George Steiner By Jeet Heer National Post (September 16, 2004) Like the celebrated Dr. Jekyll, George Steiner is a highly civilized man who occasionally goes on a rampage. The good Steiner often appears in magazines like the Times Literary Supplement, where he can be found suavely explaining the latest scholarship on Sartre, Kafka, or Nietzsche. But it doesn’t take much to bring out the bad Steiner, a high-brow snob often wearing the pained expression of a maitre d’ who finds himself working in Taco Bell. The world constantly fails to live up to Steiner’s high standards, as he is always quick to remind us. When he works himself into a lather, Steiner is the type of writer who gives high culture a bad name. “Ninety-nine percent of humanity conducts lives either of severe deprivation – physical, emotional, cerebral – or contributes nothing to the sum of insight, of beauty, of moral trial in our civil condition,” Steiner once wrote in Salmagundi. “It is a Socrates, a Mozart, a Gauss or a Galileo who, in some degree, compensates for man.” The question worth asking is: if people are such pigs than why did Socrates enjoy talking to just about everyone he met? Are the ideals of humanism, which Steiner cherishes, compatible with contempt for actually existing humanity? More than almost any other contemporary thinker, Steiner can divide up a room into competing camps. His admirers cherish him as a polymath who is willing to tackle the most important writers and ask the hardest questions. He seems particularly popular in Canada. Eleanor Wachtel, host of the CBC Radio program Writers and Company, described Steiner as one of our greatest living thinkers. My colleague Robert Fulford once wrote in Queen’s Quarterly that “For decades Steiner has been the intellectual’s intellectual, a critic of ideas at home in the seminar rooms of ancient universities and the pages of the New Yorker.“ To gauge the size of Steiner’s fan base, just try and borrow his latest book Lessons of the Masters from the Toronto Public Library system: you’ll have to put your name at the bottom of a long waiting list and find other reading material for the next six months. Like health care, access to Steiner is carefully rationed out in this country. Steiner’s enemies are as numerous as his well-wishers. He is the critic other critics love to hate. Roger Sale has complained that Steiner’s “impulse to mastery” leads him “to mongering the humourless.” Steiner’s The Death of Tragedy was dismissed by John Simon as being made up of “commonplaces” and “absurd generalizations.” Marvin Mudrick was blunter, saying that Steiner’s work often resembles “eleven pounds of shit in a ten pound bag.” With great understatement, Joseph Esptein simply observed that “many people who do intellectual work keep a cold spot in their hearts for George Steiner.” Given the polarized debate over Steiner, the literary critic Christopher Knight has done us all a favor by offering a judicious assessment of this controversial writer in a fine new book, Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader (University of Toronto Press). As his title indicates, Knight places the careers of three still-living writers within the context of the venerable tradition of literary journalism. These days, most critics are professionals and specialists: they write for fellow academics in small journals, often in prose as arcane and demanding as that found in the natural sciences. In contrast to this dominant academic tendency, Steiner (like Donoghue and Kermode) is a critic of the old school, a generalist who writes on a wide variety of topics in magazines you can buy at the newsstand. As Knight writes, “Donoghue, Kermode, and Steiner are public critics, capable, in a time of specialization, of ranging widely without a noticeable loss of critical acumen, and more than capable of expressing themselves in a language befitting that of the literary artists whom they so admire.” In examining the role that Steiner and company play in contemporary culture, Knight is contributing to the recent tendency to celebrate public intellectuals and lament their passing in an age where journalism has become more superficial just as the academy has become more hermetic. Thankfully, however, Knight actually transcends the whole tired “public intellectuals” debate by giving a detailed and finely individualized account of each of his writers, carefully weighing their virtues and vices. Knight has a good ear for style and tone, a rare trait in a young writer. Thus Knight rightly scorns Steiner’s tendency to adopt a doleful nostalgic voice, while praising the crispness and clarity of Steiner at his best. Whenever I’m down on Steiner, I just have to remind myself that his book Martin Heidegger (1978) is a little gem, a compact volume that is perhaps the best introductory guide to a very difficult and potent thinker. Uncommon Readers is really a study of book reviewing, a lowly but important profession. Often scorned as parasites or hacks, book reviewers are a necessary part of our cultural ecology. Like bees that help pollinate flowers, buzzing critics might seem like pests but they serve a useful task. The only problem with Steiner is that his ego refuses to let him see that he’s at his best as a book reviewer and popularizer. He’s a bee with delusions that he can stretch out his wings like an eagle. Unlike their insect counterparts, book reviewers can be very entertaining when they sting. In tribute to the art of book reviewing, it is worth revisiting one of the most amusing critiques ever inflicted upon a George Steiner book. “But what can you expect from a critic who, in his Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, performed stylistic analysis on a passage from the Russian on the basis of its uses of ‘a’ and ‘the,’ even though Russian has neither the definite nor the indefinite article?” John Simon once asked in The New Criterion. “Or a scholar, moreover, who in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly settled the vexed ‘Homeric question’ (without knowing Greek): the Iliad and Odyssey are the works of the same poet, the former of his angry youth, the latter of his mellow old age? Or of a fellow (sorry, Extraordinary Fellow, his title at Cambridge University; in Geneva, he is a professor) who published a two-part essay in The Kenyon Review arguing that Robert Graves was an overrated minor poet, but an underrated major prose writer, and cited as evidence, among others, Grave’s two novels about the Argonauts, The Golden Fleece and Hercules, My Shipmate – without realizing that they were the same novel under its British and American titles? And when a reader wrote in pointing out this and other comparable errors, Steiner’s printed rejoinder was not an apology but a string of insults hurled at the hapless correspondent.” Unlike Christopher Knight’s judicious study, Simon’s attack on Steiner is unfair and mean-spirited. Yet there is something fitting about a master reviewer being reviewed in these terms. Taken together, both Knight’s book and Simon’s review help give us a fully-balanced view of George Steiner.