My unwritten Books
By George Steiner,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £8.25

George Steiner is the envy of all polymaths. His formal position is that of a professor of poetry at Harvard, but he has written extensively on other aspects of literature and also very profoundly and engagingly on philosophy and religion. He is also the author of an autobiography. Thus, when he writes a book like the one under review, most of his readers and admirers have to sit up and take notice. Despite his amazing range of reading and writing, what are the books that he never got down to writing? The result is a book which is a reflection on the art of reading and the internal and external pressures that prevail on a writer for not writing. The writing coruscates with learning.

The first of the seven essays is a revelation. In the Seventies, when a series called “Modern Masters” was being planned under the general editorship of Frank Kermode, in a fit of enthusiasm Steiner had chosen to write a volume on Joseph Needham. Needham was a scientist and a sinologist who left the world of scholarship aghast by the range of his learning. He knew his science, of course, but he also new his literature, his classics, music, and his multi-volume Science and Civilization in China was his life’s work, his legacy to the world. It is easy to see what attracted the polymath Steiner to Needham.

Yet, the book was never written. One immediate reason for this was Needham’s refusal to co-operate with the project once he realized that Steiner would not be a hagiographer. There were other reasons, as Steiner reveals when he reflects on his “failure” to write the book. The great work, Science and Civilization in China, was written as history, but represented, according to Steiner, a different genre in which “mythologies of learning, black fables out of mandarin erudition” came together. In Steiner’s words, “What Needham discovered he already knew to be there, as do mathematicians and mystics...He did not ‘make up’ the story in any mendacious vein, but he ‘made it’.” Needham’s not-so-implicit disapproval prevented Steiner’s exploration of this genre.

Steiner’s morning prayer is the Hassidic maxim that says “The truth is always in exile.” As a writer, he has struggled to persuade truth to return home from exile. Yet the idea of home is elusive. Steiner’s own sensitivity to this plight has often made him refrain from some favourite projects. More than the prurient interest in Steiner’s failures, what is alluring about this book is the meditation of a writer on the pain and the joys of reading and writing. Steiner’s voyage of discovery into himself allows us to discover many books that we could have read.