Errata: An Examined Life, by George Steiner, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 171pp, £11.99 in UK
Born in Paris of Viennese Jewish parents, raised trilingually through English, French and German, and educated in Britain and the USA, George Steiner has always moved with ease between worlds. Few writers have as sharply defined a sense of the values they wish to defend, or as effortless-seeming a cultural purchase on them, as Steiner. The author of books as diverse as The Death of Tragedy, Tolstoy or Dostoevksy? and After Babel, as well as a body of fiction, he invariably attracts the tag of "polymath" - a description not without undertones of implied pretentiousness and dilettantism, as he is the first to observe. Ironically, it is his insistence on a shared intellectual heritage, what Mandelstam called a "nostalgia for world culture", that makes him seem so coldly elitist and even reactionary to his detractors. Real Presences (1989) was his attempt to justify his intellectual values. Errata, subtitled "An Examined Life", does the same, this time through the prism of autobiography. Errata is not quite a memoir, however, but a series of autobiographical reflections on the major pre-occupations of what has been an eventful life of the mind. Large sections of the book, it must be said, revisit well-trodden ground. Sentences in a chapter on his polyglot upbringing are reproduced almost verbatim from After Babel. A chapter on the unique brutality of the 20th century reiterates arguments first made as long ago as Language and Silence, while Steiner's thoughts on religion add little to Real Presences.
More engaging and more concretely alive are the excellent chapters on his formative years. From his childhood there is the memory of the "morose, flogging insistence" of Tyrolean rain, the "world made boiled cabbage" of Austrian bad weather. At the University of Chicago Steiner rooms with an exparatrooper at whose insistence he is relieved of his virginity in a Chicago brothel. A series of brilliant teachers, including Allen Tate and Humphrey House, is probingly assessed.
Steiner has always been addicted to drawing up lists for his personal canon of the truly great, and predictably enough the names of Bach, Mozart, Goethe, Holderlin, Kafka, Heidegger and Celan are frequently invoked. But Steiner is not without his surprises. Who would have suspected that Claudel's Partage de midi would be one of his three desert island books? (The other two are Racine's Bernice and Dante's Commedia.) If Steiner is completely at ease with the masterpieces of world culture, he can seem very awkward indeed on other territory. His attitude to our anything-goes post modernist times, needless to say, is one of extreme hostility. But it is not just "the circus folk of deconstruction or post-structuralism" who are condemned; whole sections of 20th-century culture are written off or simply ignored. Pop music sends him into an Adornian rage at the "bubonic plague of capitalist populism". Cinema, even in the form of Tarkovsky or Bergman, holds little fascination for Steiner; other 20th-century arts such as jazz and photography leave him similarly unmoved. Painting and sculpture are more frequently invoked but seldom discussed at any great length, a symptom perhaps of the Judaic distrust of the image which Steiner diagnoses in himself.
His compulsive earnestness even leads him (with suitable disclaimers) to admit to a sneaking nostalgia for the former Soviet bloc. In its bizarre way, he argues, Stalin's persecution of poets represented a tribute to the power of the word, a power it has lost in the illiterate democracies. Freedom has its price, but Steiner's statements of disgust that people should prefer soap operas to Aeschylus are repetitive and self-indulgent. They are certainly a world away from the passionate embrace of modernity to be found in the work of his great hero, Walter Benjamin. Steiner is at his best when presenting rather than preaching. At one point he comments on the "almost scandalously rare" number of thinkers who have written illuminatingly on music, with Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Adorno the only modern thinkers on his list. What is to stop Steiner from joining their number, in the small classic on music he is so obviously capable of? It would make a much more rewarding use of his gifts than lectures on the evils of pop.
David Wheatley is a poet and critic