Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 12

In his own art, there are numerous references to smell and even more examples of noses, with quite a few exploring or explaining Gogol's influence. Steinberg called a drawing he made for Location, the literary magazine cofounded by Harold Rosenberg and Thomas Hess, his "version of the nose problem" and the "equivalent in drawing of Gogol's treatment of the same problem in literature." In real life, olfactory sensations served Steinberg as an aide-memoire, something akin to Proust's madeleine. Of Betty Parsons, for example, he said, "She left a very good taste, like something good you smelled or tasted or saw that increased in importance in memory." Even his sister Lica acknowledged his fascination with noses when she described her first impression of the move to Cachan in a phrase he would appreciate, as being "surrounded by [Armenian] noses, one bigger than the other." Images of noses fill his sketchbooks, and in one, a man sits on a chair with a small table between him and another chair on which sits a gigantic nose. He called it "I talk to my Nose about Childhood."

Like much of Steinberg's art and Gogol's prose, Nabokov's so-called biography was a slightly off-kilter look at life. He begins not in the traditional manner, with Gogol's birth, but with his death, when doctors applied half a dozen slimy black leeches to his long nose in an attempt to cure the disorders of his stomach. Poor Gogol spent his dying moments desperately trying to pull off the "slimy, creeping, furtive things," which is how Nabokov segued into crediting Gogol's actual "long sensitive nose" for the "nasal leitmotiv" that pervades his fiction. Nabokov concluded that "it is hard to find any other author who has described with such gusto smells, sneezes, and snores," and he found the same gusto in Steinberg, who was his favorite contemporary artist. What Nabokov liked best about Steinberg was how he "could raise unexpected questions about the consequence of a style or even a single line, or could open up a metaphysical riddle with as much wit as an Escher or a Magritte and with far more economy."

STEINBERG WAS LEFT TO FEND FOR himself during the last months of the 1962 summer, while Gigi was still on her European vacation. He chose to stay in Springs, where he found himself truly alone because the Nivola family was in Tino's native Sardinia and there were no sounds of children or the informal running back and forth across the road from house to house that usually punctuated his days. He swam or fished at Louse Point and pedaled slowly up and down the country roads on his bike, but mostly he sat on the front porch and read. In his semi-isolation, a novel that resonated deeply was Richard Hughes's The Fox in the Attic, about a fairly clueless upper-cla.s.s Englishman who visits his German cousins in their Bavarian castle between the two world wars and observes. .h.i.tler's rise to power. Steinberg was struck by Hughes's ability to convey the "sadness or despair that we're familiar with," which he was feeling too, but "rarely and for a short time."

Even though it was the dog days of summer and he was virtually hiding out in the country, the offers of commercial work still came in the usual flood of letters and telephone calls. He ignored them, because he was taking a one- to six-month respite from projects that came with stipulations and deadlines, and from his own creative work as well. He knew he was in a mood where nothing he did would please him: "Work derives from work and that has to be avoided ... What used to be excitement once, it's no more so." He estimated that he had enough money to take time off from everything connected with art, commercial or personal, and still be able to meet his self-imposed responsibilities. Lica and Rica were both working, but they depended on his large contributions. He continued to send regular payments to his Aunt Sali and her children in Israel, and he always responded to the occasional requests for help that came from his other cousins. His largest expense was Gigi, for he had become her sole support, and it took a lot of money "to get her out of granny dresses and keep her in couture and jewelry in the style of Marilyn Monroe," but he was determined to do it. He also had to find a discreet way to funnel money to Aldo, who had been desperate after The New Yorker rejected a hastily written memoir of their trip to the American South. Aldo needed money to pay the expenses of an "Anne" as well as to contribute support to Bianca Lattuada and her two daughters, and his financial distress threw him into a depression that left him nearly incapacitated. Steinberg's problem was to find the way to offer money and persuade him to accept it without wounding his pride. Also, Ada chose the moment of his deepest concern for Aldo to dump a new load of financial troubles onto her "Olino Caro," whom she knew would always come to her rescue. In frustration, he begged Aldo to see her and learn the truth of the matter.

WORK AND TRAVEL CAME TOGETHER IN an intriguing manner while Steinberg was alone in Springs, despite his intention not to accept any commercial proposals for the next several months. Dino De Laurentiis had wanted to work with Steinberg for years, and to entice him into finally agreeing, he phoned repeatedly to dangle an invitation for him to collaborate on a new screenplay that he wanted to film, written by Mario Monicelli, one of the most distinguished proponents of commedia all'italiana. Steinberg had long admired De Laurentiis's talent for producing a string of award-winning successes, among them Fellini's Nights of Cabiria and La Strada, each of which won him an Oscar, and the possibility of working with Monicelli was irresistible.

As Steinberg was mulling over the proposal, an offer to design a mural arrived. Murals were not as intriguing as film, but this one promised a great influx of cash and he felt he had to consider it. It was never realized, but it gave him the excuse he needed to travel to Rome, as it was to be built there. He had had enough of tranquillity and was bored by his bucolic solitude, and he wanted company and needed pampering; he planned to spend the last two weeks of September at luxurious Italian resorts, where he all but begged Aldo to join him. Then, just as he was writing to various Italian friends to set up appointments, a totally unexpected invitation arrived. The Israeli shipping firm Zim asked him to create a mural for one of its pa.s.senger ships and proposed to pay his expenses for a visit to Haifa at his earliest convenience.

STEINBERG HAD A GOOD TIME IN ITALY, despite the fact that De Laurentiis was mysteriously unavailable and the Monicelli project withered and died without his ever knowing why. He declined the Rome mural project in short order and then concentrated on having a happy vacation for the two weeks he was there. Aldo and Bianca were his guests at several posh resorts on the coast above Rome, and he went alone to La Spezia, Naples, and Iscia, where he enjoyed "beach fronting." One of his most pleasurable meetings was his lunch in Rome with Nicola Chiaromonte, one of his oldest and most respected friends, to discuss various ways in which his work might appear in Tempo presente, the publication Chiaromonte coedited with Ign.a.z.io Silone.

