George Steiner passed away February 3 at the age of ninety. Obituaries have appeared in virtually every major newspaper around the world, in addition to literally hundreds of tributes online in many different languages. He published dozens of books and hundreds of essays and reviews on topics from Tolstoy to Derrida, from Antigone to Celan, from the infinite complexities of language to—perhaps most notably of all—the Holocaust.
When Frederick Turner and I were planning the revival of the Kenyon Review, which had ceased publication in 1970 and resumed its New Series in 1979, we contacted the poets and fiction writers, the literary and cultural critics whom we most wanted to publish. At the top of our list was Steiner, who at that time was Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Geneva, and in the middle of his thirty year term as the New Yorker’s chief book critic, succeeding Edmund Wilson in that position. Later, in 1994, when Oxford established its first ever chair in comparative literature, Steiner was appointed its first occupant. When we originally wrote to him briefly explaining our plans for the revival, Steiner, who had published a number of articles in the original series of the Kenyon Review, wrote back a very polite letter arguing that revivals of literary magazines are rarely successful and that the original KR was such a distinguished journal that he would suggest we let it rest in peace.
A few months later, Steiner was scheduled to be in residence at Kenyon for a week to deliver the John Crowe Ransom Lectures, a series of lectures that had been established a few years earlier to honor the great poet and original editor of KR. After receiving Steiner’s polite but disappointing response to our first letter, we sent him a very detailed description of the kind of magazine we wanted to create and politely asked him if he would read it before coming to Kenyon so that we might revisit the question when he was in town.
In April 1977 Steiner arrived at Kenyon and I met him for the first time at lunch. Just a few days earlier my wife Inese had given birth to our first child, prematurely as it turned out, so that he was still in the intensive care unit at the local hospital, where I spent the morning with him before meeting George Steiner at noon. At lunch Steiner’s concern about our new baby was so heartfelt and generous that it not only helped me deal with a very trying time but, as I reflect back over the years, was the rock-solid foundation of our deep friendship over the course of nearly half a century.
At that lunch George also told us he had read our prospectus with great interest, enough to make him change his mind and accept not only our original request to send us a piece for KR but also our offer to have him be our European Editor. At the end of that lunch George asked Fred and me if he could send us a manuscript he’d recently finished but had shown to no one. A couple weeks later a typed draft of The Portage to San Cristobal of Ah appeared in our mailbox. Although Steiner had published some short fiction in the past, this was his first novella and the central character was Hitler. I still remember reading that manuscript in one sitting long into the night, calling Fred the next morning and learning that he was as wild about it as I was, and agreeing that we should immediately contact Steiner and ask him if he would be willing to let us publish it in its entirety in one of our first issues of the new series of the Kenyon Review. George agreed and we devoted the entire second issue of KR, in spring 1979, to The Portage.
We knew it was risky at best, unprecedented at worst, to devote an entire issue of a literary quarterly to one work. But it was the subject of that amazing novella that constituted by far the biggest risk. Although both before and after writing The Portage, Steiner has written dozens of articles and books in which the Holocaust is his central concern, in this novella Hitler appears as an actual character who is still alive in the jungles of South America.
After its publication in the Kenyon Review we had literally hundreds of our new subscribers cancel their subscriptions, often accompanied by angry and, in some cases, anti-semitic rants accusing us of using the journal to promote Jewish issues or, alternatively, of giving a forum for what were clearly anti-Semitic views. We also had hundreds of subscribers wildly excited by the brilliance and originality of Steiner’s novella, along with The Portage’s subsequent publication as a book in a dozen languages—to say nothing of its 1982 adaptation by Christopher Hampton for the London theater, in which Alec McCowen starred in the lead role of Hitler.
For many years George had a major impact on the Kenyon Review, not only by serving as European Editor but also by publishing several more articles, in addition to The Portage, in KR over the course of several decades and being the subject of an extraordinary essay on the importance of his work by Amit Majmudar in the fall 2012 issue of KR.
Just ten days after George died, his wife Zara passed away as well. She was a distinguished historian at Cambridge University and, like her husband, a person of both extraordinary accomplishment and unimaginable warmth and decency. My first letter to George was to solicit his support for our launching of KR. My second, after meeting him at Kenyon, was to tell him how much I loved The Portage and that Fred Turner and I wanted to devote a whole issue to its publication in the Kenyon Review. Those were the first two letters of a series that we wrote to each other twice a month, without interruption, over the course of the next forty-three years. His legacy to the world of literature and culture is immeasurable. Our friendship is one of the singular blessings of my life. And his love of, and dedication to, this magazine is not the least of his innumerable gifts to our literature and culture.