Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 7

CHAPTER 15.

THE DRAFTSMAN-LAUREATE OF MODERNISM.

Your princ.i.p.al fear, I think, is caused by your great talent-facility-which becomes a burden (like too great beauty), particularly with a background that causes masochism, like feeling guilty.

It was more than "a point of honor" for Steinberg to fulfill the Boston commission; he needed to do it for the money and was disappointed when it was canceled. His mood improved after he persuaded Hedda that her anger over the girl's letter had been unfounded. He stayed in New York just long enough to pick up what supplies he needed before leaving for a New Yorker a.s.signment in Chicago, where he was to attend the two 1952 political conventions and make drawings to accompany Richard Rovere's reportage. Hedda went with him for the Republican convention, which came first, but she did not stay on for the Democratic one. By the end of July he had exchanged Chicago's heat and humidity for the steam bath that was New York in pre-air-conditioned days. The rest of the summer pa.s.sed in a lazy haze, too hot to do any real work, so he went to the movies every night just to sit in air conditioning. "I must have seen 200 films," he exaggerated to Aldo, remembering nothing about any of them. He concluded that it was "a mistake to spend the summer at home" and vowed never to do it again.

In early September, he and Hedda were off together, flying to Brazil for a joint exhibition that opened at the most prestigious museum in the country, the Museu de Arte de So Paulo (MASP), and then traveled to Rio de Janeiro. The show had been in the works since 1950, thanks to the Civita brothers and two other Italian friends who had been at the Politecnico with Steinberg before settling in Brazil: Pietro Bardi, the founding director of MASP, and his wife, the architect Lina Bo Bardi. The Bardis and the Civita brothers knew that it would be an expensive exhibition and other sponsors would be needed to help finance it, so they started with the enthusiastic American consul general, William Krauss. Between the United States government and Brazilian benefactors, the money was raised and dates were set for a three-week exhibition, which opened on September 18, 1952.

Steinberg and Sterne flew to Rio the day before the opening and then spent the next ten days in So Paulo, where Bardi kept them busier than their wildest imaginings. He was a brilliant publicist who filled every possible venue with tantalizing information, and every day brought new press releases or pamphlets highlighting their work while dropping teasing tidbits about their personalities. Steinberg was described as having "invented a new world by simply judging his own world" and by knowing "exactly how to reap the ridiculousness in all things futile, all wrong headed ambitions and distorted vanities." Sterne was touted as "an avant-garde painter ... an utterly paradoxical artist, given her intimate allegiance to the real object." By the time the show opened, the public was lining up to see it and the press was clamoring for interviews.

An issue of the important arts magazine Habitat gave them the cover and showcased their art with photos and articles. As the pressure for interviews mounted, Steinberg rebelled, insisting that "his person" was of no interest and all attention had to be paid to the work: "You could stand a matchstick in front of the camera and it would be the same thing." Bardi saw this as another opportunity for publicity and in quick reb.u.t.tal composed a new promotional text using a pa.s.sage from Habitat that declared "the man himself" was indeed very interesting because of the way he resembled his own drawings: "His bottle-end gla.s.ses hide his eyes, turning him into one of his own pupilless characters, those empty-eyed figures that see nothing. He walks with his hands in his trouser pockets and his blazer becomes a kind of wing. As he stands there in the middle of the exhibition hall, shoulders. .h.i.tched, surveying the public, he becomes a bird. At least that is how we begin to muse ... It was he who taught us to transform people into animals, because it was he who turned the waiters of San Marco Square in Venice into birds, and the pigeons into human beings."

Bardi had previously hosted exhibitions by other North American artists, among them Richard Neutra and Calder, but Steinberg and Sterne were the ones who brought the museum its largest audience to date. Everyone wanted to meet them, and Bardi invited the cream of Brazilian society to receptions at the museum and parties in his home, the famed House of Gla.s.s designed by his wife. It was the first house built in what later became a fas.h.i.+onable suburb but was then just a tropical forest on the outskirts of the city, a setting that reinforced Steinberg's observation that the entire country was one huge insect infestation. On their first night in Brazil, when they were on their way from the airport to the Copacabana Palace Hotel, he and Hedda saw a traffic accident that they thought was eerily prescient of their exhibition: a car was turned upside-down, reminding them of a beetle and bringing to mind images of the machines and machinelike insects in some of Hedda's paintings. When they went to stay in the House of Gla.s.s, they were witnesses to an "insect ma.s.sacre" every night.

They were not impressed with the major Brazilian cities, which Steinberg dubbed "tropical Bucharest." The only beauty was "among the colonial things ... the usual bra.s.s, mahogany and tiles as decorations, the open trams ... thousands of equestrian monuments, the vultures that circle over the sidewalk in search of carrion." He made drawings of these, and they and other drawings he made while touring found their way into his sketchbooks; some, in one form or another, were included in The Pa.s.sport.

By late October Steinberg and Sterne were back in New York, where Steinberg had to sandwich his own work in between commercial a.s.signments. He needed thirty drawings to replace those that had been sold for the smaller version of the Parsons-Janis show that was to open at the Perls Gallery in Beverly Hills in December, and he had to ama.s.s a larger number for a more important exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris the following March. He had not done any lucrative work for such a long time that he had to spend the first three months of 1953 working on paid commissions for everything from a container corporation's advertis.e.m.e.nts to Hallmark cards. He was furious when Raymond W. Hall and other Hallmark executives interrupted his work to insist that he go to Kansas City for personal meetings to discuss their ongoing differences.

Raymond Hall wanted Steinberg's drawings badly enough to pay him a minimum commission of $10,000 each year, but he was a demanding employer who frequently questioned and often rejected Steinberg's offerings. One refusal that particularly rankled was when Hall responded to his Valentine's Day submissions through a committee memo: "The general feeling ... is that this design does not express a Valentine's feeling and it would do much better if it had some Valentine motif, or an indication of a Valentine in it." The committee invited Steinberg to "try again." More trouble with Hallmark came when the Museum of Modern Art placed a large order for an original design for Christmas cards that Steinberg had done before he signed the contract granting exclusivity to Hallmark. Hall was furious with Monroe Wheeler's casual explanation that he had reordered the cards because "MoMA patrons wanted them." It took several telephone conversations and personal meetings for Steinberg to make Wheeler desist and to placate Hall. The incident was not resolved until Wheeler promised that MoMA would not reprint again, even though he told Hall from the beginning that the museum's sales would never be "challenging compet.i.tion" to Hallmark's.

