Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 15

Because Steinberg was having so much trouble formulating a text for the Skira book, he had hit on the idea of doing it in collaboration with Aldo. His plan was to have taped conversations with Aldo about his most important influences, after which Aldo would select the most revealing remarks and prepare a transcript. Some of the examples that came immediately to Steinberg's mind were Romania and everything connected to his life there, and painters such as Van Gogh and Courbet, whose lives he studied avidly in order to understand their work. Most recently he and Nabokov had disagreed strongly about Courbet, and he was eager to talk about the artist with Aldo. Steinberg agreed that with the give-and-take of this sort of collaboration, "maybe it could be done."

But Aldo did the flummoxing when he introduced something else he thought should go into the book: extracts from every one of Steinberg's letters, all of which he had kept from the first year of their friends.h.i.+p, when Steinberg had gone home to Bucharest for summer vacation, and then from the year that he left Italy for good. Steinberg was stunned to learn they were extant, and when Aldo sent copies, he was unable to read beyond the first five pages. He was so emotionally paralyzed that a month pa.s.sed before he could even skim the rest to craft a reply. He said it took "courage" to reread what he had written throughout the past thirty years, and he had needed the one-month hiatus before he could face himself when younger. The time off gave him the distance to declare them "indeed good and moving because it really shows the development in a clinical fas.h.i.+on," but they did create a new worry: that he might become "artificial" when he wrote to anyone in the future. He put the worry aside to insist that Aldo come for the summer, to see the new addition and to work on the proposed book. Aldo agreed, and he and Bianca came in August 1974, as Steinberg's guests and with all their expenses paid.

STEINBERG WAS HONORED TO BE ELECTED to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1968, and since his induction he had partic.i.p.ated fully in the academy's events and activities. He took the responsibilities of members.h.i.+p seriously and gave great care to nominating likely candidates, putting up many of his friends, writing fulsome letters of recommendation, and actively networking with other members to secure their admission. Awards and accolades from other inst.i.tutions were offered to him almost every year throughout the 1970s, and he accepted most while carefully refusing others. By 1976 he was confident enough to decline the gold medal of the National Arts Club in New York, because it had become "impossible to witness and listen to speeches praising me," especially "if my presence is necessary." But in 1974 he was pleased to be present when the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the Gold Medal for Graphic Art. Philip Johnson was the presenter, and his statement raised many of the same questions that Steinberg had recently asked himself, particularly when working with Aldo for the Skira book.

Johnson prefaced his remarks by asking not who but "what is Saul Steinberg?" Johnson noted that Steinberg's gold medal was being given for his ability as a graphic artist, but wasn't he also a satirist, and wasn't he also a painter? To corroborate the latter, he noted that Steinberg's work had been shown at MoMA as long as thirty years before, but-again a qualification-wasn't he also a humorist, and wasn't he also an architect? When it came time to determine Steinberg's place in contemporary art and culture, Johnson metaphorically threw up his hands over the impossibility of the task: "With the twentieth-century insistence on careful categories, our academic enthusiasm for dichotomy and definitions betrays us: we cannot pigeonhole Saul Steinberg."

Now that Steinberg was fast becoming the darling of the intellectual world, these were the same questions-the same irritating questions-that he would be asked repeatedly as others strove to define him. Even worse, to his way of thinking, was that others would pose these questions and then wait expectantly for him to define himself.

EVERYTHING WAS GOING WELL FOR STEINBERG in mid-1974. Sigrid was on one of her many solo trips to Africa, this time to Mali and Upper Volta (Burkina Faso), and before she left, they had bid each other farewell in a desultory but basically fond fas.h.i.+on. They were in one of the periods when he was involved in a succession of casual flings and her att.i.tude toward them was one of casual indifference. He was alarmed when one of the women threatened to want more than a brief affair and complained that he would never learn, as he landed up to his nose in trouble and became mired in one of the same old traps he had been baying at for years. At the age of sixty, he thought of himself as an old man, but even as he questioned his need for continual conquest, he had to admit that he could not help it that he still loved women, loved the foreplay of seduction, and loved most of the initial s.e.xual encounters. Always in need of something to blame for his general melancholy, he focused briefly on his appet.i.te for many women but soon discounted it to blame something else. "What does this sadness mean?" he asked rhetorically. He decided that it had to be "the nose speaking. It must be old age."

The sadness was mixed with a vague, unfocused fear of death and the actual deaths of friends and family. Nicola Chiaromonte had died in 1972, and Steinberg was reminded of the death when he deepened his ties to Mary McCarthy over their mutual opposition to the Vietnam War. He kept in touch with Chiaromonte's widow, Miriam, whom he always visited in Rome and who sent him articles and homages to her late husband for many years. Ennio Flaiano, the Italian novelist whom Steinberg much admired, had died, and he regretted that he had not managed to know him better. His brother-in-law, Rica Roman, died that winter, a death not unexpected because of his years of ill health, but still the suddenness of it came as a shock. In accord with Jewish custom, Rica was buried the next day, and in a gesture that comforted all the family, in a grave ab.u.t.ting Moritz Steinberg's. It was not possible for Saul to be there, but he planned to visit Lica as soon as he could arrange to get away, and he intended to persuade her to come for a long visit to Springs at the earliest possible moment.

When nothing succeeded in helping him shake the doldrums, he scheduled another visit to the Buchinger Klinik in uberlingen in the hope that a stay in the sanatorium would alleviate his sadness. He had been suffused for years by malaise, melancholy, depression-whatever name he called it during the periods when he was enduring it-so these periods were nothing new, but this one was more alarming than usual. As it deepened, it reminded him of the kind of sadness that had often come over him in Romania when he was very young. "One is never saved," he concluded, even as he hoped that several weeks of fasting in a spartan setting would raise his spirits. He put so much faith in the clinic because he had not smoked for the previous two years and was confident that another stay could cure anything, even depression. When it was over, he told himself and others that it had worked, but his letters to Aldo and the occasional jotting whenever he tried to keep a journal proved otherwise.

LICA DID GO TO SPRINGS IN MAY 1975, to stay for a month. Steinberg gave her the happy news that the a.s.sociation of American Artists had just agreed to purchase her edition of drawings that she called La Famille for the impressive sum of $1,400, but it was not enough to raise her spirits, which had been down since her husband's death. She was more subdued than usual and wanted only to sit on the porch in the warm sun and browse her way through the huge pile of back issues of the New York Times that Steinberg had acc.u.mulated. Sigrid came on the weekends, along with her new cat, Papoose, whom Steinberg was convinced was far more intelligent than any human and whose antics he never tired of watching. He adored the cat, and throughout Papoose's long life, if there was anyone or anything that could make him smile, it was he. But during Lica's visit, even that respite was brief.

