Gross and Grooms were so concerned that they invited Sigrid to spend the summer with them in Provincetown. Being there seemed to lift her spirits, especially after she found a run-down shack and put her personal touches to the place. She even tried to work again by setting up a s.p.a.ce where she contentedly painted watercolors with the intention of preparing a portfolio to take to galleries when she returned to New York. She also planned to get in touch with some of the publishers who had previously hired her to design book jackets to see if they would have work, and she was going to ask the design studio where she had worked part-time or freelance for something more permanent. "She was just getting used to being on her own," Gross remembered, "and then he called and she ran back to him, leaving everything."

The reunion lasted less than a month, and this time they both thought the separation would be forever. "It has been coming for a long time," Sigrid wrote in what was to be her last letter to Saul for quite a while. She had returned full of hope, only to find that nothing had changed, and the ups and downs were incapacitating: "I just don't think I can make it, and the more I get discouraged, the less I can cope." She insisted that since Reesom had left, she had been faithful to Saul and not used drugs, staying straight and not cheating because she wanted to win him back. Saul was not swayed by her pleas, and once again his response was an impenetrable wall of silence.

He claimed that once she was gone, he deliberately restricted his social life to spend most of his time alone, but as always, his appointment calendar contradicts the a.s.sertion. It listed (among many others) novelist Anthony West, songwriter Adolph Green, publisher Roger Strauss, literary agent Candida Donadio, and gallery owner Xavier Fourcade. He was correct, though, when he said that he saw a lot of the old friends he called "my Mafia," among them Betty Parsons, the Vicentes, and the Nivolas, because he was happy only when living twenty years in the past.

When he was in New York, he was reluctant to leave; when he went to Springs, he always stayed far longer than he intended. He compared himself to the turtle in his sh.e.l.l, because he was doing what he always did when he could not arrive at a decision, tucking in his head to "pretend the problem does not exist. Or," he added, "rather several problems."

For years he dithered about whether to live permanently in the city or in the country, in the United States or Italy or France, but now he was in the sad state of "inevitable confusion ... three houses, not to mention the three girl friends, etc." He wondered if he should give up both the apartment and the studio when the leases expired. If so, he would have to buy a bigger house in the Hamptons or else put a huge addition on the house in Springs to hold all the treasures he had acc.u.mulated over the years. As for the women, even when things were fine between him and Sigrid, he indulged in ongoing long-term liaisons with several married women in New York, two off-again, on-again married lovers in Paris, Ada and another occasional lover in Milan, and still another in Turin, all of whom he saw regularly for copulation without constraints on either side. Sigrid used to mock him for "looking absolutely silly performing for those cold fish, the tall blond American college girl type," whom he pursued openly in every social situation, to the embarra.s.sment of his friends and the amus.e.m.e.nt of those who saw "the ridiculous aspect" of his pursuit of younger and younger women.

In all situations he excused himself by saying that he could not make decisions on his own and was "waiting for a deus ex machina." One quiet Sunday afternoon when he was alone in the city apartment-the first time he had been there in seven months-he dreamed for a brief moment of walking away from everything and moving into one room to live like a student. Swiftly he dismissed the idea as "a fantasy" and concluded that the only decision he could make was to make no decision at all. "Meanwhile," he decided, "confusion is an excellent climate for working," and working was his only "area of calm, a refuge."

CHAPTER 34.

FURNITURE AS BIOGRAPHY.

I got to work as though out of remorse and work has become a vice.

Here I've spent five days in a beautiful prison," Steinberg wrote to Aldo Buzzi in February 1971 from Zurich, Switzerland. He had checked himself into the Privatklinik Bircher-Benner on the advice of Vladimir Nabokov, to see if he could stop smoking, cold turkey, through a regime of controlled starvation. There were also medical tests, examinations, and ma.s.sages, but unfortunately the hunger treatment did not work, and he continued to smoke his several packs a day for another year or so.

