If my life, or yours or others were translated into architecture, who knows what incredible constructions, lack of logic, waste of materials, miraculous equilibrium, wrong locations.
The official invitation to create a mural for the American Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World"s Fair came from the State Department, but Steinberg"s good friend Bernard Rudofsky had a great deal to do with his selection. Rudofsky was the chief designer for all of the United States" cultural exhibits, and his charge was to tell "the American Story" within the general framework of the fair"s theme, "A New Humanism." Rudofsky was looking for "exhibition design with a sting," one that "p.r.i.c.ks our complacency...[and] puts doubts into our heads." He wanted the exhibits to be controversial, and he was confident that Steinberg was just the man to help him fulfill his desire. Rudofsky got more than he bargained for when reactions to the exhibits ranged from bewilderment and confusion to anger and accusations of sabotage from American visitors who could not recognize themselves or their way of life. President Eisenhower was so disturbed by the controversy that he sent an envoy to investigate.
The American Pavilion was a domed building with an adjacent annex, both designed by Edward Durrell Stone. Leo Lionni, a friend of Rudofsky and Steinberg, had an exhibition in the annex ent.i.tled "America"s Unfinished Business" that featured the controversial desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was too controversial for the government and also for visitors and was shut down within days of the fair"s opening. Although Steinberg had intended to portray "blacks" in his mural and worried about how to do it, he ended up by not including any, thus avoiding being drawn into the political controversy. His charge was to cover five freestanding walls that contained eight panels of various widths but all a uniform ten feet high, with the entire length totaling about 260 feet. He undertook the commission with the highest seriousness and concentration, poring over the sketchbooks he had made on his numerous cross-country trips to find the eight to ten themes that he thought best represented America. Before he began to arrange old drawings or make new ones, he studied techniques to find which one would work best, and he made a series of notes about his overall intentions.
As he promised himself to do after the 1954 labirinto mural in Milan, he had worked on perfecting the technique of sgraffito in the 71st Street bas.e.m.e.nt, and he felt confident about adding it to the other techniques he planned to use in Brussels. He finished fifteen pen-and-ink drawings, which were then photographed and enlarged to the sizes they would fill on the walls before brown-paper cutouts were made of most of them. His overall plan was to create composites that would show the vast variety of American life and landscape to curious Europeans. Some of the t.i.tles he settled on were "The Road," "Main Street-Small Town," "Downtown-Big City," "Farmers," "Drugstore," "c.o.c.ktail Party, and the all-American pastime, "Baseball." Because Europeans were fascinated by California and Texas, he included scenes from those two states and threw in Florida as well.
He did the initial drawings in New York and shipped them and some small brown-paper cutouts and boxes of other supplies to Brussels, where he arrived on a Sunday in mid-March to begin three weeks of work. He chose to stay in the Hotel Canterbury, unlike the Rudofskys, who had an apartment and insisted that he come to dinner on his first night. He would have preferred to go directly to bed but instead went to listen to "Bernard full of politics intrigues, etc." He told Hedda, "The whole thing smells of nest of vipers, we"ll see."
Everything started well on Monday morning. He liked the white photographic paper that had been chosen for the background cover of the walls because it was "beautiful, like enamel," and when he pinned several of the brown-paper figures on it to get an idea of how it would look, he thought both scale and visibility might make it "quite a beauty." The pavilion was open to the elements and there was noise, dust, and confusion throughout, but his section had been screened off so that he had a modic.u.m of privacy in which to work. He blessed Hedda a million times a day for forcing him to take woolen underwear and socks and heavy work shoes, because the s.p.a.ce was unheated and he was freezing. He used an office chair on wheels to scoot around from screen to screen, and as he did so, he saw that the size of the walls was "very misleading" and he would have to invent at least one hundred new figures to fill it up. When he began to glue the brown-paper figures onto the white background, he found that the glue did not hold, so he "lowered standards" and used staples until he found a fixative spray that he hoped would work. Unfortunately, "things already glued unglue. Fixative spray bungled. Great incompetence around. Lots of disasters."
The exhibition was to open on April 17, and to be ready for it, he worked for ten or more hours every day, seven days a week. He made it a point to return to the hotel at 6 p.m. for a two-hour nap; then he went to a solitary dinner and directly back to bed, managing to sleep through the night with the help of sleeping pills. Brussels was as cold and dark as Moscow, and he was so tired that his entire social life for three weeks consisted of two dinners at the Rudofsky apartment. When panic over the isolation and the unfinished project was setting in, he broke down and hired a German art student to help him during the "slaving 12 hrs day pasting and fixing." He credited her for saving the work "from worst disaster" and told Hedda not to worry because he found her very unattractive. However, neither his helper nor anyone else could do anything about the only fixative they could find to hold the collage together, which turned everything yellow. "A pity, but all in all it may look good," Steinberg concluded. The next day brought more "miseries and disasters," when someone attached a vibrating motor for another exhibition to the rear of one of his panels: "Things are peeling off, mural hardly finished. It"s so huge I could work for two more years." At this point he didn"t care and was determined to finish it as best he could and leave for Paris the day before the fair officially opened. Between the problems with the mural and Rudofsky"s ongoing political contretemps, he felt like someone who was being slowly poisoned, and he just wanted to get out of there.
In fact, his mural was the greatest success of the entire pavilion. When an American journalist commented that Steinberg showed everything about America but people at work, he replied that it was a deliberate choice not to, because tasks of work were "the same everywhere." As an American, he wanted "to show how we really are. There are few people who can afford to grin a little bit at themselves. We can." It was the age of Sputnik, and neither Steinberg nor the critics and journalists could resist comparisons between the Soviet Union and the United States. The French journalist Pierre Schneider called the mural "a biting satire of American life" and found "no such good humored relaxed self-irony at the Russian Pavilion. The atmosphere there is of relentless propaganda and self-glorification."
THERE WAS ONE BRIGHT SPOT DURING Steinberg"s stay in Brussels. He arranged to buy a Jaguar, and it was ready in time for him to drive it to Paris and then on to Nice. He was thrilled with the car but not with the color, which he called "ugly dark blue." Still, he had always wanted a Jaguar, so he accepted what he could get. He drove slowly to Paris because the car was new and had to be broken in; by the time he arrived at the Hotel Pont Royal, he had had a long and tiring day and was happy to sleep the better part of his first twenty-four hours in Paris. He was depressed when he woke up but blamed it on "a hangover of the three weeks excitement in Brussels," conveniently ignoring the unsettled triangular situation he had left at home with Hedda and Elizabeth Stille. He invited Hedda to come to Paris and travel with him, first to Nice, then to Spoleto, where "they are frantic about the [Robbins] ballet" and wanted him to redesign parts of the backdrop and create a new front curtain. He wanted her along because he planned to look again for a house to buy in Italy, and if he found one, he intended to stay there for several months. He urged Hedda not to doubt either his love or his need for her, both of which were true, but the problem was, as she knew, that he felt the same emotions for Elizabeth Stille.