Sigrid Spaeth and Papoose. (ill.u.s.tration credit 35.1) Steinberg blamed his sister's la.s.situde on more than grief over her husband's death. No matter how much he tried to rea.s.sure her, she was unable to accept that he would always provide the income she needed; nor could he persuade her of the value of her own art. He wondered if her low spirits were caused by "envy" or "stupidity," but they were "real, nonetheless." The only time they had fun together was when they recalled incidents from their childhood and laughed about their "comical parents." When Lica returned to Paris in June, she went directly to her doctors, because it was clear that her problem was more than simple la.s.situde and something was physically wrong. Stephane wrote twice, first to tell Steinberg that his mother had had an exploratory operation in early June and then again to say there were no tumors and nothing out of the ordinary had been found. When it appeared that Lica would soon be released from the hospital, Steinberg wrote to her on July 10 to say he was convinced the French doctors had not arrived at a diagnosis because she was suffering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever, as he was calling tick bites. He told her that Papoose brought ticks into the house, and he and Sigrid had to examine themselves and the cat constantly to be sure they were not infected. He filled the letter with chatty news, even enclosing a photo of the artist Syd Soloman, whose work he admired. He told Lica that he loved working in the studio now that he had so much light streaming through the new windows, and then, desperate to think of something she would care about, he told her that someone from the Smithsonian had visited and admired one of her portraits hanging in the studio. Steinberg said he hoped to persuade the museum to buy it. His biggest news of all was that in June he would give up the Union Square studio, and there would be a horrendous amount of work involved in deciding what to keep in the city and what to move to Springs. He closed by telling her that Sigrid and Hedda both sent warm good wishes, and he sent all his love to her and to Dana and Stephane.

Lica never read this letter. Four days after he wrote it, she died, on July 14.

Saul Steinberg and Papoose. (ill.u.s.tration credit 35.2)

CHAPTER 36.

SADNESS LIKE AN ILLNESS.

I've found and taken a good look at my childhood photographs and I look at myself as a pa.s.serby. I find no familiarity with that little boy.

Lica's death at the relatively young age of sixty-three came after a "difficult and frightening" lung operation that led to pulmonary complications, probably stemming from the dermoid cyst she had had since birth. Steinberg flew at once to Paris and was with her children and a small group of close friends when she was buried next to her husband and parents on July 18, 1975. He stayed in the Cachan house for several days before returning directly to Springs. Aldo wanted him to go to Milan, but he was too sad to see anyone then or even later, when he rescinded his invitation for Aldo to spend September and October with him. He begged Aldo to understand that he could not have visitors because his "sadness was like an illness, and very tiring."

Conflicting emotions were only natural after the loss of the one person who had been dear to him far longer than anyone else. He told Aldo he had not been aware of how much he loved Lica until she was gone, when he realized that he would mourn her for the rest of his life. At her graveside, he wept for the first time since he was a boy in Romania, and when he tried to a.n.a.lyze why he sobbed so unrestrainedly, the very fact that he could cry was almost as shocking as the death that inspired his tears. When he was back in Springs, he was roiled by the same emotions as those he experienced during Lica's last visit, when he was "depressed, scared in the morning, sad in the afternoon." All the while she had been with him, he was forced by her state of mind-and Sigrid's too-to play a role that was foreign to him, the strong male presence who provided calm rea.s.surance for others. He was so accustomed to having women take care of him on every level from the physical to the emotional that he found it difficult to have to be the giver of strength and stability.

Sigrid had begun sustained psychotherapy after it appeared that she had inherited her mother's clinical depression and become almost catatonic. She had tried one or two a.n.a.lysts in the past, usually for a few consultations which lasted several weeks at the longest. Her newest a.n.a.lyst became the first on the fairly long list of those she would consult and dismiss throughout the rest of her life, switching from one to another on what seemed little more than impulse or whim. When she became disillusioned with her current treatment or heard of a new therapeutic technique, she went eagerly to the next new thing, convinced that this would be the one to cure her forever. Sigrid perked up after finding an a.n.a.lyst who (according to Steinberg) featured an "anti-tears cure" that used a great many mood-altering prescription drugs to be effective. Knowing Sigrid's proclivity for recreational drugs and basically unsure that any treatment would be successful, he was still willing to pay for whatever she thought might cure her. As her health was otherwise robust, he feared that she-and he as well, because he was so loyal-faced a long life of battling demons that were far more serious than anything he had thus far personally endured.

He did everything he could for Sigrid in the early years of her severe depression. If she felt the urge to visit Africa, he paid her way and sent her off for as long as she wanted to stay; if she thought she was well enough to work, he was discreet about asking friends in publis.h.i.+ng to send commissions her way. A number of interesting projects resulted, among them the lettering for the cover of Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer. He stayed quietly aloof when she took her drawings to the Whitney Museum and asked to have them included in an exhibition or when she took them to downtown art galleries that specialized in emerging artists, knowing that her work was not good enough for either. Everywhere she submitted her portfolio, she was asked to return at some future time, when her "ideas were more developed." Unfortunately, her moods fluctuated so unpredictably that she was never able to sustain equilibrium and capitalize on the periods when she was productive.

One year after Lica's death, in 1976, Steinberg was in Cachan for the unveiling of the headstone on her grave. He realized that the date was July 9, the sixteenth anniversary of the day he met Sigrid, and he wrote a letter addressed to "Dear Papoose," using the name of the cat they both adored, which had become their private symbol of tenderness. His letter was filled with more sentiment than he had expressed in all their years together and was exactly what she had long wanted to hear him say: "Of course I still love you and think of you as my dearest friend." She was stunned when he told her that his gift for her birthday on August 9 would be the little cabin she used as a studio and all the land around it in the meadow, starting from a poplar tree she particularly liked and extending to the vegetable garden she tended so lovingly. Even more astonis.h.i.+ngly, he told her that "the rest of the land will be yours after my end, of course. You know more and like it more and deserve it and enjoy it [more] than anybody." In retrospect, looking at their later lives as their "thirty-five years' war" played itself out with dramatic intensity, both his gift and his sentiments became tinged with the irony for which he was famous.

THE SUMMER WAS GRUELING AS HE moved out of the Union Square studio, which was far more complicated than going from one apartment to another. Before Anton could do the actual packing, Steinberg had to decide what to keep and discard, what to send to the country and what to keep in the city. As he sorted through everything from the lace bib his mother had made when he was born, to wartime souvenirs from China, to photos of himself, his family, friends, and lovers, he was haunted by the way Lica's death had made him fearful of "the brutal image of the end of life."

