The first time I saw George Steiner was at an event ten or so years ago. At that time, when European elections were approaching, it was still possible to invite intellectuals from central Europe to speak, and people actually listened to them. The room was packed, and at the end of the session the audience was invited to ask questions. Steiner’s talk on the rise of populism had been powerful, on both a historical and a philosophical level. A man asked a convoluted question, more to showcase his knowledge than to seek an answer. Steiner didn’t go easy on him. I thought this great intellectual, some of whose works I had read, was not an easy fellow.
I wasn’t wrong. I saw him again a couple years later, at a colloquium at the École Normale Supérieure, to which leading specialists on Antigone had come from all over the world to exchange ideas. Before the opening of the session, Steiner, unlike the other participants, didn’t join in the conversation. He stayed in the background, tense, engrossed in his thoughts. He looked like a nineteenth-century Romantic, preparing for a duel on a cold morning, knowing that his life might be about to end.
That moment was typical of Steiner. When he speaks, he’s fully engaged. His always adventurous thinking unfolds as soon as he articulates it. And even though he has an encyclopedic knowledge, expressed in many languages, and is at home in several disciplines, Steiner is always on the hunt for more. He poaches, he dives into the underbrush. He hates the beaten path and prefers to get lost, even if he has to go back the way he came. In short, he seeks to surprise even himself.
Such a modus operandi is not easy for someone who has never believed that the piling on of knowledge is the way to give a speech, which is supposed to articulate a theory.
This is because in order to think, one must use language. And for decades Steiner has analyzed the traps, the maneuvering, the tricks, the difficulties, the false bottoms of language. An admirer and daily reader of Heidegger, he keeps his thinking within the certainty of our finitude and hooked to his attempt to bring together poetic speech and the origins of language.
We could go on and on about the highly scientific aspect of the various intellectual exercises that Steiner has mastered. But that is of little consequence, because he himself makes light of it. With Steiner you never have the feeling that to reach a goal, to elucidate a problem, would bring some consolation. Quite the opposite. The search itself is the essence of life. And the more dangerous the process, the more he revels in it.
He is constantly on the lookout. Funny and sarcastic, sometimes unflattering about himself and his contemporaries, serious and exhilarating, Steiner is lucid to the point of despair, and his pessimism is active.
He is a son of Kafka, whose work he knows by heart, but he hates Freud and is curiously scornful of psychoanalysis. He is not without paradoxes. He admires the exact sciences but continues to spend a great deal of time, like a hobbyist, seeking the infralinguistic zones that govern our relationship to the world.
He hates interviews. I knew that. At a time when I was too busy with other obligations that had temporarily halted my work as a journalist, I asked him on behalf of the France Culture radio station to grant an interview with an interlocutor of his choice. He said: “Come over to Cambridge. Come see me.” I asked the president of Radio France permission to cross the Channel with a tape recorder, feeling a bit like a boarding-school kid asking permission to leave the premises because a great-aunt was coming to visit for a few hours.
Steiner’s wife, Zara, opened the door. She had baked a cheesecake between writing a couple of pages (she is currently one of the leading scholars in European history, focusing on the advent of totalitarianism). Outside, in the small yard, there were hollyhocks, birds chirping at the top of their lungs, perched on the branches of a cherry tree blossoming in the early spring. George led me to the back of the yard and opened a door to his office, a sort of octagonal cabin built to house as many books as possible.
He stopped the Mozart record he was listening to. The conversation could begin.
I didn’t know then that I would return so often and that over time he would come to see our meetings almost as a secret, the apprenticeship of what he calls a long Saturday.
I will soon return to Cambridge with this book. I hope George will have completed the new project he was working on at the time. It will be an opportunity to continue our conversation.
Laure Adler
July 2014