He liked Zurich, a "clean and orderly city." The clinic stay was actually a side trip tacked on to an exhibition of his work at Maeght's Swiss gallery after it closed in Paris. It was one of his two solo exhibitions that year, the other at the Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago, and he was in three group shows at the Art Inst.i.tute of Chicago, Was.h.i.+ngton's Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. He had submerged himself in his own work with such a pa.s.sion that his interests spilled over into activities within the art world and he became a more public artist. He was a judge for the American Inst.i.tute of Graphic Arts show, chaired that year by Milton Glaser, and because of his friends.h.i.+p with Donald Barthelme (they met through The New Yorker), he donated the drawing "Two Women" to a show called "She" at New York's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery.

He was also turning out work at warp speed for The New Yorker, which featured five of his drawings on covers during 1971. Three of the five were quasi-philosophical and word-dependent, with the one for July 31, "I do, I have, I am," among his most lastingly popular. It generated enormous mail, including a letter that Steinberg particularly liked from a fan who told him he must have befriended "a couple million scientologists" because the drawing represented the three conditions of existence according to Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard: "Be, do, and have." Another cover was more quietly profound, a landscape peopled with vaguely figurative words either marching in a parade or floating ethereally alone and depicting states of being based on the verb to be.

As Steinberg drew these covers, he was already thinking of the kind of drawings his next book should include, and unlike the previous ones, for which the t.i.tle was a last-minute decision, this one had a t.i.tle that he had already settled on: The Inspector. He chose it carefully, to convey the idea that his was the all-seeing eye pointing out the enormous changes happening within culture and society, manners and mores. Steinberg always liked to meditate on the twin topics of art and reality, and he did so here with drawings that ill.u.s.trated the onrush of tectonic s.h.i.+fts and changes in the art world of the seventies and of how the artist was affected by them. He dealt gently and humorously with the theme by featuring an artist-dog who stands on his hind legs holding a brush and palette to ponder the canvas on which he has just painted the adage "Beware the Artist." Storm clouds explode over the artist-dog's head as he critiques his work, perhaps an indication of the ferment and fracas that Steinberg glimpsed or heard about every day when he went to his Union Square studio.

The cover he t.i.tled "Bleecker Street" signaled another change in his subject matter, as it marked the time when Steinberg "left his study for the streets" and much of his work became "all about New York: its images, streets, and city scenes."

Besides his sightings of what went on in Warhol's Factory, which was in full swing a few floors below his studio, he could see and hear the noise, confusion, and chaos of the pa.s.sing parade in Greenwich Village from his front-row seat on the balcony of his fifteenth-floor apartment. His version of what happened on Bleecker Street incorporated sentiments from his growing involvement with antiwar activity, his ongoing iconic imagery, and his serious explorations of materials and techniques that he had experimented with only briefly in the past. To render the drawing, he added graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor to his usual crisp black line, all of which were smudged, smeared, and softened in various degrees. They gave a blurred and unfocused quality to various parts of the drawing, which as a whole he intended to be unsettling but also to be instructive and educational. In this drawing, the process of making it was as important as the idea it conveyed, and he wanted viewers who studied it to see how he, as the artist, made the decisions that led to the completed work. To make sure viewers could see the process, he gave strict instructions to the magazine's art department not to erase the many signs of strikeouts, erasures, and other changes and corrections he had made as he worked.

Some of Steinberg's ideas about how to portray people in street scenes came from the underground comics that he had been collecting for several years, everything from R. Crumb's eccentric vision to the characters in j.a.panese manga. From them he took grim, scary, and pop-eyed faces, s.h.i.+ny black-helmeted authority figures, and creatures either bristling with fear or armored and threatening The last of the five New Yorker covers was far more serene, a collection of six small paintings he called "Six Sunsets," positioned to resemble two rows of postcards, mini-canvases depicting Steinberg's fascination with the way the light changed throughout the day at Louse Point. As he worked on this series for the next several years, he turned to executing both large canvases in oil and watercolor on paper, and a major component of the paintings became clouds. He was delighted with them and proudly included many that featured clouds in the Maeght exhibition of 1973, as well as in the exhibitions at Parsons and Janis. Hedda Sterne trained her critical artist's eye on the paintings and found them seriously flawed, lacking in originality as well as technique, and they sparked one of her most stringent and caustic criticisms of his work. She told him she could not understand his fixation on such a mundane subject, saying that he, who had always known his strengths unerringly, had "evidently lost all sight of the uniqueness of your gifts. Thousands and thousands of idiots can outcloud you!" She admonished him to "have fun. Play!...Don't underestimate your G.o.d-given ability to enchant and delight ... beware of the wrong kind of pride and self-challenge!"