Hedda replied with an uncharacteristically frank letter. "Decisions, decisions," she began, as she addressed his instruction that she should not make hers on the basis of his "desire or need." She asked if he would allow her to make the definitive decision about him and Elizabeth if he were not so riddled with doubt. For the first time, she told him how she thought he treated her as "an object of dislike and irritation in New York," where she had her "functions" and served his needs because he was away from home so much that he seldom saw her. To enforce her point, she told him how she was acting as his secretary, busily responding to the many social invitations that were pouring in from various European n.o.bles and international art dealers, all for him alone and not for them as a married couple, and how difficult he had made the task because he had not left her the address of his Brussels hotel, only its name, and she could not consult him in a timely fashion. In conclusion, she told him that he had to decide what he wanted and needed, and whatever it was, he would have her blessing.
HE WAS IN PARIS LONG ENOUGH to see the three good friends with whom he could talk about his work and theirs, the painters Helion, Matta, and the aged Victor Brauner. He refused an invitation to dinner from Darius Milhaud and avoided returning Oriana Fallaci"s telephone calls because he did not want to be interviewed again after having sat through so many interviews in Brussels. Most of his time was taken by negotiations with Robert Delpire, who was more or less in charge of a book of the Brussels murals that would also be published by Hamish Hamilton in England, Rohwolt in Germany, and Mike Bessie at Harper. Delpire had various mockups and proofs ready to show Steinberg, but, ominously, he also had "suggestions to reconsider certain aspects." Delpire particularly wanted Steinberg to "describe the contents" or at least "to give a written hint as to what they represent." Steinberg was furious and demanded to see the French translation of the few remarks he had already provided: "It seems to me they are obvious. The sort of people who need explanation deserve a mystery." He did not approve of Delpire"s suggested changes, nor did he approve of the color plates of the first four panels. He p.r.o.nounced them "terrible" and brooded about it until he reached Nice, where he sent a telegram telling Delpire to "interrupt production book."
The project dragged on for one full year before Steinberg decided that he did not want the book to be published "anywhere, in any form" because it did not meet his meticulous standards for any reproduction of his work, and it seemed unlikely that publication would ever happen. Delpire had already spent more than $8,000 on it, so Steinberg proposed that all four publishers split that cost and he would agree to let them all publish his next book, to which he had already given a working t.i.tle, "Steinberg"s America." Alexander Lindey thought that this would be "a happy solution to an unpleasant situation."
An unhappy resolution occurred while Steinberg was in Paris, though, when William Shawn declined to feature portions of the murals in The New Yorker, saying that he could not see how to make them suitable for the magazine. Shawn tried to soften the blow by inviting Steinberg to call him as soon as he returned from Brussels to discuss future possibilities, but it was still a disappointment on two levels: financially, because Steinberg needed the money, and professionally, because it had been a long time since his last spread in the magazine.
AFTER SEVERAL DAYS IN NICE, he was glad that Hedda had decided not to meet him. "I"d be horrible to you if you were here now," he wrote from Genoa, to which he had driven all night long to escape from his family, especially from Rosa"s "distinguished conversation and other horrors." He was dismayed by Lica, who had had "some sort of breakdown: poor sister, a tragedy. Sensitive, simple, ignorant, terrorized by mother, affected by pity, staying with the stupid husband, living still in Rumania [sic] (or in Nice, which is worse). She stays indoors for weeks, paints in confusion (trying to discover Cubism). It breaks my heart. She really needs help. I behaved like the usual grandfather, brought gifts to the children."
To clear his head, he spent the day in Genoa making advertising drawings for a New York bank. Then he drove on to Rome, thinking that if he stayed long enough he could avoid having to go to Spoleto, because the Robbins ballet would have opened without his redoing the rear curtain and designing the new one for the front of the stage. However, he was almost irrationally worried about money, despite the fact that lucrative requests were coming to him on almost a daily basis. A huge shipping company in Genoa, thinking that he was in New York, offered to pay for a flight to Genoa just to see if he wanted to accept a commission to make a drawing approximately fourteen feet long and four feet high for a new building; They invited him to name any price he wanted, which they would gladly pay. Stanley Marcus, of Neiman-Marcus, wanted to see him as soon as he returned to New York to discuss further projects for the store, and the newly reissued Horizon magazine was willing to pay him top dollar for whatever he wanted to contribute. Nevertheless, he still drove north to Spoleto to collect his $500.
He started driving in late afternoon, and by the time he arrived, it was late and he was tired, so he parked the Jaguar on the street and checked into a hotel without unpacking it. The next morning he discovered that thieves had broken in and taken everything inside, including a green hat that he was fond of, a sweater, and a small drawing portfolio, which fortunately contained nothing he cared about. On top of everything else he had to do for the festival, he had to negotiate with the Paris agency that had insured the car. He chose not to report the theft to the Spoleto police, fearing headlines about the "affamato artista e la sua pottente giaguar."
Despite the "horror of the brutality of the robbery," he enjoyed Spoleto, a "splendid town ruined by sn.o.bs. He liked it, but the robbery and all his aimless driving through Italy convinced him to give up the idea of trying to buy a house in which to live semi-permanently. Living in Italy would have been too great a change and might have made him "forget all the good or wrong things of America." He told Hedda, "We have no idea how much we are protected in America." Also, he was aware for the first time that no one in Italy, not even his closest friends, still thought of him as Italian. Although he remained close to the old friends-Aldo, Zavattini, Rogers, and others from his days at the Politecnico-and to the new friends he had made since the war-Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Primo Levi, and so many others-he was still, to them, "the immigrant," or even in some circ.u.mstances, when Americans were disliked, "the goy, the abuser." This marked the first time that he considered himself fully American, and it made him realize that he could not make a permanent home in any other country.
His feeling of being an outsider continued in Rome, where he saw Nicola Chiaromonte and Ennio Flaiano. He did not see Aldo, who was working on a film in Yugoslavia, but he did take Bianca to dinner before he headed north for one final day in Milan. The realization that he was no longer considered to be an Italian was so disorienting that he had to go to the Politecnico and walk around familiar places for a while before he could become fully functional within the rest of the city"s geography. It was as if he could relax only by sticking to favorite haunts, such as the bookstore in the Galleria, and only buying books that were in Italian. It was a shock to read Carlo Emilio Gadda"s novel That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana and find that he could not fully understand the Milanese and southern Italian dialects in which it was written.