Steinberg hated personal dealings such as these, but often there was no way to avoid them, since many employers insisted on dealing directly with the artist with the quirky vision. He tried to shunt them off onto his lawyer, Alexander Lindey, but if they persisted, he simply ignored them, thus earning a reputation for being cranky, p.r.i.c.kly, and exceedingly difficult. Actually he was an inordinately polite man, sometimes upset for days over having to be rude when people who worked in advertising or publicity would not take his no for an answer and hounded him to change it.

STEINBERG WORKED STEADILY BY DAY, but every night he partied. More and more he was at the center of the most interesting and important social, intellectual, and artistic groups in New York. It was the beginning of the era of the iconic dinner table, when a hostess would mix and match guests from different worlds, wooing some from, say, Park Avenue society or national politics by hinting that important names in art or literature would be gracing her dining room. Quite often Steinberg's name was dangled as the magnet to attract others. It was also the beginning of the era when modern American art became a commodity with significant market value, and for every letter Steinberg received from a commercial firm wanting to pay for his work, he received at least two from people who wanted to buy and collect it.

Hedda recalled Saul's reaction at a small informal supper with Mark Rothko in her 71st Street kitchen, when Rothko bemoaned the way artists were being turned into "marketable mills, workers who produce something buyers want." She remembered Rothko telling how "people used to come into the studio and look at the work and you would have real engagement, a discussion before you made the transaction, the actual sale and purchase. Now, they just come in and buy. They hardly look at it. No discussion, no transaction." Steinberg sat silently while Rothko spoke, but after he left, he muttered something about how it was all very well for those who did not have dependents to complain about how buyers devalued their artistry and respected only the high prices; as for him, he had responsibilities and no time to kvetch about the att.i.tudes of buyers or the prices they paid. Knowing full well the financial pressure he was under, Hedda wisely said nothing.

Besides supporting his parents and his sister's family, he steadily received requests from relatives, and just as steadily he sent checks by return mail to four or five in Israel. If one of them made a slightly barbed comment comparing Saul's wealthy and successful American life with their own poverty in Israel, he ignored it. He was also trying to find discreet reasons to funnel money as regularly as he could to Aldo, and now to Ada as well. She had resumed fairly regular contact with Saul, and although she never asked directly for help, each letter contained an account of some new tribulation with a hint that she could use money; here again, he always sent a sizable check by return mail. And as his feelings of civic responsibility deepened, he felt an obligation to contribute money to everything from Adlai Stevenson's presidential campaign to the fund drives of suburban Jewish congregations. His friends.h.i.+ps with Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald grew, and both had a strong influence on his naturally left-leaning and liberal political sensibilities; in years to come he would quietly observe the positions taken by writers for the Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Reporter and often adopt them for himself. He gave freely to all the causes they embraced.

STEINBERG HAD ACCEPTED SO MUCH COMMERCIAL work that he found himself giving short shrift to one of his most important solo exhibitions, the one being mounted by Aime Maeght for March 1953. In the few short years since its founding, the Paris Galerie Maeght had become one of the most prestigious in the international art world. Maeght wanted 110 drawings, but Steinberg had so many other deadlines that he did not finish his selection until early February. Because more than half were small, he decided to carry them by hand; the rest were s.h.i.+pped by Parsons and Janis, and he could only hope they would arrive in time for the opening, which Maeght had had to delay until April 17. Maeght planned to dedicate an edition of Derriere le Miroir, the exquisite oversized publication that featured lithographs of the artist's work, with an accompanying text by a distinguished writer. When he asked who should write the preface, Steinberg chose Le Corbusier, but time was short, and if Maeght actually asked Le Corbusier to write it, his reason for turning it down remains unknown. This DLM became one of the few without any text.

On March 1, with his new pa.s.sport in hand, Steinberg boarded a plane to Paris, not sleeping during the fourteen-hour flight but "eating chicken, drinking highb.a.l.l.s, and reading Orwell." He checked into the Hotel Crillon, planning to stay overnight to catch up on sleep, make appointments, and give himself a quiet day before telling Aime Maeght that he had arrived. Then he planned to check into a smaller hotel on the Left Bank, where he could have an incognito week before surrendering for publicity engagements. He told Hedda he had not done anything but go to the movies, when in fact he was out all the time.

During his two months in Paris, his calendar was filled with every glittering name in the worlds of art and culture. He met many luminaries through Maeght at his gallery or his home, among them two artists to whom Maeght was devoted, Georges Braque and Joan Miro. Braque remained a cordial but formal and distant contact, while Miro became a good friend. Mme. la Baronne Elie de Rothschild liked his show and invited him to dinner, which led to other invitations from members of the French n.o.bility. The German publisher Rowohlt courted Steinberg by going to his hotel several times to discuss possible projects and to introduce him to some of his writers who were pa.s.sing through Paris. Steinberg met several times with his European agent, Jennie (Mrs. William) Bradley, who tried to interest him in various doc.u.mentaries that were never realized. On the personal side, Janet Flanner entertained him at lunches and dinners. He dined separately with Marcel Duhamel and Yves Tanguy and saw his friend Cartier-Bresson. He went to the home of Meyer Chagall, where he conversed with Roland Pet.i.t about the ballet and cemented his lifelong friends.h.i.+p with Jean Helion over conversations about techniques of painting. In the short time he and Steinberg knew each other, Helion became such a close friend that Steinberg initiated a correspondence in which he exchanged more personal information than he did with anyone else but Hedda Sterne and Aldo Buzzi. Among the other guests at Chagall's were Jean Dubuffet (who also became a cordial friend), the art historian Charles Estienne, and the wealthy English art collector Peter Watson, whose money was largely responsible for the creation of London's Inst.i.tute of Contemporary Arts. There were also lunches, c.o.c.ktails, or dinners with Robert Doisneau, Giacometti, and Gi Ponti. And Steinberg still managed to save several long afternoons to browse for rare books, which he had begun to collect.