Without making direct references to Sigrid, Hedda was not only criticizing Saul's subject matter, she was also criticizing the way he was conducting his personal life. He had not recovered from the shock of Sigrid's affair with the Ethiopian, Reesom, but he succ.u.mbed to her tearful pleas that he should to try to forget it. Hoping that travel would work its usual magic toward reconciliation, he put her "on probation" and took her on a holiday to the Virgin Islands, Mexico, and Arizona. It was not the healing experience either wanted, for everywhere they encountered wealthy retired Americans who seemed to be turning idyllic scenery into "concentration camps for old folks." They returned home despondent, and by Easter, when Sigrid claimed that Saul called her "a pig," they had separated yet again.

STEINBERG RETREATED INTO A WHIRL OF work out of "remorse" over the distress in his life, and work quickly became an absorbing "vice" he could not get enough of. While he was churning out new drawings, an intriguing offer came from the Geneva publisher Albert Skira to contribute a book of writings as well as ill.u.s.trations to the series called Les Sentiers de la Creation (Pathways of Creation). Skira, who was renowned for his beautiful art books, invited an elite group of international artists, writers, and other intellectuals to write about the genesis of their personal creativity. Among those who had already written or accepted to write were Steinberg's friends Joan Miro and Eugene Ionesco and an artist he admired and to whom he was pleased to be compared, Pablo Pica.s.so. He relished being in the distinguished company of Michel Butor and Roland Barthes, whom he knew through their essays for the two volumes about his work in the Derriere le Miroir series; he had been acquainted with Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon since his encounters with the Sartre-Beauvoir existentialists at the Pont Royal bar in the 1950s; and he had been aware of the international theoretical influence of Jean Starobinski and Claude Levi-Strauss ever since Hedda Sterne had encouraged him to read their books, along with the poetry of Rene Char and Octavio Paz. Steinberg was inordinately proud to be included in such company, and as "the writer who draws," he set to work with alacrity in Springs and scheduled a meeting with Skira in Geneva on his next trip to Switzerland, in November. Steinberg did not come away with any insights into what Skira wanted after they met, because all the publisher talked about was Pica.s.so. Still, he remained enthusiastic about the challenge, telling Maeght that "a writer's work is a lot more difficult and tedious than mine is, but what a pleasure to learn a new craft." The euphoria dissipated abruptly when Skira gave the book the t.i.tle La Table des Matieres (Table of Contents) and announced its imminent publication before Steinberg had written a word or made a single drawing.

WHEN HE MET WITH SKIRA, STEINBERG had just made his third flight to Europe in a single year, still something of a novelty in the early 1970s. He had flown to Zurich for the October 22, 1971, opening of his exhibition at the Maeght gallery there and joked to Aime Maeght that going back and forth so much was bound to raise suspicion that he was smuggling heroin. He had made the two previous flights because he was worried about how his new work might make the forthcoming shows "risky," and he wanted to do what he could to mitigate the danger.

In June, depressed and in a bad mood after his travels with Sigrid, he had gone to Paris, mostly just to get away but also to make sure everything was proceeding according to plan. Once again he irritated everyone working at the gallery as he obsessed over what each picture should be called, where it should be hung, and how much it should cost. The last decision was the most crucial, as he had spent money lavishly during the past year and was so desperate for an infusion of cash that he had to ask Sidney Janis for an advance of $10,000 against future sales.

Steinberg spent the evenings systematically working his way through dinners with his sister and her family, his long list of friends, and the two women with whom he had been in sporadic long-term liaisons since the late 1950s. When he finished his business in Paris, he made his usual circuit of friends in Milan, including Ada and especially Aldo.

He had a difficult time in October trying to fit in everything that he wanted to do. There was his opening in Zurich, and as soon as his show was safely launched, he went again to the Buchinger Klinik but this time to the one in Bodensee, the uberlingen facility in the isolation of Lake Constance that Nabokov had recommended for overcoming his cigarette cravings. This time the starvation treatment worked, and two months later he told Aldo the "sensational news...no more accordion in the chest, no more human ashtray." It made him feel so strange not to crave cigarettes that he used one of James Joyce's favorite words to describe what happened to him: "metemphyschosis" [sic], a veritable transmigration of the soul.