STEINBERG CONTINUED ON TO NICE, where he girded himself for one final visit with his family. He did not relish his "undesired role as head of the family," and to fortify himself he made an unplanned excursion to Pica.s.so"s Villa Californie, high on a hillside overlooking Cannes. Both Aime Maeght and Daniel Kahnweiler had been urging Steinberg to do so for some time, as they agreed with the many other critics and scholars who saw similarities in the two artists" vision and who also called them the best draftsmen currently working. In his influential 1915 essay, "The Rise of Cubism," Kahnweiler was the first to interpret Pica.s.so"s approach to art as a language and to suggest the link between the cubism he practiced at the time and what Kahnweiler called "scripts," or sign systems. In the 1950s, when Maeght began to show Steinberg"s work, Kahnweiler believed this was true of Steinberg as well, and he thought a meeting between them would be interesting and perhaps beneficial. Earlier in 1958, when Kahnweiler was in New York, he had invited Steinberg to a c.o.c.ktail party and once again entreated him to find a way to meet Pica.s.so.
The afternoon at La Californie pa.s.sed pleasantly enough, but the artists were a bit wary of each other until Pica.s.so proposed that they play the surrealist game cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). A sheet of paper was folded into small squares, and first one man, then the other, would draw a line or fill a square. When the squares were all covered, the paper was unfolded, and most likely a nonsensical drawing resulted. Pica.s.so gave the paper to Steinberg as a souvenir of the afternoon, which turned out to be their one and only meeting. Years later, Steinberg remembered Pica.s.so as "an old Jewish man in the Florida sun-all torso and shorts. The voice of a cigar smoker ... the falsetto of a cello."
WHILE IN NICE, STEINBERG PLANNED to spend most of his time in his hotel room working on one final curtain for Spoleto. As always, no matter how irritated he was at having to do a commercial project, once he began to do the work he became engrossed in it, and feelings of satisfaction, even happiness, suffused him by the time he finished. The work was steadying, and it prepared him for the uncertainty and chaos he found when he visited his family. There were many legal obstacles obstructing the Roman family"s attempt to move to the United States. The French government would not let them go to Paris, where it would have been easier and faster to make the arrangements, but would provide visas only for several months at a time and then only for the Alpes-Maritime province in which Nice was located. The United States government still considered them to be in transit between France and Israel, which meant they could not be put on any country"s quota list, and none of Steinberg"s influential contacts could persuade either government to bend so many conflicting and contradictory rules and requirements.
Meanwhile, Rosa decided that the Romans could not leave Nice because she was too old to consider another move, even to an apartment that would take her closer to them. Moritz was still sad that Rosa had refused to go to Israel, where he could have been happy, surrounded by all their relatives and friends from Bucharest. Now that there was a possibility that Lica and her family might have to go to Israel, he hoped silently that Rosa would agree to follow them. Saul was so appalled by the family"s indecision on every front and so alarmed to think of what his life would be like if they were in New York that he insisted they stop trying to immigrate to America and think instead about where they could all best live together, whether in Israel or in France. He promised to give them whatever financial a.s.sistance they needed to make everyone content, if not happy. He was willing to pay any price to keep them an ocean away.
The Romans were seriously considering Israel, because Rica had a better chance of working in the legal profession there than he had in France, where he faced barriers in becoming certified to practice law on top of his difficulties in learning the language. But whenever they tried to talk about Israel, Rosa became hysterical and claimed to be felled by everything from heart palpitations to migraine headaches. She could not stand being with the children, whom she called "noisy savages," but she still went to Lica"s apartment every day to berate her for her many faults, from her inability to control her children to her continuing loss of weight and the depression that kept her in bed or unable to leave the apartment. Saul understood that the Romans were having a difficult time making the transition from life in an Iron Curtain country to the tremendous freedoms of life in France, but Rosa chose to blame everything wrong in their lives on Saul, saying that he was obviously writing unpleasant letters to Lica because he never wrote to her. Nor did Hedda, at whom Rosa aimed one barbed dig after another.
While she scolded them for not writing to her, she was whining and writing to them to ask for things like a new television (it had to be the same brand as the last one), a new coat (a fur, but not too heavy), a trip to a spa where she could take the waters (someplace refined, with a good clientele), and money for her ongoing dental problems (her dentures were ill-fitting and needed constant adjustment). Meanwhile, Moritz took her pills, because she would not give him an allowance to buy the ones he needed to keep his erratic heartbeat under control; nor could he do anything pleasant, because she refused to give him an allowance. When they first arrived in France, Moritz won a small amount of money on the lottery, all of which he spent on Rosa, staying at home while she booked rooms in expensive hotels near the various "cures" she claimed she needed. Whenever Saul"s checks arrived and he asked for spending money, she insisted that he still had plenty of lottery francs and could entertain himself with those. Moritz wrote secretly to Saul, asking him to send money separately from the household allowance and to wrap it in a different-colored paper so that he could surrept.i.tiously remove it when he opened the letters before Rosa"s prying eyes.
Saul told them all to think seriously about moving to Paris, where Rica had a better chance of finding work, where Lica could return to her painting, where the children would receive a better education, and where he would be better able to buy a house large enough for them all to live in, his parents separately from the Romans but still together. For the rest of the year, the family drama consisted of anguished letters about whether they should move or not, whether they should all go or just the Roman family. He left them to sort it out and prepared to return to New York.
As he left Nice, he realized that he had made several important decisions, starting with the one that he would not allow his family to join him in New York. France or Israel, he didn"t care; it just could not be New York. An equally important decision was the one not to live in Italy. Having made these two, he felt such elation that he swore he was no longer depressed. He drove back to Paris, arranged to ship the Jaguar by boat, and flew to New York on May 21, confident that he could face whatever was waiting for him.
CHAPTER 23.
CLa.s.sIC SYMPTOMS.
I"m a bit troubled and confused-all of a sudden I discover that the last fifteen years have gone by too fast. Cla.s.sic symptoms.
