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Overview
The issue date was March 29, 1976. The New Yorker cost 75 cents. And on the cover unfolded Saul Steinberg's vision of the world: New York City, the Hudson River, and then...well, it's really just a bunch of stuff you needn't concern yourself with. Steinberg's brilliant depiction of the world according to self-satisfied New Yorkers placed him squarely in the pantheon of the magazine's—and the era's—most celebrated artists.
But if you look beyond the searing wit and stunning artistry, you'll find one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. Born in Romania, Steinberg was educated in Milan and was already famous for his satirical drawings when World War II forced him to immigrate to the United States. On a single day, Steinberg became a US citizen, a commissioned officer in the US Navy, and a member of the OSS, assigned to spy in China, North Africa, and Italy. After the war ended, he returned to America and to his art. He quickly gained entree into influential circles that included Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Willem de Kooning, and Le Corbusier. His wife was the artist Hedda Sterne, from whom he separated in 1960 but never divorced and with whom he remained in daily contact for the rest of his life. This conveniently freed him up to amass a coterie of young mistresses and lovers. But his truly great love was the United States, where he traveled extensively by bus, train, and car, drawing, observing, and writing.
His body of work is staggering and influential in ways we may not yet even be able to fully grasp, quite possibly because there has not been a full-scale biography of him until now. Deirdre Bair had access to 177 boxes of documents and more than 400 drawings. In addition, she conducted several hundred personal interviews. Steinberg's curious talent for creating myths about himself did not make her job an easy one, but the result is a stunning achievement to admire and enjoy.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780385524483 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 11/20/2012 |
Pages: | 752 |
Product dimensions: | 7.22(w) x 9.34(h) x 1.84(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Author's Note
Like many other Americans in the last half of the twentieth century, I grew up eagerly awaiting the arrival of The New Yorker each week. Back when there was no table of contents, I think a lot of people must have done as I did, flipping through the pages to scan the titles of articles and glance at the end to see who wrote them while reserving my initial attention for the drawings and cartoons. And from the quantity of fan mail the magazine received, I don’t think I was the only one who stopped fanning the pages to study whatever Saul Steinberg contributed to an issue. His work always got my attention, and nine times out of ten, my first response was the same puzzled question: Just what did he mean by that? All those numbers, letters, squiggles, and curlicues; those funny animals and ferocious figures; the brutalist buildings, tranquil landscapes, and chaotic street scenes—what was he getting at? And as for that poster, the iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” dubbed by me and countless others “The New Yorker’s View of the World,” I am sure I was among the first delighted buyers who rushed to the store on Madison Avenue for a copy, which has hung in every house I’ve lived in since then.
When I became a university professor, my office bulletin board was festooned with Steinberg’s covers, most of them the ones containing words that I used to try to inspire my students to think. There was the one that showed a man standing between two signs, one pointing to “before” and the other to “after.” There was the one with all versions of the verb to be, and the one that proclaimed “I do,” “I have,” and “I am.” And whenever assignments were due and I knew I’d be deluged by requests for extensions, I’d send my students a message by posting one of my favorite cartoons on the office door, of a man who sits behind a desk beaming as the word NO floats above his head and over to the deflated supplicant who sits in front of him.
In my home office, ever since I was a graduate student in Paris years ago and I went without lunches to buy it, a Steinberg print has hung on the wall where my eyes naturally gravitate when I raise them from my work. It has floated above every desk since the days when my ancient typewriter gave way to a succession of computers, because I always found something soothing in it during my daily search for whatever words or thoughts were eluding me. I still don’t know what there is about this print, one of his landscapes from the era of The Passport, that is endlessly fascinating. It just is.
That vague generality pretty much characterized my overall response to Saul Steinberg’s art until early 2007, when I saw two exhibitions of his work, at the Morgan Library and Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. I spent so much time studying the drawings and trying to puzzle out what inspired him to create them that the friends who were with me grew tired of waiting and were about to leave without me when I rushed to tell them how I thought I’d found what I’d been missing all those years. I had just read a caption that quoted Steinberg as having said, “I am a writer who draws.” That was it, of course, the elusive key that opened the first of the many doors that led me to spend three magical years searching for an understanding of his oeuvre.
On my way out of the Morgan Museum, I bought the book that accompanied the exhibition, and when I got home, I put it beside the four books of his drawings that were already on my library shelves. One by one I took them down again, once more finding puzzle and pleasure in equal part. Several months later, when I was packing books and files for a household move, I came across a huge folder left over from my teaching days that contained all the Steinbergiana that had adorned the walls and bulletin boards of my various offices. For the first time I was aware of the variety of his output, from New Yorker covers to product advertisements. I had saved an old Hallmark calendar and one leftover Christmas card from those he drew for the Museum of Modern Art. There was even a photo of a funny-looking fellow with a mustache and black-framed glasses holding a tiny brown paper mask over his nose, who I now knew was Saul Steinberg himself. How many years had I saved all this? It was hard to remember when I started, or even why. I knew nothing about the artist’s life when I collected all these things and until that moment had never considered finding out who he was, where he came from, or why he made such an impact on his culture and society. At that time I really believed that I would never write another biography, but thoughts about Saul Steinberg persisted, and almost before I could verbalize what they were, I knew that I wanted to write about him. One thing led to another, and that was the start of this biography. Four years later, the end result is here.