On October 1, Steinberg flew to Tel Aviv, ostensibly "to work" and primarily "to doubt," but to his astonishment, everything about Israel struck him as a delightful surprise. Before he was invited to visit, he had not thought about the country as anything other than the place where a slew of relatives had settled among many others from his old neighborhood in Bucharest (which may have been why Israel was never high on his list of places to see). However, once he landed in Tel Aviv, the sheer beauty of the landscape was almost overwhelming. As he traveled to Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem and after he visited a kibbutz, he was a.s.saulted by a series of unexpected sensations. Israel was composed of "the poetic, romantic...of the ancient, medieval, Turkish, Arabic, Romanian places." In short, it brought back memories of his native Romania with its similar layers of settlement and the same "odors and perfumes." What he liked even better than observing the landscape was how easily he was able to glide into conversations with ordinary citizens as they went about their daily life. He could not wait to write to Hedda to tell her how calm and happy it made him, to be "surrounded by Jewish faces," with whom he felt very much at home, and how the sight of so many "Jewish noses" almost made him cry out with joy. Everywhere he went, he was accepted as a lanzmann, and he told Aldo that it made him almost delirious to find he could talk to people so easily and "immediately, in the most subtle way."

Steinberg and Sigrid Spaeth: "He's aFreud she's too Jung for him!" (ill.u.s.tration credit 27.1) Until he went to Israel, Steinberg's Jewishness had been cultural rather than religious. He did not attend services regularly, but if he heard of a particular rabbi whose ideas interested him, he would go to the temple just to hear the sermons. If a certain synagogue was noted for its music, he would go to hear it as if he were attending a concert. Most of all, if there was a political underpinning to the service, he could be counted on to attend, and whenever a Jewish group, cause, or organization asked for a contribution, he sent whatever it wanted, be it money or art. It was interesting, however, that despite the distance he maintained between himself and any practice of the Jewish religion, he always fasted on Yom Kippur.

STEINBERG DECIDED NOT TO MAKE THE mural for the Zim ocean liner, and it was just as well, for shortly after, the company decided that airline travel had made pa.s.senger service unprofitable and ended it. It made him determined to resist all further "work on command," no matter how tempting the project might seem. As the year ended, when he drew only what he wanted, he found himself unable to concentrate long enough to produce anything worth keeping. It was difficult to sit at his work table for the long periods of time that had in the past made him feel that he was working happily and well. His disposition was not helped by a new spate of troubles with his teeth, which kept him seated in the dentist's chair several times each week for a series of appointments that lasted almost two months.

Everything, it seemed, was giving him trouble. He was fed up with the Jaguar, which was in the repair shop more than it was on the road, so he sold it and bought a Buick. He was beset by unexplained "terrors," and the only way he knew to rid himself of them was to draw them "in a comic way, in the manner of savages." Everything he drew became "part of a diary," and he filed the very few drawings he kept under the word Confessions. For a time he thought this would become the t.i.tle of the book he was forcing himself to work toward, but he so disliked what he saw that he stopped drawing and tried to write instead. "This is a sad but very human story," he began, quite ordinarily, before trying to imitate some of the wordplay a.s.sociated with Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Blue of spirit ... a middle-aged introvert has been contemplating the problems of a union with a red-blooded, cigarette addicted, lush young moll. He's aFreud she's too Jung for him!"

He was writing about his relationship with Gigi, who was happy in her studies at Columbia, where she had met many people her own age and befriended quite a few, including a student from Ethiopia who insisted he was a prince of royal blood and with whom she was having an off-again, on-again affair. Steinberg still had a retinue of women with whom he slept routinely, but unlike Gigi, several were married, and all the others had independent lives and professions so they were not dependent on him, as she was. When his other women were otherwise occupied, Steinberg was often alone, and his way of overcoming loneliness was to immerse himself in literature. He reread all of Chekhov's work that was translated into English and countless "random biographies of obscure people." He did enjoy Enid Starkie's life of Rimbaud, who was one of his favorite writers, but it took several years before his imagination allowed him to construct "Rimbaud's Lost Diary," a doc.u.ment that looked so authentic that he actually fooled some friends into thinking it was.

In January, to get away from the cold and to cure himself of depression, he took Gigi to Key West for the month, but he was not happy when they had to return so she could start the new semester. The cold weather in New York made him feel "sadder still." He withdrew in boredom from the constant round of socializing but then could not stand the solitude, so he invented excuses to phone people whom he knew he could trust to accept him unquestioningly. Harriet and Esteban Vicente were two he counted on for frequent invitations to their home in Princeton, and he often made the trek to Penn Station "if only to have an hour's train ride in the evening."

Gigi told him she wanted to go to Europe again as soon as the spring term ended, and she had an ambitious itinerary: she planned to start in Paris with shopping and sightseeing, then continue on to Trier, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, Dubrovnik, Istanbul, and Samsun, with one or more stops in St. Tropez to rest up for successive stages of her journey. She wanted to be away for two and a half months or maybe longer. He told her to do whatever would make her happy and said he would meet all her expenses.

Even before she left, he knew he needed to fill his life with some sort of work, no matter what it was, and as he could do none that he thought worth keeping, he began to experiment to see how well he could copy other artists: he made "cubist collages" in the style of Braque and Gris and painted a "very elegant collection of Mondrians," all of which he framed and hung in the house in Springs. He was proud that no one recognized them as fakes. Then he busied himself in physical work without thought by painting the interior of the Springs house, with all the walls white and the floors gray.

When he did think, it was only to arrive at the same sad conclusion: "I don't like being alone anymore." In the past, when he was unhappy with his life, he had always found a way to flee from it. Travel was the great eraser, and for the next several years he seized on it with a pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER 28.

THE TERRIBLE CURSE OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF FAME.

Impossible to recount things ... As always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things ... Also coming home and finding myself no longer the same.

I'm not working," Saul told Aldo as June became July 1963 and all he could do was make collages in Braque's 1912 style. He was mired in an "unhappy period-but not even unhappy, intense rather, but not bad." He defined his malaise as stemming from a desire for "absolute happiness (who knows what it is)" and the resulting "confusion, which comes from not following the highest ideals." He moped around until August, when Gigi's return from her triumphant tour of Europe made things brighter. To celebrate her homecoming, he did something he detested: he drove to Idlewild Airport to surprise her by meeting the plane. And he did something else he disliked almost as much: he planned and organized a surprise party for her August 9 birthday, inviting everyone he knew to join them at Ashawagh Hall in East Hampton.

The party was an extravagance, for he was preoccupied by money and the fear that he did not have enough of it. He had wanted to go to Europe with Gigi and make the trip a truly grand tour that she would never forget, but he sent her alone when his income tax bill was much higher than expected. Shortly after, he learned that his 1961 return was being audited because the IRS wanted a dollar value for each of the eleven paintings he had contributed to the Library of Congress. He a.s.sessed the lot at a modest total of $2,000 and it was quickly settled, but he was still shaken by the experience. Although he had been in the United States for two decades, his initial reaction to any contact with authority aroused the same fear he had felt as a Jewish boy in Romania, always on the alert for arbitrary government persecution.

