Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys

Nabokov, Joyce, and Others

Jessica R. Feldman

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813945118
• eBook ISBN: 9780813945125
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Techniques
• Index: Literature

Saul Steinberg's inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg's work have often been noted in passing, critics and art historians have yet to fathom the specific ways in which Steinberg meant drawing not merely to resemble writing but to be itself a type of literary writing. Jessica R. Feldman's Saul Steinberg's Literary Journeys, the first book-length critical study of Steinberg's art and its relation to literature, explores his complex literary roots, particularly his affinities with modernist aesthetics and iconography. The Steinberg who emerges is an artist of far greater depth than has been previously recognized.

Feldman begins her study with a consideration of Steinberg as a reader and writer, including a survey of his personal library. She explores the practice of modernist parody as the strongest affinity between Steinberg and the two authors he repeatedly claimed as his "teachers"—Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce. Studying Steinberg's art in tandem with readings of selected works by Nabokov and Joyce, Feldman explores fascinating bonds between Steinberg and these writers, from their tastes for parody and popular culture to their status as mythmakers, émigrés, and perpetual wanderers. Further, Feldman relates Steinberg's uniquely literary art to a host of other authors, including Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, and Defoe.

Generously illustrated with the artist's work and drawing on invaluable archival material from the Saul Steinberg Foundation, this innovative fusion of literary history and art history allows us to see anew Steinberg's art.

Part I

Introduction

1

Thought Images

Steinberg Praises Joyce and Nabokov

Saul Steinberg’s mingling of the visual and the verbal, based on his fascination with—and reworking of—the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, indicates that modernism developed in part through a bold exploration of inter-art energies. Steinberg deserves an honored place both in the vanguard of mid-twentieth-century artists and in our understanding of modernism. In order to give him his due, it’s necessary to explore further the notion that he regarded his drawing as a form of writing—a statement that, as we’ll see, both he and his astute admirers often make.1 It is time to explore with specificity what Steinberg’s understanding of himself as a writer meant to his actual making of art, image by image.

Luckily, Steinberg gave us an important clue. In 1977 Grace Glueck, for ARTnews, asked some one hundred artists, “heavily weighted on the American side,” to answer this question: “What specific work(s) of art—or artist(s)—of the past 75 years have you admired or been influenced by—and why?” Saul Steinberg carefully wrote out his reply: “The artist is an educator of artists of the future—of artists who are able to understand and in the process of understanding perform unexpected—the best—evolutions. In this sense James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov are our great teachers.” He goes on to name and praise three visual artists: Pablo Picasso, Walker Evans, and Andy Warhol. This was an unusual response to the survey: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, and Constantin Brâncuși dominated, in that order, and only a few of the artists polled mentioned writers.2

By naming Joyce and Nabokov, Steinberg announces his literary culture. Visual artists are not necessarily fervent readers, much less readers of difficult texts. He also epitomizes with these two names a lifetime of intense reading—had the “past 75 years” limit not been placed on him, he would likely have listed Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Gustave Flaubert, and Charles Baudelaire among his personal greats.

Not only did Steinberg have a literary bent, but he also thought of himself as a writer. “Drawing is like writing,” he explained. “Or, you do it instead of writing. Drawing is actually the necessity to explain something. In a writer’s drawing, a line is a line. Like a written word is seen letter by letter and then it is translated. I draw to explain things to myself.”3 Let us then consider the works of his two “great teachers,” Nabokov and Joyce, in relation to Steinberg’s own oeuvre.

We don’t yet have a comprehensive examination of Steinberg’s place in the history of art, nor will this study provide one.4 Books and writers who mattered most to him will predominate here. Steinberg, Nabokov, and Joyce, taken together, will reveal a modernist triad in which literary art and visual art cast light on each other and even challenge those categories themselves. From Simonides’s “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is eloquent painting” to Horace’s “As is painting so is poetry,” through G. E. Lessing’s Laokoön and Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, to many twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical and theoretical works, analyses of the relation of visual art to literary art abound.5 Saul Steinberg joins this analytic tradition, himself writing and speaking about the relation of writing and drawing. But it is through his visual oeuvre—his drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, and assemblages—that he most eloquently makes the case for the inseparability of his own visual and verbal artistry.

