Professor George Steiner

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is an intellectual. He was born into a Jewish family who lived in Paris and fled with them in 1940 to America. This early experience of being brought up in a secure, happy home surrounded by a world of terror has influenced much of what he's said and written since. The English academic establishment has taken decades to accept him, despite his huge early popularity as a Cambridge lecturer. But his books have always been influential. His mind is a warehouse of knowledge, which, in works such as Language and Silence and in Bluebeard's Castle, has been channelled into a ferocious advocacy of the values of European culture. He's well aware of the pitfalls of such convictions and stays close to his father's advice and I quote, always have your bags packed. He is George Steiner.

Presenter1:19

Advice, George, guaranteed to give you a sense of impending crisis. Did your father intend you to take it literally?

Professor George Steiner1:26

Oh, very much so. Remember that Hitler was coming nearer and nearer. And the important thing, I think, was to say

Professor George Steiner1:33

We're going to see that, I hope, in some of the music. Don't be afraid. The world is a very large and very exciting place.

Presenter1:39

But is it advice you've always stuck to? You didn't, for example, stick to it, did you, in the sixties, when the Faculty of English at Cambridge rejected you, you know, didn't let you in, you didn't up and off?

Professor George Steiner1:48

I didn't because I had to find something in Europe. Uh my father, who was still alive, very ill, when he knew what was going wrong in Cambridge, I went to see him and with some very, very handsome senior American offers of chairs in comparative literature. And he said, Of course you must take them, but how very sad that Hitler has won. What he meant by that was that if I left Europe with my family, then the great boast that none of us would survive in Europe would have been fulfilled. And that that evening or night I I phoned my wife, who's very distinguished on in Cambridge, and I said, I think I'll do anything. I'll I'll sell insurance. It's also very exciting, but I will not stand my father's contempt ever again. And so, very luckily, other things turned up in Europe.

Presenter2:33

Terrific onus, though, he put on you. When he was in America, why did you have to keep the Steiner name going in Europe?

Professor George Steiner2:38

He was in America and unwell, and had become a very successful man of business, with only one

Professor George Steiner2:47

vibrant purpose that I wouldn't even know the difference between a share and a bond. I mean, his passion was, very Jewish passion, that a child should be a scholar, or a teacher, or something to do with the life of the mind. And he worked so that that would be possible. That's a historical pattern which goes back a long, long way.

Presenter3:04

But what he was saying to you in saying, Always have your bags packed, it seems to me, was, you are what you are, you are rootless, and you should be proud of it.

Professor George Steiner3:12

Absolutely. Because trees have roots, and I love trees. I have some wonderful ones in my garden. Human beings have legs. I regard this as a tremendous advance. And what he meant me to understand was that the peregrine condition, the pilgrim's condition, the refugees, the wanderers, has its own great joys.

Presenter3:33

And the proof of your rootlessness is that you you don't have a first langu well, you have three or four first languages.

Professor George Steiner3:38

I was brought up, of course, like everybody is, by mamma, and mamma was a Viennese grande d'homme, and she used to begin a sentence in one language and end it in another, without even noticing it. She is quite unconscious of it. She's a superb linguist, an immediate ear. And so I picked that up, I picked up the languages at the beginning, and I I think I was somewhat surprised when I discovered that most people are monoglott. Um I hadn't at all believed this, or I hadn't known it as a very young child.

Presenter4:05

So there's no answer to the question, George Steiner, where is your homeland?

Professor George Steiner4:10

Oh, wherever there's a table and a typewriter or a pen

Presenter4:13

Tell me about your first record.

Professor George Steiner4:15

Well, uh like so many Jewish homes in the thirties of Central European background, Wagner was immense. It's a big paradox. Wagner's anti Semitism we all knew about. Wagner was surrounded by Jews. Jews had largely made Bayreuth possible, etcetera. So the ruling was father said no more in Germany, he couldn't bear it. So we had some French Wagner. And there's a singer, Rogachevsky, and his Lohen grin was something we heard very often. And to day, as I listen to it again, the sheer wonderful absurdity of it doesn't it turn it into a French opera, Le Roi Dis or so. But it still moves me enormously.

