Postscript: George Steiner 1929 - 2020

George Steiner (Photo by Peter Marlow)

Back in the 70s, when I started reading The New Yorker, its book reviewers were John Updike, V. S. Pritchett, and George Steiner – heavy-hitters all. Of the three, Steiner was the heaviest – the Boog Powell of book critics. What do I mean by “heavy”? He could crush a book he didn’t like. For example, in his “Old Man and the Sea” (The New Yorker, April 23, 1979), a review of Frederick R. Karl’s Joseph Conrad: Three Lives, he wrote,

It is difficult to believe that anyone could produce an almost unreadable biography of as vivid a figure as Joseph Conrad, but Professor Frederick R. Karl, of the City College of New York, has succeeded in doing so. His turgid leviathan “Joseph Conrad: Three Lives” is a triumph of the academic, in the trivializing sense of the word, over the living. It is composed in a style of the texture of ageing jello.

He could also praise lavishly. In his “Rare Bird” (The New Yorker, November 30, 1981), a review of Guy Davenport’s The Geography of the Imagination, he said of Davenport’s writing,

Seemingly short sentences and fragmentary phrases open, via unexpected commas, into sequences as opulent as Japanese paper blossoms dropped in clear water.

For me, Steiner’s most memorable piece is “The Cleric of Treason” (The New Yorker, December 8, 1980), a powerful reflection on the British art-historian turned spy, Anthony Blunt. That’s the one that unforgettably ends with Steiner's thunderous “Damn the man.” The piece is included in his excellent collection George Steiner at The New Yorker (2009).