Full interview with George Steiner - part one

so it's a great privilege and pleasure to have a chance to talk to George Steiner who is lectures I attended 20-30 years ago and who is a distinguished literary critic George where were you born and when I was born in Paris in 1929 my father was of Czech origin but had grown up and been educated in Vienna my mother was Viennese and by a miracle of foresight or of instinct I would call it an instinct of apprehension my father had left Vienna in 1924 convinced that a form of Nazism was coming had transferred us to Paris started his life all over again and I was educated in the French lycée system and and in France but the key fact is I was educated totally trilingual II there was no difference between German French and English in my upbringing in the home in daily life in every aspect of my childhood this was really the center of fact and from a very early date on my father sense that English would probably be the world language the language in which the future would develop this fruit very much in the face of French linguistic chauvinism but it made for a very creative tension in my own growing up and my mother was a brilliant linguist in her own right and a Viennese grand-am now Viennese grande um meant a certain kind of enlightened cynicism and intellectual elegance very very much a woman up with the development of the world and together I owe them everything my bitter quarrel bitter is an exaggerated work my deep quarrel with psychoanalysis being that I regarded as utter nonsense I neither wish to sleep with my mother nor to kill my father they were the best friends I had in the world the closest to me in a relationship of constant fun and excitement now let me emphasize my father was a very very distinguished internationally known investment banker and had said himself one purpose in life that I should never know anything of that business he would not even tell me what the difference was between a bond and a share that was almost the Shibboleth of my education he hoped and worked for the idea that I would be some kind of scholar and teacher now let me immediately open a large and central footnote that is a deeply Judaic point of view the word rabbi as you know means teacher nothing else robbing him is simply the word for teacher and if you ask me today did my father in some way inhibit in me the hope of being a creative artist I drew and painted a great deal as a child the answer might be yes of course he loved the classics he read them to me we studied them together but somewhere in him and in the tradition which he stood for was a view that being a teacher was more important than being a creator I put this in to abstract away but it's terribly important and it determined perhaps the natural limitations in my own life and he still lived to see me having a number of very major university chairs and this filled him with a deep satisfaction I think he would have been proud of course if I'd been able to be lets say a distinguished artist or novelist but I don't think it would have brought him the same satisfaction and your mother my mother had as a goal to make of me someone who having a rather severe physical handicap would regard that as a privilege now let me take that slowly because it's the other crucial element from the beginning not only did she refuse any compromise we own their life for the first eight to nine years I had to be in constant remedial treatment very painful very different and at some very early date I wish I could identify the moment I calm she said you realize how fantastically lucky you are you're not going to do military service and that is probably one of the turning points in my life from that day on I regarded myself as fantastically lucky footnote within footnote she was right she was of course totally right god knows what could have happened to my life had I had to serve in the war I didn't and this turning a great handicap into a privilege into a pleasure was a stroke of pure genius but she would not compromise already at that time you had slip-on shoes for example or shoes with a zip she refused I went through hell learning to tie the knot on a shoelace and knot it very useful or necessary art but morally an enormous triumph I shall never forget the ecstasy of victory when I was able to achieve that but it was painful and long and full of disappointment so I owe to not only the sense of being terribly lucky being handicapped but secondly that there is nothing you cannot achieve if rightly guided if there is someone who turns the difficulty into a joy not as I think presided over my whole life so it was a pretty magnificent start well I think if you don't mind viewers will probably want to know what the handicap was oh it was a purse accident a right arm without natural motion to this day and it meant at the beginning it meant that the the wisdom the wisdom which obtained was for example you the left hand wherever possible let him write with the left hand mama decided that was completely wrong and I fought my way through to writing as I do with the right hand and she said there's no question of these nonsensical choral compromises with the inevitable there was no inevitable for her and my whole philosophy of Education my intense opposition to the present kind of syrup utak a political correctness is that on the contrary the handicaps the difficulties are the wellspring not only a will and achievement that's easy but of joy and that's much more difficult did you have brothers or sisters yes Ida sister 7 years older