Although he told everyone who lived away from New York that they should not come, Sandy Frazier insisted that he had to be there, flew from Montana, and stayed with friends just in case Steinberg needed him. Steinberg remained alone in his apartment or took solitary walks that usually ended in Central Park, where he would use the pay phone in a men"s room to phone Frazier, who explained, "Sometimes he"d say "no, don"t come," sometimes he"d say "yes, come over." " If they met, they always walked back to Steinberg"s apartment and sat at the big table in silence. "I can"t talk," Steinberg told Frazier. "I can"t say anything." But the telephone rang constantly with people who wanted to help, and Steinberg always answered it. Frazier remembered that he told his callers, " "Don"t come over, -Sandy is here." It rea.s.sured them that he was okay because he had someone with him."
Frazier was there when the funeral home telephoned to say that Sigrid"s ashes were ready. Steinberg found a double shopping bag and they took a taxi to the West Side and sat in the waiting room until the attendant came to present them with the urn. Steinberg put the urn into the shopping bag and all the way back to his apartment and afterward repeated "Poor Sigrid" over and over as he cried.
SIGRID"S WILL BROUGHT ANOTHER ROUND OF shocks when Steinberg learned that she had changed an earlier version in which he was her executor to appoint her sister, Ursula Beard, and lawyer, Barry Kaplan, to replace him. She left the personal property within her apartment to Uschi, but she left the apartment itself, the one Steinberg had bought and paid for, with an estimated value then hovering around half a million dollars or more, to her a.n.a.lyst, Dr. Armin Wanner. Her personal property included a sizable collection of Steinberg"s art as well as the works of others that he had given her, with an estimated value of $300,000. After her body was taken away, police sealed the apartment, and no one was allowed to enter until the executors applied for and received permission to remove all uninsured objects of value, starting with the art. Steinberg had to apply separately for permission to enter and remove the things he had given her, but by the time his permission was granted, Uschi Beard had followed Sigrid"s instructions and everything of value was gone.
SAUL WAS STILL REELING WHEN HE phoned Ruth Nivola for the second time, again with an "almost inaudible deep voice." He told her he was "lost, in need of friends," and Ruth urged him to let her cross the road to be with him. He said he would not see or speak to anyone until he could manage to "detach [himself] from the house in which Sigrid"s spirit still dwells." Ruth asked her son, Pietro, to phone him later, and when he did, he told his mother that he feared "Saul was preparing himself for death and was soon going to die."
Although Saul was "practically catatonic with grief," he managed to get himself into the city to await Aldo and Bianca"s arrival on October 5. Before he left Springs, he phoned Ruth and said "an amazing thing, something he had never said before in all the years I knew him. He said, "Anytime you need something, call me." " In the city, he stayed alone in his apartment, phoning Hedda multiple times every day and seeing only Aldo and sometimes Bianca, who discreetly absented herself so her husband could take care of his friend. Josefine did the shopping and cleaning, but Aldo prepared many of their evening meals, cooking the simple pasta dishes of their university days to try to tempt Saul to eat, as he had no appet.i.te and was losing an alarming amount of weight.
Condolence letters poured in, and despite the writers" intentions to bring comfort, they only increased his pain. The letters fell into several general categories: Arthur Danto wrote that he hardly knew Sigrid but that whenever they spoke on the telephone she was so kind that it was like speaking to an old friend; Ben Sonnenberg said the relationship that endured for more than twenty-five years could not possibly have ended without great grief. Peter and Maria Matthiessen thought they were easing Steinberg"s "remorse" (his word, not theirs) when they said they were long aware of what a tenuous hold Sigrid had on life, but instead of providing comfort, their letter provoked a tearful outburst of self-recrimination, as did many others. Ruth Nivola sent a note via Aldo saying that she respected Saul"s wish not to see or hear from any of his friends, but she was "across the road" whenever he needed her. And Uschi Beard"s letter was the most painful of all, because she enclosed with it a copy of Sigrid"s earlier, outdated will, the one in which she wrote that she was leaving "everything to Saul Steinberg, who gave it all to me." Uschi"s attached note said, "I feel for you ... she must have been very desperate to do it to you. She must have been desperate."
SAUL, ALDO, AND BIANCA WENT TO Springs on October 16, in preparation for the private ceremonial burying of Sigrid"s ashes the next day. That afternoon Saul called his niece, Dana, in Cachan to a.s.sure her that he would be all right, and then he allowed Aldo and Bianca to persuade him to cross the road and eat lunch and dinner in Ruth"s warm and welcoming kitchen. When they arrived for lunch, Ruth was "frightened by the mood of all three, so dark and impenetrable." They were so silent that she wondered if "all three had forgotten to use language" and conceivably had not exchanged one word on the long drive out from the city. Her way of offsetting the mood was to surround them with the foods they loved, from prosciutto and mortadella to her homemade cake. Ruth had to originate what little conversation there was, eliciting an occasional pleasantry from one of the Buzzis while Saul said "absolutely nothing." Afterward, Aldo literally had to guide Saul across the road to his house while Bianca stayed with Ruth. At dinnertime he led Saul back to Ruth"s kitchen, where she served them roast chicken and loaded the table with everything from potatoes and salad to the luncheon leftovers. "A table with food can heal, and eventually Saul joined the conversation," she wrote in her diary. He talked about Italian food, "which he used as a shield for real emotions, but he did warm up and he did talk some more."
The weather was glorious for the entire week, and on the brilliant, crisp, and sunny October 17, Sigrid Spaeth"s ashes were buried exactly where she wanted to lie. On July 16, 1994, she had taken a sheet of pink paper, written her wishes, and attached the paper to a little sapling she had planted three days earlier. It was not addressed to anyone, but it gave full instructions for her burial. Steinberg detached the note, put it away, and when the time came, honored it: "This is the place where I would like my ashes to be buried, under the little (or if I am lucky-by then big) tree I planted on July 13. Over a dead catbird. Among the catbirds and chipmunks and moles, etc., not far from where Papoose"s soul is waiting in his tree. I know that when I die and go to heaven, Papoose will be waiting there and perhaps Papa and Mama and all those I loved."
She signed it, "Sigrid. Facing east toward Papoose and Africa."
Afterward, Aldo and Bianca had to help Saul into the car for the return drive to the city. Except for an occasional remark about the traffic, they were all silent. Aldo and Bianca were uneasy when they returned to Milan on the twenty-third, hopeful that Saul would soon be able to accept that he was powerless to have done anything to stop Sigrid from killing herself. It was rea.s.suring to know that Hedda was on the phone with him several times each day, sometimes for more than an hour at a time. Afterward, Saul seemed to come briefly out of the haze that otherwise enveloped him, but it never lasted for long.
