Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 16

Nothing is lost of what the memory acc.u.mulates, an immense computer that continues to register and cla.s.sify data that are used only in a minimal proportion for conventional and monotone life. Life in this sense is like a huge ocean liner in which only one cabin is used.

While he was caught up in the media excitement generated by the Whitney retrospective, Steinberg received a letter, via The New Yorker, from a man in Arizona named Phil Steinberg, who said he was the son of Moritz Steinberg's brother Beryl and therefore Saul's first cousin. Phil Steinberg had read the glowing profile in Time and decided to get in touch with his famous cousin. His letter came totally out of the blue, for Saul had never been in contact with the Arizona contingent of his family. He and his uncle Martin in Denver, and later Martin's son, Charles, wrote from time to time about providing support for the relatives in Israel, but his only fairly regular correspondence was with Charles's daughter, Judith Steinberg Ba.s.sow. It was a pleasant exchange, with Judy sending news of her doctor husband's work and her quest to balance her work as a lawyer against the needs of her two daughters, whom Saul occasionally entertained in New York when they were attending eastern universities. He usually wrote short notes to accompany frequent gifts of art to the Ba.s.sows, and when they came to New York, he enjoyed their company. He formed a close friends.h.i.+p with Judy when they exchanged information and cooperated on a Steinberg family geneology.

The letter from Phil came as a shock, not only because of the eloquent simplicity of Phil's life story but also because he enclosed a photograph of himself, and when Saul looked at it, it was as if he were looking at himself. Phil was his age, had been in the Marines, and had seen heavy fighting during the battles for Guam and Iwo Jima. When he came home, he married Rita, an Irish girl originally from New York, and like his father and uncles before him, worked as a typesetter until he taught himself to build and repair radios, televisions, and other electronics. He opened a small shop and did as much work as he needed to do to support his modest lifestyle; when he retired, he bought a house trailer where he and Rita lived, sharing a pa.s.sionate love for motorcycles and roaming together throughout the Southwest on his enormous Honda. Phil's letter was an honest and straightforward account of a life satisfied with the simplest of pleasures, and he told his newfound cousin that he was sorry to say that he had great difficulty understanding Saul's work. Phil hoped Saul would come to Tucson, because he would never go back to New York. Saul was captivated by "the mysterious cousin," and even though he had just returned from a trip through the western states, he had such "a powerful desire to meet a cousin whom I'm not ashamed of" that he went west again, to Arizona, in November.

PHIL'S LETTER CAME AT AN INTERESTING time in Steinberg's professional life, when the idea of family and its effect on the individual was uppermost in his mind. "These days," he told Aldo, "I'm drawing my aunts and uncles from photographs, and I recognize (scrutinize them as real people for the first time) parts of myself: an ear, an eye. Archeology!" He had conceived the idea of creating mythical family groups that were loosely based on portraits of his own relatives and on some of the paintings and photographs he had observed in foreign cultures, particularly Russia, where family photographs were still taken in the old-fas.h.i.+oned tradition, "where dignity was the most important thing." Over the years he had ama.s.sed a large collection of such photos, starting with his own family and then with those he picked up in flea markets and his beloved "junque" shops. When he started to tinker with them, he began by making totally new drawings, which he intended to turn into easily recognizable parodies, until one day he discovered that by applying a thin overlay of black enamel paint to the photographs themselves, he could turn them into perfect imitations of old-time photography, "as varnished as the painting of Ingres that were their models." Eventually both his new drawings and the transformed photographs became two thematic portfolios for The New Yorker called "Uncles" and "Cousins."

The fixation on family marked the start of Steinberg's increasingly introspective vision, as he plumbed his own life to convert it into the pictorial autobiography that became one of the dominating motifs, if not the dominating motif, of his last two decades. "Nothing is lost of what the memory acc.u.mulates," he wrote in one of the many notes he made on this subject. The question he pondered repeatedly was how to reveal these memories so they transcended the personal and became universal, which in his worldview always became drawings suitable for The New Yorker. How it rankled when he tried to explain what he wanted the portraits to convey to Bernard Rudofsky, who cut him short by asking, "Are you working or only selling?" "He thinks he's funny," said Steinberg, who thought this was a truly "nasty" comment.

Steinberg had always been a serious reader whose main interest in the ideas of others was to see how he might relate them to his own personal experience. From Gogol's nose to Joyce's peripatetic Leopold Bloom to the many philosophers whose aphorisms Hedda Sterne sent his way, Steinberg always found something he could use. When he read Proust (whom he thought boring and never finished), the one idea that resonated for him was how certain scents or objects could serve as lifelong triggers of memories. It was, therefore, a "wild" experience when the curators for the retrospective uncovered some of the drawings he had made thirty years earlier and not seen since, thus a.s.saulting him with memories long forgotten. He felt that looking at these old drawings was akin to playing a game he named "First and Second Cla.s.s Reality," where the artist looking at his art engages in "a sort of voyeurism that probably interferes with life, a truly unnatural act." He had always made the occasional jotting in the past, but after the retrospective he started to make more frequent and far more detailed notes about his thoughts and experiences, especially as he tried to recapture the emotion he had felt at the time he created the work. The two portfolios for The New Yorker became, like so many other photographs he agonized over, a serious search for the truth of himself and the essence of his being.

One of his most famous first- and second-cla.s.s realities is a photograph taken by Evelyn Hofer, of the adult Saul Steinberg standing in the middle of the immense Persian rug that filled his studio floor, which appeared from time to time in his drawings, holding the hand of a life-size cardboard cutout of himself as a boy of six or eight. Both the cardboard boy and the real adult look steadily at the camera, as if in all seriousness they are inviting the viewer to join them in playing a game to find the reality.

Saul Steinberg holding the hand of his eight-year-old self, 1978. (ill.u.s.tration credit 38.1) STEINBERG WENT TO TUCSON AT THE end of October to visit Rita and Phil Steinberg. During the fourteen years they had lived in a trailer park out in the country, they had watched as the city encroached until it surrounded them with suburban clutter. Steinberg had a difficult time fathoming this new relative, especially when he saw the elderly childless couple, Phil and Rita, set out on their motorcycle surrounded by a phalanx of other old people on theirs. He was grateful that their trailer was so small that he did not have to risk offending their hospitality by staying in a hotel, and he managed to invent reasons to keep himself occupied during the day so that he only spent evenings in their company. Anything more would have been too emotionally exhausting, for simply being with his cousin gave Steinberg an image of the person he would have been "without education, without success." He left Tucson with deeply divided emotions, aware that he could not understand living the life of a man like Phil and that he would never grasp how anyone could be satisfied with it. He made a comparison unflattering to himself: that Phil was indeed "an authentic person," whereas he was not.