Speaker 44:58

Il conno fareva.

Speaker 45:38

Baison Reimi Sils and Taro for swift fear as all

Presenter5:56

That was Wagner, part of Lohengrin's narration of the Holy Grail, sung by Josif Rogachevsky.

Presenter6:02

Your father, George Steiner, true to his own advice, had fled Vienna in the mid twenties, uh nineteen twenty four, I think. Did did he then have a sense of the terrible things that were to come?

Professor George Steiner6:08

Yes.

Professor George Steiner6:11

Total, total. We have his diaries. He expected it to come from there, not Germany. And of course it did in a sense. And he came to Paris with mamma, my sister. I was born in Paris, brought up in French school system.

Presenter6:25

But he obviously did very well, because by the time you came along in the late twenties you were living in a very smart RD smart man.

Professor George Steiner6:30

He did very, very well indeed. He began his life three times over, Sue, and um he said it it was each time very, very difficult and enormously exciting.

Presenter6:40

How early in your life were you aware that life for for for a Jewish family was different? Was it was an unfair business?

Professor George Steiner6:47

Oh, right at the beginning. I remember being chased down the street from Malysee by the boys yelling rather Hitler than Blum. That was at the time of what is called the Franc Populaire and the Socialist Government in France. Uh it was a constant element. That's how you grew up. You had to know that something very big was coming. One couldn't of course tell what it really was, but that the situation was precarious.

Presenter7:11

So you did no fear.

Presenter7:13

even when you were small, despite what your father said to you.

Professor George Steiner7:16

I must have, I must have but I also knew enormous confidence and support.

Presenter7:23

Did you know the name of Hitler?

Professor George Steiner7:25

Yes, because the voice came through on the radio. Those are among the most distinct memories I have gathering.

Professor George Steiner7:32

at the old fashioned radio honeycomb kind of shape, and through the crackling, to hear that voice coming through.

Presenter7:38

But how did your parents react when you were chased down the street, as you describe? I mean, they were surely.

Professor George Steiner7:42

That was one wonderful moment which which which probably shaped me for the rest of my life. Uh mama had me next to N. We came up in the apartment and she shut the shutters because there was a perfectly stupid mob coming down the Rue de la Pompe. And

Professor George Steiner7:59

Papa came home, said open the shutters, and took me with him to the balcony.

Professor George Steiner8:04

and said very quietly

Professor George Steiner8:06

This is called history. You must never be afraid.

Professor George Steiner8:10

And that, I think, marked me probably more than anything, and I watched fascinated. This is called history. It was a marvellous thing to say to a child.

Presenter8:17

And you'd have been very tiny, what five?

Professor George Steiner8:19

Five and a half, six.

Presenter8:19

Six honey.

Presenter8:21

And yet, despite that knowledge and those experiences, the Steiner family remained in Paris right up until nineteen forty.

Professor George Steiner8:29

My father was working for the government and it was the phoney war and he was sent over to try and buy fighter planes from the United States. It was too late, we didn't know that. And he was over there and we, by a series of complicated miracles, were allowed to join him just in time. But from my class in that Lycée, which was heavily, heavily Jewish,

Presenter8:40

Okay.

Speaker 48:40

Uh

Professor George Steiner8:53

Because the sixteenths are only small at the time,

Professor George Steiner8:57

Only one other, so far as I know, child has survived. Only one other. There are two of us.

Presenter9:03

But why did you leave it so late? Nineteen forty?

Professor George Steiner9:05

Because there was the hope of fighting Hitler, and and and after all, France had helped win the First World War.

Professor George Steiner9:13

And very few people realized

Professor George Steiner9:15

that the second one was an altogether different business.

Presenter9:18

And how did he get you out at that last moment?

Professor George Steiner9:20

Um it's through an American ship through Genoa just before Italy came in. So it was a series of of of miracles.

Professor George Steiner9:28

Record number two.

