George Steiner
Literary critic and scholar whose lectures left audiences spellbound but divided academic opinion
GEORGE STEINER, who has died aged 90, was an academic agent provocateur widely admired as the polymath champion of European high culture.
Steiner was fluent in four languages and his tally of academic distinctions was impressive by any standards. He wrote more than a dozen highly assured books and countless articles on large, important subjects – Greek tragedy, 20th century totalitarian politics, literary criticism, music and theology, the nature of language, the relationship between art, politics and religion and the nature of creativity
– as well as fiction. His range was extraordinary.
Yet Steiner remained a controversial figure on the English academic scene. From 1969 he was an “extraordinary fellow” of Churchill College, Cambridge, but neither of the ancient universities gave him tenure.
Some put this down to antisemitism, and indeed Steiner fitted the stereotype of the middle-europe Jewish intellectual with almost comic perfection. Cosmopolitan, erudite, passionate, he combined elaborate, courtly manners with belligerent intellectual one-upmanship and spent his career wrestling with highly abstract questions of culture and society. Yet other Jewish scholars had flourished in England, and it was a fellow Jewish savant who described Steiner as “that very rare thing: a complete charlatan”.
There was undoubtedly an element of jealousy. By contrast with the average lecturer in English who might attract an audience of half a dozen, Steiner’s ad hoc performances at Cambridge were filled to overflowing with students from all disciplines and, as he never hesitated to point out, his list of graduate students was longer than anyone’s.
In some ways his popularity among students was baffling, for he never made concessions to youthful ignorance. A typical Steiner lecture was larded with obscure archaisms, long, half-remembered quotations in German or French, conspiratorial references to a cavalcade of European writers and thinkers – Musil, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Mandelstam, Vlastos, Tirso de Molina, Adorno, Herder et al (lists often prefaced by a Steinerish “as is well-known”) – and off-the-cuff literary parentheses (“remember Pushkin’s matchless reprise of Horace’s tag” was a typical example).
It was all well over the head of the average undergraduate. Yet Steiner’s Olympian generalities were always punctuated with brilliant shafts of insight, and the pungency of his sentences, delivered in a high-octane and not always comprehensible midatlantic cascade, held his audiences spellbound. His hearers seldom came away with a clear idea of his argument, but they were certain that something important had been said.
Lisa Jardine described Steiner as “a rebel who made us aspire to being Europeans; he helped move British culture from utter provincialism to cosmopolitanism, and taught us to listen to language”. She first heard of existentialism in one of Steiner’s lectures. “People thought he was showing off,” she recalled. “Here was this firebrand with a foreign accent, of whom all our teachers disapproved.”
His listeners felt they had been given a privileged glimpse into an Aladdin’s cave of European culture of which they had been deprived by insular British academe.
The freewheeling nature of Steiner’s discourse was the antithesis of the highly specialised traditions of British scholarship. “In France, where they are passionate about abstract ideas, if you shoot a man for disagreeing with you about Hegel then that is a tremendous compliment to the life of the mind,” he once observed wistfully. “The English would say: ‘No, no. That is very silly.’ ”
Steiner was often credited with reinventing the role of the critic by exploring art and thought unbounded by national or institutional frontiers – and that was, perhaps, his problem. His interests could not be encompassed by any single academic discipline. He could not be “slotted in” to the British university system in the years before the term “multidisciplinary” had, largely as a result of his influence, become fashionable.
Steiner’s determination to ask awkward questions was infuriating to some. It was once suggested that the term “steiner” should be employed, like ohms and watts, as a measure of controversy. He once informed a roomful of African and Asian academics that the Third World could not afford the luxury of universities; he outraged Jewish opinion by floating the possibility that Hitler might have been good for the Jews, in giving them what they had always wanted – the promised land – and he asked whether the survival of the Jews had been worth the appalling cost: would not complete assimilation be a better idea?
What particularly irritated Steiner’s critics was the combination of a presumption of omniscience with an almost cavalier attitude to texts. Even friends acknowledged that his immense range came at the price of accuracy. Everyone had their favourite Steinerian blunder. The philosopher Wittgenstein did not say that the unwritten half of his Tractatus was the most important part; nor did King Lear jump off the white cliffs of Dover.
But then, as Terry Eagleton once remarked: “One does not go to George Steiner, any more than one goes to the National Enquirer, for the facts”; and errors that would have devastated more humdrum reputations made no impact at all on Steiner – rather the reverse.
There was no great unifying theory one could label “Steinerian”, and in any case he saw no problem in being inconsistent. Instead, in his lectures and books, beginning with Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1958) and The Death of Tragedy (1960), he posed huge philosophical questions about the humanities and their relationship to 20th-century history, most centrally about language and creativity and its debasement in the post-holocaust age.
Steiner’s contempt for the modern had dark roots in a Judaic sense of tragedy, centred round the Holocaust (he preferred the term Shoah) as the defining catastrophe of our age. In Steiner’s view, the Holocaust had destroyed the assumption that literary culture is a custodian of humane values.
“Some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been trained to read Shakespeare and Goethe,” he wrote, suggesting “the paradox that modern barbarism sprang in some intuitive, perhaps necessary way, from the very core and locale of humanistic civilisation”.
Indeed, sometimes he went so far as to suggest that great art might have a deadening effect on our moral sensibilities: “If I have spent the day teaching King Lear or Bach, or in front of Goya, I come home and it may be that the cry in the street is muffled.”
