Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 8

Once he got there, he realized he was not rested, he had not rid himself of stress and anxiety, and his insomnia was worse than ever. When he tried to come up with an idea for drawings suitable for The New Yorker, his mind was a complete blank. When he was in transit, what had struck him most was the evidence of Jim Crow everywhere he went, of "colored" water fountains and restrooms, of African-Americans moving dutifully to the back of the bus, of segregated schools and restaurants. The magazine was not ready to publish pictures that would arouse political activism, and in truth, he had not yet identified segregation as anything other than an accepted way of life. He was certain that the entire trip had been a waste of time.

Several projects awaited him, and his spirits lifted slightly when he began to work on the first: Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k had engaged him to create drawings for the t.i.tle sequence in the film The Trouble with Harry, and after all the intense work of the previous year, it was "sheer fun." The second project was to prepare some of his architectural drawings and false doc.u.ments for an exhibition scheduled for March by his good friend Jose Luis Sert at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Sert was the dean. This project did require the intense concentration and meticulous attention to detail that Steinberg gave to exhibitions, and he forced himself to do it. By the time he had finished, he was so exhausted and unfocused that he was not sleeping at all and often broke down in bursts of sobs and tears.

Hedda was sick with worry and tried to get him to talk to about it, either to her or to a therapist. He resisted both ideas, especially therapy, which he dismissed as a waste of time and money but which in reality frightened him with the possibility that it would lead to self-knowledge that he was terrified to confront. Also, he feared that telling his most private thoughts to anyone would reveal him as a weakling, and he could not bear to lose face before another human being.

Eventually, however, he did talk to Hedda. She was stunned when he said that he didn't think he loved her because he was not sure that he was const.i.tutionally capable of loving anyone. He wondered if the intensity with which he had pursued her when he wanted to marry her had been honest love or merely a desire to acquire this incredible woman because of the qualities she possessed.

In her public life, Hedda was a beautiful woman and a respected artist warmly welcomed by her many friends within the artistic and intellectual life of New York; in their private life, she gave Saul the personal comfort that came from their mutual Romanian-Jewish heritage and that smoothed his entree into this rarefied world. Being with Hedda provided all the trappings that enabled him to enjoy what he believed represented success and happiness within the ideal American life, as well as the personal security that came from being loved so unconditionally. "Love is the only thing that makes life bearable," she told him.

Now, a decade into their marriage, all Saul felt was a tremendous desire to be free of everything in the life he had constructed with Hedda, starting with her and going on to the work he did for hire, all his financial obligations, and even America. He had an urgent, unfocused need to get back to Europe to see if he could find any trace of the self he had so eagerly discarded almost twenty years before, when the successful Italian cartoonist that he had been morphed into a stateless Jewish refugee totally dependent on the goodwill of others. He was not going to be the prisoner of a timetable on this trip; he would spend as much time as was necessary to roam from place to place throughout Europe until he could regain his equilibrium and find the stability and stasis that eluded him.

Hedda told him to go, saying that she could "easily" wait for him to return. Instead of soothing him, her serenity added to his general anxiety: he didn't want to lose her, but he wondered if he had the right to keep her tethered to a relations.h.i.+p that might come to a shattering conclusion. He was frustrated because for the first time in their relations.h.i.+p, she refused to solve his problems. He decided that the major problem was one of "honesty or truth," and that she had unwittingly helped to create it. They were so well suited to each other that it was difficult to sort out where she began or he left off within the marriage. He thought they were so "well mixed ... that the truth becomes an animal with one foot size 5, one size 10." He blamed this for his loss of individualism, which allowed him to fool himself into believing that the savoir faire he adopted for his professional dealings was an acceptable subst.i.tution for the truth and honesty that was absent from his most important personal one, his marriage. Also, because he liked being accepted among the "the elegante welt," as he called the social and intellectual circles Hedda had originally introduced him to, he accused himself of wasting the past decade putting on an elaborate front to keep himself at the top of it. In doing so, he had lost his ident.i.ty to a collection of deeply unfocused fears, which he tried to bury by avoiding any occasion when his galloping insecurities might become exposed. Others often described his behavior in the social situations where he insisted on holding the floor as cold, rude, arrogant, and selfish, but it was merely his way of hiding his basic insecurity.

He told Hedda that two of his three most crus.h.i.+ng fears were about her: that he wasn't sure he was capable of loving her, and that she only wanted to stay married to him because of inertia. These were certainly valid fears, but the biggest fear of all was that he had made a terrible choice by sacrificing creativity for the need to make money, which he described quite simply as "I lost twenty years." He was forty-one years old and was so depressed that he insisted he had done nothing to be proud of since coming to America, that none of his drawings, books, exhibitions, or awards had given him any true pleasure: "My preoccupation has been success, probably. I need it, but very much the way I need whiskey." And so, he asked himself, if success was merely a palliative, where did personal satisfaction lie, and how would he find it?

Hedda agreed that he should go away to anywhere he wanted for as long as he needed. He decided to start with Paris, where he had pressing business, after which he would go wherever impulse took him. She intended to send him off with her usual stoicism, but when the time came for him to leave and he told her that "it may be for good," his words shocked them both. She could not stop crying and said that she could not forgive herself for sending him off with such a memory. He replied that he recognized how "horrible" her fears must be, for he could not get the image of what he had done to her out of his mind. He did not sleep on the long overnight flight, and spent his first twenty-four hours walking in the unseasonable cold or pacing in his room when he could no longer stand to be outdoors. "Now I understand insomnia," he wrote. "One blames the outside reasons but sleeplessness is inside." He tried to calm himself with his usual late-night recourse of going to the movies and saw Diabolique, which relaxed him but not enough to sleep.

In Paris there were things he had to do and people he had to see, starting with Mrs. Jennie Bradley, who had a slew of offers from galleries, museums, and publishers for which he had to make decisions. Aime Maeght invited him to a private three-hour lunch at his home, where they ate multiple courses of "all sorts of sea monsters and mostly garlic." It made Steinberg literally sick, but he was actually grateful that this time his upset stomach was due to rich food rather than "bad conscience." Maeght had an ulterior reason for the lavish meal, to try to persuade Steinberg not to exhibit at the Berggruen Gallery, as he had promised, but to agree to a larger show the following year at Galerie Maeght. Steinberg didn't think he could be ready for a show anywhere and tried to stall for time. He had an appointment with Gallimard to oversee the imminent publis.h.i.+ng of Dessins, a compendium of drawings from his three American books, and Robert Delpire wanted to discuss a proposal for his firm to publish another book, but it was not realized at the time. Steinberg was unable to concentrate on either project. As always, the one person in whom he could confide was Hedda, but she was not providing answers. He told her that even though he was in Paris, staying in a good hotel and being wined and dined, it still felt like a concentration camp. After writing that letter, he went to the movies and saw Gina Lollobrigida, whose voluptuous pulchritude made him feel slightly better, but he still couldn't sleep.