Steinberg had been at home for less than a month when the Jaguar arrived and gave him the excuse that he needed to go away again. He said it needed further breaking in, so he planned to drive across Pennsylvania to West Virginia, southern Ohio, and Kentucky. Even though The New Yorker had not been interested in the drawings from his earlier trips to the South and Southwest, he hoped to interest the editors in the new ones. He sensed a new political urgency in American life and wanted to contribute something that would awaken readers, albeit quietly, to the social inequities and injustices. He wanted to see for himself "the ancestors of the Americans, the heroes of our best fiction," and these included "cowboys, crooks, and country derelicts." He went to company towns where coal miners lived and worked in dire poverty, to small towns where residents were both isolated from and deeply suspicious of the outside world and where rampant distrust of it made local prejudices harsh and threatening. He saw and drew a way of life so different from that in New York that it might have been a foreign country, one dominated by old-time religion and violence, where landscapes were despoiled by mining and commerce and daily life was as primitive as that in African villages. "Here"s where they ought to make a film," he said of one urban landscape, but once again The New Yorker was not ready for it.
Hedda stayed behind in New York, where she was busy preparing for new exhibitions and taking care of last-minute details connected with several that were just ending. "I hear you are rich," Saul teased, after she sold several large paintings through Betty Parsons and received commissions for several more following the annual exhibition at the Whitney Museum. She had four new shows to prepare for throughout 1958 and had already received two more invitations to show in 1959. It was a period of surprising public recognition for an artist who was still entirely content to paint quietly at home and who would have been happy to do the work without showing or selling it.
An important reason for Hedda"s growing introspection was that it kept her from thinking about Elizabeth Stille. Their friendship had become so close that when the women came down with severe flu at the same time, they talked on the telephone several times daily to compare their cases. Saul was away, as he almost always was, but when he phoned Hedda, one of his first inquiries was usually about Elizabeth. Hedda"s antennae were alerted that Saul"s infatuation with Elizabeth was still strong when she noted how charmed he was by her tale of how Elizabeth was too sick to get out of bed to stop Alexander, then a toddler, from flushing a twenty-dollar bill down the toilet. Such excessive delight in a child"s doings was quite unlike him.
Saul"s restlessness was such that he could not bear to be at home any longer than absolutely necessary, because by staying he would have to face "doubts and complications." He needed an excuse for his inability to concentrate, so he blamed the outsize Brussels murals for making it difficult to return to drawing on "the usual scale." And as he dawdled, a number of commissions languished. He told Aldo that in the past, the moment he plunked his "a.s.s on the chair" he could always focus on the project at hand, but it was not working this time. Still refusing to face the complications in his life, he insisted that all his anxieties were caused by his work, and if he did not have so many financial responsibilities he would give it up entirely. Deep down, however, he knew that he was kidding himself and would not change a thing because he liked success, the books, the temptations, and was afraid of missing out on something good.
TO PULL HIMSELF OUT OF MALAISE, he decided to get serious about a new book, envisioning a biographical exploration of "life ... seen here like a voyage from birth A to the end, B." When he was in Europe and pondering how he had changed from a transplanted Italian to a bona fide American, he thought about calling the book The Labyrinth, but after the driving trip, the content took a temporary detour to become something different and he gave it the working t.i.tle "Steinberg"s America." The basic premise was autobiography, but at the start he could not clarify the unifying idea that would let him emphasize either his inner life (that is, "Labyrinth") or his life as an observer of the external world ("America"). He still owed the four publishers a book to make up for the aborted murals project, so every now and again, when nothing else commanded his attention, he gave thought to what a new one should be.
He was tending toward "Steinberg"s America" because he had just provided the cover drawing for Delpire"s publication of Robert Frank"s revolutionary photographs of everyday American life, so sensational in their ordinariness that every American publisher Frank contacted refused the book. Frank, a Swiss-born Jew, loaded his then wife, the artist Mary Frank, and their children into a shabby used car and drove randomly back and forth across the country, taking photos of the "easily found, not easily selected and interpreted." Delpire recognized that the book, which he published as The Americans, was groundbreaking, but as Frank was unknown, he thought a Steinberg drawing would help to sell it. Both Robert and Mary Frank were good friends of Steinberg and Sterne, but as much as Robert admired Saul, he did not want a drawing on the cover of his book of photographs. Delpire, aware of Steinberg"s enormous popularity in France, insisted that his drawing would be a selling tool, and the book was published that way. When the matter was settled, Steinberg was sure he had found his next book.
EVEN THOUGH HEDDA WAS CONTENT TO spend the summer of 1958 in the city because of all the work she had to do, Saul was itching to let the Jaguar take him somewhere else. In July, saying that he needed more drawings for the "America" book, he imitated Frank"s car trip, but unlike Frank, he drove with purpose in mind. He filled a sketchbook with drawings from cities like Aberdeen, Maryland; South Hill, Virginia; Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Athens, Georgia; Middlesboro, Kentucky; Williamson, West Virginia; and Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
The trip did little to relieve the anxieties that beset him when he started out, and he returned from it "a bit troubled and confused," saying only that "the last fifteen years have gone by too fast." By the autumn he was looking for someplace else to go when an invitation conveniently arrived from Denmark, one similar to so many that he had always declined in the past but that this time he decided to accept. Piet Hein, the Danish poet and mathematician, who was a fan of Steinberg"s work and with whom he had exchanged several letters, invited him to meet the filmmaker Carl Theodore Dreyer, to discuss the possibility of Dreyer"s filming several of Faulkner"s novels. Steinberg was intrigued by the proposition because he admired Faulkner"s fiction and had gone to Mississippi several times, thinking that seeing the state would help him understand why its people thought as they did. He brought home numerous souvenirs of Oxford, and on one of his trips stole a phone directory because he was fascinated by the "many Faulkners and Falkners" who were listed in it.
He decided to make Denmark the first part of a business trip that would continue with a visit to Rowohlt"s headquarters in Hamburg, then on to Paris to talk to Delpire, and at the end the obligatory visit to his family in Nice. He arrived in Copenhagen on December 3, 1958, and was immediately certain that going there had been a big mistake. He was the celebrity of the moment, a hapless being who felt as if he had been dropped smack in the center of a bowl of monkeys who were all yammering and picking at him to explain his work. He bore it stoically, saying that it was fortunate he could not read Danish and therefore could not understand what they wrote about him.
