Obituary: George Steiner, writer, critic, polyglot and polymath

George Steiner in 2006 (Photo: Getty Images)

In remembering George Steiner, I wish particularly to recall his connections with Scotland, with Glasgow and Edinburgh, and my own and colleagues’ fleeting but intense engagement with him in 1997 in Cambridge and in Dundee.

Yet briefly he was a European, born in Paris, brought up and educated in the US, at a French lycée in New York, then at the University of Chicago, BA, 1948; at Harvard, where he gained his MA in 1950, before proceeding as a Rhodes scholar to Balliol College, Oxford (the Scots’ college), for his PhD, which served as the basis of his classic The Death of Tragedy (1960; US edition 1961).

In 1969 he was called to Churchill College, Cambridge (founded 1960), where, in harmony with Winston Churchill’s own wishes for the college, Sir John Cockcroft wanted an English tutor who knew something about science and mathematics.

That Steiner had received in the liberal arts tradition at Chicago, then under President Robert M. Hutchins, and he was an obvious choice.

I first knew him by his engagement in the famous or notorious Two Cultures affair, provoked by C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959 at Cambridge, in which Steiner came down firmly on the side of Snow, against F. R. Leavis.

Jumping decades, his Gifford Lectures in Glasgow, 1990, Grammars of Creation, led to his book of the same title (2001).

Steiner was chosen to deliver in Scotland an inaugural lecture – the First Edinburgh University Festival Lecture, A Festival Overture, in August 1996, for the 50th anniversary of that great institution. No better choice could there have been in this European city.

There he pointed out that all people and things, including institutions, have their birth, their growth, and their eventual decline and even death. He offered two suggestions to both revivify and sustain the Festival. First, master classes for selected young persons from the great visitors to the city. Second, he asserted that in the late 20th century any such festival that did not address science and technology together with the arts was not doing its job.

Together with Richard Demarco, I decided that this demanded some follow-up, and together we gained the support of the principals of the University of Dundee and of Abertay University and from the then Lord Provost Mervyn Rolfe. So we developed a conference, Steiner, Art and Science: A City Responds, in August 1997.

With staff from BBC Radio Scotland, we visited Churchill College to interview Steiner. Imagine walking to the senior common room and encountering Martin Wells, grandson of H G Wells, on the way. Steiner kindly hosted three of us at lunch, but once again came more. Just a few days before the Dundee conference, he called to ask whether he and his wife, Vera, might attend the conference in person, and that at his expense. With reference to his 20 years as professor at Geneva (1974-1994), we discussed Mary Shelley and Frankenstein in regard to Dundee; and, in correspondence I dared to broach the subject which he himself never flinched from addressing – the Shoah, or Holocaust. He patiently understood my particular reason for doing so, which I only now realise chimed with his own statement: “...some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been trained to read Shakespeare and Goethe.” (Language and Silence, 2010). It is, therefore, particularly poignant that he should have died so soon after the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (27 January).

George Steiner calls forth superlatives. He was most erudite, magisterial, a polyglot and polymath across cultures and ages, and a passionate thinker and commentator upon relations between the arts and sciences.

Within a single one-hour lecture, he would call forth authors, actors and ideas ranging from the pre-Socratics to Russian chess grandmaster Kasparov, as, for example, in The Poetry of Thought (March 2016).

Yet more, he had something of the prophet in him, on the disinterested pursuit of truth, of goodness and of beauty. Witness his inaugural Bronowski Memorial Lecture, Has Truth a Future? (BBC, 1978).

A sometimes stern critic, George Steiner had, of course, his own critics – some deprecatory. Even the term polymath may be accorded in praise (Callimachus), or dispraise (Plato). Compare the charge of “sciolism” (being a jack-of-all-trades and master of none), levelled at Hippias of Elis. The battle between the generalist and the specialist is perennial, one well-known to us in Scotland, but Steiner recognised the need for both.

So in conclusion, I quote the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in a statement with which George Steiner would also surely have sympathised: “We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all embracing knowledge... but on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind to command more than a small specialised portion of it.

“I can see no other escape from this dilemma... than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them – and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.”

George Steiner was no fool, but he did take intellectual risks in his breadth. Yet he shall be greatly missed by many for his rich appreciation of language and truth, and for his insightful and constructive provocations.

George Steiner is survived by his wife, Vera (née Shakow); by their children, David and Deborah, and by two grandchildren.

COLIN SANDERSON