GEORGE STEINER IN AMERICA

For more than thirty years, the literary authority George Steiner has presented himself to Americans as a critic of culture — our culture in particular. He was educated at the University of Chicago, and he writes in English. But what he has used his time in America to do is tell us that we are provincial and parochial, ignorant in particular of the foreign languages we need to know for the philosophies and sciences we should study and the writers we should read.

In 1978, for example, in a talk called “The Archives of Eden,” Steiner notoriously declared that the United States has produced little of cultural worth and instead functions as the repository of others’ arts, having superb museums and libraries holding the work of non-Americans. The reason for this is that Americans most value “material progress and recompense.” While great art is made by an elite for an elite, ours is a plebeian society in which ” human mediocrity” prevails. Shy, diffident America was impressed and grateful to be enlisted into Steiner’s larger intellectual world, and the New Yorker published more than 150 of his review-essays between 1967 and 1997.

The British (perhaps because they have an older and even more determinedly parochial culture) chose instead to regard Steiner primarily as a charlatan — a sort of polyglot, tiresomely serious-minded Woody Allen, scattering allusions to last week’s Scientific American. The comic commentator on British life, Clive James, attended Steiner’s lectures at Cambridge University during the late 1960s, heard the dons’ doubts, and gave droll voice to their reservations in a brief section in his long, mocking doggerel about academics in England, Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage:

His name was broadcast by a neon sign

On top of his top hat. It said DOC STEIN.

A placard on his back asked, “Tired? Tense?”

And answered, “Take my Culture cure. Ten cents.”. . .

“The Lapse,” spake Stein, “of Culture in the West

We know to be (a spectroscopic test

Was carried out last week at M. I. T.

By seven leading brains including me)

A function of Verbality’s decay.”

In his brief and newly published autobiographical essay, Errata, Steiner recalls the “unctuous venom” with which “elements in the English Faculty of Cambridge University during the 1960s’ resisted him. His colleagues animus was based, he tells us, on his being a polyglot (“French, German and English have been to me equally “native'”). The British academics, insular bigots and fools, smugly assumed — as Steiner tells the story — that he could “never possess the somnambular at-homeness in a single tongue that marks both the writer and the receptive reader of a literary text.”

The success of such writers as Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov, fluent from childhood in no fewer languages than Steiner, demonstrates the obvious falsity of this idea. But that doesn’t mean his British colleagues were exactly wrong about the man. It merely means that the explanation for Steiner’s leaden prose and tin ear must lie elsewhere.

The subtitle of Errata is the pretentiously Socratic “An Examined Life.” (The title itself surely alludes to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, in which Franklin refers to his life’s adventures as “errata” — a printer’s joke for typographical, moral, and intellectual errors.) The book recounts some striking anecdotes. When Steiner was six years old, his father introduced him to the Iliad in Greek. When he was nineteen, his roommate at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s — an ex-paratrooper who was able to leap straight from the floor onto his upper bunk — first introduced him to sex by taking him to a prostitute in Cairo, Illinois, “a town justly ill-famed but, by virtue of its name, reassuring to me.” At the same university, his professor Allen Tate seriously asked him to research the question of “whether or not a Jew was, in the context of his faith and morals, at liberty to accept a challenge to a duel” — since Tate wished to challenge Karl Shapiro for criticizing Tate’s choice of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos for the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

But these constitute almost the only recountings of events or challenges in Steiner’s life. We learn that his father early feared and warned of the Nazis’ intentions and that the family had fled from Vienna in 1924 to Paris, where Steiner was born in 1929, and later arrived in Manhattan, where he attended high school at the French Lycee. We do not discover when the family arrived in Manhattan and do not hear any details at all of the family’s forced peregrinations.

Of all Steiner’s early and later family, we have a description only of his fatherland that is almost exclusively a description of his father’s ” innermost passions” for “intellectual history” and “history and philosophic aspects of biology” and his desire that Steiner be “a teacher and a thorough scholar.” His mother is “my radiant Mama”; his daughter an “exact and illuminating philologist”; and his wife one “whose sagacity of heart, radiant good sense, and unspoken perceptions are incomparable.” This sole description of his wife, presumably his first and only wife, a much-admired diplomatic historian, is inserted into a sentence about her driving them in a blizzard and how “we edged the car . . . back to a paved road.” The reader would love to know if his wife is driving because Steiner cannot drive — and how it is that she is driving but “we” got the car back on track. Is Steiner a back- seat driver determined to drive the car along with his wife? So sparse are personal details that one teases at any presented.