than myself I've recently lost her that age distance meant she really looked after meal took care of me more than a sister normally wouldn't because I was so young and she was already a teenager and that was very important during the war in during the times they'd led up to our next move which was to the United States what was the role of religion in your childhood my father was an utter vault Aryan utter very ironic vault Aryan so was my grandmother she taught me the only prayer she taught me was I am bad I could be better but it really doesn't matter she had me to say this is a very young child and it has guided my life on the other hand we marked a number of the High Holidays out of piety towards my parents parents and out of solidarity with the Jewish community not in a religious sense in a sense of history my father taught me a great deal of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy in Jewish thought but entirely in an agnostic or vort Aryan way did you go to school in France to begin with and yes indeed I did and I went both to a French Elysees in the neighbourhood is everybody did and then briefly to the American school in Paris to get the English in absolutely good shape whether any teachers there who particularly influenced all that comes later now remember I we we escape from France by miracle in 40 and 1940 1940 and I'm just on to becoming 11 years old so the great influences will come later in New York what was the miracle oh the miracle was getting out we my father already was in the United States on a French government mission and got permission to ask mama and his two children to visit him and the visit turned to rock the long one we were able to leave with the last American ship that got out of Genoa before mussolini closed the harbour and invaded france and so you went down to Italy from France eros his couldn't get out no she was quite front when we got out through Genoa what can you remember your first arrival in America yes my father you laugh at this and it shouldn't be said openly but it is now known it's appeared in a number of biographical essays on the dock my father said to me remember we're going back that was the first words he spoke to me mama was very upset about this he rightly felt let's make a go of it in the United States and my sister felt promptly in love with America because being late teenager in France was hell and it was heaven in America hmm was it happy for you or not no my father saw to it that it wouldn't be and I remember there were very bitter moments of course I remember the night that we could date easily Google would do it for us on which he woke me saying Marshall von Paulus has surrendered at Stalingrad we're going to be on the way home I shall never forget them it might take a long time but he knew from that moment on that the war was won and that had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor American eventually it was the Red Army had made sure we would one day go home so you now go to a new school and a brief experiment in a very cupboard at American high school which went very very wrong I hated every moment of it and the turning point was very very amusing because it's a story against ourselves they have in America something called parents day and the parents come and sit in on class and it was the class in ancient history and we were asked why did Herodotus praised acin so much in his history on sir he was paid to do so my father took me out that day out of this distinguished America and put me where I wanted to go into French lycée in New York footnote the answer was perfectly right contrary to my father's idealistic beliefs the Robert US was bribed but but thereby hangs a quite different tale and I blossomed in the French lycée it was exactly right for me and I did have one or two great teachers why because people of international renown were earning their living teaching children in the French lycée some of them like Marita like the great lady's clothes like she's some of the medieval historian then got university jobs but quite a while Steve Jobs but for a while they were teaching kids in the lycée so just imagine I had some of the great stars of the mind teaching me you had levy stars yes live his trials then he was teaching he was helping teach geography I think and not sure he knew any but why not then got his appointment to the advanced school of studies but I went to his lectures in my last year's of the Lisa who because it was easy in New York to attend those lectures which were given by this brilliant French intellectual refugee community you've been quite interested in lévi-strauss for many years afterwards haven't you was it started with this period because him it certainly started then it then was renewed when I realized he was a distant cousin of Proust yes and when I came to realize they pleased to topic who whatever it's anthropological merits which I'm not qualified to judge is one of the ultimate classics of French prose hmm and he was a good lecturer no no it was certainly briefly there Marie tom was a magnificent lecturer and there were scholars of every kind and then one day a lady with a leather skirt a curious detail was stuck with me marched in with a mexican brooch which wouldn't we covered her ample front and gave us a guest lecture about why we should be interested in philosophy she was a lady called Simone de Beauvoir and she was doing a lecture two of the United States so I was spoiled and were you persuaded why you should be interested in philosophy totally okay were you already beginning