He spent the weekend walking around, particularly at the Bird Market on the Quai de la Megisserie, where he relaxed slightly by thinking of his beloved cat at home while petting the strays that lurked around the cages. By Monday morning he knew that he had to get away, because being in Paris meant business as usual and he needed to avoid people. Except for the appointments he had to keep, he did not go anywhere that he might be recognized, avoiding the Left Bank arrondiss.e.m.e.nts where most of his friends lived and eating in obscure restaurants. And yet being alone did not have the soothing effect he sought: once he had the solitude to think about himself, he didn't like the self-portrait he created. He compared himself to an inflated balloon that was slowly deflating: "This is what I wanted, but it's hard." On the spur of the moment he decided that the only way to seek what he was now calling his "true ident.i.ty" was to return to the places that divided his life from its first half-the one provided by his parents, which he had unquestioningly accepted from earliest childhood-and the life he had created since coming to America. He decided to go to Italy, expressly to return to Tortoreto and revisit his incarceration. "It's not a ham gesture," he insisted. "It's as good a place as any to spend a few days quiet, no smoke, no drink ... I'm waiting for sanity to come back to me."

THREE DAYS LATER, ON MARCH 23, he was in Pescara, which he believed was the terminus of his original railroad journey from Milan to Tortoreto. He arrived there after a full day in a slow train from Rome, where he had flown from Paris in order to see Aldo and have dinner with him and Bianca: "It was bad. I was tired. We talked nonsense." The next morning he realized that the evening had been unsuccessful because he had wanted to confide in them and ask their advice but did not know how.

The mornings when he woke up alone in a hotel were terrible, because he was tempted to cable Hedda and ask her to come and rescue him; the nights were worse, because he had nightmares and could not sleep. Although Steinberg had no faith in psychoa.n.a.lysis and did not believe that talking to an a.n.a.lyst would alleviate the various traumas that increasingly beset him, he had a deep and abiding interest in dream a.n.a.lysis and often kept detailed diaries of some of his most troubling dreams. On this trip, he no sooner fell asleep at night than he was jolted awake by dreams of someone pounding on his door. The setting was always his New York bedroom, because the knocks were always accompanied by Hedda's screams. They would wake Moritz, who was also in the house and who ran up and down the four stories of the steep front and back staircases. This caused Saul to jump out of bed in alarm, fearing that his father would suffer a fatal heart attack if he could not catch and stop him. Saul attributed these nightmares not only to his "sense of guilt" but also to "something worse." As much as he felt he needed Hedda if he were ever to sleep again, he begged her not to come to Italy to rescue him but to stay where she was and "please worry about me."

To divert himself from his anxieties, he returned to a theme he had been expressing since he first met her, that everything would be fine if they could just buy a house away from New York, where he could hole up and work. This time he thought perhaps the Adriatic coast or Paris. But even as he wrote this he knew it was mere talk, because he was "confused as usual and postponing." He brought the letter to an abrupt end by admitting, "I think I had some sort of breakdown a few days ago and I'm recovering." Then he concentrated on getting himself dressed, packed, and ready for the pilgrimage to Tortoreto.

A slow train took him to Tortoreto, where he left his luggage in a dreary tavern so he could walk through the village. Nothing in the town looked familiar, but he was sure that was because he had seen it only when he was one in a long chain of prisoners being herded to the villa on arrival and departure. The town was small, but he thought he found the building where he had been incarcerated. It had been repaired and repainted and looked inhabited, so he did not enter through the large iron gates, not wanting "to get silly with strangers." He was filled with emotion as he walked back and forth in front of the house, and yet the only things that looked truly familiar were the few trees on the grounds. He was irritated to think that he had lost the memories of a place that once meant so much to him, so he decided to take a walk on the beach, because the prisoners were never permitted to go there.

For the next three hours he walked, enveloped in a dense white fog that the natives swore was highly unusual, but to him it was "one of the most pleasant things I did ever." Afterward, damp but happy, he went into a bar, had a beer, and wrote Hedda a lighthearted letter describing the villa as "a castle, a true romantic prison," and the town as "a summer resort for the poorer tourists." He described the local color, how fishermen fixed their nets, dirty children followed him and asked for handouts, and dogs barked at him. He was pleased with the adventure-until he got on the bus to leave the town behind.

As the bus belched its smoky way into the hills above Tortoreto, Steinberg chanced to glance out the window at the very moment the bus was pa.s.sing the villa in which he had actually lived. "There are-I didn't know-two Tortoretos, and I had gone to the wrong one!" He made the driver stop the bus and jumped off in "the right one," Tortoreto Alto, where he walked around "recognizing with horror every house, shop, tree, stores, types of people, dogs." The villa where he had lived had been badly bombed and was abandoned in total disrepair. All the palm trees around it had been burned and were dead, and the town itself was filthy. He was lucky to find a taxi driver willing to take him to the next village, San Benedetto del Tronto, where he could wait for another slow train to take him as far away from the real Tortoreto as he could go.

That evening, from a hotel in Ancona, he described for Hedda all the emotions that beset him as he sat on the railway station bench. He was able at last to confess the real reason for all the traveling he had done during the past several years: that it enabled him to evade what his life had become. Constant traveling did not allow much time to think about his own needs or desires; frenetic movement was his way of coping with the things he needed to do to maintain his expensive way of life and to forget momentarily all the financial responsibilities he had willingly chosen to accept. He was able to hint that such behavior was probably cowardly or immature but stopped short of describing it as such, saying that he had forced himself to return to Tortoreto because he thought it would give him "proof of maturity or courage." He was not amused by his "curious mistake of unload[ing] my feelings on the wrong and pleasant Tortoreto." Instead, it made him so angry that even though he wanted to forget it had ever happened, he had to admit that the incident could stand as a metaphor to describe his life: "The truth is that I ran away as soon as I looked at the real one."

