He is best known for his non-fiction book, Crowds and Power, published in German in 1960 and translated into English in 1962, and Die Blendung, a novel written in 1935 and translated to English in 1946, under the title Auto da Fe, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1981. (Auto da Fe does not mean anything similar to Die Blendung, but I don't suppose that matters.)
I've just finished reading Party in The Blitz, supposed to be the last part of his memoirs, but published after his death. I've been looking forward to reading it for some time, and had a feeling I was going to like the book, (it seemed to be calling me), and so, wanted to get some other reading out of the way and give it my full attention. Possibly, part of it's attraction came from the fact that Iris Murdoch valued him so highly. Rumor had it she was in love with him.
Canetti took a long time in getting his words out there. He was an exile to the depth of his non-religious soul: extremely sensitive about being an outsider. He was an atheist but though the Political Left was his faith, he didn't write much about it or refer to it, at least in this part of his memoirs. He was concerned with the environment in which he had lived, feeling that he was at the center of the intellectual ferment. His memoirs are a personal history of his life from Bulgaria where he was born, to Vienna, where he was raised in a Jewish intellectual environment, to London and finally to Zurich.
Party in The Blitz is meant to be part of a series but comes out much later and posthumously...perhaps edited too much or not enough to the writer's specs. Is he sadistic to women? Probably. And do I forgive him too much by giving him credit for being self-abasing in his exhibitionism? Probably.
Though most of the people he writes about were not familiar to me so that the book is an exposure to a wider milieu, I have long been interested in the topic of artists in their social world. The cocktail party is essential to the book, but the British designation leaves out the word "cocktail", unlike the parties I mentioned in another post referring to those occurring among the Partisan Review crowd during a similar historical time frame in New York City.
Each character is given a short chapter, finely tuned and "off the nose", as someone said; taking you somewhere you didn't expect. There's Herbert Read, Enoch Powell, Veronica Wedgewood, Franz Steiner, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, people who he often claims not to like but seems quite fascinated with. A street sweeper is one he liked.
Kathleen Raine was a poet, and not from the aristocracy or even the upper classes. She was raised by a schoolmaster descended from coal miners, in the countryside in Northumberland.
She had earned her place in the literary world, for which Canetti gave her credit, though he is sure that she didn't like his work, and that he didn't give her's the time of day. He doesn't say if they were lovers but he is fascinated in turn by her fascination with two brothers, themselves aristocrats. He met her at "one of her parties in Chelsea." At the time she was giving lots of parties. He went with one of his mistresses, Friedl. (His wife was completely tolerant of his mistresses and in fact often befriended them.) But his relationship with Raine failed to deepen until he became friends with the Maxwell brothers, about whom Kathleen seemed to have a serious fixation, at least as Canetti saw it. (He too was, I think, impressed by the history of the two boys, and probably projects some of his thoughts onto the poetess.)
Blitz; p. 63;
"When they were out walking once, Kathleen's mother pointed out to her a couple of golden, shining-haired boys who were standing together on a small bridge. Their mother was speaking to them in elevated tones, the language was like poetry. This was lady Mary, the daughter of the Duke, with her boys, who if not the sons of a Duke were at least grandsons... ...The vision of the two golden-haired boys was to accompany Kathleen all her life. Thirty years later, when I knew her, she still spoke about it in visionary terms. ..."
Canetti spent years patiently listening to Kathleen pour out her heart concerning her failure to get one of the boys, Aymer, the older one, that had inherited the great estate, to fall in love with her. She seems not to have understood that he, in fact both Aymer and his brother Gavin, were gay. Both were, at least on the surface, manly swashbuckling types. They were also both very bright but unambitious intellectually, and were good listeners, which was Canetti's most important qualification in a companion. In the book, he gives the two boys by far the most generous treatment, which I'm not sure any of the critics has put down to their lack of threat to him in his pursuit of total adoration from women. Gavin did, eventually, become a writer, though, not a terribly good one we are to understand, but was a monumental success with his book about his pet Otter, Ring of Bright Water.
Like the two or three critics I investigated in light of this reading, I was most interested in what he had to say about Iris. I can empathize with Canetti's hatefulness toward her, I've been there, that is to say in terms of women with whom I have been in love. It seems to me like a natural reaction, after the love has gone. (Not going for any high moral ground, of course..) I'd rather see him wallow in meanness, after giving her the props of being a real and true and competent artist, someone of standing that he didn't possess, at that time or probably ever; if that is what being her lover made him feel. He grew up in a glamorous Vienna, with no doubt an adolescence full of idyllic visions of tall thin Klimptian womanhood.
After finishing reading "Blitz", I read a criticism of it by the well- known though recently deceased contemporary English critic Clive James which is a fairly savage review. James didn't find much good to say about Canetti either as a writer or as a man. The review is snide, clever and unsympathetic. Though James is Australian, he's more of an Englishman then I am and I suppose he took offense to the not always positive view that Canetti had of his hosts. James is offended by Canetti's seeming lack of interest in The War. But let me just quote a piece from this James review, which I believe was first published in The Guardian and then in The New York Times;
"...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 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-fe" would have shriveled up if he had gone near it." "
Then there's this quote, from Carol Angier, in a review of "Blitz", in The Independent, July, 2005;
"It can only be love-hate, because for Canetti and his kind the best things in England are also intolerable. He is hot in everything, especially his opinions, while the English are cool and moderate. He admires their moderation immoderately, and knows it is the reason why Britain alone in Europe is non-Fascist and free. But nothing could be more alien to him. He craves attention and praise, while in England praise is embarrassing, and attention-seeking the ultimate sin. His leitmotif is arrogance, but the English are more arrogant than him. He can enslave some of their women; but Englishmen, and Englishness, mock and defeat him as nothing else will ever do but death itself."
In
the process of finding the James review I became aware of just what a
big-shot Canetti was, or is, judging by the space he takes up on Google.
It appears that he has been written about by half the Western World.
So, when I say to myself that he must be a big-shot, let me be seen as
gesticulating in the manner of Mel Brooks. "I mean, whoa, such a big
shot!" Of course he made his name pre-Mel Brooks, pre-Borscht Belt, but
there must have been a little Jewish humor in his persona available to
him, to his fellow refugees, and to the local Britishers. He had
friends. You could say he was somewhat popular. There were those that
loved him and those that didn't but he seems to have been well respected
as an intellectual, and managed to get close to some and close enough
to others.
There is something attractive about the exile narrative or it wouldn't be such a big part of literature. It is almost all of Joyce. Homer. Some of Mark Twain. and etc. and of course some of us'ns. I'll have more to say about Canetti.
# A note on the illustration. It is only vaguely related to Canetti in that he considered himself a Balkan, and that his name is most likely a derivative of Elijah. ( But I think it's nice. )
