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ELIAS CANETTI
(1905 - 1994)
HARVILL £17.99
Elias Canetti arrived in London in 1939, a Bulgarian Jew long resident in Vienna who managed to get out just as Hitler's troops got in. Auto-da-Fé, his sinister avant-garde novel of 1935, had gained him a reputation in German literary circles but had been banned by the authorities. As several volumes of autobiography before this one made clear, he enjoyed terms of mostly mutual respect with most of the leading lights of German literature, and when he arrived in England with his wife only a select few German-speakers knew who he was. This was nearly crippling to an ego accustomed to such regular massage, and Party in the Blitz, written from memory and diaries when Canetti was in his eighties, shows that the humiliation rankled all his life.
Living in Hampstead, Canetti was well-placed to observe the cultured elite of wartime London. William Empson, Dylan Thomas, and Bertrand Russell float through these pages, plus T S Eliot, Iris Murdoch and fellow émigrés such as Oscar Kokoschka and Franz Steiner. Along the way Canetti, who was all the time working on his flawed socio-political masterpiece Crowds and Power, offers acute vignettes of the English social experience. "There were a lot of people there who didn't exist, but there were a lot of the other sort too, who did," he writes of one party. "Neither the one category nor the other conferred any sort of distinction."
This account was left in manuscript at the time of the author's death, so it is unclear how much he would eventually have expanded or suppressed. Peculiarly, that is one of the book's great strengths. Canetti voices a wish at one point to write a book about England like that of John Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian and gossip whose sketches of character were published as Brief Lives, and parts of this work show the same eye for glancing incidental detail: Enoch Powell quoting "great chunks" of Nietzsche at parties; Bernard Russell's laugh like "the cackle of the goat". The episodic form of the book owes much to Aubrey, too, and chapter-headings such as "Misery at Parties" and "The Silence of Contempt" might have raised a dusty snicker from Burton.
Canetti reserved particular venom for people who he thought enjoyed more than their fair share of public adulation. T S Eliot, whom Canetti barely knew, is singled out for especial praise: "a miserable creature... thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old... armed with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife". Given the Possum's reputation as the high priest of icy disdain, this blast of snarling hatred is refreshing but somehow on the wrong playing-field. And he takes the ludicrously ad hominem style of address to extremes in his passage on Iris Murdoch, whose lover he was for three years or so. Murdoch, he maintains, was ungainly and unfashionable in her dress, dreadful and static in bed, "if not schoolgirl-like, then schoolmarmish" in her writing, mean and petty-bourgeois in her tastes. Whatever one thinks of her work, it is a distasteful hatchet job; and if it were possible to take the other animadversions seriously, many of them would be despicable as well. But the style comes to remind one more and more of the lyrical cankankerous meanderings of Beckett's Krapp.
However, there is much beautiful, funny and sensitive writing here as well. It is an odd piece of luck that Canetti did not have the chance to work over the manuscript and adjust his own portrait in it as he did in the lofty chronicles of his days in Germany. His phrasing is often wonderfully poised, and it is very well caught in Michael Hamburger's vigorous translation. By casting his net into memory so haphazardly Canetti undeniably brought up some monsters, but the catch as a whole is worthy of anyone's attention.
RITCHIE ROBERTSON
Sven Hanuschek
ELIAS CANETTI
800pp. Hanser. 29.90euros .
3 446 20584 5
Elias Canetti
PARTY IN THE BLITZ
Translated by Michael Hofmann
206pp. Harvill. 17.99euros.
1 84343 204 8
AUFZEICHNUNGEN FUR MARIE-LOUISE
Edited by Jeremy Adler
l20pp. 12.90euros.
3 446 20594 2
AUFSÄTZE REDEN GESPRACHE
400pp. 27.90euros. 3 446 18520 8
BILDER AUS SEINEM LEBEN
176pp. 24.90euros. 3 446 20599 3
Hanser
Elias Canetti (1905—94) is among the most original, and the most variously talented, of German-language authors of the twentieth century. The fierce, grotesque satire of his one novel, Die Blendung (translated by Veronica Wedgwood as Auto-da-Fé), written when he was twenty-five, hits the reader like a fist. Some thirty-five years of thought and reading went into his treatise on crowd psychology, Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power). After its publication in 1960, and the reissue of Die Blendung in 1964, Canetti at last acquired fame, but it was his arrestingly vivid three-volume autobiography, appearing from 1977 onwards, that attracted world-wide attention and, in 1981, gained him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The published work, however, represents only the peaks of a vast oeuvre preserved mainly in the City Library at Zürich. Its central massif, according to Canetti’s biographer Sven Hanuschek, consists of notebooks. Sporadically from the mid-1920s, and systematically from 1942 to his death, Canetti wrote down his thoughts, usually spending one or two hours a day on this task. Since 2002 these notes have been accessible, though some more personal records are still barred until 2024. They include comments on day-to-day experiences, outbursts of emotion, aphorisms, reflections on crowds, power, and much else. The hand-picked selections which have appeared as volumes of aphorisms from Die Provinz des Menschen (1973; “The Human Province”) onwards represent, according to Hanuschek, only one-tenth of the whole. Hanuschek’ s extensive quotations from these notes enhance the value of his excellent, highly readable, consistently fascinating, and badly needed biography.
