Reading more Steiner is both exciting and irritating. He is perfect and pure “old school” and I finally thought to myself, Yea, why didn’t God get rid of one of the weaker commandments (thou shalt not not) and have the 10th be Thou shalt not demonstrate your own brilliance until After you have demonstrated your own blindnesses before imposing power of any sort over another, including views and opinions and interpretations. Steiner is the “best” of high humanistic education of two generations ago—-or presents himself that way. But maybe he was just the best A-grabber, too.
Maybe at least it should be a law for all memoirists and autobiographers—you may not publish your book unless you have a chapter called “My Blindspots” that has been edited by someone outside all your major spheres of influence. I guess that would take all the fun out of reading memoirs.
Finally though I gave up on Steiner—the way I think I have every time I have looked into one of his books. Insufferable pedant is I guess the short phrase. His memoir is entitled “Errata” and his stance toward his readers is precisely that—”you did not get my points earlier so let me try once again you dummkopf to correct your errors.” Yes he is brilliant, polymath, cultured, worldly blah blah blah—but if this is the best that a life in literature has to offer then no wonder the study of literature is as in sharp decline—-as all other studies.
He was smart and wise enough to reject Theory & he mastered the old style philology & now he makes endless discernments and judgments. Maybe he should have been a canon lawyer or a corporate defense lawyer.
Once again I find that it is the voice–the voices—of the “truth-tellers,” the historians and memoirists and auto-biographers that I have little patience with after I’ve satisfied a curiosity here or there about this or that point of needless trivia or gossip. For real pleasure and truth, give me the lying sons of bitches who write fiction every time.
Historian John Lukacs, also in his 80s, calls his recent memoir Last Rites. Maybe that is just as magisterial, just as bad.
I agree.
Sentences, paragraphs, chapters by Steiner seem soaked in self-loathing – but they are so dense it is really difficult to tell. Why is he so afraid of expressing himself more simply and more clearly? Is it because he is afraid he doesn’t have quite as much to say as he thinks he has? I cannot remember reading anything as physically painful as Real Presences for ages, and I feel as if I have been reading it for ever.
Thanks,
Chris Lawrence
thinking makes it so