A TALE OF THREE CITIES

IN THE LAST year, as so often before, the Nobel Prize in Literature has proved a mixed blessing. Elias Canetti’s writings are profoundly private and fragmentary. They stem from hidden centers and have unfolded with a cunning patience. Because of the 1981 Prize, much of his that is minor has been rushed into reprint and translation, and the work as a whole, spiralling out of and coming home to one masterpiece, the first and only novel, “Auto-da-Fé,” has shifted out of focus. Canetti himself, moreover, has reacted to the abrupt notoriety bestowed on him in his seventy-seventh year with characteristic irascibility and hauteur. He has rounded fiercely, and not altogether fairly, on those who—particularly in England, to which he came as a refugee—failed to keep his books in print or in the light of critical regard during the long years of (relative) obscurity before the Nobel. It is all the more important that the autobiography of this virtuoso of intransigence should now be available outside the incisive, marmoreal German (Canetti is heir to Kleist) in which it was composed. “The Torch in My Ear” is Volume II (translated by Joachim Neugroschel; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16.50). It covers the decade—absolutely decisive for Canetti’s development as writer and thinker—from 1921 to 1931. It begins with Elias Canetti as a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in a Frankfurt Gymnasium, and closes with Dr. Canetti giving up the chemistry he had studied at the University of Vienna in order to turn to the more potent alchemy of his great fiction. But this is more than the memoir of an exceptionally observant and original witness; it is a vivid image of central European high civilization on the edge of the abyss. It was Canetti’s peril and good fortune to come of inward age in a time of twilight.

Readers of Volume I, “The Tongue Set Free,” will recall the writer’s formidable widowed mother and the intimacies of tension which bound mother to son. Mme. Canetti’s imperceptions could be as coldly strategic as her divinations. In the Frankfurt of the nineteen-twenties, inflation was deepening to lunacy and ruin. All around him, Elias observed insistent symptoms of human wretchedness and despair. When the boy saw a woman fainting with hunger in the street, he demanded some explanation, some reflex of compassion from his mother. “Did you remain?” Mme. Canetti asked mordantly, and went on to remind her son that he had best get used to such sights if he was to become a doctor and earn the bourgeois wealth that would guard him from similar misery. Like the crazed child in D. H. Lawrence’s story “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” young Canetti heard a call for money screaming out of every corner of his mother’s expectations. In a riposte that was half ruse, half hysteria, Elias himself, in Vienna a few years later, covered sheets and sheets of paper with the word “money.” The alarm that this exercise provoked in a mother always given to taking medical advice was to help bring on her son’s liberation and departure from home.

But the final school years had brought other emancipations. The actor Carl Ebert, whom Canetti had admired in classical roles at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus, gave a Sunday reading from a Babylonian epic older than the Bible: “I discovered Gilgamesh, which had a crucial impact on my life and its innermost meaning, on my faith, strength and expectation such as nothing else in the world.” Canetti’s summary of this impact can, indeed, serve as epigraph to his œuvre:

I experienced the effect of a myth: something I have thought about in various ways during the ensuing half century, something I have so often turned over in my mind, but never once earnestly doubted. I absorbed as a unify something that has remained in me as a unity. I can’t find fault with it. The question whether I believe such a tale doesn’t affect me; how can I, given my intrinsic substance, decide whether I believe in it. The aim is not to parrot the banality that so far all human beings have died: the point is to decide whether to accept death willingly or stand up against it. With my indignation against death, I have acquired a right to glory, wealth, misery . . . I have lived in this endless rebellion. And if my grief for the near and dear that I have lost in the course of time was no smaller than that of Gilgamesh for his friend Enkidu, I at least have one thing, one single thing, over the lion man: I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.

The second major discovery was saltier. Canetti found in Aristophanes a vital clue: “The powerful and consistent way that each of his comedies is dominated by a surprising fundamental idea from which it derives.” Such an idea, Canetti concluded, should always be of a public and, in the deeper sense, political order. A radical imagination must seek to o’er-leap the private sphere. And could there be anything more Aristophanic than the spectacle of German life in the grip of fiscal, social, and erotic dissolution?

The supreme analyst of this dissolution was at work in Vienna. With distance, it is becoming more and more obvious that essential traits of sensibility and of expressive style in the West in this century derive from the example of Karl Kraus. The legacy of this apocalyptic satirist is visible all the way from Kafka’s vision of language and society to the black, self-lacerating humor in the American urban vein of the nineteen-fifties and sixties. Canetti gives a memorable account of Kraus’s celebrated reading-recitals, of one of those mimetic tours de force in which the author-editor of Die Fackel—The Torch, which burns also in Canetti’s title—educated a generation to the bracing arts of hatred and self-hatred. It was appropriate that it was at Kraus lecture that Canetti first saw—sitting, as she always did, in the front row—Venetia Toubner-Calderon, the enigmatic and beautiful Veza, whom he was to marry in 1934. More immediately, Kraus’s mesmeric effect suggested to Canetti what was to become the pivot of his own questioning: the power of the individual in relation to that of the crowd. Thinking back on Kraus’s fantastic vocal register, Canetti notes, “Chairs and people seemed to yield under this quivering; I wouldn’t have been surprised if the chairs had bent. The dynamics of such a mobbed auditorium under the impact of that voice—an impact persisting even when the voice grew silent—can no more be depicted than the Wild Hunt.” (How many readers, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, will identify this penetrating allusion to the myth, probably Celtic in origin, of spectral hounds and hunters crossing the night sky in infernal pursuit? But there are no footnotes in this edition, and the translation is often ingeniously unhelpful.)