Any biographer of Canetti has to negotiate some delicate and difficult matters. First, Canetti was married to another gifted writer. Venetiana Taubner-Calderon, known as Veza, came, like Canetti, from the Jewish community of south-eastern Europe who spoke Ladino, a language descended from medieval Spanish. They met on April 17, 1924 in Vienna, at a public reading by Karl Kraus, and married in 1934. Veza had some fifteen stories published in newspapers, and soon after the Canettis’ arrival as refugees in England in 1939 she wrote, but refused to publish, a short novel, Die Schildkröten (The Tortoises). When it appeared fifty years inter, it was immediately recognized as ranking among the masterpieces of the - astonishingly rich - literature produced by exiles from Germany and Austria. In the early l940s, Veza wrote two plays and a novel in English, but these seem to have been destroyed in a state of depression, and increasingly she confined her literary activities to translation (she translated Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory into German) and supporting Canetti’ s work by taking care of his correspondence (he was a notoriously erratic letter-writer) and pressing him to get on with Crowds and Power.
Veza Canetti was among those literary wives who have subordinated their careers to their husbands’, as Jane Welsh Carlyle took second place to Thomas, or as Willa Muir, the author of two spirited novels, concentrated on translation to enable her husband Edwin to devote himself to fiction and poetry. Eventually we shall need a joint biography of the Canettis, along the lines of Rosemary Ashton’s Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a marriage (2001).
Another delicate matter, which makes Hanuschek’s biography all the more timely, is Canetti’s relationship with Iris Murdoch in the early 1950s. In John Bayley’s memoir, Iris (1998), Canetti figures as “the Dichter” who made love to Iris, possessing her as if he were a god” even while his wife, with her “sweet face and air of patient welcoming reserve”, was present in the same flat. Peter Conradi’s biography of Murdoch added unappetizing details. It is tempting to imagine Canetti as a monster of egoism, and to demonize him in relation to Veza rather as Ted Hughes has been pilloried for his alleged selfishness towards Sylvia Plath. Veza Canetti died (of an unidentified illness) in May 1963, a few months after Plath’s suicide, and Canetti, who had recently got to know Hughes, felt like his brother in misfortune. Hanuschek fortunately presents a somewhat more rounded, though not uncritical, picture of Canetti.
A defining event in Canetti’s life was his father’s sudden death in 1912, which brought him under the exclusive control of his mother. Intending to move the family to Vienna, Mathilde Canetti taught her eldest son German in a month, spurring him on with exclamations of “I’ve got an idiot for a son!”. This pedagogical method worked, in as much as German was the language in which Canetti wrote throughout his life. But it also gave him an experience of domestic tyranny. Later, around 1926, Mathilde Canetti, then living in France, did her utmost to separate him from her rival Veza by writing him furious letters denouncing Veza as an “unscrupulous intriguer”. Canetti broke off contact with his mother, but the structure of his autobiography, ending with her death in 1937, confirms how much she shaped his life. Even in 1967 he felt he was still in revolt against the moral authority represented by his mother, as well as the quasi-paternal figure of Karl Kraus. After admiring Kraus fanatically for years, Canetti had discarded his idol when in 1934 Kraus carne out in support of the Austrian Corporate State.
This pattern of subservience and revolt indicates the powerful passions that are also evident from Die Blendung, which Alban Berg called an “epic of hatred”. There were tensions also between Canetti and his two younger brothers, Georg and Nissim, who stayed with their mother in Paris (and became respectively, as Georges and Jacques Canetti, a distinguished doctor and an owner of record companies). The novel turns on the antagonism between the book-obsessed sinologist Peter Kien, who Canetti admitted was a caricature of himself, and his brother Georges, a psychiatrist based in Paris. It culminates in Peter’s denunciation of the suave and supple Georges as a shameless liar who exploits his patients to feed his own ego.
What must the real Georges have thought of this? Strains between the brothers could be violent. We hear of a dreadful quarrel at the meal-table in 1939, provoked by Elias’s inadvertently finishing a cheese and leaving only the rind, whereupon Georges seized it and cried: “That’s what you’re like, you leave us only this rind, you are this rind!”. In his notes Canetti admits that he needs someone to hate —a man as “object of long-term hatred”, such as the Austrian émigré Robert Neumann, who served him for years as au “idol of hatred”. The same theme entered paradoxically into Canetti’s reaction to the Holocaust. Once his initial fury against the Germans had abated, he wrote: “I don’t want to hate. I hate hatred”.
When, after living with her for some years, Canetti married Veza, Georges advised him against the marriage with a vehemence which is initially perplexing. Canetti explained that by marrying her he was saving her from the danger of deportation to Yugoslavia, of which she was technically a citizen. But he added, strangely, that she was his “warmest and must selfless friend”, “now my mother”, and that if he wanted “really” to marry, she would agree to a divorce. From a letter of November 1932 in which Veza refers to “the great upheaval this summer”, Hanuschek plausibly surmises that she had a miscarriage and that subsequently her relations with Canetti ceased to be sexual. Georges, whose correspondence with Veza is among Hanuschek’s most important sources, is likely to have known this.
In the same letter, Veza promises to allow Canetti ”your freedom, your adventures and mysteries”. For much of their English exile they had separate addresses, first in Amersham and later in Hampstead. While tolerating his relationships with other women, she sought to bring them under control, and she apparently did much to arrange his relationship with Frieda Benedikt (1916—53). Frieda was the grand-daughter of Moriz Benedikt, the powerful Viennese newspaper proprietor whom Kraus had denounced, and also published successful novels in English under the pseudonym “Anna Sebastian”. The resulting ménage à trois, which flourished during their early years of exile in England, was enlarged around 1941 by the addition of the painter Marie-Luise von Motesiczky (1906—96). Hanuschek is suitably sceptical about Canetti’s rumoured relationships with numerous other women. Relations with Frieda ended around 1945, when, perhaps to provoke Canetti, she took up with a succession of other men. In contrast to the resulting crises, his relationship with Motesiczky petered out into distant friendship.
