A Long Saturday: Conversations

By George Steiner, Laure Adler and Teresa Lavender Fagan

George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else “writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing,” while the New York Times says of his works that “the erudition is almost as extraordinary as the prose: dense, knowing, allusive.” Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of modern barbarisms, Steiner probes the ethics of language and literature with unparalleled grace and authority. A Long Saturday offers intimate insight into the questions that have absorbed him throughout his career.

In a stimulating series of conversations, Steiner and journalist Laure Adler discuss a range of topics, including Steiner’s boyhood in Vienna and Paris, his education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and his early years in academia. Books are a touchstone throughout, but Steiner and Adler’s conversations also range over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and beyond. Blending thoughts on subjects of broad interest in the humanities—the issue of honoring Richard Wagner and Martin Heidegger in spite of their politics, or Virginia Woolf’s awareness of the novel as a multivocal form, for example—with personal reflections on life and family, Steiner demonstrates why he is considered one of today’s greatest minds. Revealing and exhilarating, A Long Saturday invites readers to pull up a chair and listen in on a conversation with a master.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Mar 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226350417

George Steiner

George Steiner (París, 1929-Cambridge, 2020), fue uno de los más reconocidos estudiosos de la cultura europea y ejerció la docencia en las universidades de Stanford, Nueva York y Princeton, aunque su carrera académica se desarrolló principalmente en Ginebra e Inglaterra. En 2001 recibió el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de Comunicación y Humani­dades.

Book preview

A Long Saturday

A Long Saturday

CONVERSATIONS

George Steiner with Laure Adler

Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35038-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-35041-7 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226350417.001.0001

Originally published as Un long samedi: Entretiens. © Flammarion, Paris, 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Steiner, George, 1929– interviewee. | Fagan, Teresa Lavender, interviewer.

Title: A long Saturday : conversations / George Steiner with Laure Adler ; translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan.

Other titles: Long samedi. English

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016027826 | ISBN 9780226350387 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226350417 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Steiner, George, 1929—Interviews. | Philologists—Interviews.

Classification: LCC P85.S74 A3 2017 | DDC 410.92—dc 23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027826

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Translator’s Note

Interviewer’s Note

An Unsentimental Education: From Exile to the Institute

To Be a Guest on Earth: Reflections on Judaism

Every Language Opens a Window onto a New World

God Is Kafka’s Uncle: From the Book to Books

The Humanities Can Make Us Inhuman: The Twentieth Century Has Morally Weakened Humanity

Epilogue: Learning How to Die

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The reader will discover a large number of quotations from various individuals in the course of George Steiner’s conversation with Laure Adler. When possible, I have checked and provided references for the quotations. But there are many that couldn’t be found verbatim, so the sources and editions are not always cited. As in any conversation between two people, exact quotations can be rare.

Teresa Lavender Fagan

February 2016

INTERVIEWER’S NOTE

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

An Unsentimental Education

FROM EXILE TO THE INSTITUTE

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