BACK IN NEW YORK, HE WENT immediately to the country, where he was happiest and could do his best work. He was in another of the recurring daydreams about living there permanently when the phone rang, abruptly summoning him back to the city because his apartment had been burgled. A thief had entered through a courtyard window and made off with gold cuff links that had been a gift from Hedda during their marriage. This distressed him deeply. Also stolen were the various medallions Steinberg had been awarded during his career, which turned out to be real gold and not imitations, as he had thought. Losing the medallions did not upset him nearly as much as losing the cuff links, but what upset him most of all was the loss of his "tranquillity." His first impulse was to move to a different apartment, claiming that he had never liked the one he was in because it was too dark. In the end he stayed there, after installing a security system and renting a warehouse where he could store his work, the many souvenirs of his travels, and his beloved "junque," all of which was crowding him out.

STEINBERG WAS AT LOOSE ENDS AS the seventies ended, alone in the country because of tension with Sigrid, whom he told to stay in the city. As he was without female company and because he could not read all the time, he was determined to find something other than his work to occupy his hands as well as his mind. For reasons he could not understand, let alone explain, he settled on wanting to play the violin again, something he had not done since his student days at the Lycee Basarab. Steinberg told Sasha Schneider, who immediately made him the gift of a good instrument, and he began to practice seriously, easily recalling some of what he played a half century before in the school orchestra. He liked "playing it loudly, out in the country; with no neighbors nearby, it is a pleasure." To make sure he was playing properly, he began each session with simple warmup exercises he remembered from his youth, and later, when he progressed to playing actual music, he tape-recorded himself and then listened to the playback, mostly "with admiration." Sometimes he taped himself accompanying recordings, but when he played the tape back, he discovered that fingering was "still difficult ... but with time, perhaps ..."

He had long had an important musical friends.h.i.+p with Sasha Schneider, but another was developing with Leo Treitler, the musicologist husband of his friend Mary Frank, whom he had known since she was Robert Frank's young wife living in a 9th Street studio with rear windows that were directly opposite Bill de Kooning's. Seeing her again brought back memories of how, depending on which of his two friends he was visiting, he could wave out the window to the other one. Mary Frank soon became an increasingly important friend. She was one of the few people whom he trusted enough to introduce to Lica on her last visit, and after Lica's death, Frank realized how much he loved his sister when she tried to comfort him by saying that she thought she could understand his grief well enough to share it because of her daughter's untimely death. He made no reply, but she intuited that a new level of unspoken closeness had grown between them.

Mary Frank played the recorder and "a very bad piano" and thought it would cheer both her and Steinberg to play duets. He refused at first, but she cajoled him into agreeing, even though they both thought that music for recorder and violin was not the best. After two or three such sessions Steinberg stopped, because "he could not stand that he played so badly in comparison to professionals. It was shaming for him; others could be amateurs but for him it was unbearable. It made him sad and angry." He settled for hearing music played well at the Frank-Treitler home whenever they hosted one of the musical evenings at which Leo's son, Max, a distinguished cellist, played.

Steinberg became especially unhappy with his own ability after Isaac Stern invited him to a recital and reception in his apartment. He was disgruntled all evening, calling Stern's playing of Sibelius just "so-so" and Stern himself "flabby and surrounded by over-stuffed furniture that resembles him." He went home intending to capture the evening in drawings that were initially "unkind," but his inherent dignity made him abandon it as "too easy and not right." Nevertheless, he continued to play the violin when he was alone and with more proficiency than he gave himself credit for, playing everything from "Johann Christian Bach (the Milanese Bach)" to Vivaldi, Mozart, and Haydn. He took lessons from a woman who taught at the Mannes College of Music, a Russian he called Sushanskaya whom he described as a martinet originally from Leningrad, who made him play "wicked, difficult exercises by the noted s.a.d.i.s.t Schradieck." She insisted that he join two of her other pupils, talented schoolchildren who played piano and cello, for trios. This caused Steinberg more trepidation than if Isaac Stern had invited him to play, but once he joined the children, he delighted in the feeling of having "made progress," even though it made him feel his "lack of talent acutely."

AFTER HIS VIOLIN PLAYING BECAME SOMETHING he did routinely, he needed to create other diversions to fill his time. He took to visiting the many wooden churches on the east end of Long Island, where he drew them dal vero. He thought the structures were interesting because they were "architecturally sound," whereas he disliked the many stone churches in the area because the proportions were all "built to the wrong scale." Besides these renderings of buildings, he kept his hands busy with still lifes and portraits. The objects on his desk or dining table, the wooden sculptures he put together from bits and pieces left over from Gordon Pulis's work on the tables, the iconic blue-and-white Chinese vase, were all turning up frequently. He caught Sigrid in many different poses but mostly in the quiet serenity that being in the country instilled in her. And of course there was his beloved Papoose, either captured on one of his stalking adventures or disguised as a caricature cat within other drawings that eventually appeared in The New Yorker.

To all this playful exploration Steinberg added photographic experimentation, first by capturing a person or an image on a Polaroid camera, then by making a drawing from the photograph. In the drawings he strove for the same "Courbet-style colors" that Polaroid photos usually became after they had been exposed to the light for a while. He played with postcards in much the same way, creating an original drawing and coloring them "Courbet-style" as closely as possible or drawing over the original and using it in collages. He liked to use airmail envelopes in collages and would send envelopes to friends and ask them to mail them back to him because he wanted the postmark.

His favorite entertainments continued to be reading and going to the movies, and he did both avidly and voraciously. He was aware of the feminist movement and tried to educate himself by reading books written by women, but when it came to the proper role for women to play in men's lives, he was still very much the traditional European gentleman and expected them to be submissive. After he met the journalist Shana Alexander and liked her, he read her books and articles with grudging respect, but he did not put her on his list of women who were "good writers." Two who made it were Elizabeth Hardwick, for Sleepless Nights because he thought her plot mirrored his own depressive behavior, and Renata Adler, for Speedboat, which he liked because it was "a quasi novel in fragments."