This arrangement, which might now be called “polyamory”, provided for some years a stable framework for the often unhappy and turbulent relationship between the Canettis. A constant problem was their poverty. Unlike his brothers, Canetti seemed incapable of earning a living. While writing Die Blendung he lived on the proceeds of translating three novels by Upton Sinclair; Thereafter he was largely supported by his family. Despite the self-assured manner which astonished his acquaintances, Veza considered him impractical, timid, and unworldly; she wrote of him to Georges, “He is au undeveloped, enchanting, gifted child”.
But he was also difficult. He worked on Crowds and Power in an unsystematic way, buying books in preference to using libraries, and writing only with great reluctance. Veza claimed that she had to be a “slave-driver” to keep him at work, and that she had to threaten suicide to get him even to dictate his text. Canetti in turn felt under surveillance, and referred to Veza as the “V3”, after Hitler’ s planned third weapon of retaliation. Veza told Georges that his eccentricities sometimes brought her close to suicide. Canetti underwent repeated breakdowns with spells of paranoia, while Veza suffered from depression and hysteria. One has the impression that Canetti was postponing adulthood by recreating his difficult relationship with his mother. Hanuschek calls it a love-hate relationship based on mutual dependence; Jeremy Adler, in his sensitive introduction to Party in the Blitz, Canetti’s recollections of life in Britain, sketches a more positive picture both of Veza’ s personality - “her wit, her sharp tongue, her fiery nature, her suffering, her compassion for the suffering of others” — and of the indispensable support she gave Canetti in completing his life’s work.
After Veza’s death, Canetti felt intense grief, no doubt heightened by a sense of guilt. He even came close to suicide. But at the same time he was in love with a remarkable young woman, Hera Buschor (1933—88), who was head of picture restoration at the Kunsthaus in Zürich. If one wants evidence that love can change people, this biography provides it. Canetti overcame, perhaps not without difficulty, his jealousy and need to control others (something Hera clearly would not have stood for).
Composing his daily notes became less interesting than writing to Hera. He became aware of his own vanity, and rebuked himself for it; in a poem he addresses himself as “loudmouth” and orders himself to keep quiet. The entrancing photographs reproduced both here and in Kristian Wachinger’ s handsome pictorial biography convey eloquently what an exceptional person Hera Buschor must have been. They married in December 1971, when Hera was pregnant (Canetti was then sixty-six), and their daughter Johanna was born in June 1972. Canetti enjoyed fatherhood, and perhaps the most moving thing in this book is to see the Dichter, the Central European super-intellectual, willingly transformed into an ordinary person who looks after his baby daughter and does the dishes. He can never have expected to outlive his young wife, but after Hera’s premature death from cancer, he survived her for six years.
Some of Canetti’s energies in these last years went into preparing Party in the Blitz, published in German in 2003. Canetti established himself in English society more firmly than perhaps any other émigré writer (not counting the numerous exiled scholars who entered British academe). Yet, by his own account, he always felt au outsider, repelled by the studied coolness of middle-class English parties where physical contact, display of emotion, and even interesting conversation were taboo. His evocation of these “contact-free parties” recalls the opening pages of Crowds and Power. The book’s very first sentence runs: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown”. Canetti goes on to describe how lonely one can feel within one’s inviolate personal space, and how one can long for release into a crowd. Did Hampstead cocktail parties get him started on his book?
At these parties, Canetti listened and looked keenly, and some of his acquaintances - Bertrand Russell, William Empson, Arthur Waley - are vividly conjured. Sometimes the vividness is, as Hanuschek says, caricatural: thus Russell is virtually defined by his goatish laugh. Canetti also describes with considerable sympathy the devout sectarian couple with whom he and Veza lodged in Chesham Bois; their apocalyptic fantasies, nourished by an itinerant prophetess, enabled him to understand the world of Blake, the English poet he must admired. Unfortunately, reactions to Party in the Blitz, a compellingly readable book, may be skewed by the unsympathetic section on Iris Murdoch, written in a mood of irritated retrospection. Canetti’s surely more complex responses to Murdoch at the time of their affair will not be disclosed until 2024. To be fully appreciated, the book needs to be read alongside Hanuschek’s detailed and leisurely account of the Amersham and Hampstead years.
For it is his account of Canetti’ s years in England that is the main strength of Hanuschek’s biography. For the Bulgarian childhood, it is difficult to find material to supplement Canetti’s own autobiography, though Hanuschek astutely notes that the episode in which the five-year old Canetti threatens to kill his cousin Laurica suspiciously resembles an incident recounted by Stendhal, one of Canetti’s favourite authors, in La Vie de Henri Brulard. Later, Hanuschek valuably supplements Canetti’s writings with details about interwar Vienna, but although Canetti was linked by antagonism or friendship to numerous important figures — Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, and the Communist Ernst Fischer — he was not prominent on the literary scene. With Canetti’s exile, this biography really comes into its own, and its wealth of information about London literary circles in the 1940s and 1950s makes an English translation highly desirable.