to get interested in any particular topics or disciplines by this time yes the multiplicity of languages was a condition in which I lived and for example some of the teachers who had escaped wouldn't speak a word of English the idiots in order to keep their French pure in in order not to yield to American vulgarity others learnt further languages I had colleagues who were learning Spanish in New York and doing it very very well I was interested in the problem of the relations between language and thought language and existence language and identity very very early on naturally from my home do you think identity given that you're between so many different traditions and cultures is one of the central tres you've always had it is central and it is the reason I've always been marginalized by the deep provincial allottee of English academic life by its refusal to learn languages this is a monocot country in my Geneva seminar around the table there were at one point 15 languages spoken by my doctoral students which is what comparative literature and the study of philosophy is really about yes it was utterly determinate but in America they are in mind they are in mind that from the tip of Manhattan where it goes into the Atlantic to the northern tip of Long Island there are 128 Lac which have spoken and that has become more so since the 40s and 50s but it was already a big billion metropolis who so you felt that home there with all this these languages I felt that part I delighted in as I did in the tremendous availability of every kind of music of art the New York Public Library is probably one of the world's great universities why because they let in young students and they help you and they guide you it was at that time an incomparable instrument of learning and you were quite close to it where you all know no differentially say is high up on 96th Street but there was a bus already straight down Fifth Avenue whether things about America obviously in that first school that you didn't take 2 / couldn't accept the lack of irony I couldn't accept the kind of ostentatious already at that time patriotism pledging allegiance to dragons on and it was very alien to me very strange and the Judaism I came from the historical one was not of course the observant or very committed one of the New York Jewish community hmm the lack of irony has always been a puzzle to many people I have my theories what are your theories a it's a Rand committed to things being better next Monday than they are this Monday it's al and committed to the dream that more people will be happy than ever before in any political community and irony see enemy irony subverts the Tocqueville already senses that in his great study of American democracy irony is being rather nasty about hope and in America being nasty about hope is a is less majesty that's very interesting so you're now how old about 16 17 X 16 17 I do I did my French both baccalaureates which was sent out the exams from Paris who's good Napoleonic sister who every French lycée overseas and there were three great ones in the New World Montreal New York and if I'm right Rio had the same exams at the same hour at the same as a Paris I had both my baccalaureate and my father raped effort and bride and sacrifice and made it possible for me to go to Yale now they had something called orientation week in my case that was a fatal mistake I went up for that orientation week and the first man to meet me on campus was a boy who had been in the lycée two years before I had been and he said don't come here and I said why he was himself gentle and distinguished and he said there is no place here for Jews in a friendly helpful way now let's be very careful the first you to get tenure at Yale was 1948 a man called Hempel in mathematical logic which was regarded as a crazy marginal field a GMP el4 famous very famous mathematical logician there was no place choose it was a ghetto okay and what was I going to do in September with every other University filled and open I had read Time magazine the instrument wore human knowledge about this fantastic place called the University of Chicago where there was a revolutionary completely new idea you came you sat all exams in whatever field you wanted to sit them in and if you got an alpha you didn't need to take the subject so out storms an arrogant impossible little French lease a creature me and I sat 14 final exams ten I got alpha and four I got gamma - now that was a great revelation they were mathematics physics biology in something I didn't know what the word meant social science I did not know I'd never heard of that in the friendship and so into biology physics math and social science went young mr. Steiner working around the clock I fell in love with science deeply hopelessly the point being that the teachers were the ultimate teachers I had Fermi in physics and family said to us at the opening class I remember that as clearly as you sitting here opposite me today there is no textbook because we all have to learn together we don't yet know what nuclear physics is and URI you re why another Nobel in chemistry and a man you certainly know about in social anthropology called Redfield yeah and I fell in love uh Turley with science and had a fantastic time at the University and was able to do my BA in one year which would mean that I could go into graduate school at the time when others which are starting undergraduate work whether that's a good thing I leave for others to judge so I march in head high nose high to what was called in America your