Face to Face: George Steiner talks to Jeremy Isaacs

[Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] george steiner some years ago many people thought it was a shame and a disgrace that you were passed over as a member of the faculty at cambridge did that rankle that's a very difficult question because part of old age is to begin seeing both sides of a question i think there were mistakes certainly on both sides and in one sense i'm very lucky rough you them how we may i didn't know that where i should perhaps be able to develop a multilingual teaching and something very much at the heart of europe was waiting for me in geneva so it it didn't turn out i hope too badly did that decision teach us something about the difference between english and european intellectual life oh undoubtedly i i struck many of my peers or masters in england and i do now as somehow very continental almost physically almost in the way i speak and teach a colleague lot and a person very much i suppose committed to the passionate heresy that it's marvelous to have roots i love trees and a tremendous improvement to have legs to be able to move and that's been at the center of my whole work and that is a kind of peregrine or pilgrimage which for a doctrine for a school of english literature whose shibboleth word is inwardness and rootedness there was a very real difference of sensibility is is our sensibility here too parochial is our academic life too cloistered in that way at a time when science is still absolute world rank in britain at a time when when europe is beginning to draw near though in a very difficult way i wouldn't want to use the word parochial there has been there has been a period of a certain kind of nationalism of little england isn't there has been a very sharp feeling of trying to survive against the overwhelming pressures of the american language and of that boomerang of world talent and power of a globe that speaks english but doesn't quite speak english what are your relationships like in cambridge today where you're now an honorary fellow and visit oh i live there half the year my wife is adon in full harness and the younger generation don't even remember that there was such an event they're very cordial indeed um but i don't do any teaching whatever and i'm very privileged i can do my own research in my own writing and the ghosts out of that past it's now 15 years or 20 years ago i like myself i hope people with a gift for forgetting you said polyglot a moment ago how many languages do you read in i read oh perhaps in in four or five and then and stumbling a few more i speak i was brought up speaking three and in those i write and i can dream in them and among those three very probably there isn't a first language those are english german french yes yes and in geneva i'm allowed in the chair of comparative literature which is a pretentious way of saying that you read works if you can in the language in which they were written and read first i'm allowed a great range of language with my students remember around my table there as they might be in amsterdam or stockholm almost every one of my students speaks a good many more languages than i do which other ones do you read in do you read in russian and italian i speak italian full of happy errors read in it constantly in the beginning to be ambitious enough to want to lecture in it in order to read a a an author who was immensely important to me kirk ago with a dictionary and having german inwardly um i find i can follow a lot of danish oh lots i can't but i'm not helpless in it and now it's becoming anyone interested in literature it's spanish which is just knocking at our doors i mean it's the most exciting probably literary language at the moment and one tries to make some progress say it's very difficult it's one of the great illusions if you speak italian you think i can do it you can't but they're also the eras of fun greek ancient greek i was trained as a classic i do a lot of writing about the classics um certainly totally unreliable totally unreliable um a trot facing pages and the hope the hope that that one's teachers of the long distant past don't hear one trying to do it because translation is something that's always interested you central to everything i do but i i'm convinced we translate within our own same language as you and i speak to each other the complex exercise of decipherment of trust of being on guard of trying to read between the lines of trying to hear the overtones the undertones the ironys the connotations that too is translation all my work is begun from the sense of the utter miracle the crazy miracle of being able to communicate at all and decisive when i was very young at the university of chicago there was a clinic for autistic children a very great thinker he's still alive bruno bettelheim a man whom we all owe any men's lot he allowed me to watch work with those children where no translation is possible where it's trapped deep within or the case of cordelia who kills everybody in the play king lee it's cordelia it's when you can't translate outward that murderousness follows so you don't need two different languages for the whole wondrous enigma of translation what have you been reading this week a whole number of things and and you really put your finger on a key question i first half of my answer is embarrassed i review books and of course when you're a reviewer they do very much come your way i've just been deeply involved with a large new biography of anna freud which is about to appear i'm being asked to have a look at the first big life of the spanish poet lorca an enormously fascinating figure and whose death was a very tragic one so there is that part of work but for personal reading which is very early morning and then whenever i can the absolutely quiet and concentrated reading i have been rereading just at the moment quite a bit of chaucer and this is not directly connected my teaching but i was recently up in the rylands library