In his almost frenetic search for pursuits to pa.s.s the time, he agreed to take a winter vacation in February 1980 with "la Sigrid," as he had begun to call her when he wrote or spoke of her to mutual friends. She wanted to go to Mali, but when Saul refused to go that far, she settled for Guadeloupe, first because it was French and then because he insisted he would only go somewhere "not yet cursed with poverty or political strife." He loved to travel and was always ready to go at a moment's notice, but his preference was for cities where he had a network of friends with whom he could eat a pleasant meal and have a meaningful conversation, or find shops where he could buy such things as a brand of ink or a kind of eraser he could not get in New York, or where he could have clothes made to order by tradespeople who were delighted to fit fine fabrics to his exacting specifications. In recent years this had meant making the circle of Milan (and sometimes Rome), Paris, and London and nowhere else. Going to a resort gave him a "horror of hotels and restaurants and tourists." Sitting on a beach was "inertia, indolence, and sloth-the antic.i.p.ation of death." But Sigrid liked that kind of vacation, so Saul allowed her to drag him along on "whimsical trips, almost always good despite my grumbling."

Despite his hesitation, he did have a good time on Guadeloupe. They left New York in a snowstorm and he had a bad case of flu, but the warm weather soon cured it, and he spent a lot of time floating in the deep blue water or sitting on the beach reading Babette's Feast and Out of Africa. What he remembered best about these readings was his single meeting with Baroness Blixen in New York toward the end of her life, when "her stockings hung in folds."

Still, even after all this pleasant activity, Steinberg retreated into one of his increasingly frequent "periods of paranoia," when he compared himself to a tortoise or an armadillo to insist that, despite all his activities and the quant.i.ty of work he published and the even larger quant.i.ty that he left in his carefully saved but unpublished files, he could not write, work, or read. He was bitter that his drawings were not being bought by people who took simple delight in them but rather "by people with money, as an investment." He groused about this adjunct of fame, that it forced too much responsibility on him to have to decide every time he put pen to paper whether he wanted "riches or the ruin of widows and orphans." Where, he asked himself, was the wisdom that came with age? If it was true that wisdom was indeed a benefit of age, he was hard-pressed to find it. While he was visiting Phil in Tucson, he went to an afternoon "blue movie" and was insulted when the youngster at the cash register sold him a senior citizen's ticket without his asking for it. It made him feel old, and he hated the feeling. There were new problems with his teeth, and at times he measured out his life not in Prufrock's coffee spoons but in weekly or even daily dental appointments. It helped him to be able to turn to writers whom he identified with old age, such as Giuseppe Pontiggia, whose "greedy, avaricious characters" in the short stories reminded him of "Checkhov [sic] as influenced by Gogol, in that the essential is masked by secondary issues."

Was that what he was doing, he asked himself-masking the essential with the secondary? And if so, what was essential and how could he identify it? On every level, this was the question that permeated Steinberg's life at the start of the new decade.

CHAPTER 39.

THE DEFECTS OF THE TRIBE.

I realize that for many years I've encountered only celebrities and admirers ... I haven't gotten to know anybody ... with the exception of celebrities or waiters, porters, drivers, and other indifferent people.

The only person Steinberg thought might be capable of understanding the curious emotions that were now besetting him was Aldo Buzzi. He had always confided the daily facts and events of his life to Aldo, but now he unleashed his deepest feelings. "It's clear that the desire for stamps and seals is not only a visit to the past, but to the country I have avoided since I left it," he wrote of his newest pa.s.sion, stamp collecting. Steinberg believed that one of the best ways to determine the things that matter most in adult life was to revisit the important memories of childhood, in his case what it was like to be ten years old in the Romania of 1924. He believed this was one of the most "essential" periods of his life, and the memories of it produced a confusing surge of emotions that he was at a loss to interpret. One of the first was his adult "mania" for postage stamps that were issued in 1924. As a poor Romanian boy, he had had no access to real collectibles, so his acquisitions were limited to the stamps that came through his family's mailbox or to those his kind neighbors gave him. Once he had collected all that were issued, his interest waned and he drifted to other pursuits, but now, when he happened upon some of the stamps he remembered from boyhood, he was overcome by a feeling so "powerful, confused," that he could not decide whether it was happiness or pain.

As was his habit with every new interest, he pursued this one with relentless intensity. He read all the material in the Amagansett Library, went to auctions, made friends of dealers and collectors, bought catalogues, and even tried unsuccessfully to buy a very expensive alb.u.m that contained an important collection of stamps issued between the mid-nineteenth century and 1924. This long-dormant "pa.s.sion" was "re-emerging with such alarming force" that he thought it was a sign of one of two things: "an interesting and lively senility" or the deep need to "return" to the Romania of his childhood.

Aldo had always been his sounding board, but now they became even closer, because Saul was going through a serious change in his relations.h.i.+p with Hedda. He was somewhat reluctant to involve her in the search for his past as he stood on the cusp of old age and was slightly embarra.s.sed by his deepening introspection. He hesitated to confide in her, because even though they were both scrupulous about never discussing his relations.h.i.+p with Sigrid, he feared she would interpret this serious change in his habits as something caused by Sigrid's increasingly erratic behavior.

Hedda's conduct toward him never changed: she continued her custom of copying interesting sayings and pithy aphorisms onto the pages of her little tablets and mailing them along with articles and photos she thought would either amuse him or trigger the urge to draw. As he became obsessed with aging, he stopped trying to hide his pathological interest in death and dying from her, so she sent everything from respectful obituaries of their friends to bizarre accounts of how perfect strangers had died, the latter in the hope that he would find something comic to cheer him up. They spoke on the phone almost every day, sometimes more than once, and she continued to be ruthless in telling him exactly what she thought, always restricting her criticisms to his art and almost never mentioning his life. He respected her judgments and usually heeded her advice, but most of all he counted on her for the constant warm bath of unconditional love and approval he knew she would wash over him, no matter how silly he was or how stupidly he behaved. Sigrid, on the other hand, screamed at him for looking ridiculous as he squired the steady succession of "thin blonde WASP women who get younger every year," whom he either seduced or tried to, but Hedda always welcomed them to her house: "He brought his girl friends home to show off to me what good lookers he could get. Usually, after he finished with them, they still came to see me and became my good friends."