On November 7, with the a.s.sistance of Prudence, whom he had asked to help him find an a.n.a.lyst, Saul had his first and only appointment with one. By November 24 he felt strong enough to write his first letter to Aldo since Sigrid"s death. They had talked on the phone, but Saul worked hard in his letter to a.s.sure Aldo that "the tragic depression, the constant and inexplicable terror, have pa.s.sed for the moment." Then he added, "Perhaps they will return."
CHAPTER 46.
NATURE"S CHARITABLE AMNESIA I often surprise myself by awaiting [Sigrid"s] return, and if I survive, the summer will be difficult without flowers, bouquets, even minuscule ones in the old ink bottles, and the silent strolls in the woods, when she would point out the flowers visible only to the eye of a small child.
Steinberg spent Thanksgiving Day, the only holiday he truly enjoyed, all alone in Springs, avoiding the "rich, noisy invitations" he was offered. He thought of years past, when he would take his own wine to spare himself "the local Beaujolais" at the houses of friends-James and Charlotte Brooks, Muriel Murphy, Jean Stafford-"almost all of them gone" now. He was content to be alone in his warm house and, thanks to his medications, was in one of his better moods on the dreary November day when the postman delivered a dead leaf sent without an envelope but with stamps affixed directly to it, as well as the address in Sigrid"s hand, mailed from Key West the last time they were there.
Sigrid had risen from her depression long enough to indulge in Steinberg"s little game of sending amusing objects through the mail without envelopes, just to see if they would be delivered. He once sent a dollar bill to himself, writing the address and affixing stamps directly onto the money, but that time the postman spoiled his fun by putting it into a gla.s.sine envelope. Now, several months after Sigrid"s death, he was confronted by her leaf, which provoked one of his recurring bouts of "profound sadness, and then, luckily, they pa.s.s, nature"s charitable amnesia."
He had had two rough months since Sigrid died. Often she came to him in dreams that left him lying awake and yearning for interpretation. By spending his days puzzling over them he became ensnared in morbid depression, forcing himself briefly out of it by accepting dinner invitations. His friends were delighted to see him but discomfited by his unusual silence; he was so afraid that he might break down in mid-monologue if he a.s.sumed his usual role of commanding raconteur that he thought it "prudent" to listen rather than talk. "But where, then," he asked himself, "is the enjoyment?" He could not help but think of Sigrid, whose behavior he now praised as "honorable" as she refused to partic.i.p.ate in what she had called social contracts requiring three hours of good behavior.
He was generally careful about which invitations he accepted and did not venture outside his comfort zone. Mary Frank was aware of his "tremendous fear of dirt and the smells of sickness" and invited him only for quiet suppers with herself, her husband, Leo Treitler, and occasionally another guest whom Steinberg knew and trusted, often their mutual friend Mimi Gross. Before Steinberg accepted Frank"s first invitation after Sigrid"s death, he warned her that he was depressed and had been on antidepressants for quite a long time and that none of his various medications seemed to be working. At a loss for how to comfort him, she said she admired his "tremendous will" and hoped that yoga and meditation would help. Later she did not remember whether he replied, only that he was exceptionally quiet when they were together.
He liked Jean Stein"s dinner parties, where she always had a table of eight or ten interesting conversationalists and seated him next to her husband, Dr. Torsten Wiesel, a good friend who offered soothing medical counsel through casual and informal conversation. Steinberg also liked the small dinners Barbara Epstein gave, often for visiting European writers who brought the latest cultural news about many of his favorite places and friends. He met the exiled Romanian writer Norman Manea there, and in the beginning was "not thrilled to meet another Romanian." As the other guests vied to ask Manea about the political situation for Romanian writers, a quiet but also "sardonic and taciturn" Steinberg interrupted his reply with abrupt new questions: "How can anyone be a Romanian writer? Is there such a thing as Romanian literature?" These shut down conversation as all shocked eyes turned to Manea to await his answer. Perhaps because he did not know of Steinberg"s reputation for acidly demolishing dinner companions, Manea became one of the few who survived and even surmounted the barbs Steinberg routinely tossed when he wanted center stage. He shot back with "When did you leave Romania?" When Steinberg confessed it was a good sixty years before, Manea expounded at length on Romanian intellectuals who had gone on to make international reputations, among them Steinberg"s friends Eugene Ionesco and Emile Cioran. "Maybe, maybe," Steinberg answered grudgingly, admitting that he was "not up to date on Romania."
At first the friendship was "tentative," but as Steinberg learned that Manea was "an Austrian Romanian Jew, more refined than the usual Turkish Jews like me," he seized the opportunity to recall and revisit his personal Romanian history. Every time Norman and his wife, Cella, told him they were planning a trip to Bucharest, Steinberg gave them detailed instructions about where to go for the historical postcards he wanted them to buy, particularly anything a.s.sociated with Buzu. Steinberg may have called Romanian the language of police and thugs, but it still fascinated him. He had an enormous Romanian dictionary and would often telephone the Manea household to tell them of a word that struck his fancy or to ask their interpretation of a particular phrase or expression. Occasionally he hinted that he might like to accompany them on one of their visits to Romania, but if they invited him to join them, he always refused to make "an impossible return." He told them what he had told Christo several decades earlier, that it was better to retain one"s memories in the mind than to revisit them in person.
However, no matter where Steinberg"s conversations with Norman Manea began, they always became a diatribe about the plight of having been born a Jew in a hostile country. Steinberg ranted about authority, but Manea thought his primary obsession was "really nostalgia, for his family and for the language." Whenever they argued about the worth and value of Romanian literature, Manea offered to let Steinberg read Romanian editions of writers who were currently popular, but he always refused. Manea decided that Steinberg was not interested in the country"s present or future; his only interest was nostalgia, which he expressed through a combination of melancholy and fury that had not softened during sixty years of self-imposed exile, a combination of "rage and magical feeling."
The magical feeling was for the boyhood neighborhood that was no longer there, most of the buildings having been razed by the ravages of war or the grandiose building projects of the Ceausescu government. Steinberg yearned for the people he knew, the old shops in the old streets, and "particularly the smells," which he recalled with precision and tenderness time and time again. To Steinberg"s immense delight, Prudence found a large-scale prewar map of Bucharest in the New York Public Library, and he spent happy hours making photocopies in various sizes for his friends, retracing his daily route from his house to his school and his walks to the homes of his aunts and the shops of his uncles.
