The Romanian postcards that he collected (first through an agent in Queens, New York, then through an art dealer in Amsterdam) display the same obsession with his native country: picturesque views from the interwar years of Romanian towns and villages and spas. As I looked with amusement at a market sequence with halva sellers (“Alvi
tari. Marchands d’alvita, Editura Mag. M. Rosenbaum, Bucuresti”), I was inevitably reminded that when Saul first came to our house, he arrived not with the usual bottle of wine, or the even more usual box of bottles, as he would later, but with an old colored postcard of interwar Buz
u.
Both before and after the war, Saul’s letters from his parents, still in Romania, are full of a great affection and concern, especially after he was forced by new anti-Jewish laws to leave his beloved Italy and go to America. They confirm the same painful connection to that common Romanian past from which he and eventually they were severed and liberated.
One can see why a winter journey to the Soviet Union in 1956 had a powerful meaning for the tourist Saul Steinberg. “That winter in Russia was a trip for my nose,” Saul confessed, “a voyage to the odors of Eastern Europe and my childhood — beautiful ones of winter and also of elementary school, police station, disinfectant, the terrible odor of fear which at that time, with Stalin only recently gone, permeated Moscow and Leningrad and even the countryside. Those ancient smells and emotions were like a visit to my past, a travel in time.”
The adult’s journey was also the child’s journey. Among Saul’s envelopes, letters, Romanian identity papers, documents, and other relics, I found a recent photograph that looked as if it had been extracted from a Bergman film: the elderly Saul Steinberg holding the hand of a child, himself as a boy. A collage, then, a bewildering sequence from the lost and yet never lost Proustian time of childhood.
“By putting oneself in the uncomfortable position of the immigrant, one is again like a child,” explained the New World immigrant. “I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing.” The place of exile was childhood itself, but a miraculous one full of visions and magical effects. Saul Steinberg discovered his homeland (“patria,” as he used to say) in America precisely in this sense of liberty and play and substitution, openness and creativity — and also farce. Stunning mutations, dreams and versatility and spectacle, energy and illusions, oceanic solitude, ingenuity, devastating despair.
The basic infantile mythology of this modern Land of Promise offers us, in his cartoons, an Uncle Sam in the posture of the Sphinx and a Statue of Liberty in a nightgown, but it also offers us the consumerist extravaganza of toy objects in the man-made landscapes, the man-made birds and crocodiles and cats and pencils and movie stars, and finally that inexhaustible “self-made man” himself, master of the great universal trick: METAMORPHOSIS.
To the artist — forever a child, as Brancusi put it — America is offered not just as the fable of inexhaustible contemporary reality but also as a cognitive adventure in which the newly shipwrecked Crusoe, a stranger and an adult infantilized by the shock of dislocation and dispossession, learns what it is to be an American. In this sense, both Harold Rosenberg (“The United States was made to order for Saul Steinberg”) and Arthur Danto (“The travels were undertaken in the spirit of learning how to be an American”) are right.
It is not by chance that the immigrant arrived on this side of the Atlantic with a passport he had faked, nor is it by chance that many images in the artist’s repertoire are of wandering. Saul Steinberg admits: “What I draw is drawing, [and] drawing derives from drawing. My line wants to remind constantly that it’s made of ink.” His work is the coded autobiography of an estranged foreigner, a child now “cosmopolitan” and “cosmic,” hidden in anonymity as in celebrity, who plays with a series of different identities for himself, a parodic combination of masks, surrogates, and othernesses.
We may find significant the frequent appearance in the artist’s work of fingerprints and images made from fingerprints, as well as of identity papers, rubber stamps, diplomas, signatures, pictures of post offices (in Charlotte, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Kansas City, Missouri; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Canal Street). In The Passport (1953), the oval-shaped fingerprint that stands in for the human face is completed with a collar and tie, the exile’s emblematic image.
Nothing “natural” seems to attract his attention, unless it is part of “artificial” nature, man-made in the same sense that the artistdemiurge creates objects by situating them in parodic relation to their model (when there is one), in a nonstop juggling routine. Saul is a juggler with reality who, through art, makes his public aware of ordinary things.
Among the many captivating “trifles” scattered in Saul’s files, I found a dollar bill with which he had once tested the efficiency of the US mail. He had put a strip of paper with his address and a stamp directly onto the banknote, tossed it in a mailbox, and then probably waited with an adventurer’s impatience to see the result. The postal workers put it in an official envelope and sent it on.
Saul Steinberg remembered Romania as a place of peasants in folkloric dress, mustachioed cavalry officers in parade outfits, children in school uniforms with their official numbers on their sleeves, for ease of identification and denunciation, a place where a Dadaist alloy was created out of frustration, hedonism, and grief.
“Land of masquerade,” “land of operetta,” “land of exile” … even perhaps the Dark Land? In a drawing from 1975 that he gave to Eugen Campus, the schoolboy appears in quasi-military cap, collar, and boots, with his registration number LMB (Liceul Matei Basarab) 586 on his arm. He is making his way down Strada Palas to the solemn Institute of Instruction. A rural landscape, with drainpipes, stovepipes, and barrels. The street fauna are humbly domestic: dogs, cats, chickens, “real” geese (not the man-made geese later created across the ocean). People peer awkwardly and suspiciously through windows. The props are meticulous: a briefcase in the boy’s right hand, inkwell and pen holder in his left hand, satchel on his back with a ruler sticking out like a gun.
The clue here may lie in the satchel. According to another schoolmate, the recruit’s first appearance in the schoolyard was not as ordinary as the simple provincial scenery would suggest. In reality, it was a stunning debut. The satchel with which he came armed at the beginning of that school year was also an identity card (of a sort never seen before). On the flap the schoolboy’s exotic name was printed in large black letter: STEINBERG. Of course, it drew dizzily admiring looks from his new schoolmates. But the precocious public assertion of identity was actually an innocent premonitory farce. The mark had been imprinted on the satchel by the workshop that produced it, STEINBERG Bookbinders, which belonged to his father, Maurice Steinberg, in anticipation of the name that would be printed in the memory of his contemporaries and in that of vastly more admirers in the future.
Translated by Patrick Camiller, February 2000
AN EXILE ON SEPTEMBER 11 AND AFTER
That morning I was at Bard College, about one and a half hours from New York City. I was preparing my afternoon seminar, “Exile and Estrangement in Modern Fiction.” I only heard about the brutal attack on America towards noon. Most professors canceled their classes. I asked my students whether we should go ahead as planned with Nabokov’s novel Pnin, call off the class, or discuss the event rather than the book. Their presence showed that they didn’t want to be alone, and I assumed that the theme of exile would allow for a wide-ranging discussion of today’s world — a world in which estranged people, and not only they, are obsessively looking for a lost center, even reacting hysterically to their own tensions, trauma, and mystifications.