Saul had no qualms about letting Hedda see him with other women, but he was reluctant to talk about anything even vaguely connected to their shared Romanian origins. He often felt inferior or inadequate when he compared her privileged upbringing to his modest one, and even though Hedda would never have been judgmental, he felt more comfortable confiding the emotions aroused by his country's anti-Semitic att.i.tudes to Aldo. He was not embarra.s.sed to tell Aldo about anything connected with Romania, especially how "hungrily" he read stamp catalogues, or to talk about the sheer joy he felt when he looked at stamps on old envelopes and saw them with entirely new eyes. When he bought a "Venetian-Austrian [envelope] with stamp in relief," it marked the start of his purchasing a collection, slowly, using astuteness more than money. It was a game he enjoyed, because the stamp dealers he dealt with in New York exhibited the same behavior that he remembered from 1924: they may have loved stamps, but they were still vulgar and cruel. It was fun to toy with them now that he was an adult with money and discernment. "They are pimps," he concluded, and the game they played was "archeological p.o.r.nography." Still, collecting stamps let him meet new people and go to new and different places, and with these experiences came the startling insight that for years he had not formed any new and meaningful relations.h.i.+ps. The only new people he met were celebrities or his fans, all of whom made him feel inauthentic, phony, and lacking in any admirable quality. The vast majority with whom he interacted were waiters, porters, or chauffeurs, all of whom were polite because they were paid to be. He did not tell the people he met in the stamp world that he was the famous artist but pretended instead that he was a simple retiree who was beginning a new hobby. Whether or not they knew of his reputation, he hid behind the false persona, because he feared that if he told the truth, he risked revealing too many emotions that should remain private. "In general they treat me as a fool," he told Aldo. "Maybe they are right."

As his interest in postmarks and envelopes intensified, he thought of his large personal collection of old postcards. He brought them out of their boxes and filled the horizontal surfaces of his house with them. As he looked at them with the new eyes he had earlier brought to stamped envelopes, he found different subsets among them, such disparate things as reflections in water or nude women reflected in mirrors. Many of these were on the cards he had bought in Russia, which led to musings on the Russian national character and the study of Cyrillic handwriting, which in turn led him to study all the cards and ponder the sender's obvious and perhaps hidden meanings. It drew him back to his own boyhood and young adulthood and reflections about what he might have intentionally concealed and inadvertently revealed.

Perusing the postcards led him to the collection of family photos that he had filed in a folder t.i.tled "Romania." He embellished almost every one, usually by superimposing various versions of his older self upon the younger: in a studio photo in which he wears a sailor suit and stands stiffly posed between his parents, he disfigures himself with a beard, mustache, gla.s.ses, and a large and pointed nose; in another of himself wearing the same sailor suit and pus.h.i.+ng a hoop, he drew the large table in the Springs kitchen with the iconic blue-and-white Chinese vase on it that he used repeatedly in other drawings.

STEINBERG WAS SPENDING SO MUCH TIME in the country that he instructed his housekeeper, the "Majorcan Pearl, Josefine," to redirect all his New York mail, visitors, and phone calls to Springs. Sigrid went back to Africa in early January 1981, leaving him "as usual, full of qualms, doubts, fears," and it was easier to deal with them in the country. His relations.h.i.+p with Sigrid had reached such a low point that he allowed her to come to the house only when he was absent, but he had relented at Christmas and for two days they had been able to "love one another" as they had not been able to do throughout the previous year. In keeping with his new openness to Aldo, he described their difficulties as "symptoms similar to those of Pirandello's pedestrian wife," a cryptic allusion to the mental problems presented in a "scary" biography of the author that Steinberg read mainly for its depiction of the troubled marriage. "Me, too," he told Aldo as he described his own depressed state, "the usual moments of melancholy, or worse."

Sigrid's depression, like Antonietta Pirandello's, took several forms. Sometimes it made her so angry that she acted out in public with outrageous behavior; at other times she threw things and threatened bodily harm to herself and injury to others; and at still others (mostly when she and Saul were alone in Springs) she was catatonically silent and still. He was terrified about what she might do to herself, particularly after the night he accepted an impromptu invitation to an early dinner at his friend Ellen Adler's apartment. As they exchanged greetings, Adler mentioned casually that she had just seen Sigrid (whom she had not invited) wandering aimlessly outside her building. The two women had known each other since Sigrid had been involved with Joe Rivers, and over the years they had forged what Adler called a "very complicated friends.h.i.+p." Thus she was not overly concerned when she met Sigrid, disoriented and muttering that she never should have had the abortion as she would at least have a teenage child to comfort her in the loneliness of her middle age. Adler mentioned seeing her to Saul offhandedly because she knew that Sigrid's "suicidal depressed moods" could lighten in an instant. He, however, bolted for the door as soon as she said it, calling over his shoulder as he ran to the elevator, "This is the tragedy-she can't fit in anywhere." He did not return for dinner that evening.

ALTHOUGH SAUL BEGGED SIGRID NOT TO go to Mali, she left as scheduled in January but returned in haste two weeks later, frightened by the tense political situation. While she was away and for the next several months, Steinberg's solitary nightly consumption of scotch and wine interfered with his ability to work, and he realized that he had to stop drinking. He found that with mineral water he could still become "drunk out of habit, but in a happy manner, minus the torpor and nastiness."

There was so much going on in Steinberg's professional life and so much work he had to deal with that he needed to keep his wits about him. He had just finished making complicated arrangements to close up the house while he went to Los Angeles. Going to California was one way to get away from having to deal with the phone calls and letters that interrupted his concentration every day, as everyone seemed to want or need something. Among them were his dear friends Jean Helion, who, old and ill, begged Steinberg to help promote his retrospective exhibition, and Ray Eames, who asked him to make a mural for the building she and Charles were designing for the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. He offered to attend Helion's opening but declined to help publicize it, and he also declined the Eameses' invitation. No matter how highly he regarded his friends, he still declined to work on commission unless the spirit moved him, and in these instances it did not.

He planned to stay in Los Angeles for the month of February, making his headquarters the printmaking atelier Gemini G.E.L., where he wanted to learn what he called incisioni, the Italian term for all intaglio prints. While he was there he planned to check into "a kind of uberlingen," the Pritikin clinic in Santa Monica, where he expected diet and exercise to rid him of the paunch that came from too much rich food and good wine. Steinberg was as fastidious about his body as he was about the clothing that covered it, and his fussing over his appearance stopped just short of hypochondria. His checkbook stubs list the names of one doctor after another and his calendars record appointments with specialists ranging from dentists to dermatologists, primary-care physicians to podiatrists. The only specialists whose names never appeared were mental health professionals, for he did not believe in a.n.a.lysis for himself, even though he always paid without question the increasingly expensive bills in Sigrid's ongoing quest for the a.n.a.lytic experience that would heal her.