By the autumn his money worries had lessened, and he was in a slightly better mood after two covers on The New Yorker drew a large volume of fan mail. His satisfaction was enhanced when the critic Herbert Mitgang asked to buy a drawing of the Galleria Umberto I in Naples, where he had been stationed as a correspondent for Stars & Stripes during the war. Steinberg was further delighted when Mitgang described a visit to Michelangelo Antonioni's Rome apartment, where he saw one of Steinberg's drawings hung prominently among others by Klee, Kandinsky, and Morandi. Mitgang told Steinberg that when he saw where Antonioni placed it, he understood what he aimed for in all his films; when he told this to Antonioni, he replied with one word: "Exactly."

Steinberg's usual retainers brought a new influx of cash, starting with the annual $20,000 from Hallmark, and a new spate of litigation brought more before the year ended. Life and Time had infringed his copyright by using full-page ads drawn by M. Lado that depicted a wife drinking coffee while staring at a statue of her husband at the other end of the table. It was so close to one of Steinberg's that had been in The New Yorker ten years earlier that Alexander Lindey agreed he had been "substantially injured" and brought suit and won.

Steinberg's talents permitted him to straddle numerous areas within the art and design worlds, and this polymorphism often led diverse professional organizations to invite him to share his expertise. He was flattered but he usually refused the invitations, such as those to be the featured guest and principle speaker at conferences of the California Council of the American Inst.i.tute of Architects and the California Eyes West group. Both were significant honors, which he declined because he did not consider himself qualified to dispense information to those whose work lay entirely within specific areas which he occasionally visited but did not fully inhabit: "I don't quite belong in the art, cartoon or magazine world, so the art world doesn't quite know how to place me." He believed such honors contributed to "monumentalizing" the artist and carried the "terrible curse of the consciousness of fame." To accept would have meant the difference between being an "Artist, with a capital A"-that is, one who made a living by a.s.suming an aura of expertise-and being an "artist with a small a"-that is, one who went about his own work and left it to others to judge and evaluate it.

At the same time as these genuine honors came, there was also a fairly dubious one that marked a major change in his public image: he was no longer just an "artist," who could count on being reviewed or written about every time he sold a painting, published a book, or held an exhibition; he was now a public figure, recognized as a bon vivant and man-about-town. The editors of the Celebrity Register, published by Cleveland Amory and Earl Blackwell, asked him to submit "another glossy portrait" because the one they had published in the first issue was "unsatisfactory." Steinberg was flattered by the request, but as he had not given them the first photo, he ignored the request for the second.

THE BARRAGE OF FAN MAIL STILL poured in for several months after The New Yorker featured Steinberg's dual versions of the letter E on the May 25 cover. It was another of the captivating drawings that signaled a shift in his subject matter, one that fell into the category of the quasi-philosophical drawings that left readers pondering and puzzling over his contributions to the magazine during the past year or so. His "strange, silent world" had been identified a decade earlier by Alexey Brodovitch as "peopled with chinless, blank-faced men, beady-eyed women with monstrous headdresses, precocious animals, and weird architectural fantasies," but viewers mostly attributed it to a "comic technique" that raised many laughs but few questions. In the 1960s, when his letters, numbers, and punctuation marks either took on insistent anthropomorphic qualities or reflected the existential situations in which animals, little men, and disparate women find themselves, the influx of fan mail from the magazine's readers burgeoned.

After the appearance of the October 6, 1962, cover, featuring the numbers 5 and 2, readers demanded interpretations and answers to questions that became intense, urgent, and sometimes even angry. Basically, they were all asking, "What does it mean?" The scene is one of Steinberg's traditional cafe tables, with a trim and tailored number 5 sitting confidently in a chair on the left, a thought balloon above its head br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with complicated mathematical equations and symbols. A highly ornamented 2 sits on the chair opposite, and if a number can be made to look dejected and depressed, this 2 certainly does, with its edges all frilled and furbelowed but with nary a balloon above it to show that it is capable of even the most ordinary thought.

Steinberg talked about this cover when he sat for a far-ranging interview several years later with Jean Stein, calling it "a dialogue between a No. 5 and a No. 2 ... who are both drinking and trying to figure out their relationship." He described the 5 as "more solid looking, made out of straight, simple lines," whereas the 2 "has frills and is sort of pinkish; it denotes a woman." As the 2 looks at the 5, she tries to figure out their "potential combinings," while at the same time the 5 is figuring out "the same geometrical, mathematical, or arithmetical possibilities." Steinberg insisted that the drawing worked because of the numbers he had chosen; if he had chosen a 6 talking to a 9, it would have been "unprintable."

The love of numbers came from his childhood interest in typography, when he had played with the big wooden type that his father used to decorate mortuary wreaths. Throughout his life he remained "obsessed with the question mark, and numbers-one, two, three, four-big numbers." The memory persisted of how, as a small boy, he held the oversized type his father used and how it comforted him. Steinberg was often asked about the many different ways in which he represented numbers, particularly the number 5, which he used so often. He depicted it lying in bed, wrapped erotically around a question mark, or wrapping itself like an oversized tuba around a little man who trudges disconsolately with the burden, or serving as the cupboard which a cat in search of food opens to find only apples and pears, which he cannot eat. Steinberg was uncharacteristically gleeful when he talked about the number 5, particularly the 5 as a cupboard. That one was "so simple-I even give hints. This is how children see the meaning of a number-as an abstraction: two apples and three pears make five-but five what?" By answering the question this way, Steinberg delighted in posing another, far more existential one. His questioner asked why the number 5 was always so predatory and unsettling. "Oh, that's easy," he replied as he leaned in conspiratorially to whisper, "You can never trust a 5."

His seven pages of question marks in The New Yorker on July 29, 1961, were meant to depict this particular punctuation mark as "a problem, a weakness, or a curiosity," and ultimately an erotic dialogue. When he drew a triangle in bed with a fat question mark, Steinberg saw "a line making love to a ma.s.s ... a liveliness being made love to by reason." It represented "a very n.o.ble idea" for him, the idea "that love itself, including s.e.x, is a continuation of a dialogue."

