Wednesday, February 5, 2020

George Steiner / Il postino

George Steiner

Il postino

Multilingual scholar George Steiner has for decades aroused suspicions for being 'a touch dazzling'. He has now made his peace with British anti-intellectualism.

Interview by Christopher Tayler
Saturday 19 April 2008

isitors to George Steiner's house in Cambridge are likely to be greeted at the door by Ben, an enormous Old English sheepdog. Like his owners, Ben is used to dealing with the press. "Monsieur Ben, the French call him," Steiner says. "French journalists in particular are always fascinated by him." Ben has appeared, Steiner notes, on the cover of a distinguished literary journal. Is it true that he has discriminating taste in music? "Ravel's Bolero - he growls. But he is fond of Tchaikovsky." "And Duke Ellington," Steiner's wife Zara, a Cambridge historian, adds from across the kitchen.

Ben has been getting more press than usual lately thanks to his brief but memorable appearance in Steiner's most recent publication, My Unwritten Books. "Given my age," Steiner says, "I am pretty near the end, probably, of my career as a writer, a scholar, a teacher. And I wanted to speak of things I will not be able to do." As "a kind of goodbye to what may not be", and "very much in the hope that others will take up one or two of the issues", the book details seven projects he'd have liked to carry off. These include studies of intellectual envy, comparative education, high culture and religion, Jewishness and Israel, and Joseph Needham's work on Chinese science. But most commentary on the book has focused on two chapters: "Of Man and Beast", which discusses Steiner's love of animals and describes all the dogs he's owned, including Ben; and "The Tongues of Eros", which concerns the relationship between linguistic and erotic activity.

Sex, Steiner thinks, is mediated by language in interesting ways. "I have every reason to believe," he writes, "that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language." This isn't an unexpected position for Steiner - who has written extensively on translation and "the polyglot condition" in general - to take. But eyebrows have been raised over his arresting examples of multilingual sex-talk, which draw on his own characteristically recondite experiences. A French lover, he writes, once distracted him "in, as it were, mid-flow" by using a tricky subjunctive pluperfect ("Proust may have been among the last to handle these with ease"). "V", whose dreams were filled with "cats, chamberpots and left-handed firemen", liked Viennese place names: "Thus 'taking the streetcar to Grinzing' signified a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access."

These confessions have caused a certain amount of amusement, particularly in England, where generations of scoffers have heaped sarcastic understatement and studied incomprehension on Steiner's unabashedly mandarin prose. It's hard to ask the charming and welcoming Steiner what exactly he was up to, and perhaps there's no need: he is 79, an age at which it's not unknown for men to dwell on the erotic triumphs of earlier years. Is there an arch enjoyment of arcane flourishes in his writing on sex? "Of course. Remember, I'm quadrilingual, which means I love this language freely, not by imperative imposition. I love its resources. I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong, I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right." As for what he calls "the Private Eye view", Steiner isn't fazed by that sort of derision. "I've suffered from it," he says without rancour, "my whole life here."

Steiner was born in Paris in 1929, delivered - according to family lore - by an American doctor who then returned to Louisiana to assassinate Huey Long. His parents, Frederick and Else Steiner, were Austrian Jews who had taken French citizenship, and the children were brought up speaking English, French and German, to which Steiner later added Italian. His father, an investment banker, was "an agnostic, a Voltairean", Steiner says. But he "had deeply the Jewish sense that there is no higher vocation than teaching" and encouraged his son's classical studies. When rumours of war came, "Mamam was indignant. She said, 'They will die on the Maginot Line if they dare attack.' My father, bless him under the name of God, saw more clearly." Tipped off by a German former colleague while visiting New York on behalf of the French government, Frederick Steiner arranged for his wife and children to join him there in 1940.

After finishing his schooling at the French lycée in New York, Steiner studied at the University of Chicago and at Harvard. Then, in part because his "unofficial godfather", Lewis Namier, had more or less planned for him to go to Balliol before he was born, he "made the mistake of reading English at Oxford". The English faculty viewed doctoral candidates with suspicion - "they didn't know how to teach them, they regarded it as a German-American contrivance" - and even well-disposed dons were prone to murmuring of his written work: "A touch dazzling, wouldn't you say?" Even so, Steiner had a revelation after going down with pneumonia. "I came to in my Balliol room with water running down the wall, inside. And I heard the Scottish doctor saying to the matron, 'If I pull him through this, he won't mind much else.' I fell in love with England hopelessly at that moment. No bedside manners there!"