In Los Angeles he took what he wanted from the Pritikin experience, which meant that he did a few exercises but otherwise did not follow the program. He did, however, throw himself enthusiastically into work at Gemini, where he managed to make "Two Women," the first print of the half dozen or so that he made during the next several years whenever he returned to work there. He enjoyed the processes but preferred to do them alone rather than in collaboration with others, as he told a reporter a decade later: "I do wish I had been more stoic and more craftsmanlike in order to be able to work together with the printers, with the fellows who lift lithographic stones, not to mention the acid people and the other difficult and dramatic professions. And signing and numbering, all the Zen fuss about packaging. These things are beautiful and I'm very sorry I haven't been able to reach that state. The truth is, I probably get intimidated by the contrast between my modest contribution and the giant effort done around me. I feel uneasy; I feel guilty about it, and in no time I escape." The problem, as he explained why he could not enjoy the experience, was that his mind was "working all the time," busy performing "a form of autobiography-very complex, not a two-dimensional or one-idea affair."

ONCE HE RETURNED TO SPRINGS IN APRIL 1981, "various woes" were among the major and minor problems that kept him from doing the work he wanted to do. He ended negotiations for two large exhibitions with museums he identified only as "Middle West, j.a.pan, etc." He found the courage to cancel the show Sidney Janis had scheduled for the fall, and exactly one year later, in April 1982, he left Janis "due to his avarice, which came to him as part of advanced age, minus the wisdom." Steinberg had an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, and making changes or cancellations was not easy for him. In the process he offended "some respectable people" in the museum world, but he nevertheless believed that he had spared them from the even "worse things that would have happened further down the road."

Just as he thought things had calmed down and he could get back to work on his own, a series of "small disasters" struck. Sigrid fell off a horse and cracked several ribs, and shortly afterward he fell off his bicycle and injured a knee. The Nivola house was struck by lightning during a summer storm and "everything-telephone, tv, electricity-was destroyed." The house itself was not damaged, but the immense fir tree outside Claire's bedroom window was decimated, with wood chips flung far and wide from where it had stood. Across the road at Steinberg's house, only the television and the septic system were hit. "Saved by a miracle," he rejoiced, as all the damage was covered by insurance. He planned to make an ex-voto in grat.i.tude.

Suddenly he was able to work again, and getting down to it lightened his mood. He made one still life after another of ordinary household objects; he delighted in making woodcuts and a host of small wooden objects, which included a bed, an easel, chairs, tables, and vases with flowers. He also made more of the large tables and was engrossed in a series of drawings that he called variations on the j.a.panese printmaker Hiros.h.i.+ge's bridge in a rainstorm. They, like so much else that was connected to the quest for the "essentials" of his past, appeared in one or more of the portfolios he contributed to The New Yorker between 1978 and 1985. He even made architectural drawings in the manner he had been taught in his Politecnico courses, using as models some of the post offices and federal buildings in his postcard collection. He spent the rest of the summer making what he called "sample cases and boxes for necessaries, compa.s.ses, jewelry, etc.," then wondered if he was doing it because he wanted to re-create his father's professional experiences in making cardboard boxes. He stopped trying to a.n.a.lyze why the process of creating all these objects made him so extremely happy; he just kept making as many as he wanted, even though his shop a.s.sistants told him timidly that they worried he might be flooding his own market. He also spent whole days making drawings based on the extemporaneous sketches he had been instructed to draw as part of his training at the Politecnico, where an instructor would point abruptly at something and tell the students to draw it quickly. "Who would have thought it?" he asked himself as he admitted that trying to relive his architectural training had become yet another "obsession."

The autobiographical imperative was strong in the summer of 1981. When he was not trying to re-create his past through memories of the Politecnico years, he was teaching himself to speak fluent German. He studied texts on grammar and built his vocabulary by reading the dictionary, but his real motive for wanting to speak fluent German was to be able to recall his Yiddish without having to resort to hiring a teacher. The need to re-create the "intimate language" of his parents became another "essential," not so much for the words "but more than anything else, sounds, cries." When he said the Yiddish words, the memories of family life returned, bringing "pleasure and surprise." Once again he used the phrase "archeological discoveries" to explain the reward that plumbing the depths of his early life gave him.

While he was deep into relearning Yiddish, Lica's daughter, Dana, came to visit. Having her there, a young woman who reminded him so much of her mother, took him back to Romania and the days of "regression, childish rages, commotion, feelings I had forgotten, healed forever. Instead, no, nothing ever vanishes. I contain all the defects of the tribe." It appeared that no matter how much pleasure he felt when he began the various explorations into his past, the conclusions he reached would not be entirely positive. He invariably found that the "defects" were in him and not in the exercise or activity, that there was something in his character or personality that made him unable to be genuinely happy and left him melancholy, if not actually depressed.

STEINBERG GOT SMALL COMFORT FROM KNOWING that some of the most interesting people in the worlds of arts and letters and international society found his company so highly desirable that he was regaled with invitations for every day and night of his life. He chose instead to concentrate on the negative, brooding that these people were mere acquaintances and that he had no real friends with whom he could converse comfortably about the things that mattered to him. Since Harold Rosenberg's death, he watched his world become increasingly constricted as illness and death took one friend after another. Aime Maeght died of cancer in September 1981; Betty Parsons had a debilitating stroke in November and died in the summer of 1982; his longtime and long-suffering lawyer, Alexander Lindey, died that same year. Steinberg's collection of obituaries that he or Hedda cut out of newspapers and magazines grew steadily, and most were of people he had known and usually known well. There were also too many sad tales about the infirmities and indignities of old age from friends such Jean Helion, who confessed with some embarra.s.sment that he could no longer paint because he was going blind and who timidly asked Steinberg to help him find a buyer for the beloved country estate he could no longer afford. Among the few old friends who remained active and healthy, some unpleasant changes were happening as well. Leo Steinberg sent a caustic, backhanded invitation for Saul to come to dinner with him and his then companion, Phoebe Lloyd, saying that it would have to be just the three of them as Saul had behaved too badly the last time they had been together in a larger group, when he had let everyone know he was miffed because they were all having such a good time conversing that they did not allow him to be the center of attention.