His hosts pulled out all the stops in order to give him one solid week of activity, festivity, and adulation. A welcome dinner was scheduled only hours after his plane landed; a meal of many courses (each with appropriate wines) that ended with a dessert served on a tray with exploding firecrackers, preceded by a violinist playing a spirited march. Afterward there was coffee and brandy, but it was still not over: another course followed, of smoked fish, caviar, and aquavit. After all the food and liquor, he thought he was hallucinating when he finally got to his room, looked out the window, and saw a monument to the Viking explorers that featured sailors blowing horns while carrying wounded boy trumpeters, a bear fighting a bull, and a musk ox fighting a giant fish (or perhaps it was a dragon; he was never certain). He was so tired that he was unable to sleep, but he had to get up early for several days in a row for endless rounds of speeches, lunches, and dinners with various local "bigwigs." They took him to Elsinore Castle, to all the museums, on a tour of the countryside, and then on a walking tour of Copenhagen. He liked the city and told Hedda they ought to come as private tourists, but only in the summertime.
Carl Dreyer took him to see the work of an "interesting insane Dane-painter," and Steinberg thought the topic of "another normality-that of the neurotic or insane"-worth pursuing if the book"s content became more "Labyrinth" than "America." He had time to think on the day-long journey to Hamburg by train and ferry, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of his German contacts, who had expected him to fly there in an hour. He spent his single day in Hamburg soothing his editors with promises that a book would soon be ready. After another mammoth meal, he had his first good night"s sleep since leaving New York. He was well rested when he flew to Paris, where he needed all the energy he could muster for his first order of business: to find Lica and Rica, who had made a sudden decision to move there permanently.
Armed with a huge supply of mechanical toys from Germany, he found them living in "Raskolnikoff quarters" in the run-down working-cla.s.s seventeenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt on the northwest outskirts of the city. The children were happy in school and ecstatic with the new toys, but Lica looked "pathetic" and Rica was exhausted from the only job he could find, going door-to-door trying to sell typewriters. Rica Roman was a cultured, sensitive man, who bore quietly the shame of his family"s total dependence on his wife"s little brother, as when he wrote to express it: "Dear Sauly, we live in the "City of Lights," but the life is tough and you need a lot of art and power to stay out of the darkness."
ONCE STEINBERG WAS BACK IN NEW YORK, there was no escape from what he described to Aldo as "the usual. I see too many people and talk too much, but for real or invented reasons I don"t have the courage to change." An onslaught of commercial requests was awaiting him, all of which required decisions, which, in his usual manner, he ignored. A more pleasant barrage was the fan mail that greeted his third New Yorker cover when it graced the January 17, 1959, issue. The magazine was not yet ready for the literal reality of the life Steinberg saw in his journeys around America, but the editors were delighted with his allegory of "Prosperity," or "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Steinberg drew a multileveled pedestal upon which a collection of men and symbols shared the s.p.a.ces that normally held statues. Uncle Sam shared the base of the pedestal with Uncle Tom, while the two most influential characters in American culture were at the top: Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud. The cover caused a sensation, and fan mail flooded in. Stanley Marcus bought the original drawing as soon as he saw it but continued to pester Steinberg for an explanation of the dichotomy represented by the pairs of men, while Steinberg evaded his questions. A housewife in Berkeley, California, said that if the n.o.bel Prize were given for magazine covers, Steinberg would surely get it. A professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Business asked for oversized copies to display in the school"s entrance, because Steinberg"s "wonderful anachronisms ... deserve more attention from thinking men." An owner of the Farmers" Hardware Company in upstate New York represented dozens of so-called ordinary readers who asked Steinberg to tell him what it meant, as did a student at Brooklyn"s Abraham Lincoln High School, whose POD (Problems of Democracy) cla.s.s got into such a spirited debate about what the cover meant that they decided to ask Steinberg if he "would be so kind" as to tell them. In Philadelphia, a grandmother had the cover framed, not only because it amused her but also "as a sort of time capsule" for her grandchildren: "One day when and if they become thinking adults, they may say "this is a time that tries men"s souls," but then, having studied your cover, they may take heart and realize that the sophistry, demagoguery, social, political, and economic ills which beset their times are nothing new, but were rampant and recognized in 1958."
THE NEW YORKER COVER MARKED THE beginning of Steinberg"s new relationship with the magazine, one that lasted for the rest of his life. Within his American patria, The New Yorker became his professional homeland as his status rose to an iconic level. It helped that his work was now selling for impressive prices in galleries and private collectors were buying it for themselves or to give to museums. It made him less dependent on commercial propositions and placed him in the fortunate position of being able to concentrate on honing his vision for drawings that would appear in what he believed was the most intelligent ma.s.s media publication in the country. He did continue to work for a few other publications, but it was The New Yorker for which he mostly tailored his vision.
Because the magazine, from this moment on, almost always published everything he sent the editors and exactly as he wanted it to be seen, an apocryphal story grew up: that if the editors rejected his drawings and sent them back through the mail or by messenger, he would simply put them in a new envelope and resend them exactly as they were, first to Jim Geraghty and after he retired to Lee Lorenz, both of whom would get his message and quietly accept them. Even though Hedda Sterne insisted the story was true, others had firsthand knowledge that it was not. Roger Angell and his wife, Carole, who worked in the art department, became Steinberg"s good friends and saw in person how he was always ready to change a questionable submission and how he was constantly revising his work, even after he handed in drawings that were deemed print-ready by others. Lee Lorenz said that the apocryphal story "was just not in his character. He was not a prima donna like some of the artists. He did not mind suggestions but they were rarely offered. By the time he sent in his work, it was ready to go." Frank Modell, one of the editors who often worked with Steinberg, recalled how he was "very particular about his drawings. When he turned them in they were ready to print. We would think it through, maybe make suggestions to change the size, perhaps adapt something. Maybe we might have thought once in a while that it was still a little rough so we"d send it back, but he was always very anxious to do the best he could, so he"d cooperate." Modell noted that Steinberg "usually didn"t deal with other editors, though. He went right to Geraghty." Everyone else thought Steinberg went directly to the editor in chief, William Shawn, who usually met him for lunch at the Algonquin so that Steinberg was not often in the magazine"s offices.
Steinberg seldom went to the weekly art department meetings, where everyone from the editorial and production departments to the artists gathered to go over the content of the current and coming issues. When he did visit, it was most often to the production floor, where the magazine was actually made up. He was intrigued by the various processes by which raw drawings became images on the printed page and was curious to learn as much about them as he could. Steinberg, who was compulsively neat in his own working s.p.a.ce, loved what Lee Lorenz called the "noise and confusion, the old-fashioned character and the idiosyncratic cast" who worked in the makeup department: "There was paper all over the floor; the place was in a constant uproar as we tried to meet our deadlines." Mostly, however, he conducted his business with the magazine over the telephone, and if he went to the offices, his real destination was Shawn"s office, as he became the central figure for the remainder of Steinberg"s long a.s.sociation with the magazine.