Professor George Steiner9:29

Well, exactly what you've been asking. Number two is

Professor George Steiner9:34

The that largo from Handel, sung by Schlussnus, whose text says Thanks be unto you, my lord. You have led your people through the sea, it's the Red Sea, you have led them by the hand, and whenever we got terribly depressed, terribly and said, uh uh when Austria fell, uh then part of our family vanished in Czechoslovakia, it was too late, couldn't get them out this was a record that I used to hear in the house. It moves me still to tears, and it's deep confidence and deep sadness at the same time.

Speaker 410:22

Side, dear hell.

Speaker 410:26

To harstine for

Speaker 410:39

Come on.

Speaker 410:42

Does Gosamer

Presenter11:05

Heinrich Schlussnuss singing Handel's Dankseidie Herr.

Presenter11:10

There was an unashamed emphasis on scholarship, I think, in your family, George Steiner. You apparently were made to learn by heart until you wept. What kinds of things

Professor George Steiner11:20

Quite rightly.

Professor George Steiner11:22

We were in a system, in the French lyse system, where memory was felt to be your greatest asset, and the muscle of mind, and it was going to be woken even if chalk had to be thrown at you, which was very regular, and we began by reciting La Fontaine Fables and Vito Hugo and more and more.

Professor George Steiner11:39

I owe everything to that discipline and that training, the joy of learning by heart. Remember, the wonderful English language says by heart, not by brain, not by mind. To learn by heart means exactly that. It gets into you, it lives inside you, it shapes you, you shape it. That is what education, I think, is about.

Presenter11:58

But this is of course very unfashionable thinking now. I mean, modern educational thinking has it that such methods are a deterrent to learning, that that if you that you've got to make knowledge more accessible and you kind of spoon feed it.

Professor George Steiner12:11

I'm a totally unreconstructed, unrepentant mastodon of elitist joy and passionate conviction, um which is that most of present schooling is organized amnesia. That is to say, it takes away the arts of remembrance, of history, it leaves people with very little inner ballast. Now that's fine when all is going well. Now when all is going well and you're beautiful and young and earning a lot and then you can sail very lightly before the wind.

Professor George Steiner12:41

Be careful. When things start going wrong, health, loneliness, the most natural things. What you carry inside you they can't take away from you, and then suddenly richens enriche and you are no longer alone.

Presenter12:54

Do you think it matters with what you exercise this muscle of the mind? I mean, can you learn humorous for Hilaire Belloc as well? Shakespeare.

Professor George Steiner13:01

Absolutely. And the wonderful thing is, I know many people, I know many students from my Chicago days who, within three bars of a Charlie Parker record,

Professor George Steiner13:12

not only knew it, but knew which pressing it was, had developed the antennae of exactitude in that domain any domain, but to put luggage inside. You that's the only way I can express it, so that when the wind starts blowing very hard you have ballast. And we're taking that away from our young. We're leaving them, very often, tremendously empty. Look at the howl now about primary and secondary education in this country.

Presenter13:35

M

Presenter13:38

And if you have that luggage, when you get up and go and pack your bags, you take it with you.

Professor George Steiner13:42

You take it with you, and they can't rob you of it.

Presenter13:46

Next piece, can you

Professor George Steiner13:47

The next one is

Professor George Steiner13:52

One of the last great concerts in Berlin by Furtwengler, Bruckner Seven Symphony. And most of the people in that hall, or a great many, were going to be dead pretty soon. They knew it. By that time it was clear that the Reich had lost the war and what would happen anybody could think. Berlin already was under constant air raids. That's why part of the tape is lost. And yet if you were to ask me what is total peace, total human repose, I would pick these few moments.

Presenter15:21

Part of the adagio from Bruckner Symphony No. seven, played by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwengler. I think some people might be surprised that you specifically choose Furtwengler conducting there, and perhaps also the piece of Wagner earlier.

Presenter15:34

And you tell me that Heinrich Schlussmuss was a favourite of the Nazis. All of them in their different ways associated with Nazism, so you you you choose them despite their political implications, do you?

Professor George Steiner15:43

Because in part the horror of the phenomenon and the wonder of it and the strangeness dominated so much of my childhood, but more specifically

Professor George Steiner15:52

I began so long ago in a book called Language and Silence trying to.