Hedda told him that she found it "strange, that a place can mean anything in itself, without recapturing the mood, situation." In two of her letters she made it clear that she had given his Tortoreto experience a great deal of thought before she addressed it directly. She called what happened to him "a sign," explaining her view that when people go through a period of "self-a.n.a.lysis, self-accusations," it is because they are unable to confront the real issues that trouble them: "They invent a guilt (edited, formulated in words) in order to camouflage the one that really bothers them, which is not quite clear possibly, or lacking glamour. There is some kind of narcissism, self-indulgence, to begin with, that causes our concern with our image, as it appears to ourselves, which also blurs the truth. We select the sins that we admit out loud and never would we subject ourselves to any penance. We have no standard that we would not adjust here and there, if it interfered too much. We have moral problems, when, and as long as we choose only!" Calling her thoughts "probably white beardish and confused," she searched for an a.n.a.logy that would lighten the appraisal she knew would upset him and found one in the popularity of jazz bands playing spirituals in nightclubs. She used the rest of the letter to tell him of the invitations that poured in despite his absence, reverting to the tried-and-true behavior that she always used when she needed to mollify him.

AND NOW HE HAD TO FACE another unpleasant truth: "I'm terrorized about going to Nice, but I have to." To prepare himself, he planned to play tourist as he pa.s.sed through the small Italian towns of Macerata, Fabriano, and Recanati, but he could not enjoy the sights because of his wildly fluctuating moods. He decided he had had enough of solitude and on the way to Viareggio made appointments to see Nicola Chiaromonte, Carlo Levi, and Aldo when he got to Milan. Once in Viareggio, he checked into the only hotel open out of season, the dumpy third-cla.s.s Astor, and spent most of his time reading in bed. He had bought a lot of novels along the way, casually and with no purpose in mind but to kill time. With the exception of Alberto Moravia's Il Disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon) and Ennio Flaiano's Tempo di Uccidere (The Short Cut), he left them unnamed but told Hedda how strange it was that they all seemed to be about his personal problems. He thought the resonances were most likely due to "my mind see[ing] things now."

For the next few days, while he stayed in bed to read, he also made pencil drawings of his hotel room and the view directly outside. Being alone in tranquillity provided the clarity to see himself as "unbalanced and too sensitive for the wrong reasons." It also made him realize how much he missed Hedda. He told her so but insisted that he was not trying to blackmail her into returning his affection. "I'm secure with you, protected probably. I don't know if this is the normal condition of marriage. I don't know anything any more." For the first time since he left New York, he ended the letter with "I love you."

SEEING TORTORETO MUST HAVE DONE SOME GOOD, even though he did not openly admit it. He stopped overnight in Milan, where he initiated a meeting with the publisher Mondadori to confirm future collaborations and possible publications. He accidentally ran into Gian Carlo Menotti and had lunch with him, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas s.h.i.+ppers. He wandered through the Galleria, where he was happy to see copies of his books lavishly displayed, and afterward meandered among the street stalls and bought books about architecture. He also indulged himself with a manual of instructions for playing the Milanese mandolin, which he decided to learn, and spent the rest of a peaceful afternoon at Tamburini, the art supply store that carried a particular brand of pencil he could get only in Italy. He was in a mood of such exhilaration that he confessed to Hedda that he went to Ada's apartment to see her "for a moment." He explained apologetically that he went because Ada was sick and needed financial help, which he gave, and that he felt good about seeing her. He told his diary something different: that Ada confronted him about his "failure" as an artist and theirs as a couple. Her mere use of the word failure depressed him once again.

He left Milan thinking that at least one of the many issues troubling him, his relations.h.i.+p with Ada, had been resolved. She begged him to believe that her feelings were no longer those of a lover but were rather strictly maternal. They would always stay in touch, she said, implying that if she were now the mother, he as the child owed support to her as the parent. It led to a recapitulation of all the other problems still hounding him: "I feel fine but tonight I am going to feel the least free man in the world, full of worries, responsibilities, duties." He did not mention guilt, which he felt on so many different levels for so many different things, even for having escaped from Europe unscathed while everyone from his pre-American life had suffered in one way or another. Fleeing from Tortoreto for the second time and being back in many of his old haunts in Milan may have triggered something, for as if on cue, that night he had another nightmare. In this one he was running through a dark alley trying to reach a light so bright at the far end that it blinded his eyes. The image was so intense that he used his new pencils to draw it.

EVENTUALLY HE HAD TO GO TO NICE, but he never went directly there if he could help it, always stopping first somewhere pleasant to prepare himself. This time he chose Genoa, which he had never actually seen during the frantic years when he pa.s.sed through in transit between Milan and Lisbon. The nightmare of the dark tunnel still troubled him, but he was able to maintain his good mood despite having to take long late-night walks if he wanted several hours of restless sleep. He took the train to Nice, and after three days with his parents, his emotions were so frazzled that he could barely control them long enough to write a short note to Hedda, apologizing for the long letter he had torn up because he was too embarra.s.sed to send her all his "moaning, sobbing." Being with Rosa and Moritz turned him into "a mess" at his "lowest ebb." He was about to flee again, but first he had to try to tell Hedda why.

Rosa met him with her usual litany of slights, woes, and wrongs. After listening to her recitation of her troubles and everyone else's, he a.s.sumed his usual Santa Claus role, and without telling his parents, he bought a refrigerator to replace their leaking icebox. It was noiseless, s.h.i.+ny, and as big as those found in American houses, overwhelming in a tiny French kitchen. The sight of it made Rosa "sick with fear as usual," while Moritz remained "without sufficient life to be scared." Rosa complained nonstop about how much electricity it would cost to run a refrigerator, even though Saul told her repeatedly that he would increase their monthly stipend to cover the minuscule rise. It made him physically ill to think of their parsimony, for he knew that the minute he left, they would unplug it and continue to use the leaking icebox. He called their behavior a "sickness" and blamed them for the origin of his own stubborn and selfish behavior and irrational superst.i.tions and fears. Fleeing from Rosa and Moritz was really the only way to flee from the memory of what he had been when he lived in their home. He was afraid that if he stayed longer, he might resume what he called the old and despised Romanian habits and att.i.tudes of his youth, of fear and distrust of anything new or anyone outside the household.

IT WAS EASTER AND NICE WAS FILLED with German tourists for whom he had scathing regard, so he decided to "run away" from them and from his parents. He went first to Tarascon, then to Nimes and Avignon, but they were all filled with "German tourists shouting out loud all over, spending like h.e.l.l the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, and their fat wives, horrible faces." He knew he could not stay there, but he needed an infusion of cash to leave and the banks were closed for the holiday. He threw a loud and noisy tantrum until the hotel manager cashed a check for just enough for a train ticket to Paris. On board the train, he found a seat and fell into a deep sleep, not waking until he was shaken by a conductor checking the compartments before the empty train was shunted to a siding. It had arrived in Paris several hours earlier, and Steinberg had slept right through.