This series continued the trend toward the drawings that Joel Smith called "the serious core of this wordless comedy," and the letter E on the May 25, 1963, cover was its next logical extension. Much of the fan mail about this cover's meaning came from high school students, who spent their lunch hours in school cafeterias arguing about it. They wanted Steinberg to give them a solid explanation of what he meant, even as they offered their own interpretations and expected him to agree that they were right. One group thought it was simply an exercise in typography, while another was certain that it was a pun on the old song about keeping soldiers down on the farm after they've seen "Paree." Most of the mail, however, came from people whose initial was E and who wanted to buy the original, or those who sent their copy of the magazine for him to autograph. He enjoyed the many interpretations, because they represented viewers whose responses ranged across a spectrum from shock to admiration to uneasiness. Whatever the response, his viewers were all made slightly uncomfortable by what they saw, and this was exactly what Steinberg wanted, for he believed that the artist had the responsibility to "make people jittery by sort of giving them situations that are out of context." When he told this to the critic Grace Glueck, she offered her own interpretation: "In other words, you don't want to make them reason, but you want to shake them up a little bit." Steinberg agreed, admitting that even as he wanted his readers to figure out what each drawing meant for themselves, "The most difficult thing in the world is to reason."

EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE GOING WELL as autumn lengthened. Gigi's return had lifted his mood, as did another successful New Yorker cover on October 12, which provoked almost the same volume of fan mail as the earlier one in May. This one featured two of his spiky females with pointy features and garish red slashes for mouths and lips: one's mouth spouts Steinberg's version of a street map of Paris's St. Germain-des-Pres, while the other's spews a map of Sardinia. The women drink c.o.c.ktails and boast of their travels, talking across each other without an inkling of true communication. Most of the mail for this one praised Steinberg's comic vision, while his larger message of the women's inability to communicate was not addressed. The cover's overall effect was directly opposed to what he wanted: it made his readers laugh instead of making them jittery and unsettled. He took it personally, as another warning that he had grown stale and was not communicating with his audience. Whenever he felt this way, he knew he needed a change of scene, and that always meant taking a trip.

His restless mood made him seek out Elaine de Kooning, whose company he could normally tolerate only in small doses. She had begun to make frequent trips to Texas whenever she wanted to "get a gig for a workshop or a slide lecture or a commission," and Steinberg shared her fascination with the state where everything seemed to be bursting with "frontier energy" and "everything is possible." "Call Elaine about museum in Texas," he wrote at the top of a very long list surrounded by doodles-always a dangerous sign that he was bored and didn't want to do any of the irritatingly mundane items on it. After the one-sided reader response to his October New Yorker cover, he wanted to go to a place where he could look at the world with "a fresh eye, to put myself in a condition to have a fresh eye," and there was no chance of finding a fresh eye in New York, what with all the details to which his long list attested.

Gigi was peremptory and demanding, and he had to buy "ice-scates and easle [sic], paint and colored pencils for you-know-who." Friends asked him to write recommendations for grants and fellowships, an onerous task because he disliked writing official letters in English for fear he would misuse the language. Despite having a lawyer who took care of such things, he personally hounded Mrs. Jennie Bradley about long-overdue foreign royalties. He had begun to see more of the group of Upper West Side intellectuals that included Diana and Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight Macdonald, all of whom routinely enlisted him in social causes and political events that meant lending his name, donating art, or giving money, and usually all three at once. His Buick was not running smoothly, and many phone calls and service appointments were not solving its problems. He had to call his accountant, deal with the Stedeliijk Museum in Amsterdam, pacify Galerie Maeght in Paris, and "think about [an unspecified] Research Inst.i.tute" that wanted to use his name on its letterhead. And there was also his dear friend Inge Morath, who could sweet-talk him into just about anything but whose proposed book he had been stalling for months.

He was making desultory plans to follow Elaine de Kooning to Texas, and to use her contacts as the starting point for a jaunt to meet dealers and collectors throughout the Southwest, until November 22, when President John F. Kennedy was a.s.sa.s.sinated. Steinberg joined the world in mourning, and going to Texas became unthinkable. The nation's trauma left him more desperate than ever to get away in order to gain the distance he thought he needed in order to figure out how to represent it.

Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination was a stunning personal blow to Steinberg, for this was anarchy, something he thought was behind him forever when he left Europe to embrace American democracy. His politics were always liberal and left-leaning, a reaction against the punitive social inequity of his youth, and he had voted for the young Kennedy because he seemed to be cut in the mold of one of his great heroes, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Steinberg believed in a government that offered the greatest good to the largest number of citizens, and to him, Roosevelt's New Deal was a monumental achievement. He never forgot how it offered meaningful work to artists and writers during the Great Depression, some of which he studied in search of ideas. With the Kennedy administration, Steinberg found another cause to believe in just as fervently, a shared antipathy to segregation.

Ever since his first trip to the South, he had been a supporter of the NAACP and CORE, and he also held separate memberships in some of the local chapters and organizations they sponsored throughout the region. He donated drawings as well as money whenever he was asked, and in some cases he volunteered to sign pet.i.tions for causes and affidavits for individuals. If he were to travel around the South after Kennedy's death, what, he asked himself, could he possibly draw that would contribute to an understanding of, if not an explanation for, what his adopted patria had become? He had not loved his homeland for the past decade as unequivocally as he had when he had first arrived on its sh.o.r.es, but nevertheless, it was still the country he respected and admired above all others. He thought about the situation of the artist in a violently changed society for a week or so after Kennedy's funeral and then decided that if he were ever to understand what had just happened in America, he needed to distance himself from it. He decided to go to Europe to see what he would find there and where it might lead him. He had the time and the money and would just let things happen.

HE WAS EAGER TO SEE HIS SISTER and observe firsthand what her daily life was like now that she and her family were so contentedly settled. He wanted to visit his mother's grave and see the headstone that had been laid according to Jewish custom since his last visit. His primary need on this trip was an intense desire to renew himself through contact with other creative persons, especially non-Americans such as Eugene Ionesco and Jean Helion, with whom he had developed sustained correspondence about their personal philosophies and their impact on their work. Steinberg wanted to avoid anything that smacked of actual work while he was in Paris, so he went out of his way to avoid having to see his publishers and gallerists. He thought, and rightly so, that they were more interested in the commercial prospects for work he had already done than in any new ideas he might have. He wanted to talk about this with Hedda Sterne, who was in Venice on a Fulbright scholarship.

To live in Venice was expensive, even with the stipend from the Fulbright, so Hedda rented her New York house for the year she was to be away. She was counting on sales from her exhibition at Betty Parsons's gallery in December, and because she was not able to attend to the details in person, she asked Saul to do it for her. As she was particularly worried about the photographic reproductions in the catalogue, he worked hard with Betty before he left to make it what Hedda wanted. Unfortunately, despite excellent publicity and a beautiful catalogue, not a single painting sold. Hedda hesitated to tell Saul, because she was determined not to take any money from him, but he knew and quietly deposited $1,000 into her bank account, telling her not to worry.