"I"m pa.s.sing my days walking those streets that don"t exist anymore," he told Henri Cartier-Bresson. "My childhood lasted a long time, very intense. I recorded everything and now walking through the map of my childhood streets I see things consciously for the first time as if my mind has recorded everything and certain images are developed and printed only now after eighty years." He also sent a copy of the map to the Maneas, with a note explaining his various peregrinations through the city. Although it began "Dragii mei" (dear friends) and ended "Cu drag" (affectionately), he wrote the body of the note in English, the salutation and the sign-off being the only words he ever wrote in their native language.
As Steinberg"s friendship with Norman Manea deepened, another reason surfaced for his refusal to speak Romanian: his vocabulary remained that of an unsophisticated schoolboy, and he did not want to put himself in a position where he could be corrected or embarra.s.sed. Instead he chose to feel sorry for Manea, "the poor guy, obliged to write in the despised Romanian and have his work translated." He sternly demanded that both Norman and Cella speak only English, for how else would they learn their new language? Although he could be scathing about current American politics and culture, he told them that he considered himself profoundly and deeply American and they must "never be frightened or ashamed" of being American themselves.
PRUDENCE ASKED STEINBERG TO JOIN HER for a Key West holiday in January, the first winter after Sigrid"s death, but he declined. As she knew he had been there before with Sigrid, she thought he might be reluctant to return and did not press him to change his mind. Shortly after Prudence invited him, he received the news that Ada had died quietly on January 16, 1997, in her well-appointed rooms at the Casa Prina nursing home, felled by the various heart problems she had suffered for quite a few years. Her death was not a total surprise, for Saul telephoned her almost every time he spoke to Aldo, and as was her way, she chatted effusively and left out no details of her ailments and illnesses. He knew they were serious, but her death so soon after Sigrid"s was still a terrible blow.
Prudence left for Key West on January 22, and by the twenty-ninth Saul had changed his mind and flew down to join her. She had rented Alison Lurie"s house and cottage, two separate dwellings that were connected by a patio where a large kapok tree grew. Steinberg liked the tree so much he drew it several times, writing on one, "This tree looks too much like art." He stayed in the cottage, where he could have as much privacy as he wanted, and after Prudence returned to New York and her work as a copy editor at BusinessWeek magazine, he moved into the house to stay for two more weeks.
Key West was exactly what Steinberg needed, and from the moment he arrived, "he became as happy as a child, as if a miracle had happened, the sentence was lifted, and he had stepped clean away from his catastrophe." He liked everything about the town, especially the new friends, among them the writers Harry Matthews, Robert Stone, and Ann Beattie. William Gaddis was there with his son, Matthew, and he saw them often. He and Prudence had lunch with someone Steinberg had always liked, Charles Addams"s ex-wife, Barbara, who had subsequently married John Hersey. She took them to visit Shel Silverstein, the children"s book author and ill.u.s.trator who had long admired Steinberg.
What he loved most about the small town was the "strangeness more than anything else," which helped him to forget "almost everything." The tiny wooden houses that he pa.s.sed on his mile-and-a-half morning walk to pick up the newspaper fascinated him, as did the famous writers and other celebrities who cherished their privacy during the day and came out only long enough to be convivial at night. He thought he was exceptionally lucky to have Prudence with him, as she enjoyed experimenting with the local food and could whip up dinner for six on the spur of the moment. He told Aldo that having her there was "a blessing I regard with feigned indifference." And he told Prudence that they should plan ahead to rent Alison Lurie"s house again the next winter and that he wanted to invite Aldo and Bianca to join them, but in a separate house he would rent for them.
HE WAS IN A MORE BUOYANT MOOD in Key West than he had been in since Sigrid"s death, but as March ended and the return to New York loomed, what he was now calling "the tragedy" sprang to the forefront of his mind, and he dreaded returning to the familiar places where he had been with her. The first onerous task was to persuade the crematorium to accept his check as payment, for the law stated that only Sigrid"s heirs, her sister and Dr. Wanner, could authorize and pay for cremation. Eventually he prevailed. When he went to Springs and visited the grave site, he found it covered with green moss. He asked Gordon Pulis to construct a small fence to enclose it, and as soon as the weather permitted, although he had never shown much interest in gardening, he planned to plant her favorite flowers. He never did it, for he was so mired in depression that he was seriously considering suicide.
The long downward spiral began just after he returned from Key West and found himself crying over Sigrid day and night. He was afraid to see people during the day for fear he would burst into tears, and at night his dreams were so disturbing that he was afraid to let himself fall asleep. When he finally did, his rest was fitful and he awakened frightened and anxious, lying tightly curled in bed; if he slept until the morning light, he was afraid to open his eyes and face the day.
Searching for some explanation for his depression, he immersed himself in rereading the novels of Thomas Bernhard, looking for comparisons between Bernhard"s relentlessly negative prose and the rambling, disjointed, and disconnected ideas that swirled in his own head, all of which he was powerless to organize, let alone control. Steinberg invented other tenuous correspondences between himself and Bernhard: that the writer"s death at the age of sixty was also a suicide, as Sigrid"s had been at the same age, and that many of Bernhard"s women characters expressly mirrored her troubled existence. Such vague connections led Steinberg to conclude that if he had been a writer rather than an artist, Bernhard was the author to whom he would most likely be compared. Once again, as he had done when he read the novels for the first time, he found similarities between Bernhard"s fiction and Gaddis"s, which he then extrapolated to the personalities of Gaddis and himself. Their earlier rupture had been mended in Key West, and on the eve of his departure for Germany, Gaddis came to Steinberg"s house to say goodbye. After he left, Steinberg noted how Gaddis could not express the deep affection he felt for him, just as he, Steinberg, could never tell others how much he cared for them. It was a depressing reunion, as Gaddis was visibly ill; his emphysema was now in its endgame, and the symptoms of the prostate cancer that actually killed him a year later were barely manageable. Steinberg shuddered at how closely Gaddis resembled far too many of Bernhard"s ill and dying characters.
STEINBERG LOOKED FOR DISTRACTIONS FROM THE illness and death that surrounded him by focusing on his Romanian years. He was always searching for new ways to inhabit his past, and this time he found them by reaching out to cla.s.smates from the Lycee Basarab and the University of Bucharest with whom he had had little or no contact since he had left for Milan. He went to see Bruno Leventer, who lived near him on Park Avenue, which made visiting easy and also let him make a quick exit using the pretext of another appointment. Leventer had had a stroke several years previously and could not speak, so Steinberg had to carry the conversation, which, in his depression, was too exhausting to keep up for long. When he learned that a casual friend, Eddi Fronescu, had retired as a physician in Los Angeles, he telephoned often-after he discovered that he reveled in having to speak Romanian because the man was almost deaf and could only hear his native language. At first Steinberg made excuses for speaking Romanian, but he found that he rather enjoyed it, and it was the same when he wrote in Romanian to Eugene Campus in Israel, inventing as the excuse for using his native language that he could not write in Hebrew or Yiddish.