His luggage was gone, and he was certain it had been "stolen by Algerians, etc." The police detained him in the Gare de Lyon for well over an hour as he filled out forms to establish his ident.i.ty and claims for his luggage. He was not released until one of the custodians came running in from the lost-and-found with his old brown suitcase, everything in it intact. A porter escorted him to a taxi, which took him to the Hotel Pont Royal, where he was given his "old noisy room." He got right into bed and started to read, finis.h.i.+ng Henry Miller's two Tropics, Cancer and Capricorn, Vasco Pratolini's Metello, and George Orwell's Coming Up for Air. He did not leave the room for several days, until he regained enough equilibrium to walk the streets of Paris as comfortably as he did in New York.

In a very real sense, he felt at home in Paris and it was good to be there. It was also time to face the facts that he had been trying to avoid for almost four months. He decided to start with Hedda and their marriage. If the separation had taught him one thing, it was that he loved her "as much as I can love." But at the same time, being on his own and having to fend for himself had given him the freedom he craved. When she told him she was thinking of going to a Caribbean island for warmth and sun, and to think things through, he replied in a snit, demanding to know why she was not content to stay at home and wait for him. He told her he was still "half in doubt," but he invited her to come to Paris anyway, where they would rent an apartment big enough for both to work in and spend the summer on neutral ground while they (actually, he) sorted through their emotions and a.n.a.lyzed their thoughts about the state of their marriage.

In her customary way, Hedda gave careful and thoughtful a.n.a.lysis to her decision, and as always she could interpret the personal situation only by turning it into a universal. She cited literary examples such as D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and Women in Love, which she and Saul had both read, finding "affinities" between him and Lawrence's male characters, misogynists who are unable to love women freely and completely. Throughout Saul's absence, Hedda's primary concern had been to rea.s.sure him that she could cope if he did end their marriage: "I am living in a kind of atmosphere of emergency. I summoned all kinds of formulaic faculties that have served honorably before, and from this point of view I tell you it is not kind to pity me."

The New York "gossip vultures" had been out in force since he had left, but she had not allowed them to disturb her equilibrium. She saw only her few trusted friends, among them Richard Lindner, Vita Peterson, Leo Lerman, and a group of transplanted Romanians whom she described collectively as "the ghetto group." If she did accept invitations, it was only to parties where it was professionally important to see and be seen; otherwise, she stayed at home and painted fourteen or fifteen hours each day. If she worried about anything, it was that her eyes were giving out. That, and that alone, "terrified" her.

She told Saul that when she received his "half in doubt" invitation to come to Paris, she had already squarely faced her own doubts about whether the marriage could or should continue. She realized that the possibility of his leaving raised an abject fear of which she was deeply ashamed, and after she struggled to find her balance, his halfhearted invitation for her to join him aroused that fear anew. Again she juxtaposed literary and philosophical allusions with her personal emotions, settling on Aldous Huxley, whose novels of manners, behavior, and society (Crome Yellow, Point Counterpoint, Brave New World) she and Saul had read and discussed avidly. When he asked her to tell him her honest feelings, she answered that they mattered little, "unless you are Huxley?" The important facts were that she loved him more "with each meal I cook for you, with each night I spend with you." As far as she was concerned, these were truths that needed no a.n.a.lysis: "To be with someone to whom you have already given love is partly being true to yourself. I do also love you because I loved you."

Referring to his fear that wanting her back was based on "inertia," she told him that she had just read a biography of the British prime minister H. H. (Henry Herbert) Asquith and had been struck by a similarity that might explain why Saul thought he needed her: "He [Asquith] seemed to get more and more fond of people he was used to." She had also been reading Jules Renan, where she found another correspondence that gave her pause: Renan was known as "the sweetest of cruel men." She told this to Saul, with only one comment: "Hmmm!!!"

Hedda did include one bit of "[self] a.n.a.lysis" by reminding him of the punch line in a joke he liked. A man asking for directions on a city street was told "first you pa.s.s the man standing on the corner." Saul was Hedda's "man on the corner," her "only determining point," her "patria." She believed that everything in her life that mattered began with him, and this conclusion brought her deeply hidden anger to the surface: "Your letters come and I react exactly as you want me to, and that's that! Hedda la complaisante sans caractere." She wanted him to grasp the seriousness of her situation, so she listed all the things he wanted her to be. She began with "Saul wants her independent, so independent she becomes." She tried to list other examples, but after realizing that her accusations were liable to create a chasm, she stopped after only one other: "Saul wants her [to]..." She could not go on. Even thinking about what he wanted made her "terribly tired." She stopped writing and went to bed.

She was struggling over what to do the next morning, when she began a new letter to try yet again to explain how she felt. She said it was not really a letter but a random collection of thoughts that she jotted down on the tiny sheets of notepaper she favored for literary quotes and philosophical maxims. She wanted him to acknowledge her as "a loving, respecting [her emphasis] wife" despite his insistence that he was incapable of love. She was determined to make him understand "the kind of friends.h.i.+p and intimacy that has to do with being a woman with a man but with no game or fight involved ... like walking hand in hand in complete trust all the time, feeling the yearning for and the presence of 'something bigger than both of us.' " She sincerely believed that "all of this can be debunked but life does not offer anything better."

Knowing that he would probably scoff at such an open display of emotion, she admitted that she probably should not mail the letter, but she sent it off anyway. Then she renewed her pa.s.sport; made arrangements for Richard Lindner, who loved their cat, to take care of it; closed up the house and left the key with their devoted cleaning woman, Eleanor. And then she went to Paris.

CHAPTER 18.

A DEFLATING BALLOON.

I was his long-suffering, uninterruptedly betrayed wife with a few honeymoons thrown in. The best one was when he sent for me to come to Paris.