graduate advice he was a great mathematician Gorka Bronski ka PLA n sk y Kaplinsky great message he called for my exam papers I had a first iron Asuma and he said you are technically an idiot that in the Aristotelian sense having been fantastically trained in the French lycée system you have an absolute memory and you learned endless formulas by half there is not a spark of mathematical creativity please don't try to go into science big footnote they had a sign over the gate in Chicago of the science block nuclear physics or bottle washing now had this happened five years later when a young gentleman called Jim Watson have the same interview and he's very weak in math they sent him to biology next door with the results the world knows I just came in at the height of the nuclear obsession where they really thought or science with physics and rightly you need creative mass to do physics I was utterly heartbroken but I began with two very great teachers in literature and philosophy the philosopher whom you'll know about was a man called McKeon M snores C Keo and the Greater East Italian and I had in literature the critic poet Allen Tate TS Eliot's close call him Fred dat but it took me a long time to get over the disappointment I never have so some years ago I published a paper in Nature on the French mathematician Galois jl o is a create a modern topology and sent it to Kaplinsky and got back a postcard dear steiner i have no regrets for doing a service to literature and it but it it determined my career in the sense of the wish to live among scientists at the Institute in Princeton and then a Churchill College Cambridge arose of course from this deep shock from this disappointment I just go back to Robert Redfield because he is a folk hero in my discipline did you were lectured by him or yes and was here an interesting good doctoral and no one know the material was absolutely fascinating for example in order to learn what social anthropology is I read a marine offski my first and a huge book by Mia doll called the American crisis isn't it the mag dilemma yes--the anima dilemma sir and yes I've learned a great deal but more from the reading than from him so you are not doing a piste have you done doing both and then comes one of my dear Lord of ography is called errata with good reason now comes a huge erratum how it offers me a full scholarship and little snob that I was and it's pure snobbery I took it instead of staying at Chicago where I was in utter leha peon getting the best education event I tail it off to Harvard and fell into black depression it was boring snobbish old-fashioned it was all that Chicago wasn't and I owe everything to what we call him Yiddish and untranslatable word hood spit meaning insolence arrogance h UT spe but that's a bad transliteration I wrote to Hutchins the Chancellor Chicago saying I've made a ghastly error will you give me one of your two nominations for trying for a road scholarship from Illinois he wrote back they rightly saying you should have thought about them before he left for Harvard I wrote again saying I have not elected to stand on but I think I can win it for you my arrogance was limitless and Chicago hadn't won it in many years being a non athletic counter mainstream University so amused by this arrogance he let me have the nomination I won it and was able to say to Harvard goodbye and head for Oxford how long have you been at Harvard one dreadful year and yeah now I've since end then they give me the highest honor the Eliot Norton professorship of poetics that is their top I've had every Harvard guest lecture at the time I swore I would not put my feet in that quest again and probably our relations could be defined when I went to say goodbye to the chairman of the English top department he was actually shaking with physical rage and he said one thing I can promise you you will never get a teaching post in the United States Harvard regard itself still does not only is preeminent to Paris which it is but as above any normal human law or aspiration so with that curse upon me if I went to Oxford right so you're now how old about 20 20 or 20 20 how do you when you had started your postdoctoral work what was the theme of it at Harvard at Harvard I took an MA which you could do in one year I had some good courses in comparative literature which Harvard taught but I was working mainly in the Romantic period who which also was what I hope to do my detail on at Oxford the which romantic some in the German the English no no English when I I'd begun work which I carried on at Oxford on why these great great writers Coleridge were with Shelley and Keats failed totally in the theater why they tried over and over to write successful dramas and to break into the stage and each time Fiasco so I was very interested their poetry is full of drama etc etc and of dramatic genius what went wrong hmm and now you come for the first time to England no I was here for the silver jubilee of George 2/5 with my parents standing or sitting on top of the shoulders of somebody in the crowd who this was the first adult time in England and what was your feeling at arriving in Oxford the great Wonder and bewilderment of the Wilderland not about the physical toughness you had to have at Bailey oh we had a Scottish master who believed in his a wasn't Lindsay Kia Lindsay Kira's who believed that misery was the right instrument of human education a very tenable view so walking across the courtyard to take a shower these were the worst years of rationing 49 for me the shin well winter