Shawn was quick to recognize that Steinberg and The New Yorker were, as Roger Angell recalled, "a perfect fit, entirely right for each other. Saul brought cla.s.s, pleasure, honor, to the magazine. He was an elegant dandy, perfectly dressed, beautiful manners, exquisite behavior ... Shawn really appreciated Saul and was very aware of Saul"s originality." Each, in his polite and private way, became a good friend to the other.
STEINBERG"S MOOD WAS GREATLY LIFTED BY the enthusiasm that surrounded the "Prosperity" cover after it appeared, and it was further buoyed by his own sudden prosperity. There were several unsettling situations connected with his finances, one that brought money and one that did not. The latter concerned a promotional booklet commissioned by the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency for Lincoln automobiles. Steinberg pocketed a sizable fee for the drawings he made for the booklet but was incensed when the agency used one of them on the mailing envelope as well. He complained that the purchase order made no mention of a "direct mail piece," which he believed the envelope to be, and that by sending it out as a ma.s.s mailing, the agency implied that Steinberg was personally endorsing the car. "It is repugnant to me to have my name linked with a deception," he wrote, as he instructed Alexander Lindey to begin litigation. Lindey cautioned that no matter what "ethical considerations" Steinberg felt had been violated, there was not enough "reasonable probability" for a legal claim to succeed. He reminded Steinberg that a court case would seriously impair his lucrative advertising commissions, because "advertising agencies don"t like to deal with troublemakers." Steinberg was disgruntled, but he accepted his lawyer"s advice and did nothing.
In another instance he did not follow Lindey"s advice. This one was more delicate, because it involved Hallmark, his cash cow for more than a decade. Besides the usual stipend for cards, Steinberg agreed to design calendars for an additional annual fee of $20,000. For the calendars-unlike the cards, for which he had to surrender the copyright-he expected Hallmark to honor the same arrangement he had with The New Yorker, paying to use the drawings but designating that all other rights and ownership of the originals were his. Hallmark disagreed, saying that it had bought both the drawings and the rights. Steinberg argued that they had not compensated him for the drawings" true value, which he set separately from the original fee-for-use at a minimum of $5,000 each. However, his strongest objection was not the extra money but the possibility that Hallmark "could authorize anyone-say a beer concern, a shoe manufacturer," to use the drawings without his consent and without paying him for the additional use. "This is unfair and I cannot agree to it," he insisted. After several rounds of increasingly tense negotiation, Hallmark withdrew its claim of ownership and the matter was settled in Steinberg"s favor.
SUDDENLY FLUSH WITH MONEY, HE THOUGHT it was time to be serious about buying property away from New York. Hedda liked Cape Cod and would have been content to spend the summers in Wellfleet; Saul thought it pleasant enough but was not sure it was the ideal place. It was a haven for many of their friends in architecture and design, including the Breuers and Gyorgy Kepes, and the summer home of a large community of writers, everyone from Edmund Wilson to Alfred Kazin and Ann Birstein, Mary McCarthy, and the Philip Hamburgers. Steinberg found himself increasingly drawn to the company of writers and became interested in exploring the genre himself. He went so far as to promise Kepes that he would write an article for Daedalus magazine, and Kepes began hounding him to finish it. Steinberg was stymied by his search for words to express the visual images he wanted to convey: "I find it impossible to write sentences containing ideas without their being mysteries that I"m the only one to understand." It was much easier to draw what he meant and leave the multiplicity of interpretations his drawings inspired up to his viewers. As for writing, he decided to "give it up," and at the same time he decided to give up on Cape Cod as well.
In early spring, Ruth and Tino Nivola invited Saul and Hedda to spend a weekend at their house in the Springs section of the township of East Hampton at the eastern end of Long Island. The Nivolas had been in Springs since 1948, when they had bought a run-down farmhouse with a barn and chicken coop on twenty-eight acres. In the decade since, they had created a comfortable home in the midst of landscaped gardens and what Tino called "open air rooms" that he designed to function as extensions of the house. Bernard Rudofsky contributed ideas for the exterior design, particularly the layout of the walkways and the placement of some of Tino"s sculptures on walls that were built for him to paint on and others that were stuccoed with abstract murals of his own design. Inside the house, Ruth Nivola designed jewelry that was as at home framed and hung on walls as it was being worn, while Le Corbusier decided that two large walls in the house needed a mural, so he painted one.
The Nivola household had become a gathering place for most of the poets, painters, writers, and artists who gravitated to the potato fields of eastern Long Island after Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner led the way. They lived nearby, as did many other artist friends of the Nivolas and the Steinberg-Sternes, among them Denise and David Hare, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Charlotte and James Brooks, and Carmen and Hans Namath. Architects who often came for weekend lunches included Bernard and Berte Rudofsky, Frederick Kiesler, and Paul Lester Weiner and his artist wife, Ingeborg Ten Haeff. So too did the photographer Evelyn Hofer and Humphrey Sutton; the philanthropist Dorothy Norman, who collected interesting people for her own gatherings; and May Tabak and her husband, Harold Rosenberg, who became one of Steinberg"s closest friends and to whom he turned increasingly for stimulating conversation and intellectual companionship.
On this particular weekend at the Nivolas", Steinberg mentioned casually how easy it was to relax in the setting and wondered if he should think about buying property there. Ruth and Tino spoke almost in unison: "The house across the road might be for sale." It was a run-down farmhouse at 433 Old Stone Highway and belonged to the keeper of the Montauk lighthouse, who was seldom there. Over the weekend there were many jokes about what it would be like for the Steinberg-Sternes to live across the road from the Nivolas, but on Sunday afternoon, when it was time to drive back to the city, Saul told Tino he was serious and asked him to get in touch with the owner to see if he wanted to sell. He did, and several days later Steinberg was contacted by the lawyer representing the owner, with an offer to help resolve the sale. Steinberg paid $12,500 cash, and the property became his on May 22, 1959.
"We"re neighbors now and have become closer friends," he told Aldo when he thanked him for the Italian edition of Giuseppe Lampedusa"s The Leopard, which he pa.s.sed along to Tino. Unlike the Nivola homestead, which was a constantly evolving artistic creation, Steinberg at first did nothing to his home, a simple house with two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms and a kitchen downstairs, and a front porch. The house was "not beautiful," but he thought it "smelled good inside" and would be "ideal when in the winter I"ll need a prison." He enjoyed everything about being there, particularly the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the island followed by "the best pleasure, the first mouthful or noseful of cold clean air, a visit to the ocean-at night, with the waves illuminated by the headlights of the car." A weekend was usually enough to satisfy him and make him eager to return to the city, where he could once again become an anonymous cosmopolite. And besides, he was used to city noises and streetlights, not the darkness of the country, where he slept badly because of the night noises.
