`The Artist and the Derelict'

The great cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg was a long-time friend of the Italian writer, architect, filmmaker and buongustaio Aldo Buzzi. About him, see much more at James Marcus’ House of Mirth, though I can recommend three of his books available in English: Journey to the Land of the Flies, A Weakness for Almost Everything and The Perfect Egg and Other Secrets. In 2002, Buzzi published Reflections and Shadows, an edited transcription of conversations he and Steinberg had in the 1970s. The book is disappointingly slender and includes only Steinberg’s end of what must have been exceedingly interesting talks between these two men of the world. Even so, it represents the sort of wide-ranging, discursive grab-bag volume I enjoy.

Steinberg’s imagination is intensely visual. He sees everything in pictures and seldom mentions music or the other sounds of the world. It’s fascinating to be in the company of a thoughtful person who perceives reality so differently from one’s self. Here he is on traveling across the United States by bus:

“Traveling by bus, if you manage to sit in the front row, you enjoy the ideal view, the rarest and most noble one, the view of the man on horseback. Now, unfortunately, they’ve started tinting the windows against the sun and you see a sad crepuscular landscape, even if there’s bright sunlight. Or else they color the windshield blue, shading it toward the bottom, and thus the panorama is transformed into a Japanese print.”

Steinberg, a native of Romania and former resident of Italy, views America with bemused European eyes:

“Here there is every sort of felicità, including the horrendous happiness of Florida, concentration camps for old people, the happiness of the rich, who want only to buy things, and the happiness of the bums, the human wrecks.”

This prompts a digression on skid row and its residents, which leads to an interesting (and very visual) observation on one of our presidents:

“On the Bowery you see many noble faces, marked by life’s sufferings, but without the degradation of vulgarity and cunning. There are artists there, painters (I’m not talking about musicians or writers, who don’t belong to the same family), defenseless, childish creatures who use their intelligence and courage not for survival, who are primarily concerned with their integrity; who don’t exploit anyone, or live on this earth like those born with a specific purpose and think of life as something from which to gain the greatest possible advantage. The face of Ulysses S. Grant, president of the United States, which appears on the fifty-dollar bill, to me represents, in a moving way, the artist and the derelict.”

Steinberg is oddly and unexpectedly right about Grant, who was from Ohio, as I am, and who lived briefly in Galena, Ill., where my family and I stayed for several days while visiting friends in the summer of 1966. Nine Civil War generals, counting Grant, lived in Galena, as did Herman Melville. Grant’s popular reputation as a drunken, hapless schlemiel is belied by his military prowess and his memoirs, one of the great American autobiographies, written while the ex-president was dying of throat cancer. Mark Twain, of course, had it published shortly after Grant’s death in 1885, and called it “the best purely narrative literature in the language.” Sherwood Anderson’s father, who served under Grant during the Civil War, sold the memoirs by subscription in Ohio, door to door. Henry James, Matthew Arnold and Henry Adams got it wrong, but surprisingly Gertrude Stein, who said she couldn’t think about Grant without weeping, got it write and wrote a long, eccentric portrait of him in Four in America (the other three are Wilbur Wright, Henry James and George Washington). Compare Stein’s “Grant” to Steinberg’s Grant:

“He is heavier and thinner, he is taller and yellower, he is older and redder he is a leader. Nobody comes when he calls.

“He wears a beard, perhaps he is drunk every day perhaps, perhaps he needs where he goes if not, perhaps, who thinks of wills and willing or moon and sun and is he willing. He is not willing to stop and he is not willing except when he is working and he never shakes a hand not when he is willing. He is willing to come alone, or not.

That is what he is not willing.”