2007–2011
New Haven, Connecticut
CHAPTER 1
THE AMERICANIZATION OF SAUL STEINBERG
Saul Steinberg’s Italian diploma in architecture stated clearly that he was “of the Hebrew Race,” which meant he was forbidden to work in Milan in 1940. He was a Romanian citizen, but his passport had been canceled, making him a stateless person bound to be rounded up by Mussolini’s Fascist police and sent to an internment facility, the Italian version of a concentration camp. Although he was well known for his satirical drawings and cartoons in two of Milan’s leading humor newspapers, he lived for several months as a hunted man and never stayed long in any one place.
His Italian girlfriend hid him in her room and her friends hid him in theirs; his classmates from school did the same. But Milan was really a small town and difficult to hide in for long. It was only a matter of time until he would oversleep and be arrested in one of the daily 6 a.m. sweeps through the poorer parts of town, then be loaded onto a train with others who had run afoul of the Fascisti and sent to an internment facility. Those on the run heard rumors that suspects who surrendered voluntarily were treated better than those who were caught in the daily raids, and so, on the advice of his friends, Steinberg turned himself in at the neighborhood police station. Shortly after, he was indeed shipped off to an internment facility, Tortoreto.
The train ride to Tortoreto was the start of a long series of peregrinations that eventually took him from Milan by plane to Lisbon (twice), to Rome by train, to New York via ship, and then to four days in a holding pen on Ellis Island until the ship that took him to exile in the Dominican Republic was ready to sail. A year later, through the intercession of everyone from Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt to his American uncles and cousins, to several finally admitted to the United States. He took his first legal footsteps on American soil in Miami and from there he took a Greyhound bus (one of his favorite modes of travel) to New York.
Several months later, in one single day, Saul Steinberg became a United States citizen, a commissioned officer in the United States Naval Reserve, and, via the Office of Naval Intelligence, a member of the fledgling OSS (later the CIA) under the auspices of Wild Bill Donovan, who wanted him despite the fact that navy doctors who had examined him declared him both physically and psychologically unfit for service.
Ensign Saul Steinberg, USNR, was sent to Washington, D.C., for a brief period of training in psychological warfare to prepare for an overseas posting where his considerable knowledge of languages would complement his artistic abilities. Fluent in his native Romanian and Italian, with excellent French and good German, able to get by in Spanish, and with a smattering of Portuguese and comprehensible English, he was sent by his superiors to be a spy in inland China.
And that, as he was fond of remembering, was the start of the Americanization of Saul Steinberg, and of his lifelong love affair with all things American.
Table of Contents
Author's Note xiii
Chapter 1 The Americanization of Saul Steinberg 1
Chapter 2 A Decidedly Peculiar Place 3
Chapter 3 A Wunderkind without Knowing It 18
Chapter 4 A Secure Trade 29
Chapter 5 The Place to Go 36
Chapter 6 The Betrayal 53
Chapter 7 To Answer in English-A Heroic Decision 74
Chapter 8 In a State of Utter Delight 54
Chapter 9 Going Off to the Oss 91
Chapter 10 My Hand Is Itching for Drawings 106
Chapter 11 Starting Again in the Cartoons Racket 130
Chapter 12 The Stranger She Married 141
Chapter 13 Slaving Away With Pleasure 163
Chapter 14 The Only Happily Married Couple 183
Chapter 15 The Draftsman-Laureate of Modernism 205
Chapter 16 Balkan Fatalism 217
Chapter 17 Some Sort of Breakdown 235
Chapter 18 A Deflating Balloon 249
Chapter 19 A Grand Old-Fashioned Journey 282
Chapter 20 Covering 14,000 Miles 276
Chapter 21 Six People to Support 286
Chapter 22 A Biting Satire of American Life 295
Chapter 23 Classic Symptoms 305
Chapter 24 The Thirty-Five Years' War 318
Chapter 25 Changes and New Things 326
Chapter 26 I Lived With Her for So Long 338
Chapter 27 Boredom Tells Me Something 349
Chapter 28 The Terrible Curse of the Consciousness of Fame 301
Chapter 29 Autobiography Doesn't Stop 372
Chapter 30 I Have to Move 319
Chapter 31 The Desire for Fame 389
Chapter 32 Such a Didactic Country 400
Chapter 33 Living in the Past 413
Chapter 34 Furniture as Biography 427
Chapter 35 Up to My Nose in Trouble 437
Chapter 36 Sadness Like an Illness 449
Chapter 37 The Man Who Did that Poster 401
Chapter 38 What the Memory Accumulates 473
Chapter 39 The Defects of the Tribe 481
Chapter 40 The Passion of His Life 494
Chapter 41 "Steinbergian" 504
Chapter 42 Winding Up Like My Parents 515
Chapter 43 The Latest News 529
Chapter 44 Affirmation of Things as They Are 543
Chapter 45 What's the Point? 560
Chapter 46 Nature's Charitable Amnesia 570
Chapter 47 The Annus Mirabilis of 1999 583
Epilogue the Uncertainty of His Place 587
Acknowledgments 593
Notes 597
Illustration Credits 705
Index 709