In his achievement the centrality is manifest; the humanity has often been tragically absent. W hat had happened? In the Two Cultures debate, Steiner had aligned himself with C. Snow against Leavis. But his critique of the wilful ignorance of the British establishment had aroused the ire of Leavis, who saw himself as a lone voice crying in a wilderness of philistinism.
Snow had merely suggested that elite schools in Britain gave almost exclusive recognition to the humanities, in contrast to the American and German educational systems which gave equal weight to the natural sciences.
The book appeared in , soon after the controversy with Leavis. By far the best account of the dispute is by Lionel Trilling, already then the leading American critic, but curiously ignored by Steiner. Trilling has long since eclipsed Edmund Wilson, whom Steiner overrated because he succeeded Wilson as chief book reviewer for the New Yorker. Steiner saw himself as a Leavis with languages, a Wilson with academic rigour. The cosmopolitan pyrotechnics were indeed dazzling; the scholarship indubitably broad, if not invariably deep.
He made it his business to get to know as many as possible of the European intelligentsia who had survived Hitler and Stalin; those who had not, such as Walter Benjamin, he introduced to an often sceptical English-speaking public. For a generation coming of age in the shadow of war and Holocaust, Steiner became the archetypal archeologist of the buried treasures that testified to an all-too-recently lost civilisation. Countless middle-aged men and women, now nostalgic for their callow youth, are grateful to this day for their initiation into the sacred mysteries of European culture.
One undergraduate during the late s recalls Steiner giving a series of lectures on tragedy for which there was standing room only. The rest of the English faculty, by contrast, could barely fill the front row. For such eager young apprentices, Steiner was a sorcerer whose magic never failed — however much he was ostracised.
They have this diminutive, bespectacled cicerone to thank for opening their eyes to the murderous magnificence of their own heritage.
Y et something happened to Steiner in the first flush of fame. He gradually adopted a new style, as idiosyncratic as it was unidiomatic and as highfalutin as it was highbrow. Instead of the clear, precise prose of his early books, Steiner now wrote in a stilted, clotted, incantatory manner that sometimes seemed scarcely English, and which constantly teetered on the edge of self-parody. In his determination to avoid the quotidian at all costs, Steiner occasionally verged on the vatic — or even the vapid.
This is the Steiner who was indeed heir to Coleridge, minus the poetry, to be sure, but a master of critical prose, possessed of a fine ear as an interpreter of Continental thought. In his late memoir Errata: An examined life , he gives a clue as to how this transformation came about. He made it his business to get to know as many as possible of the European intelligentsia who had survived Hitler and Stalin.
He does not say, because for all his sensitivity to language, he could never have acknowledged any such difficulty — that his own writing might actually have become quite difficult to read.
My father, the historian and journalist Paul Johnson, experienced the wrath of Steiner at full throttle. They were contemporaries and ought to have been allies. But my father could not abide academic jargon or pretentiousness. One day he must have singled out a sentence by Steiner for satire in the Sunday Times.
Steiner did not take criticism well. The following letter, typed on now yellowing, ultra-thin paper, is vintage Steiner. My attention has been drawn to your attack in the ST of yesterday. It is risibly easy to take a sentence out of an explicitly technical context, in what is quite openly an academic-philosophic book, and charge it with obscurantism.
I do not expect that you would have either the knowledge or honesty to see that each of the technical terms in that sentence has an exact meaning which only lengthy paraphrase could render. More repellent is the fact that so much of your essay exactly echoes my own stuff on language and civilisation as set out in Language and Silence, Extraterritorial etc. Dryden and Pope work from prose into verse: some of their best verse is a heightened kind of prose. It is under deep suspicion.
Let's do a little history. The man of letters represented a kind of consensus of taste and of interest in his society. People wanted to hear about literature, the arts, from a cultivated nonspecialist. Macaulay, Hazlitt—the ranking men of letters—almost made a book of a review; they were that long. There was time for that kind of publication. The man of letters might also write poetry and fiction, or biography, and in England the tradition has not died.
We still have Michael Holroyd, my own student Richard Holmes who is now so acclaimed, we have Cyril Connolly, Pritchard, who is an exquisite short-story writer, a constant critic, a constant reviewer. And I'm not one who sneers about J. The people who sneer about Priestley would give their eyeteeth to have had a jot of his talent. Critic, biographer, memorialist, in many ways Robert Graves, who was such a fine poet, was a supreme man of letters. Every one of my opponents, every one of my critics will tell you that I am a generalist spread far too thin in an age when this is not done anymore, when responsible knowledge is specialized knowledge.
A review appeared of the first edition of After Babel by a very distinguished linguist, an old man now, still alive, and someone I respect very much: the high priest of the mandarins.
I can live with that. Then he wrote me something very interesting. He said we have reached a point where no man can cover the whole field of the linguistics and poetics of translation.
This book, he said, should have been written under your guidance by six or seven specialists. It would then be wasted, and end up gathering dust on the technical shelves.
There were indeed errors, there were inaccuracies, because a book that's worth living with is the act of one voice, the act of a passion, the act of a persona. We disagreed gently but deeply. He said no, that cannot be done. It could be done till the First World War, but from then on the self-splitting and fission of knowledge has become such, even in the humanities, that powerful minds spend a lifetime on getting their own specialty more or less right, let alone the landscape.
So that's a very central disagreement. The man of letters — and what was George Orwell, if he was not a man of letters, what was Edmund Wilson, whom I succeeded on The New Yorker twenty-seven years ago? I think so. We could talk ten hours.
I'm committed to the bitter passionate view that we live in a Byzantine period, an Alexandrian period, in which the commentator and the comment tower above the original. Today we're told there is critical theory, that criticism dominates—deconstruction, semiotics, post-structuralism, postmodernism.
Meaning what? That whatever the stature of the poem, it waits for the deconstructive commentator; it is the mere occasion of the exercise. That is to me ridiculous beyond words.
His doubts over the American role in Vietnam were publicly expressed, but his misgivings about American civilisation went even deeper. In , in an essay titled The Archives of Eden, which was intensely resented in the US, Steiner passed magisterial judgment upon an entire culture.
The greatest American achievements in thought and culture were, he asserted, largely the product of European artists and intellectuals. His father, an investment banker, reached a high position in the Austrian Central Bank, but the shrunken horizons of post-Versailles Austria prompted a move. Although nominally Zionists, the Steiners had no wish to settle in Palestine, and in the family went to Paris, where George was born. Their lives there were cosmopolitan, secular and multilingual.
English, French and German were readily spoken at home. A quiet tip from a German banking friend impelled him to get the family out of Europe. He was able to complete the requirements for a BA at the University of Chicago at age of There were quotas on Jews at the Ivy League universities in the s, but none at the University of Chicago, and its well-founded reputation for highbrow intellectuality attracted a brilliant cohort of assimilated Jews. It was at Chicago that Steiner first encountered the work of Heidegger.
He worked at the Economist for four happy years from and then was invited to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He spent on a Fulbright professorship teaching at Innsbruck, returning to Princeton in as the Gauss lecturer. Two years later he was appointed a founding fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and The Death of Tragedy, a wide-ranging and erudite study of the classic texts, was published.
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