there was no cold bread had been cut to below the war it was less bread than during the war the smell of egg powder and of whale-steak will never leave me you're rightly smiling saying you know that isn't the Western I'm smiling because I was in Oxford in the same years I just come back from India saying and you remember some of that yes and um and then I realized nobody was interested in English in a DPhil it was regarded as an American import very unwelcome the idea of a prize fellow or research from of doing a DPhil was completely out of the question today everybody elected to All Souls is told to get a DPhil enormous difference and there came the wonderful beginning of war to fill it by my supervisor was a man called Hugo dicen dy som at Merton you will have seen him in a film called darling who with Julie Christie he plays the Dom it was filmed in his magnificent rooms Adler Hugo said to me I'm not the slightest bit interested in research which is an American German invention but I'm an honest man this is totally true and unbelievable the fee is eight guineas a term for my supervision of you I'm now going to supervise you but we will go and spend it either at a good dinner at the bear in Woodstock or at a play in London every penny will be spent on us to having a good and instructive evening just don't ask me to read your bloody nonsense this is a completely true story result is that when the viber came under the presidency of a lady called Helen Gardner later Dame Helen Gardner the room was packed there with you why because I've begun publishing quite a bit in London of critical articles and essays I've made a nuisance of myself so there were a lot of people who smells what would happen Dame Helen said to me cricket may be the most boring silly game on earth nobody forces you to play it if you play it you have to learn the rules nobody forced you to go for a DPhil you have an immense future but if you want a DPhil you have to know what a correct text your note is what a proper addition is how one writes a footnote boom boom boom it was a courtesy right she was absolutely right and I was already having a wonderful job on the editorial staff of The Economist I had won a contest to get the job on the account to write editorials on foreign policy and on anglo-american relations a lovely salary a nice room in Kensing I was envied beyond words by the successful DPhil candidate aura right but it hurt terribly who was the co examiner there must have been - yes a man from the University of Edinburgh whom I have for Freudian reasons suppressed for a moment it will come back to me whose sarcasm was justified whereas hers was an open challenge hers was an instructive didactic challenge so you were failed completely and at old and already the book which would be the death of tragedy who was more or less ready and it was lying in my drawer at the Economist and one day and again I don't think you'll get a more curious story from any of your distinguished interlocutors I'm told that there is someone from Oxford downstairs at the Economist who would like to see me in a coat down to the ground he was a clergyman but no longer in orders huge black hat I'm Humphrey House of hwadam I am secretary of the board of the English faculty is it true that you have no supervision is it true that no one taught you what a DPhil yes that is a grave scandal it is no compliment to you if you were too stupid you were stupid to get help but it is a grave dereliction use the word which I didn't know was beautiful where a grave their election and if you want to be taught properly and restart the whole process I will take you on whose great scholar the great Dickens letters I've written survey clock Rekha shows he was a scholar scholar the Hopkins journals are none mine and they followed the most wonderful experience Geoffrey Crowder my bastard The Economist's the the famous editor said right the London library we will help pay your membership it's around the corner it was literally 20 yards on our corner and you will have one day off a week to do your research and we're keeping you on we want you on the economist but if you want to do this imagine the liberality of mind the insight movement he said you never need it with us you never need it but if that's what you want you and by God I worked my head off and Humphrey house dies three days before my Bible but he knew already known Gardner had told him it was a congratulatory Bible and did she examine it again yes really indeed she did indeed she did and she to congratulate and I said to myself and I just got married I said to myself into Zara I never need this again forget about it and I don't ever want to be called dr. Stein so much for my insight into the future but I wanted to be able and he meant a great deal to my father who have been very very angry at the whole business and I worshipped Humphrey house he was a dark sad soul but a scholar scholar who and I learned what scholarship might really be about how long did it take you Oh over two years to redo the whole ceases hmm but it was M dr. Steinem and it became them the death of tragedy the book did you wait until you read it because thank God had I published I could not have redone the same subject mmm and also maybe the book would have been weaker in certainly but certainly hmm so how much longer did you stay with the economy oh good deal I eyed for one for years hmm and then came an assignment to go to the United States to cover the debate over the Atomic Energy Act and the founding the AEC a perfectly normal assignment