Our book today is George Steiner’s meaty 1996 collection of critical essays, No Passion Spent, which features 21 pieces drawn from two decades of Steiner’s long career as a literary journalist. During the course of that career, he sold pieces on a wide array of topics to an almost equally wide array of paying venues, from The New Yorker to The Guardian to the mighty TLS. He’s been a true literary omnivore, and the signature joy of reading his essays is how unabashedly seriously he takes everything. He’s bristlingly intelligent in every one of these collected pieces; he never takes any book, idea, or preconception at face value.

He’s a formidable guide to the books and authors he introduces to his readers. He himself has read everything – the choice bits of quotation and allusion come obediently when he calls – and although he very often takes it upon himself to interpret-for-hire the literature of the day, he’s never more comfortable than when luxuriously prowling around in the cool wooded sanctuaries of canonical literature. That’s a big part of what makes No Passion Spent so enjoyable, that sense of an enormous, passionate intellect fighting some kind of perpetual rear-guard action against an onrushing blunderbuss future. Even back in 1978, he was making typically oracular stand against that era’s equivalent of an e-book reader:

The paperback is, physically, ephemeral. To accumulate paperbacks is not to assemble a library. By its very nature, the paperback preselects and anthologizes from the totality of literature and thought. We do not get, or get only very rarely, the complete works of an author. We do not get what current fashion regards as his inferior products. Yet it is only when we known a writer integrally, when we turn with special querulous solicitude to his ‘failures’ and thus construe our own vision of his presentness, that the act of reading is authentic.

There are ruminations in these pages on writers from Kierkegaard to Kafka, from Socrates to Simone Weil, and always there’s such a strong, vitally contagious feeling of engagement. Steiner could summon that deep engagement almost at will – as more than one friend of his pointed out over the years, he read always with a pen in his hand:

We underline (particularly if we are students or harried book-reviewers). Sometimes we scribble a note in the margin. But how few of us write marginalia in Erasmus’s or Colerige’s sense, how few of us annotate with copious rigour.

One of the first and grandest pieces in this collection is the Preface Steiner wrote to the Hebrew Bible in 1996 – its comparatively lax guidelines forced Steiner to fall back on his own eloquence, and on his wide and rather acute familiarity with the book under consideration:

The Old Testament is as far-flung as the stars; it is also as earthbound, as localized as an Ordnance Survey. Carry it in hand and it will guide you, cubit as it were by cubit, to the field of Gilboa, to the well at Shiloh, to that hillock under the unmoving sun at Ajalon. Drive a spade into the parched ground, be it in the seeming emptiness of the Negev or the busy hills of Galilee, and the biblical past crowds at you.

Steiner affected a gruff, cynical exterior even when he wasn’t being prickly (and he was often being prickly), but like so many immigrants to the United States, he found some truly remarkable things about his adopted country – including its dedication to higher education. “American are engaged, like no other society,” he writes, “in a general pursuit of intellectual and artistic attainment in establishments of tertiary education”:

No society has ever declared and fulfilled a comparable commitment to advanced schooling in the liberal arts, in the social and natural sciences, in technology and the performing arts. No other society has every opened the doors of the academy to almost anyone desiring entrance.

And if you’re detecting just the faintest wish on the author’s part that all this intellectual egalitarianism perhaps not be so glad-handy, well, you might not be entirely wrong. Steiner at the height of his powers could be a bit of a contrarian, wearing down some of his most exalted subjects with the strength of his  irritation at the fact that they’ve become exalted in the first place. In this volume there’s certainly no better example of this than his famous 1986 essay  “A Reading Against Shakespeare,” in which he protests in vain against the domination of the Bard – and alludes to others who’ve taken up the same doomed task:

Who now remembers Edmund Gosse’s outcry, at the turn of the century, that Shakespeare’s sheer weight and precedent was crushing the life out of English verse and out of any attempts to renew serious drama in the English language? Closely related to this protest are the attempts of both Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound to liberate the American language from the Shakespearean hold and, more especially, to find and test American verse rhythms in which the Shakespearean iambic would no longer be the implicit metronome (an attempt crucial to both the splendours and the disasters of Pound’s Cantos)

No Passion Spent is a big, densely detailed feast of a book, now out of print but perhaps not destined to stay that way. New Directions, much to their credit, has started re-issuing George Steiner with simple, attractive new covers. It looks like they started with something called George Steiner at the New Yorker and following up in 2014 with The Poetry of Thought and his great and strange masterpiece My Unwritten Books. So we can keep a hopeful eye out for a pretty new edition of No Passion Spent.