The wider significance of Canetti’s residence in England has two main aspects. First, he belonged to a network of émigrés including two other versatile writers who continued to work in German, Franz Baermann Steiner and H. G. Adler. Despite the work of the latter’ s son Jeremy in editing their writings, too little is generally known about this fascinating intellectual circle which flourished, almost overlooked, in a British setting. Both Steiner and Adler came originally from Prague. Steiner was an anthropologist, who taught at Oxford and published a well-known study of taboo. He is gradually becoming recognized also as a major poet, whose often opaque work shows the impact not only of Hölderlin and Rilke but also, as Canetti himself notes, of Yeats and Eliot, fusing them into a highly individual mode of utterance. Canetti recalls in Party in the Blitz how he and Steiner shared a consuming interest in myths and used to discuss them for days on end.
Adler first met Canetti in 1937 when he invited the novelist to give a public reading in Prague. A few years later, Adler was transported to Theresienstadt and, thence briefly, to Auschwitz, before being transferred to Buchenwald. He put his horrific experiences to use in two important scholarly studies of the Holocaust, and also established a reputation as a novelist and poet in German. All this work was written in London, where Adler arrived in 1947. His friendship with Canetti was close but often tense, as Hanuschek recounts. One source of friction is suggested by the dedication Canetti wrote in a copy of Crowds and Power: “To H. G. Adler who lived what I only thought”.
Canetti, and his relatives, had escaped the Holocaust; Adler had survived it, and his first wife and her mother had perished in Auschwitz. It is noteworthy that the explicit reflections on the Holocaust in Crowds and Power are among its weakest pants. Canetti maintains that the mass degradation and destruction of Jews in the 1940s was a symbolic compensation for the mass degradation of currency in the German inflation of the 1920s. The millions of dehumanized victims corresponded to the millions of marks suddenly required for every transaction. This seems hardly more than a conceit. Elsewhere in the book, without mentioning the Holocaust, Canetti reflects on the covert satisfaction and sense of power felt by the survivor as he wanders through a cemetery among the graves of people he has outlived. While there is some unwelcome truth in this reflection, its limitations are shown by the many Holocaust survivors who feel, not satisfaction, but guilt at outliving so many others.
Whatever the weaknesses of Crowds and Power, it also benefited - and this is the second important aspect of Canetti’s residence in England — from his contact with English anthropology. Second-hand bookshops yielded much information about events from imperial history which he could interpret as mass phenomena: the self-inflicted mass starvation of the Xhosas in 1857, or the “lamenting pack” formed by the Warrarnunga of Central Australia. His acquaintance with the anthropologist Mary Douglas drew his attention to her study of the Lele people of the Congo, whose relation to the forest supported his theses about mass symbolism. Above all, perhaps, Canetti is indebted to a virtually forgotten book by Wilfred Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1953). Trotter was the brother-in-law of Ernest Jones, but a devotee of Nietszche rather than Freud. In his reflections on “gregariousness and the future of man”, Trotter surmises that the human race will presently form a single unit, like the bee-hive. The members of this unit will need to draw on human sensitivity to develop successful modes of intercommunication. Canetti’s equivalent to “intercommunication” is Verwandlung (transformation), a major theme in Crowds and Power, where it means a kind of empathy based on identification, an alternative to the merely external unity that exists within a crowd.
Besides this intellectual stimulus, Britain not only gave Canetti much to observe but suited his empirical cast of mind. In Canetti’s fiction and plays, everything is on the surface. Passions of greed, hatred and vanity are enacted so openly that any search for latent meaning is futile. Crowds and Power works out by argument but by “thick description”, especially of rituals (the rain-dance of the Pueblo Indians, the Muharram festival of Shi’a Islam, and many more), which makes explicit the emotions that Canetti takes to be animating them. Canetti’s account is interspersed with apodictic statements which in turn link Crowds and Power to his favoured genre, the aphorism.
The collections of aphorisms Canetti published in his lifetime, which fill two volumes of his ten-volume collected works, have now been augmented by a group of texts of which Canetti wrote out a fair copy, probably for Marie-Luise von Motesiczky’ s birthday on October 24, 1942. Jeremy Adler’ s edition includes a facsimile of Canetti’s neat handwriting with a facing-page transcription and an afterword which provides an admirable introduction to the art of the aphorism as Canetti practised it. This genre is firmly established in German literature (Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kraus, Kafka), and Canetti went back further, poring over the hermetic dicta of the Presocratics. A single example, “Man is the measure of all animals”, illustrates how Canetti can vary a familiar truism and thus provoke new thoughts about our relation to the animal kingdom. There are also reflections, extending sometimes over two pages, on Chinese poetry, the Old Testament, and various forms of obsession, besides brief evocations of emotional states (“She lives in a desert of expectation”) and counter-factual fantasies of how things might be: “All weapons are abolished and in the next war only biting is allowed”.
The uniform edition of Canetti’ s works, symbolizing his acceptance as a canonical author, has now been enlarged by an assemblage of his occasional essays and speeches, along with a number of revealing dialogues and interviews that were originally often published in inaccessible places. Although this volume contains au index to the entire series, the edition is wisely called Werke, “Works”, with no claim to completeness. Besides the two new volumes discussed here,. we can be sure that the massif of notebooks in Zürich will yield many more publications, and all those intrigued and troubled by Elias Canetti’ s complex personality, as well as his works, will look forward with particular eagerness to the release of personal material in 2024.