BECOMING A HOMEOWNER WAS NOT ENOUGH to keep him settled, and to pa.s.s a restless summer he went often to the Bronx Zoo. "Too bad it"s full of children, and worse, parents," he told Aldo. Still uncertain about which theme to pursue for the next book, he made repeated visits to draw monkeys, peac.o.c.ks, vultures, and flamingos, and also to draw "Women-Portoricans [sic]-fighting in the Bronx."
In August 1959 he was beset by such anxiety that he left again, this time to roam for two months through the western states by plane, car, and bus. He flew from New York to Salt Lake City, where he called briefly on friends but did not stay because their children had mumps. His next stop was Denver and a visit to his Steinberg cousins, the children of his father"s brother Milton. They took him to a Shriners parade, where he chuckled at the men in funny fezzes driving tiny cars, but most of all he liked the cowboys who sang songs for the Salvation Army. He rented a car and drove to Elko and Las Vegas, where he stayed in the Hotel Tropicana and was "disgusted" by everything he saw: "Even the cigarette machines are crooked ... take money and give you nothing." He drove to Los Angeles, this time "shook" by "the frightening desert." He drove aimlessly for three days along back roads in the "most horrible landscape," which made Monument Valley "seem like a bourgeois garden." In Los Angeles, there was not much to see and no one he wanted to talk to, so he took a bus to Phoenix, where it was much the same. In a hurry, he flew to Tucson, where he was bored once again, and in an effort to stall, he continued on to El Paso by train. Suddenly ready to go home, he flew to San Antonio and then back to New York.
His rambles may have seemed without purpose, but he knew what he was doing, and why: "Traveling has been for me a gift for avoiding solutions ... I was traveling to forget! And I knew it but it was such a pleasure."
In New York, he found he could not settle down to work. All he could manage was to "continue to see people, to talk and drink." He needed to unburden himself but was unable to do so, not even to Aldo, his most trusted confidant. He could only confess that he had "lost hope of having what you call character but maybe something sui generis can be saved." The major cause of his anxiety was the unsettled relationship with Elizabeth Stille. Speculation and gossip about what it was-a full-blown affair or a flirtation, true love or mere infatuation-whatever he and she felt for each other, it was threatening to explode and shatter the marriages of the two couples and destroy their friendship with one another.
If the memories of the last living spouses who partic.i.p.ated, Hedda Sterne and Ruth Nivola, were true to the events as they happened, during the second half of 1959 the behavior of Saul and Elizabeth became too obvious for others to ignore. Hedda confirmed that she encouraged Saul to make the trip to the western states to give him and Elizabeth time to think about the consequences for the four adults and the two Stille children if their affair became public, and of the dual divorces that would certainly follow. But when Saul returned, neither he nor Elizabeth had come to any conclusion except to resume the relationship. It created a tremendous personal crisis in Elizabeth"s life and led both her and Saul to consult a.n.a.lysts. Hedda, as was her wont, ignored the resumption of the affair and went on with her painting. Ugo Stille seems not to have known about it until later, when it caused a severe marital crisis. However, as none of the princ.i.p.als took precautions to hide it, gossip among others was rampant.
Ruth Nivola, who cared deeply for the two couples, felt that she could not stand by and watch two marriages fail, nor could she bear to have any of the parties suffer the gossip of outsiders. She confronted Saul and Elizabeth separately but directly, and they admitted their pa.s.sion for each other and their inability to decide what to do. Both told Ruth that they loved their spouses and did not want to hurt them. Saul"s solution to their problem was for him and Hedda to live with Elizabeth and her children, a relationship that could be lived openly in the Springs house and more discreetly when they were in the city in their individual residences. He was confident that Hedda would agree to this arrangement, because she had learned to cope with and accept all his other infatuations, affairs, and one-night stands. He gave no indication that he was aware of the suffering it caused her.
Ruth was horrified when she heard his plan and told Elizabeth and Saul that she would give them two choices: they could end the affair and she would say nothing; if they did not, she would tell their respective spouses before some unkind gossip did. If they forced her to do the latter, they must take the consequences. Apparently they did not end the affair, for Ruth did tell Hedda, who never forgave her for meddling.
The year 1959 ended in a haze of uncertainty, of little work, little thought about the new book, and more aimless drifting. Elizabeth Stille disappeared from Saul Steinberg"s life quietly, without fuss or fanfare, and she and Ugo Stille remained married to each other for the rest of theirs. Although he saw Ugo from time to time, Steinberg had no meetings with Elizabeth until a chance encounter happened in 1984, when he was on his way to a dental appointment and she was walking down the same street: "She calls out to me. Unrecognizable. Fat face of businessman. Cruel. Talks about my fancy 75th Street [apartment]." He often wrote about the other women with whom he was involved in the many biographical jottings he made later in life, but this was the only time he mentioned Elizabeth Stille.
Hedda, after the separation from Saul. (ill.u.s.tration credit 23.1) A NUMBER OF NEW INITIALS, dates, times, and addresses filled Steinberg"s appointment diaries, but otherwise he read constantly because he could not concentrate on anything else. He was happy to discover that he liked Colette, but mostly he reread Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which he was happy now "to understand-in part. A great loss of time not to have understood it years ago." He went alone to concerts of avant-garde and abstract music and was upset by "the impossibility of understanding" it. It made him feel like "an ape reading the newspaper."
Just after the start of the new year, 1960, he wrote to Aldo that "for some time I"ve been drawing up a balance sheet of lost years, mistakes, wrong paths, connivances, etc. etc., an endless list." He did not write again until August, when he told his friend, "I haven"t written you in all this time because I"ve been too busy with the changes and new things in my life."
It had been a busy eight months: during the hiatus in their letters, Saul Steinberg left Hedda Sterne because she "kicked him out." He moved to a new apartment, found a new companion, and settled in for what Hedda called "the thirty-five years" war."
CHAPTER 24.
THE THIRTY-FIVE YEARS" WAR If Saul wants pasta tonight, he gets pasta; if he wants separation, he gets it.
