The gravity of George Steiner
The word “awesome” is the most easily used by teenagers these days, but the range of learning that the critic and novelist George Steiner possessed was great in the old and adult sense: really, truly impressive. Steiner, who died on Monday at the age of 90, knew modern languages, ancient languages, classical literature and modern literature. He had memorized the rhymes of Racine and he could elucidate Joyce’s puns and he could tell you why the two were, in his opinion thorny but not cheap, superior to the prolixities of Shakespeare. It was what many people call a human encyclopedia – not in the American sense, a safe void of facts, but in that of the French Enlightenment: a critical repository of important knowledge. His long book reviews for this magazine, written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were peppered with allusions of the kind that a naturally horizontal thinker could not help but include. But they were never imposed or forced – his mind, on its way to Borges, passed through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to admire the view at Heidegger. Steiner has always traveled on these roads. “Pretentious”, although a word that journalists sometimes use to describe it, was the last thing it ever was. He never pretended. He was himself a faculty of humanities, an academy.
And how much and to what extent his subjects were: Lévi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Montale, Liszt, Koestler, the linguistics of Noam Chomsky, and knowledge (and cowardly Stalinism) of Anthony Blunt. (And it’s mostly a collection.) It certainly wasn’t a High and Low type; he did not happily follow his essay on Levi-Strauss’s conception of raw and cooked with another essay full of recipes on how to cook raw. But it was not the moral way of his generation; born in 1929, he was of the high and superior kind and always superior, the kind that passionately believed, however fragile belief may seem, in the power of serious art to redeem life. Of course, not to redeem the world. Steiner’s seriousness was greatly disturbed by the Holocaust, which he understood to be the central event of modern times. (His family had fled Vienna shortly before the worst started.) It was part of authentic, not just patrician, seriousness to see the war years as a fundamental break not only in history but in our faith in culture: educated people have done these things to other educated people. It is not the ignorant armies that clash at night that shiver the soul of George Steiner; it was intelligent Germans who listened to Schubert assassinate educated Jews who had trusted Goethe, and by train. This recognition of the limits of culture to change the world was the limiting condition of his love of literature, and it was what gave this love a darker and more tragic cast than any simple proselytism for “big books” could provide.
With Steiner’s death, the obituaries rightly reminded readers of his big books – massive books, as they used to be called. His study of the language “After Babel” and his intimidating but surprising novel “The Portage in San Cristobal by A.H.” Are perhaps the most likely to be read, or at least to remember. But what is perhaps worth savoring at the time of his death is a fact denied by all these references. Although he held numerous university positions, at Harvard and Cambridge, among others, Steiner was never entirely at home in the academy. He had no “school” or acolytes, just readers. What was amazing, given how attached he was to a demanding level of literature, was how much he also engaged in a popular role – you could almost call him, even if he would have creaked teeth at the turn, a role of medium. His presence in the academy, although constant, was accentuated by his even greater presence in newspapers and magazines, like this one, which he honored with his apprenticeship. At a time when most critical writers sought, in the academy, to be obscurely entertaining or, in popular pages, to be obscurely entertaining, he sought rather to be always serious and enlightening.
Steiner challenged his readers but never condescended them. He assumed they cared about him as much as he did. He was the real thing, the last of the great intellectual travelers from Central Europe, one with Benjamin and Cioran and the other exiles, for whom books were the only constant country and reading them a matter of life and death. With him gone, we can only reread his writing, determined to honor the intensity of his commitment by intensifying ours.
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