October 2, 2005
'Party in the Blitz': International Man of Mystery
By CLIVE JAMES
PARTY IN THE
BLITZ
The English Years.
By Elias Canetti.
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.
Illustrated. 249 pp.
New Directions. $22.95.
As a literary type after World War II, the German-speaking International Man of Mystery found Britain a more comfortable land of exile than America, where he was always under pressure to explain himself in public, thereby dissipating the mystery. The chief mystery was about his reason for not going back to German-speaking Europe. Before the mysterious W. G. Sebald there was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti. While the Nazis were in power, Canetti had excellent reasons to be in London. But now that the Nazis were gone, why was he still there?
Like Sebald later on, Canetti might have found Britain a suitable context for pulling off the trick of becoming a famous name without very many people knowing precisely who he was. Canetti even got the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, and people still didn't know who he was. He was a Spanish Jewish Viennese Swiss Bulgarian refugee with an impressively virile mustache; he was Iris Murdoch's lover; he was a mystery. Apart from a sociological treatise called "Crowds and Power," which advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title, his solitary prewar novel, "Die Blendung," known in English as "Auto-da-Fé," was the only book by Canetti that anybody had ever heard of. Almost no one had read it, but everybody meant to. Those who had read it said it was about a mysterious man in a house full of books, and that the house, in a symbolic enactment of the collapse of a civilization, fell down, or almost did, or creaked a lot, or something.
While living in Britain, Canetti wrote three books of memoirs about his life in prewar Europe. He wrote them in German. (All three volumes are now available in English, although readers are warned that the translations lose some of the effortless pomposity of the original.) They were full of literary gossip: hard material to make dull, even for a writer with Canetti's knack for colorless reportage. He proved, however, that he had a long memory for the frailties of his colleagues. He had a good story about Robert Musil, author of "The Man Without Qualities." In the circumscribed world of the Vienna cafes, Musil reigned unapproachably as the resident genius. But Musil was eaten up by resentment of the public recognition accorded to Thomas Mann. When, in 1935, Canetti published "Die Blendung" to some acclaim in the press, he entered the cafe to find Musil, who had previously barely noticed his existence, rising to meet him with a congratulatory speech. Canetti was able to say that he had a letter in his pocket from Mann, praising him in exactly the same terms. Musil sank back into his chair and never acknowledged Canetti again.
The story shows how Canetti could recognize self-obsession in others. But there is no account of his ever recognizing the same failing in himself. His memoirs not only take him to be the center of events - a standard strategy in autobiographical writing, and often an entertaining one - they proceed on the assumption that no events matter except those centered on him. Hitler scarcely gets a mention. The story is all about Canetti, a man with good reason, we are led to assume, for holding himself in high esteem.
Canetti spent the last years of his life in Zurich. In his very last year he was at work on his memoir about London. (Now, in Elysium, he is probably working on his memoir about Zurich.) The unfinished book, "Party in the Blitz," is the story of his years in and around Hampstead during the war and just after. The translator, Michael Hofmann, has found all the right English words for the wartime detail: the V1 was not a rocket, but that mistake was probably in the original text, whose comparative brevity should be taken, I think, as its chief virtue. We are fortunate that there is no more of it, lest we start wondering whether Canetti should not have received another Nobel Prize, for being the biggest twerp of the 20th century. But a twerp must be at least partly stupid, and Canetti wasn't even a little bit that.
Instead, he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority. Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the Battle of Britain taking place above him - the completeness with which he fails to evoke the scene is breathtaking - Canetti, unlike many another German-speaking refugee, managed to take no part whatever in the war against Hitler, then or subsequently. He had his own war to fight, against, among others, T. S. Eliot. Canetti's loathing of Eliot is practically the book's leitmotif: you have to imagine a version of "Die Meistersinger" in which Beckmesser keeps coming back on stage a few minutes after he goes off. "I was living in England as its intellect decayed," Canetti recalls. "I was a witness to the fame of a T. S. Eliot. . . . A libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante . . . thin-lipped, coldhearted, prematurely old . . . armed with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife . . . tormented to such a degree that my 'Auto-da-Fé' would have shriveled up if he had gone near it."
The problem, of course, was that Eliot couldn't have gone near it, because before 1946, when "Auto-da-Fé" was finally translated, scarcely anybody in London had read it. This might have been one of several practical reasons that Canetti was not accorded the automatic respect he felt due to him, but there was a supreme, spiritual reason that only he, the profound analyst of crowds and power, could detect: English arrogance. The English intellectuals, his antennae told him, were being arrogant even when they strove to seem tolerant. Tolerance, in fact, was the surest sign of their arrogance. "Arrogance is such an integral part of the English, one often fails to notice it. They take arrogance to new, unsuspected levels." Eliot, for example, was such a master of arrogance that he could conceal it completely. "There he sat, the terribly famous man among all those others, amidst whom there were certainly many bad poets whom he must despise from the depths of his being, and he gave no indication of the fact." Always keen to seem at home in British polite society, where zeal is rarely worn on the sleeve, Canetti found it politic to forget his earlier history as a Brechtian radical, but passages like this remind you that he was a born Vyshinskyite prosecutor, forever taking the ability of the accused to defend himself as proof of guilt, and the ostensible absence of a fault as a sure sign of its lurking presence.
