G.I. Sketchbook

In Naples you may come home and find a goat in your bed. In China, when you wiggle your ears, people walk backwards in front of you trying to learn the trick. Algiers is a very provincial place, and India's great Taj Mahal is a piece of architectural corn.

That is the way world travel affects the Navy's 31-year-old, Rumanian-born Lieut. Saul Steinberg, who has spent the past two years being shifted about the world in uniform, scribbling cartoons in his spare time. Last week Cartoonist Steinberg published his first book of drawings, All in Line (Duett, Sloan & Pearce; $2.50).

The book is a collection of 210 acidulous, weavy, relaxed drawings, some of which look as though they had been made by dropping black thread on a white washed floor. Freest bird in the cartooning aviary, Saul Steinberg once experimented with the value of line by bending wire coat hangers into pictorial forms: "Out of line you make whatever you wish." Among Steinberg's more rewarding finds:

P: A Nazi general presenting a half-frozen infantryman with a choice between the Iron Cross and a suit of woolen underwear.

P: A chinless character, seated in a rococo chair, casually puffing squares and triangles from a cigaret.

P: Drawing of a man drawing a drawing of a man making a drawing of a man. . . .

P: Daddy, bound hand & foot across the tracks of Susie's electric railroad set, as a three-car train approaches.

P: A tender embrace, in the midst of which both the gentleman and lady are keeping one hand free to hold on to their spectacles.

P: A ravaged-faced man bent on suicide, determinedly sipping his poison through a soda straw.

P: Dozens of sharply observed, deftly reported spot scenes of U.S. military life superimposed on the life of China, India, Italy, North Africa (see cut).

Slight, sandy-haired Lieut. Steinberg, now in Washington awaiting a new Navy assignment, cannot disclose what his Navy job has been--except that in India and Africa "I was doing the usual waiting for transportation, having stomach trouble and sitting under a fan."

A first-string performer for The New Yorker since he began to mail in drawings in 1941, he has repeated some of his New Yorker work in All in Line. His travel impressions (half the book) are vaguely intended to be geographical notes on the world as a G.I. sees it. Having studied G.I. travel reactions with his specially slanted artist's eye as closely as he observed foreign landscapes, people and furnishings, Steinberg observes: "The boys bring America with them. They behave right. They get drunk."

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