Instead, Steiner uses Errata to remount the hobbyhorses he has ridden again and again in his essays — the only difference being that this time he uses truncated personal anecdotes to start him off. Dusted off one more time in the book are such tired old chestnuts as: his assertion that after the Iliad and Odyssey, there are virtually “no poetics” or “philosophic inquiry into the status of the imaginary” worth mentioning; his belief that Racine is better than Shakespeare because Shakespeare has no “orders of moral and intellectual clarity”; his opinion that it is because the Jews are the ” begetters” of God that they are “unforgiven” in Western culture; and his conviction of “the radical untranslatability of music.”

One worries a bit about his teaching when he tells us that “the Sirens of teaching and interpretation” first began to sing for him when, as a student at the University of Chicago, he saw the awe with which his fellow students received his view of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl as “a somewhat overwrought, involuted parable” (which it isn’t). He reminds the reader of his “distrust of theory” and belief that “the current triumph of the theoretical in literary, historical, sociological discourse is self-deception” — at which point one must remember that Steiner has frequently endorsed theory; he just can’t stomach deconstructive theory.

It cannot really be explained why Errata focuses on Steiner’s intellectual stances rather than on anything concrete about his location in time and space, about the facts and events in his life. Some (Steiner himself, perhaps) might claim that the book belongs to the genre of the “confession” – – the genre in which St. Augustine, describing his intellectual and emotional pursuit of divine love, does not name his earthly “loves” (not even the woman by whom he had a child). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions similarly describes his political and philosophical development with little concern for complete biographical detail, while James Joyce fictionalized his own account of intellectual and artistic development in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

We don’t, however, have in fact a confession in Errata. At almost seventy years old, Steiner not only considers his life the sum of his ideas, but also seems to believe that his ideas sprang full-blown. There is no development, no progress in this book: Either Steiner has the same ideas he had reading the Iliad at age six and The Rape of the Lock at nineteen, or he has entirely forgotten that his ideas were ever inchoate or undeveloped.

This lack of self-recognition and self-historical understanding reveals Steiner for what, alas, he is: a lightweight in heavyweight’s armor. Steiner and his rhetoric conjure up the Wizard of Oz: a necromancer, dexterous but pitiable, toiling endlessly over smoke-machines and other special effects. In Errata one searches, almost always in vain, for some insight into what connects the immigrant polymath to his high-sounding words. What emerges, touchingly enough, from Steiner’s inability to venture any real intimacies is — once the reader has discounted his patented grandiosity — a curious analog to the old, old notion of a tragic flaw.

One peculiar aspect of Errata is its echo of No Passion Spent, a 1996 collection of what Steiner regards as his most important essays. The topics taken up are largely the same and so are the conclusions. Despite savage attack, Steiner has chosen to stand on the absolute importance of these topics for his life.

At the very end of Errata, Steiner finally addresses the expectations set up by his title, and — its hallmark pomposity notwithstanding — his description of his “errors” does achieve an unwitting pathos. He claims credit for introducing the ideas whose spread he despises but for which he wishes he had got the credit: “the thesis of deconstruction and postmodernism” and the introduction “to English-speaking readers [of] the Frankfurt School” of criticism. The reader hears ad nauseam of a “fundamental challenge I voiced” that “was taken up by others.”

But Steiner’s verbal slurry covers an emotional inarticulateness that he cannot address — and that could, in fact, have made in other hands a great autobiography. One of his errata rings truer than he himself seems to understand:

My father was, and remains long after his death in 1968, the indispensable friend, the exigent partner in dialogue. Nevertheless, there may be a mustard- seed of truth in the psychoanalytic conjecture that an overthrow, a psychically homicidal erasure of one’s father-figure, is necessary to independence; that there can be, without such rebellion, neither sufficient originality nor will to power. It may be that too much of my father’s ” library” . . . conditions and confines me still.

Some readers will have picked up this “mustard-seed of truth” from the beginning of Errata when Steiner described how a father conned a six-year- old into reading Homer’s Greek and made him believe he’d understood a masterpiece.

Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.