From the multitude of possible approaches to Steinberg’s work I have chosen to begin with two simple questions. First, when we think about the works of Nabokov and Joyce, what do we begin to see and understand in Steinberg’s works? And second, when we think about Steinberg’s works, what do we begin to see and understand in the works of Nabokov and Joyce? What I promote, then, is an interpretive circle. If we are ever fully to tease out Steinberg’s debts and gifts to literature—and this study is just a beginning—this circle is one that we must travel. Steinberg himself liked to collapse the distinction between visual and verbal (not to mention musical) art: “my idea of the artist, poet, painter, composer, etc., is the novelist.”6

The question of the ground of comparison between visual and verbal art arises, and I believe that the answer lies less in abstract formulation than in pragmatically attending to actual practices of the artist’s drawing and writing as well as to the audience’s viewing and reading. As Wendy Steiner writes, “There can be no final consensus about whether and how the two arts resemble each other, but only a growth in our awareness of the process of comparing them, of metaphoric generation and regeneration.”7 We can begin with Steinberg’s own statement of their necessary relation: “In art everything has a literary origin—except Abstract Expressionism, which pretended to grow out of the activity of the body, not out of thought. However, even action painting is the intelligence of the body. Anything that implies some sort of intelligence, of whatever kind, belongs at least partly to the realm of literature.”8

This study of Steinberg’s explorations in that realm does not provide a complete compendium of literary sources for Steinberg’s works, although several, beyond Joyce and Nabokov, will be mentioned. Instead, it teases out the affinities among the works and lives of Nabokov, Joyce, and Steinberg. While the very word “affinities” may seem to lack authority, the search for them requires strong reading and viewing. By “strong,” I mean interpretation made possible only through our imaginative and informed collaboration with the works of art before us. We bring them to life. Such interpretations must always be based on the “facts” before us: actual texts, whether visual or literary. Steinberg himself hoped for such readings of his work; he counted on our moving beyond perception of his works to understanding. “The bourgeoisie is happy with perceptions,” he notes. “They see a Vasarely, their eyeballs twitch and they’re happy. I am concerned with the memory, the intellect, and I do not wish to stop at perception. Perception is to art what one brick is to architecture.”9 As we’ll see, Nabokov and Joyce too, in their letters, conversations, and essays, and especially in their works of art, themselves promote that kind of reader/viewer participation.

Such strong reading requires multiple faculties. John Ashbery, in his essay “Saul Steinberg: Callibiography,” has argued that such a requirement is in any case always fulfilled, because “our eyes, minds and feelings do not exist in isolated compartments but are part of each other, constantly crosscutting, consulting and reinforcing each other.”10 Here we might usefully swivel for the first time to Nabokov, who, in a passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, describes simultaneously a writer, the masterpiece of this writer, and the interpretation of this work by its reader (and supposed narrator of the novel), declaring, “One thought-image, then another, then another, breaks upon the shore of consciousness” (RLSK, 175). It’s no accident that such a statement reflexively tells us how to read the very novel we hold in our hands: by choosing to accept its combined sensory images and ideas, its “thought-images,” as naturally as we accept the gifts of the tides, by readying ourselves to both perceive and conceive, view and read and think. Steinberg’s works require nothing less.

Finding the “thought-images” or verbal/visual presence in Steinberg’s work requires first of all a recognition that he loved books and read widely. In a 1986 letter to his close friend Aldo Buzzi, Steinberg writes, “These days I’m creating a library of books I’ve read. Books made out of wood, Russian books in Romanian, French books in Italian, etc., a kind of autobiography . . . I should end up making at least fifty or so books” (LAB, September 25, 1986). This project culminated in Library (fig. 1), an assemblage of fifty-six books, a “carpenter’s sketch of a desk” (SS: I, 216), and a few flattish versions of domestic items—bottles, houseplant, miniature bus—along with an architectural model.