In 1952, through "pure impertinence", Steiner landed a job at the Economist, which lasted for "four of the happiest years of my life". Sent to interview J Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he ended up accepting a post there. But he soon wanted to return to Europe - "by rowboat if necessary" - and when the founders of Churchill College, Cambridge, went in search of a literature teacher with experience of scientific institutions, he was an obvious choice. He was already making a name as a critic with such books as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958) and The Death of Tragedy (1961), and in Cambridge he became a star lecturer as well as a prolific contributor to literary magazines, helping to bring news of such figures as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger and Claude Lévi-Strauss to the English-speaking world.

"They had to move me to the biggest lecture hall in Cambridge," Steiner says. "And the students packed it." But a charismatic generalist with an interest in continental theorists was not all the dons' cup of tea. Things came to a head when he was summoned to an interview for an English faculty job in 1969. The two senior members of the faculty were sitting waiting, armed with a copy of an article he'd written. One of them, speaking "in a dry chirpy voice", said: "I would like to read a sentence to you. 'To shoot a man because you disagree with him about Hegel's dialectic is after all to honour the human spirit.' Did you write this sentence? And do you believe it?" Steiner replied: "Absolutely." That, he says, "was the end of the interview", and although his college came through for him with "fantastic generosity", he decided to go freelance, inheriting Edmund Wilson's berth at the New Yorker.

During the 70s and 80s, Steiner became well known in a distinctive role: part Mitteleuropean Jewish sage, part brooding modernist dialectician, part scourge of both scholarly narrowness and French theory. He ascended to the lecture-circuit stratosphere and, sustained by a professorship at the University of Geneva, published numerous books, of which the magnum opus might be After Babel (1975). While academic honours haven't been in short supply, he has sometimes felt marginalised by the academic community: "Among stamp collectors," he wrote in 1992, "letter-writers are not always welcome." Early on, he published poetry, though "one morning I looked at it and I knew it was superb verse. And verse is the opposite of poetry." He's also "published a bit of fiction", including a successful short novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of AH (1981), though he has, he says, "no illusions" about its value.

"In Beckett's great phrase," he says, "I should have failed better." He laughs cheerfully. "That wonderful phrase." But, he adds, "unless you are absolutely first rate, which so few of us are, then what I call the letter-carrier function of the teacher is wonderful. To serve great works, to send the letters out hoping they get to a good mailbox, is a marvellous thing. I'm terribly proud, of course, of being in the National Portrait Gallery. I'm even prouder that they've named a room for me at the University of London. A lovely portrait there, and I've insisted that it be called Il Postino. That beautiful film of the mail carrier for Neruda . . . I am the postino. And what fun it's been, and what luck. I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward."

Not that the mail he brings is always consoling. "No culture has a pact with eternity," he says. "The conditions which made possible the giants of the western poetic, aesthetic, philosophic tradition no longer really obtain." Steiner doesn't believe "there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa", and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are "nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don't believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind." Most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight - often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where's the bloody horse?"

Yet Steiner has made his peace with British anti-intellectualism. Part of him thinks "it's absolutely deplorable that this country treats ideology and intellectual debate the way it does. But: we owe to this its ironies. Its tolerance. Its decision not to take too seriously what in other countries have proved fatal challenges. It is my conviction that had the infinite rhetorical genius of Adolf Hitler been tested at Hyde Park Corner, people would have said, 'Ah, come off it', and walked away. And this is magnificent . . . Why is an Enoch Powell so totally ineffective, thank God, thank God? Maybe because he was the only man ever to hold a major chair of ancient Greek at age 25. That's no good! That alerted unconsciously - I'm saying this lightly - that alerted the body politic . . ." He smiles and puts on a low English voice: "this chap was too clever by half . . ."

THE GUARDIAN