George Steiner

James Gardner captures the eccentricity, flaws, and brilliance of George Steiner in a short piece in the June 15 issue of the Weekly Standard .

His weaknesses are manifest – Steiner is “an unapologetic know-it-all and acrobatic show-off” given to “incessant posturings in print.” Gardner describes his usual modus as one of “hyperventilating conviction, elevated, intellectualized, and incessant.” I would only add that writing like a know-it-all is easier when you know as much as Steiner does. He makes an illuminating comparison of Steiner and de Maistre, but notes that Steiner wears his pessimism so lightly and so long that he has become “so comfortable in his lugubrious dissent as to be oddly heartened by it.”

But he also notes that Steiner recognizes that the “defining, immovable truth of modern times is the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia . . . and the West’s dysthmic response to it.” Steiner’s “abiding reverence for words” and his “rare sense of style” give him an ability to “summon the syntactical powers of English” beyond his contemporaries.

Above all, he commends Steiner’s selection of the writers that mean most to him: “It is here that Steiner’s [tragic] reverence for the exile, the displaced person, the ‘depayse,’ reaches its fullest fruition. Most people who take letters seriously view their native literature with a parochial, even tribalistic sense of proprietorship, just as they regard foreign literature as – foreign.” Not Steiner: Since he is “nowhere a native, it follows that he is foreign to no culture, at least no European culture.”

Gardner also observes that Steiner is almost along among contemporary critics in being “spectacularly ambitious.” For Steiner, “everything is always at stake in all of his writings, as though history and the future of mankind itself hang in the balance . . . . You have only to read a few salvos of his prose to understand just how spare are the aspirations of most of his latter-day colleagues of the scribal class, just how little faith they have in the power of words to do anything more than meet a deadline.”