The isolation on the sh.o.r.es of the frozen lake in the depths of winter brought on the need to reach out to friends he could confide in, and as always happened when he was away from home, his feelings toward Sigrid softened. He sent her a postcard that he signed, "Saul with warm blue scarf [her Christmas gift to him] who sends love." Even though he had been away from home for the better part of 1971, and even though he claimed he was desperate to get back to his studio to settle down to work, the Zurich show sold so well that he was once again flush, with enough money for the travel bug to infect him. He wrote from the clinic to ask Sigrid to go with him to Africa and she was thrilled to accept. He didn't have time to think about his impetuous action until he was back in New York in November, when he told Aldo he was "confused-but very busy."

ON JANUARY 19, 1972, MR. AND MRS. SAUL STEINBERG (as it said on the tickets issued by Thorn Tree Safaris, Ltd., in Nairobi) left for a grand tour of every tourist destination on the African continent. They used Zurich as the point of departure because of the easy connection to Cairo. And because Sigrid felt the need to cleanse her system from drugs and drink before undertaking such a momentous journey, they both checked into the uberlingen clinic for several days. They flew to Cairo and Luxor, Nairobi, and Kampala, making stops at Paraa, Murcheson, Entebbe, Ngorongoro, Arusha, Lake Manyara, and Amboseli-Kilimanjaro. The trip meant different things to each of them, but for Sigrid it was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with Africa, particularly Mali, to which she returned as often as she could, sometimes with Saul, mostly alone, and often several times in a single year.

Africa thrilled Sigrid, and for years afterward she tried to explain how it touched the depths of her soul. One of her best paintings was a representation of the African continent, all done in luminous shades of browns and greens. Occasionally she kept journals and diaries in which she tried repeatedly to describe how much it meant to her to evolve from a nubile woman into the wise old one who had gained the respect and friends.h.i.+p of the local people, particularly in Mali. Africa became the only place where she was truly at peace, a sensation she felt from the very first trip, and some of her happiest memories were of driving in companionable silence in an open jeep across landscapes where the wind gently fanned their faces. She wanted to believe that the mere fact of being there was enough to resolve many of their problems and bring them closer.

For Saul, the trip was fine, but when anyone asked, he dismissed the African experience as just another "of these absurd trips in a world ruined by the d.a.m.ned race of tourists." Once they were back in Europe, he returned to business as usual and became his brusque and peremptory self. He and Sigrid had been guests of the Maeghts at the Fondation in St.-Paul-de-Vence (to which the Zurich show had moved) and then stopped in Paris, where Saul tended to business and Sigrid spent time quietly painting in Cachan with Lica and her family. He was itching to go home to Springs, where he could be alone to sort out the swirling feelings aroused by his personal problems. They all came down to one: Sigrid, who was now thirty-six to his fifty-eight, and who in middle age had become a far different woman from the young girl who had entranced him.

HE COULDN'T TELL HEDDA WHAT HE was going through because he was too proud to admit that his personal life was not as placid as he pretended, nor that he had no idea of how to smooth it out. Also he couldn't talk to Hedda because of something that had happened some time before between the two women. Sigrid had tried to make Hedda a.s.sume the role of mother/big sister, which she made many other women play, but Hedda refused and told Sigrid what she already told Saul when their liaison began: that she did not want him to ask for advice or confide personal details to her. When Sigrid tried later to do so, Hedda told her that they could never be close friends or confidantes; Sigrid could always expect cordiality and politeness, but that was all. When she related this to Saul, he knew it was Hedda's way of telling him not to expect her to help him sort out his problems with his younger lover.

The only other person Saul had ever trusted as implicitly as Hedda was Aldo, so he continued to confide in him, but a shade more openly than before. They had always written in Italian, and although Saul considered it his first language, he had been away from Italy long enough that he had become removed enough from the language for it to provide a buffer from the harsh reality that came when he expressed embarra.s.sing or emotional thoughts in English. He was as honest as he could permit himself to be when he told Aldo that once he was back in New York, he was going through "a special period, I mean a sad one-changes-not feeling like myself."