As soon as Saul had the security of knowing that Hedda was coming to Paris, he was able to revert to his rigidly focused concentration on work, this time on hers as well as his own. Hedda's paintings were included in "Fifty Years of American Art from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York," a huge exhibition that filled the Musee National d'Art Moderne and brought in record crowds throughout the month of April 1955. Steinberg was determined to promote Sterne as the star of the show and to secure future solo exhibitions for her in Paris, preferably at Galerie Maeght. He was pleased to see how well placed her paintings were in the main room, where they were "certainly one of the best if not the best." As for the show itself, he dismissed it as "a little like [Alfred] Barr, prudent, pansyish fear of showoff, something like a bookkeeper's honesty." He was cognizant of the postwar s.h.i.+ft of dominance in modern art from Paris to New York, and because he was always a.s.sessing how his own work was received in Europe and how its reception there might differ from that in the United States, he scoffed at Barr's selections, saying they were tinged with "the fear of Oncle (France)." He accused MoMA's ill.u.s.trious director of unconsciously kowtowing to the French, which resulted in a selection of the mostly tried and true in American art, and ultimately the safe and boring.

Steinberg used Sterne's inclusion in the Paris show to try to persuade Louis Gabriel Clayeux, the gallery's artistic manager, to give her a solo exhibition at Galerie Maeght. Clayeux was not enthusiastic, but he hesitated to offend Steinberg, one of the gallery's most popular artists, so he used the polite excuse that he was away from Paris and would not return in time to see the "Fifty Years" exhibition before it closed. He suggested that Sterne should try to be included in the Salon de Mai but did not offer to use his influence to help secure a place for her in the invitation-only show. Steinberg was not pleased when Clayeux said the only venue in Paris where anyone could enter a painting without an invitation was the Salon des Independants. There were approximately four thousand entries in 1955, but Steinberg planned to see the show and a.s.sess the quality of the submissions before deciding if it would be worth Hedda's while to enter in future years.

He was spending a great deal of time negotiating on her behalf, everything from persuading Alberto Giacometti to see the show and tell his friends to do the same to taking the art collector James Thrall Soby there in the hope that he would swing his significant patronage behind Sterne. Steinberg did all this on his own, without Hedda's knowledge. He did not tell her until after he did it, for she had little interest in promoting herself and never shared his drive for fame and success. All she wanted was to be with him and paint in the solitude of their home.

Besides Clayeux's refusal to give Hedda a show, there was another unpleasantness surrounding his affiliation with Galerie Maeght, and he did not know how to counteract it. "How horrible the mud splashes people around," he complained, as he tried to find out who started the rumor that the only reason Aime Maeght had given him the 1953 solo exhibition was that he had paid for it. He thought this "bit of gossip" probably originated with Stanley William Hayter, whose techniques of etching and lithography Steinberg had observed in New York. He seldom joined the international coterie of poets, writers, and artists that congregated informally every night in Hayter's Rue Ca.s.sini atelier because he knew that Hayter was a great gossip, quite cheerful about adding color to existing rumors and making up new ones. Very few of Hayter's guests held his wicked tongue against him, but Steinberg saw it differently. "Hayter-Hate. When he laughs it's frightening. His eyes remain steely and mean, a bit crazy, too."

Steinberg always ignored gossip about his personal life, no matter how vicious it was, but when anything impinged on his profession, he dealt with it ruthlessly. Too many American painters hung out at Hayter's for him to ignore the gossip, even though they were only "small fry abstracts" whose names he could not bother to remember. "They do nothing because they feel that being here is enough," but they still managed to spread the rumor far and wide, all the way back to New York. He found it impossible to squelch, and it plagued him on and off for the next decade.

Meanwhile, he had real work to do and kept himself busy overseeing the various stages of what became the 1956 Dessins, published by Gallimard. The book was a compilation of drawings from his three previously published books, and his task was to select those that would resonate best with a European audience. Making the selection created the first disagreement, for he originally wanted sixty and Gallimard only thirty. While choosing them and working on the layout, he was "horrified" by every single one, dismissing them as the work of the "clever little monster" he had been when young. At the same time, Robert Delpire wanted to publish a separate collection for a book whose working t.i.tle, "Labirinte [sic]," was so appealing that Steinberg used the English version, Labyrinth, several years later for an entirely different kind of book. Delpire was the founder of the arts magazine Neuf, and later the promoter of photography as an art form and the publisher of important works about the genre. He was famous for always championing the unusual, if not the outre, and he planned to issue his selection of Steinberg's drawings in the unusual format of a depliant, with the book's pages unfolding like an accordion.

"There may be trouble here," Steinberg worried, and indeed there was. He was never satisfied with the quality of the reproductions, no matter how many times they were redone, nor did he like the way they looked when the pages unfolded. He was "furious and confused" when both Delpire and Gallimard used the excuse of expensive publis.h.i.+ng costs to cut his royalties, saying sarcastically, "Because, of course, I don't need money!" He was determined to finish both books despite the insult to his income and the technical problems involved in the visuals, if only to "honor" the drawing table he had bought and installed in his hotel room. After several months, when it became clear that no matter how much Mrs. Jennie Bradley intervened there would be no resolution in his favor, he made two decisions. Gallimard was the most prestigious publisher in France, so despite the cut in royalties he would not sever his ties there and would let the company publish Dessins; but despite his need for the money the Delpire book would bring, he made Delpire cancel it, because it would never meet his high standards.

The French publis.h.i.+ng situation was insulting, especially after the previous two years, when he had enjoyed extraordinary attention and praise within the international art world. His reputation was in the ascendant, and his sales burgeoned after nonstop solo exhibitions in galleries and museums. He was the subject of articles and reviews in newspapers and magazines and on radio and television shows. Critics vied to dub him a cultural commentator, a visual historian of contemporary culture, and an authority on everything from the iconic to the ordinary. His work was seen in Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Basel, and throughout Germany in cities like Dortmund, Hanover, Lubeck, and Frankfurt. In the United States, there were solo shows in Chicago, Richmond, Was.h.i.+ngton, Dallas, and Santa Barbara. Steinberg's style was so well known that the adjective Steinbergian was coined, shorthand for a new, unusual, and slightly off-kilter way of looking at the world.

For Steinberg, it was wonderful indeed to be recognized for the sheer hard work he had put into creating, organizing, and occasionally helping to promote his drawings. On the one hand he took his reputation as his just reward, while on the other he blamed it for the turmoil and exhaustion that made him want to flee from everything he had worked so hard to create. The problem was that whenever he thought he could relax and enjoy the accolades and financial rewards, somebody needed something that only he could provide, and because of his overdeveloped sense of responsibility, he did what he could to help.