for an economist young journalist and so I get an appointment that was terribly difficult but I get an appointment with Oppenheimer at the Institute in Princeton and I go out on the little train and I wait and wait and he finally says I think I should make clear to you that I don't speak to journalists so I said no ma'am I did have an appointment yes I'm sorry that may be a misunderstanding but I don't want you to waste your time completely there's somebody I want you to meet who to be interested the great Plato's scholar CH er ni SS Harold Chernus sir mainly and Chinese very welcoming very warm in his office and says let's have lunch and the table was George Kennan Chernus Panofsky and one other and instead of despising me they were eager to know about the economists but like children how do you produce it it was anonymously written at the time how much the table would do and who decides the policy they made me feel that I was the lucky visitor who could tell them so journeys takes me back to his office I have a strange guardian angel in my life and he's working on a Plato text where there are Lacuna he's trying to work on emendations Oppenheimer comes into the room and doesn't sing I believe is unforgivable he sits behind us which gives him every advantage he curled up his long legs his famous pipe and sat on the table behind us and suddenly barked at me isn't it silly to try to fill blanks in text1 what is the use of that deliberate provocation I was by that time so angry and so pleased to be on The Economist that I said I believe that is a silly remark toc-toc mouth has always never been said to him madam a taste his poetry and something he called label on the missing like much in modernism his based on the notion of empties Heidegger and we went for each other and suddenly his secretary Verna Hobson said dr. Steiners taxis waiting because I was going on to Washington on the train so Oppenheimer says all right let's go get your taxi I sank Chernus for his hospitality with time as we walk out silently and he suddenly says to me are you married I said yes he said any children I said no he said that will make housing easier that is a totally true story and that is how I was elected the first young person in arts an experiment who to the Institute for Advanced Study now again pigfoot no dear Otto I should have said let me think it over I should have got in touch with my bosses at the Economist and said what you think of this offer I didn't I took it on the slope I was out of my mind with pride the Institute for Advanced Study Einstein's house girdles house enough schism the first young man and the economist very said to me when you've made a mistake you've made a big mistake but if you want to come back we will always want you which was incredible it was a different time of history it was a time full of elite elite generosity and elite gentility and Alena and so my wife and I arrived one morning at Princeton and we were asked to come to lunch in the cafeteria cafeteria lunch and we stand there and literally could not move by or how do you enter a lunchroom where the world's Giants are sitting or taking their trays and suddenly seeing us I think we were shaking physically niels bohr comes over and says welcome welcome sit with me we sit down the trace unable to say a word newsboy again realizes this and pulls out of his ancient danish waistcoat a photograph my 12 grandchildren and i know all their names and within minutes this prince of princes put us at ease and told us come on relax you're one of us you're going to be one of us not everybody seemed unveils great brother Andre Vail at the time the world's foremost algebraic said to me very quietly in French we will not have much to say to each other but one thing I want you to get in your head people with brains - algebraic topology and number theory people with lesser brains like ion revile - group Theory the rest is garbage less Sidel ordeal in French that was my welcome aim many were welcoming many were not because it was an open i'ma decision and I'll deny my experiment and there was no guarantee at all that it would work and I had to Magnificent years and out of that came further work and the decision not to stay even if he would have asked me to he wouldn't have it was a two year appointment it was so unreal and you were not allowed to teach you're not Prince and invited me to give courses of my mother Beto did you are not allowed each and it would be difficult to describe to you the Byzantine atmosphere there's no other way to put it up and I'ma had special envelopes made as I'm not a great novelist I can't invent this for the monthly cheque which would not make noise when slipped under the door now that that was the atmosphere at the Institute and one day of my mother near the end of my second year came in and his he certainly I mean nothing to him he said I understand you want to go back to Europe and I said by rowboat if necessary and he said there's a man who wants to see you in my office so John Cockcroft who had cracked the atom and was the first master elect of something that didn't exist called Churchill College and he said we're looking for a director of study in the arts with a science background the list is small a very British put down a very British put down the list is small that's how I came to a muddy field full of water with blueprints which I couldn't read of course to see the beginning of Churchill College lovely good can we just go back to the Institute for a moment whether you mentioned two or three of the amazing