Pursuing all things Romanian could not occupy his mind completely, nor could such self-appointed tasks as making major repairs and repainting Sigrid"s cabin. Just as suddenly as he started, he decided not to do it and turned instead to other projects, which he became too exhausted to finish. Even writing letters took too much effort, and he abandoned one to Aldo after three sentences, with the excuse that he had to telephone Hedda for another of the rambling conversations in which she tried everything she could to boost his spirits. Although he thought himself powerless to control or change his moods, he was a shrewd observer of the effect they had on others; he noted how what he was calling by another euphemism, his "friendship" with Hedda, was really a dependency that grew and strengthened every time they talked. He decided that the friendship stemmed from her unconditional love, which made him ashamed, embarra.s.sed, and often sobbing over how much he needed it and how unworthy and undeserving he was.
His letters to Aldo were less frequent now because he picked up the telephone whenever he felt the urge to unburden himself, often through sobs and tears. The phone calls worried Aldo more than the depressing and repet.i.tive letters, and in an effort to cut through Steinberg"s haze of depression, he made him promise repeatedly not to phone unless he had something positive to say, and also to promise that he would be careful not to repeat himself time and again when he wrote-both to little avail. In one worrisome letter, Steinberg said that he was writing only to exercise his mind, as he had nothing to offer except continuing affection; he apologized for wallowing in self-pity on the telephone and promised to restrain himself in the future. His intentions were good, but he could not live up to them.
He became obsessed with Sigrid"s suicide note and, almost as if he needed to justify to himself that he bore no blame for her action, made photocopies and sent them to Aldo and many other friends, sometimes more than once. Aldo"s and Sigrid"s birthdays were one day apart, she on August 9, he on August 10. Even though the better part of a year had pa.s.sed, Steinberg commemorated both anniversaries by crying to Aldo in a phone call and writing in a letter how he still missed her every minute.
JUST WHEN HE SEEMED THE MOST DOWN, he became the most up he had been since Key West. He told Prudence to go forward with reserving two houses there for the following winter, Alison Lurie"s for him and her, another for Aldo and Bianca. Even though he had not driven for the past several years, he decided that his old Chevrolet was becoming too dangerous to drive, and on Gaddis"s recommendation he bought a Volvo. He was also making plans for new books, new exhibitions, and even new friendships. He expressed regret that he had not reached out over the years to the many interesting people he had met at the dinner tables of others, and he regretted even more that he had always been a guest and never a host. He decided to give dinner parties of his own, but his teeth prevented him from doing anything immediately, and like many other good intentions, this one also drifted away.
So much that he did in his daily life became an homage to Sigrid, as he made litanies of her qualities and virtues that he had not sufficiently appreciated when she was alive. Preparing meals became a tribute to her as he made a fetish of seasoning his foods with the perennial herbs she had planted years before, convinced that they continued to grow so lavishly because it was her way of sending him greetings. By the autumn he was having such troubling dreams about her that he refused to describe them even to Aldo. Instead he compiled and mailed more lists of the flowers and herbs Sigrid had planted and then recited them on the phone to Hedda. Hedda and Aldo both worried when he described how he had awakened smiling from a nap because Sigrid was there and she invited him to take a walk in the woods with her and Papoose; he told them not to worry but to be serene, because Prudence had a.s.sumed all responsibilities for his care and there was very little he had to do except sit, sleep, and dream. He pretended to complain, but he was content to be relieved of the responsibilities for his daily well-being. Prudence worked in New York during the week, and when she went to Springs on the weekends to care for him, he was always filled with hope that "maybe the terror will disappear." Unfortunately, it never did.
For more than a month at the end of 1997, Steinberg was physically incapacitated by depression, unable even to write to Aldo or pick up the phone and call him. Like one of his favorite fictional characters, Goncharov"s Oblomov, what he liked best was to pull the covers up over his head and let his still excellent memory revive past regrets and painful memories, because each time he did, he remembered something he had not been aware of at the time he had lived it. If friends who were not in his intimate circle wanted to visit, he put them off, saying that he was working and needed to be alone to concentrate for whole days at a time, but in reality he was afraid he would break down and cry in front of them. Just as he sometimes thought Sigrid was there with him, he thought Papoose was still alive and once took his flashlight out into the dark night to troll the underbrush looking for him. He bought a book about the destruction of Bucharest"s old neighborhoods during the reign of Ceausescu and wept over the photos of buildings and streets he remembered from his boyhood that were no longer there. Looking at the pictures made him unhappy, but they also provided an excuse to stay in bed and sleep off unpleasant memories.
His only happiness came when he was planning his escape to Key West for January 1998, this time including a reunion with Aldo and Bianca. The holiday was everything his three friends could have hoped for in terms of seeing him cheer up, and indeed he did enjoy it. He mixed seemingly effortlessly with the local literary crowd at dinner parties and took pleasure in introducing his Italian friends to the locals. Ann Beattie gave several small dinners at which Steinberg held forth with monologues, almost but not quite as in days of old. What he enjoyed most was the pleasure he and his three companions took in each other"s company and how the warmth and relaxation they found in the colorful setting permeated their affection.
BACK IN NEW YORK, HE WAS IMMEDIATELY beset by lethargy and despair. Steinberg regretted that he had been so happy in Key West that he had not taken Aldo aside to give him the details of what he was now describing generically as his "illness." He meant the term to include much more than the euphemism "melancholy" that he still subst.i.tuted for depression. There were new problems with his teeth and continuing worries over the many visits to the doctors who supervised his still indolent thyroid cancer, and there was also a host of new aches and pains for which he consulted specialists. His neurologist recommended a physical therapist who visited regularly several times each week to put him through a routine of exercises. The main problem was that the antidepressants were not working, and he felt the need to see an a.n.a.lyst and begin therapy on a regular basis. He asked Prudence to help him find someone, and in early 1998 he began therapy with at least two or three a.n.a.lysts, none of whom he consulted for long.
Once again he was on the telephone, first to Aldo, until he realized how upsetting his unfocused ramblings were, then to Sandy Frazier in Montana. "Strange how the letters and telephone don"t mix," he wrote. "Will I tell you the same things when I"ll talk to you? Will I worry?" Frazier was indeed worried, for Steinberg asked him to buy a gun, specifically a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that he was familiar with from his time in the navy. Frazier tried to talk him out of it: "I took it as something crazy and said no, I wouldn"t do it. All I could think of was that he would shoot himself in New York City with a gun that was registered to me in Montana. I told him I thought it was a crazy thing to do." Steinberg accepted Frazier"s refusal and dismissed the subject by saying he wished he were Swiss, because all Swiss men had to serve in the army and "everybody there has a bazooka under the bed." Next he asked Prudence to buy him a gun, and she too refused. Shortly after, he decided that as nothing else was working, he would have electroshock therapy.