Steiner’s best work was prompted by investigations into the power of language, whether used to literary ends (by Heidegger, for example) or marshalled for the perpetration of evil, as in the case of the Holocaust. This was the central preoccupation of his collection Language and Silence (1967), in which he explored the limitations of language, and the possibility that the only moral response to the atrocities of our age is not literature but silence. There was, as Adorno had said, and as Steiner never tired of repeating, “no poetry after Auschwitz”.
Yet paradoxically, rather than despairing of “high” culture, Steiner put faith in its transmission. And though silence may have been the only response to the horrors of the Holocaust, Steiner was incapable of it.
Indeed, the critical success of his novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A H (1981), in which a team of Nazi hunters discovers an aged Adolf Hitler living in exile in the Peruvian jungle, led him, briefly, to consider becoming a novelist, notwithstanding his strictures on the impossibility of postholocaust literature. The question as to why someone who doubted the capacity of the humanities to humanise devoted half a century to their interpretation remained, like so many of Steiner’s conundrums, unanswered.
Francis George Steiner was born in Paris on April 23 1929 to parents who had left Austria five years before. His father, a senior lawyer in the Austrian Central Bank, saw “with grim clairvoyance” the forthcoming Nazi storm, but when he warned friends and relatives to leave Vienna, they dismissed him as a “tedious Cassandra”. Steiner recalled that, as late as 1938, his aunts and cousins in Vienna and Prague were saying: “Oh come off it, we’re completely safe.” Many stayed and died.
Steiner’s father believed that Jews were endangered wherever they went, and set about equipping his children, George and his older sister, with the tools of survival – languages, learning, and the ability to pack a suitcase and leave in a hurry.
Steiner’s mother, a “typical Viennese grande dame”, was also a formidable influence. Although her son was born with a withered right arm, she refused to let him use his left hand. “From her came the conviction that if it’s difficult, it must be fun and worth doing,” Steiner recalled.
Young George grew up with “three mother tongues”, French, German and English. He was reading Shakespeare in English and Homer in ancient Greek by the age of five. His father took him to museums every Saturday and taught him to love the classics, poetry and music.
Once asked if he had ever read anything frivolous as a child, he replied “Moby
Dick”.
Luck played its part. In 1940 the family went on a trip to New York. Within a month, the Nazis had occupied Paris. Steiner spent the war years at the French lycée in Manhattan and became an American citizen in 1944.
Following a spell at the Sorbonne after the war,
Steiner chose Chicago University in preference to Yale. He majored in sciences, but later switched to literature and philosophy.
In exchange for help with his academic work, his paratrooper room-mate, Alfie, took him to hear
Dizzy Gillespie, taught him poker (which he later abandoned for chess) and procured a prostitute for him at 19 – all services for which he remained deeply grateful.
Steiner went on to study at Harvard and gained a Rhodes scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford – where he ran into the first of many academic brick walls. His doctoral dissertation was turned down by the Donne and Eliot scholar Helen (later Dame Helen) Gardner on the grounds that it was a work of comparative literature, a subject then unknown at Oxford.
Relenting somewhat, the university allowed Steiner to take one chapter of his magnum opus and turn it into what Steiner described as “the most boring and footnoted Dphil ever to moulder in the Bodleian”. His original thesis eventually became The Death of
Tragedy, his magisterial survey of the genre over 2,500 years.
Steiner worked for The Economist from 1952 to 1956. During this time, he met Zara Shakow, a New Yorker of Lithuanian descent, then on secondment at the Foreign Office. They had both received separate postcards from former professors at Harvard urging them to “be a sport” and meet up. The professors had a bet that the two would get married if they ever met.
They met for afternoon tea, agreeing to send back a postcard saying “you lose the bet”. But they married in 1955, and Zara would accompany her husband to Cambridge to become vice-president of New Hall.
In 1956 Steiner returned to America to take up a post at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where he was appointed lecturer in 1959. Two years later he returned to England at the suggestion of John Cockcroft, who was setting up Churchill College, Cambridge, and wanted a director of studies in English.
Steiner became a founding fellow of the college, but it was soon clear that he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he applied for a university job he was turned down and given to understand that he would never get a job in the English faculty.
Steiner professed not to mind, saying: “I’m a Hegelian, taught to think and feel against myself ”; but there is no doubt that he felt his rejection keenly.
Churchill offered to set him up as professorial fellow at the college but he turned the offer down. In 1969 he resigned his fellowship, though retaining the title “extraordinary fellow” of the college.
Steiner might have returned to the US, but his father objected that Hitler, who had apparently predicted that no one bearing the name Steiner would be left in Europe, would then have won. So he decided to tough it out in England – becoming, in his description, “a great wanderer, a figure on the margins, working in universities but belonging to none”.
In many ways the outsider role suited him. He honed his abstract polemical style in deliberate contrast to the precise provincialism of English scholarship, “surfing the wave of anger” that greeted his provocations, as one admirer put it. As a result he had a huge influence on a younger more radical generation of writers, thinkers and academics.
Steiner remained at Churchill until 1974 when he was offered Europe’s oldest chair of comparative literature at the University of Geneva, where he remained, on and off, for 20 years.
In 1994 Oxford University appointed him visiting Weidenfeld Professor of European Comparative Literature.
Steiner was a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur and was awarded the King Albert Medal by the Royal Belgian Academy. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1998.
Steiner continued to live in Cambridge. He and his wife, Zara, had a son and a daughter.
‘People thought he was showing off. Here was this firebrand of whom all our teachers disapproved’
‘Some of the men who devised Auschwitz had been trained to read Shakespeare and Goethe,’ he wrote