Professor George Steiner15:57

struggle with how do you cope with men who play Schubert beautifully in the evening or sing Leda and then are torturers during the day, uh which we can document. Um I picked this passage from Bruckner, himself a strangely unworldly, holy person, because of its infinite tenderness in midst of hell. Um and this, I admit, leaves me always baffled and and asking.

Presenter16:24

But let let's look at the case of Furtwengler briefly. Uh I mean, his career might have collapsed if he hadn't if he'd insisted on playing what the Nazis didn't want to hear, and he wasn't the only German musician who'd towed the line, as we know.

Presenter16:37

You don't entirely blame him, do you?

Professor George Steiner16:39

No, he could have left too. But his famous answer was, by staying, there were at least moments of decency and humanity. He could have left. No one who has not been in this situation, I think,

Professor George Steiner16:52

knows how they would behave. I've never heard them hammering at my door. I would probably behave abjectly. I'm convinced of this. Um I've always said and and I've wrapped up in my old English sheepdog, if somebody began beating her in front of me, I would probably break down so fast it would even embarrass the police. Um I don't know. The we each

Professor George Steiner17:16

should shut up on these things.

Professor George Steiner17:18

Until we know. And those who do know, who have behaved magnificently there are in Cambridge, one or two people who went through torture during the Second World War without breaking, and they don't want you to know that, and they will never refer to it.

Presenter17:33

So let's look at the music itself. How important is music to you? We know that your reading and literature great literature is enormously important. How does music compare?

Professor George Steiner17:41

Absolutely at the center. Um and as I get older

Professor George Steiner17:46

I reread more and more.

Professor George Steiner17:48

But I still am.

Professor George Steiner17:51

Wrapped up in new music. I think we're in a very great period of new music.

Presenter17:56

So l let me ask you this. Do does music

Presenter17:59

To use the modern idiom, reach the parts of you that other great works of art can't reach.

Professor George Steiner18:03

Probably and with age more essentially.

Presenter18:06

Got it. It touches you somewhere, new and different.

Presenter18:09

What does that say to you then? Does that say to you that that music

Presenter18:14

is or can be greater than literature.

Professor George Steiner18:17

I wouldn't want to put it that way.

Professor George Steiner18:19

At a certain point in one's life it seems indispensable. Or, let me put it another way, there's an island way. I'm lucky enough, I think, for a little while on your island, I would know a lot by heart, innerly, of literature. And it would stay there and would be with me the music I have to bring because I can't play.

Presenter18:39

But as you sit on your island and you've got access to the literature and the music,

Presenter18:44

Who do you end up thinking is greater, Shakespeare or Beethoven?

Professor George Steiner18:48

Oh, I would never want to answer that. Uh it would be a horrible way to.

Presenter18:52

But if the one touches you more deeply than the other, perhaps the one is more God given.

Professor George Steiner18:55

The world is more god.

Professor George Steiner18:57

No, there are probably moments, so let's cheat, and let's say it would be Festi's closing song with the Hey Noni No and the rain, it raineth every day. I would take Shakespeare and the music together. I would cheat a little, and take one of the very great songs in Shakespeare with the text.

Presenter19:14

Next record.

Professor George Steiner19:16

The problem of beauty.

Professor George Steiner19:18

Now there is no more difficult problem, I think. In philosophy, in series, one man's beauty is another man's ugliness. One man's utter loveliness can repel. If I had to pick one case where the sense of total beauty I could put it no more intelligently stupid way to put it where beauty incarnate

Professor George Steiner19:38

a number of things in Belios. It seems to me one of the reasons why Belios is so difficult to approach is that he transcends almost any other music in this mystery of sheer loveliness, and I would want that to be with me.

Presenter20:55

L'Esperte de la Rose from Les Nuis d'Été by Belliot, sung by Régine Crespin, with L'Oquesse de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Ernest Anselme.

Presenter21:04

You referred just now, George Steiner, to one of the abiding themes of your work, which is which is how men who appreciated great works of art could listen to them and read them by night and then put people in gas ovens by day.

Presenter21:18

It may sound like an extraordinary question, but why do you find that such a paradox?