STEINBERG WAS "TIRED OF WAITING FOR SANITY TO RETURN," an expression he had used many years earlier when he made his return pilgrimage to Tortoreto in search of he knew not what. He knew he had to do something drastic, because panic and anxiety left him frightened to the point of paralysis most of the time, and depending on where he was, he was afraid to leave his house or apartment. When he could not avoid being with people, he had to make a superhuman effort to pretend that everything was normal, and when others treated him as if everything was as it always had been, he was both upset and amazed that no one could sense his despair or realize how troubled he was. His night fears were overwhelming, so he took Ambien to help him sleep. Sometimes it made him wake up happy, but the feeling never lasted for long.
By early December 1998 he feared that his depression was intractable and that he could do nothing to cure it, either alone or with the help of doctors and psychiatrists. Dr. Jerome Groopman had just become a staff writer on medical subjects for The New Yorker; he recommended that Steinberg consult his psychiatrist brother, Dr. Leonard Groopman, who was the first to suggest that Steinberg might benefit from electroshock therapy. When Arne Glimcher learned of Dr. Leonard Groopman"s suggestion, he referred Steinberg to the psychiatrist Dr. Frank Miller, who agreed that it could be beneficial and then became the doctor who authorized the treatment. At first Steinberg dismissed the idea out of hand, but eventually he decided that he had no other option.
Prudence was so alarmed when he told her that he would have the treatment that she went to a medical bookstore and bought and read the only book in stock on the subject. The book"s introduction gave the history of all the past horrors of shock treatment, but the text described the latest progress, explaining how treatments were much shorter and more controlled than they had been and were surprisingly effective for curing depression in older people. She was unexpectedly rea.s.sured by what she read and felt it made her better equipped at Steinberg"s next appointment with Dr. Miller, to be "a less naive advocate, since Saul wasn"t the type to do research or grill doctors."
The original plan was for Steinberg to have ten or twelve treatments, and originally he did not want anyone but Prudence to know. He changed his mind and told Aldo in a telephone call, but instead of calling Hedda directly, he asked Prudence to go to her house and tell her in person that she was not to worry. His internist, Dr. Tepler, and the psychiatrist, Dr. Miller, both told Steinberg that he would suffer a c.u.mulative loss of short-term memory but would regain it entirely within six to eight weeks. Originally he was to go to the Payne Whitney clinic"s psychiatric facility, perhaps as an outpatient, but someone, Prudence remembered, probably one of his doctors, thought he would need greater privacy to be amenable to the treatment and he was admitted to the Greenberg Pavilion at New YorkPresbyterian Hospital.
He was treated every other day from December 16 to December 24, 1998, and was discharged for a short break on Christmas Day. He began a second round of treatments as an outpatient on December 31 but was rehospitalized for further treatments every other day from January 4 to January 13, 1999. He was discharged again on January 15, and by that time, as Prudence remembered, "he was getting a little scrambled (not unpleasantly so) and they didn"t want to push him into flat-out incoherence, is how I recall their putting it." She also remembered that Steinberg was "never not himself," and although he did not see anyone but her during the treatment, she did not think any of his close friends would have been able to tell that anything untoward had happened to him.
Prudence was waiting when he was brought back to his room after the first treatment. She was terrified to go in despite hearing from the nurse that he was fine, but the moment she saw him, she was astonished at the change in his expression. "I didn"t know then the term "mask of depression," but it was simply gone. He fell immediately into easy banter and said he had to call Hedda immediately. And I knew just from the tender way he drew out Hed-da-a-a, as if it were the first word he"d ever learned to say and was savoring the syllables, that she would be instantly rea.s.sured. She told me later-I"m sure I would have gone there afterward so we could kvell together-that she hadn"t heard his voice sound like that in ten years."
Almost immediately he felt so much better that he was able to joke. He was allowed day pa.s.ses, and just before Prudence collected him to go to lunch in a nearby Turkish restaurant that he liked because the cuisine reminded him of Romania, the nurse took his temperature with a sonar instrument. Prudence had never seen one before and asked what she was measuring; without missing a beat, Saul replied, "Ego." He joked that even with no memory he could still make a bon mot. Dr. Torsten Wiesel came to visit, and the ever-courteous Saul said, "This is Prudence, and this is"-forgetting Torsten"s name-"Virtue."
Prudence a.s.sumed that because Saul was never bedridden, he had been hospitalized both as a safety precaution because of his age and to make sure he stuck with the treatment long enough for it to be effective. He liked to go for walks around the neighborhood, noticing with pleasure that his physical vitality had returned. He looked at the street scenes with such expectation, as if he were plotting new pictures, and he was so joyful that it gave her joy to see him that way. As his treatments wound down and because it was January and bitterly cold and snowy, Dr. Miller thought it would be a good idea for him to go somewhere where he could move around easily and consolidate the psychic and physical gains he had made. Prudence was surprised when Saul said he wanted to go to St. Bart"s, for he had not been back there since the time Sigrid had had such a serious breakdown that she had to be airlifted back to New York under heavy sedation. She could only guess that he might be testing himself to see if he really had overcome the many emotions connected with Sigrid"s suicide, but he may also have chosen St. Bart"s because "it was warm, he knew the hotel and could predict the kind of anonymity he would enjoy. And maybe they"d been happy there the time before [her breakdown]." Just before they left, he wrote to Henri Cartier-Bresson, telling him that he thought he would never recover from Sigrid"s death but (without mentioning the electroshock treatments) that he was slowly and timidly coming back to life. As he reread what he had written to his old friend, he was convinced that the worst was over.
THEY LEFT FOR ST. BART"S ON MARCH 7, and Steinberg was happy to be back in the same hotel in the same rooms, sitting on the same balcony and looking out at the beach. He sent Sandy Frazier a postcard praising the weather"s "many degrees of perfection" and told him how much he was enjoying reading Lytton Strachey"s Elizabeth and Ess.e.x. He particularly relished that she was seventy and Ess.e.x thirty-four when she had him decapitated. He was also reading G. M. Trevelyan"s History of England, pleased with and sharing Trevelyan"s liberal political interpretations.
They were there a week when the effects of the electroshock therapy began to wear off. He began to make notations about himself in his datebook on the day they arrived, and on the day after, March 8, he wrote, "Lost memory of part of life made of quarrel [sic] tears, pacify, forgive, no speak. Then again offense, etc." After that, his daily notations were about how his moods varied; how pleasure came from glancing through Prudence"s copy of Moby d.i.c.k and rereading Solzhenitsyn, taking long walks on the beach, and enjoying the local food, but how easily pleasure was replaced by concern. He was carefully calculating his worrisome weight loss in both pounds and kilos and calling Hedda every day, more because he needed her to rea.s.sure him that he would stay well than because he simply wanted to talk to her. At the end of March, he was back in New York and summed up the vacation as leaving him "tired and disappointed."
