Introduction to George Steiner

By Maurice Elliott

Presenting Professor George Steiner is difficult, if only because his learning and eloquence are legendary. I feel that it should be done in at least three languages, and probably in a verse form appropriate for someone who shares a birthday with Shakespeare. Fortunately, Professor Steiner’s courtesy and grace are also legendary. Did he not once say, “I think we must all learn to be guests of each other.” Therefore I may be forgiven a salutation stolen from Chekhov, who has a schoolmaster in one of his stories addressed as “Your Scholarship.” Educated in Paris, and at Harvard, Chicago, and Oxford, Professor Steiner is “Extraordinary Fellow” (how apt!) of Churchill College, Cambridge, Professor Emeritus of the University of Geneva, and the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative Literature at Oxford.

I hesitate to call Professor Steiner a literary critic, not least on account of Rilke’s advice to a young poet: “Read as little as possible of literary criticism – such things are either partisan games, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.” Perhaps his first two books, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (1958), and The Death of Tragedy (1960), are literary criticism – arising out of a debt of love, he might argue – but the major portion of his work of over twenty volumes, including prize-winning fiction, and in addition to his two hundred or more appearances as a reviewer in The New Yorker, has concerned two inextricably related topics, and in many ways forms an arabesque on a double-braided theme: the mysterious problem of evil, particularly in relation to the Shoah and like events; and the crisis in language and humane culture, the relation between aesthetics and the barbaric. Central to his thought, he has said, “is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.” It has been a complaint of his critics, that Professor Steiner repeats himself. Well, there is a short riposte: “He needs to!” It is clear that he has a custodial and ever-vigilant eye – for example, on outbursts of racism and neo-Nazism. ”Lest we forget” might also be said of Kristallnacht, November 1933; and in 1994 Professor Steiner wrote that of the Jewish boys and girls in his school class or circle, only two, including himself, had survived. It is clear from each of his works that his theme is unending and that his passionate commitment to understanding spurs him to apocalyptic eloquence and provocative expression, qualities that do not suit all tastes. In a fine tribute to Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti (as always, alert to the conscience of words) gives a version of the artist as one who shares the tortured gravel of everyday life with the “dog-like vice” of “sticking his damp nose into every thing.” For Broch, says Canetti, this vice takes the form of breathing – “he has a memory for breath,” which amounts to an intelligent and refined study of the relationships between people.