No less seminal than Karl Kraus in the education of Elias Canetti were the paintings that he saw and pondered in the great Vienna collections. Two, especially, came to possess him, though with contrary effects. Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death” seemed to confirm the message of “Gilgamesh.” The energy of the resistance to death pulsing in the multitudinous figures on the canvas flowed into Canetti’s consciousness. Though death triumphs, the struggle is pictured as eminently worthwhile, and it is one that binds all men to each other. The other painting was Rembrandt’s colossal “The Blinding of Samson”: “I often stood in front of this painting, and from it I learned what hatred is.” Moreover, and although he could not yet be aware of it, blinding and blindness were to serve as a leitmotif in Canetti’s fiction, travel notes, and philosophic aphorisms. The German title of “Auto-da-Fé” is “Die Blendung,” which signifies both the act of blinding and being dazzled or bewildered to the point of blindness. Canetti’s reading of Rembrandt’s Delilah seems to echo forward into almost every feminine figure in his subsequent inventions:

She has taken away Samson’s strength; she holds his strength, but still fears him and will hare him as long as she remembers this blinding, and, in order to hate him, will always remember it.

In the summer of 1925, Canetti broke with his monstre sacré of a mother. Though still pursuing his studies in science at the University of Vienna, he was now intensely available to the summons of experience—to that which would, if his intimations were accurate, rouse his dormant powers like a fire signal in the night. On July 15, 1927, that signal came, literally. Turning on their own Social Democratic leaders, the more radical workers of Vienna, enraged by a recent miscarriage of justice (workers had been shot down in the Burgenland and their killers acquitted), marched on the Palace of Justice. They set it on fire. That day, Elias Canetti, the lyric metaphysician, the allegorist of violence, came fully into his own: “I became a part of the crowd, I fully dissolved in it.” This immersion—the French phrase bain de foule exactly renders Canetti’s experience—confirmed his resolve to analyze, as Gustave Le Bon had begun to do in the eighteen-nineties, the internal structure, exponential energies, and contagious aura of crowds. It would be 1960 before “Crowds and Power,” a torso of a work, fragmentary in its brilliance, appeared. But the crowd and crowd feelings into which he plunged on that violent summer day were to preoccupy Canetti henceforth. Private obsessions and the public fact, moreover, had fused:

The fire was what held the situation together. You felt the fire, its presence was overwhelming; even if you did not see it, you nevertheless had it in your mind, its attraction and the attraction exerted by the crowd were one and the same. . . . And you were drawn back into the province of the fire—circuitously, since there was no other possible way.

Both in his meditations on crowds and in his metaphoric appropriations of fire, Canetti found Freud useless. Freud’s “Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis” repelled him “from the very first word, and still repels me no less fifty-five years later.” Canetti saw in Freud the very embodiment of the secondhand—the edification of dogmatic abstractions on the uncertain bases of other men’s deeds and testimony. This rejection has wider resonance. Canetti belongs to the small constellation of first-class minds and sensibilities who have in our time rejected Freud and the psychoanalytic construct as a factitious, antihistorical mythology, whose methodology is, at best, aesthetic and whose evidential material—the dreams, speech acts, gestural styles of fin-de-siècle, primarily female and middle-class Jewish Central Europe—is almost absurdly narrow. This constellation comprises Kraus, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger as well as Canetti himself. It is marked by a tragic sense of life, by an acute alertness to the historical, temporal nature of human discourse, and by grave skepticism as to the ideals or claims of the therapeutic. With the current fading of psychoanalytic presumptions, it may well be these “refusers” of Freud who will prove lasting.

The July uprising had determined Canetti’s vocation. Seeking crowds “in history, in the histories of all civilizations,” he came upon and was fascinated by the history and early philosophy of China (a fascination that was to animate the novel). Street sounds took on a rich, diverse meaning. The fellow-students with National Socialist sympathies whom Canetti met in the laboratory focussed his attention even more precisely on crowd phenomena and the possibility that the politics of mass manipulation would lead to the collective trance of war. Canetti was now writing “wild and frenzied’ poetry. Every new poem was handed to Veza. And she was beginning to know how deeply Canetti loved her. On July 15, 1928, a year to the day after the burning of the Palace of Justice, Canetti left Vienna to spend the rest of the summer in Berlin. After Frankfurt and Vienna, Berlin was to be the third of the cities crucial to his self-discoveries.

