The seriousness of George Steiner (1929-2020)
Obituary by Adam Gopnik
The word “awesome” is
most easily used by adolescents these days, but the range of learning that the
critic and novelist George Steiner possessed was awesome in the old-fashioned,
grown-up sense: truly, genuinely awe-inspiring. Steiner, who died on Monday, at
the age of ninety, knew modern languages, ancient languages, classical
literature, and modern literature. He had memorized the rhymes of Racine and he
could elucidate the puns in Joyce and he could tell you why both were, in his
thorny but not cheaply won view, superior to the prolixities of Shakespeare. He
was what many people call a human encyclopedia - not in the American sense, a
blank vault of facts, but in the French Enlightenment one: a critical
repository of significant knowledge.
His long book reviews for this magazine,
written over thirty years, from 1966 to 1997, were dotted with allusions of the
kind that a naturally horizontal thinker couldn’t help but include. But they
were never imposed or forced—his mind truly, on its way to Borges, passed
through Sophocles and stopped for a moment to take in the view at Heidegger.
Steiner was a lifelong traveller of those routes. “Pretentious,” though a word
journalists sometimes used to describe him, was the last thing he ever was. He
was never pretending. He was a humanities faculty in himself, an academy of
one.
And how many and how
wide 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 the connoisseurship (and
craven Stalinism) of Anthony Blunt. (And that’s mostly one collection.) He was
not, to be sure, a High and Low guy; he did not cheerfully follow up his essay
on Levi-Strauss’s conception of the raw and the cooked with another essay filled
with recipes on how to cook the raw. But that was not the moral manner of his
generation; born in 1929, he was of the High and Higher and ever Higher kind,
the kind who passionately believed, however fragile the belief might seem, in
the power of serious art to redeem life.
Though not, to be
sure, to redeem the world. Steiner’s seriousness was significantly
disrupted by the Holocaust, which he understood to be the central event of
modern times. (His family had fled Vienna shortly before the worst began.) It
was part of the genuine, and not merely patrician, seriousness of his view to
see the war years as a fundamental rupture not just in history but in our faith
in culture: educated people did those things to other educated people. It was
not ignorant armies clashing by night that shivered George Steiner’s soul; it
was intelligent Germans who listened to Schubert murdering educated Jews who
had trusted in Goethe, and by the train load. This recognition of the limits of
culture to change the world was the limiting condition on his love of
literature, and it was what gave that love a darker and more tragic cast than
any mere proselytizing for “great books” could supply.
With Steiner’s death,
the obituarists have rightly reminded readers of his big books—massive tomes,
as they were once called. His study of language “After Babel” and his daunting but in its way astounding
novel “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.” are perhaps the
likeliest to go on being read, or at least remembered. But what is perhaps
worth savoring at the moment of his passing is a fact belied by all these
credentials. Though he held many academic postings, at Harvard and Cambridge,
among others, Steiner was never entirely at home in the academy. He had no
“school” and no acolytes, just readers.
What was astonishing, given how fully
he was committed to a demanding standard of literature, was how fully he
committed as well to a popular role—one might almost call it, even if he would
have cringed at the turn, a middlebrow role. His presence in the academy,
though constant, was accented by his even larger presence in the journals and
magazines, like this one, that he graced with his learning. At a time when most
critical writers sought either, in the academy, to be entertainingly obscure or
else, in popular pages, to be obscurely entertaining, he sought instead always
to be earnest and enlightening.
Steiner challenged his
readers but never condescended to them. He assumed that they cared as much as
he did. He was the real thing, the last of the great middle-European
intellectual journeyers, one with Benjamin and Cioran and the other exiles, for
whom books were the one 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 our own.
