Volume 46, Number 11 · June 24, 1999
On Saul Steinberg (1914–1999)
By John Updike
The New York Times obituary quoted a fellow cartoonist as saying, 'Steinberg was not a warm man. He was chilly and Olympian with a somewhat hauteur tone [sic],' but in my slight acquaintance with him he consistently appeared gracious and kind. Our acquaintance was slight but long: in 1945 I wrote him from my small town in Pennsylvania asking that he send me, for no reason except that I wanted it, the original of a drawing I had seen in The New Yorker, of one man tipping his hat and another tipping back his hat with his head still in it. At this time I was an avariciously hopeful would-be cartoonist of twelve or thirteen and Steinberg a thirty-one-year-old Romanian Jew whose long American sojourn had begun but four years before. Perhaps he thought that his new citizenship entailed responding to importunities from unknown American adolescents. He sent me not the original but a duplicate he had considerately made, with his unhesitant pen, and inscribed it, in impeccable New World fashion, 'To John Updike with best wishes.' Nearly fifty years later, when I turned sixty, he sent me a pencil drawing of a rabbit on a fragmentary table drawing a Steinbergian scroll, with the inscription 'John Up 60! Love from Saul ST.'
Feature, 1686 words
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