On this trip he was especially interested in books about Turkey, because he had made several visits to study the Louvre's exhibition "Les Splendeurs de l'Art Turc." It was homework in a sense, because he had long wanted to visit Turkey and it inspired him to make a spur-of-the-moment decision to get away from his frenetic Parisian life and go there. He crammed the trip in before the one of several weeks when he had to be in Rome for work connected with an exhibition of Hedda's paintings. The journey began with a brief stop in Nice to visit his parents, where he stayed once again in a hotel to escape from Rosa's complaints. Then he flew to Istanbul via Zurich and Athens, as there were no direct connections at the time. The weather was bad and he was delayed in Athens, but he didn't mind because he liked the "beautiful and civilized city" and fantasized about returning for several months. It brought back memories of his first year at the Politecnico, when he studied Greek architecture and was so fascinated by the Temple of the Winds that he spent six months drawing it. But what impressed him most of all were the smells of Athens: "black olives, garlic, cheeses, placinta, sweets ... a real treat for the nose." Istanbul, by contrast, was "terrible." He had trouble finding a hotel room and slept the first night in a "nameless inn, filthiest bed." When he finally got a room, it was "modernistic and cubistic Turk." The food was inedible and the city was "full of shapeless people." Everything gave him nightmares and he could not wait to leave.

He flew to Rome, where he saw Aldo alone and was relieved that the reunion was filled with their old jos.h.i.+ng camaraderie. He was happy when Aldo agreed to come to New York in the fall and stay for three months, but otherwise he worked mostly on the arrangements for the Hedda Sterne show at the Galleria dell'Obelisco. The hardest part of the work involved writing letters to persuade her that even though it was only a ten-day exhibit, it was well worth doing. She thought it was too much to do for too a short time, with too much of their money being spent on expenses for unlikely sales; he said the final decision was hers but he would be unhappy if she refused. To compensate for the show's brevity, he ordered the gallery to make "an especially beautiful catalogue" that he would pay for, and he gave specific instructions for the artist to be identified simply as "Hedda Sterne, painter," and not as "the wife of Steinberg." When she heard of how much money he had already spent and how hard he was working on her behalf, Hedda agreed to the show.

STEINBERG RETURNED TO PARIS, PLANNING TO BE "invisible" while the exhibition was running, but as usual his calendar was too full for him to hide out. This time he only saw people who had become good friends: Janet Flanner, Giacometti, Helion, and Miro. His only business dinner was with Mrs. Bradley, but here again he turned her into another of his foreign representatives, all frustrated by the inability to get him to commit to any of the projects on offer. She wanted him to "settle a book or two, a doc.u.mentary, drawings for a tapestry, [and to] decide on shows in Torino, Zurich, Stockholm, maybe in Germany, etc." He was too frazzled to make decisions and begged her indulgence as he postponed everything. He was actually relieved when he found out how many other requests he had avoided by running away to Istanbul, such as when his new German-language publisher, Daniel Keel of Zurich's Diogenes Verlag, made a spur-of-the-moment trip to Paris to meet his new author, only to find that Steinberg was not there.

By the middle of June and despite his resolve never to spend the summer in New York again, he was there for most of it, almost submerged by work and taking on many more projects than was reasonable because once again he needed to make up for all the time he had lost while in Europe. He had sold some drawings at the Maeght show, but not as many as he hoped. As he had left instructions with Maeght's accountant to send all monies directly to his father in Nice, he had to earn more for his own support. Once again the commercial work interfered with preparations for an important upcoming show. This one, of forty-five drawings at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, required much more personal involvement than usual: after selecting the pictures, he had to get them ready for s.h.i.+pping, fill out the insurance valuation forms, and then respond to the many requests from museum personnel for everything from publicity about himself to captions for the work. Clearly he needed an a.s.sistant, but he had no time to find one. At the same time he was dealing with legal issues concerning Aldo's forthcoming visit: his lawyer had to prepare an affidavit that Steinberg would be financially responsible if Aldo overstayed his visitor's visa, and this meant gathering various tax forms and earning statements from his accountant and attorney.

It was an unusually stressful time, and as usually happened when he was under stress, problems flared with his teeth. For several days before his appointment with the dentist, he girded for pain by drinking scotch more heavily than usual. He worried that he was drinking too much in general but did nothing to curtail it, as whiskey also kept him from worrying about time lost from work. It also helped him to cope with another major worry, this one that the editors of The New Yorker might be forgetting him.

Although he had seldom shown up at The New Yorker's weekly meetings of the art department, he thought it professionally expedient to make periodic appointments with the staff to keep his work in the forefront of their minds. Lately there had been ominous signals: Jim Geraghty had started returning many drawings as unsuitable. Steinberg had always tried to make his work serve a dual purpose, often selecting from those he had on file whenever he thought they would fit into advertising as well as in magazines, and now that he was under so much pressure, he was trying to make much more of his work do double duty. He chose, for example, drawings and cartoons that had appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's to ill.u.s.trate the small pamphlet ABC for Collectors of American Contemporary Art, and he sent others to E. H. Gombrich for his Bollingen book, Art and Illusion. Steinberg was plucking old work from his files for The New Yorker, and this was not working for Geraghty. It seemed especially important to drop in casually at his office and take him to lunch at the Algonquin, because Geraghty, who had always phoned Steinberg whenever he rejected a drawing, now began to send carefully worded letters like this one: "There must be an area where our demands coincide with your aspirations. This bunch of drawings is tantalizing, frustrating, infuriating, not to mention wonderful, amazing, and (to use a patronizing word) promising. The Magazine Steinberg and the Gallery Steinberg can't be the same person and you shouldn't ask that they be."

Steinberg accepted that Geraghty would not automatically buy anything he happened to have on hand, and he put a great deal of effort into getting back into the good graces of everyone he worked with at the magazine. It was frustrating to take time away from meeting other deadlines just to be seen walking through the hallways, but Steinberg did it, his mood always lightening when he stopped on the compositors' floor and became deeply engrossed in technical conversations about layout and typography. He usually avoided the staff's large c.o.c.ktail parties, but he needed to see and be seen, so he went to one hosted by the writer Maeve Brennan and another by Ross's ex-wife, Jane Grant. He was a frequent visitor at Geoffrey and Daphne h.e.l.lman's, first when they were still married and later after they separated. He lunched frequently at the Algonquin with the editors William Shawn and Hawley Truax.

He also began to frequent the gatherings at Benjamin Sonnenberg's nineteenth-century mansion on Gramercy Park and at Dorothy Norman's ultramodern town house on the Upper East Side, where he could count on chatting with New Yorker staffers. After Cartier-Bresson introduced him to Dominique de Menil at Betty Parsons's gallery, Steinberg spontaneously invited her to supper in the kitchen with him and Hedda; in return, she invited him to parties in her New York apartment and was soon an avid collector of his work. On one of his few excursions downtown he took Bill de Kooning to dinner at an Eighth Street restaurant, but he was much more comfortable in uptown venues and preferred to see people there. When Alberto Lattuada came to stay in the 71st Street house for several days in December, Steinberg took him to a party at Jane Grant's and introduced him to writers who he hoped might promote his films. He entertained Lattuada every day with lunches or dinners, but they never went below 52nd Street.

