Saul Steinberg

Photo by  Inge Morath

Saul Steinberg was famous for his drawings, but according to Deborah Solomon’s review of the new Deirdre Bair biography, Steinberg often crossed the line (“Drawing the Line, and Crossing It,” NYT, 11/21/12) “As Bair reveals,” Solomon says, “his love life was a string of infidelities, and crabbiness was his default mode.” The review quotes Steinberg’s wife, Hedda Sterne, as saying, “In a way sex was his life. He deprived himself of true union because he was not ever in love.” Bair, according to Solomon, also describes how Steinberg’s indiscretions which included “the teenaged daughters of his dearest friends” were often excused because “his work was manifestly first rate, and talent tends to foster forgiveness.” Steinberg’s mixture of talent and promiscuity places him in a long line of Lotharios that include Victor Hugo and George Simenon in literature, John F. Kennedy and his father Joseph in politics, and Wilt Chamberlain, the basket ball player who claimed to have slept with over 20,000 women. And one wonders about the relationship between talent and sexuality. Did the talent occur because of the sexuality (with the sexuality being a manifestation of a certain ambition) or in spite of it? Or is hyper-sexuality the reward bestowed on certain narcissistic geniuses,whose insights into human behavior don’t include a keen understanding of the effect they may have on others? On the other hand, can we say that love is an overrated emotion and that one of the products of Steinberg’s highly developed sensibility was to know a good time when he saw it? Hedda Sterne, who died in 2011, was interesting in her own right, as the sole female member of the Irascible Eighteen a group of abstract expressionists which included Pollock and Rothko.

Vagina: A New Biography

Photograph of Naomi Wolf by David Shankbone

Katha Pollitt is adding her name to the list of “conscientious objectors” to Naomi Wolf’s Vagina: A New Biography. In a review in The Nation (“No Carnations Please, We’re Goddesses," October 1, 2012), she writes, “The vagina may be built to withstand multiple childbirths, but apparently even a joke at its expense can shut women down: Wolf says she couldn’t write for six months after a male friend celebrated her book deal with a festive dinner featuring vagina-shaped pasta (‘cuntini’) followed by salmon. It was the salmon that really did her in. Well, at least it wasn’t fish tacos. Or clams.” Pollitt also goes after Wolf on the facile equating of “female confidence”(deriving from a well orgasmed vagina) and “creativity.” “I dunno,” Pollitt says,”—the virgins- and-celebates team has some pretty heavy hitters: Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, the Brontes, Forence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony, Virginia Woolf…There’s something to be said for sublimation, as Freud observed.” Pollitt has her fingers, as it were, on the role of hyperbole in dehumanizing sexuality. It’s as if Woolf had picked up the virus hosted by macho male intellectuals that equates the encounters of famous philanderers like Pushkin, Hugo and Updike with their productivity. In her critique of Wolf, Pollitt is inadvertently championing the solitary males counterparts of the woman writers she cites, Proust and Kafka. And then there is the question of the vagina itself. Is Wolf a dualist? By writing a book entitled Vagina: A New Biography, she undermines neuroscience’s hard won mind/body connection.

Crimes of the Heart

What do Terry Stanton, Tiger Woods, Silvio Berlusconi, Eliot Spitzer, and Bill Clinton all have in common? Each of these men has attained a certain degree of celebrity not only for their professional abilities, but also for their extramarital exploits. More importantly, each epitomizes a tendency to make value judgments about human sexuality. Bonobos have recently come into the news because of their polymorphous perversity, bisexuality, and, in the case of males, generalized priapic behavior. Recent stories have revealed a degree of admiration for these love apes—though a piece in The New Yorker qualified the matter by questioning the bonobo as a paradigm of cuddliness, and introduced the specter of aggression into the palette of their behaviors.

   

Victor Hugo, George Simenon, John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and most of the characters in novels by mid-20th-century American authors like Richard Yates, John Updike, and John Cheever—all indulged in adulterous exploits. In fact, far more repressive times have yielded a greater admiration for infidelities. Even as children, we were taught that Benjamin Franklin explored electricity in ways other than simply flying a kite. Colette, George Sand, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, the abstract expressionist artist Joan Mitchell, and Mary McCarthy are only a few of the famous women who led equally colorful sex lives.

Yet for all the openness about sexuality in our current age, and all the attempts to deal with both the problems and pleasures of the libido, few periods in history, with the exception of the Puritan world of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, seem to be as censorious of human impulse as the present day. Yes, crashing cars and hiring prostitutes might be a source of interest and even concern. It’s true that condom companies are the only endorsement Tiger Woods is likely to retain in the coming year. But the shock and surprise that a golfer might gratify the attraction generated by his legendary swing betrays a questionable threshold for human transgression. Adultery isn’t a victimless act, but why has it risen to the top of the food chain in the evolution of society’s response to human sin? Only the French seem to cherish desire as the ultimate form of natural selection.