As April began he made a careful note in his datebook about the times and quant.i.ties of the medications Ritalin, Dexedrine, and Adderall that he was supposed to take each day but did not. At the same time, Dr. Miller"s office was telephoning to implore him to schedule a followup appointment and he was stalling. On April 11, Dr. Miller sent a letter urging him to come to the office for an evaluation: "It is my opinion based on twenty-seven years of work that you will relapse within the year if you do not have either outpatient ECT or attempt to reintroduce an antidepressant." Dr. Miller put the risk of relapse within the year at 65 percent and within eighteen months at 85 percent, saying, "Obviously, this is a serious but avoidable prognosis. You may not appreciate fully the work and effort that went into your diagnosis and I don"t want it wasted."
Still Steinberg did nothing. He blamed his increasing lethargy on his loss of appet.i.te and the steady weight loss that resulted. During the last week of April 1999 he had lost so much weight that he consulted his internist, Dr. Tepler, who had him check into the hospital for several days of tests beginning on April 28. Prudence Crowther was at work on April 30, when Steinberg telephoned to say he was putting Dr. Tepler on the line. Dr. Tepler told her that Saul Steinberg had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and there was nothing to be done.
"And then I went to the hospital," Prudence recalled. "I don"t know if Saul ever actually told anyone else, including Hedda." Although there was the possibility that one of his doctors told Hedda at an appropriate moment that the disease was fatal, Prudence thought it more likely that "maybe we just figured she"d realize soon enough what was happening."
CHAPTER 47.
THE ANNUS MIRABILIS OF 1999.
The annus mirabilis of 1999. The year of my death-I would guess, calmly.
While he was in the hospital, Steinberg signed a second advance health-care directive naming Prudence Crowther as the person authorized to make decisions about his care and treatment if he became unable to do so himself. Nothing was necessary, as he was in full cognizance, but she organized all the details of his release and contacted the people she thought should know that his pancreatic cancer was so advanced that he would go home to hospice care for what might be a matter of days, a week at the most. By the time he was back in his apartment, Aldo Buzzi and Sandy Frazier were on their way to New York to help Prudence through the final vigil, or, more accurately, to help Prudence help Saul and Hedda get through it.
Sandy slept at a friend"s apartment but spent long days at Saul"s, while Aldo stayed full-time. He arrived on May 6 and went directly up to Saul"s bedroom on the second floor of the apartment, leaving Prudence downstairs in the living area to hear something she had not heard for a very long time: Saul"s deep and resonant laughter, a laugh that surely only a friend of such long standing as Aldo could have elicited. Aldo worked hard to make their meeting a joyous reunion, and his effort set much of the tone for how the people who loved Saul would behave as his last days unfolded.
When it came to stoicism, Prudence believed that Aldo could have given Marcus Aurelius lessons. By his own choice, he slept on the living room sofa, rising early to make his bed and clear away the evidence of his habitation and get things ready for the friends who came throughout the day. The apartment was perfectly constructed to hold a vigil for the dying, as Saul"s bedroom was quiet, tranquil, and secluded on the upper floor, while his friends downstairs could cook, talk, laugh, and sometimes cry without disturbing him. There were often many people floating about in the kitchen and dining room, as each of Saul"s friends had an orbit of their own friends who wanted to make sure their needs were met while they ministered to his. Vita Peterson was there for Hedda, and among the others was an Italian-speaking friend of Prudence"s whom she invited to give Aldo a respite from having to speak English all the time. In an effort to instill levity into the sadness of what was essentially a death watch, Prudence and Aldo agreed that living in a duplex was the best way to ensure a good end.
For the several days before the hospice attendants began their daily visits, Prudence and Aldo took care of Saul, doing everything from helping him sit up in bed to escorting him to the bathroom. Saul was resigned to his end, medications kept him relatively comfortable, and he relaxed in Aldo"s care, rea.s.sured that Aldo knew what to do because he had had years of experience caring for his terminally ill mother.
On the afternoon of May 8, Prudence recorded in her datebook that the doctors had decided morphine was no longer necessary; she followed this with Aldo"s observation that Saul no longer felt pain but his despair had returned. She also recorded some of Saul"s remarks to her: "I"m dying, I can feel it-and of something so stupid. And I don"t know what I"m dying for." Later that same day, he said, "I"m glad I don"t have parents." And even later, when he was drifting in and out of sleep, he said something for which he seemed to want an answer: "a.m. Send everybody home." Prudence asked what about Hedda-should she still be allowed to come every day, and if not, what should she tell her? Saul said, "Tell her to stay home." Sometime later he said, "I want a Parisian doctor to tell me what I have." When he had periods of delirium, he sometimes talked to Sandy in Italian, a language Sandy did not speak; to Hedda in Romanian; once or twice to Aldo, whose mother was German, in what might have been garbled German but was more probably Yiddish. At other times he spoke coherently in English to Prudence.
No one who observed them could forget how tenderly Aldo cared for his dearest friend, particularly Prudence, who thought Aldo may have been suffering greatly inside but admired the way he could still be witty for Saul and enchanting to others. Aldo"s demeanor helped to keep everyone on an even keel, and they were all grateful to him. During the week he was there, the only problem for Prudence and Sandy was the delicate one of how to ensure that Aldo and Hedda would be in each other"s company only briefly and in pa.s.sing, for in all the years they had known each other, they had never forged a friendship of their own and maintained cordiality only out of consideration for Saul.
Aldo had to return to Italy on May 10, and in their last encounter, Saul bid his old friend addio, an expression he did not use with anyone else, in the most moving and meaningful way. After Aldo was gone, Sandy and Prudence set up a schedule of shifts to make sure that someone would always be with Saul and so that Hedda could be alone with him whenever she wanted. Hedda always went to her own house to sleep, but during the day she stayed close to Saul, either watching him from the staircase while he was being attended medically or sitting at his bedside. Despite the anti-anxiety medications he still took, Hedda was convinced that Saul"s sleep had been restless and fitful until Aldo was gone and she began to stay with him; as if sensing her presence, he slept quietly and deeply. But there was something puzzling about Hedda"s behavior, as she gave an impression of growing anxiety to the others. At first Sandy and Prudence thought it had to do with Aldo"s being there, but when her nervousness continued after he left, they were unsure about what to do until Vita Peterson told them why Hedda was so jittery and uncomfortable.