As he sifted and sorted his papers, he was coming across so many things from his past life (or lives, as he thought of his years of living in different places) that he dubbed himself his own "voyeur." He realized that he had saved every sc.r.a.p of information that pertained to his life and much else that pertained to his times, from movie ticket stubs and hotel bills to take-out menus from neighborhood restaurants, calling cards from countesses and dukes, business cards from his local dry cleaner, news clippings of current events, and obituaries of everyone from his friends to strangers whose deaths were bizarre or garish. Such intense immersion in memories exhausted him physically even as it made his mind race, energized by the curiosity to remember more.

He asked Aldo to send him a copy of their cla.s.s photograph from the Politecnico, and he searched his own files for images of the places connected to his Romanian boyhood, even though he refused to return there because the country could not be magically transformed into the 1924 version he held in his mind. He asked anyone traveling to Bucharest to take photos of his house on Strada Palas and to bring him souvenirs, particularly old street maps or postcards showing street scenes. And yet he insisted that no aspect of his life in Romania had influenced his work. His poet friend W. D. Snodgra.s.s, who went to Bucharest and took some of the photos Steinberg requested, raised an interesting question about the origins of his drawing. Fascinated by peasant clothing, especially the black embroidery on white coats, Snodgra.s.s wondered if the quality of Steinberg's line might have been heavily influenced by it. Steinberg emphatically dismissed the possibility. Even so, Bucharest became ever more prominent in his memory, and a quarter century later he was avid to collect images of how it had been in the 1920s. Each time he spoke of his collection of things Romanian, he called it "an emotional orgy, exhausting," but he was happy every time he went through "this secret life."

BY OCTOBER 1975, THE MOVE FROM Union Square was over, and Steinberg was in the country and reluctant to return to the city and his life there. He stayed in Springs until the end of November, and while he was there, letters of condolence came in steadily from friends all over the world, every one of them deeply touching in their concern for him. There were also many from friends in New York, which was why he stayed away: it would have been too difficult to accept condolences in person without becoming emotional.

Ada's letter was especially poignant, as she had known Lica since they were young girls; now she tried to cheer him up with a diversion, telling how she had become an old but still pretty woman and coyly inviting him to come and see for himself. Ada had also written a touching letter when Ennio Flaiano died, which struck him with her ability to convey exactly the sentiment he needed to hear. He realized that she had always done this, and also that she had become almost (but not quite) as necessary to him as Hedda. Ada had been the companion during his formative years, and those were now the source of most of the memories that engulfed him. With Lica gone, he drew closer to Ada, because she was one of the few people who had known Lica since her first visit to Milan when Saul was a poor student; they had corresponded over the years off and on and had a genuine friends.h.i.+p based on their love for "Sauly" (Lica's affectionate nickname) and "Saulino" (Ada's "mio olino caro").

HE STAYED ON IN SPRINGS THROUGH the early winter, content to spend his days sorting through his boxes of papers when not actively creating new work. He was mostly alone now that the friends he saw regularly in the Hamptons had gone back to the city, so he got into the habit of fixing simple solitary suppers at the end of his workday. The meals reflected his Romanian heritage and the foods of his Italian years: peasant breads and cheeses, scallions to dip in good olive oil, zesty olives to nibble before the main course of grilled vegetables or pasta with simple sauces. The only part of his diet he worried about was his tendency to drink too much, mostly the expensive French white wines that he ordered by the case.

After dinner he tried to relax for sleep by reading voraciously, always on the lookout for something that would not intrigue him enough to stay awake. He followed Aldo's suggestion to indulge in harmless thrillers like Das.h.i.+ell Hammett's, saying that he knew Hammett's widow, "who keeps writing wonders about him." Referring to Lillian h.e.l.lman allowed him to avoid commenting on the fiction itself. His taste in literature was more cosmopolitan, and if he wanted a thriller, he preferred a writer like Manuel Puig, whom he called "Joyce's illegitimate son."

He often recommended writers to friends, particularly to Claire Nivola, with whom he had carried on an intellectual correspondence since her Harvard student days. His recommendations often came in the form of something whimsical or charming, such as the multicourse "Literary Menu" he drew for her "degustation." The "antipasto" featured selections that ranged from Victorian explorers (Burton, Gordon, Kitchener, etc.) to Kropotkin's autobiography, while the "soup" course offered a biography of Charles XII of Sweden, "boring [but] worth reading." The "entree" was serious nonfiction: Van Gogh's letters to his brother, Delacroix's journals, Herzen's autobiography (all "6 or 8 volumes"), books about Lawrence of Arabia, a biography of Dostoevsky, and Enid Starkie's Rimbaud and Richard Ellman's James Joyce. For "dessert," he recommended Norman Douglas-not the Old Calabria he loved but rather Looking Back-and Nabokov's Gogol, which he thought "one of the best things written." They were both fond of Tolstoy, and after each read Henri Troyat's biography, Steinberg said they must find another that was "more contemporary and more historical," because Troyat's was too full of "anecdote and quotation." His most recent suggestion was for them both to read Roland Barthes, whose writings they occasionally talked about during the next several years.

Because the Skira book was still unwritten and long overdue, Steinberg told Aldo to read the biography of Courbet he had discussed with Nabokov on his last visit to Montreux. Steinberg found the disconnections between the artist's dysfunctional life and his art endlessly fascinating, and he said that when he and Nabokov talked about Courbet, they agreed that biographies of artists were often unsatisfactory because biographers understand "only other writers (as shown in diaries, letters, etc.)." This a.s.sertion led him to Roger Shattuck's The Banquet Years, in which he heavily annotated the pa.s.sage about how Flaubert would not allow ill.u.s.trations in his novels. Flaubert believed they limited the reader's imagination and offered the example of how a drawing of a woman would render the text "closed, complete, and every sentence becomes useless, whereas the written woman makes one dream of a thousand women." Steinberg's problem was the opposite of Flaubert's: he made drawings whose interpretations were legion, whereas if he wrote about what he drew, he would be the one rendering his work "closed, complete, and useless." He had to think about this.

Several months later, the Skira book (for he refused to call it by the despised t.i.tle given by the publisher, Table of Contents) was still going nowhere and he needed an excuse to explain why, not only to others but also to himself. Even though he read constantly and liked almost everything he read, he told anyone who asked that he had "completely lost faith, enthusiasm and respect for books." It was only a matter of time until he gave up entirely on the project. Meanwhile, he insisted (and it was true) that the only thing that gave him genuine unalloyed pleasure was what he dubbed "the exercise" that he set for himself every day, of turning out drawings with alacrity for The New Yorker. After not having a single cover in 1973 and 1974, he had four in 1975, and Parsons and Janis were planning a large exhibition for 1976 that featured many of his "old cartoons."

