Readers are defined by what they don’t read as much as by what they do. George Moore shunned works of reference. ‘An encyclopedia in this house!’ he spluttered indignantly at the enquiry of a friend. Mark Twain was not an enthusiast of Emma and Pride and Prejudice. ‘The best way to start a library,’ he advised, ‘is to leave out the works of Jane Austen.’ Sins of omission in writers are harder to judge, largely because, in the authorial realm, confessions of this kind are rare. Stephan Mallarmé, in a letter to Paul Verlaine, admitted that his unwritten opus was ‘simply a book, in several volumes, a book that is truly a book, architecturally sound and premeditated, and not a collection of casual inspirations however wonderful that might be’. And Nathaniel Hawthorne jotted down in the wish-list of his notebooks: ‘To write a dream, which shall resemble the real course of a dream, with all its inconsistency, its eccentricities and aimlessness — with nevertheless a leading idea running through the whole. Up to this old age of the world, no such thing has ever been written.’
George Steiner, seldom daunted by terrae incognitae, has in his latest book confessed to seven such sins: seven unwritten books that he has, up to a point, exorcised by pinning their vaguely perceived forms to the page so that now we know what might have been and can lament what has not come to pass. My Unwritten Books is not, however, a compendium of wishful thinking. Each chapter is a thoughtful, fact-filled, lucid map of somewhere whose exploration, Steiner tells, he refuses to undertake. Mysteriously, the cartography suffices.
Reading Steiner makes me wonderfully conscious of my ignorance; I become what Browning called ‘a picker-up of learning’s crumbs,’ grateful for what falls off his table. Accordingly, his first ‘unwritten book’ is on the scholar Joseph Needham, of whose monumental achievements I knew nothing. According to Steiner, Needham’s writings seems to have spanned every human endeavour, from the history of science to the history of ideas, from hermeneutics and historical novels to biology and crystallography, culminating with Science and Civilisation in China, a multi-volume colossus begun in 1937 and continued after Needham’s death in 1995. ‘No bibliography,’ Steiner writes (but this is meagre consolation) ‘can convey the myriad-minded density of Needham’s perceptions’. As Steiner’s readers have come to expect, even for Needham’s seemingly infinite realms, he finds a useful and unlikely chart. Proust, of all people, serves Steiner to explain the spider’s web multiplicity of this ‘archaeologist of consciousness,’ as he calls him. ‘SCC and the Recherche are,’ Steiner explains (and we understand exactly what he means,) ‘the two foremost acts of recollection, of total reconstruction, in modern thought, imagination and executive form’.
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