I thought, for once,
I had a chance to air a tribute to a great writer before his demise – but, as usual, I dithered, and lately
discovered to my great sadness that George Steiner had died last year, aged 90.
You’re unlikely to
have encountered Steiner unless you’re pickled in literary criticism – and
possibly not even then, since the academic establishment has had a habit of
marginalising him at crucial times. This despite him fielding hundreds of
reviews and public lectures, publishing some 40 books (only a handful of which
I’ve read myself), and eventually holding some exceedingly prestigious posts at
the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Geneva.
During my undergrad
years, my beloved mentor Don Maclennan introduced me to Steiner’s 1975 magnum
opus, After Babel. This is a daunting
tome which, ostensibly about the problem of translation from one language to
another, turns out to be so much more: an extended meditation on the phenomenon
of language, on interpretation, on the slippery relationship between objects
and the words that describe them, in the end on the nature of consciousness
itself. I was instantly entranced by the opening pages, in which Steiner
unpacks a longish passage from Shakespeare’s lesser-known drama, Cymbeline. It didn’t matter that I
hadn’t read the play: it was the way Steiner showed how every word and sentence
structure fizzes with its specific energy, history, and concatenations of
meaning. He goes on to do the same with an extract from Jane Austen, revealing
how her vocabulary and syntax was so specific to her eighteenth-century milieu,
class and education that it is fundamentally impossible now to recreate in our
own minds the fullness of her meanings. It is – to use one of his favourite
words – incommensurable, never completely translatable, always slipping away
into mystery – the mysteriousness of poetic creation itself. No neurological
brain-scans can perceive how this facility operates.
I was also blown
away by Steiner’s own language-use: thick, metaphorical, laden with literary
reference, slick. Every sentence was, is, a cultural education. If he
name-dropped as densely as an encyclopaedia, it seemed to me not so much
pretentious as authoritative. If he could bring into intimate proximity Homer,
Goethe and Walter Benjamin, somehow you knew that he had actually read all
three, in their original languages, thoroughly and with a penetrating
understanding. Above all, he instantly convinced me of his seriousness. Unlike
many popular polemicists, he was never playing intellectual games, but took the
task of accurate, knowledgeable, and honest literary appreciation and cultural
interpretation as vital to our very humanity. Even as a young and (he admits
this) insufferably arrogant whippersnapper, he was openly intolerant of
academic pomp and pretence. There would never be any hesitation in panning
anyone’s sacred cows, so it’s little wonder that he was sometimes regarded
warily. In our Honours course on Literary Theory, I remember professor Nic
Visser sneering at Steiner as somehow behind the theoretical curve, but
admitting a certain genius: “God, to be able to write like that!” But then Nic
favoured Marxism, which Steiner dismisses as largely dangerous nonsense. I must
have, in some half-baked instinctual way, agreed with Steiner: I ploughed
through Nic’s photocopied reams of Marxist literary criticism, from Engels
through Christopher Caudwell to Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, but – like
cosmic rays passing invisibly through my body without disturbing a single cell
– not an iota of it stuck. But Steiner: now here was someone whose eloquence
and depth spoke to my very core.
A certain
dismissiveness persists. He is in various commentaries characterised as
“literary critic”, which is right, but also absurdly narrow. There are few who
could range as he did from linguistics to neurology (he nearly became a
scientist), from writing on foreign affairs for the Economist to a book on Heidegger. He did, in retrospect, accuse
himself of dabbling too widely, making certain over-hasty judgements, but –
compared to a compulsive dilettante like me – even his dabbling has enormous
and provocative weight. He knew enough to locate yawning gaps in scholarship
and understanding, being fond of saying “we know nothing about” X or Y,
concerning not the usual scholarly trivia, but the profoundest existential
questions. (I took as epigraph to my novella The Flight of the Bat such a sentence from After Babel: “We have no history of the future tense.”)
He is also routinely
characterised as “French-American”, which doesn’t begin to describe this
Euro-polyglot. True, he was born in Paris (just two weeks after my mother in
April 1929): his Viennese-Jewish parents saw Nazism coming a long way off and
got the hell out. And true, having moved again, he became an American citizen
in 1944, and was later educated at Chicago (loved it) and Harvard (awful; they
mutually vowed never to have anything to do with each other, though they still
granted him a chair some forty years later). But he moved back to the UK and
Switzerland, closer to his European roots; if he didn’t stay there, his beloved
father said, Hitler would have won. Thus, “French” was only one touchstone in a
man who also spoke English and German from childhood, and who became more than
conversant with half a dozen further languages, from the Russian of Dostoyevsky
to the Italian of Dante. The cultural richness he can thus draw on is
fantastic. He deplores the snobbish monolingualism of so many Anglo-American
academics, and of the extinction of so many of the world’s minor (but no less
wonderful) languages by the global dominance of American English. The mythic
splintering of the world’s languages “after Babel” he regards as engendering a
manifold, irreplacable richness, even as it creates insuperable problems of
cross-cultural understanding. It is among his abiding questions: How did that
even happen? What is this universal
“languaging” facility in humans that has spawned such cultural magnificence in
literature, art (and above all for him) music? And how is it that such beauty
can coexist with such cruelty and hate? As an inadvertent escapee of the
Holocaust (he prefers Shoah), he repeatedly asks how an Auschwitz commandant
could return home after a mass gassing of Jews and weep at a Schubert sonata.