in manchester giving a lecture and they showed me one of the few cactons in perfect shape and the words were so electric on that first caxton sheet that i've been absolutely mesmerized again since there can be a physical shock which puts you onto a text let's go back and tell me about your childhood i owe everything to to to a father who as very often in a jewish house said one thing you've got to do is try and be a teacher or scholar or writer something like that however limited what you can bring that great dream that generational dream uh it's after all the only face so far as i know where once a week on the sabbath it is a blessing for scholars spoken in cinema which is quite a hair-raising thing if you think of it a marvelously strange idea um so i owed to that into the french lisa in paris where i was brought up those open habits of ambition which again in this country are judged very very suspect a school child in this country may wish one day to have a blue plaque in london on in his house of birth he'd better not mention that whereas we in france we came to rue la fontaine plus victoria go square and the moment even a five or six year old walked into one of those barracks military barracks they were two he was yelled at saying maybe one out of a hundred thousand of you is worth having because you too will write a book that matters or a poem or a theorem or a piece of music this open elitist clarity yes this education for passionate clerics formed me very very deeply were you told that you were one of a hundred thousand no oh they wouldn't let you know that um on the contrary they encouraged a kind of of rather dangerous rivalry this is that old french pyramid system one will claw his way a little upward the others will fall behind it's quite extraordinary we're celebrating the second centennial french revolution there is of course no more aristocratic country than france nothing has happened to change that sense of what the french called the concur the grand national where you leap over barry after barrier in the hope that one day to see you also will be someone whose books will teach and if you drum that into a young child it can have a very dangerous and very deep impact and it did on you i certainly was formed by it and then it was immensely fortunate pure miracle the other my friends in the class the other children of my face were of course all died in their families by my pure miracle were able to get out in 1940 but continued in the french system the french lease in new york and more or less in that system till my american universities jewish mothers are important too tell me about your mother a viennese lady of great elegance of a wonderful irony in cynicism the grand dam of the viennese world um she taught me a perilous prayer and now that i think back on it's your question it brings it back she taught me to pray i'm bad i could be better but it really doesn't matter amen which is a kind of agnostic cynicism now that i think back out all of vienna 1890 1900 laughs in that little uh rhyme she was a wonderful linguist who used to begin deliberately a sentence in one language with me and then it will always end in another one and it was very late that people began telling me that there were people who had one absolute bedrock language i remember being surprised by that you've talked of yourself as a sort of survivor and i've written of yourself as that and and a moment ago you talked about the miracle that saved that saved your life at what age were you conscious of what had happened to your schoolmates immensely early no before things now completely forgotten there was a big financial scandal in france in 34 when i was five years old and in 36 and we had to run home down the street because people behind us were yelling rather hitler than bloom leon bloom the jewish prime minister and a number of times i remember the shutters being shut in our apartment as crowds of extreme right wingers what were later to be the vichy militia were pouring down the street and i remember i was never allowed to be in any way afraid my father a master of psychology took me to the window to watch one of these mobs and said look closely this is called history i shall never forget that and in a sense there was no more fear for me this is called history and and that can be a turning point in a child's life i thought it like he that it was unutterably fascinating however dangerous and interesting to be alive at all in a major historical pit so hitler's voice some that over my childhood on the radio fully conscious from 37 38 on it was just a question when what are your early memories of pleasure what gave you happiness as a child oh oh immense um first of all gluttony i still fight it bitterly at ten in the morning uh you had a short break in the lise and there was a hot chocolate untranslatable into english it's a little roll with warm chocolate in the middle and the smell of it coming around the route la pompe i can still exactly here and the footfall of the lady who brought them a lot of wonderful viennese and french things to eat and to drink landscapes uh very very early on the mountains which are still one of the reasons i'm in geneva is to be very close to the high mountains do you walk in them yes i walk in them i i hike a little in them i used to hike a little more and then the magic of reading let me tell you one tiny simple story two seconds but it really fills the whole picture um i must have been four four and a half my father took a a greek homer and i translated for me from some unbelievably exciting episode the spear is lifted above the kneeling man or the arrow is flying towards or the horse is rearing and i'd be out of my mind with excitement and papa would put on a lugubrious mean and say i don't know how to explain this to you there's no translation for the next line which i believed completely and passionately and he said shall we try to construe it and that's how i began and those were the the ecstasys the great