Professor George Steiner21:23

You're quite right. There are many people who seem to accept this, who say, why should love of great beauty, and even ability to perform it or carry it out, be any barrier? Well, there I got it utterly wrong. All I can plead was there were quite a few splendid people who got it wrong too, from Plato to Matthew Arnold, perhaps to FR Levis, a wonderful teacher, who were certain that the cultivation of the sensibility of beauty, of humanity, of seriousness in art, in literature, in music and painting, would be some kind of help, some kind of barrier against inhumanity. But it's all over our world. Inhumanity can be combined with high aesthetic experience. And I don't have an answer.

Presenter22:09

So the humanities

Presenter22:11

don't necessarily humanize. Civilization doesn't necessarily civilize.

Professor George Steiner22:14

It may indeed barberize.

Presenter22:16

If you truly believe that, you must be a deeply depressed man.

Professor George Steiner22:20

Often am very deeply confused, man. Um but then I keep asking again. Um question

Presenter22:25

Because you want the answer to be different.

Professor George Steiner22:27

I don't know. Questions are my oxygen, my alcohol, and they are so urgent at the moment, and and our situation is in some way so critical, one is almost bound to keep asking. But you're quite right. There are moments where

Professor George Steiner22:41

I couldn't trust an artist or a teacher who wouldn't at certain times be very near to despair.

Presenter22:47

So all we can say is that the great arts entertain, they divert.

Professor George Steiner22:52

Got a vision.

Presenter22:53

Touch, they move.

Presenter22:55

But they don't necessarily

Professor George Steiner22:56

So far as we know.

Presenter22:57

Improve, us.

Presenter23:00

Request number five.

Professor George Steiner23:01

Um, question of humour. We've just had absolute beauty in Berlioz. One of the wonderful questions, Sue, about which very little is worth reading, is when music is funny, when it makes you smile, in a very special way, even laugh. Haydn has famous jokes. That's not quite what I mean. It's the rarest thing is of an amusing musician. I hesitated a long time. There are pieces by Brubeck which seem to me deeply funny and funnily deep. But for a very brief piece, it's Eric Sati, one of the deepest jokers ever in music.

Presenter24:37

Sati's Jimmy Nopadi number one, played by Maura Limpany.

Presenter24:41

Another business you find profoundly depressing, George Steiner, is the tyranny of noise, the lack of silence, the inability of the young to sit down and read. I mean it's it's at this point that listeners under thirty disappear and call you a reactionary fuddy daddy. But before they go, why why in a nutshell does it matter? What are the young missing that they can't pick up in newspapers, in on the television, on the internet?

Professor George Steiner25:04

But they're missing everything. You can't read.

Professor George Steiner25:07

serious poetry, if at the same time your walkman um is on to music.

Presenter25:12

But some very good writers like to have classical music on them in the background while they're working. It inspires them.

Professor George Steiner25:17

Yes, I'm not sure.

Presenter25:17

It gives them peace.

Professor George Steiner25:19

I envy their control. Perhaps it's possible. I careful, I don't think we know all that much about the cortex and how many impulses it can really digest happily at the same time. I love silence. Silence to day and space are, I know, great luxuries, and they will be more and more difficult for people to have.

Presenter25:37

And what about the computer? Some of its pioneers compare it to they say it's as great a revolution as the invention of the printing press.

Professor George Steiner25:44

May well be. Uh computers are wonderfully silent. Um in fact, one of the extraordinary things is the revolution from the typewriter. Where you used to have the clatter of the typewriter, you now have the very faint little click of the computer.

Professor George Steiner25:56

This is meant partially humorously.

Presenter25:58

So you don't find a threat.

Professor George Steiner25:59

It is extraordinarily exciting to see the young particularly.

Professor George Steiner26:03

playing the piano of the computer, their fingers moving with lightning speed.

Presenter26:07

So you're a fan of the computer despite the fact it will stop people sitting in silence or sitting and reading a book, which you believe is absolutely essential.

Professor George Steiner26:14

They may read, they may read, by the way, on the computer more and more are doing it. This is more and more are, in fact, reading online and from the World Sgate Libraries, which can now come into your own room.

