Harvill £17.99 pp266

Elias Canetti escaped from Hitler’s Germany to London in 1939, and disliked it very much. He was 34, and had gained some renown back home for his novel Auto da Fe. But the English had no idea who he was, and he found their cold-hearted indifference a “torture”. At literary parties in Hampstead he felt sure they were eyeing him contemptuously. They addressed him, if at all, with icy politeness which, he was convinced, was their way of insulting foreigners and other nobodies. He began to suspect that he did not really exist, and in a bid to restore his self-confidence he would sit for hours in Hampstead cemetery, because he could at least feel superior to the occupants of the graves. The English, he concedes, behaved well in the blitz. Their calm while the bombs were falling made him “gawp in dis-belief”. But, he insists, this was merely the flip side of their unparalleled arrogance. To have shown fear would have been to behave like lesser breeds, and that was unthinkable.

In his hypersensitive state, the mere sight of people with established literary reputations brings on paroxysms of jealousy. TS Eliot, whom he scarcely knew, is denounced as a “miserable creature” exuding a “stink of enfeeblement”. His poems are “spittoons of failure”. That he should have worked as a bank clerk is regarded as a deliberate offence against Canetti’s ideal of the pure, unmercenary artist. Successful women friends prove even harder to stomach. The poetess Kathleen Raine was remarkable only for “social rapacity and snobbishness”. The historian CV Wedgwood, who generously gave up time to translate Auto da Fe into English, and persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it, “had no ideas of her own about anything”. Iris Murdoch is recalled with particularly devastating ferocity. She and Canetti had been lovers in the early 1950s, before she published any books. In those days he was the maestro and she the humble acolyte. But by the time Canetti came to write this memoir 40 years later, their positions had reversed. He was an old has-been, she a famed sage with 24 bestsellers to her credit. The injustice of it reduces Canetti to gibbering fury. He deplores her “vulgar success”. Her origins were, he protests, “utterly petit bourgeois”, and she “had not one serious thought”. She encased her large, flat feet in “grotesque sandals”, and walked like a “repulsive bear”. Their love-encounters are maliciously recorded. She would shed her “woollen and ungainly” underwear and lie numbly on the couch awaiting his attentions. It was all utterly mechanical. The only thing that excited her was a ludicrous erotic fantasy in which she was a hapless maiden and he a brigand dragging her to his cave.

It might occur to readers to wonder why, if Murdoch was so awful, Canetti bothered to pursue the affair. But that would be to treat his account seriously, whereas it is clearly just an outflow of venom and envy. He admits that he is “shaking with rage” as he writes it. It is only when the people he meets are no threat to his self-esteem that he becomes capable of a reasoned response. He feels most comfortable when they are his social or intellectual inferiors. A philosophical street-sweeper in Chesham Bois, who talks like an Old Testament prophet, gains his affection. His funniest sequence is about a couple called the Milburns with whom he and his wife Veza lodged when they moved out to Amersham to escape the blitz. Mrs Milburn was mystically inclined and believed that evil was not real but a projection of the psyche. “What about the bombs?” demanded Veza. “The bombs are imaginary,” countered Mrs Milburn. Despite this faith, as soon as the sirens sounded both Milburns would crawl under a stout kitchen table and lie side by side, keeping as quiet as mice lest they should attract the attention of the German pilots. Mr Milburn, a retired clergyman, was regularly visited by itinerant prophetesses. One of them, whom Canetti got to know, confidently expected the second coming of Christ in the near future, and had bought a small hill in Cornwall on which, according to her calculations, he was scheduled to land.

Canetti’s observations of the English were not merely mischievous but intended as research for his treatise on mass psychology, Crowds and Power, which was eventually published in 1960 and helped win him a Nobel prize. These memoirs, released by his literary executors two years ago, and first published in Germany, reflect the same contradictions about people and his relations with them as that muddled magnum opus. He had been fascinated by crowds ever since his student days in Vienna. In July 1927, he had found himself caught up in a mob marching on the Palace of Justice. The excitement, and the feeling of being absorbed into a greater whole, remained with him, and gave him a vision of the crowd as the salvation of mankind, in which the individual escapes the burden of distance from his fellow beings. But as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany he was also conscious of the crowd as a mindless persecuting agent, obedient to the will of power-hungry demagogues.

The two views constantly clash. In these memoirs he laments the cold aloofness of the English, which prevents them touching one another and merging into gladsome unity. Yet his segregation of himself from such people as the Milburns, let alone Eliot and Murdoch, makes it clear that any notion of merging with them would be repellent. The figures who intrigue him are always wielders of power, whether intellectual or political. He remembers the formidably intelligent Enoch Powell quoting huge chunks of Dante and Nietzsche in their original languages, simply in the course of conversation. One of only two Conservative MPs from a humble background, Powell had had a brilliant war as a brigadier in Montgomery’s desert army, and was offered a professorship in classics at the age of 25. His racial views were abhorrent to Canetti, yet his aura of power was unmistakable.

Bertrand Russell was another centre of potency. He spoke in immaculate and serene 18th-century English, reminiscent of Horace Walpole’s letters, but would suddenly break out into a wild, goat-like laugh that betrayed his animal passions. Canetti remembers watching him at a glittering reception, arguing incisively with a group of powerful and famous men. Nearby stood a stunningly beautiful young woman. It was clear they had never met before. But when he saw her he burst into his goatish laugh and they promptly left together as if they had an assignation — the 80-year-old, with the 20-year-old trotting obediently beside him. “As he left, he continued to laugh, while she became more beautiful at every stride.” With writing of that quality, mediated through Michael Hofmann’s versatile translation, you need no further incentive to go on reading Canetti, for all his self-pity and paranoia.

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websites:
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1981
Canetti on excellent Nobel site

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