SAUL WAS NERVOUSLY AWAITING ALDO'S ARRIVAL in December 1953, mostly because he needed a foil between himself and Hedda. They had never really talked about most of the things they wrote in letters, particularly the fissures in the marriage caused by his relations.h.i.+ps with other women. As there had been no discussion of the state of the marriage when he returned from Europe, there was no clarification about how his behavior was affecting it. Hedda continued to be the good wife who attended to all his household needs and desires, while he mostly came, went, and continued to do as he pleased. Hedda was shocked when Saul seduced the babysitter of Ad Reinhardt's children: "The main thing about her was that she was foreign and exotic. They just had s.e.x together." Of another conquest, "she was my girlfriend first and then he had to seduce her because he always tried to seduce my girlfriends. With this one, we were good friends and managed to remain so." And of still another, "she was one of those little d.u.c.h.esses he met in Europe and he brought her here to meet me. He always brought his girlfriends home. He needed my approval." Hedda had given up trying to discuss the things that truly hurt her: "It was always difficult to have an argument with Saul. He could touch a nerve and make you hurt, but he was never intent on hurting you. Usually he would diffuse an argument by telling you something about his work or showing you some of it, and of course you could not resist it. After a while he made it seem ridiculous to argue with him."

The one part of each day they looked forward to was what they called "the second dinner." No matter whether they held dinner parties at home or dined out together or separately, Hedda would cook a complete meal at midnight or later-a steak or chops, vegetables and salad-and they would pour wine and sit down together at the big kitchen table and eat and talk. The problem was, they never lacked for conversation, but it was always about other people or things they had done that day, their current work, or their plans for the following day. They never talked, as Hedda put it, "about the things we should have."

SHORTLY BEFORE ALDO ARRIVED, STEINBERG MADE a curious doodle at the back of his 1953 datebook. He was a constant doodler on all the pages of his daily calendars, using colored pencils or ballpoint pen to create elaborate geometric constellations of circles, squares, and triangles, of flags, banners, and exploding fireworks. Sometimes he drew faces and figures, but not often. In this instance he drew a heart that enclosed the face of a man with a disgruntled expression, whose features resembled his own. He had another habit of making odd jottings in his datebooks, of several words or phrases that might be the genesis of an idea for everything from an individual drawing to a series or a complete book. In this particular one, he filled the next several pages with comments about two subjects: his perceptions of architecture and the situation of the contemporary artist.

Architecture was very much on his mind, not only because of his friends.h.i.+ps and collaborations with Alexander Girard, Le Corbusier, Breuer, Gropius, Charles and Ray Eames, and Dione and Richard Neutra. Steinberg followed the debates and controversies about Eero Saarinen and his floating, flamboyant commissions, and when he moved to New York with his writer wife, Aline, Steinberg was their frequent guest. He had friendly arguments with Bernard Rudofsky about everything from the design of private homes to the planning of entire cities, and he had recently accepted a commission from Ernesto Rogers to make the drawings for a "children's labyrinth" that Rogers's firm was to construct in 1954 for the tenth annual Milan Triennial, the showcase of the best of Italian architecture and design. It was an important commission for Steinberg, because it would be on view before so many of his teachers and fellow students at the Politecnico. While working with Girard in Detroit, he had been dubbed "the draftsman-laureate of modernism," and it was a t.i.tle he was especially anxious to live up to in front of his Milan colleagues.

He thought long and hard about the role of architecture in modern life and the artists who created it. Although what he wrote in this particular datebook seems to be a collection of random jottings without an orderly progression toward coherent thought, taken all together they do give an indication of what he was thinking and feeling.

Geraghty had identified only two categories into which to divide Steinberg's work, "the Magazine Steinberg and the Gallery Steinberg," but there were numerous others as well, the most obvious being the work-for-hire that consumed the major portion of his time (which Geraghty might have been including in the Gallery category). The notes Steinberg made in the datebook address these splits in his professional life and how-even if-they could be unified under the single heading of artistic ident.i.ty. On the subject of architecture, his comments range from the awestruck to the sardonic, from "pure architecture is like playing the harpsichord" to annoyance with "the Mickey Mouse style" and the "amus.e.m.e.nt park quality of skysc.r.a.pers." The two specific architects whose personalities fascinated him as much as their work inspired him were Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, with "their fantasy-articulate, aware." As for the artist, he probably had himself in mind when he wrote, "There is a tendency to dismiss talent." His final summation remains a mystery, because he carefully and thoroughly blacked out the last word of the sentence: "America is disarming-it finds the 'gimmicks' in the [word blacked out]."

Steinberg and Buzzi at the 71st Street house. (ill.u.s.tration credit 15.1) HE WAS AT HOME ON 71ST STREET by November 1953, nervously willing himself to concentrate on work and trying to stay calm by playing billiards while he awaited Aldo's arrival. He sent letter after letter going into minute detail about every possible incident that might arise, from what clothes to bring to the best brands of sleeping pills for the fourteen-hour flight. Hedda was amused by Saul's nervousness but did "every crazy thing" he asked her to do to calm his nerves. She was not amused when she learned that he planned to take Aldo on a trip through the American Southeast just as soon as they rushed through all the things or places a first-time visitor to New York should experience.

She was distressed because Saul was so eager to see his friend that he gave little consideration to leaving her alone again. Two years had pa.s.sed since they had moved into the house in joyful antic.i.p.ation of working together side by side, and she got a terrible shock when she added up how much of that time he had actually been gone; she forced herself to stop counting when she reached one full year. She knew that Saul's calendar for 1954 was already full of new trips, and several more were planned for 1955.

When Aldo arrived and they went away, Hedda sent a letter apologizing for how "sad, mixed up, scared" she had been when they said goodbye. She felt "terribly guilty" about accusing him of using absence as an excuse to run away from the reality of his life. She asked him not to "interpret wrong," but she thought he should know: "Your princ.i.p.al fear, I think, is caused by your great talent-facility [her emphasis]-which becomes a burden (like too great beauty), particularly with a background that causes masochism, like feeling guilty." She tried to explain that she was like many other women who desire to "keep their man" and how such women push their character and honesty into the background and make themselves "ready for compromises." Such behavior crippled women, causing everything from "indigestion" to "spiritual troubles." Both were very real, Hedda cautioned, and occasionally one would lead to a manifestation of the other. A woman had to know that these were possibilities, and to survive in such a marriage, she had to "take care of what is in our power to maintain, which is a way of life and health, to a certain degree."