Perhaps the
unflinching, even embarrassing acuity of such questions is what turns some
away. The Wikipedia entry on his “Views”, for example, is exceedingly brief and
feeble: fully a third is given over pruriently to a four-line quotation from
his memoir, Errata (1997), about how
he lost his virginity to a gentle prostitute (while ignoring pretty much all of
the major ideas, including his lengthy condemnation elsewhere of pornography).
I delayed writing
this piece partly because I wanted to read Errata
first; the rest of the work said remarkably little about him. Like some other readers, I was a little disappointed that Errata remained thin on the personal. It
is mostly about the ideas that have coursed through his work, so there are
compact discussions on translation, on his secular version of Jewishness, on
language and music, and a characteristic whinge about the state of the academy,
its “professionalisation” of mediocrity, the commercialised, shallow
over-production of tens of thousands of unreadable theses. He is particularly
scathing about the current predominance of “theory”, much of which he condemns
as unreadable, even “mendacious”
posturing by “the circus folk of deconstructionism” which adds nothing
to the appreciation of creative works themselves. Being rubbish at wielding
theory myself, I’m inclined to concur. One reviewer sniffed that you would do
better going to the other books to get these ideas’ full treatment, but Errata might equally serve as an
introduction to them. (The other good way in would be Penguin’s A George Steiner Reader. Among its
various extracts from the big works, is one from his only novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.,
which imagines Adolf Hitler re-discovered alive and well in the Amazon. Steiner
seems to fancy he could/should have written more fiction – he did publish three
volumes of short stories, which I haven’t read – but I find Portage close to impenetrable.)
In tiny snatches the
life is revealed. An unspecified “car mishap” when driving with his wife Zara
occurs, but only because Steiner wonders if his instinctive shout reveals a
“first language”. (Inconclusive.) Something about old age provokes a numbing
description: “a malodorous waste, an incontinence of mind and body made raw by
the remembrance of the unfulfilled.” Ouch. He mentions his son and daughter
just once each. Only in the closing chapters, when he pays tribute to various
of his life’s teachers, do we get piercing and fond portraits of others,
something verging on the anecdotal. (He can be quite anecdotal, slyly humorous,
in his interviews on YouTube.)
Otherwise, he remains focused on the serious business, especially of
teaching: “The signal reward for a teacher is to engage students whom he
discovers to be abler than himself.” One of his mentors, R P Blackmur, he said,
“let down by his poetry, burnished his prose to a pitch of obtrusive
brilliance, of ornamentation so visible, so ‘palpably designed’ (Keats’
admonition) as to interpose itself between insight and object.” Some might say
the same of Steiner’s own prose. It’s sometimes a relief to catch him writing a
simple sentence.

The concentration on
education – his life-work, even more than criticism, which was being “a happy
parasite” really – you might follow up in his book Lessons of the Masters (2003). Ranging across pedagogical
encounters from Socrates to Schopenhauer, he drops lapidary thoughts to keep
one thinking forever: “The pulse of teaching is persuasion ... and, optimally,
collaborative dissent.” “Argument should end in poetry.” He worries that the
age-old organic relationship between Teacher and Disciple is eroding in our age
of internet and mass literacy; for all its power, it depersonalises: “Human
fidelity, ... love and betrayal, are foreign to the electronic.” Perhaps.
Personally, wedded to the face-to-face nature of ‘real’ teaching, I am so
grateful to be spared having to teach via Zoom.
Or one might pick up
on his ubiquitous references to the great philosophers and read The Poetry of Thought (2011), in which
he shows how thinkers, from Hellenism to the present, have used poetics to
convey philosophic concepts. Plato formed fictional dialogues to pursue
arguments; Nietzsche used the character of Zarathustra; Marx engaged constantly
with literature; Merleau-Ponty wrote almost pure poetry. (I simplify horribly.)
Again and again he returns to the primacy of the linguistic in forging human
self-awareness, even though “The inherited fixities of vocabulary and syntax
can never altogether bridge the gap between articulation and the flow and
eddies of consciousness.” Because of that, Steiner believes, we in effect act
constantly in what amounts to a state of religious faith, a belief, forever
deferred, that we can articulate the
world, that we can reach out to “real presences”, not just phantasms of our
imaginations. Don Maclennan gave me his copy of Real Presences (1989), scored over with his wavering pencil lines
and left-handed marginal ticks. Among the points he marked as worth attention:
“I would define literature (art, music) as the maximalisation of semantic
incommensurability in respect of the formal means of expression”. Chew on that
for a bit!
So much more might
be said of this “Platonic anarchist”, as he thought of himself. Much is
arguable, but it would be facile to dismiss him as an outdated elitist. Steiner
pursued excellence in all things, and so disdained those modes of political
correctness which substitute easy slogans and a culture of complaint for the
hard graft of creative reading and interpretation. Like the great literature he
makes his stamping ground, he is worth going back to again and again. He has
certain limits. He is European to the core: Asia, Africa, Latin America and the
Antipodes scarcely register. Well, he has enough to work with. He does show
signs of attending to more global, less literary concerns. He saw towards the
end of his life some redeeming hope for humans in their increasing concern for
animals and the natural environment. And Errata
includes this passage, as good a summary of our planetary plight as any:

All of us are guests
of life. No human being knows the meaning of its creation, except in the most
primitive, biological regard. No man or woman knows the purpose, if any, the
possible significance of its “thrownness” into the mystery of existence. Why is
there not nothing? Why am I? We are guests of this small planet, of an
infinitely complex, perhaps chancy weave of evolutionary processes and
mutations which, at innumerable points, might have gone otherwise or witnessed
our execution. As it has turned out, we are vandal-guests, laying waste,
exploiting and destroying other species and resources. We are rapidly turning
to poisonous garbage this uncannily beautiful, intricately adjusted
environment, and even outer space. There are trash-bins on the moon. Inspired
as it is, the ecological movement which, together with a nascent perception of
the rights of children and of animals, is among the few lit chapters in our
century, may have come too late.******