Just when he thought he was well under way to regaining the equilibrium he had gone to Europe to find, events conspired to throw him off track once again. Parsons and Janis were pleading with him to send more drawings for shows that would enable them to capitalize on the momentum of his European reception. Requests were coming from other galleries, such as the one from Elodie Courter, who organized traveling shows for the Museum of Modern Art and who was pestering Hedda to get Saul to partic.i.p.ate. Courter wanted to include his work in an exhibition that would take recent American art to cities where it had not yet been shown and would not accept his refusal. Saul deputized Hedda to go in person before she left for Paris and repeat to Courter what he had already told her in letters and cables: "I don't want to be shown with just a few drawings ... I hate group shows. I dislike humour in large doses and I refused constantly to partic.i.p.ate in anthologies or cartoon festivals." "You don't have to feel responsible," he instructed Hedda. "Just tell her NO."

THE SUDDEN SPURT OF WORK WAS once again turning him into the "deflating balloon" he had been at the beginning of his European wanderings. He was having second thoughts about staying in "the misery that Paris has become" but had made too many appointments to leave. The main reason he could not leave was that the "Lica troubles" were starting up again. The Romanian government had relaxed restrictions slightly, allowing a larger quota of Jews to immigrate to Israel, and once again it seemed that the Roman family might be among them. Steinberg learned of this in a roundabout way when an official from the American emba.s.sy left a brusque message for him to appear at the Israeli consulate early the next morning. Fearful that his insomnia would cause him to miss the appointment, he took a strong dose of sleeping pills and went to bed early. He still slept so fitfully that he was groggy throughout his appointment.

It was a total frustration, a bureaucratic formality of filling out thirty new forms with the same facts he had been attesting to for years. After he verified his income and raised his hand to swear financial responsibility for the Roman family, the Israelis told him to go home and await further notice, while the Americans shrugged dismissively, implying that there was nothing more they could do. It was another stress-inducing runaround, but if this one held the possibility that his sister's family might actually emigrate, he wanted to be in Paris, where it was easier to leave at a moment's notice if the Israelis granted the visa that would let him shepherd them from Bucharest to Israel.

Hedda had dropped everything to come to Paris, and now it appeared that he might have to leave her alone yet again. He considered it one more depressing example of how external realities hindered him from having what he wanted, in this case the "Paris Honeymoon" he was counting on. What angered and frustrated him most was the way intimations and influences of Rosa and his Romanian upbringing surfaced during these times of stress-especially Rosa's maxims to keep his head on his shoulders and keep making money. Moritz added to Saul's confusion when he wrote that Rosa was having a serious nervous breakdown and making him ill with her negative thoughts and changes of mind. Saul's comparison of his own erratic behavior with his mother's was unavoidable.

The only time he felt "a wave of warmth and security" was when he was drawing for his own pleasure, and once again pleasure was eluding him. He complained that whenever he had to draw to make money, there was "displeasure that can last for many months, linger like an illness." Now he refused to see anything good in work that had originally pleased him, and to prove his point he made a list of all the projects that he claimed were responsible for making him impossible to live with. When he and Hedda had spent the summer in Vermont, he blamed the "cute mural for Bonwit Teller." Hollywood was "h.e.l.l" because of the need to earn money by decorating a swimming pool. Stonington was "silly" because he resented having to work alongside Jerry Robbins in the same room, claiming he was "never able to work properly" unless in his own work s.p.a.ce.

Brooding over the conflicting claims on his time and energy led him to seek the company of Alberto Giacometti. The artist lived and worked in an atelier that was one step removed from a hovel, and despite the money his sculpture was commanding, he had no desire to live elsewhere. The best part of his life was his work, and he communicated that joy to Steinberg, who after one of their evenings would spend the next day exclaiming, "I want to become a clochard" before fretting over the impossibility. "I don't want to be what I was but how can I change? I have to make money." He decided that one way to lighten his load would be to enlist Hedda's help, which he had never done before for several reasons. Hedda was "never one of those artists' wives who make a profession of promoting their husbands." She already had her own esteemed professional life when Steinberg met her, and throughout their marriage, he respected her need to practice it. However, the main reason he never asked for her help was that he needed to be in total control of every aspect of his work. He found it impossible to delegate the authority to anyone else-not even Hedda, the person he trusted most-to make decisions on his behalf. These s.h.i.+fting att.i.tudes collided when he told Hedda that as soon as she arrived, she would have to concentrate on helping him learn to live in such a way that he would not have to do any work but his own. Almost immediately he changed his mind, and for the first time he worried that he was not taking her needs into consideration, asking, "What about you? Do you want to live with [such a] monster?" He apologized for all the moaning and complaining he had done in the past several months, saying that he was embarra.s.sed because he had done nothing for her while she was always so kind and rea.s.suring toward him.

Even though he was still "a bit insane" in the midst of so much indecision, he resorted to the animal imagery he often used to describe their intimate relations.h.i.+p. "Rabbit" was his favorite term of affection for Hedda, and he called himself a "crocodile," both of which became iconic images in his drawings. Continuing with animal metaphors, he told her he was sure that in a few days his struggle to be either "worm or b.u.t.terfly" would be over, and if she wanted him back, he would fall into her lap as her "old messy crocodile, loving and sedate."

HEDDA ARRIVED ON MAY 3, 1955, and moved into his room at the Hotel Pont Royal. Saul was sick of hotel living, and when their friend the painter Roberto Matta told him of an apartment at 26 Rue Jacob, he rented it sight unseen. In a spurt of happiness, they moved to what was then a shabby street on the Left Bank. They were several doors away from Natalie Clifford Barney's extraordinary house in the courtyard of no. 20 and the building of the same number in which Ellen and Richard Wright had an apartment. Hedda was fascinated by all the existentialists, members of the haut monde, and beatniks she saw coming and going at no. 20, but Saul told her they had friends enough already and she should concentrate on them, him, and her painting. However, for the next two months they led a highly social existence, their calendars filled with luncheon and dinner dates. They saw a great deal of Germana and Roberto Matta, and Saul went alone to visit Geer van Velde at his home in Cachan, outside Paris. Janet Flanner invited them to dine with her and the visiting James Thurber. On a single day they had drinks with Eugene Ionesco and his wife and dinner with the Giacomettis, and capped off the evening with a late-night viewing of La Ronde. Sonia Orwell demanded their presence at several dinners, and they went along cheerfully because they were amused by her imperious manner. Among the writers they saw were Georges Bataille and Andre Breton, who along with Matta introduced them to the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel. Eugene Ionesco introduced them to the aged Tristan Tzara, who liked them so much that he invited them to lunch several days later. He also introduced them to Stephane Lupasco, the Romanian-born logician and philosopher whose dense and elliptical writings fascinated them both, but especially Hedda, who puzzled over them for years afterward. They spent a great deal of time with the photographers Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, and Steinberg dined alone with Paul Rand and later with Le Corbusier.