Saul had long before made Hedda promise that she would be holding his hands when he died, and Hedda had willingly agreed, but now the prospect terrified her, for several reasons: first because she was afraid that he would die at night when she was not there, and then because she feared she might break down in front of him and ruin his last moments of life. Her first fear was soothed soon after Saul was brought back to the apartment, when his doctors realized that the quick end they had envisioned was not going to happen as swiftly as they had predicted and that his death would probably happen in a matter of weeks instead of a few days. Although Prudence would have found a way to make private sleeping quarters for Hedda if she had wanted to move in, Hedda never asked, deciding on her own initiative to sleep at home and spend her waking hours at Saul"s. Vita Peterson was the devoted friend who usually accompanied Hedda back and forth, and after Hedda broke down and confided her fears, Vita thought Prudence and Sandy needed to know so they could try to resolve Hedda"s uneasiness. From then on, Prudence and Sandy worked out a sensitive and discreet collusion to ensure that someone would be downstairs and ready to run up to a.s.sist Hedda in any way she needed.
The last days unfolded with a certain structure imposed by the team of hospice personnel from Mount Sinai Hospital. Early each morning a nurse examined Saul and a.s.sessed his condition. Afterward, Prudence telephoned Hedda to give her the report and tell her to come whenever she wanted. Despite the inevitable recitations of daily decline, which were so sad for Hedda to hear, knowing how she would find him before she got there made it easier for her to a.s.sume the bedside vigils. She broke down only once, but gained control over herself and recovered quickly. It happened when Dr. Tepler came to examine Saul while Hedda waited outside on the staircase; when he was finished, he a.s.sured her that Saul was not suffering and that he would have all the medication he needed to relieve his pain. She accepted what he said and seemed fine until shortly after, when the retired Dr. Fisch arrived out of friendship to pay his final farewell, at which time she burst into tears. She was more difficult to comfort and calm that time, until Dr. Fisch told her to take one half of one of Saul"s anti-anxiety pills when she went home that night. She did, and slept for the first time in a very long time, and when she went back the next day there was a marked change in her ability to cope.
On May 12, the nurse overseeing Saul Steinberg"s daily evaluations came downstairs and told the a.s.sembled friends that she thought he would die that day. Sandy had spent the night shift with him, and he stayed on while Prudence called Hedda and told her to come at once. They left Hedda alone with Saul, holding his hands to fulfill her promise, while they and some others gathered downstairs to wait for the end. As the day went on, someone asked Prudence if she thought she should go up to check on Hedda. When she entered the bedroom, Hedda, still holding Saul"s hands, said, "I don"t think he"s breathing." Prudence called Sandy to come up, and the three of them sat quietly together for a very long time.
Hedda kept her promise to hold Saul"s hands during his last moments, but he was not aware of it, as a morphine pump had been installed a day or two before and he was unconscious. At the time it was installed, Hedda recalled, Saul knew on some level that the end was coming. "I am dying," he told her. "I can feel it, but what am I dying for?" His last words to her were "I am still thinking. Can you hear me?"
"Yes," she told him, "yes."
EPILOGUE.
THE UNCERTAINTY OF HIS PLACE.
His choice of media, his use of humor, and his success at The New Yorker contributed to the uncertainty of his place in the art world. After exhibits at Maeght, Janis, and the Whitney retrospective, people still asked "Is it Art?"
Saul Steinberg was cremated and his ashes were buried next to Sigrid Spaeth"s in the small plot enclosed by the white picket fence and beneath the tree she had planted.
Steinberg made his last will and testament on April 16, 1999, naming his attorney, John Silberman, as one of his two executors. He was the only person privy to the will"s content until after Steinberg"s death, when he informed Prudence Crowther that she was to be the co-executor. Before he died, Steinberg had told her that he planned to establish a foundation, but he was not specific about the degree of her involvement.
Silberman set up the Saul Steinberg Foundation, following Steinberg"s directives as described in its mission statement: "a non-profit organization whose mission is to facilitate the study and appreciation of Saul Steinberg"s contribution to 20th-century art." In his will, Steinberg also appointed two other trustees for the original governing board, John Hollander and Ian Frazier. He also heeded Hollander"s advice that Yale University would make an excellent repository for his holdings, and the will stipulated that with the exception of a specific bequest of eight drawings to the Whitney Museum, his artworks were to be divided between Yale and the Steinberg Foundation: The university"s Beinecke Rare Book and Ma.n.u.script Library received his archives and sketchbooks, all works smaller than fifteen by seventeen inches in size, and all the black-and-white New Yorker drawings; the foundation retained all works larger than those given to Yale as well as the copyright to all of Steinberg"s texts and art.
Besides the generous financial bequests to his friends and a.s.sociates, some of which he had changed from his 1996 will, Steinberg stipulated that his residuary estate was to be divided between his niece and nephew, Dana and Stephane Roman. They received the New York apartment, the property in Springs, and his personal art collection. He left the library in the New York apartment to Anton van Dalen. Hedda Sterne received her choice of whatever personal property had not been effectively disposed of through his other bequests, and Prudence Crowther was designated to distribute the balance of what remained.
All his wishes were either being attended to or were fully satisfied by the time his family and friends gathered for the memorial service on November 1, 1999, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The invitation featured a playful photo of Steinberg taken by Sigrid Spaeth in which he holds a large leaf that almost covers his face; the program featured another photo, taken by Evelyn Hofer, of an almost smiling Steinberg wearing one of his trademark tweed caps and posing in front of one of the antique postcards in his collection, a Russian street scene that he had enlarged to poster size.
Hedda Sterne chose not to attend the ceremony, but Steinberg"s niece and nephew came from France, and the American cousins attended as well: his uncle Martin"s descendants, Judith Steinberg Ba.s.sow and her family, came from Denver, and those of his uncle Harry came from the East and West Coasts. The ceremony began with Gioacchino Rossini"s Duetto buffo di due gatti and ended with one of Steinberg"s favorites (also by Rossini), La Pa.s.seggiata. Dr. Torsten Wiesel introduced the six speakers: Leo Steinberg, Norman Manea, John Hollander, Mary Frank, Ian Frazier, and Saul Bellow.
Bellow spoke last, following five moving personal accounts of what the speakers" friendship with Saul Steinberg meant to them. He was the only one who puzzled and dismayed some in the audience with remarks that seemed to be more about himself than about the man he was supposed to eulogize, offhandedly dismissing the friendship that Steinberg thought was one of kindred souls as little more than occasional meetings imbued with goodwill and cordiality. "Each of us wished the other well," Bellow said. "But when he ... was seriously up against it I had no relief to offer him. I learned with astonishment that he had died of cancer."