He accomplished everything he wanted to do in Paris in less than a week, so he flew to Milan and went directly on to Venice. Hedda had rented the house where the poet and painter Filippo De Pisis had lived during and just after the war. He had ama.s.sed a huge personal library that featured such works as Casanova's memoirs and other "mild p.o.r.nography" that Hedda was sure Saul would like. She joked that she would steal one of the volumes of Casanova's Intrighi di Francia for him, and when he saw Di Pisis's collection of erotica, he asked Hedda to look for erotic paintings of nude women, particularly the legend of Susanna and the elders. Like Hedda, he was intrigued by ill.u.s.trated periodicals of the 1880s, and together they spent hours in De Pisis's library turning pages and searching for his annotations, sometimes touching, sometimes very strange (he died insane).

Saul was worried about Hedda while he was with her, not because of her financial needs, which he intended to take care of, but because of her health. She had arrived in Venice wearing a black eye patch because her sight was impaired, and for the entire year she was there she had to be careful not to damage her vision further. As soon as she moved into the house, she came down with a lung infection, which she called pleurisy, bronchitis, cold, or flu, depending on the symptoms of the moment; whatever it was, it did not go away for the entire winter. Her health was run-down and her mood dispirited, mostly because everyone praised her work but did not buy it. In a gossipy letter to Saul about the Biennale, she told him that the museum director James Johnson Sweeney raved "enthusiastically" about all her "periods," which led her to ask acerbically "why he don't buy ten?"

However, it did them good to see each other, for it was apparent to both that once they had stopped being lovers they had become each other's closest friend and most valued sounding board. Now that they no longer lived together as man and wife, they could talk about anything-and they did, from their views about the way art had become a commodity to their personal philosophy of how an artist should conduct him- or herself in an increasingly philistine world. At the Biennale, Hedda found "such poverty of spirit, imagination, or even simple talent" in so much of the art world, "and what savagery, brutality, in the fight for a prize, recognition!" She told Saul about "Castelli's revenge," as "the triumph of pop [art]" was being touted that year in Venice. She thought there were too many "fat middle aged 'enfants terribles' " parading themselves before the press, with Robert Rauschenberg leading the lot with his "phony enfant terrible statements."

Mostly, however, they talked about themselves. Hedda feared that she would sound pompous when she told how the luxury of a fellowship year was letting her clarify her views about art in general and giving her insights into what she valued about her own work. She was reading some of the volumes of art history in De Pisis's library, and it made her feel "vaguely nauseated" when she came across critics who would say (as she paraphrased) "the painter speaks a truth he does not know," implying that the work of art had no validity until the critic p.r.o.nounced upon it. She went to an exhibition and was horrified to find that there were two names printed in the same size type and given equal prominence in all the advertising: the artist's and that of the critic who wrote the introduction to the catalogue. Hedda said she made up her mind then and there that she would have no more of "this 'career' business" in her life. When she painted, she would transfer only the purity of her thoughts to her canvases, and the world would be free to evaluate the paintings on those terms. She told Saul she hoped this did not sound "pompous" and said how grateful she was to have these conversations.

As such talks had always done throughout the twenty-some years of their relationship, the discussion turned specifically to Saul's version of his current unhappiness, of his inability to concentrate on work, his constant need to travel in search of new places, his inability to tolerate most of the people he knew, and his frustration over the lack of communication with others. Hedda was no longer afraid to risk offending him, so she told him that from here on, no matter what transpired between them, she felt the obligation to tell him the truth as she saw it. In this instance, she hoped it would lessen his despair when she told him that his current state of mind was nothing special or unusual; it was the same malaise that infected any creative artist worthy of the name, and rather than fighting it, he should accept it for what it was, a tribute to his genius.

HE LEFT VENICE IN A FAR BETTER MOOD than when he had arrived. Being with Hedda was restorative and gave him the energy to push onward in search of "the fresh eye," which still eluded him. The entire trip became something far greater than he had originally envisioned after he attended a reception for the diplomat Carlo di Bugnano, who was then the Italian amba.s.sador to Indonesia and who invited him to visit. Steinberg had not thought about where he would go after staying in Rome for a week or so, but while in Venice he mentioned offhandedly to Hedda that he sometimes thought about returning to the places in North Africa where he had been stationed during the war and that retracing his postings might help him to put the past fifteen years into perspective. She told him to think about it, because he could always cross North Africa and fly back to New York from Algiers. At the time he shrugged it off as a whim, but after he met Bugnano, he decided to expand the trip to include many places in Africa he wanted to return to or to see for the first time. It made him think of India, where he had flown across the Hump; China was off-limits to Americans, but there was British Hong Kong, and if he went to Hong Kong, he might as well go to j.a.pan. The next thing he knew, he had a round-the-world itinerary.

On the spur of the moment he decided to leave Milan and go to Florence on his way to Rome, to spend several days as an art tourist. He did not plan his African itinerary until he got to Rome, so he decided to get there via Athens, because he wanted to see the ruins again and smell the magical flavors he always a.s.sociated with Greece. He flew from there to Cairo, where his main sightseeing was of the Pyramids. They inspired him to visit his old friend from the Politecnico, Sandro Angelini, in Ethopia. Steinberg flew from Asmara to Gondar, where he saw the royal compound of Fasil Ghebbi. He stayed briefly in the capital, Addis Ababa, and then went to Lalibela, where he toured the rock-hewn twelfth- and thirteenth-century churches built by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. It was always a pleasure to see Angelini, but as a trained architect himself, Steinberg thought the churches in Lalibela were "stupidly made," poor imitations of Coptic Christian churches. His only praise was for the setting, "a terrific plateau with purity and magic, a concept of heaven."

He flew from Lalibela to Nairobi, Kenya, where he saw for the first time "gazelles and giraffes and hippos and crocs and so on," and with the "fresh eye" he was thrilled to find had been rejuvenated: "By cutting my bridges, by being in a condition that is new to me, I suddenly have the eye that sees, the nose that smells. All my senses are active. I'm not taking for granted anything the way one does when living day after day in the same routine."

