LAURE ADLER There’s something, George Steiner, that your friend Alexis Philonenko mentions in Cahiers de L’Herne: your arm, the deformity, that physical challenge. He talks about it, and suggests it might have been a source of suffering for you all your life. Yet you never talk about it.
GEORGE STEINER It’s very difficult for me to look at it objectively, of course. The decisive factor in my life was my mother’s genius—she was a great Viennese woman. She spoke several languages: French, Hungarian, Italian, English; she was fiercely proud, but in a completely private way; and she had marvelous self-assurance.
I must have been around three or four—I can’t remember exactly, but the moment was life altering. The first few years of my life were very difficult because my arm was more or less attached to my body; the treatments were very painful; I went from one hospital to the next to have it corrected. My mother said to me, “You are so lucky! You’ll never have to do your military service!” What she said changed my life. “You are so lucky!” It was amazing that she could say that. And she was right. I was able to go to graduate school two or three years before my peers who had to do their military service.
Imagine: being able to say that to her son! I hate today’s therapeutic culture, which uses euphemisms to describe the handicapped: “We’re going to deal with this as a social advantage,” and so on. That’s wrong: it’s very difficult, it’s a serious problem, but it can also be beneficial. I was raised at a time when we weren’t given aspirin or candy. There were shoes with zippers—very easy to put on. “No,” my mother said, “you’re going to learn how to tie your laces.” I can tell you, it was hard. Anyone with two good hands doesn’t even think about it, but it’s an incredible achievement to be able to tie shoe laces. I yelled, I cried, and after six or seven months I managed to tie my shoes. And my mother said, “You can write with your left hand.” I refused. Then she held my other hand behind my back, “You’re going to learn to write with your bad hand—yes, you are.” And she taught me how. I was able to draw pictures and sketch with my left hand. It was a metaphysics of effort. It was a metaphysics of will, discipline, and especially happiness to see all that as a great privilege; and it continued throughout my life.
I think it also enabled me to understand certain conditions, certain problems, that must be confronted by those with infirmities, problems that human Apollos, those fortunate to have a magnificent body and marvelous health, find difficult to grasp. What are the connections between physical and mental suffering and intellectual effort? We still don’t understand this very well. Let’s never forget that Beethoven was deaf, Nietzsche had terrible migraines, and Socrates was ugly. It’s fascinating to find out what another person has had to overcome. I always ask myself this question when I meet someone: What has that person experienced? What has been his or her victory—or major defeat?
L.A. In Errata you tell how your father, who was born in Vienna and understood very quickly that Nazism was on the rise, left Vienna and moved to Paris with his family. And so you were born in Paris, and one day when you were very young, you witnessed a demonstration where people were shouting, “Kill the Jews!”
G.S. Yes, that was known as the Stavisky affair. It was an obscure scandal but is remembered because the extreme right in France keeps bringing it up. One of the marchers was a Colonel de La Rocque. Today he seems like a rather sinister clown, but he was taken very seriously at the time. I was quite close to the march, near the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, and was running home up rue de la Pompe with my nanny because a small group of demonstrators of the extreme Right was approaching, led by Colonel de La Rocque. “Kill the Jews!” A phrase that would become “Better Hitler than Communism.” This was happening in a neighborhood (rue de la Pompe, avenue Paul-Doumer) where there was a large population of Jewish bourgeois. My mother, not because she was afraid, but rather out of respect for old-fashioned conventions, said to my nanny and me, “Oh! lower the blinds.” In came my father, who exclaimed, “Raise the blinds.” He led me onto our little balcony. I remember the scene vividly: “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” He said to me very calmly, “This is called history, and you must never be afraid.” For a child of six, those words were transformative. Since that time, I know what to call history, and if I’m afraid, I’m ashamed; and I try not to be afraid.
It was an enormous advantage for me to know very early on who Hitler was, and that knowledge provided me with me an “unsentimental” education. From the year of my birth, in 1929, my father had predicted with absolute clarity—I have his journals—what was going to happen. Nothing surprised him.
L.A. So your father, who had foreseen what was going to happen in a Europe inflamed by Nazism, then decided to move his family to the United States. How did that come about?
G.S. The French prime minister, Paul Reynaud, had decided at the last minute that the country desperately needed fighter planes, Grummans. My father was sent to New York with some other financial bigwigs to negotiate the purchase of fighter planes for France. When he arrived in New York, something incredible happened. We sometimes forget that New York was a neutral city, completely neutral, with a lot of Nazis there on business, the Swastika pinned on their collars, as well as Nazi bankers also on buying trips or there for financial negotiations. At a Wall Street club a German who had been a close friend of my father’s—this man ran the large Siemens company, which still exists—noticed him at a table and had a message sent over to him. My father tore up the note in front of everyone and didn’t even acknowledge his friend. He didn’t want to listen to him or see him. But his friend waited for him in the men’s room, took him by the shoulders, and said, “Listen to me. This very year we’re going to go through France like a hot knife through butter. Get your family out of there whatever the cost!” This took place before the fateful Wannsee conference, but already the big German bankers and CEOs knew what was happening from Polish accounts, as well as reports from the Wehrmacht in Poland; they knew that Jews would all be killed. Not how, or by what method, but they knew in principle: the Jews were going to be massacred.