It should be said in his favor that Canetti, by his own reluctant account, did manage to meet at least a few Englishmen who were not reduced to "desiccation" by the national trait. Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arthur Waley: each is forgettably evoked, with perhaps an extra touch of specificity for Waley, because he had read Canetti's novel in the original language. But as a general rule, Englishmen neither realized Canetti's importance at first glance nor managed to conceal their arrogance even when adopting an elaborate guise of congeniality. Take T. S. Eliot as a case in point. The fact that Eliot had been born and raised in America was only a further proof of the pervasive nature of English arrogance: having gone native, he had taken on the local characteristic, and indeed would not have been a success in England had he failed to do so. But he probably managed to acquire it so easily because his ancestors had been English in the first place. It was "the acquisition, so to speak, of an American returned to the home country after many generations. It will be difficult to describe Eliot as the quite abysmal character he was. . . . His costive-minimal work (so many spittoons of failure), the poet in England and among the Modernists of emotional impoverishment, which through him became fashionable."
The continually recurring diatribe about Eliot is made almost piquant by the fact that Canetti is talking about a time in his enemy's career when the sequential poems later to be known as "Four Quartets" were being published to universal praise for their magnificence. There were plenty of English intellectuals who had no particular respect for Eliot's conservative intellectual position but could see that he was writing the greatest poetry of his time. For Canetti, however, it was out of the question to separate man and work. The man was the work: it was the way, after all, that he felt about himself. "My chief trait, much my strongest quality, which has never been compromised, was the insistence on myself." Canetti measured himself against other men according to the adamantine strength of his self-regard, so it can be imagined what he was like when he was measuring himself against women.
Or, rather, it can't. Just when you thought you had been handed the complete picture of a louse, you read how he rewarded the young Iris Murdoch for having bestowed her favors on him. Here we need to make a distinction. His abusive opinions on her qualities of mind were delivered long after their affair was over, and might even seem reasonable to those of us less than convinced about her status as a philosopher. "I don't think there is anything that leaves me quite so cold as that woman's intellect." But his comments about her qualities as a mistress bring into question his own judgment at the time. "I could not ignore the ugliness of her feet. She had a bearlike walk, but it was a repulsive bear." It was also a passive bear, for whom love was "an indifferent act." You might have thought that this drawback would have become apparent to him fairly quickly, but not so. "This went on . . . for a couple of years." Their love affair (one of the inspirations behind her second novel, "The Flight From the Enchanter") became famous as an event submissive on her part and dominant on his, but on this evidence he did his own share of the suffering, simply by having known her. "Everything I despise about English life is in her." Except, strangely enough, arrogance. With typical gallantry, he sums her up as being "ambitious as a master-criminal. But she's too fixated on love to be arrogant." The bitch, she couldn't be depended on even for that.
Regulars in Canetti's extensive harem pop up wanly throughout the book, usually doing exactly what he wants and almost invariably being patronized for their compliance. The historian C. V. Wedgwood, as "the student who loves her teacher," is given a few points for translating "Auto-da-Fé" but earns a conclusive demerit for not being enthusiastic about - for possibly (whisper this) not even having read - "Crowds and Power": "She was unoriginal, had no ideas of her own about anything." It could be said that she had enough original ideas to go to bed with an unmitigated creep, but it isn't said by Canetti, who never awards women credit for choosing him. What choice do they have? It's fate. Abject devotion from the poet Kathleen Raine is first welcomed ("It did not seem to matter to her that she didn't know the first thing about me") and then scorned for the usual reason ("I had no idea at the time of the arrogance there was concealed behind such modesty"). That was a close one.
Intelligent beauties lined up to be treated like dirt. The International Man of Mystery was also the Man With Power Over Women. In Hampstead there was only one Vienna-style coffee house. It was called the Coffee Cup. Canetti was still to be found hanging out there when I was introduced to him in the first summer after I got to London in the early 60's. He didn't even pretend to be polite, and I couldn't blame him. After only a few minutes in his company it was clear to me what attracted him about the passing parade: trainee bluestockings, of the stamp nowadays known, in Britain anyway, as posh totty. He didn't move his head to track them as they wafted by, but I could see his eyeballs swivel. Suffering from the same proclivities, I was in no position to despise him, and I might say that the same goes for the characteristic that he projected on to the local population because he had so much of it himself.
Arrogance is the natural condition of a mind in exile. If history had never torn Canetti loose from his first context, he might have flourished as a type well recognized, and even cherished, in the European world of the literary cafes: half know-all, half clown. It was being a displaced person that made him preposterous, and those of us in the postwar peace who chose to roam the world could have no warrant to look down on those among our elders who had been forced to. For the German speakers, especially, there was never any easy undoing of the damage. Of the two undoubted masters of modern German prose, the novelist Thomas Mann and the essayist Alfred Polgar, neither ever really came back to the main German-speaking lands. Each was offered every enticement, but they settled for Switzerland. So, in the course of time, did Canetti, if not to find a final home for his mastery, then at least to give one extra twist to his mystery, and to gain the perspective for writing a memoir so delightfully awful that it makes his self-satisfied literary personality palatable at last.
Canetti had some reputation as an analyst who could skewer people in a paragraph. Here is the proof that he was too pleased about himself to be truly perceptive about others. The striking aphorism, said Polgar, requires a stricken aphorist. On the threshold of death's door, Canetti saw nothing to be worried about when he examined his conscience. On this evidence, he couldn't even find it. Instead, he wrote a book fit to serve every writer in the world as a hideous, hilarious example of the tone to avoid when the ego, faced with the certain proof of its peripheral importance, loses the last of its inhibitions.