Even Hedda addressed his dismaying personal behavior by couching her observations obliquely through comments about his art. After one of their daily telephone conversations, during which he was more self-centered, bitter, and depressed than usual, she sent one of her undated, unsigned missives telling him that every time she talked to him it upset her so much that she had to pull out some of his past drawings and study them intently before she could get over her distress at what he had become. She asked him why he was wasting his time and energy on so many pointless diversions and what led him to have such "total disregard for [his] gift." She wondered if it was because he operated within the public art world, where there was only "abeyant hostility," which left him unable to separate how he acted there from how he behaved in his personal relations.h.i.+ps. It seemed to her that instead of avoiding these unnerving encounters, he sought them out. This was still no reason for him to behave as he did toward her and others-"to reprimand & put down, to sting, to 'give low marks,' " all the while insisting that he needed so much "to be loved." Most puzzling of all was how completely he lacked any sense of humor or proportion: "You, of all people!" Clearly, when even Hedda, who loved him unconditionally, could not tolerate his negative behavior, it was time to make significant changes.

HE MADE CHANGES BY REACHING OUT, mainly to writers with whom he forged some of the most meaningful friends.h.i.+ps of the last decades of his life. One of the closest, probably because he saw him more than the others, was William Gaddis, whom he met through Muriel Oxenberg Murphy. When Steinberg moved to 75th Street, Murphy welcomed him with a "block-busting warming party" and made him a regular dinner guest at her New York salons and her house in Wainscott. Gaddis soon became one of Steinberg's closest friends, although he was touchy and thus the friends.h.i.+p began cautiously. Gaddis was in a particularly morose period, dejected because his books were not widely read or reviewed and quietly resentful that he owed his comfortable lifestyle to Murphy's largesse. Steinberg was pleased to befriend someone whose personality seemed similar to his own, for Gaddis could be dour and was often laconic. In Steinberg's semidepressed state of mind, he found it comfortable to be with another man who did not speak until or unless he had something intelligent and interesting to say. He was, however, wary of what he a.s.sumed was Gaddis's ferocious intelligence, because he had a great deal of difficulty whenever he tried to read one of the novels, none of which he had yet succeeded in finis.h.i.+ng. When Gaddis sent him work in progress to ask for comments or critiques, Steinberg fell into the mental equivalent of a cold sweat and usually tried to find something inoffensive and innocuous to say that did not betray the galloping insecurities he felt every time. It was when they began to talk about politics and philosophy that the friends.h.i.+p flourished, and it flourished quickly when they discovered similar tastes in literature as well.

Each man was aware of the discrepancies in their professional circ.u.mstances, and it sometimes caused an unspoken tension between them: the accessibility of Steinberg's art, the positive public reception it received, and the huge income it generated were almost something to be embarra.s.sed about whenever he compared it to the way the inaccessibility of Gaddis's dazzling fiction brought him few readers and generated little income. But Steinberg was a generous friend, and one of the ways he dealt with the unease Gaddis instilled in him was to do everything he could to further his friend's career. He was largely responsible for the novelist's members.h.i.+p in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, acting as Gaddis's sponsor and soliciting seconding letters from Saul Bellow and pet.i.tioning other members to support his candidacy. Steinberg was one of the background figures who recommended candidates for the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grants, and he worked tirelessly to ensure that Gaddis got one. He never revealed his role in securing the grant but allowed Gaddis to take full credit for the generous anointment proclaiming him a genius worthy of half a million dollars.

Steinberg and Saul Bellow had been good but casual friends for several decades until Bellow married his fourth wife, the Romanian scholar Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea, and wanted to introduce his "Romanian friend" to his "Romanian wife." Bellow told Steinberg that he was planning to visit her family in Bucharest, and Steinberg jumped eagerly to help him plan the itinerary, which included detailed instructions for the inspection of his boyhood home and haunts. Bellow's Romanian trip eventually resulted in his novel The Dean's December, which Steinberg read in ma.n.u.script. By 1982, Bellow was routinely sending ma.n.u.script copies of other writings and asking for Steinberg's comments and corrections. Whether it was a philosophical/political essay or a work of fiction, Steinberg responded, engaging far more freely in a critical dialogue than he ever did with Gaddis. Each time Steinberg went to Chicago, he made sure that his activities would leave time for a long dinner with good conversation. Steinberg thought Bellow was one of the rare people who took friends.h.i.+p seriously, "even if his style is naturally witty and tongue-in-cheek." They had a rich correspondence and talked often on the phone, but as Bellow was a political conservative while Steinberg was moving slowly from the far left toward the center, they never discussed politics per se; it was as if they realized their friends.h.i.+p would not withstand it.

Gaddis and Bellow were Steinberg's contemporaries, and the thought that he and they were old and growing older did not escape him. He deliberately sought to make friends younger than himself by starting with some of the writers he admired at The New Yorker. For several years he enjoyed the company of the fiction editor and satirist Veronica Geng, who had the reputation of being opinionated but whom he liked because she conjured up word games and images for his amus.e.m.e.nt. He liked to go to the movies with Geng, because her vision of what she saw on the screen could be offbeat but was always good for long conversations that could go on for hours. However, Steinberg could be dismissive, even cruel, when it came to tolerating the differing opinions of others. He was astounded when Geng voiced a positive opinion about an innocuous movie that he felt had no redeeming value, and he ended the friends.h.i.+p without a backward glance. And yet when she was dying of a brain tumor and Philip Roth was soliciting $5,000 from each of a group of friends to help her, Steinberg gave it at once.

"He could do this, just cut people out of his life," said Ian ("Sandy") Frazier, another of his younger New Yorker friends. When Frazier asked Steinberg one day if he still saw Geng, he said as matter-of-factly, as if he were refusing a second cup of coffee, "No, I divorced her"-divorced being the word he often used to describe the way he severed a friends.h.i.+p.

Steinberg contacted Sandy Frazier shortly after The New Yorker published his comic essay "Dating Your Mom." He told Frazier he was a "fan" who thought the younger man "could do no wrong" with anything he wrote. The praise meant so much to Frazier that he showed Steinberg's letter ("like a diploma!") to all his friends. It would have meant even more if he had known at the time how compet.i.tive Steinberg was with younger men and how unusual it was for him to reach out to one, particularly one who was tall, good-looking, and talented. He had actively avoided befriending such men for most of his life, but whether old age had made him mellow or whether he found it irresistible that Frazier's slightly off-kilter way of perceiving the world so matched his own, he instigated a friends.h.i.+p that flourished.

