Lessons of the Masters
by George Steiner
Harvard University Press, 185 pp., $19.95

IN THE WORLD of intellectual journalism, George Steiner has always been a figure of controversy. No one who reads him seems to be neutral about him, with opinion divided between those who think his range of learning and power of dramatizing ideas astonishingly brilliant, and those who think him a fake of astounding portentousness and pomposity. Judgments about him are made even more complicated by the fact that he has been the victim of English academic anti-Semitism, colder and more disdainful than which civilized Jew-hating does not get.

Steiner is a writer who has always come on high, toweringly high. His first book, "Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky" (1959), set the tone for his unremitting highbrowism. For many years he moved the heavy mental lumber for the New Yorker, reviewing works on Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, and Paul Célan, bringing his taste for the abyss to that otherwise lighthearted journal. "Men in Dark Times," the title of a collection of Hannah Arendt essays, is a phrase that provides a rubric for Steiner's own intellectual proclivities. If one is looking for a fifth horseman of the Apocalypse, Steiner is your man. I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, "A joke, I say, that's a joke, son," because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.

I find myself unable to resist reading George Steiner, these days more often than not in the London Times Literary Supplement, where he is still doing his men-in-dark-times number. His is one of the tightest acts of our day. My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner's of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world's most learned man.

The performance is near flawless. If you don't take him too seriously, it's great fun to watch his by-now patented moves, feints, operatic touches. Rounding off paragraphs in "Lessons of the Masters," his recently published Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on the relation between teachers and students, Steiner writes, "Here, too, the finale of the 'Tractatus' is pertinent," or "Are there in this model ironized versions of Orphic or Pythagorean doctrines?" or, after a reference to Plotinus, "The phenomenon will recur in Wittgenstein's coven." Adumbrations like that one does not run into every day.

Steiner's pretensions are to polymathy. He claims just about all knowledge as his province. His reading is three stages beyond omnivorous--although he might admit, on the rare occasion, to a bad conscience over not reading an eight-volume history of the French Revolution (by Georges Sorel) that you had not hitherto known existed. He is multi-, he sometimes suggests omni-, lingual. He'll talk Boolean Algebra with you, fourth-level composers, and, in this book, even Knute Rockne, the great Notre Dame football coach, a high proportion of whose players, he informs readers of "Lessons of the Masters," went on to become major coaches at Notre Dame and elsewhere. Whether he knows all he claims to know in any genuine depth, or is instead a high-level kibitzer, is difficult to say.