Clive James's most recent book is "As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002."
Cultural insight and vicious gossip from Nobel laureate Elias Canetti.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, October 2, 2005; BW15
PARTY IN THE BLITZ
The English Years
By Elias Canetti
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
New Directions. 249 pp. $22.95
Born in Bulgaria in 1905, Elias Canetti -- best known for his gloomy novel Auto-da-Fé and his socio-philosophical study Crowds and Power -- seems to have known nearly all the most interesting Austrian and British literary figures of his time. Readers of The Torch in My Ear and The Play of the Eyes , Canetti's memoirs of the 1920s and '30s, will recall his vignettes of the celebrated satirical journalist Karl Kraus and the Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel ("he meant more to me than anyone else I met in Berlin"), his friendship with the great Viennese novelist Hermann Broch, and the brief encounter (in Zurich) with James Joyce (whose first words to the young Canetti were "I shave with a straight razor and no mirror"). Little surprise that the eager young intellectual also got to know the playwright Bertolt Brecht and the composer Alban Berg and the artists Oskar Kokoschka and Georg Grosz, among many others.
As Jeremy Adler observes in his long and illuminating afterword to the newly translated Party in the Blitz: The English Years , those earlier accounts of Canetti's youth display an almost Augustan serenity and polish. Take, for instance, this description of his friend Viennese novelist Robert Musil in The Play Of The Eyes :
"Musil was always -- though one wouldn't have noticed it -- prepared for defense and offense. In this posture he found safety. One thinks of armor plate, but it was more like a shell. He hadn't built the barrier he put between himself and the world, it was an integral part of him. He eschewed interjections and all words charged with feeling. He looked with suspicion on mere affability."
After this striking précis, The Play of the Eyes goes on to portray Musil as a complex and prickly genius, one who never touched currency, looked down on Broch and Joyce as misguided, and grew annoyed with Canetti after Thomas Mann sent an admiring letter about the young man's work. When friends would say to Musil "that someone had praised The Man Without Qualities to the skies and would be overjoyed to meet him, Musil's first question was 'Whom else does he praise?' " Canetti's three early memoirs -- the first, about his childhood, is The Tongue Set Free -- have been called a nonfiction Bildungsroman. But Party in the Blitz is, by contrast, a raggedy, first-draft set of notes about some of the people Canetti came to know after he emigrated to England at the outbreak of World War II. Many of these pages were dictated by the 1981 Nobel laureate in literature just before he died in 1994, and they display a fair degree of malice. Canetti himself likens his sketches to those in John Aubrey's Brief Lives , that irresistible grab-bag of more than 200 brief memoranda of 17th-century notables. But, in truth, Canetti's portraits and mini-essays more often recall the frequently snide commentary about Oxford life found in the diaries of Aubrey's contemporary, the bilious Anthony à Wood.
Most of the people Canetti writes about here lived in Hampstead, long a neighborhood attractive to successful London intellectuals, novelists and artists. Many of them would meet at the parties thrown by the poet and critic William Empson and his wife Hetta. By the 1940s Auto da Fé -- about a scholar who burns his library and immolates himself because he cannot deal with the grasping modern world -- was well known (it was translated by C.V. Wedgwood, the historian), but Canetti never heard a comment about it from the bookish Empson. Indeed, he was never sure that Empson knew who he was. But Canetti was always a good listener, and "I often heard him speak, he had wit and verve, he was quick and confident, talked in streams of interpretative knowledge, very individual opinions and precise knowledge, perhaps the most fluent, inspired, clearest speaker I ever heard in England, among poets." As Canetti himself was regarded as a marvelous talker, this is quite a compliment.
But Hetta Empson really steals the show. A committed communist from a South African Boer family, she was "a very beautiful woman," and was drawn to intellectuals of any color and provenance. "She turned over all the flats of the house to them, with the exception of her own quarters. Her lovers, of whom there got to be quite a number over the years, she sometimes even allowed into her quarters. Empson seemed not to have anything against it at all."
Alas, we get no more of Hetta Empson's tantalizing love life. And this is a recurrent problem with Party in the Blitz : Canetti tells more often than he shows, and he usually doesn't tell enough. Sometimes he simply delivers judgment, or launches into sustained jeremiad. Take his rolling diatribe against that easy target, T.S. Eliot, where phrases like "drools his self-loathing" and "impotency" build to an almost incoherent Old Testament denunciation of this "miserable creature":
"He kowtows to any order that's sufficiently venerable; tries to stifle any élan; a libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante (to which Circle would Dante have banished him?); thin lipped, cold hearted, prematurely old, unworthy of Blake or of Goethe or of anything volcanic -- his own lava cooled before it ever warmed -- neither cat nor bird nor beetle, much less mole." And on and on, as Canetti continues his frenzied indictment of all the "enfeeblement that emanated from Eliot."
Even more troublesome, though, is his antipathy to the novelist Iris Murdoch, his former lover:
"I don't think there is anything that leaves me quite so cold as that woman's intellect. She is a passionate schoolgirl, of the kind that likes nothing better than studying systems. She seems to realise herself in that compulsion. And then she's the schoolmarm who likes to explain these systems."
After this he describes, with obvious revulsion, Murdoch's sexual fantasies, dowdy underclothes, mechanical love-making, intellectual vampirism and inept social climbing. It's undeniably fascinating, and there is doubtless some truth to Canetti's portrait (that "passionate schoolgirl" is just right), but even those who like gossip as much as I do will find the tenor of his comments not only ungentlemanly but downright cruel and vindictive. After all, this is the brilliant woman who praised Crowds and Powers in a rave review for the Spectator, who dedicated her own early novel, The Flight from the Enchanter , to Canetti.