Professor George Steiner26:25

Um

Presenter26:25

And that's acceptable to use it.

Professor George Steiner26:26

Oh, I think it's a good idea.

Presenter26:27

As this elitist that you say you are.

Professor George Steiner26:29

would be an idiot not to be very excited. Mark you, uh around this vexed question of elitism, which simply means that one does know some things are better than other things, that's all it means, around this vexed question, will we get a new class of the disappropriated, the underprivileged, who will not be able to keep up with the minimal computer skills needed in the world to come?

Presenter26:52

If

Presenter26:53

To go back over everything we've talked about, if the humanities can't humanize, if education is becoming a shadow of its former self, if the computer means that people will leave their books and move to the to the screen,

Presenter27:06

I think it's a very good idea.

Professor George Steiner27:08

Oh no, there there will be completely new and unexpected forms. The possibilities of musical, literary also, though not yet, it has to get much better with the production of works of art. Oh, th th a dazzling and difficult and complicated period lies ahead. But there will be a few monks left, a few very, very unpleasant and cantankerous old monks, as there were in the High Middle Ages, in Santana and other places, who'll sit there and they'll have something in front of them and they'll read it, and suddenly they'll start learning by heart.

Presenter27:40

And will you be one of them?

Professor George Steiner27:42

Too late for me the epilogue, but I hope to have educated or trained a few of them.

Presenter27:43

Yeah.

Presenter27:48

Record number six.

Professor George Steiner27:50

My whole life from probably the first thing I ever did learn by heart was some lines from Homer, and Homer has never left me. The Iliad Odyssey is simply indispensable, and that's why I've picked the next selection.

Presenter27:56

Never left.

Presenter29:01

The end of Act Two of Michael Tippett's King Priam with the London Sinfonietta Chorus conducted by David Atherton.

Presenter29:08

You've attracted a lot of criticism in your time, George. Specialist academics have accused you of being a generalist, and your detractors have pounced if you've made the slightest linguistic or factual error.

Presenter29:19

Why do you think you've elicited that kind of reaction? They seem to relish criticising you, finding you out.

Professor George Steiner29:25

First of all, I am an outsider in many ways, always have been, but I will reveal to you, I think, where the source of this and it is often hatred, it is often hatred lies. From the first sentence of my first book, which was called Tolstoy Dostoevsky, I said If one could write a single page of Tolstoy's War and Peace, or Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, who the hell would want to write a book about them? That is to say, that there are light years between the acts of creation and even the finest criticism and commentary, which is our John. Pushkin had a wonderful image. He said, You're the mailman. Please carry the letters. And it's fun and it's exciting. I am immensely grateful for my life in profession. I'm a mailman. Sometimes I've been able to carry the letters to the right box, to the right readers, saying, Read this, look at this. I've never mixed it up with writing the letter, as Pushkin most unkindly reminded me.

Presenter30:19

But it was before you'd written that offending sentence, wasn't it, that you were rejected by the Faculty of English in Cambridge. Now why did they do that?

Professor George Steiner30:26

You don't

Presenter30:30

You'd already written it.

Professor George Steiner30:31

So is that why they rejected you?

Presenter30:31

So is that why they reject it?

Professor George Steiner30:36

the outsider, the person at home in too many languages.

Presenter30:40

Too continental.

Professor George Steiner30:41

Yeah, I think it's a very good idea.

Presenter30:42

Dirty word.

Professor George Steiner30:42

The word continental is a complicated word in certain English mouths or was at that time. It has, if you want, some tones.

Professor George Steiner30:51

In Cambridge

Professor George Steiner30:53

There was, perhaps there still is, a conviction about rootedness. The the the great word is inwardness, that only a native sensibility could be really at home in the language. This is so ludicrous that that it fills me with delight. But perhaps they should have compared their English to Nabokov's or Borghius or half a dozen others, who speak an English no one there could even have approached.

Professor George Steiner31:19

So that's pretty fake stuff, but it has a very deep grip.

Professor George Steiner31:23

Next choice.

