One of William Steig's drawings in ''Our Miserable Life'' captures something about the artist who drew it. A man in a coat and hat is sitting up in a baby stroller, stunned. The caption reads, ''The Napper Wakes.'' Mr. Steig, with his intense blue eyes and head of startled hair, is a curious, ingenuous and impertinent child at the age of 90. He had his birthday this month.

William Steig is not quite a household name, but his 67-year-old ink trail is instantly recognizable. He has drawn countless voluptuous matrons and lustful men, crusty commuters and big-breasted shoppers for The New Yorker. And for children he has drawn brave pigs, dogs and donkeys who have (more often than not) lost their way home. His squiggly line seems to knot itself spontaneously into the faces of angst or glee. And to a generation of cartoonists, he proved that comic art does not always come with a gag.

In person, Mr. Steig is a tangle of willful contradictions. He is open but opaque, intense but easily distracted. He happily talks on topics most people find taboo while bucking perfectly innocuous questions. And he practices ''symbolic drawing,'' an exploration, in graphic form, of the unconscious, but refuses to decode any symbols in his work.

He rails against his enemies and lavishes undying loyalty on a chosen few, most of whom are dead: Arthur, his favorite brother; Picasso, his favorite artist; William Blake, his favorite ''symbolicker''; Wilhelm Reich, his favorite thinker, and Jeanne Steig, 67, his favorite (and fourth) wife, who is an artist and writes books with him.

Mr. Steig also has a favorite contraption. In his studio is a box the size of a squat telephone booth made of wood, cardboard and steel wire, created by Reich, the radical psychologist who wrote ''The Function of the Orgasm.'' ''That's an orgone energy accumulator,'' Mr. Steig said solemnly in a recent interview. It is supposed to concentrate the world's free-floating orgone, or universal libidinal energy, in the sitter. ''Go sit in it,'' he said.

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With his interrogator safely seated on a bench in the orgone box, lighted by a reading lamp, Mr. Steig looked in through a slit. ''What does it feel like?'' he asked, genuinely curious. His wife, who seemed less enamored of the box, laughed, ''You'll be stuck in there until you beat your way out.'' They seemed like two naughty children who had just shoved the witch in the oven.

Indeed, being around the Steigs can feel like inhabiting a fairy tale, with Mr. Steig as the child hero stubbornly refusing all interpretations of his work and life.

He was born in 1907, grew up in the Bronx and had what he once called a ''defective education.'' He graduated from high school at 15, went to City College for two years, then to the National Academy of Design. His father was a house painter and his mother was a seamstress.

Both were socialists. ''My parents didn't want their sons to become laborers, because we'd be exploited by businessmen, and they didn't want us to become businessmen, because then we'd exploit the laborers,'' Mr. Steig once wrote in Horn Book Magazine. So they all became artists. His brother Irwin was a journalist and painter, his brother Henry played the saxophone and painted and his brother Arthur, according to Mr. Steig, read The Nation in the cradle, was telepathic and ''drew as well as Picasso or Matisse.''

The hallway of the Steigs' Boston apartment is lined with the artwork of generations. Ms. Steig's studio is full of her small metal sculptures and works of found junk. And in the midst of all this, Mr. Steig has allowed only a few of his ownworks to be hung, including two garish wall hangings he stitched while entranced by the Watergate hearings. Ms. Steig loves them. He hates them. ''I don't think I was meant to be an artist,'' he said.

As a child, Mr. Steig had plans to become a bum, but the Depression changed all that. ''I supported my father, mother, my brother Arthur and myself, and in good style,'' he said. He made $4,500 a year by drawing for The New Yorker and doing occasional ads (which he loathed). This is how he once described his coming of age: ''I flew from the nest with my parents on my back.''

In the early 1930's, Mr. Steig was best known for his ''small fry'' drawings, pictures of street-tough kids. Around 1936, though, he turned away from these gag cartoons and began making ''symbolic drawings,'' pen-and-ink works expressing states of mind. Like the poems of E. E. Cummings, they were unconscious excursions rendered on paper. The New Yorker, which loved his gag cartoons, was not interested.