He did the same with Donald Barthelme around the same time, when he started to go fairly often to the fabled apartment on 11th Street where Barthelme had lived for years, both alone and through several marriages. Steinberg had known Don for at least a decade, but it was not until Barthelme married his second wife, Marion, that he became a frequent dinner guest, perching on the edge of the sofa, holding forth and regaling the other guests with his stories. Art was a common bond between Steinberg and Barthelme, and although they talked often of collaborating on a project, they never did. Marion and Don moved to Don's hometown, Houston, in 1980, and he died there of throat cancer in 1989. Long before that, Marion recalled, "Saul fell out of both our lives." Although they both enjoyed and valued Steinberg's friends.h.i.+p, there was not enough time to devote to the kind of intense friends.h.i.+p he required.

It was different with Frazier, who was younger and single and who thought being with Steinberg was "totally magical." Frazier thought it almost uncanny how "he could make something happen in the real world to confirm his vision." He told the story of how Steinberg wanted to get rid of a dead pine tree on the property at Springs and said that he remembered enough about demolition from his navy years to set the explosives himself. Indeed, the explosives went off and the tree rose high into the air-only to come down to rest upright in the same spot it had earlier occupied. And after a restaurant meal when the two men wanted to share a dessert, Steinberg asked the waiter for "one dessert and a blank plate." When they were delivered, he cut the dessert so artistically that "it was as if he had made a drawing out of the situation." Frazier was learning Russian, and he told Steinberg that some of the Cyrillic letters looked "really weird." No, Steinberg demurred, they looked like "sneezes." He reached for his pen and drew them, and to Frazier's amazement, "You could see that they did look like sneezes." He and Steinberg discovered so many parallels in their intellectual curiosity, particularly in their perception of the otherness of the external world, that they eventually collaborated on the book Ca.n.a.l Street.

Steinberg took Frazier to meet Hedda, who liked him at once and whose devoted friend he became. He had heard there was another ongoing, if not permanent, relations.h.i.+p in Steinberg's life, but he was not introduced to Sigrid until later. It was the architect Karen van Lengen whom he thought of as "Steinberg's girlfriend," because Steinberg made no secret that they had begun an affair, and he often took her to Frazier's loft or she joined them for dinners. At the time she was working in the offices of I. M. Pei, and in the style of the times she wore her blond hair long, straight, and with bangs, which led Steinberg to make jokes about his "Blonde Chinese." It was evident to Frazier that Steinberg "never took her seriously or gave her the recognition she deserved," and when they became friends, both van Lengen and Frazier agreed not to take offense when Steinberg became "very airy about people," particularly women. In a time of increasing political correctness, whenever anyone objected to his dismissive comments about women, he would say, "Yes, yes, it's not important" and wave away the criticism. Hedda told them it was ingrained in him to treat women as all the men did in Romania, "like garbage." They all regretted that he thought less of women than they would have preferred but agreed that overall "he was still a really good judge of people" and could recognize excellence when it mattered. After van Lengen won an important international compet.i.tion and began receiving both brickbats and accolades fast and furiously, Steinberg celebrated her success with the drawing of a statue in which a man was falling off his pedestal. He interpreted the drawing, she recalled, "as telling me what I already knew, that the building would never get built. But then he said, 'Don't ever forget that you won this.' "

LIKE FRAZIER, VAN LENGEN KNEW OF Sigrid long before she met her: "He kept her in a place where he could have total freedom, but still, he could not separate from her." She mostly observed the relations.h.i.+p from afar but believed that Steinberg's behavior was a combination of the intense physical relations.h.i.+p he had with Sigrid when they were together (which he did not hide from her) and, even more, that it was due to "the loyalty issue-he could never abandon her." She knew that Steinberg had long-term, ongoing s.e.xual relations.h.i.+ps with other women and that he had one-night stands with others as often as he could arrange them. She also knew that he invited other women to join him and Frazier for dinner, but Sigrid was never one of them. Frazier thought it "kind of strange" that, on the rare occasion when he was invited to Springs, there were signs everywhere of Sigrid's presence, even though she was never there.

Sigrid was a shadowy background figure in Steinberg's friends.h.i.+ps with Frazier and van Lengen, both of which deepened over the years and lasted until the end of his life. They seldom saw Sigrid and then it was only in pa.s.sing, and when she made her first attempt at suicide, in 1981, they were totally unaware of it. So too were the few people to whom Sigrid was, in her strangely distant way, close. Evelyn Hofer, Dore Ashton, the Nivola family-no one was aware that she had tried to end her life, let alone of the method that she used. Only once did Steinberg speak of it, when he told Mimi Gross many years later that he was "embarra.s.sed" by what Sigrid had done. By the time he made this casual remark there were vague references by others to "the time before," but by then there had been several other times before, and no one was sure which one was being talked about.

"Poor Sigrid," Aldo said as he tried to comfort his friend Saul, who had taken to phoning rather than confiding his worries to letters. Every time the telephone awakened him at some unG.o.dly hour, Aldo knew that Sigrid had done something upsetting. The only comfort he could offer was to tell Saul that it was too bad that he and Sigrid could not live in friends.h.i.+p, for there did not seem to be any other way they could be together. From time to time the few other persons who were privy to Saul's private life wondered if his obsessive concentration on hobbies or his ongoing need to experiment with new techniques for conveying his art might be strategies to distance himself from his troubled companion. If they were, they were seldom successful.

CHAPTER 40.

THE Pa.s.sION OF HIS LIFE.

Saul truly loved her. He said she was totally sincere in everything she did. She was the pa.s.sion of his life but it was difficult to live with her.

Perhaps Sigrid was not fated to find peace or happiness in this world, Aldo concluded after Saul told him how worried he was about her ill-mannered, erratic behavior and her heavy use of prescription drugs. She could not be accurately described as manic-depressive, for her usual condition was depression and the manic periods almost always stemmed from rage and humiliation when Saul effectively isolated her by cutting her out of his daily life or when she learned that he had taken up with yet another woman. These phases of flamboyant behavior occasionally led "Mrs. Saul Steinberg" (a name she used when she wanted to provoke him) to rack up enormous charges on credit cards whose bills went directly to him. More often, these episodes occurred when they were together in public, where Sigrid took perverse delight in embarra.s.sing him and shocking others.

Ruth and Tino Nivola invited her and Saul for dinner on a weekend when Dore Ashton and her husband, the Russian painter Adja Yunkers, were their houseguests. As they all sat around the Nivolas' big table chatting after the meal, someone referred in pa.s.sing to the n.a.z.is. Despite everyone's repeated wish that she not talk about it, Sigrid insisted on praising the wartime behavior of ordinary Germans like her parents, who were "not all that bad because they may have thrown a few stones on Kristallnacht, but that's all." Ruth gave Saul a hard look that meant he should do something to stop her, but Dore was aghast to see that the look on Saul's face showed he was enjoying it. The outraged Adja left the table and stomped up the stairs to spend the rest of the evening in his bedroom. Both women recalled that Tino was very upset, but what upset everyone most was that Saul didn't say a word.