In her indirect way, Hedda was asking Saul to understand her plight and to change, but he never responded directly to this letter, and she never pressed her point. He continued to go away from the dream house while she stayed at home and waited for him.

CHAPTER 16.

BALKAN FATALISM.

I've had and still have problems in which I get involved for no reason, caused rather by the lack of reasons and by Balkan fatalism. Every year or two I'm obliged to clean the stable and I suffer.

After three months in Aldo's company, Saul tried to get down to work, but he didn't find it easy. Aldo was there from November 1953 to the end of March 1954, and most of the time pa.s.sed in a re-creation of their carefree student lives, only this time they had a lot more money with which to do it. They played billiards, but on Steinberg's private table, whenever they wanted and without having to wait their turn in a public bar. They did not have to be content with reading about boxing matches in the newspapers as they had done on long-ago lazy afternoons in Il Grillo; now they went to the arenas and sat in the best seats. If they wanted to see two movies on a single day, interspersed with a good meal in a chic restaurant, they did it. They saw Broadway plays and heard Toscanini conduct the New York Philharmonic. Just for fun, they were among the first flyers on New York Airways, "the first scheduled helicopter pa.s.senger service in the world." And when they traveled throughout the southern states, they flew to major cities, rented comfortable cars, and stayed in the best hotels. They were fascinated with what they saw in the Jim Crow South and read some of the novels of William Faulkner while they were there. Seeing segregation at first hand was a shocking reminder of Steinberg's life in Europe before the war and marked the beginning of his interest in civil rights and his later quiet activism on behalf of African-American causes.

Aldo's departure left him at loose ends. Steinberg had hardly worked at all during the visit, other than to choose drawings for his new book, The Pa.s.sport, often amusing himself by dipping his fingertips in ink and using the prints as faces. When he bought a fingerprint kit to make the process slightly neater and cleaner, it was the only work-connected event significant enough to record in his daily diary. He had selected the book's t.i.tle and most of the content well before Aldo arrived, so he had a fairly firm idea of how he wanted it to look. He gave 241 drawings to the publisher, Harper & Brothers, and envisioned a book of 160 pages, which was more than they wanted or could use, but he was insistent, offering a halfhearted apology that there was "too much stuff in it but it's too late to change." Actually, he wanted to include more drawings, but he was unable to focus on selecting them, so he put the book aside to oversee the last-minute details of an exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. As he was so unsettled, he decided to go to the opening. He was not closely involved in the show, because it was the same exhibition that had originated at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and would go after Dallas to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. All he needed to do was to specify the order in which he wanted the works hung and then affix prices, in this case ranging from $250 to $500.

When he returned to New York, he could not avoid The Pa.s.sport any longer, so he selected forty-nine additional drawings and sent them to his editor, Simon Michael "Mike" Bessie. Steinberg didn't like conflict of any kind, even genteel discussions about how to arrange the drawings or which could legitimately be cut, so he didn't stay around long enough to settle anything over one of the lavish lunches arranged by his Francophile, bon vivant editor. He was delighted to have a valid excuse to leave New York when Life magazine invited him to spend several weeks covering the Milwaukee Braves baseball team. However, before he could do this, he had to learn what "America's pastime" was all about, and he needed to educate himself fast.

STEINBERG HAD BEEN TRYING TO UNDERSTAND American culture and society from the first day he set foot on American soil. From the bus that took him to New York from Miami, to the cross-country trips by bus, train, and car, to the Alaskan cruise he took with Hedda and the journey to the Deep South with Aldo, he had been eager to see everything, to bring his memories and souvenirs home with him, and to turn them into trenchant observations in drawings that inspired a shock of recognition in everyone who saw them.

He expressed his interest in all things American through his personal library, which grew to include histories of the United States (particularly of the Civil War) and iconic fiction ranging from Melville, Poe, and Mark Twain to Theodore Dreiser, James T. Farrell, John P. Marquand, and John Dos Pa.s.sos. After every trip his postcard collection burgeoned with photos of everything from county courthouses to Civil War monuments, motel cabins, fast-food stands built in the shape of foods they sold (the Long Island Duck was a leading example of the genre), wild animals in zoos, pinup girls, the Rocky Mountains, Niagara Falls, and even the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Steinberg at the Long Island Duck. (ill.u.s.tration credit 16.1) "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball," said the cultural critic Jacques Barzun, but sports, particularly organized sports, was probably the only aspect of American life that Steinberg had not yet investigated; with the exception of boxing (which he had learned to like in Italy), he knew nothing about any of them. When he told this to Dorothy Seiberling, the art editor of Life, she told the journalist Clay Felker that they had to take Steinberg to Yankee Stadium. As the game progressed, they tried to explain to their befuddled guest what was happening on the field, and when it was over, they asked what he thought of it. "It just confirmed my suspicions," he replied, leaving them to ponder "a remark that remains to this day undecoded."

The first thing he did on his own after accepting the Milwaukee a.s.signment was to walk over to his favorite newsstand on Lexington Avenue and buy every sports magazine and baseball manual, and all the daily newspapers just so he could read the sports pages for the first time ever. He took them home, spread them out, and studied them. Every so often Hedda could hear him muttering to himself in Italian, then repeating words and phrases in English. When a game was broadcast on television he would sit without moving, staring intently at the screen and repeating words after the announcers: "A called third strike ... a line drive down the right field line ..." All of this remained a foreign language to Hedda, while to him it became a familiar part of American English. When the game was over, he would consult his ever-growing stash of baseball magazines to look up biographies and statistics for the players whose names he had heard that day. He even taught himself how to score a game and often exclaimed out loud as he wrote the symbols for the player who got on first base with a bunt and the one who stole second.

When he joined the Braves in Philadelphia for the road trip, he had picked up enough of a vocabulary to be able to talk to the players in their own jargon, but he mostly kept silent, just as he had done when he was first in the navy and watched how other officers behaved so he could imitate their actions. The players were intrigued by the little man whose sketches captured the intensity of the game as well as its languor, and they were soon kidding around with him as they saw themselves take shape through his eyes. For Steinberg, baseball was all about "an incredible individual spirit done in a loosely collective manner." His pitcher stares down from the mound with the menacing intensity of a high-speed locomotive bearing down on a hapless batter, while his catcher is an immovable object, a formidable block confident of receiving the pitch. The batter poises on his toes like a gymnast ready to take off in an arabesque of movement. A drawing of the entire team mimics the annual group photograph for which every team in every league poses, and here Steinberg's players have indistinguishable faces as they cl.u.s.ter around the glowering figure of the manager, who hunkers down at their center. A baseball diamond floats like an oversized halo just above their heads, while in front of this tableau, a bat and ball lie crossed on the ground with two tiny trophies on either side, a loving cup and a figure on a pedestal.