Wedged into their social program were several visits to Hedda's mother and brother in Paris and an overnight visit to Nice to see Saul's parents, which was all they could tolerate. At the same time, several of Lica's "heartbreaking" letters reached Saul. Hards.h.i.+ps and restrictions had made her "mean and ugly," and she did not know how much more she could stand. Between her anguished letters and his mother's hysterical ones, he was feeling suffocated by half-truths, and the two women chose this moment to introduce a new wrinkle. Under the Romanian Communist government, the only acceptable destination for any Jew who wanted to leave was Israel, and the only acceptable reason was to reunite with family already there. Since Lica's parents were in France, the government now wanted to know why the Romans had not applied to go to Israel, although of course they would not have been permitted to go there if they had. "On top of that, they are in Bucharest-a complete family with children of their own," the government decreed, and therefore they had no valid reason for emigrating. Most damaging of all in the government's view was Lica's rich brother, who lived at the epicenter of decadent Western civilization and who had already corrupted them by sending luxury goods and money on a regular basis (less than half of which ever reached them).

"I don't know what to do," Saul said, fearing that he was running out of options. He contacted "Rothschilds, Romanians, Israeli Consul," and then asked Maeght and other "art people" to use their influence with influential Jewish philanthropists and benefactors of Israel. He left nothing untried, in the hope that someone could open useful political doors. As he was working to secure the Roman family's pa.s.sage to Israel, Lica dropped another bombsh.e.l.l, telling him for the first time that despite his years of efforts to get her family to Israel, what she had really wanted all along was to come to France. She sent frantic appeals for him to get them a French visa, and this, he said, was "after I troubled the whole Palestine, consuls, etc." Embarra.s.sed by all his earlier efforts to enlist the help of influential Jewish advocates for Israel and not knowing whom to ask for France, he turned to Hedda's brother for advice.

As if on cue, Rosa chose this moment to vent her frustration over Lica's troubles by chastising Saul for buying such an expensive refrigerator, laying all the blame on Moritz as the one who put him up to it. She saved a portion of her ranting for Hedda, blaming her mother for "hiding" her and Saul in Paris and selfishly refusing to let them go to Nice. Whatever Saul did, he knew it would always be "the wrong thing" for Rosa, and of course it was. When he stopped on the street to watch a funeral procession pa.s.s by, he "envied for a moment the princ.i.p.al."

HE CONTINUED TO WORK ON GALLIMARD'S Dessins, going frequently to the print shop and fussing over every single detail as both the printer and publisher tore out their hair over the constant changes his meticulous demands necessitated. Even though he did whittle the book down by twenty-two drawings plus "cutouts," no one was happy as he dragged the process on. Despite feeling that he was wasting his time, Steinberg still slogged away. "I'll never learn," he scolded himself each time he returned to the print shop. Eventually he and Gallimard agreed on a compromise: the publisher would agree to his final selection and allow him to paste the layout providing that he drew a new jacket and front and back covers. He agreed, and when the book was published, he was content that all his slogging had changed the "kind of anthology of old drawings" into a good book filled "with many new ones."

WHILE HE WAS AWAY IN EUROPE, his friends at The New Yorker had not forgotten him. Shawn and Geraghty had both rejected his idea for drawings of the southern trip, but they had a more ambitious project in mind for him. They were trying to secure a visa from the Soviet Union for him to go there and prepare a significant collection of drawings based on whatever he saw as he traveled wherever the government would permit. He was excited by the idea and eager to go. Originally he thought the visa would come swiftly and easily, so he completed all the detailed paperwork at the American emba.s.sy in Paris, patiently doing it on top of all the forms he had to fill out for his sister there and at the Israeli consulate. He had not counted on all the bureaucracies moving in their own good time, which was at a glacial pace, and by the middle of June there was still no word about his visa. Confronted with bureaucratic slowness, worried about the need to bring in some cash, and not wanting to spend the summer in the heat of either Paris or New York, he sent Hedda home with instructions to rent a house on Cape Cod or anywhere else that had a sand beach but definitely "NO Stonington."

He spent his last days in Paris adding up the money he had earned from gallery sales and book dividends, a grand total of $868.34, which he spent at Hermes buying farewell presents for his friends.

HE LEFT PARIS ON A HIGH NOTE. At least one of his two books-Gallimard's-would turn out to be what he wanted, and despite canceling the other he still had cordial relations with Delpire, who was ready to publish another whenever Steinberg wanted. Most of his interaction had been with artists, and much of their talk had been about work. These conversations had given him some interesting new perspectives on his own work, and he thought about them on the flight home, but the one that resonated most had been with Geer van Velde. Steinberg was fascinated by the simplicity of van Velde's modest little house in Cachan, saying that he lived a life that reminded him of Voltaire's admonition to Candide to cultivate his own garden. As they talked after dinner, van Velde confessed that he was confused and troubled by the new direction his painting had taken, becoming stark, dark, and veering from abstraction toward representation. Van Velde thought it was changing spontaneously, without his being able to explain exactly how or why. Steinberg offered that it was moving from "pleasant semi-abstractions" to "things that are not pleasant looking." Van Velde responded that he was struggling through his painting with issues in his life of "moral problems" and "truth." Steinberg suggested that nonrepresentation was merely a way of "avoiding easy ways out (the old Jewish taboo of the human figure in art)." He offered the possibility that such struggles often led artists to "become inevitably Jews at heart and mind," and thought that this might be happening to the Dutch Protestant van Velde. Their initial discussion ended unresolved, but the subject of morality and truth in art became one they returned to frequently whenever they met from then on. That night, when Steinberg returned to his hotel room, he made a cryptic entry in his datebook: "Note: alone, people will become Jews. Abstract painting. Jewish."

He factored his thoughts about the exchange with van Velde into his recollections of the conversations he had had with other artists, writers, and filmmakers throughout his several months of peripatetic travel. Each social encounter usually included an exchange of information about current projects, often with details of new methods and techniques, which Steinberg digested to make them relate to and sometimes apply to his work. As he thought them through, he usually explained them in letters to Hedda before recording his thoughts in his pocket notebooks or making drawings in his sketchbooks.