Now that he had his studio in the country set up as he wanted it and as it would remain for the rest of his life, he found that he did his best work there. He papered the end wall with page after page of drawings from his sketchbooks, which he mixed, matched, and s.h.i.+fted into "Manhattanite dystopias and memory-caricatures of Fascist-era Milan." Gla.s.s sliding doors kept him in touch with the changing light, landscape, and wildlife he had come to love. Papoose was endlessly entertaining as he bravely swatted flies, stood up to the occasional fox, and actually chased the deer who ambled up to eat the flowers just off the porch. Tranquillity came through painting watercolors and crafting collages; a new pleasure came through arranging the ordinary objects that gave him pleasure in his daily life into whimsical still lifes, such as the blue-and-white Chinese vase or the mushroom and pistachio cans on his large kitchen table. He took renewed pleasure in sketching his friends in what he called dal vero, as he captured Sigrid in the act of reading a newspaper or Harold Rosenberg holding forth as he emoted from his favorite chair.

Steinberg went into the city for New Year's and left it in a slightly better mood after several weeks of being warmly welcomed by his many friends, who were genuinely glad to see him. Sigrid was in Africa again, Cameroon this time, and because she and Steinberg were on the outs, she left Papoose with a cat sitter to spite him. The cat misbehaved, the sitter resigned, and Steinberg took Papoose to where both were the happiest, Springs, where he had the tranquillity to work and Papoose could chase everything from birds to foxes.

He was productive during the winter despite his depression, although he was worried enough about it to try to alleviate it on his own. His first action was to stop drinking except for an occasional gla.s.s of wine when he dined out or when he had a visitor, when he sipped just enough to keep company. His relations.h.i.+p with Tino Nivola was in one of its quietly companionable periods, and he accepted more invitations to dine with him and Ruth than he had for a long time. No one could understand why Saul Steinberg had a tendency to tease, taunt, and even belittle his old friend, but he departed from his usual impeccably polite behavior to do it to Tino, even in front of others, and no one ever questioned or upbraided him. While Ruth seethed-mostly to herself, because her husband forbade her to engage in reb.u.t.tal-Tino usually smiled and shrugged off the barbs as just "Saul's way" and not worth fussing about because his mood was bound to change momentarily. The Nivolas knew how stunned Saul had been by Lica's death and how unnerved he was by Sigrid's depression; they worried that he brooded when alone, so they invited him to dine casually and often. There was the excuse that they needed him to help eat the squid Tino bought directly from the fisherman who caught it, then grilled lightly and served with salad from their garden and boiled local potatoes. Tino invited Saul to help him hunt for mushrooms and rejoice in the cache of porcini they found behind the house, which were then cooked to perfection by Ruth.

The meals served by the Nivolas in their welcoming kitchen were also triggers for pleasant memories of past culinary pleasures. Steinberg told Aldo they reminded him of some of the first pasta dishes he ever ate, the rigatoni "in boarding houses in Milan, made with mysterious sauces of leftovers and stuff from the day before." One of the things he liked best about Colette's fiction was her description of village markets, particularly the cheese stalls; one of the things he liked least about Tolstoy was in the novel Family Happiness, because he was "outraged" that Tolstoy wrote a lengthy description of the conversation at a dinner party "with no mention of food. Gogol would have."

The exchanges about food began toward the end of 1976, during a time when Aldo was especially worried about Steinberg's depression. For five months he had not received a single one of the chatty letters Steinberg usually wrote several times each week. When Aldo probed for his reasons, Steinberg attributed his inability to write to "laziness or worse." Aldo was so worried that he lectured him about taking better care of himself and sent actual menus for him to cook, eat, and report back on. "I'm following your advice to count my blessings," Steinberg wrote, describing his previous night's dinner, a cutlet prepared in the Italian style and an eggplant appetizer that was pure "Romanian food." To thank Aldo for his concern, he sent a copy of The Joy of Cooking and, as an "hors d'oeuvre," two drawings for L'uovo alla kok (The Perfect Egg), the book Aldo was writing, for which Steinberg volunteered to provide ill.u.s.trations. He was engaged by a text that, even though "disguised as a cookbook," fell somewhere between philosophy and the novel, and he thought it deserved translation into English, which he was unable to make happen.

Still, it was difficult for Steinberg to be cheerful, and his correspondence remained sporadic. "I'm a little depressed," he confessed, as he told of waking up every day "at 3:30 full of terrors, regrets-the usual suffering." Even though he was in the country with the "delightful" Papoose, who walked beside him like a companionable dog when he went into the woods, and even though Sigrid was now well enough to make the occasional weekend visit without its ending in her tears and his silence, he could not force himself to be happy or even to be content with his lot. He was embarra.s.sed to think he was becoming like his father and all his other Romanian Jewish male ancestors, something he had long vowed never to do.

BUT HE WAS VERY GOOD ABOUT creating excuses to justify himself, to himself as well as to others, and all too quickly he found quite a few "excellent reasons" to explain why he was ent.i.tled to this depression. He blamed it on the overwhelming workload as he prepared for the Parsons and Janis dual "cartoon" exhibition and for the 1977 retrospective Maeght was determined to have. He was also drawn into the commotion connected with the ending of the two-year-long retrospective that began in Cologne in 1974 and was just now ending in Vienna. Despite his best efforts to stay aloof, the show garnered so much publicity as it traveled that he was roped into granting print interviews to European publications and being filmed for German television. Aime Maeght shrewdly appraised the steadily mounting enthusiasm as the show traveled, and despite Steinberg's insistence that he would not cooperate on a retrospective, Maeght insisted that his next exhibition had to be one and had to be ready by November 1976. That was too soon for Steinberg, who cabled "next year with pleasure," all the while plotting how to postpone any exhibition for as long as possible.

Maeght surprised him by moving with such alacrity that members of his exhibition staff were in New York within the week of Steinberg's cable. Maeght instructed them to go to Springs and make Steinberg work with them every day during the month of October to prepare the catalogue and the content for the show, which he insisted on calling "The Retrospective." Steinberg picked up the phrase and grudgingly began to call it "the retro show," even though it was a difficult concept to accept. He told Aldo he wanted a "less posthumous" t.i.tle and asked for suggestions.