people who were waiting in that queue as you got your lunch were there any others who particularly you either befriended or struggle the great historian kantorovich who's the main living medieval historian of course it was their de tournay tol na why the Michelangelo man the main Renee sauce art man oh there were the whole department of scholars of ancient Greek and Latin yes indeed but I had come just after for Noma an Einstein so girdle the one Geo DL I mean who has changed everything it do you know what his citation was at the Harvard honorary degree Harvard in it snobbery does not announce who gets some before they get them and their trots on to the stage with every glasses a little man and the citation was the greatest step in human thought since Descartes and that was girdle he was there of course and that's one of the few deeply personal things up and I'm I ever said to me he said early on you may think you've been made welcome in the house of Einstein you made me well you be made welcome in the house of girdle and probably true Einstein himself often felt this that girdle had changed or humans thought they had aged 24 windless proof made so but now I'm in Cambridge hmm a Churchill and the fun of starting a place was immense the sheer fun we had Nissen Hut's in which to teach with the water coming in but we started a number of revolutionary things like overseas fellows we had brilliant people from America Chuck parson from the start and there was three students in English who had come desperately not being able to get into any proper College and it was an enormous ly exciting adventure but from the start I knew it wouldn't work I had come and Cockcroft had made me feel that he agreed that he was an opportunity to stop new fields that we should have linguistics there were not at campus that we should have comparative literature was none of course damage all sorts of hopes I thought we were and the people who warmly made me welcome but warmly were called Richard Keynes Richard Adrian Martin wells I could go on with it not on the high princes of Cambridge intellectuality Fellows of Trinity or Peter house to a man who had come to join the new college with the one ambition to have as many firsts as trendy I mean they didn't disguise this which I thought was the most petty ambition for a new national college for college which had funds which have which didn't know anything in my opinion to Cambridge they saw it very differently and so there was a a warm happy misunderstanding in a sense if you want from the start and then I have to be allowed to lecture as a fellow college and finally they had to move me - what's the biggest so Mitchell - the lady Mitchell who is standing room only there why I taught how to read a poem after Marx Freud and levy Strauss you imagine the excitement for the board multitude yeah I taught as a seminar what is translation the philosophy I had more applicants to do doctorates than anyone else in the English faculty this was going to be punished and punished hard and so then as the law demanded I was invited to apply furnaces lectureship that was the law if you were a fellow and had lectured you had to be given the chance of putting in furnaces lectureship and there came the famous famous interview witches and so often described as become legendary muriel Bradbrook and half in for gown and their and I think you know the story there was a copy of encounter in front of them until it and Huff say reads a sentence to shoot a man because you disagree with him about Hegel's dialectic is a complement of the human spirit he said did you write this answer Sarah Schulman do you believe it I said yes that was the end of the offer and mrs. lectureship and the end of enter whereupon in its chivalric generosity Churchill says we don't give a damn about you having an assistant that ship lecture in our dining war which is one the biggest in Cambridge I'm go on supervising we will pay you a professorial fellowship what downing was doing for leaders the exact parallel who also didn't have election at that point then and I thought hard about it I loved the place I love my college I loved Cambridge my wife already was teaching well leave is the students paid a terrible price as leavis couldn't examine nor be member of the boards that set the tripod no they paid a terrible price they paid for his genius and for his belief that to be a lecturing a downing was more necessary and eminent rightly than any faculty post and then he went to York as you know and we followed some very very hard years to children to young children no Cambridge job a tiny college type a mural tiny with when you're a fellow just a fellow stipend but you were professorial no I turned that down I see I turned all that down because I knew it would how I see I wasn't going to play the Nevis game yeah not twice not once was bad enough in Cambridge and um one day I'm so I began earning my living by freelance writing and by guest lecturing with many American guest lectures which meant also being away a great deal and my father was already ill very ill he suffered from Hodgkin's disease and he asked me to his favorite dining table in New York at the hotel they always have me for dinner and I said to him I've been offered chairs in comparative literature I think it was Chicago and I think it was yellow Columbia for Kepner two eminent Amman university which do you think I should choose advantages list Ava and then he said only you can decide but if you do this Hitler will have one meant there wouldn't be any Steiner left in Europe