George Steiner

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  George Steiner was born Francis George Steiner on the 23rd of April 1929. He was a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator, and he is described as both French and American. Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature director of the British Council, thought him a magnificent lecturer, prophetic and doom-laden. He would "turn up with half a page of scribbled notes, and never refer to them".

  The novelist A. S. Byatt reached for an even longer description. She called him a "late, late, late Renaissance man" and "a European metaphysician with an instinct for the driving ideas of our time".

  How does a boy raised among several languages grow into a thinker obsessed with what language can do to people? And why did a mind so widely admired find such an uneasy welcome in the English university where he made his career?

  482728

• 2. Three Mother Tongues

  ›

  Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris, was where Steiner was born to Else, née Franzos, and Frederick Georg Steiner, both Viennese Jews. He had an elder sister, Ruth Lilian, who was born in Vienna in 1922. Else was a Viennese grande dame. Frederick had been a senior lawyer at Austria's central bank, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, and in Paris he worked as an investment banker.

  Five years before his son's birth, Frederick had moved the family from Austria to France to escape the growing threat of anti-Semitism. He believed that Jews were "endangered guests wherever they went". So he wanted his children to have languages with which to earn a living, and to learn to "pack a suitcase rather than a steamer trunk".

  German, English and French were all mother tongues to the young Steiner. His mother was multilingual, and she would often "begin a sentence in one language and end it in another".

  At the age of six, Steiner was taught by his father to read the Iliad in the original Greek. Frederick believed firmly in a classical education.

  A withered right arm was the handicap Steiner was born with. His mother, for whom "self-pity was nauseating", would not let him become left-handed. She insisted that he use his right hand as an able-bodied person would.

  His first formal schooling took place at the Lycée Janson de Sailly, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.

  482710

• 3. The Survivor's Debt

  ›

  In 1940, Steiner's father was in New York City on an economic mission for the French government. German forces were preparing to invade France. Frederick obtained permission for his family to join him in the United States, and Steiner, his mother and his sister Lilian left by ship from Genoa.

  Within a month of their move, the Nazis occupied Paris. Many Jewish children had sat in Steiner's class at school, and he was one of only two who survived the war. His father's foresight had saved the family again, and it left Steiner feeling like a survivor. That feeling shaped his later writing profoundly.

  He stated it plainly: "My whole life has been about death, remembering and the Holocaust." He also described himself as a "grateful wanderer". In his words: "Trees have roots and I have legs; I owe my life to that."

  The Lycée Français de New York, in Manhattan, took him for the rest of his school years, and he became a United States citizen in 1944. At the University of Chicago he studied literature alongside mathematics and physics, and he earned a BA in 1948. Harvard University granted him an MA in 1950.

  A Rhodes Scholarship then carried him to Balliol College, Oxford, the first of several English institutions that would claim him.

  48271026

• 4. Firebrand at Cambridge

  ›

  The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, hosted Steiner as a scholar from 1956 to 1958. A Fulbright professorship in Innsbruck, Austria, followed in 1958-59. In 1959 he became Gauss Lecturer at Princeton, where he lectured for two more years.

  Churchill College, Cambridge, made him a founding fellow in 1961, but the English faculty did not welcome him. Some disapproved of this charismatic "firebrand with a foreign accent". Others questioned why he kept bringing the Holocaust into his lectures.

  Bryan Cheyette, professor of 20th-century literature at the University of Southampton, explained the mood of the time. In his words: "Britain … didn't think it had a relationship to the Holocaust; its mythology of the war was rooted in the Blitz, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain."

  Steiner drew a professorial salary at Cambridge, yet he was never made a full professor with the right to examine. Posts in the United States were open to him. His father objected, arguing that Hitler, who had said no one bearing the family name would be left in Europe, would then have won.

  Steiner stayed. "I'd do anything rather than face such contempt from my father," he said. In 1969 Churchill College elected him an Extraordinary Fellow.

  6482728

• 5. Geneva and the Chairs

  ›

  After several years as a freelance writer and occasional lecturer, Steiner accepted a post in 1974 at the University of Geneva. He became Professor of English and Comparative Literature there and kept the chair for 20 years. His teaching ran in four languages.

  Goethe supplied his guiding maxim: "no monoglot truly knows his own language." When Steiner retired in 1994, Geneva made him professor emeritus.

  Oxford claimed him twice in quick succession. From 1994 to 1995 he was the first Lord Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature and a Fellow of St Anne's College. In 1995 Balliol College named him an Honorary Fellow.

  Harvard University later appointed him Norton Professor of Poetry for 2001-02.

  14154827

• 6. Critic Without Borders

  ›

  The Guardian described Steiner in a 2001 article as a "polyglot and polymath". He is often credited with recasting the role of the critic, because he explored art and thought without regard for national frontiers or academic disciplines.