To Steinberg, a retrospective held the specter of another kind of death: of a career that had reached its zenith and was all but over. Since his sister's death, he had certainly been in almost constant biographical reflection, especially about "the brutal image of the end of life." Now he would have to reflect on personal brutal images as he sorted out which works belonged to each of the "lives" that represented Milan, Santo Domingo, New York, and the places where he had been stationed during the war. It meant dividing the work into geographical as well as chronological periods and setting up categories within each. It meant finding terms and t.i.tles to define various works and periods and perhaps disputing the terms and definitions critics and scholars applied to it.

He had to make the initial selection of works to be shown, and in some cases he and those who worked with him had to track down works that he had given away or his galleries had sold. He had to become the scholar of his own life, and as Maeght's staff took over to scrutinize what he selected, they naturally disputed the facts and events of it. There were the ongoing questions of how other artists influenced him and corrections for all the biographical obfuscations and falsehoods he had given out to interviewers over the years. There were the apocryphal stories to deal with, such as how Steinberg often wore one of his paper-bag masks to c.o.c.ktail or dinner parties just to draw attention to himself while pretending to be doing just the opposite. And there were the by now boring arguments about how to categorize his work, whether he was a cartoonist, a magazine ill.u.s.trator, or a museum-worthy artist. All this had been reported or debated in so many articles and interviews that he was sick and tired of it. He did not want to do the external work that a retrospective required, and he was not sure that he was strong enough to face everything internal that he would have to dredge up and relive. It was almost too staggering to contemplate.

THE YEARS 197476 HAD TRULY BEEN watershed years in Saul Steinberg's life. He thought of them as a time of life-changing events, the two most meaningful being the death of his sister, Lica Steinberg Roman, and the coming into his life of the beloved cat Papoose. Such a linkage may have struck others as falling somewhere between the shocking and the superficial, but he spoke of it with such seriousness that no one dared to question it, at least directly to him. There were other changes as well, but perhaps with hindsight they were not so much changes as solidifications of his interactions with others. Sigrid's role as the princ.i.p.al creator of Sturm und Drang intensified, while Hedda's role as the level-headed sounding board who told him the worst about himself but loved him the best held steady. Ada remained her l.u.s.ty, cheerful self in the face of constant adversity (always needing money, seeing doctors for one ailment after another, having to move house often); she reminded him of how lovable he had once been as her youthful olino caro and of how much she still loved the sad older man he had become. But instead of cheering him up, all this attention and affection made him feel old, especially when he discovered that it was getting harder to lure nubile young women into his bed for the brief flings he still needed and wanted. He still had his steady bed partners in every one of his cities-New York, Paris, Milan-but even that was depressing. It convinced him that there was diminution on two important fronts, his creative powers and his s.e.xual prowess. All he had to look forward to was gradual death, his own and others'.

His close friend Sandy Calder died suddenly in November, the day after they had dined together at one of their favorite hangouts, Joe's Italian restaurant on Macdougal Street. When Steinberg was notified, he went immediately to give what comfort he could to Louisa and the two daughters, Sandra and Mary. He spent the entire day with them, all the while trying not to let them see the "many emotional reactions" that engulfed him. The primary one was how difficult he found it to accept his friend's death without the finality of a religious ceremony. As Steinberg had aged, his Jewish ident.i.ty had become stronger and his thinking of himself as a religious Jew had deepened. He always honored Pa.s.sover quietly and alone, preferring not to partic.i.p.ate in a seder. He went to temple on Rosh Hashanah and fasted at Yom Kippur. Although he did not formally sit s.h.i.+va for his friends, engaging in the funeral obsequies had come to be the most important part of his acceptance of the death of a dear one, so he was dismayed to learn that there was to be no religious ceremony for Calder, only a memorial service at the Whitney Museum of American Art several weeks after his death.

As one of Calder's dearest friends of longest duration, Steinberg was invited to speak. He recalled the happy weekends and holidays at the house in Roxbury, when there was music and laughter and everyone danced, especially Sandy, who would dance with a chair or his Labrador retriever if there was no other partner. Steinberg told of an evening when the noise level was so high he had to bend down to hear what Calder, sitting in a chair, was saying. To hear him, Steinberg "comfortably and naturally" sat on Calder's lap, and he thought afterward that it had been sixty years since he had sat on a man's knee.

After he spoke, he was relieved to find that he had delivered his oration without "getting tongue-tied, fainting, laughing hysterically, etc." He was happy that he had finally overcome his shyness at having to stand before a microphone in front of a large crowd and a phalanx of reporters. He called it a combination of "duty and age" but it served him well once he decided that it was akin to religious expression and all he had to do to get through it was to bear down and speak. When it was over, however, he had to retreat to the country to deal with the pain of this newest terrible loss.

IT WAS NOT THE HAPPIEST OF HOLIDAY SEASONS, and to get over it, he made a hasty trip to Paris at the start of 1977, to tell Maeght that he could not face a retrospective but would help the staff mount an ordinary exhibition. Maeght more or less accepted his decision but still called the show "The Retrospective," which it was. Maeght also insisted that Steinberg had to meet Italo Calvino, whom he had asked to write a critical essay for the catalogue because he wanted Steinberg to be elevated to the pantheon of European intellectual thought and he wanted Calvino to do it. Steinberg had forgotten that they had been introduced ten years previously, but Maeght, who was determined to bring these two iconic figures together, reminded him. Steinberg was irritated and puzzled by Calvino's desultory conversation until he suddenly blurted out that he wanted very much to write a preface and was volunteering to do so. It made Steinberg wonder if his initial response to such a respected writer might be due to his increasing intolerance for meeting new people. He thought Calvino's preface was "not bad," mostly because it was filled with quotations about Galileo, Michelangelo, and other luminaries but, most important of all, because he was "not praised directly."

The show was to open on May 11, 1977, and he planned to be there for the opening before taking his niece, Dana, to visit a cousin in Israel whom he did not know and "who rather scares me." Still, he liked being in Israel, where he was comfortable surrounded by people whom he thought he resembled and whose lives reminded him of his Romanian youth. He never pa.s.sed up a chance to go there.

DESPITE STEINBERG'S APPREHENSION, IF NOT REVULSION, over the idea of a retrospective, he could not avoid the one proposed for New York in 1978, which seemed a natural outgrowth of the 1977 show in Paris. Harold Rosenberg and Tom Armstrong, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, were the instigators of the American show, which gave Steinberg such "big worries" that he delayed for several months before eventually allowing them to persuade him that he had to do it, although he was perturbed that the "d.a.m.ned flatterers and confounded old men" would get their way. Astonis.h.i.+ngly, they were all younger than he, and he was not at all happy about being "venerable."