The other tributes reflected the variety of relationships Steinberg had formed throughout his life and revealed many different facets of the man he was. Leo Steinberg described how some of the juxtapositions within Saul Steinberg"s oeuvre were "the most biting satire arriving always in draftsmanship of sweet open-faced innocence, instantly loveable." Norman Manea offered insights into the friendship that had developed because of his and Steinberg"s shared Romanian heritage, recalling a telephone conversation when Steinberg asked how he was and Manea replied that he was well. Steinberg insisted that that was impossible: "We carry a curse, the place from which we come, we carry it inside us. It doesn"t heal easily. Maybe never."
John Hollander spoke as the friend who was also a scholar and critic of Steinberg"s work and of how difficult it was to define his place within the broad spectrum of twentieth-century art. Hollander remembered hearing, when he was a perplexed teenager, Steinberg dismissed as a cartoonist even as his work was being shown at MoMA. Hollander said that if the art world persisted in cla.s.sifying Steinberg as a cartoonist, it might be as one like Daumier but more likely as one akin to William Blake, for like Blake, he was a "visionary intellectual satirist, rather than a narrowly political one."
Mary Frank came next, surprised by her invitation to speak despite the long and deep friendship with Steinberg that made her an obvious choice. Her remarks were the briefest and the most Steinbergian, to use the adjective that always gave its eponym enormous pleasure whenever he heard it. Frank listed the subjects of some of their conversations over the years: "the dreams of cubes," "rubber stamps of teeth used by dentists," whether horizons were "the future or the past," and "how at dusk, the day (which is painting), turns into night (which is graphics)." She praised Steinberg as "a profound visionary artist who was prophetic from so far back about this country and our lives." Her remarks touched the audience as she ended on a personal note: "Saul, in dreams I cry over you."
Ian Frazier evoked a similar response when he told how he found himself seeking the company of others who loved Steinberg just to be able to share memories of the man everyone agreed was "a marvel in nature." Frazier captivated the listeners as he told of Steinberg"s adventures in teasing the U.S. mail delivery system, citing Hedda Sterne"s contention that "reality accommodated Saul." Quoting Sterne, Frazier spoke of Saul"s "great tenderness for the world" and of how he would suddenly turn to a friend, put out an arm, and demand, "Embrace me." "And you would embrace him," he concluded.
THE MEMORIAL SERVICE TOOK PLACE six months after Steinberg"s death, but the tribute paid by his patria, The New Yorker, came a swift twelve days after he died, when the May 24 issue featured a cover drawing and a three-page spread accompanied by Adam Gopnik"s tribute, which called Steinberg "the greatest artist to be a.s.sociated with this magazine and the most original man of his time." His death, Gopnik concluded, "takes a world away."
The obituaries, articles, and other tributes were instantaneous and worldwide, laudatory but nevertheless equivocating, as, like John Hollander in his memorial eulogy, they all addressed the question of where to slot Steinberg within the history of twentieth-century art. None seemed able to take a stand, let alone come to a decision. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica devoted an entire page to an obituary and three related articles that asked and then evaded the question by concentrating instead on Steinberg"s Italian ties and his love of all things Milanese, especially the dialect. In France, Liberation also allotted Steinberg a full page, arguing that his fame was such that it would be necessary to invent a special cenotaph in which to place him, while Le Monde agreed that despite his fame as an artist, he was nevertheless impossible to cla.s.sify. In an appreciation in the New York Observer, Hilton Kramer praised Steinberg as one of the best-known and most admired artists of his time but wondered why, curiously, he was never written about or seldom mentioned in the many historical studies of twentieth-century art.
The question of what to call Steinberg and where to place him preoccupied those who wanted to lay him to rest in a tidy little time line and those who wanted to send him into artistic eternity with honor and praise. A prime example of the dichotomy appeared in the front-page obituary in the New York Times: the headline writer called Steinberg an "epic doodler," while the writer Sarah Boxer described him in her first sentence as the "metaphysically minded artist and cartoonist" who was solely responsible for raising ill.u.s.trated comics to fine art. Michael Kimmelman echoed most others when he described Steinberg"s "in-between status in the art world" and wondered why American cartoonists such as R. Crumb were considered major artists while Steinberg was ignored. Art Speigelman was more succinct as he evaded the debate entirely: "He was neither cartoonist nor painter. He was Steinberg." Boxer gave the most sustained attempt at categorization in her obituary when she repeated much that Harold Rosenberg had written in his essay for the Whitney retrospective catalogue. She noted how many comparisons had tried to place Steinberg among painters like Pica.s.so and Klee, writers like Beckett, Ionesco, and Joyce, and even the film antics of Charlie Chaplin. But then she veered into what almost every other obituary would cite, if not actually stress: that he was known best of all as "the man who did that poster."
The critic Peter Plagens dubbed Steinberg"s famous poster "the most iconic image in American art since Grant Wood"s American Gothic," and if the many ways it was used in various media were proof of the contention, it certainly was. "Only he could have dreamed up the poster," Robert Hughes insisted, while Jean Lemaire called it quite simply "Steinberg"s most famous composition," Steinberg himself often said he could have retired on that poster if royalties had been paid for all the rip-offs and knockoffs, but, as Boxer wrote, "They weren"t, and he didn"t."
BUT STILL, WHERE TO PUT HIM? The question proliferated in the years after his death until 2007, when a major retrospective of Saul Steinberg"s art was organized by Joel Smith for the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Va.s.sar College. It then moved to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York before traveling for a full year to other museums throughout the United States. A major publication accompanied the exhibition, Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, and even though it was intended to be the first comprehensive study of Steinberg"s contribution to twentieth-century art, it too raised the question-albeit obliquely-of how to cla.s.sify Saul Steinberg and where to put him. The jacket copy described how the book was designed to show Steinberg"s evolving vision through his many different kinds of artistic activity and stated the book"s intention as one of raising "fundamental questions about the historiography of modernism and the vexed status of "the middlebrow avant-garde" in an age of museum-bound art."
Steinberg"s friend Charles Simic wrote a brief introductory essay for the volume that summed it up best: "Seven years after his death, Saul Steinberg is both a familiar name and an artist in need of discovery. This strange, posthumous fate would have puzzled him and confirmed his suspicion that the critics never had any idea what to do with him." Steinberg addressed this himself, way back in 1973, when he told a newspaper reporter, "I don"t quite belong to the art, cartoon, or magazine world ... they just say "the h.e.l.l with him." They feel that he who has wings should lay eggs." He placed his work squarely in "the family of Stendhal and Joyce," with a half-nod toward Goya. Like them, his purpose was to provoke his audience into looking for something beyond mere perception. "That"s what I"m playing with," he insisted, "the voyage between perception and understanding."