This was 1940, right before the German invasion. Fortunately, my father took the warning very seriously. He asked Paul Reynaud permission for his family—my mother, my sister and me—to join him in the U.S., and Reynaud granted it. But my mother refused: “Out of the question! If we leave France, the children won’t pass their bac. My son will never get into the Académie française!” Luckily, we were a Jewish family and the father’s word was law. And so we left Paris and managed to get onto the last American cruise ship leaving from Genoa, just as the Germans were invading. If we hadn’t, would I be alive today? Some say the Germans didn’t know Hitler’s plans for France, but in fact—and I’m not making this up—some did know, and had known since the end of 1939, since the events in Poland, when huge massacres were already taking place. They weren’t allowed to talk about it, of course. But if you were the head of Siemens, you heard the news because the leaders of the Wehrmacht talked about it, told others about what was going on in Poland. That’s how our lives were saved.
L.A. Maybe that’s why there’s a sense of guilt that you mention in several of your books, that feeling of being “one too many”?
G.S. Yes, I feel that very strongly. At Janson-de-Sailly, in my class, only two Jews survived. And yet the class was full of Jews because Janson-de-Sailly was a sort of Jewish academy for young boys. All the others were killed. I think of this every day. Chance, the roulette wheel of survival, the mysterious lottery of chance. Why did the other children and their parents die? No one, in my opinion, should even try to understand that. It can’t be understood. All you can say is: “It was a matter of luck—the immeasurably mysterious throw of the dice.” If you’re religious—which I’m not—you see the hand of God in it. Otherwise you have to have the courage to say, “It was a complete game of chance, and I picked the right number.”
L.A. So you arrived in the U.S., went to a French high school there, and then experienced some rather unhappy years.
G.S. The book describing what New York was like in those days has not yet been written. It would be a fascinating subject, though. The lycée was in the hands of the Vichy government, of course. In my class there were the two sons—quite nice boys, incidentally—of the admiral who commanded Pétain’s fleet in Martinique. The lycée was officially Pétainist, but some of the students were refugees, resisters of one kind or another. And in the class just above mine, two friends who were only seventeen had lied about their age to go fight in France, and both were killed in the Vercors. They were only two years older than I. And at the lycée we fought each other between classes because there was a lot of hatred. The Vichy gang, full of confidence at that time, didn’t just hate Jews; they hated the Left, anyone who had shown any resistance. As soon as the tide turned, the head of the lycée, all the teachers and the administrative staff, promptly put up the Cross of Lorraine, the symbol of a free France. It was a decisive lesson for me: how things can change from one day to the next! General de Gaulle came to visit the lycée, and those cowards bowed down before him, of course, pretending to be overjoyed with the Liberation. That taught me a lot.
That said, I had a wonderful education there. Why? Because the great intellectuals who were exiled to New York gave lessons to kids like us to earn a little money. So in philosophy class I was taught by Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain before they had jobs at Princeton and Harvard. I attended classes given by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Boris Gourévitch. Intellectual giants like that were there, wasting their time with teenagers like us, preparing us for exams and for the baccalauréat. It was an extraordinary time. My best school friend was the son of Francis Perrin; Perrin had received a Nobel Prize with Frédéric Joliot-Curie for discovering radioactivity, and both men yearned for a Communist future. Joliot-Curie, Perrin, Jacques Hadamard: that whole group hoped the Liberation might lead to a Marxist France. That was very important, too. Those high school years were formative, and I realize how decisive they were for me. I feel very indebted to that time.
L.A. An enormous debt perhaps, George, but that didn’t prevent you from leaving the U.S. for the U.K.
G.S. First, there was Paris, where I went in 1945. You can’t imagine what Paris was like in 1945. I wanted to enroll for my final years of lycée at Louis-le-Grand or Henri-IV (I was arrogant enough to hope I would pass the exam for the École Normale Supérieure), but my father told me, “Out of the question! The future belongs to the Anglo-American language. I’m sorry, but if one day you manage to write a decent book in Anglo-American, it will then be translated into French.” I remember that extraordinary prophecy. I obeyed my father and spent my early university years in the States, at two wonderful universities: Chicago and Harvard. I still often wonder about the fate of the French language; it has been a crucial question in my life from many points of view. And I also often wonder what my life would have been like if I had tried to get into Normale Sup. I still regret never having made the attempt.