It took the always succinct and direct Alexander Lindey to put the occasion into the proper perspective: "A retrospective usually comes toward the twilight of an artist's career. In your case it has occurred at a time when you are at the height of your creative powers. What a happy circ.u.mstance!" Steinberg wasn't so sure about that, but it was always difficult to refuse Harold Rosenberg, who recognized his old friend's deepening depression and saw the retrospective as a tremendous opportunity for personal and professional renewal. Steinberg remained convinced that it was just the opposite, downhill all the way. In that glum mood, he began one of the hardest-working, most grueling years of his life.

CHAPTER 37.

THE MAN WHO DID THAT POSTER.

There is no frontier in America. If you want, the nearest thing would be Weehauken. The frontier goes from New York to New Jersey.

From the moment it graced the cover of The New Yorker on March 29, 1976, until Saul Steinberg's death more than two decades later, he was known to most people (as he lamented later in life) as "the man who did that poster." n.o.body knows whether the genesis of the "View of the World from 9th Avenue" came from one of the free-wheeling, far-ranging dialogues of free a.s.sociation that happened every time Saul Steinberg and Harold Rosenberg got together, but it is a possibility, because one of Steinberg's favorite anecdotes was about how a real-life incident had led him to create the pineapple as one of his most iconic symbols.

A decade before he made the "9th Avenue" drawing, Steinberg told Claire Nivola that "one of the very rare times when a real incident gave [him] the idea" of the symbolic meaning he wanted to convey came whenever he drew a pineapple. It happened in the mid-1950s, during the years of his closest intellectual friends.h.i.+p with Dorothy Norman. Steinberg was visiting her in East Hampton, where, as in her New York town house, she presided over an informal salon of some of the most interesting people in the creative professions. Norman was writing a book t.i.tled The Heroic Encounter to accompany a collection of objects and photographs she planned to exhibit at the Willard Gallery in New York. As she described her intentions to Steinberg, he thought the project seemed "hopeless" because the material was so vast, disparate, and personal. The only point on which they agreed was that the history of art was the story of humanity's ongoing struggle in one "heroic encounter" after another, all of which were portrayed through myth and symbol.

Some months later, on a hot summer afternoon when Steinberg dropped in at the Rosenberg house in Springs, he found Harold sitting at the kitchen table wielding a large kitchen knife and "bothering" a pineapple. "Voila! The Heroic Encounter," Steinberg said theatrically, as Dorothy Norman's t.i.tle popped into his mind. Harold hacked away at a pineapple that stubbornly refused to be cut, and his expression seemed to Steinberg "crocodilian ... a sinister smile." Steinberg didn't remember who won, but the memory of Rosenberg's battle always made him think that the top or "feathered" half of the pineapple was "the hero," whereas the p.r.i.c.kly bulb below it was "the dragon" that the hero was compelled to slay.

Steinberg had been playing with representations of the North American continent for well over a decade before the "9th Avenue" poster took its final form. In 1966 he did a series of drawings for a three-part profile of Los Angeles in The New Yorker, some of which featured the West Coast as if the artist were poised high above the Pacific Ocean looking down on the city. In 1973 he switched coasts for "The West Side," a drawing that placed Manhattan Island at the center of a universe that included a collection of amorphous lumps denoting the five boroughs (Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island), with a vague sixth lump known as Upstate. Beyond the city, a sun peeked over the Atlantic Ocean at the top of the drawing, while the largest lump of all, an upside-down bean-shaped "USA," filled the bottom. After he made this one, Steinberg started to draw visions of a city that might have been New York and might have had a river beyond it, but without any of his iconic images: no Chrysler or Empire State Building, no Statue of Liberty, and no other recognizable landmarks. There was only a power station, which may or may not have been the one on East 14th Street, but the buildings along the horizon looked as if they would be more at home on Red Square in Moscow than along the Hudson River.

There were other versions of cityscapes, and in one of them Steinberg added words, marking off 9th and 10th Avenues, the Hudson River, and a vague "America," but it was still very much like his earliest drawings, with nothing except the street names to make the viewer aware of a specific place. In another version, "Jersey" showed up beyond the Hudson River, and the landscape included Texas, Nevada, and Canada. All these were drawn on 8-by-11-inch paper, but he expanded the next version to 20 by 15 inches, then to 26 by 19 inches, and finally to the largest, 28 by 19 inches. The streetscape eventually included the ordinary squat redbrick apartment buildings and warehouses that dot the midtown West Side of New York, to which he added some generic-shaped cars and many scritch-scratches of rubber-stamp people who scurry along the sidewalks.

When viewers first saw the magazine cover, the usual response was almost always a smile of recognition swiftly followed with a nod of superiority over the parochialism of supposedly sophisticated New Yorkers, who allegedly believe the world ends once they cross the Hudson River. n.o.body, it seemed, stopped to consider that Steinberg was showing how the New Yorkers' parochialism was no different from every other American's, the only difference being that New Yorkers seldom ventured outside the small neighborhood villages into which the great city is divided. Steinberg's ordinary "crummy" New Yorkers are rendered as impersonal rubber stamps who live in the "crummy" parts of town seldom seen by tourists, and who are too busy just making it through another day to have time to think about the larger world beyond the appointed rounds of where they live and work.

After the magazine's legendary reader, "the little old lady in Dubuque," enjoyed her moment of condescension with the cover, she and the rest of Steinberg's viewers wanted to know why none of his typical landmarks were included to identify the grandeur for which the city is famous. He had a ready answer: this was a drawing of how "the crummy people"-that is, the working cla.s.ses-see the world that lies beyond their immediate neighborhood. He never intended to make people feel superior or even comfortable when they looked at this drawing, for his thoughts about America, particularly New York and its environs, had darkened considerably during the past decade. Like most of the rest of the country, he had been "glued to the television" and was in "paralysis" over the Watergate affair. During the worst of the Vietnam War, he thought it was probably for the best that the average American was confronted by its brutality in every newspaper headline or television broadcast. In a paraphrase of Gertrude Stein's famous remark about Oakland, California, "There's no there there," Steinberg enlarged the phrase to include the entire continent: "Today you get from here, where you board the plane, to there, where you get off. There's nothing in between, not like it used to be."

And just as the country was facing one crisis after another, so too was he. There were too many "boring parties and primitive conversations, nagging, bragging, the usual kindergarten." He fled from the city at every opportunity because he thought it had been ruined by an influx of poor people, while paradoxically, East Hampton, where he went for solace and tranquillity, was "ruined by invasion of the rich." The country was roiled by gasoline shortages, falling house prices, and rising unemployment, and he could see all this clearly in eastern Long Island, where there were no cars in the supermarket parking lot, many stores had to close, and "everyone has left, due to poverty."