His next stop was India-first Bombay, where he was most impressed by the architecture of a railway station that the natives insisted had been built by Rudyard Kipling, and then Calcutta, where his flight, "Great Eastern 229!" touched down at midnight on New Year's Eve 1964. He spent the next day at the New Market, happily engaged in one of his favorite pastimes, buying "junque." Early the next day he boarded a Swissair flight to Bangkok, where he visited temples during the day and went to the movies at night. Thailand did not impress him, so the next day he flew to Hong Kong. On January 6 he flew to Tokyo, where he checked into the Imperial Hotel. He played tourist the next day, visiting the Ginza with "Mary," whose name appeared in his datebook during the eleven days he toured the country. He stayed at inns as well as posh hotels, visited geisha houses, took trains into the countryside, played pac.h.i.n.ko, visited temples, and saw sand gardens that reminded him of some of his own drawings of labyrinths and mazes. From Tokyo he circled to Osaka, Nagasaki, Beppu, Kobe, Kyoto, and Saigo before returning to the capital city on the nineteenth. On the twentieth he went to American Express and found a letter from Gigi. He had done enough traveling to regain his fresh eye, and now it was time to go home and put it to use.

HE WAS BACK IN NEW YORK early in February 1964, but it took several weeks to get used to being there. "I'm still confused," he told Aldo on February 19, because returning to New York was akin to being back in Romania. He had seen so much that it was difficult to find the words to describe such things as the wild animals in Kenya and the hot baths in j.a.pan. It would all come out eventually in his drawings, but for now, "as always, I was more interested in myself (that is, trying to understand what sort of man I am) than in seeing outside things." He thought his confusion at returning to so-called familiar circ.u.mstances might have been as disorienting as that of explorers who returned to civilization after long stays in primitive lands. Steinberg wondered if they felt as he did after "coming home and finding myself no longer the same."

A short time later he was still questioning his role and place in New York, in the United States, and, by extension, in the art world. He made another list, on which he noted that he had given money to an organization that wanted to do away with all organized charities, because he detested all the "monks and missionaries of bureaucracy." But most of all he had his own mission: "Artists of the World Unite. You have nothing to lose but your b.a.l.l.s."

CHAPTER 29.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY DOESN'T STOP The fact that stuff gets printed even if not perfect is a blessing. It clears the path and lets us go forward toward things never thought of before and still based on stuff from the past. So one's autobiography doesn't stop.

When Steinberg returned to New York in early 1964, the requests were piled up and much work was waiting if he wanted to take it on, but he was mostly concerned with reentry into what pa.s.sed for ordinary daily life. His main creative activity was fiddling around "rediscovering Cubism" and making collages, but "not the usual ones of course." When he actually finished making drawings, they were mostly "jokes about art history and the conventions of drawing, still lifes representing not objects but elements of drawing and painting combined with 'speech balloons' placed on the tables of still lifes."

On the personal side, he was worried about Hedda, whose eye problems had been exacerbated by a winter of debilitating flu that left her with chronic fatigue, low blood pressure, and stubborn infections that lodged in her eyes. One was so badly inflamed that she had to cover it with a black eye patch, and she had to coddle the other by limiting how much she read or painted. She tried to joke that the patch made her look as sophisticated as the male model in the ads for Hathaway shirts, but she told Saul more seriously that nearly all her "allowance," the monthly stipend he put into her account, went to pay for prescriptions and doctors. Hedda was so worried about money that she was trying to extend her Fulbright until the autumn of 1964 so that the renter could stay on in her house. It led Saul, who never discussed money concerns with her, to confess that he was in a temporary bind and feared running short himself.

When not worrying about Hedda, there was the nagging question of his relationship with Gigi and how it should progress. She was still taking occasional courses at Columbia, where she had befriended a group of fellow students with whom she spent much of her time. It gave her warm satisfaction to know that she was welcome among interesting people of her own age and also the jolt of self-confidence she did not have in the early days of the relationship with Saul. While he was away, she had several brief affairs with men she met at Columbia, but she ended them when he returned, managing to keep the lovers as good friends. Throughout the affairs, Gigi made no secret of her relationship with Saul and how dependent she was on his largesse; when she ended them, she told her lovers that his disapproval was the reason. She always behaved with discretion, and even though Saul knew that she regarded their relationship as he did-open, to use the word that came into increasing prominence in the sixties-he was still not pleased about it. This time, however, he managed to keep quiet, because he realized he bore some responsibility by going off around the world and leaving her alone.

Gigi was an outspoken woman who never hesitated to vent her true feelings, even though she knew her eruptions would lead to ferocious arguments, black silences from Saul, and total separation as each waited stubbornly for the other to give in and apologize. Usually it was she, because she was dependent on his financial generosity, and that was why, when he announced suddenly that he was going around the world alone, she was miffed but said nothing. Now that he was back, she was restless. The term was ending and she wanted to go somewhere. Europe was out of the question this year, as he had to make money, so he promised her an auto trip through the western states, but not until late summer. Until then, he needed to catch up with everything that had happened while he was away and line up possibilities for future work.

Steinberg had not published a new book since The Labyrinth in 1960. Like his previous two, it had not sold well, and now all four were out of print. There had been two other recent books, but they were mostly reprints, compilations of drawings taken from the earlier ones: The Catalogue appeared in the United States and Steinberg's Paperback in Germany. Alexander Lindey was still handling all his book contracts, but he was overwhelmed by the barrage of requests that came to his office on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, mostly to reproduce Steinberg's drawings in other publications. Lindey thought Steinberg's financial interests would be best served if he continued to vet all contracts, but he insisted that the time had come for Steinberg to have an American literary agent who would deal specifically with publications, as Mrs. Jennie Bradley did in Europe.

Steinberg was seeing a lot of Arthur Miller now that he was married to Inge Morath, and with their urging, he agreed to be represented by Phyllis Jackson at the agency of her name (where Miller was represented by Kay Brown). Jackson soon found that Steinberg was the kind of client who "needed a lot of hand-holding, a little too much for her," which was how the young Wendy Weil, just starting out at the agency, was a.s.signed to deal with what she called "Steinberg's scut work," the continuing flood of requests to reprint Steinberg's drawings in other books and periodicals. Weil handled them all with such dispatch and efficiency that a cordial working relationship resulted, and when she left for the Julian Bach Agency around 1971, Steinberg followed her, first there and then to her own agency when she founded it some years later.