Berlin was at that hour the nerve center of modernity. Though the Brown Shirts were increasingly in command of the currents and eddies of street life, the left, both Communist and Socialist, was still present. In the implosive ambience of the city confrontations, practices of psychological and physical aggression, soon to be demonstrated on a global scale, were being rehearsed. Canetti’s description is apt:

The animal quality and the intellectual quality, bared and intensified to the utmost, were mutually entangled, in a kind of alternating current. If you had awakened to your own animality before coming here, you had to increase it in order to hold out against the animality of other people: and if you weren’t very strong, you were soon used up. But if you were directed by your intellect and had scarcely given in to your animality, you were bound to surrender to the richness of what was offered your mind. These things smashed away at you, versatile, contradictory, and relentless; you had no time to understand anything, you received nothing but strokes, and you hadn’t even gotten over yesterday’s strokes before the new ones showered upon you. You walked around Berlin as a tender piece of meat, and you felt as if you still weren’t tender enough and were waiting for new strokes.

The image of “a tender piece of meat” walking around Berlin under a rain of blows is pure Expressionism. It would have amused George Grosz, whom Canetti came to know and admire. Grosz’s ferocious drawings threw Canetti into a world of sexual brutality and exploitation. He never queried the truth of Grosz’s witness, and it was to influence profoundly the drama of tyrannical eros in “Auto-da-Fé.” Brecht, too, impressed the young visitor, and Canetti glimpsed something of the man’s cool but sovereign professionalism. But the great encounter was that with Isaac Babel. Here was a manifest purity such as Canetti was to come upon, later, in the talismanic truth of Kafka. Literature was sacrosanct to Babel. Babel had plumbed the depths of human savagery, but the vision he had of literature made cynicism alien to him. “If he found that something was good, he could never have used it like other people, who, in sniffing around, implied that they regarded themselves as the culmination of the entire past. Knowing what literature was, he never felt superior to others.” Isaac Babel, Canetti says, kept him from being “devoured” by the voracious city.

Now Canetti’s apprenticeship was almost complete. Returning to Vienna in the fall of 1929, he set aside his mother’s obstinate dreams of medical or commercial respectability. He would earn his living as a translator; his tongues “set free,” and begin work on a fiction in several extensive parts, provisionally entitled “The Human Comedy of Madmen.” One more encounter proved pivotal: that with a young philosopher, crippled in body but with an awareness of human beings which at times made him resemble “a Christ on an Eastern icon.” Though the dissolution of the individual in a crowd remained for Canetti “the enigma of enigmas,” the desolate yet luminous condition of his friend brought the theme of death into the forefront of his concerns. Thinking back on the flames that had enveloped the Palace of Justice, seeing before him a human being possessed, kept alive by abstract thought and the energies of unsparing perception, Canetti found his great theme—that of the quintessential “Book Man,” who would, in a final ecstasy of crazed clairvoyance, burn up with all his books. At first, the character was to be named Brand, mirroring the very term “fire” and, perhaps, the fierce absolutist of the spirit in Ibsen’s play of that name. Next, he became Kant, touchstone of metaphysicians and archetype of mandarin routine. Finally, the central persona of “Auto-da-Fé” became Kien, a monosyllable that combines the German word for resinous pine-wood with a hint of Chinese tonality. At twenty-four, Elias Canetti was composing one of the most intellectually mature and stylistically controlled novels of our century.

Much that he has published since is of great quality: the ingenious philosophic play “Life-Terms,” the meditative commentary on Kafka’s letters to Felice Bauer (“Kafka’s Other Trial,” of 1969), the aphorisms and lyric notations in “The Voices of Marrakesh,” and, as I have suggested, certain sections of “Crowds and Power”—the section, for instance, on the role of monetary inflation in the destruction of social identity and ethical discriminations in Weimar Germany. Canetti’s autobiography is such as to make one hope for a continuation. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to find anything in Canetti’s subsequent writings to match the powers of Opus I. “The Torch in My Ear” provides an absorbing insight into the genesis of a classic.

Inevitably, albeit prematurely, one tries to place Canetti in relation to the entire configuration of Central European and Jewish genius which has so largely determined the climate of modern sensibility. There is not in Canetti the immediacy of mythical creation, the unforced access to specific yet universal symbolic forms, which makes the fictions and parables of Kafka tower over the twentieth-century imagination—Kafka being to his age, as Auden said, what Dante and Shakespeare were to theirs. Nor, one feels, has Canetti the response to physical nature and to the secrecies of the human psyche which gives to the novels—and here the plural matters—of Hermann Broch their patient authority. But it is by these standards that Canetti invites—indeed, compels—judgment. His exacting presence honors literature.