Woman in Tub, Saul Steinberg, 1949 courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARS/DACS
Woman in Tub, Saul Steinberg, 1949 courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARS/DACS
To celebrate DPG’s new exhibition of illustrations by Saul Steinberg of the New Yorker magazine, Anna Sayburn thinks back over half a lifetime of magazine consumption.
Leave it to TS Eliot to measure out his life in coffee spoons. I once measured mine through the pages of magazines, starting about the age of 6. So why can’t I find one I want to read any more?
Once upon a time, the highlight of the week was going to the newsagent to pick up my weekly copy of Twinkle. For the uninitiated, this sweetly innocent magazine for little girls featured fairies, woodland creatures and – actually, I can’t remember what else. It was a long time ago.
A decade later, Thursday afternoons (’study’ afternoon in my sixth form) meant a cup of coffee, a Kit Kat, and Just 17, the first teen mag I bought regularly. I’d savour all three, scouring the magazine pages for tips on looking fashionable for less than a fiver, what sort of hair gel/eyeliner/earrings would make me look like Madonna, and most importantly, how to talk to boys. Who were human too, apparently.
Things took a different turn at university. I plastered my walls with photographs of inspirational women (Alice Walker, Suzanne Vega, um… Winnie Mandela) from the covers of Spare Rib, the monthly feminist publication on which I decided to write my history dissertation. I read my way through hundreds of copies, alone in Manchester Central Reference Library, starting in the early 70s (I was astonished to see knitting patterns and recipes in the earliest issues), through radical feminism and into the hard-left 1980s, with tales of hardship from the women of the mining villages. I shaved off my hair and wore a boiler suit. For a while. Then I graduated and needed to get a job.
In magazine terms, I’d graduated to Cosmopolitan.
Curtain design Saul Steinberg, courtesy of the Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARC/DACS
Cosmopolitan girls were different, back in the early 90s. They were the living embodiment of having it all. They had the ‘confidence cut’ – a sort of pudding bowl hairdo that went well with power suits and taupe lipstick. They wore enormous hoop earrings, had five-year career plans to make it to the top, knew 18 different ways to bring a man to ecstasy.
As an impoverished reporter on a local newspaper, these creatures were impossibly glamorous, but at the same time something to aim for. I read the articles on career success with as much interest and belief as I’d previously lavished on Twinkle’s fairies. I modelled my working wardrobe on their fashion pages, with varying degrees of success. Stiletto boots work better in the pages of a magazine than while out reporting anti-racist marches on the streets of south London.
After a while, it was time to move on again. I’d begun to tire of the seasonal merry-go-round that magazines are slaves to. Who needs another guide to ’surviving the office Christmas party’ just because it’s December? (Especially when you can sum it up as ‘don’t drink too much’.) I don’t do beach holidays, so ‘get a bikini body in just 6 weeks’ cuts little ice. And I started to feel I’d read most of the articles before (101 things you didn’t know about chocolate? Yes I did, thanks, since this much-repeated article was first run in Just 17 back in 1986).
Three Liberties Saul Steinberg, courtesy ot the Saul Steinberg Foundation/ARC/DACS
But where to? I tried Vogue, seduced by the beauty of the clothes. But I wanted more than a picture book. For a while I enthusiastically cut articles about colour schemes out of Living magazine, or Elle Decor, until we’d finished decorating the flat. Red, Eve and others promised to cater for 30-somethings like me, but never quite hit the spot. What was missing? Humour, for a start. Women’s mags seemed so po-faced. And I never felt I was learning anything new.
Thinking back, what I miss is the feeling of being part of a club, with the magazine acting as some kind of worldly-wise big sister, letting me into the secrets of the grown-up world. I want to be told something I didn’t already know. I no longer want to look like Madonna, 1986 or 2008 version. I read New Scientist, the Financial Times magazine, occassionally The Economist, all packed with stuff I don’t know. But none of them has that feeling of luxury, of settling down with glossy pages of pure pleasure, that my magazines used to have. Maybe it’s time to follow Saul Steinberg’s exhibition with a subscription to the New Yorker.
Saul Steinberg – Illuminations is at Dulwich Picture Gallery from 26 November to 15 February.