ecstasies and of those i was very fortunate have you any idea how old you were at that point oh yes this was uh five we began that little exercise at five um i'm to this day total reactionary hyena i believe there is no such thing as starting too early you're a jew what does that mean to you that i belong first of all to a club which in the century of auschwitz one does not leave and does not resign from whatever might be the temptations or advantages i mean is it a club that you can resign from oh in the united states a present best estimate and i'm not a sociologist but those who know say over one third are passing into changed names mixed marriages my grim feeling is that won't work but i hope i'm wrong by god i hope i'm wrong because why shouldn't it work if that's what they want for me it's an inconceivable act but but there it is i respect it i can see it in others it means above all belonging to a people whose survival is an enigmatic challenge i got the romans were gifted the greeks the most gifted people they've ever been on this why not they why this stubborn scattered little tribe and everything i've written strives to the answer we are meant to be the people who despite all the pain and horror are guests of each other our guests on this earth must must learn to be good guests not ever in an armed nationalistic camp that's why i'm not in israel that's why i'm deeply anguished about zionism uh we are guests of life jeremy of this i'm convinced why we're invited onto this scarred planet i don't know we're making a garbage dump of it um i think what judaism inherently says is if there is an element of miracle in this history of these people and there is there is because it's common sense defies it defies all probably it is to keep moving to to know that almost everywhere on this earth is worth working in and knowing human beings and trying to contribute something and this is this is judaism for me but all the same uh you talked a moment ago about those who assimilate um each of us has to keep a balance between the particularity of our culture and a common humanity which which um uh is different from it is wider than it i mean how do you see those two in your own life i certainly haven't solved that problem but what you call my culture would be that central european jewish humanism out of which exploded out of which exploded the tragedy and the genius of the 20th century whether it be modern science and physics or whether it be relativity theory or psychoanalysis or marxist socialism and messianic economics or the great writers and thinkers in that sense my homeland is a typewriter and quite honestly if proust said you can only write in a hotel wittgenstein often remarked that it was a railway station where you can do really deep analytic consequent work i think it's rather marvelous a part of that genius to use your phrase also a representative of it you sometimes sound as if you seem to be so no most eminently not um what i hope to be is something which was defined so wonderfully by pushkin he said look i write the letters i'm one of the greatest poets ever you sir can be a mailman you will carry it for me you will know where to post it a teacher a critic a scholar as i am is not a great creator thing but he can be a very good mailman i hope from time to time to know in which slot to put the letter more than a mailman surely i mean in the new book you actually make a contrast between real writing real art and commentary upon it you're not saying that you're just a commentator right i'm probably mainly a commentator no man should have a very accurate sense of his own hopes he should have a very sharp sense of his own constraints as you know i've done fiction from time to time um when i try to look back and and books that have had almost too much noise about them such as a hitler novel some years ago which has gone pretty much around the world in one way or another when i look back i say a great artist has an innocence which a person like myself can't even guess that he has an immediacy um when i think of a story there's usually an idea in it an argument a way of attempting to convince you or to give a more moving form of proof you know that one has to be very very careful that is not that mystery of the immediate um watch a very great sculptor i i have no names mentioned who had an association with my college in cambridge uh one of the greatest so it's quite obvious what i'm talking about when he opened his mouth on politics did feel good heavens and then if one watched his hands on the table one knew what total intelligence is it was in the hands of course but this is a serious point for you because you want to tell us that art has a meaning even a holiness and yet it can coexist with the simple practical physical business of knocking chips off a block but that's the marvel of it i've just been rereading a conversation with a late guerte and he was asked about how he could do faust northwest gets very very angry he said if i knew i couldn't have done it and he said the strangeness of it is that the mystery of total creative power goes far beyond any rational or positive understanding it is not analytic he could still speak as i try to in this book of some kind of relationship to a supernatural to a transcendent possibly to a divine agency the great artist is as close as we sometimes get to having some inkling of what is very much larger than us and what created the dam i was talking to a painter last night though who said he was listening to you on the radio the other day expressing precisely that thought and as he you were talking he was painting and all he was doing as far as he was concerned was putting paint on the canvas and wondering what he was going to have for dinner i mean don't you think that there's a um that this what you detect in art may may uh be an unconscious process in the artist let me make a two tiny i was a very difficult question it is quite conceivable that when mozart writes the kind of theme that