L.A. You then decided to live in London and, paradoxically, to work for the Economist. You’re known as a philosopher, a writer, a semiologist, an intellectual, but very few people know that you began your professional life as an economist—a columnist-journalist-economist.
G.S. It was the most respected weekly in the world. And you worked there anonymously, that was essential: articles weren’t signed. Getting a job there was pretty competitive. I knew nothing about political economy, but I was passionate about good prose and international relations. And I was asked to write editorials—I was quite young, absurdly young—on the relations between Europe and America. So I spent four magnificent years there, but then fate decided to play a mean trick—which turned out to be an amazing stroke of luck. The Economist sent me across the Atlantic to cover the debate on American atomic power: was the U.S. going to share its nuclear knowledge with Europe? Under Eisenhower the Americans decided they wouldn’t. It wasn’t a given; there was still hope that there would be true collaboration. Within that context I went to Princeton, a wonderful, unreal little town, to interview J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. He had a pathological hatred of journalists, but said: “I’ll give you ten minutes.” He was a man who inspired spine-chilling fear; it’s quite difficult to describe. One day, in front of me, in front of my desk, I heard him say to a young physicist, “You are so young and you have already done so little!” After comments like that, you could only hang yourself! Oppenheimer had set our meeting for noon. He didn’t come. So I had lunch with George Kennan, the diplomat of diplomats; Erwin Panofsky, the leading art historian at the time; and Harold Cherniss, the great Hellenist and Plato specialist.
Afterwards, while waiting for the taxi that was to pick me up a half-hour later, Cherniss invited me to his office, and as we were talking, Oppenheimer came in and sat behind us. It was the ideal trap: if the people you’re talking to can’t see you, they feel paralyzed and you become master of the situation. Oppenheimer was a genius at this sort of theatrical maneuvering, it was incredible. Cherniss was showing me a passage from Plato that he was editing, which included a lacuna; he was trying to fill it in. When Oppenheimer asked me what I would do with that passage, I began by stammering something. Then he added, “A great text should have some empty space.” I said to myself, “Hey, you’ve nothing to lose, your taxi will be here in fifteen minutes.” And so I replied, “That’s a pompous cliché. First, your statement is a quote from Mallarmé. Second, it’s the type of paradox you can play with ad infinitum. But when you’re trying to prepare an edition of Plato for the common mortal, it’s better that the empty spaces be filled.” Oppenheimer responded superbly, “No, in philosophy especially it is the implicit that stimulates argument.” He enjoyed our exchange immensely, he whom no one ever dared to contradict, and we had a real discussion on the subject. Then Oppenheimer’s secretary ran in and announced, “Mr. Steiner’s taxi is about to leave!” I was going on to Washington for my reporting assignment. At the door of the Institute, this extraordinary man asked me, as one might speak to a dog, “You’re married?”
“Yes.”
“You have children?”
“No.”
“Great. That will make it easier to find lodging.”
That’s how he invited me to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as the first young humanist. He was amused by our encounter. I sent a telegram to The Economist, and they told me, “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re happy with us, we’ll give you one day a week for your research. You can write your books on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, tragedy. Stay with us.” And once again, as with the Normale Sup, I wonder if I shouldn’t have continued there. I could have been number two, certainly; that was their plan, but I would never have been the chief. I was so happy there. I was paid well and had all that I wanted, but just the idea of entering the house of Einstein—I had to renounce my ill-placed pride. And so I left The Economist and we went to live in Princeton.
L.A. What did you learn from those years with Oppenheimer? Did they prove decisive for the rest of your intellectual life?
G.S. Profoundly. First, because I started my professional life among leading scientists; and second, because I wanted to pursue it among leading scientists. We are, I believe, living in a century of extraordinary science, including from an aesthetic and a philosophical point of view. I was surrounded by intellectual princes. That environment, that complete oasis, that ideal of pure research. During their first social event at the Institute, newcomers would shake hands with the old guard; it was a little ritual. A very tall, thin man walked up to me, “I’m André Weil. I don’t think we’ll have the opportunity to talk again.” All of that was in French. “But I have something to tell you. If you’re intelligent, you work on the theory of pure numbers. If you’re fairly intelligent—like me—you do topological algebra. Everything else, sir, is rubbish.” I’ll never forget that. He was Simone Weil’s brother.
L.A. And the co-founder of the Nicolas Bourbaki movement.