Professor George Steiner31:24

I've chosen the next extract two things the unearthly beauty of Cambridge, and secondly, a selection where American and English truths meet in a completely unique way, a great American composer in the setting of Trinity Chapel, Cambridge, for which he wrote this piece.

Presenter32:42

Samuel Barber's Annuus Dei, sung by the choir of Trinity College, Cambridge, directed by Richard Marlowe.

Presenter32:48

Your passions, George, are self evidently literature and music. Are there any others? And what about food?

Professor George Steiner32:54

Yes, I eat too much. I mean, uh it's one of the great intellectual vices. I try to be very careful about it. But I've been privileged twenty years in Geneva, uh which where one eats far too well, um brought up in France.

Professor George Steiner33:08

I'm

Professor George Steiner33:09

Bleat tougher amateur, but I love a good glass of wine not maybe much more, but a good glass I delight in and art, art, art, of course, to travel and to see things.

Presenter33:19

And what about love?

Professor George Steiner33:19

Love

Presenter33:20

Are you are you a romantic husband or loving father? Have you brought your children up exactly as you told us we should be bringing up ours?

Professor George Steiner33:26

Others must answer that, Sue. One day I will publish posthumously a secret book about making love in different languages. No one has studied this. Each act of love, of sex, is also linguistically surrounded. One makes love in French quite differently than in German, quite differently than in Italian, quite differently than English. There are d'Andjourns of love, and it's a wonderful secret subject. It's it's buried in a safe. The book one day it may appear.

Presenter33:59

So let's come to the island. Um it'll give you the silence you crave. We deliver the music you've got the great literature in your head. Can you envisage any other advantages of this solitary existence, or is it all bleakness after that?

Professor George Steiner34:11

Oh, yes. Uh time to do some serious listening and reading without the telephone.

Presenter34:17

And you can finish your book Steiner the Great Lover.

Professor George Steiner34:20

of languages.

Presenter34:22

Last record.

Professor George Steiner34:24

This is a record which I've almost identified over and over with so much in my own life.

Professor George Steiner34:30

It's France, but it's much more than France. It's a voice such as has never been again, though it's imitated and imitated. And if you were to ask me where does the mystery for you of the grip of music lie, why does a melody or a beat

Professor George Steiner34:46

Or a modulation, enter into and never leave you again whether you want to or not, it would be in the opening bars of this selection.

Speaker 434:57

Gloria Gloria.

Speaker 435:00

No run away greater.

Speaker 435:05

Nila Bea Fom

Speaker 435:11

Need a mile.

Speaker 435:13

Simon Yeni

Presenter35:25

Now if you could only take one of those eight records, do you know which one it would be?

Professor George Steiner35:30

Which one it would be? Absolutely not, because I'll tell you why.

Professor George Steiner35:33

If I took one I would somewhat forget the exact memory of the other seven. I want to carry the eight in me, so I refuse your question. I would not want any of the others to be diminished.

Presenter35:40

I would not

Presenter35:43

Eight or nothing.

Professor George Steiner35:44

Eight or nothing.

Presenter35:45

Okay. You may get nothing, of course.

Professor George Steiner35:46

Of course, but then I carry them in me.

Professor George Steiner35:49

Your book

Professor George Steiner35:50

The book

Professor George Steiner35:51

Now bet

Professor George Steiner35:52

There is a small publishing firm.

Professor George Steiner35:56

I don't want to betray where it is. It's very far away.

Professor George Steiner36:00

Can they publish with the help of a computer?

Professor George Steiner36:03

A calendar book and appointment book for five hundred years ahead.

Professor George Steiner36:08

day by day exactly with the astronomical analytic. And I would have that, and begin filling in imaginary appointments, engagements, lectures, quarrels, lawsuits, encounters with men and women and children

Professor George Steiner36:22

for hundreds of years after my death, and suddenly that would be the Book of Life.

Presenter36:29

And what about a luxury?

Professor George Steiner36:30

Um no doubt at all. A good little chess computer, and I would never be alone.

Presenter36:35

George Steiner, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Professor George Steiner36:39

Thank you, Super.

Speaker 336:47

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.