possesses us forever or schubert which for many of us change earth one ear is indeed listening to the kitchen or wondering where they can pay the bill we understand very little about a mozart a schubert or a shakespeare first of all i would say that what they say of what they do often has a wonderful ironic modesty which is difficult for us to judge second thing is i can just imagine just if pushed into a corner that after writing to be or not to be comes home and he's asked how was it today will well not bad just imagine i think it's silly but i can just that doesn't work for me with supreme music i do not know how a schubert or a beethoven and beethoven is totally convinced of a divine mystery within him totally i think other composers have not been but you think that something holy in music there is in music a kind of of assurance of dimensions which we know are profoundly meaningful and we can't paraphrase them for a single minute we talk about them and it's usually rubbish they change our lives and we don't have a clue how they do this when they get inside us um i think that's a lot to go for some people's lives are changed many people's lives are changed by rock music yes something holy in that i say that specifically in the book look um in my case the example i give as one of the things that change everything is is as it happens in adpf tune uh which if it was starting the studio now everything in me would in a curious way begin hammering resonating but far deeper than any psychosomatic level i think almost every kind of music can do the famous remarks of elliott and old coward others wonderful null cards in the cheap tune that is so unbearable that you can't even face love after that i don't know about that but i know it's a fact yes of course it can be a vast range of music is silence important immensely i've i've talked too much about it as people have you ever reduced to silence oh very often in front of great art music in front of certain other human beings absolutely this is why another great heresy this is why there are moments when i have difficulties with shakespeare there is such overwhelming constancy of saying everything there are forms of great drama there's a play by the french playwright racine where there's a single word and abdu nothing is in an immense sound a man and a woman face each other no forests marched to dumpster name no ghosts no bodies a man and a woman who will never meet again and the universe collapses because to leave someone one love supremely or to not meet again is to me the apex of intensity of the tragic yes there are forms of art great music is full of them the pauses and rests in great music and i'm i can't be silent here today this would be but many of your questions when i will think back on them in a few moments i will be very silent there are two sorts of scholarship i mean that's a ludicrous generalization but some people connect great ideas across centuries and other people write about a subject are you ever going to do have you chosen to do one are you ever going to do the other i hope i've done both i the book before this is called antigones and is is a massively you know footnoted and and and pretty demanding study of a single scene that of a great sophocles play in all its versions and inner problems including some of the original text problems um at other times yes i have been too disseminated do i i haven't chosen that and one's passions you know jump at you they lie in ambush almost everything i've written comes out of a great need out of great passion and sometimes i do get a little intemperate with academic cowardice in these respects cows have fields i know not every human being needs to what are you most certain of in this world that it is worth trying that if anybody took that away from me i would have nothing left now he comes to you he let's call him the devil because i'm of that heresy which is quite sure about hell and very doubtful about heaven that's one of the most dangerous heresies but i have no doubt at all about absolute evil but suppose he comes to usually very elegant the gentleman with the cloven hoof when you're a young child or at the moment of puberty and he says you have one 30-second period to choose a bargain with me i'll give you the chance to try to create something to put your nail on the wall and make a little scratch a tiny one in the history of science art sort music mathematics dance whatever it is and you'll be miserable because 99.9 you won't pull it off but i'm getting the chance of 191 to pull it off or you can have a very happy life full and decent life if you hesitate more hundredth of than second how you answer he won't ever come back if you were a scholar of the 21st century looking back on yourself and the history of ideas in this century how would you rate yourself probably as a rear guard it's again most searching an upsetting question in some ways probably as someone who stayed in europe rather than go to america where god knows the generosities are greater the chances in the illa vital is greater who has hung on and it was very very difficult after the cambridge failure and before i could go to geneva was hung on because there's got to be still a few people who remember the inventory of that very very great culture roughly from the renaissance to auschwitz to the downfall the polyglot liberal humanistic culture and i still my masters great teachers i still knew i was immensely lucky or even could hear lecture but of that world a linguist like roman jakobson the greatest of all jewish kabali singers geshon sholem um i still knew a castle a bronovsky in that sense immensely lucky so probably they'll say he never understood his own time at all he was hanging on to something which was in many ways a world of ash a dead world that's i'm i'm being deliberately self cruel i hope i'm not right but it may well be that [Music] you

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Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020