The players took to the guy with the funny accent, thick black-framed gla.s.ses, and sliver of a mustache, who came to the dugout each day in bespoke or Brooks Brothers clothes and hand-sewn shoes. They gave him a baseball hat and jacket, boldly emblazoned with the Milwaukee Braves logo, and he wore them proudly for the rest of his life, especially when he watched a game alone at home. For Steinberg, baseball became "an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate and sober self-esteem (batting average)." He agreed with Barzun that it was "impossible to understand America without a thorough knowledge of baseball."

ONCE THE LIFE a.s.sIGNMENT WAS COMPLETED, it was June and well past time to get down to the business of earning money. For the past several years, because Saul had been away so much, Hedda had decided on her own where they would vacation, usually renting a house from one of their many friends in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, with Saul joining her when he could. This summer he needed to work with Jerome Robbins on stage sets for a new ballet, so she decided to rent a house in Stonington, the Connecticut town where Robbins summered along with a collection of New Yorkers that included the poet James Merrill, who soon became Hedda and Saul's good friend as well. They both wanted to buy a country house and were still thinking primarily of Cape Cod, but because Saul had so many commissions to fulfill, Connecticut now seemed a more reasonable distance from New York than the Cape. They decided to see if they liked it by renting a house big enough for each to work in comfortably. Hedda set up her studio and painted while Saul spent most of his days at Robbins's house, informing himself about the ballet that became The Concert. He executed two backdrops, painted curtains that featured some of the same creatures and characters that populated his work for The New Yorker, in front of which the dancers played out the dance in costumes that reflected those characters. The Concert became one of Robbins's most successful creations and was responsible for many in the steady stream of requests for Steinberg to work in film and theater.

Working with Robbins provided a fun-filled diversion when Steinberg compared it to his other commitments, which at this time could be divided into two large categories: moneymaking commercial projects and dealing with his ever-growing fan mail. It had been nine years since he sold his first cover to The New Yorker, and cognizant of Geraghty's concern for his slipping status at the magazine, he worked hard to get another. When it appeared, on March 20, it caused a sensation. For the next several months letters poured in, all similar to one written by a truck driver who delivered the magazine to subscribers in Salmon Falls, New York. "What the h.e.l.l does this cover mean?" he demanded, referring to the black ink drawing of a tall mustached cat whose face resembles Steinberg's and who stands on two feet and holds a smaller cat in his arms while two others cl.u.s.ter at his feet. The staff writer who answered the letter gave its writer and most of the others who asked similar questions the same reply: "Our March 20 cover has no hidden meaning. It is simply Saul Steinberg's version of the standard, old-fas.h.i.+oned portrait of a father and children."

Steinberg in his Milwaukee Braves uniform. (ill.u.s.tration credit 16.2) Steinberg read his fan mail carefully and kept all of it, both positive and negative, but he seldom responded unless it came from children, whose innocent yet penetrating questions and comments he could not resist. A nine-year-old from Brooklyn wrote to tell him how much he liked a picture of "baby sh.o.r.e birds" that he saw when his father took him to the Janis gallery. He wanted to buy it but was told it cost $200. The boy wrote that he counted forty-eight birds in total, which would make each bird worth about four dollars. "I have $20 saved up," he wrote, and asked Steinberg to make a drawing he could afford to buy, one with five birds. A week later the astonished little boy wrote a second letter, this time to thank Steinberg for "the lovely present" of birds that looked "just like sandpipers," made from fingerprints, ink, and crayon. In a postscript he wrote that he was sending a picture of birds he had drawn himself to thank the artist.

Unfortunately, the majority of letters Steinberg had to deal with were not as pleasant. Many kept his lawyer busy, for he was highly litigious and always on the lookout for possible infringement of his intellectual property rights. He wanted to sue the New York Times because he thought the newspaper violated his copyright when it printed a picture of a German production's stage set and costumes for Mozart's Cos fan tutte that resembled some of his caricatures. To support their contention that they had not committed copyright infringement, the Times's lawyers sent their correspondence with the German company, whose stage manager insisted that "they didn't copy directly-merely followed your style." Steinberg still wanted to sue and had to be persuaded once again by the ever-patient Alexander Lindey that litigation in this case would be both costly and futile.

Steinberg frequently created legal problems for himself by accepting every commission that came his way, regardless of whether one infringed upon another. A case in point concerned the Patterson Fabric Company, for which he had been designing for the past seven years. Other firms courted him throughout that time, and now, because the year was half over and he was still far short of the income he needed to support all those who depended on him, he accepted new a.s.signments from other American companies and some foreign ones. Patterson Fabrics thought it deserved "slightly more consideration" than he was currently giving and sent an artfully couched letter hinting at its disapproval of his designing for other houses. The company warned that although it was true he would sell more by creating many designs, he would soon saturate the market and "decorators will tire of you." It urged him to "consider this carefully." He ignored the advice because he needed the money and continued to accept nearly everything he was offered.

For a variety of reasons, most of what Steinberg agreed to do was never realized; for example, the mural the Beverly Hilton Hotel had commissioned was canceled because of budget problems. He was quite excited when Harold Arlen, Truman Capote, and Arnold Saint Subber invited him to design the sets for the Broadway production of House of Flowers, and because he could not work on Broadway without union members.h.i.+p, he immediately completed the extensive paperwork required to join the Scenic Artists Union. It was a shock to everyone when his application was rejected. Nor was he mollified by an invitation to join the National Society of Mural Painters, but he accepted anyway and sent the $10 annual dues.

Despite his abrupt resignation from An American in Paris, Hollywood was still interested in Saul Steinberg. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer asked permission to use his name in a movie called The Cobweb, which was set in a "clinic for nervous disorders." The lead character was a patient who designed fabric patterns, and another character was to say of him, "I think [he's] more like Steinberg." Lindey sent the official refusal letter after the horrified Steinberg forbade MGM to use his name or anything else that might tie him to a mental hospital.