By the time the "View of the World from 9th Avenue" appeared, it was not meant to be the cheerful, optimistic poster people took it for, and the public misreading of Steinberg's intention only deepened his chronically gloomy outlook. When the demand for copies of the cover became more than the magazine could handle, a contract to reproduce a poster was quickly drawn up, and by 1980 25,000 copies had already been sold. As years pa.s.sed, it became a kind of public shorthand for New York in the American imagination: in 1992, at Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court, the president of the New York State Bar a.s.sociation used Steinberg's iconic poster as an example of how Justice Ginsburg's vision would be far vaster than "how the world revolved around 7th [sic] Avenue." Chambers of commerce all over the world literally stole the idea as they adapted the poster to promote their cities and organizations, while individuals as well as publications created other kinds of rip-offs.

Steinberg ama.s.sed a file of imitations a good five or six inches thick, as people from all over the world sent him various versions, and it made him fume repeatedly about everything from plagiarism to copyright infringement. Time and again Alexander Lindey had to restrain him from suing over everything from Ts.h.i.+rts to coffee mugs that bore an adaptation of the poster. Steinberg complained that he hated to walk down Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 59th Streets, for the windows of every souvenir shop he pa.s.sed had some rip-off relating to the cover that made him wince. There were heated exchanges between the angry and outraged Steinberg and the obviously irritated Alexander Lindey, whose patience wore exceedingly thin as he told his client repeatedly that he had no grounds to sue. Steinberg insisted that he did, and just when the situation threatened to explode, he usually backed off and sent Lindey another of his many euphemistic apologies for his "Mittel Europa att.i.tudes."

The fuss over the cover showed no sign of abating, and Steinberg festered for the next seven years, until 1984, when he finally had legitimate grounds to sue for copyright infringement. He sprang to the ready when Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., appropriated specific images of some of the buildings from his poster for one they created to promote the movie Moscow on the Hudson. It took four years for Steinberg to win his case, and by that time Alexander Lindey had retired. After Steinberg paid his new lawyers at Rembar & Curtis, his share of the settlement was an impressive $225,859.49.

Despite the fact that the decade from the time the drawing appeared on the New Yorker cover until the lawsuit was settled was so full of personal trauma and an overload of professional work, Steinberg was possessed with an energy fueled by anger, and he stayed focused on righting alleged wrongs connected to the poster. Other people were making a great deal of money using his creation, and it was natural for him to want retribution. He remained fixated on justice until he got it, for as with so many other aspects of his character, looking back and focusing on the past was what he did best.

MEANWHILE, HIS IMMEDIATE PROBLEM WAS THE Whitney retrospective, and there were many facets with which only he could deal. Once he made the commitment to the "nightmare" (as he called the exhibition), Steinberg took the entire process very seriously: "I accepted, I have to do it and will get to work so as to do it well." A major undertaking was the chronology, and only he could prepare it. He had been out of touch with his Denver and New York cousins for a very long time, especially the Danson family, who had done so much to bring him to the United States. To ensure that his memories were factually correct, he contacted Henrietta Danson to ask for any help she could give, particularly with family photographs. She was a great help, as she had saved everything pertaining to his coming to America, starting with correspondence dating from the time he was desperate to leave Italy, and she sent it all to him. She called the letters "a treasure trove" as she again read about all the false starts and confusions connected with securing his visa. She noted how his writing showed the development of his ability to express himself in English in the chatty letters he wrote about the trials of life in Santo Domingo. She also had his wartime letters, full of blacked-out material, and even the "secret note" he had tried to send to his parents, which obviously never made it through censors.h.i.+p. From the vantage point of what his life had become since the war ended, she told him, "It all reads like a novel...It seems hard to believe any of it."

STEINBERG URGED ALDO BUZZI-or perhaps begged is more accurate-to come to Springs in September 1977 and help him prepare for the retrospective. He was so eager for Aldo to come that he tried to entice him with the news of his first flying lesson, during which the pilot was so pleased with Steinberg's progress that he let him take over the controls. He promised to take Aldo on a flight, but that news did not thrill him. He came to Springs but managed not to get into an airplane at all, let alone one piloted by Steinberg, who soon tired of lessons and gave them up.

To help both himself and Aldo, Steinberg made an outline of the work he had to do for the retrospective. The first task was to select the pictures: at first the museum wanted approximately 150, but by the time everyone had considered all the phases of his career, they agreed that they needed almost 250 to encompa.s.s its full range. Steinberg knew that was too many but resigned himself to making the selection. Harold Rosenberg was engaged to write the text and edit the catalogue, and with his usual exuberance, he was full of ideas for what was becoming a very large and expensive book. Steinberg called it "the Art Book I've feared and avoided, and which makes my hand tremble." When he agreed to the retrospective, he had hoped for "a show and a simple catalogue," but it was fast becoming the very thing he had tried for years to avoid: "a heavy, expensive vulgar book, which is the stuff on which museums feed." Part of his animus came from the fact that although he would get a small royalty on every copy sold, the book was a catalogue and the property of the museum, which would glean the real profit.

To get through the preparations for both the book and the exhibition, he was determined to do two things: to "defend" himself and to make the best of the situation. He and Aldo conducted mock interviews based on the questions that interviewers were bound to ask. It paid off, and he thanked Aldo when they quoted him "with precision." He prepared for the ordeal of the opening and its hoopla by working on his physical stamina, riding his bike most days around the country roads leading to Louse Point and watching his diet by eliminating whiskey, bread, and desserts. He slimmed down to the same weight he had carried in 1955, a fact that he knew because he checked the scale against his driver's license from that year, one of the doc.u.ments he had unearthed while trolling through his past life.

To prepare the chronology of his life and work, "a guy from the museum, slow and patient," was a.s.signed to help him. The compilation was frustratingly slow, and as he needed someone whose memories overlapped his own, he naturally turned to Aldo. There were also the bibliography and the list of t.i.tles, both for works that already had names and for those that did not, which had to be a.s.signed t.i.tles. Also, although the museum staff was in charge of contacting collectors who owned paintings the curators wanted to exhibit, they occasionally had to enlist Steinberg to help with a few of the recalcitrant, the reluctant, and in several rare instances the uncooperative. It was exactly the kind of human interaction he detested, but he did it. Everything had to be finished by November to be ready for the April 1978 opening. When time seemed against him in mid-August, Steinberg decided that if it turned out well, it would be by a miracle.