Fig. 1. Library, 1986–87. Pencil and mixed media on wood assemblage, 68½ × 31 × 23 in. (Collection of Carol and Douglas Cohen)

While the books Steinberg fashions for this piece seem a haphazard collection, a “canon of . . . Steinberg’s idiosyncrasy,” it is also true that the assemblage moves toward both autobiographical and “mysterious” ends (SS: I, 216). Like all gifted writers, Steinberg is also a reader, and Library is an account of the intertwining of his life with books. One untitled mock volume, simply labeled “Nabokov” on its spine and presenting a portrait of a woman on its cover, opens onto a subject of this study: the “unexpected evolutions”11 that Steinberg made after “studying” Nabokov. The Gogol and Flaubert volumes also made themselves felt throughout his career.

As readers of Library as a whole, however, we can find further evidence of affinities among our triad. With his description of Library for Buzzi—again, “Russian books in Romanian, French books in Italian, etc.”—Steinberg emphasizes the importance of translation to a man who is both an immigrant and a cultured, multilingual cosmopolitan, as were Nabokov and Joyce.

Thirteen of the books in Library appear in translation, such as Gogol’s Nose, Kipling’s Il Libro della Jungla, Erskine Caldwell’s Le Petit Arpent Du Bon Dieu (God’s Little Acre), and “Dostoievschi’s” Crima si Pedeapsa. Several more might well be translations: any of the books that have an author’s name without a title, such as “Suetonius” or “Céline.” Steinberg delighted in reading works translated into several languages, not just English: “I read Anatole France in Italian, Hemingway in French (funnily enough), I Promessi Sposi in English, and in 1927 I saw in Bucharest Les Précieuses Ridicules performed in Yiddish,” he reported.12

Multiple languages and translation mattered enormously to those other émigrés Joyce and Nabokov. Nabokov not only oversaw the translations of some of his own works but also translated the work of other writers, his beloved Pushkin first and foremost. His fictional characters sometimes engage in translation. Translating, and also finding better and worse translations by others (he collected “howlers”), led Nabokov to theorize translation as well, in both his essays and fiction. Joyce translated from Latin, French, Italian, and (less successfully) German. He taught himself some Norwegian in order to read Ibsen, spoke good enough Danish, lived for many years in polyglot Trieste and Switzerland, and wrote the “poly- and meta-language” of Finnegans Wake.13 In both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus enjoys the act of translation. Leopold Bloom muses on the subject.

Furthermore, multiple kinds of translation order the worlds of Joyce, Nabokov, and Steinberg: not just translations between languages. Translation is a subtype of metamorphosis, and, as I’ll show, Steinberg, Nabokov, and Joyce widen the notion of translation to include movements between the imaginary and the real, between verbal and visual art, and even between what appears on a canvas or a page and viewers’ and readers’ responses to those markings. Steinberg tells Jean vanden Heuvel, “The purpose of the drawing is to make people feel that there is something else beyond the perception. That is essentially what I am playing with—the voyage between perception and understanding.”14 For these modernists, translation, always involving movement, can shrink to the size of a word and expand to the size of a book, an artistic medium, or even human understanding in the face of the work of art.

If Library is, as Steinberg announces, “a kind of autobiography,” then we learn that he loved fiction (the largest category of books, at twenty-one volumes). Much could be made of the crafted models of bottles, a bus, a planter, and an Art Deco building that sit atop the book shelves, those shelves themselves sitting on a table. Suffice it for the moment to say that these items announce that books for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I. Introduction
• Part II. Steinberg: Writing, Drawing, Reading
• Part III. The Artist Abroad: Steinberg and Nabokov
• Part IV. Assembling Steinberg and Joyce
• Afterword: “Thought through My Eyes”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index