At the time, the word depression had not come into general casual use, nor was it in Steinberg's vocabulary, so he pa.s.sed off his feelings as an inexplicable malaise or melancholy. When he had to address his general lack of enthusiasm for life and work, he told different stories to different people. To Hedda, he said merely that overwork had made him tired and perhaps he had also picked up a bug in Africa that he could not shake. To Aldo, he said he was working steadily but had wasted too much time on the book that became The Inspector and "like the previous collections will be mixed and confused." He only found "freedom and diversion" when he could "invent new work," but he had little time for it because of all his responsibilities and commitments. To Aime Maeght, he said everything was just fine and he was working cheerfully for his own amus.e.m.e.nt, but the rest of his letter contradicted the comment.

Of all the work connected with the 1973 Paris show, he was surprised by how pleased he was with the lithographs, especially the drawing he called "Le mois du coeur" in homage to February and Valentine's Day. It had always been a very special holiday for Sigrid, and he was puzzled about what led him to produce such a drawing during a time of unsettled, possibly tumultuous feelings about their relations.h.i.+p. Other projects were not even that clear-cut: he promised to sign off on the Derriere le Miroir proof ("bon a tirer") during the summer, but when autumn came, he had to apologize for being late. He blamed everything on his "struggle against tobacco," with the excuse that he was so "vigorously not smoking" that it had become his full-time occupation. In truth he was convinced that the absence of tobacco in his body had altered his "chemical composition" and changed him into "somebody else-less fun or actually boring." He was grateful to have something external to blame for his increasingly melancholy state of mind.

IN JUNE 1972 HE COULD NOT DECIDE where his oil paintings fit within his canon or whether they even contributed to it. Just looking at them made him go through his files to contrast them with drawings done long before. By comparison, the old work looked so "beautiful and simple" that he questioned why he was driven to waste so much time on "paintings that look printed." Obviously Hedda's letter chastising his cloud fixation had struck a chord. She was the only person who could criticize his work and get away with it, so anything that displeased her rankled him.

As a respite from painting, and because he now had a second studio a.s.sistant, Gordon Pulis, to help him in Springs, he found another diversion when he decided to work in wood. He joked that he turned to wood because he had two carpenters in his employ and had to invent work to keep them busy, but that was only partially true. He was unable to identify his other reason, saying that he thought it "a bit sinister" that he had become nostalgic for "things from architecture school and in general from the drawing table." He watched in awe as Pulis and van Dalen cut the wood to his exact specifications for rulers, triangles, T-squares, pencils, and pens, leaving him to draw the markings delineating inches and centimeters. Sometimes he found a remnant that lent itself to an ill.u.s.tration directly from his imagination, without any help from the carpenters, such as the slice of pinewood bisected by a natural crack that he turned into the drawing known as "the Montauk Highway Map." He began to make other objects as well, everything from wooden dog tags like the ones he had worn in the navy to a series of wooden cameras that he gave as gifts to photographer friends, among them Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt. Eventually his vision expanded, and so too did the works in wood when he began to make large-scale tables, both flat tabletops and three-dimensional stand-alone structures.

Steinberg believed that working in wood brought him closer to "the rather animal world of painters." As he watched the carpenters, and as he took over to contribute his vision to the raw shapes he asked them to cut, it gave him the only "pleasure" he could find within his work: "The mind is at rest, it's the happiness of a horse ... it makes me work and even dream that I'm working."

"I think there were many too many [tables], but he just loved the idea of them," van Dalen recalled after Steinberg hired a carpenter, Sig Lomaky, to do the actual construction. He himself may have been unable or unwilling to learn carpentry, but even before the wood was touched, he always knew what it should become. "He was all about ideas," van Dalen said, and Pulis agreed: "He could make it look like I did it, when really it was all his own doing."