G.S. At that moment, you could almost hear the voice of Simone Weil. And in fact, we never did speak to each other again. But there were also moments of great generosity. For example, the day I had my first meal at the Institute, I was afraid to go into the room. What do you do when faced with a dining room in which every person is an intellectual giant? Niels Bohr saw my hesitation, got up, and said, “Come with me.” He had gigantic shoulders and hands. He was so warm; I didn’t dare speak. He took a photo out of his pocket, “My twelve grandchildren, I know all their names.” That’s how Niels Bohr made me feel comfortable. And we ended up being close friends. There were others who were very difficult, of course. Great scientists are sometimes deeply solitary. Two activities did manage to connect them: music (there were wonderful evenings of chamber music) and chess (the language of those who are otherwise mute). After all, what do you talk about with a John von Neumann, an André Weil? Even if you’re fairly good at mathematics it’s better to hold your tongue—but at chess, in music, there was a lot of contact and warmth. From that time, and then at Cambridge, I have the impression that there is an alarming amount of bluffing in the humanities. In mathematics or in the pure sciences you can’t bluff: it’s either right or it isn’t. You can’t cheat. Anyone who dares to cheat in an experiment, in a result, in a theorem, is destroyed. Overnight, or almost, you are excluded from the community of your peers. The moral rigor is extreme. It’s a very special morality, a morality of truth. It’s a world that I’ve always liked and one that endures. Here in Cambridge, from Roger Bacon in the seventeenth century to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Stephen Hawking, each generation (Newton, Darwin, William Thomson) has seen an explosion of genius in the sciences. If I’m not mistaken, today, in this little town, we have among our teaching colleagues—not to mention honorary professors—ten Nobel laureates.
L.A. From that community in which you lived, from that experience shared with those great scientists, you seem also to have acquired a precision and rigor of analysis that you have applied in the field in which you have subsequently worked: the vast field known as the humanities. You were the first in European history to introduce concepts of quasi-mathematical rigor into literature, mythology, and literary history.
G.S. If only you were right! I despise bluffing, I despise cheating in the humanities. First, we have a fundamental philosophical problem. A critical judgment on a piece of music, art, or literature cannot be put to the proof. If I declare that Mozart was incapable of writing a melody (there are people who believe that), you can tell me I’m a poor fool, but you can’t prove me wrong. When Tolstoy said that Lear is an overblown melodrama by someone who doesn’t understand tragedy at all, you can say, “Mr. Tolstoy, I regret to inform you that you are laughably wrong.” But you can’t prove him wrong. In the end it’s scary: opinions are not refutable. People say that eventually a consensus is reached, so be it. That doesn’t prove anything; the consensus can be wrong, too. So in aesthetic judgment there is always something ephemeral, something deeply ephemeral. And if I were to write down what I consider to be the five or six most important names in, let’s say, contemporary literature today, four out of five would be quite unknown to well-educated people, good readers, the so-called enlightened public.
Then, of course, for reasons we don’t really understand, there is the fact that the great artistic, literary, aesthetic experience is beyond good and evil. Now that the end of my life is approaching, I’m working on these problems more and more: “Why can’t music lie?” and “Why can’t mathematics lie?” They can be wrong, of course. But that’s an entirely different matter. Music can present a character who lies, an Iago in Verdi, if you like. But I don’t think music knows how to lie. That gives it, in my opinion, much greater weight than speech.
It is in France, of course, though imitated in other countries, that the drama of the deconstruction of language, so-called poststructuralism, all that came after Dada—Duchamp’s great precursor, who for me is the mind that presides over the great crisis in the arts—is most active. In France, in the land of Molière and Descartes, the crisis is—or still was, a few years ago—most acute; there the destruction of language, the placing in doubt of the possibilities for truth, has reached a breaking point. It’s very interesting. Language admits everything. It’s an alarming truth that we hardly ever think about: we can say anything, nothing stifles us, nothing shocks us when someone says the most monstrous things. Language is infinitely servile, and language—this is the mystery—knows no ethical limits.
L.A. Yes, but at the same time, language can also approach truth. Perhaps not necessarily tell the truth or espouse it, but at least approach it.
G.S. Language may sincerely attempt to convince, but it must represent the opinion of the one who is speaking. There must be a connection between a statement and a life, an action. For example, France has had thousands upon thousands of Marxist intellectuals who would never have set foot in Soviet Russia. Never, not for anything in the world.
L.A. Or some who were there, but with blinders on, like Sartre.
G.S. But who said things about Stalin, knowing they were lies. There have been (as is the case, closer to home, with my immediate contacts in France), and there still are, passionate Zionists, heated, angry, who would never set foot in Israel. But there has to be at least some connection between speech and a life. It can be very complicated, I know; sincerity is an extremely difficult thing, it demands constant self-criticism. But to make statements that reflect the opposite of how one lives has always seemed too easy to me.