Before Steinberg went around the world, Ca.s.s Canfield reminded him that he still owed a book to Harper & Row and urged him to come home with one. He thought about it while he traveled, and when he returned, the idea of questions of ident.i.ty was uppermost in his mind. As he retraced his steps through places he had been during the war, he thought about who he had been in those days and was disappointed to realize that the man he had been previously was not the same man who had just returned as a tourist. He sensed that a new book would have to be far more autobiographical than the previous ones, and for that reason he was determined to call it "Confessions." The book bore that t.i.tle until the eve of publication, when he reluctantly changed it to The New World, fearing that he was in a profession where such a t.i.tle as "Confessions" would leave him "vulnerable to the stupidity of critics and scribblers." By the time the book was published a little over a year later, he found that he had indeed entered into a personal New World, so the t.i.tle took on multiple meanings that became his own private joke, his veiled jest to the world.

FOUR MONTHS HAD Pa.s.sED SINCE STEINBERG returned from j.a.pan, and he told Aldo that he had resolved none of the issues that troubled him when he went away and was more confused than ever by "amorous delights and suffering." Ostensibly he and Gigi were a couple, a status he wanted to maintain even though his behavior continued to be the same as it was when he lived with Hedda. Her observation from the early days of their marriage still rang true: "Saul thought he had the obligation to seduce every woman he met, no matter whose wife or girl friend she was." He still slept with a succession of women with whom he had previous ongoing s.e.xual encounters, even as they led separate lives and forged their serious and lasting relationships elsewhere. And he did not hesitate to have casual s.e.x with any new woman who struck his fancy.

Unlike Hedda, who suffered his infidelities in stoic silence, Gigi railed and ranted and then went off to have her own independent s.e.x life. He was surprised by how much he resented it when she behaved exactly as he did. It created a troubling time in his life, and as he always did whenever disturbing events invaded his dreams, he kept a dream journal. In one, he and Gigi were in a forest where dogs barked to signal the approach of a hunter. The hunter morphed from a man into a long-haired reddish monkey about four feet tall and Gigi became a frightened cat who jumped into Saul's arms. He had difficulty holding on to the Gigi-cat and felt it grow tense and ready to jump. Saul dreamed, "If she jumps now, lost forever." He tightened his grip on the dream cat and woke up in bed to Gigi's screams because he was squeezing her arm so tightly it hurt. In another dream he was in Venice, taking a water taxi around the lagoon, trying to catch up with an elusive Gigi, whose boat was always one stop ahead of his. He transposed his next dream into a drawing for the newsletter of the American Council of Learned Societies that featured a man with a bull's-eye for his head and a woman with a square for hers. It was another in joke, but this one was not so funny: Saul told Aldo "at a crossroads with her and must decide-a mess."

They were at the first crossroads in their long, fractious relationship, and as Steinberg was in command, he chose the road forward. Again, quite unlike Hedda, Gigi chose not to follow but to go her own way. He chose to accept honors and invitations while she chose to become more of a hippie than ever. While he accepted accolades and entry into the highest echelons of society, she used drugs, got drunk, and picked up men. One of his honors came when Paul Rand invited him to become a fellow of Morse, one of the two new residential colleges at Yale designed by Eero Saarinen and featuring sculptures by Constantino Nivola. He was flattered when James Laughlin asked him for a blurb-not a drawing-for a book of Stevie Smith's poems, as he thought it far more impressive to comment on a writer's work than to ill.u.s.trate it. Steinberg was invited to join the National Committee of Citizens for Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey as part of an august group that included Aaron Copland, Charles Eames, Martha Graham, Walter Gropius, and Calder and de Kooning. Jean Stein and William vanden Heuvel, to whom she was then married, invited him for c.o.c.ktails in honor of John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who were speaking in support of Robert Kennedy's senatorial campaign. He was also a sought-after dinner guest in the highest social circles: Mme. Helena Rubenstein invited him to dinner; Bert Stern invited him to meet the model Dorian Leigh; Amanda and Carter Burden invited him to a black-tie dinner for Geraldine Chaplin; and Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Sonnenberg invited him to meet Hedda Hopper, an invitation he accepted with disgust, as he abhorred her politics.

He did all these things alone, as Gigi either sulked, brooded, and smoked marijuana at home or went bar-hopping with friends like the young Mimi Gross, who lived across the street from Steinberg on LaGuardia Place. Gigi had also become dependent on Evelyn Hofer and Humphrey Sutton, who treated her like an adult daughter, which gave her another kind of security. It was, however, a dangerous dependence, as Evelyn and Humphrey liked to play off one person against another; while swearing that they kept everything Gigi told them in confidence, they often repeated it to Saul. Ruth Nivola watched the drama play out from her house across the road and now and again brooked Saul's wrath by trying to intercede. He dismissed her concerns as "the Nivola family spectacle, which is a cross between Balzac and Joyce."

Ruth Nivola was one of a number of mothers who worried about the attention Saul Steinberg paid to their teenage daughters. Steinberg had been captivated by Claire since she was a child, and now that she was a lovely and intelligent young woman, he found that he could engage in lively conversations with her about books and paintings. He called her "Chiaretta" and was generous about giving her everything from spontaneous drawings of things that happened in daily life to special valentines or the carved wooden boxes he liked to make. He even had calling cards printed for her that announced "Chiaretta!" Ruth was an attentive mother who kept a stringent eye on the friendship, which remained correct for the rest of Steinberg's life. Dore Ashton was another mother who became upset after she brought her fifteen-year-old daughter to a working lunch at Steinberg's house to discuss an article she was writing. As they were leaving, he invited the girl, to whom he had said very little, to return the next day for a private lunch. Ashton was direct and to the point: "She is fifteen and cannot drive and therefore cannot get here on her own, and I certainly am not going to deliver her!" When Steinberg invited a third girl, who was just sixteen, to a lunch for just the two of them, her mother wrote a much harsher letter to Steinberg, saying that she had no idea what he was up to but would not allow him, "even in complete innocence ... to put her in a situation of questionable taste." She ended in sarcasm, telling him not to "put such temptation before her sociable little heart until she is considerably older." These three invitations appear to be the only ones of this kind that he made; he never referred to why he made them in any of his occasional diary writings, and he left no explanation for such curious and uncharacteristic behavior.

He did, however, frighten Anna, the nineteen-year-old daughter of his friend the Italian journalist Riccardo Aragno, when he invited her to spend a weekend in Springs. Anna Aragno was a ballet student who shared with Steinberg an "Italian affinity based on intellectual interests" and enjoyed it when he took her to the theater or the ballet. She felt no qualms about spending the weekend alone with him, because she a.s.sumed that his feelings were paternal because of his friendship with her father. In the middle of the night, she woke up, "petrified with fear," to find him in her bed. He embraced her, but she "froze and wouldn't budge," until he eventually "just sort of gave up and went to his own bed." The next day he drew her portrait, capturing her downcast face and hands crossed tightly over her thighs. It was the last time they were together other than on social occasions.

