This latest work by George Steiner, the celebrated French-born poly-math, sketches seven unwritten books in seven chapters. The themes will be familiar to those who have followed Steiner’s glittering academic career: artistic creativity, Jewishness, the death of God. So, too, will the grand manner and lofty style.

The one real surprise is a rapturous chapter entitled The Tongues of Eros, which is presumably intended as a serious, inquiring, lyrical and tender outline of a sexual autobiography, but induced uncontrollable fits of laughter in this reader. Steiner’s central argument is that making love “in German” is very different to making love “in Italian”, and that as a polyglot himself (a tetraglot, to be precise), he has had ample scope to confirm this personally.

Ch. “when nearing climax . . . would cry out, though in a muted register, the name ‘Sankt Nepomuk the Lesser.’ ” Another used the euphemism “taking the streetcar to Grinzing” to signify “a gentle, somewhat respectful anal access”.

In bed, in Angers, a French conquest used the rare subjunctive pluperfect, as perfected by Proust, “which arrested me, in, as it were, mid-flow” – something worth remembering if trapped in a lift with the professor. Another rebuked him for taking an unspeakable liberty: “ ‘How dare you address me as tu?’ panted V even as I parted her comely legs.”

He recalls “a glorious ebony partner” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an intriguingly “unmentionable caress” called “our flowering cactus”, and another’s “lobelias gently watered with saliva”. A woman whose initial he cannot remember, a one-off in a hotel bedroom, observed as they undressed, “Am I myself? Are you you?” “The question,” Steiner muses, “seemed to stem directly out of Fichte’s meditations on the cancellation of the self.” Well, maybe. Or maybe she was just drunk.

The problem with recounting your numerous sexual conquests (assuming you have racked up as many notches on your bedpost as this esteemed chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur) is that it can sound a bit boastful. Then again, since Steiner tells us on several occasions here that, in 50 years of teaching, he has encountered only “four pupils, three men and a woman, abler, more original, more open to crisis and modernity, than I am,” perhaps sounding boastful isn’t his greatest anxiety.

Invidia, the chapter on artistic envy, begins, “Not many today, I presume, read the works of Francesco Stabili, better known as Cecco d’Ascoli.” Steiner goes on to quote d’Ascoli for us – in 14th-century Italian, untranslated. He quotes Goethe and Paul Celan, too, neither of them translated for the benefit of the common reader. The suspicion that Steiner may not actually want common readers is confirmed by the prose style. Often you can only guess at his meaning. What about Aristotle’s advice to “think like a wise man, but express yourself like one of the people?”

There are times when Steiner does the exact opposite, dressing up banalities in the most clotted, Latinate and circumbendibus waffle in order to make them appear profound [see below]. At other times he can be hilariously portentous. My favourite is his solemn observation, apropos of Darwin, that, “The newt is among our forefathers.”

In feminist mode he laments “the millennial constriction of women”. What is the adjective “millennial” doing here? It signifies either a 1,000-year period, or else a coming golden age, neither of which is relevant. Although scornful of the obscurities of poststructuralism and deconstruction, Steiner’s own writing is little better, suggesting all too vividly a world of comfortably tenured academics talking among themselves, in a language that deliberately excludes the rest of us, and effectively saying nothing anyway. A congress of bats squeaking to each other in an airless cave, quite unregarded by the rest of the sunlit world.

With his rarefied and mandarin address, Steiner’s puzzlement over what distances the creative from the critical mind is almost poignant. He exhibits only a sensitive disgust at the masses and their frightful entertainments, their American movies and pop music, and at the common man “whose God is, across so much of the planet, football”. (He is especially antifootball, even though many of the greatest thinkers, from Albert Camus to Rod Liddle, have been fans of the beautiful game.) Despite his reverence for our culture heroes – Shakespeare, Brueghel or Balzac – his outlook on the world could not be further from their endless fascination by the warm, jostling, infuriating throng of common humanity.

In the final chapter, he insists vehemently on his love of privacy, his hatred of “the exposure of bodily intimacies in the mass media” and its “rampant vulgarities”, which is odd given the earlier stuff about watery lobelias and anal access. Perhaps it doesn’t count as vulgar if it appears in a book rather than on telly. The most appealing and authentic passages are on his love of animals, his real, flaring anger at their maltreatment by the “moronic Chinese”, among others. The pen portrait of his dog Ben is truly lovely, and his description of the way the mere presence of a dog gives a home a perpetual “warm hum”, even when it’s asleep, is worthy of Jilly Cooper. An entire book that good would have been worth writing.

In other words...

Making sense of Steinerese may look difficult, but it’s quite simple once you get the hang of it. Just ignore three-quarters of the words, and translate the rest into plain English.

Steinerese: “The rhetoric of desire is a category of discourse in which the neurophysiological generation of speech-acts and that of love-making engage reciprocally.”

English translation: “Talking and making love are closely related.”

Steinerese: “Though it may take on ‘surrealist’ modes, the grammatology of our dreams is linguistically organised and diversified far beyond the historically, socially circumscribed provincialities of the psychoanalytic.”

English translation: “Dreams involve language, and elude psychoanalysis.”

Steinerese: “Saturation by commentary, by textualities parasitic on preceding expositions, may, arguably, inhibit autonomous creativity.”

English translation: “Too much criticism stifles literature.”

Read on... book:
After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation by George Steiner
(OUP £13.50)
Steiner’s controversial 1975 study of literary theory

MY UNWRITTEN BOOKS by George Steiner
Weidenfeld £14.99 pp224

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