One of the earliest tables, ent.i.tled "Politecnico," was a precisely arranged collection of objects that hinted at Steinberg's past experiences as a student in Milan. Pencils, an old-fas.h.i.+oned straight pen, and a ruler frame the other objects on the table; at the bottom, varnish smoothes and blurs three photographs just as memory might do, while above them, a languid landscape is populated by rubber stamps of human figures, with one of Steinberg's fake seals hovering in the sky above as if to bestow authenticity on the scene below. On each side of the landscape he arranged two small plywood wedges carved and striated to represent receipt tablets. At the top of the tableau, a piece of thin wood colored and scored to resemble an etching plate provides architectural detail, as it depicts a mythical building in the brutal style so popular in Mussolini's Italy when Steinberg studied there.

He began to make the tables, both the flat tabletop a.s.semblages and the three-dimensional stand-alone pieces, in the early 1970s and continued until the last three years of his life. If all his work was an autobiography of sorts, the tables are among the most teasing, as they conceal even as they reveal. Steinberg called one of the most intriguing (and possibly concealing) "Furniture as Biography." It was one of the three-dimensional pieces which he chose not to sell and kept in the bas.e.m.e.nt at Springs for years, although he allowed it to be shown late in his life, in 1987, under a different t.i.tle ("Grand Hotel"); once again he refused to sell it, and finally he partially disa.s.sembled it. On this table was a collection of furniture of the size usually a.s.sociated with dollhouses-chairs, tables, beds, dressers, armoires, and chests of drawers. Many were three-dimensional replicas of furniture that was loosely reminiscent of the hotel rooms he stayed in during his travels, a lot of which he drew in his sketchbooks. Whether he referred to them or drew from memory is not known, because he worked on the furniture alone, with no help from Pulis. When the table was finished, Pulis posits, Steinberg thought it too crudely a.s.sembled to let it be seen; Hedda Sterne thought it was because it might have brought back too many memories that he decided were best left in the past.

One of the most revealing wooden constructions is the one he called "Library," a high, spindly, and large-as-life bookcase-c.u.m-secretary on which two shelves resembling a wooden crate hold a collection of some of his favorite books, all ornamented with his lettering and cover drawings. His taste in literature was eclectic and occasionally surprising. While he raved about Richard Hughes's novel The Fox in the Attic and recommended it to all his friends, he chose instead to commemorate another of Hughes's novels, In Hazard, which he liked less. He loved anything Italian or about Italy; Norman Douglas is there with Old Calabria, and he honored his friends Aldo Buzzi and Ennio Flaiano along with Kipling and Jack London in the Italian translations in which he read them. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Gogol, and Nabokov are on his shelves, as are Jules Verne and Dostoevsky in the Romanian translations he read as a schoolboy. Curiously absent is his all-time favorite novel, James Joyce's Ulysses. However, Steinberg enjoyed a Joycean in-joke when he included a book whose author's name suited his subject: W. M. Oakwood's Carpentry and Cabinet Making. As he played with wood, he marveled over everything about it, telling Aldo that he was so captivated that "in fact, I'm preparing a show for Maeght in October [1973] all tables." Working with wood was akin to a miracle: "Who would have said old Saul would be revived and obsessed by work!"

CHAPTER 35.

UP TO MY NOSE IN TROUBLE.

All's well here. Up to my nose in trouble. How have I managed to fall into the usual traps (at which I've been barking for years)?

The show, yes, it went well and I made the usual trillion," Steinberg said when the tables were first shown at the Parsons-Janis exhibition in February 1973. He liked the way they were displayed and was elated when audiences found them enthralling. When the reviews came, Steinberg dismissed them as "vulgar compliments," but he still thought they were good enough to send to Aldo. The kind of reception he wanted came from other artists, prominent among them Philip Guston, with whom he was sharing an increasingly close friends.h.i.+p through letters that dealt with what they were striving to attain in their work and hoping to convey to audiences. Guston said he was "utterly captivated and excited" by the tables and understood that they were "all about art and your adventures in art-your autobio." Steinberg could not have asked for more.

Shortly after, The Inspector was published, to decent critical response but not the raves Steinberg wanted or needed to help generate sales. He blamed the lukewarm reception on his new publisher, the Viking Press, which positioned it as a gift or coffee-table book and priced it at ten dollars, a hefty sum at the time. When taken as a whole, all the responses to the book were much the same as those to the rest of Steinberg's professional undertakings-successful-and success in work was sweet after such a long period of being down in the doldrums. It made him full of energy and ready to tackle "the boring problems" that he had put aside for the past several years.