His thinking did not end there, for often traces of earlier conversations could be found years later in the random collections of pages that served in lieu of a formal diary or journal. In one such collection of notes, he t.i.tled a pa.s.sage "What I learned from Artists." He asked de Kooning, "How do you achieve this or that effect?" De Kooning replied, "All you need is a strong desire to achieve this or that and you invent it." Barnett Newman gave him more practical advice: "Never laugh for photographers. Dress well, necktie. 'They' want to show that you are a regular fellow." Marcel Duchamp gave the best advice of all: "Answer or throw away immediately all mail as soon as it arrives." Unfortunately, this was advice Steinberg never followed. He did, however, follow the pattern of every other artist he respected, who, when asked to pa.s.s judgment on another artist's work, would always reply, "Great!"

NOW, ON THE WAY HOME AFTER several months totally immersed in thinking about himself and his career, and with the Russian journey he hoped to make uppermost in his mind, he began to think of the months in Europe as a natural break that divided his career cleanly and sharply into two parts: drawings he had done "before" his abrupt flight away from New York and the life he lived there, and what he would go on to do "after," when he intended to create both life and work anew.

When he thought about it, the divisions between his life in New York and his life in Europe were vast, with the major difference being work. When he was in New York, his main objective was to do enough commercial work to support himself and all his dependents during the several months when he would be in France or Italy doing only what he wanted to do. Also, his primary socializing was with a different sort of people in New York than those he saw in Europe. In New York, c.o.c.ktail parties, dinner parties, gallery openings, and book launches were ubiquitous, and the guest lists were usually large enough to preclude anything but politely superficial chatter. In Paris, he was mostly with artists and writers, usually over dinner tables in their homes or in quiet restaurants where they were able to engage in serious conversation, more often than not about current work and ideas for future projects. On this last trip in particular he had been with so many other writers and artists that he could not help but think about his own way of life in relation to theirs. Even the artists who were financially comfortable, such as Giacometti and Miro, to give but two examples, lived far more quietly and simply than he did, and with a daily existence that centered completely on their work.

Steinberg was different from them in an important way. Although many of his friends on both continents were among the intelligentsia, his was a questing intelligence that was always on the lookout for whatever struck his offbeat vision and for new ways in which to use it. No matter how ordinary anything may have seemed to others-a street sign, a woman's clothing, even an overheard conversation-Steinberg always found a way to make it new. Everything was grist for his creative mill, from the silliest movie to the most serious book. By putting his own particular spin on what he drew, he could turn his subjects into an "aha!" moment for those who beheld his work. "I am a writer who draws," he said of himself, and he could legitimately have expanded this self-definition to include the social historian and cultural anthropologist.

From childhood, Steinberg was always a voracious reader, and he counted writers among his closest friends. If he read something he liked, he often wrote to the author, and inevitably friends.h.i.+ps were created. His months alone had given him the opportunity to read widely and deeply, particularly in serious nonfiction. Like almost every other reader of Isaiah Berlin's famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," he used Berlin's cla.s.sifications to interpret himself. Steinberg saw Berlin's hedgehog as viewing the world through a lens that restricted itself to a singular, fixed image, idea, or vision, while his fox drew on a large body of images and experiences in order to form an all-encompa.s.sing, all-inclusive worldview. In one of his brief notes Steinberg wrote, "In order to become a fox, I had to be a hedgehog for a long time. I can't make distinction between what is right and what my mind tells me is right."

When he had been a hedgehog, one single idea had dominated his thinking and behavior: the need to make money and the concurrent responsibility to support others. During his years in Milan, when he was a poor student, he had to sell his art in order to supplement the meager financial aid his parents could afford to send. When he was in Santo Domingo, in order to support himself he had to tailor his work to create a desire for it in American media. After the war, he needed to provide financial stability for himself and his wife, his parents, his sister, and his numerous other relatives. He also felt the need to help his friends, sending money to Aldo on the frequent occasions when he needed it and a monthly stipend directly to Ada's bank. By the time he ran away to Europe in 1955, he had been on a proverbial treadmill for almost two decades, during which he had been a hedgehog with a single fixed idea: to be successful as an artist in order to acquire money. And when fame came with it, he reveled in it, even though it meant he had to run harder, faster, and longer.

The time he spent in Europe encouraged him to think he could still fulfill his responsibilities while branching out to become Berlin's fox, one who knew many things and had many ideas. While in Paris he did buy a hedgehog's drafting table for his hotel room, but he also bought a fox's white parasol, easel, and blue artist's coat, all for painting outdoors, which he had earlier given up because it took too much time away from paid projects. If he retained anything from his hedgehog years, he convinced himself that it was how to use his commercial work in ways that would continue to bring in the much-needed income while allowing his private creative vision to be like a fox's, multifaceted and ready to explore many different avenues of expression.

HE RETURNED TO NEW YORK AT the end of June but stayed only long enough to pack summer things before joining Hedda in Wellfleet, where she had rented a house through early September. He liked it there well enough to think that Ma.s.sachusetts might be the place to buy a second home, but he was still eager to get back to New York and resume his frenetic socializing, as if there was nothing more important to do in life. Much of it was with friends from The New Yorker. Jim Geraghty took him to lunch at the Algonquin, where they plotted strategies for securing the Russian visa; he shared Charlie Addams's love of gambling and accepted all his invitations to play poker; and he even allowed Brendan Gill to take him to lunch at the Century a.s.sociation as a prelude to proposing him for members.h.i.+p. He went to Geoffrey h.e.l.lman's large and boozy parties and lunched alone with St. Clair McKelway or Joe Mitch.e.l.l, both of whom were writers he much admired.

He spent weekends with Mary McCarthy and her husband, James West, and he and Hedda made the trek to Utopia Parkway in Queens to see Joseph Cornell. But all the while he was out and about, he had not forgotten his European good intentions. He went often to Wittenborn, the shop of the New York dealer in rare art and architecture books, and added to his growing collection. He was still thinking about the self-knowledge he had gained during his time abroad and he continued to make self-referential notes that might translate into drawings. He was exploring his own "vices," both "good," which he defined as his love of drinking fine scotch whiskey, and "bad," which he equated with his tendency toward "avarice." To him, this meant the l.u.s.t to make money and rake in as much as he could ama.s.s, greedily buying expensive clothing in greater quant.i.ties than he needed, and the need for s.e.x with almost every woman he met. He was discreet about several French encounters, one of which remained an occasional liaison for years afterward; and when he returned to New York, the coded initials, times, and addresses continued to clutter his appointment books.

As he thought about himself, he was also col