The volume of fan mail was equaled only by the requests for his work that poured in from commercial firms, most of which he accepted, with much of it coming due during his Stonington summer. Among the commissions, Remington Rand wanted cartoons for a promotional booklet for electric shavers; the Lawrence C. c.u.mbinner agency wanted ads for Smirnoff vodka; Jamian Advertising and Publicity wanted a two-page spread for s.h.i.+ps designed to ill.u.s.trate their Marco Polo line of fabrics. The Good Time Jazz record company of Los Angeles wanted designs for many of its record covers, and a St. Louis advertising agency wanted designs to ill.u.s.trate a campaign slogan, "We teach copper new skills," for the Lewin-Mathes copper tubing company. This one in particular led to a long, lucrative, and exceptionally creative a.s.sociation.

As Steinberg was striving to earn money, the summer of 1954 saw the true beginning of the requests that flooded in until the end of his life for donations of his work as well as his cash. Everyone from the Citizens Art Committee for the New Canaan, Conecticut, public schools to the satirical French newspaper Canard Enchaine wanted him to donate drawings. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts asked specifically to "borrow" the baseball drawings, but the request carried the underlying hope that he would donate them. Roland Penrose began what became an annual plea for Steinberg to send a drawing to the ICA for its fund-raising. There were also requests from individuals who wanted him to draw something on a specific subject, such as the socialite Babe Paley, who asked for a Siamese cat she could give her husband, William S. Paley, the head of CBS, for Christmas. Hedda chafed because Saul spent so much time fulfilling these requests that he neglected his own work, but she never expressed her feelings to him: "He thought this country gave him a lot, and he could afford to give something back." After a thoughtful pause she added, "He was afraid people would think he was cheap if he didn't. He didn't want the stigma that he was a cheap Jew."

IT WAS HOT IN NEW YORK in August 1954, but Steinberg had to be there to finish all the work that was due before he left in September for Paris and Milan. Publication of The Pa.s.sport was requiring his attention, and there were frequent meetings with his editor, Mike Bessie. Bessie had become one of Steinberg's fast friends, and the friends.h.i.+p boded well for their publis.h.i.+ng collaborations, because Steinberg was a nervous perfectionist and Bessie was adept at soothing him.

At the same time, an extraordinary amount of correspondence had acc.u.mulated, starting with his father's American brothers and some of their offspring, whom he called "the Denver and Saint Paul Steinbergs." Both contingents had contributed money and energy to bringing Saul to America and were now just as eager to help Lica and her family leave Romania, which was why so much postwar correspondence was generated. And as the uncles' children grew up and Steinberg's fame increased, the letters came most often from the cousins, who saw his work in magazines and wrote to praise it. His cousin Judith Steinberg Ba.s.sow in Denver became the most frequent correspondent because of her interest in his work and the genealogy of the Steinberg family, but it was his cousin Phil Steinberg in Arizona with whom he felt a special affinity and to whom he became increasingly close several years later.

There was even more correspondence connected to his European trip in late August. He made a brief stopover in London, followed by several weeks crammed with activity in Paris, before he went to Milan to work on the mural he had agreed to design and execute for Ernesto Rogers. The list of people he had to see and the things he needed to do before he could begin the work was staggering. Bessie wanted the names of people who could provide blurbs to promote The Pa.s.sport; Steinberg offered Dorothy Norman, Igor Stravinsky, Jane Grant, Alexey Brodovitch, and Walker Evans, all of whom agreed. For the opening reception, he invited what would appear to an outsider to be a glittering list of celebrities but who were in actuality people with whom he had formed friends.h.i.+ps that were both genuine and lasting. A contingent from The New Yorker included Shawn, Truax, h.e.l.lman, and Geraghty. Uta Hagen, Herbert Berghof, and Stella Adler represented his friends from the theater; Mary McCarthy, E. B. White, Ben Grauer, John Gunther, and Edmund Wilson represented literature; and from the worlds of art and design, Walker Evans, William Baziotes, Mark Rothko, Jose Luis Sert, Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, and Alfred Barr. Everyone, it seemed, was invited, from Leo Lerman to Adlai Stevenson, and everyone accepted.

Steinberg's list of people to see in Paris was even longer and contained the names of many he had met the year before through Aime Maeght. From the literary world the names Steinberg put on the invitation list included Janet Flanner, Albert Camus, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Henri Michaux, Andre Malraux, Paul Painleve, and Jacques Prevert. Noticeably absent were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whom he had never forgiven for snubbing Hedda in the bar at the Pont Royal. Baron Rothschild led a sizable contingent from the social world, and that resulted in a number of invitations that he accepted. Some of his best friends from the art world did not attend the opening but wanted to see him privately-Helion, Giacometti, Cartier-Bresson, Dubuffet, Doisneau, and Miro-so he made appointments to see them separately. After he squeezed everyone in, he was ill and run-down and had to stay for an extra day in Paris because he could not get out of bed.

THE FLIGHT TO MILAN WAS b.u.mPY, and by the time he checked into the Hotel Duomo, he was "very sick," not only with the upset stomach he was certain came from air sickness but also with a raging head cold and the flu. It was only August, but it was cold and rainy and felt like November. For the next several days he had to force himself to get out of bed and go to work in the rain while someone held a large umbrella over him. Rogers's firm, BBPR, had been commissioned to create a labirinto dei ragazzi, or children's labyrinth, for the tenth Milan Triennale. Steinberg's drawings were on all the walls, and no matter where the viewer entered, there was a Steinbergian panorama to guide him to the center and into the two other wings, the entire structure resembling a kind of three-leaf clover.

He had created the designs on long sheets of scrolled paper before he left New York, then mailed them to Milan to be enlarged to the proper size for the walls. They were then transferred a second time, to a kind of paper that could be placed directly onto the freshly applied plaster so he could do the actual sgraffito, incising the designs through the paper directly onto the walls. He was prepared for the worst when he arrived, because everything from the weather to his health had been so dismal, but when he saw what the "three incredible boys" (two painters and a sculptor) had done, he was so pleased that he did something highly uncharacteristic: he insisted that the three men pose in front of the mural to have their photo taken, with him beaming at their center. He told Hedda that sgraffito was "a wonderful technique" that would solve all his problems for any future murals and he hoped there would soon be another. In the meantime, he planned to experiment on the walls at home, "in the bas.e.m.e.nt perhaps."