He didn"t actually move out of the 71st Street house until the day after his June 15 birthday, which he celebrated on the sixteenth to honor Joyce"s "Bloomsday." Hedda baked two cakes: one for his birthday and one for his new life, to wish him well and a.s.sure him that she hoped sincerely he would finally find the peace that had eluded him throughout the years they had lived together. She had asked him to leave because she could no longer endure "the terror that grips the shoulders," nor did she want to live in the daily fear of saying something to provoke his cutting remarks or silent treatment.
From January to April 1960, while he still lived in the house with Hedda, he would have withdrawn entirely from the normal routines of the marriage if she had not demanded that he behave otherwise. She insisted that as long as they lived in the same house, they must be more than civil to each other, they must be kind. Her fear was that if they did not behave cordially, they would part with such acrimony that they could never be friends again, and she actually wrote a letter to convince him that she meant what she said.
Saul"s initial response to her ultimatum was to insist that she shared half the responsibility for the separation by not believing that no matter where he strayed, his ultimate loyalty was to her. She refused to accept it, saying, "I am afraid that all you have is a fear of my possible ill will toward you and the superst.i.tion that it might mythically affect you!" Her conclusion was poignant: "Just let me know and I"ll vanish from your life as if I had never been. With all my love (strange, isn"t it?)."
AFTER HEDDA MADE HER POSITION CLEAR, Saul lived in a state of confusion that veered between embarra.s.sment and shame. He was bewildered that things had degenerated to such a sorry pa.s.s that he could not think clearly about what to do next. Hedda had taken care of him for seventeen years, and he had forgotten how to manage the ordinary acts of daily life, starting with how to look for a new place to live. His response to her demand for civility and kindness was to be excessively polite when they encountered each other, and that was usually in the kitchen, for he spent most of his time sheepishly trying to avoid her by hiding in his studio and concentrating on the new book.
The theme had finally become focused on the idea of the pa.s.sage of life as a labyrinth, and that became the book"s t.i.tle. In its most basic conception, The Labyrinth was a continuation of Steinberg"s autobiography, a collection of drawings intended to show how one gets from point A (birth) to point B (death). Steinberg ill.u.s.trated his life"s journey as it had been thus far, portraying his travels to foreign countries, his observations about American culture and society, and his interior musings on what both the life of the mind and the artist"s representation of the body (his own and others", particularly women) meant. He asked himself questions such as "what is marriage," made notes about "equality of s.e.xes," and dismissed existentialism as "b.a.l.l.s."
These notes and a number of others provide allusions and insights into the drawings that fill the book, and the dust-jacket copy (which he suggested) confirms that the content is a "continuation" of Steinberg"s biography, wherein "he is discovering and inventing a great variety of events." The dust jacket bears one of Steinberg"s most famous drawings, a man"s head with a rabbit inside; some of his women resemble the battle-ax Rosa had become, bullying their tiny husbands from within the ma.s.sive furs and towering hats his mother favored; his couples are both poignant in the absence of emotional connection and unsettling in their barely controlled hostility toward each other.
Steinberg wasted nothing, and when he put the book together, he gathered drawings from his disparate travels and adventures, some of which had appeared in other publications and others that he used for the first time. There are horses and jockeys from his stint in the paddocks at Aqueduct Raceway, baseball players from his time with the Braves, and main streets, motels, highways, and deserts from his travels crisscrossing the continent. Some drawings may have dated from his time in China, and others were from his travels in Samarkand. The Russian trip is there, as are vast European plazas and monuments, Greek street scenes, and French skylines. The crocodile is there in many guises, sometimes swallowing the artist at his easel, other times jousting at mathematical circles, squares, and geometric equations, and sometimes dressed up in medieval armor, sprouting wings, and riding a horse into battle. Mythical maps measure how to get from art through law and on to "prosperitas, caritas, and mediocritas."
There are many playful drawings in which single words tell stories that depict plot, character, and setting, thus allowing Steinberg to fulfill his self-described role of "the writer who draws." Letters, for example like those forming the word tantrum are diving crazily in the full throes of what they describe, while those in the word sick drape themselves along a hospital bed in languid weakness. Steinberg"s nod toward existentialism has his "thinker" poised on a bench, pondering a question mark which he holds before him. His male characters in particular are enveloped in mazes, labyrinths, and cages of their own making, either creating puzzles to explain themselves to themselves or in a panic as they try to find a way out of them.
For every drawing that inspires a grin of surprise and delight, there are others that evoke wry recognition of the difficulties of balancing life and work while maintaining personal and professional relationships. Whether astride Don Quixote"s horse or not, each of Steinberg"s cartoon characters is, in his or her own way, jousting at windmills, and so too was he.
IN EARLY APRIL 1960, JUST AS Saul accepted Hedda"s ultimatum that he had to start looking seriously for someplace to live, a series of unfortunate events struck his family in France. Rica Roman lost so much weight that he was hospitalized for three weeks with a combination of ailments that suggested exhaustion, depression, and a mild heart attack. When he was diagnosed with infiltrating pulmonary tuberculosis, he was sent to a sanatorium at Evreaux, where he stayed for three months, until the disease was brought under control. Even before the illness, when he was still at home, Lica was too depressed to cope with running the household; now that he was gone, she was initially paralyzed with fear and grief. Her version of coping was to tell Saul that she had moved herself and the children into an artist"s studio in the eighteenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt, on the Rue Caulaincourt, and that she had found a part-time office job nearby. She did not convince Saul, who heard another version from Rosa, which convinced him that his parents were unraveling and Lica was "disintegrating."
Rosa complained nonstop about the obstreperous children, insisting that Lica "doesn"t really work. She fights with the children all the time (who are almost their parents" enemies)." Not so, Lica wrote to Saul, criticizing him for not writing to Rosa, thus making her totally responsible for having to "cheer Mom up." She berated him for not helping, even though all Rosa"s letters could be described as "one futile moan" for his attention.
Rosa had been diagnosed several months previously as a diabetic with congestive heart failure, and in her inimitable style, she milked the situation for all it was worth. She took to her bed and refused to get up until the day Moritz was too ill to get the mail and there was no one to bring it to her. Rosa got out of bed and went to the mailbox, where she found a brief note and a check from Saul for $500. As he had written earlier to say that he was sending $400, she knew immediately that Moritz had asked him for spending money, and she was furious. "Mom doesn"t let go of money as soon as she grabs it," poor Moritz wrote to his son. "Please explain to her that one hundred dollars should be mine because I also need a buck."
Rosa wrote a separate letter to scold her "Dear Saul" and instructed him to ignore Moritz"s letters: "He has become childish. I have too many fights with him, only I know how many. I won"t go into details." Not content with her letter, she threw a tantrum and "forced" Moritz to enclos