I phoned my wife late that night or whatever the time difference was and said rather than that contempt I would sell shoelaces I meant it I'm not going to put up I can't stand that I can't face it because I happen to agree with indeed Hitler would have won there are no other Steiners where he meant none of us Allah Allah of course there are many but you know not that many but on the memorial tablets in Prague there are about 30 members of our family who were gassed so my father meant it in a very deep sense that Hitler would then have driven me out yeah and so there was very rough and I was at a lovely university called Santa Barbara a dream place were Creek then ended and giving the what the California whole region's lectures when the phone rang from Geneva saying you may remember that during the Italian Risorgimento and the cavora they was founded the first chair of comparative literature anyway in the world for a man called sis Mundi historian a very distinguished man and the name of it is Rita hottie Oceania heart which I prefer which is much more beautiful name and well restarting it funds have been gathered if you will accept it and that's how it all happened and what I've never been I've been to Geneva on the train passing through and that's how it all happened what here is this I go to Geneva in 64 64 and you got the phone call when you were in America or in America lecturing it's and about and that they were prepared to devote the funds to creating to recreating this Monday's chair and that's how it all happened did you ask your father again about this or oh he was so happy he was so happy hmm he later dies in Zurich and my mother also by chance ten days later dies on holiday in Switzerland vigorous Switzerland became decisive in my personal life but much more my professional life io2 chance to teach in every language I knew the rule was in my comparative literature same now should talk of Zenda this was not for undergraduates that I taught the text in the relevant language so far as I could and that was a dream who the decision of my wife to stay here not only this house you had already bought this - yeah not only her new she became vice president not only that she's a historian of English who International Relations all the materials here but something which rather haunts me she's incredibly intelligent and gifted and totally monocot totally monogrammed which is the irony of our marriage should Chomsky cannot say yes or no in another language Chomsky's a total baka for example a big footnote if I were a great psychological scientist I would be working on the following problem what are the three sings tone deafness without a lesion in the year monitor autism the inability to learn the length and thirdly what we now call equation blindness people in front of 2 X equal 4 start weeping and this is being studied are they related we don't know what are they what are these organic blocks there are head waiters who have 10 languages effortlessly there's no correlation with intelligence whatever what on Geneva where nearly come to the end of this tape so just to how long were you in geneva 25 years 25 years and I arranged a 7 months a year schedule 5 months here seven months ago five months here and some months there yeah and did you find it a very good place to teach I mean apart from adding the language for the students good and the other not as brilliant as they would have been here or at Harvard very mixed but at the graduate level absolutely international and the city in which itself four or five languages are completely current and perfect for comparative literature right I mean tailor-made for that kind of vision of literature and the center of Europe weekend I might be in Milan down the road through the tunnel I'd be in Paris I'd be in Munich constantly teaching lecturing drawing it's a central point there wasn't yet the Eurostar remember this island was even more insular than it is from a place like Geneva you could live Europe which is what I wanted to do did you keep your contacts with Churchill at all very much so food they they insisted and most generously they made me an extraordinary recorded fellow would you watch much mirth in the breasts otherwise and then a pensioner fellow I'm there forever as a founding fellow played with mmm so did you teach at all at Churchill oh no no I never taught again who never thought like them but it is so full of ironies two years after kicking me out the English faculty puts gobbets a called them their select passages from the dress of tragedy on the tripods paper two years after asking me to leave all right just one last question before this tape finishes which is about Lewis um were you close to him and no but his wife Sheila Bulstrode Gardens was through the hedge to Churchill College she took on undergraduate supervision for me she was fabulous hmm she would take someone whom we had consigned to a third and say you have no right to do that and teach them into a good two two or two one she was a fabulous pedagogy for s-- who with a burning Puritan conviction that all human beings must be given the very best of intellectual challenges and when she would invite me to 12 Oregon's to talk about the papers the shy little man would bring in the teeth lovely

Channel: Prof Alan Macfarlane - Ayabaya

Views: 90,524

Rating: 4.8885245 out of 5

Keywords: George, Steiner, language, tragedy, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare

Id: 7bEeAiVnGbM

Length: 60min 33sec (3633 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 07 2007