  Steiner preferred generalisation to specialisation. He insisted that being literate had to include knowledge of both the arts and the sciences.

  At the University of Chicago he was already active on undergraduate publications. He later contributed reviews and articles to many journals and newspapers, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. For The New Yorker he wrote for over thirty years, and he contributed over two hundred reviews.

  A deadpan streak ran beneath his seriousness. Once he was asked whether he had ever read anything trivial as a child. His answer was Moby-Dick.

  74278

• 7. Words That Love and Destroy

  ›

  Astonishment sat at the center of Steiner's thinking, and he admitted it might seem naive. In his words, you can use human speech "both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate".

  His view of nationalism followed from his Jewish identity. He believed nationalism is too inherently violent to satisfy the moral demands of Judaism. "Because of what we are," he said, "there are things we can't do."

  Steiner drew both criticism and support for arguing that racism is inherent in everyone and that tolerance is only skin deep. He is reported to have said that it is easy to sit in a room and declare racism horrible. Then he posed a test: a Jamaican family with six children plays reggae and rock music all day next door, and an estate agent says his property has lost its value. "Ask me then!" was his challenge.

  181942627

• 8. A Half Century of Books

  ›

  Steiner's literary career spanned half a century. His essays and books addressed the anomalies of contemporary Western culture and the "debasement" of language in the post-Holocaust age. His field was primarily comparative literature, with a special interest in translation and the nature of language.

  Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast, published in 1960, was his first book. It compared the ideas and ideologies of the Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Death of Tragedy followed in 1961. It began as his doctoral thesis at Oxford and surveyed literature from the ancient Greeks to the mid-20th century.

  After Babel, from 1975, is his best-known book. It was an early and influential contribution to translation studies. Television adapted it in 1977 as The Tongues of Men. In 1983 it inspired the creation of an English avant-rock group called News from Babel.

  No Passion Spent, from 1996, gathers essays on subjects as varied as Kierkegaard, Homer in translation, Biblical texts and Freud's dream theory. Errata: An Examined Life appeared in 1997 as a semi-autobiography. Grammars of Creation, published in 2001, grew out of his 1990 Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow. It ranges from cosmology to poetry.

  His last book, A Long Saturday: Conversations, was written with Laure Adler. It appeared in French in 2014 and in English in 2017.

  Four short story collections sit in Steiner's fiction shelf: Anno Domini: Three Stories (1964), Proofs and Three Parables (1992), The Deeps of the Sea (1996), and A cinq heures de l'après-midi (2008).

  The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., a novella from 1981, proved controversial. In it, Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler, the "A.H." of the title, alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II. The story explores ideas about the origins of European anti-semitism that Steiner first set out in his critical work In Bluebeard's Castle (1971). There he suggested that Nazism was Europe's revenge on the Jews for inventing conscience.

  Cheyette reads the fiction as "an exploratory space where he can think against himself". He sees it as a contrast, with its humility and openness set against Steiner's "increasingly closed and orthodox critical work".

  At its heart, Cheyette says, lies the survivor's "terrible, masochistic envy about not being there", the feeling of having missed the rendezvous with hell.

  In 1984 the French government made Steiner a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. A Guggenheim Fellowship had come in 1970-71. The Morton Dauwen Zabel Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters followed in 1989, and the Belgian Academy Council of Applied Sciences awarded him its King Albert Medal.

  Stanford University gave him the Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, the same year he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He was also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2001 he received the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities.

  Book prizes marked individual works. Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966 won the Remembrance Award in 1974. Proofs and Three Parables took the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1992 and the PEN/Macmillan Fiction Prize in 1993. In 1997 No Passion Spent earned the JQ Wingate Prize for Non-Fiction, which he shared with Louise Kehoe and Silvia Rodgers.

  Twelve honorary doctorates of literature were awarded to him. The first came from the University of East Anglia in 1976, followed by Leuven, Mount Holyoke College, Bristol, Glasgow, Liège, Ulster, Durham, Salamanca, Queen Mary University of London and Bologna. The last on the list is the University of Lisbon in 2009.

  A rejected draft of The Death of Tragedy, later published by Faber and Faber, followed Steiner's Oxford doctoral thesis. He took time away from his studies. He taught English at Williams College, and from 1952 to 1956 he worked as a leader writer for the London weekly The Economist.

  In London he met Zara Shakow, a New Yorker of Lithuanian descent who had also studied at Harvard. Their former professors had suggested the meeting. "The professors had had a bet... that we would get married if we ever met," Zara recalled.

  They married in 1955, the year Steiner received his DPhil from Oxford. Their son, David Steiner, served as New York State's Commissioner of Education from 2009 to 2011. Their daughter, Deborah Steiner, became a Professor of Classics at Columbia University.

  Steiner last lived in Cambridge, England. He died at home on the 3rd of February 2020, at the age of 90. Zara Steiner died from pneumonia ten days later.

  213061620