He hovered over the museum's staff as they did the work of a.s.sembling the paintings and drawings from which he made the final selection, but he needed help to a.s.semble the non-art material. Sheila Schwartz, an art historian and editor who had been working with Leo Steinberg, agreed to help him one day each week whenever he was in the city. One of her earliest duties was to buy a typewriter on which to record his remarks for the chronology and, as he asked her to do, to correct him if he made mistakes in English. When she did, Steinberg would listen intently, then say, "No, that doesn't sound like me," and as Schwartz remembered, "back we'd go to his original wording."

Working with Schwartz required Steinberg to go through his voluminous files of letters and papers. His file cabinets contained "fat, messy, amorphous folders," and he explained how he wanted her to put them into an order that would permit him to lay hands on exactly what he needed. Schwartz began by breaking down the contents of the first several files and creating many new folders with precise identifications. Steinberg took one look at it and said, "No, I can't work this way," and put everything back into the original messy files. She thought he was bothered by what was "(to him) excessive categorization and definitiveness; his intellect and imagination wanted things in a constant state of flux."

Everyone who read the chronology agreed that it complemented Rosenberg's text and vice versa; as the book dealer John L. Hochmann, put it, "Most chronologies read like tombstones, but this one reads like a narrative." Work on the retrospective continued as 1977 ended, with Steinberg giving interviews nonstop and being photographed for the many feature articles generated by the Whitney's publicity department. He still had to complete the poster, give final approval for the printed invitations, and, most important of all, prepare the guest list, a task he compared to the logistics for the Battle of Austerlitz.

IT WAS TOO COLD AND THERE was too much snow that December to go to the country, so Steinberg stayed in New York and went to dinner parties every night in a constant round of "new people and pretty women." He was able to hold court and pontificate with pleasure because Sigrid was "traveling," and since he was not involved with other women at the time, "words and ideas [came] more freely." As had happened in the past when he had allowed himself to be wined and dined exclusively by the cream of New York society and the celebrities whose boldfaced names dotted the tabloid gossip columns, he earned the enmity of old friends. One among the several was Sasha Schneider, who asked Steinberg to create a poster for a concert he planned to give to celebrate his seventieth birthday in October 1978. Steinberg knew that he had too many other commitments, and when the deadline arrived, he had not been able even to begin it. When Schneider phoned to ask about his progress, Steinberg became nasty and defensive and Schneider withdrew the request, saying that it was more important to keep the friends.h.i.+p that had begun almost four decades earlier than to fight over a poster. But he accused Steinberg of having time to hobn.o.b only with the rich and famous and claimed that, as one of Steinberg's oldest friends, he had "the right" to remind him that his own seventieth birthday was fast approaching, and when it arrived, he might need the old friends who truly cared for him. Steinberg did not reply, but he hurriedly made the poster.

This was the social climate in which Steinberg prepared his guest list for the opening night dinner on April 13, 1978, for friends of the museum, lenders, and his personal guests. Not only did he have to hobn.o.b with the international glitterati at the dinner, but he also had to see them at other times, and he antic.i.p.ated having a few frantic weeks after the opening. After all the help Aldo had given him, Steinberg asked him not to come because he would be too nervous to enjoy his company or give his old friend the attention he thought he deserved. However, he put Hedda at the top of his list of invitees. Despite her protests that she should not attend the dinner but should leave the evening free to be Sigrid's, he insisted that she had to be there.

He and Sigrid were in a period of cooled pa.s.sion and a pattern of cordiality when she was in New York, which was not often because she spent so much time in Mali. She was especially dreading the opening, and to get away from it she had gone to Mali, where she had a long-established network of native friends and was having an affair with one of a series of African lovers. Steinberg insisted that she had to be present for the opening dinner and she came back reluctantly, which was enough to make them both tense.

On the night of the opening, photographers lined the sidewalks as everyone from Jacqueline Kennedy Ona.s.sis to Andy Warhol to Woody Allen mounted the steps into the museum. What a "cla.s.sic way to show muscle," Steinberg gloated. The New York Times critic Enid Nemy could not resist a tongue-in-cheek appraisal of the crowd by quoting Leo Lerman's partner, Gray Foy, who gushed about how much he adored Hedda Sterne before he got in a zinger about how she and Steinberg had "separated (but did not divorce) almost two decades ago, but artists never did care about time." And, as Hedda had feared there would be, there was an incident at the dinner involving her and Sigrid.

Steinberg was seated at the head table with Mrs. Ona.s.sis on his right and the museum director, Tom Armstrong, on her right, the rest of the table being filled with various luminaries and dignitaries. Sigrid and Hedda were each placed prominently at other, separate tables. As the dinner was winding down and guests were getting up to mingle and chat, Dore Ashton sat down next to Steinberg to offer praise for the exhibition. She was a genuine friend to Steinberg and to the two women, so she made a remark in total innocence about how wonderful it was that his "ex-wife" (Hedda) could be on such good terms with his "new one" (Sigrid). Steinberg erupted; he slammed his hand down on the table and set the cutlery bouncing as he said, "Hedda is my WIFE! She is, was, and always will be!" Unfortunately, Sigrid was standing directly behind him and heard everything. So too did several others, who hurried to tell Hedda what had just happened. Hedda left quietly and quickly; Sigrid stayed on, awkward and insecure, and she never forgave him. Her embarra.s.sment was magnified when People magazine interviewed Steinberg and chose to highlight his relations.h.i.+p with the two women in its coverage of the exhibition. In a diary entry from 1985, Sigrid wrote a list of reasons that she hated him; most of all she hated him for his "last exhibition, 1978," and "your interview ... and what it did for me."

AS FOR THE EXHIBITION ITSELF, there was mostly critical praise, with a few of the usual questions and quibbles about Steinberg's place in the world of art. Publishers Weekly led off with a review of the catalogue, and after calling it "a dazzling gallery [of his] mad, sardonic, and hilarious" work, it referred to him as a "cartoonist" and offered a "resounding 'yes!' " to the skeptics who asked, "But is Steinberg an artist?" The architecture critic Paul Goldberger sidestepped the question, calling the retrospective "one of the best pieces of architectural criticism in years," while reporter Kim Levin paraphrased Anais Nin by calling Steinberg "A Spy in the House of Art." Clearly the critics did not know what to do with such a vast collection of disparate creativity. The International Herald-Tribune paid more attention to the "media blitz" surrounding Steinberg than to the show itself, as it seemed more content to list feature articles-in the New York Times Magazine and Newsweek-and the cover features in Horizon and Ti