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February 8, 2004
TT: Right between the eyes
Joseph Epstein (who is not OGIC) on George Steiner:In the world of intellectual journalism, George Steiner has always been a figure of controversy. No one who reads him seems to be neutral about him, with opinion divided between those who think his range of learning and power of dramatizing ideas astonishingly brilliant, and those who think him a fake of astounding portentousness and pomposity. Judgments about him are made even more complicated by the fact that he has been the victim of English academic anti-Semitism, colder and more disdainful than which civilized Jew-hating does not get.
Steiner is a writer who has always come on high, toweringly high. His first book, "Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky" (1959), set the tone for his unremitting highbrowism. For many years he moved the heavy mental lumber for the New Yorker, reviewing works on Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Célan, bringing his taste for the abyss to that otherwise lighthearted journal. "Men in Dark Times," the title of a collection of Hannah Arendt essays, is a phrase that provides a rubric for Steiner's own intellectual proclivities. If one is looking for a fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, Steiner is your man. I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, "A joke, I say, that's a joke, son," because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.
I find myself unable to resist reading George Steiner, these days more often than not in the London Times Literary Supplement, where he is still doing his men-in-dark-times number. His is one of the tightest acts of our day. My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner's of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world's most learned man....
Read the whole thing here.
Posted February 8, 2004 1:43 AM
