Essay
By LEE SIEGEL
George Steiner, who turns 80 next month, has poured forth millions of words on the fate of art in our times.
Believe it or not, there was once a “George Steiner problem.” Back before the economic meltdown, the nanosecond news cycle and our surprise-a-minute public life replaced reflection with the necessity of just keeping up, people argued about the merits of this fabled literary scholar, critic, essayist, amateur linguist and amateur philosopher — as if they were debating the fate of culture in modern life. In fact, they were doing exactly that.
George Steiner in 2003.
Steiner, who turns 80 next month, has poured forth millions of words on the fate of art and literature in modern times. His central obsession is the Holocaust, and specifically the haunting fact that the Holocaust’s ashes spread from high culture’s Promethean fire: the civilization that produced Bach also produced Buchenwald. In books like “Language and Silence,” “In Bluebeard’s Castle,” “After Babel” and “Real Presences,” and in countless magazine essays — the recently released George Steiner at the New Yorker (New Directions, paper, $17.95) gathers 28 of the 134 articles he published in the magazine between 1966 and 1997 — Steiner both celebrated culture’s survival and questioned its value in an age of atrocity and disbelief. But his provocative lifelong inquiry into the sources of human cruelty and creation does not alone account for his controversial status.
Born in France to an Austrian Jewish family that escaped Vienna, Steiner was raised in Paris and New York, and educated at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and then at Oxford. He taught at Cambridge for several years, then accepted a professorship at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. After that, he shuttled back and forth between prestigious universities here and in England before retiring from teaching. All the while, he published dozens of critical monographs, a handful of novels and hundreds of essays, articles and reviews.
Steiner aroused his share of outrage with his passionate aversion to Zionism, and especially with his 1981 novel “The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.,” whose portrayal of Hitler some readers thought strangely sympathetic. But even more than these brief uproars, what once made Steiner such a contested figure was the question of just what type of bearer and interrogator of high culture he was. Celebrated as a one-man bastion of high Western culture and admired for his moral subtlety by some, Steiner was attacked as pompous, pretentious and inaccurate in scholarly matters by others. His bracing virtue has been his ability to move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph. His irritating vice has been that he can move from Pythagoras, through Aristotle and Dante, to Nietzsche and Tolstoy in a single paragraph.
Absurdly or gratuitously pedantic comparisons flow from his pen: “More, perhaps, than anyone since Nietzsche and Tolstoy . . .”; “Like Pascal, like Kierkegaard and like Nietzsche . . .”; “In a way and on a scale inconceivable to Western man from, say, Erasmus to Woodrow Wilson . . .” — to cite just a few examples from “George Steiner at the New Yorker.” He has a flair for portentous statement of the obvious: “Massacres have punctuated the millennia with strident monotony.” He also has a flair for portentous statement of the obscure: “The shade of a shadow . . .”; “The political-social desideratum. . . .” The grating hallmark of his prose is an almost self-parodic knowingness: he will make allusions without explaining the reference and allude to events without describing what happened. Sometimes it seems that for all of Steiner’s vaunted erudition, he is so intellectually ambitious that he frequently feels insecure about his command of the material under review, and so overcompensates with a flustered stream of cultural name-dropping. His editors were perhaps too insecure around Steiner to intervene.
At the same time, a spiritual energy enlivened Steiner’s work, drawing in readers who surrendered themselves to his profligate ruminations. He attributed this quality to Arthur Koestler, who, he wrote, “seemed to exemplify Nietzsche’s insight that there is in men and women a motivation stronger even than love or hatred or fear. It is that of being interested — in a body of knowledge, in a problem, in a hobby, in tomorrow’s newspaper.” An intensity of outward attention — interest, curiosity, healthy obsession — was Steiner’s version of God’s grace. There is something both exalted and wonderfully mundane about that.
To put it bluntly: Was it a pleasure or a punishment to read Steiner? Did he present art and ideas as the entertaining urgencies that they are, or did culture become for him — as it does for certain people — simply an extension of ego, a one-man kingdom, the keys to which he flaunted and jingled under the reader’s nose while he solemnly pranced back and forth, reciting names of the distinguished dead as though they were aliases for himself? Since Steiner’s erudite voice grew more authoritative the more he published, the George Steiner problem came to encompass the larger question of just how culture gets transmitted.
Reading the essays in “George Steiner at The New Yorker,” you realize that in his polymorphous, polymathic, polyglot — he taught in four languages, and knew many more — attraction to just about everything under the sun, Steiner resembled that other great explicator of culture to the matriculated masses, Susan Sontag. They both were critics of the open-minded school, mostly generous in their judgments, abundant in their generalizations about life beyond the subject at hand. But in the deeper sense, Steiner was everything Sontag wasn’t — and vice versa. He was the anti-Sontag.
Both critics made their careers introducing and explicating major trends in European culture to Americans, but the ironic contrasts between them are rich. Though Sontag published in highfalutin journals like Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, she expounded radically democratic notions of pleasure and power. Steiner, on the other hand, used the solidly middlebrow New Yorker (or the equally bourgeois Times Literary Supplement in Britain) to examine and ultimately uphold the sacredness of the very high culture Sontag was attempting to deflate. Both writers, consciously or not, appealed to their audience’s vanity: Sontag allowed her intellectually aristocratic readers to indulge their contempt for middle-class Kultur, while Steiner enabled his middle-class readers to feel empowered by aristocratic ideas of truth and beauty.
At the same time, again and again, in essays on Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Solzhenitsyn, Céline, Anthony Blunt, Simone Weil — and in just about every essay in the new selection — Steiner likes to take on complex personalities, double-sided genius-monsters. “Where are the bridges in the labyrinth of that soul?” he asks about Céline, the brilliant novelist and vicious anti-Semite. About the xenophobic Solzhenitsyn: “This colossus of a man, so markedly a stranger to common humanity.” On the pacifist Bertrand Russell’s nearly homicidal cold-heartedness: “Bertrand Russell is a man who loves truth or the lucid statement of a possible truth better than he does individual human beings.”
Reciting such elegant moral conundrums has been Steiner’s way of easing the general reader into culture and then out again. Out ofthe Promethean fire comes destruction: If you have time to apply yourself to the treasures of Western culture, fine; if not, count your blessings. At the core of Steiner’s horror that the instruments of civilization — language and even rationality itself — are also the weapons of barbarism is a palliative for the harried reader’s conscience. You haven’t finished Proust’s novel? Being good, or at least not monstrous, is even better. Steiner may still be a problem for some people, but as a critic, he efficiently offered one double-sided solution to the problem of preserving your attachment to culture after the long leisureliness of college. He has kept people interested in the world of literature and ideas, and he has freed them from feeling guilt when their interest flags.
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