Suddenly he decided that it was "important to get out of the Village, more than anything else," and he made his first major decision by not renewing his lease. He had never really liked living in Greenwich Village, and now that his sixtieth birthday was approaching, he was uncomfortable being surrounded by the young and the hip and wanted to return to the staid Upper East Side. He found what he wanted almost immediately, a duplex apartment at 103 East 75th Street, "close to the old neighborhood" on 71st Street where he had lived with Hedda, "expensive," but he could easily afford it.

As with all co-op apartments in New York, he had to pa.s.s board inspection, and that required letters of reference. Marcel Breuer, John de Cuevas, and Betty Parsons all attested that (as Parsons wrote) he was "a talented, charming, reliable man, who fulfills his obligations in every way." The letter that probably carried the most weight, however, was from his accountant, Martin H. Bodian, who stated that Steinberg's earned income for the past several years had been "in excess of $75,000" and that his net equity in real estate, marketable securities, and bank accounts was "in excess of $250,000"-a veiled way of saying that he was a millionaire several times over. His application was approved, and he was given a certificate attesting that he owned 180 shares in the building's corporation. It resembled all too closely one of his false doc.u.ments, which may be why he stashed it in the folder where he kept all his other "honorary" memorabilia, including his "Kentucky Colonel" certificate and a letter telling him to pay his long-delinquent dues to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts or he would be removed from the members.h.i.+p rolls (he didn't pay). It also included copies of his letter of resignation from the Century a.s.sociation, whose members were distinguished authors, artists, and amateurs of letters and the fine arts. His dues were in arrears there as well, so he paid up and sent a letter announcing his "friendly resignation."

New York is really a collection of small villages, and the natives are not p.r.o.ne to go outside them. Steinberg became a walker in his part of town, often encountering old friends and casually joining them for something informal. Leo Steinberg invited him for a meal, and when Saul ran into Niccol Tucci they would walk along together and then often dine. His new and stylish address garnered invitations to glamorous benefit dinners such as one for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum hosted by Mr. and Mrs. Henry J. Heinz II, ("Jack and Drue," who were collectors of Steinberg's work). He was on the guest list that included George Plimpton, Diana Vreeland, Brooke Astor, and Arthur Schlesinger. "Everyone ... looked fabulous," wrote "Suzy" in the New York Daily News, "especially Saul Steinberg who arrived in a deerstalker."

Other collectors of Steinberg's work wanted him to grace their tables, and Sigrid was usually included in the invitations. More often than not, Saul did not tell her she was invited, and most of the times when he did, she refused because she was uncomfortable in such settings. Apocryphal stories, always of their bad behavior, abounded about them both. Sigrid was reputed to have deliberately vomited on a society hostess's dinner table because she was bored by the company; at another dinner, when Saul was allegedly disgusted with the superficial conversation, he rose from the table and threw down his napkin, saying, "This can only get worse" as he stomped out. The most oft-repeated story of their bad behavior concerns a Giacometti painting that hung over the toilet in the powder room of a Park Avenue apartment. Sigrid emerged from the room and in her raucous voice announced what she had seen to all the guests in the very large drawing room; Saul said it was an insult to a great artist, grabbed her arm, said, "We're leaving," and off they went. An entire mythology grew up about the bad behavior of Saul Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth, much of it probably stemming from hearsay about their fractious personal relations.h.i.+p. But very little of what they were alleged to have done in public was actually true, and almost none of it could be verified.

ONCE THE APARTMENT WAS HIS, STEINBERG made changes to it over the next several years. He hired the architect Ala Damaz to alter the layout, calling her back several times until he had the s.p.a.ces exactly as he wanted them. He wanted the public areas to be on the entry floor, where he had a separate kitchen and a combination living and dining area that could hold a table as big as the one he already had in Springs and as big as Hedda's, which he remembered sitting at with great affection. There was also a maid's room and bath behind the kitchen area, which he used for art storage, as his housekeeper came in daily and he never had houseguests. His private quarters were on the floor above, where he had his bedroom, bath, and a large studio. There was also a s