SAUL AND GIGI LEFT FOR THE western states on August 4, 1964, driving long and hard the first day as far as Wheeling, West Virginia. As soon as they got onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a tire blew out and they had to buy a new one, which put a damper on the entire trip. Steinberg thought Wheeling was a rough town, distinguished only by a good army and navy store, where he bought a "smokey [Bear] hat." He was not happy about making a detour to Columbus to stay with Gigi's sister, Uschi, and her husband, Bill Beard, but it made Gigi happy so he did it. Between August 6 and her birthday on the ninth they drove from Columbus to Chicago, Des Moines, Council Bluffs, Omaha, and Ogallala, Nebraska. They spent her actual birthday on the road between Ogallala and Cheyenne, and she was ecstatically happy with everything about the day, from the scenery to Saul's devoted attention. The rest of the trip took them through the desert of Utah to Navajo Indian reservations that made them feel as if they were in concentration camps. They drove across the desert with the windows open to the hot winds, speeding at 90 miles an hour or faster, both describing it as an experience unlike any other. They crossed Arizona through Caliente, Tuba City, Flagstaff, Window Rock, Phoenix, and Gallup, New Mexico before traversing Texas, from El Paso and Uvalde to San Antonio and Houston. Throughout the trip, the goal was to see how far they could go in a single day, so they could tire themselves out and not have to talk to each other as they crashed late at night in a roadside motel. They went to Natchez, Selma, and Montgomery, Savannah and Charleston, and over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge to Washington. They did not stop in New York but went directly to Springs, where on August 26 they collapsed in exhaustion, each of them loaded with questions they dared not broach while on the road.

Once back, Saul tried to avoid the major issue Gigi wanted him to decide by concentrating on the ill.u.s.trations Aldo wanted for a short book he was writing, which was intended for a primarily Italian audience: a loosely woven description of his travels through America coupled with his philosophical musings on such topics as "the limitations of liberty." The text fit Steinberg's current concerns, and some of his quasi-philosophical drawings seemed appropriate as ill.u.s.trations, but he dawdled unnecessarily over which to choose. Pretending to concentrate on Aldo's book was a good excuse to evade Gigi's question, a simple one which was not yet an ultimatum: When was he going to divorce Hedda and marry her, and then, would he let her have children? He didn't answer, and for the time being she stopped asking.

Several decades later, when she stopped calling herself Gigi and had become the mature Sigrid, she reflected back on her first ten years with Saul Steinberg and saw for the first time how lonely she had been throughout most of them. One of her strongest memories was of sitting alone in her bedroom most evenings and then going to sleep simply because she had nothing better to do, while he sat in his own room contentedly reading far into the night. When they walked up the road to Louse Point on lovely summer evenings, he refused to hold her hand, never putting his arm around her or giving what she lacked and needed, "the more primitive togetherness of people cuddling." By the time she called herself Sigrid, she was a perceptive judge of character who described Saul as being satisfied with a "spiritual togetherness" that was not enough for her: "My life is not based on my intellect, rather on the senses." She made another discovery as their relationship stumbled on: that actual s.e.x, either as a single act or in quant.i.ty, was not of major import to her; rather, what mattered most was "the nearness, the pleasure of touching in pa.s.sing that's rea.s.suring and satisfying, the sense of a body being there rather than a political figure."

They were both exhausted after the trip, and exhaustion was not the proper state in which to make life-changing decisions, especially after a month of driving dangerously fast to go as far as possible, as if eluding pursuers. Gigi went back to the city, because Saul told her what he had earlier told Aldo: "Tired now and, as always when I come back from these experiences, never sure that I'll be able to resume my work." She knew they were at a terrifying impa.s.se and it was probably best to let things ride for now.

CHAPTER 30.

I HAVE TO MOVE.

I have to move. I left everything to the last minute ... I don't find myself an apartment because I don't have a clear idea of what I am or want to be. Husband? Painter? Old, young, uptown, downtown, man about town, hermit? Also: rich or poor?

Steinberg knew for almost a year that New York University had taken over Washington Square Village. In December 1963 he was notified that present tenants would be allowed to renew their leases but that as apartments became vacant, they would be rented to the university's faculty and staff. He did nothing about renewing his lease, and the following August he received a letter saying that as it was expiring and he had not replied to several previous letters, management a.s.sumed that he planned to vacate. He got as far as reading the real estate ads, but there as in everything else, he was crippled by malaise; at the last possible moment, at the end of September 1964, he renewed the lease. "I thought summer would last forever," he told Aldo as he more or less drifted until Christmas, when he and Gigi went to Roxbury, Connecticut, to spend the holidays with Inge Morath and Arthur Miller.

The relaxed informality of the Morath-Miller household provided a welcome buffer for Saul and Gigi, who were not quite on the outs but close to it. Good drink, excellent food, and pleasant company did much to relieve the tension between them. Inge was another of the older women to whom Gigi looked up as something between a subst.i.tute mother and an older sister, and it helped that Inge liked Gigi and enjoyed conversing with her in their native German.

Whatever relaxation they found in the Connecticut countryside evaporated as soon as they returned to New York and began to snipe at each other before they were even out of the car. On the spur of the moment, Saul decided that they had to get out of the cold and announced that they would go to Santo Domingo, where he had not been since he lived there as a refugee. They went first to Jamaica for a week, which pa.s.sed without incident, mostly on the beach, and then to Santo Domino for a brief day and a half, which gave him little time for sentimental journeys to old haunts. They flew home via Puerto Rico and were both in a much better frame of mind.

Before they left, Steinberg had mailed to Maeght in Paris a collection of drawings plus the thirty-three photos that he and Inge Morath had decided upon for a publication that Maeght t.i.tled Le Masque. Morath had known of Steinberg through Cartier-Bresson, but Gjon Mili had actually introduced them by asking Steinberg to let Morath take his photo when she arrived in New York in 1956. For their first session in 1956, Morath was thinking of a formal portrait-of-the-artist-in-his-native-setting and Steinberg agreed to sit for it, so she was surprised by the man who opened the door of the 71st Street house he shared with Hedda, wearing a brown-paper-bag mask on which he had drawn a self-portrait. He was delighted when she laughed at his prank and took her into the big kitchen to meet Sterne. Morath noticed that the room opened onto a large backyard, and she as