In his 1997 memoir, Errata, George Steiner describes calling on the Oxford don Humphry House shortly before his doctoral viva: “On his Victorian lectern lay the handsomely printed text of my Chancellor’s English Essay Prize. I waited, I ached for some allusion to it. It came when I was already at the door. ‘Ah yes, yes, your pamphlet. A touch dazzling, wouldn’t you say?’”
Two things are striking about this passage. First, the crushing put-down—“a touch dazzling.” This is how two generations of critics have attacked Steiner. Too clever by half. Almost 50 years later, James Wood, writing in Prospect, attacked Steiner’s “imprecisions,” his “vulgarity,” his “melodrama of transcendence.”
The door is also worth dwelling on. House spoke when Steiner was “already at the door.” On his way in or on his way out? Or neither? Perhaps just there, never quite welcome inside.
Steiner was always an outsider. His first attempt at an Oxford DPhil ended in controversial failure. Not English enough. Too European. Steiner was over 30 when he had his first academic position in Britain. He was made a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge but never a professor except late in his career, in 1994-5, when he was the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature at Oxford.
An essayist and public intellectual, he was more at home in the books pages of the New Yorker and the Sunday Times than in the common room. Above all, he was an outsider because he was a Jew, a refugee and a European—indeed the last of the great Jewish European intellectuals.
His first book was Tolstoy or Dostoevsky; his second was The Death of Tragedy, which had almost a hundred references to Racine, more than 80 to Corneille, more than 50 to Goethe and to Schiller. (Born in Paris to Viennese Jewish parents, he was trilingual in German, English and French.)
His cosmopolitanism thrilled a generation of students in the 1960s and 1970s. This is why they packed the lecture halls of Cambridge to hear him speak. They loved his range of interests, the big issues he took on. Why do the humanities not civilise us? Do dictatorships produce more great art than democracies? Is tragedy dead?
Steiner opened up Britain’s closed literary world to Europe, especially central Europe. “A door was flung open on what had been there all the time, at our backs, namely, our European heritage,” said John Banville. “He told us not to be cowed by insularity or hidebound by small minds, but to look beyond the border.” The critic Bryan Cheyette argued that Steiner provided “the first telling those who would listen in Britain about Heidegger, Benjamin and Paul Celan—the great German philosophers and poets. Now work on those figures is an industry, but he was a lone voice in the 1960s.”
Which English literary critic would have reviewed Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Gesammelte Werke (10 volumes) or a 2000-page edition of Céline’s Lettres for the TLS? Steiner didn’t just review such works—he staged an intellectual drama. “In the 20th-century context,” he wrote in the TLS in 2004, “the most challenging, creative encounter between philosophy and poetry is that between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger.” Or on Céline, “Sartre, whom Céline loathed for his political opportunism and second-hand philosophy and whom he savaged in À l'agité du bocal in 1945, declared not long before his own death, ‘Only one of us will endure: Céline’ … [T]wo bodies of work lead into the idiom and sensibility of 20th-century narrative: that of Céline and that of Proust.”
For Steiner, Heidegger and Céline were not just great cultural figures. They raised the crucial question: what does it tell us about culture that men drawn to fascism and anti-semitism could produce great philosophy and literature? His debates with Christopher Ricks and Craig Raine about Eliot’s anti-semitism addressed the same question.
Steiner’s Jewishness was at the centre of his moral imagination. A generation of gentile critics didn’t seem to understand this or his preoccupations with the Holocaust and Stalinism. They thought there was something hysterical or excessive about them.
He wrote about big history and big ideas in powerful, accessible prose. Many of his best essays in Language and Silence were originally published in small magazines: Commentary, Encounter, The Listener, the New York Times and the TLS and most of his books were published by Penguin, Faber and Weidenfeld and Nicolson. After Babel (1975), on the art of translation, was his first to be published by a university press. His writing is refreshingly old fashioned. Most of the few footnotes in the first chapter of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky are from writers, not critics, and many go back to the pre-war period.
Perhaps the best chapter in Errata is about his former teachers, including the American critic RP Blackmur. Blackmur’s “meditations on Henry James… remain classics of encounter,” he writes. Encounters between two great minds is one of Steiner’s great themes. Mandelstam reading Dante, Karl Barth glossing Romans, “the hotel Zum Storchen where Nelly Sachs met with Celan, occasioning, in the shared after-death of the Holocaust, one of the indispensable poems in the German language.” He describes meeting the German-born Israeli historian Gershom Scholem: “We met in Berne at the very café-table which he had frequented with Walter Benjamin.”
Steiner had his critics. Some, like Robert Alter, were devastating. Others only saw only his failings, not his achievements. These can be summed up easily. More than any other British literary critic, he broke the silence about the Holocaust and introduced readers to a new world of European writers and ideas. George Steiner changed the cultural landscape of modern Britain.