It rained every day, and he could legitimately have stayed in bed until he was well, but he was captivated by the mural's progression and so he worked alongside his three a.s.sistants, improvising all the time. He flitted among them to make spur-of-the-moment additions, many of them easily recognizable Milanese landmarks. Some were whimsical, such as his rendering of the Castello Sforzesco, placed directly in front of where the castle could actually be seen if adults (and the children they held) raised their eyes to look over the wall. All the drawings inspired feelings of fun and laughter as viewers traipsed along the walls, and most of the reviews took note of the joy that people expressed. Steinberg's labyrinth was so different from the formality of all the other exhibits that the New York Times critic declared that it stole the exhibition. All the other designs and structures were "serious, professional, and well-meaning," but the only "humanity and humor" in the entire Triennale was found in Steinberg's drawings. It was high praise indeed, especially welcome because it came in his old hometown, but it was difficult to bask in it for long.

On August 29 the partners in BBPR gave a party in their studio to celebrate the opening, which was for Steinberg a reunion of ghosts. No liquor was served, so there was nothing to make him feel (in one of his favorite slang expressions of the time) "snappy." Most of the guests had been his professors and cla.s.smates at the Politecnico, and it was grating to be kissed on both cheeks by old teachers who hadn't given a hoot about him as a student. Even worse were the snide, d.a.m.n-with-faint-praise articles in magazines he called stupid about how successfully American he had become to command mille dolari al disegno (a thousand dollars per drawing). The hardest thing to deal with was the culture shock when he realized that he was so deeply imbued with American values that he could not accept the postwar Italian way of conducting business in the worlds of art and culture, the raccomandato of "I do something for you, you do something for me." Whether it was truly far more blatant in Italy than in New York or Paris, or whether his entire Milanese experience was so disorienting that he needed to find a scapegoat for the depression that enveloped him, it was no longer something he could take as par for the course. It left him deeply unhappy to think that the country he had so warmly embraced and that had embraced him in return now considered him a foreigner. The only high spot came when Alberto Lattuada and Aldo Buzzi arrived to make a movie and he was given a walk-on part as a pa.s.serby in a scene they shot in the Galleria. Even this pleasure of being with old friends was double-edged: "It was ok but they felt they had other obligations and at times it was clumsy."

WHEN HIS WORK WAS FINISHED, he told Hedda he wanted to go to Bergamo to have lunch with Aldo's mother and then go directly to Venice for several days to decompress after all the work and socializing. He said he planned to see no one and have several days of the privacy that he had been without since leaving New York, but he did not tell her his real reason for going to Venice: that he needed to sort through the welter of emotions that came from seeing Ada again. For the past several years, besides regularly sending her money, he had managed to see her on most of his trips, and when he was in New York he telephoned regularly for long, secretive, and rambling conversations. However, once he resumed their liaison, he was so embarra.s.sed that he kept it secret even from Aldo.

There had been three previous postwar encounters between them before this one, and all had ended badly. She felt the first went poorly because of "insincerity" on both their parts, the second because he cynically made fun of her extreme neediness, and the third because he told her he had to flee from her excessive pa.s.sion and if she had any pride left at all, she would disappear from his life forever. Ada's letters were a case study in self-contradiction. If she responded at first with histrionics, insisting that brain cancer would be preferable to the emotional torment and suffering he caused, which made her so ill she would soon die of whatever disease it caused, she would then swiftly become compliant and pacifying, with her next sentence, meant to be soothing, saying that all she wanted was to spend time with him, not necessarily in bed, just in his company; to be "maternal" rather than s.e.xual. All she needed from him was "for the phone to ring," but when he did call, he had to listen to a series of elaborate dodges that she invented, claiming they were necessary to keep the affair hidden from her husband.

While he was working on the mural, even on the days that he was sick, he managed to slip away to meet her secretly. She still traveled a lot, always being careful never to specify the reasons, and when she was in Milan, she lived once again with her husband in an apartment on the Viale Misurata, not far from where Steinberg was working. She arranged for them to meet halfway in between, in an apartment belonging to the girlfriend who had provided cover for them before the war. Ada was content with this arrangement, having accepted that Saul was married and so was she. She a.s.sumed that when he came to Milan they would resume their affair as if no years had intervened since he had been a student at the Politecnico, and when he left, each would return to their legal partner. This was easier for her than for him because she claimed never to have loved her husband, whereas despite his constant infidelity, he truly did love Hedda.

By the time he left for Bergamo and Venice, he was in an emotional turmoil because of everything that had happened during his time in Milan. Ada left him reeling; he had been affronted by the former colleagues who mocked his Americanness and by the two-faced behavior of his former professors, who now claimed they had known all along that he was a genius. Most troubling of all was his own shame about the duplicity of his relations.h.i.+p with the wife he professed to love above all others and the lover on whom he placed all the blame for luring him into bed each time he saw her. He could not help but contrast the two women.

When Hedda wrote letters, they were always on two levels. Hedda was a voracious reader, and she generally began with a philosophical interpretation of pa.s.sages from books that she thought had relevance to their lives. Often she used them to launch into news of household happenings or of social occasions with their friends or events in the art world, because so many of their friends were artists. When Ada wrote, it was usually to tell him that he had left her in such a state of o.r.g.a.s.mic ecstasy that she was having difficulty returning to married life with her dull husband. Her letters were blunt recapitulations of their time in bed, which almost always ended with how his departure left her ill and unable to work. She never asked directly but always implied that being unable to work meant that she sure could use some money. Ada was adept at blithely telling contradictory lies one after the other and getting Saul to accept them unquestioningly. First she told Saul that she was in such dire health from an undiagnosed illness that her husband, who "knows the cure for my ailment" (that is, Saul), actually took pity and guided her to the post office so she could mail a letter to him. In the next sentence she told Saul that mailing the letter immediately cured her, and as an aside told him to use her maiden name and a post office box number so her husband would not find out they were having an affair.

Saul hoped that several days alone in Venice would help him decide what to do about Ada, especially whether to end the affair permanently before it became a public embarra.s.sment. He decided not to tell her that he had to return to Milan for a number of public events scheduled to conclude all the necessary dealings with the mural and let her think he was going directly to France and England and then home to New York. However, Milan was a small town, and it was not difficult for Ada to find out that he had been there. It made her furious even as it made her more determined than ever to stay in his good graces. In a series of letters, she first told him that she was working as a teacher but did not specify where, only joking that the work made her eyes so weak that she had to buy new gla.s.ses, which made her feel not only "old" but also "ridiculous [to be] still in love." As soon as she told him she was a teacher, she changed her story in the next letter, saying that she had joined the theatrical company Senza Rete (Without a Net) and would be on tour in Padua, Florence, Naples, and Rome until the end of the year. After these illogical contradictions, she lapsed into fury, berating him for being his "usual pig" self, afraid to let anyone see him with her. She knew he had returned to Milan, not only b