This was the era when stories (many apocryphal) about Sigrid's erratic behavior, many of them concerning her German origin, proliferated. She allegedly enjoyed telling everyone that V-E Day was the worst day of the war for her family because her father was a member of the n.a.z.i Party and from that day on their "comfortable" circ.u.mstances became "horrible." Most of all, she was accused of taking perverse delight in teasing Saul about how he could "be with a n.a.z.i's daughter when he himself was such a Zionist." There was truth, however, in the story that she would occasionally belittle his contributions to Jewish charities and other organizations, usually in front of a table full of stunned dinner guests who did not understand how he could sit there in composed silence. The general impression was that "he was very sweet to her in public, quite tolerant, but it must have been different in private."

Some of their friends who were able to observe how Saul and Sigrid interacted in private as well as in public agreed that "deep down, he loved how outrageous she could be." Hedda Sterne said it was more than that: he himself was too timid to epater le bourgeois, and he took vicarious delight in how recklessly she could do it. One clue as to why he neither responded to nor engaged in her reckless behavior might lie in an undated page among the voluminous diary writings Sigrid began to keep sometime in the 1970s and in which she sought solace on and off for the rest of her life. She had no qualms about letting Saul read what she wrote, no matter how cutting and wounding the accusations she leveled at him were. However, there were other times when what she wrote was so personally painful that she hid the diaries in her room at the Springs house, where she thought he could not find them. For whatever his reason, he often snooped until he found them and read them. She would write about his snooping expeditions in one of her next entries, and according to her, the arguments they had when he defended himself against her accusations were frightening and ferocious. He told Aldo that she had the same temperament as Papoose, her cat: "Not bad, but fierce." On one page, where it is not clear whether she gave him the diary pages or he read them without her permission, Saul wrote several numbers. He did not explain what they refer to, but the a.s.sumption is that he was trying to itemize the medical expenses he would have to meet, for next to the numbers she wrote: "The question is-who of us is sick. Why not check with Dr. Rosen before you tell me that I am insane."

To others, the overall impression Sigrid presented was one of "terrible loneliness." She had picked up another of Saul's habits, which in her case interfered with forging real friends.h.i.+ps: she could not engage in conversation and wanted to do all the talking, and as she did not have his wit and intelligence, her efforts to hold the floor drove people away instead of bringing them closer. "She had very few friends because she drove people nuts," said Mimi Gross, who was better able than most to put up with her wildly fluctuating behavior.

Sigrid loved Springs and wanted to spend a lot of time there, but her ongoing battles with Saul often resulted in long periods when he "banished" her (to use her expression). Sometimes she was able to persuade him to relent and allow her to use the house when he was not at home, but as he was living there more and more of the time, these occasions were so infrequent that she was provoked into taking the train to East Hampton and staying in a rooming house in town. She confided to her diary about how she had to skulk about and hide as she darted in and out of stores for fear that she would accidentally run into him on the street and he would create an angry scene. At other times they reached a stasis when he would allow her to be in the house while he was there, just not anywhere near him. They ate their meals at separate times; he rode his bike alone during the day and spent his evenings in the studio listening to music and reading, while she sat alone at the large kitchen table until she was tired enough to go to her bedroom on the second floor in the old part of the house. Many of their friends knew they were "two people living together in the same house who don't talk to each other." More than one wondered, "How could they have managed that!?!"

Sigrid loved the house but loved the grounds even more. She was the one who planted and tended large flower and vegetable gardens, and she always did the housework, heavy cleaning, and shopping herself. Even though she enjoyed every one of these activities, she complained bitterly about Saul's lack of consideration for all the work she did, grousing that he did body-building exercises while she did the hard work of spring cleanup and getting the property ready for summer. Sigrid and Dana had become friends, and when Dana came to spend the summer, Sigrid tried to think of "girl friend" things they could do; even so, she was bitter that Saul spent the days sunbathing, riding his bike, exercising, and body-building while she had to cook for Dana and clean up after her. Sigrid was angry when she told the diary, "I'd rather be like Hedda. She may be married to you but she got more freedom than I, and less duties." She noted that Hedda had houses in East Hampton and New York and no responsibilities except for herself and her work, but she did not acknowledge that Hedda was not indebted to Saul but fully independent, thanks to her first husband's generosity and the sales of her paintings.

It had been twenty-five years since Sigrid had left her parents' home and more than twenty since she had become Saul Steinberg's lover. She was now a middle-aged woman of forty-six who had no marriage, no house, no real income of her own, and therefore no independence. The year encompa.s.sing 198182 had been one of her better ones, as she made $6,000 designing book jackets; otherwise, she was totally dependent on him for her support. It made her feel "trapped, living month to month on handouts, as your sidekick." She was outspoken with the few friends she had who were separate from his (mostly the other tenants in her apartment building on Riverside Drive) and told them how she resented the fact that he did so little to help her professionally; one of them later said, "She felt she was worthy of more attention, respect, and jobs. She was angry and disappointed, very serious about her art and feeling diminished that he didn't help her." The problem was that her talents were very modest, and Steinberg, who never took advantage of his friends in high places, was embarra.s.sed to ask for favors. To do so might mean that they would both have to face the possibility that her work would not be good enough, and it would be more devastating to her fragile psyche to experience failures instigated by his intercession than if he stayed completely out of her professional life.

Because he paid the rent on the apartment, she claimed she had nothing to call her own, not even the little cabin just behind the house that he gave her to use as a studio. During one of the periods when she was banished from the house, she sent him a postcard begging to be allowed to use the cabin whenever she wanted. He did not reply. She was enraged by his silence on top of his ostracism and insisted that their relations.h.i.+p had to under go a major change: "I don't want to subjugate myself my will [sic] to your will. This has always been your game unless I holler and scream. I don't want to anymore. You drove me to those hysterics but please no more."

When she wrote this, Sigrid was trying to a.s.sess the relations.h.i.+p objectively, starting with her real feelings about his work. She did not think she was jealous of his talent, because she recognized and admired his genius and was envious that hers was not comparable. She did not resent the time he spent sequestered in his studio creating new work, because that was what geniuses did; rather, the cause of so much of her "anguish" was the obsessive attention he paid to his hobbies. If he