''They were too personal and not funny enough,'' said Lee Lorenz, who is now working on Mr. Steig's biography. So they were published in a series of books, ''All Embarrassed,'' ''About People'' and ''The Lonely Ones.'' And when these symbolic drawings, these nongag cartoons, came out, said Mr. Lorenz, who was for many years the cartoon editor for The New Yorker, ''the next generation of artists felt a freedom they never had before.''

In the 1940's, Mr. Steig found a psychological mentor to match his mystical turn of mind. This is how he remembered it: ''My marriage was in trouble. I was a wreck. Someone said, 'Why don't you try Reich?' I said: 'He sounds like a dumbbell. He wrote a book called ''The Function of the Orgasm' as if you don't know what that is.'' Nonetheless, he said, ''I stayed up all night reading it and called him the next day.'' His life was forever changed. ''If you met Reich you would be impressed with him,'' he said. ''He looked alive, like an animal. After meeting him, nobody else is what he should be. I saw a picture of a baby gorilla who looked like him.''

Ultimately, Reich was jailed for using the mails to send out his orgone boxes, which were deemed fraudulent by the Food and Drug Administration, and he ended up dying in prison in the 1950's. ''Reich is the most neglected genius that ever lived,'' Mr. Steig observed. ''He was thrown in jail, because every great man is crucified.''

Mr. Steig now spends at least a half-hour every day sitting in his orgone box (a contraption that Woody Allen parodied in the movie ''Sleepers''). It gives him ''an inner vibration, a little bit like an orgasmic feeling.'' Still, he always brings a book into the box to read. ''Otherwise you get bored.''

Reich confirmed Mr. Steig's already firm belief that people should be emancipated from ''the crippling inhibitions that society imposes.'' In the 1950's, Mr. Steig illustrated one of Reich's books, ''Listen, Little Man!'' and drew a wrenching series of lovelorn men and icy women for a book titled ''The Rejected Lovers.'' One drawing is of a tiny man smashed under the sole of a woman's shoe and clinging to her high heel. In another a knife is plunged into a man's gut; above his body the head floats with a quizzical expression. The caption reads: ''Sometimes I wonder if I really do want her.'' Looking at some of these drawings, Mr. Steig said, ''I think it should be obvious that I like women.''

In this decade, Mr. Steig also examined the psychological trials of childhood. ''Agony in the Kindergarten,'' dedicated to Reich, featured the repressive comments parents make: ''God is watching you.'' ''Don't do that.'' In one picture a child is dressed up like a clown and the caption reads, ''We trained him early.'' What is symbolic about that? Mr. Steig answers quickly, ''The kid doesn't really dress like this.''

It has often been observed that Mr. Steig is an adult who thinks like a child. But Mr. Steig did not formally begin writing for children until the 1960's. And even now he says he writes these books only because it is better than doing advertising. Part of him chafes at the idea of illustrating stories. ''I don't like repeating characters,'' he said.

Whether he likes writing children's books or not, he has an unusual talent for them. His books, including ''Sylvester and the Magic Pebble,'' ''Doctor De Soto'' and ''Spinky Sulks,'' are smart, funny and neither condescending nor punitive. ''The villains are vanquished but never killed,'' Mr. Lorenz points out. ''There is no sense of revenge.'' And they are often full of verbal mischief. In the books ''CDB'' (for children) and ''CDC'' (for older kids and adults) he uses letters to stand for words. A picture of pygmies standing around a carcass is, for example, captioned V F E-10 D L-F-N. In other books Mr. Steig manages to slip in words like ''cloaca'' and ''cleave,'' little linguistic messes for the parents to clean up. Why does he do that? ''Kids like those words.''

One of Mr. Steig's drawings in ''Grown-Ups Get to Do All the Driving,'' shows a man throwing an angry-looking child into the air. The caption reads: ''Grown-ups take liberties.'' After an afternoon of talking with the Steigs, it appears that one of those liberties, at least in Mr. Steig's mind, is interpretation. He will have no part of it: ''If I watched myself I wouldn't get an idea. I'd just be watching myself.''

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