So, is Party in the Blitz a mere exercise in snarkiness? Not entirely. As Canetti's aphoristic notebook The Human Province showed, the man can be as shrewd as Lichtenberg or La Rochefoucauld with an apt and concisely phrased insight: "Social life consists of futile efforts at proximity." "It was possible to discuss some thousands of titles with him, so long as one didn't get into too much detail." "While analysts manage to appear full of curiosity, they don't really manage much more than patience. They give the appearance of listening."
At the end of his life, Canetti came to loathe Margaret Thatcher's England and the triumph of modern selfishness. So it's not surprising that the writer's most telling chapter in Party in the Blitz describes not the eccentric aristocrats with whom he became friends or the women he loved or scholars like Arthur Waley or poets like Herbert Read and Kathleen Raine, but rather an old street sweeper who, he tells us, "looked like a fresh-painted apostle" and spoke with the unconscious majesty of the Bible. The two men only encountered each other occasionally, always on the street. But as Canetti movingly concludes:
"In the course of those years, I met many of the local people. He was the only one whom I wholeheartedly loved. . . . He lived alone in a hut nearby. He was never ill. One time, when he failed to turn out for two days in a row, I knew what had happened. There are only four or five people in my life whom I mourned as I mourned him." Today Elias Canetti himself seems to be in danger of falling into neglect. At the very least, Party in the Blitz , for all its uneasy mix of wisdom and waywardness, should lead adventurous readers back to this learned, idiosyncratic mind, and to his many books, nearly all of which -- whatever their genre -- deal with mankind's greatest burdens, the problem of evil and the inevitability of death. ·
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for Book World. His e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtontonpost.com.
Canetti tussles with Britain
Reviewed by Anthony Giardina
Sunday, October 2, 2005
Party in the Blitz
The English Years
By Elias Canetti; translated by Michael Hofmann
NEW DIRECTIONS; 249 PAGES; $22.95
Elias Canetti was 34 years old when, in 1939, he arrived in England, "a lost emigrant" from a newly inhospitable mainland Europe. (Canetti was born in Bulgaria, had lived in Vienna, wrote in German and was a Jew.) He'd already published the novel "Auto da Fe," a celebrated success in Germany; his magnum opus, "Crowds and Power," was still ahead of him, as was the Nobel Prize he was to win in 1981. When he arrived in England, he was totally unknown there.
Nearly 50 years later, Canetti decided to write something like a memoir of his English years, which stretched on for four decades. His concentration was on the war years. He didn't live long enough to completely revise the book we now have as "Party in the Blitz"; the current volume has been assembled from drafts he left behind at his death.
Though Canetti covers the war, he does so primarily as it affected English social and literary life. "Party in the Blitz" is shaped as a kind of portrait gallery of English figures large and small (T.S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read) and of parties endured -- endless parties, "senseless and heartless, very much in keeping with such cold people." What emerges is a splendid record of Canetti's extremely conflicted feelings about his adopted country. "I am confused about England," he begins.
Partly, that confusion has to do with a pair of seemingly irreconcilable traits in the English character. The "emotional impotence" of these "cold people," their "inner petrifaction" coexisted with the fact that, during the worst of the Blitz, "I never once saw people, women, children afraid." Canetti relates the scene on the top deck of an English bus after the announcement has been made that a British battleship has been sunk: "The odd mouth opened, it didn't say anything, but even so, it didn't immediately fall shut either, it remained open for half a moment. Sometimes sentences were spoken. Expressing contemptuous courage. Never, not once, did I hear an anxiety, or even a complaint." Yet the mixture of awe and contempt he feels for the English gives way to pure spleen as he recalls all those parties at which no one knew the work of Elias Canetti. ("In order to be absolutely truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relive it in my memory for the torture it was.") Here is where he gets in his potshots at luminaries like the "costive-minimal" Eliot ("I was a witness to the fame of a T.S. Eliot. Is it possible for people ever to repent sufficiently of that?"), and Iris Murdoch, "the bubbling Oxford stewpot" with whom he had an affair, and whom he came to loathe. ("She has not one serious thought.")
But there is a still deeper layer of unsettledness in this book, one that reveals rather than announces itself. Canetti had come to England once before, as a boy brought by his father, and he had watched that father die in front of him. After that, the family returned to the continent, but something of England remained -- the father's love for a country that had allowed him to emigrate there. "The foundation that I received from my father in England remained intact, it was moral, and even today I am not ashamed of calling it that. I spent the rest of my life looking for people who corresponded to such an image." Oddly, movingly, Canetti's memoir becomes the record of a search for that dimly remembered country.
"Sometimes I say the word aloud. I say 'England' and I feel as if I've told a lie," Canetti writes late in the book. It's a measure of his accomplishment that we understand what he means. Doubleness prevails here -- the doubleness of people (women especially), of countrymen, of a country itself. The "arrogance" of the English, "the actual product of English life ... saved the world from Hitler"; then, in the years after, that same arrogance led to an "unstoppable decay." What remained, then, of the half-beloved country for the aging, cranky Canetti?
"The only English experiences of mine that are still valid are poems and sentences, and most of all: words."
Anthony Giardina's fourth novel, "White Guys," will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May.