Franz had introduced Iris and Elias Canetti.1 On the evening of Christmas Day 1952 Canetti phoned her at her parents’ house in Chiswick at a quarter to eight and asked her to come and see him in Hampstead. They drank in the North Star pub on the Finchley Road and adjourned to his flat in nearby Compayne Gardens, Canetti speaking that night on transformation (Verwandlung), or how one divides oneself into many personae. Iris saw dangers in this, but soon noted in him many aspects and faces – a veritable ‘Hindu pantheon’. Canetti spoke with a curious, almost naive, confident directness, finding her ‘interesting’, seeming capable of great affection, and not wanting her to go, but to stay talking, which she did, until 1.30 on Boxing Day morning when he reluctantly found her a taxi.2 She was moved by him for the first time, feared to be too direct, but reflected, ‘I think there can be no harm here, even if I were to love him’ – a thought which brought her back to Franz with pain: they could have ‘built a universe together’. By January 1953 Iris and Canetti had started a three-year love-affair,3 of central and continuing and passionate importance to both, Iris feeling ‘stunned misery, astonishment’, and despite herself ‘a sort of joy in Canetti mingling with an acute consciousness of Franz and the cruelty of his absence’. She wrote on 10 January from Chiswick:
It is midnight. [Canetti]4 was here for five hours. He fills me with wonder and delight and fear. I told him: you are a great city of which I am learning now the main thoroughfares, which roads lead to the river. Later I shall explore each quarter carefully. He said: will you ask for any changes? Do you approve of the cathedral? And what will you do with this city? Live in it. We spoke of the out-of-time character of what C. means by ‘myth’ – contrasted with the step-by-step future planning movement of Kafka. The viewpoint is that to be achieved. The concentration into the small creatures, the small scale – which shews the powerfulness of the individual so much more tensely. I am amazed at the scale of C’s thought. How much he intends. He said: I want to approach freshly, as the early Greeks or those who broke with scholasticism. He makes me believe in the possibility of understanding. (How much Ox. philos. glories in the impossibility!) We laughed very much, C. keeping up a stream of pompous-sounding discussion in an audible voice for my parents’ benefit in intervals of kissing me violently. He is a bull, a lion, an angel. I told him – most like a beast & most like an angel. He said – what I would wish. He lay there, beautiful as a landsknecht. When he left I gave him one of my fossil stones shaped like a heart. I spoke of how he was bound in my mind to Franz …
The loss of Franz precipitated an affair of which he would have been jealous; Iris tried, in her mind’s eye, to give Franz reassurance. Soon obsessively in love, she noted that Canetti is ‘the only reality these days’. It says much about their secretiveness that, in 1999, few surviving friends knew that they had been lovers, rather than friends.
2
Canetti was known always only by his surname like ‘Socrates’ or ‘Confucius’5 – never, even to his wife Veza, by his Christian name ('Canetti is a genius,’ she would say, ‘but he is not a Goethe’6). Canetti would say he had yet to become worthy of his Christian name Elias – since it betokened a little Elijah or prophet of God. Such modesty was not habitual. ‘Don’t you think Canetti is exactly like God?’ Madame Meyer, the wife of the then French Cultural Attaché, was asked, to which she riposted, ‘Yes. But is God like Canetti?’7 The story shocked him.
He was born in Ruschuk in Bulgaria in 1905, with Ladino, the medieval Spanish spoken by Sephardi Jews, his first language; he would tell of proud Sephardim enshrining in their Balkan houses the great house-keys they took with them after their expulsion from Spain in 1492.8 His intense pride in this patrician inheritance marked a life rich in further displacements. His polyglot merchant father moved the family to Didsbury, Manchester, from 1911, where Canetti learned English, which he spoke without accent, and French; at the age of eight, in Vienna, his gifted, possessive mother obliged him, with a fiercely cruel singleness of will, to learn German in weeks. Knowing many languages is one way of not being tied to any single identity; as an adult he similarly travelled on a Nansen passport, invented for citizens displaced by the treaties of 1919.9 Though schooled in Lausanne and Zurich, and having sojourned in Berlin, Vienna remained the capital of his interior universe, German its chosen tongue. He had a talent for sniffing out great artists, and his memoirs contain memorable cameo-portraits of Karl Kraus, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Alban Berg, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Grosz, Isaac Babel, Hermann Broch and others. ‘The dog of his age’, he joked of himself.
Canetti arrived in England from Vienna, via Paris, early in 1939 with his wife Venetiana Taubner-Calderon – a proto-feminist whose articles in Viennese papers were humbly signed ‘Veza Magd’ (Veza the Maid) – also Sephardi, known always as Veza, and a gifted writer;10 through her he had escaped from his mother, probably the only human being who ever dominated him. They were closely pursued by Friedl Benedikt, second daughter11 of Ernst Martin Benedikt, owner of the Neue Freie Presse and painter,12 both well-evoked in the third volume of Canetti’s memoirs, The Play of the Eyes. The other Benedikts escaped to Sweden: Friedl alone, who had fallen in love with Canetti through his novel Die Blendung (1935) and had taken trouble to meet him, followed him to London.* She carne for Canetti, and her letters suggest that they were happy together – ‘My life and his are bound together for ever, he taught me to write and to live and has been good to me …’.13
Canetti and Veza soon moved to Amersham, on the outskirts of London, where his affair with Anna Mahler, an earlier ‘official’ mistress,14 was followed by a lifelong liaison with the painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, leading student of Max Beckmann. He addressed Marie-Louise always as ‘Sie’ rather than the familiar ‘Du’, affecting the old-world decorum of Laclos’s Liaisons Dangereuses, a world with whose elaborate erotic plotting he had affinity. Probably Friedl and Marie-Louise knew little of one another:15 Friedl lived in Hampstead, at 35 Downshire Hill, of which her first cousin Margaret Gardiner left her in charge:16 ‘Margaret, don’t you think life is absolute hell, every single minute of it?’ Friedl would ask. Neither Canetti, Veza nor Friedl had any money; all were in bohemian style ready to share their last penny. Finding a Christmas present for Canetti that satisfied a practical need without demeaning him could be hard. Yet he gravitated easily towards wealth.
At the time Iris met Canetti, his habit of working late at night, then moving nomadically – ‘as if hunted’17 – between a variety of neatly book-lined safe-houses – a seedy flat at 14 Crawford Street, Marylebone, another in Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, belonging to Marie-Louise but used by Veza – was well-established. He visited friends separately, living a double, sometimes a triple life, holding court in the coffee-shops of Hampstead, which recreated a lost ‘Mitteleuropa’. When Iris was asked how he fitted his wife into his busy round of visits, she replied airily, ‘Oh, he sees her at four in the afternoon.’18 Both Canetti and Veza insisted that Veza be treated with all the respect due to a Wife Number One in a classical Chinese household: ‘Canetti can have as many mistresses as he likes, I don’t care, for I am Veza Canetti, and no one else can call themselves that.’ She revered him – ‘Ich verehre ihn‘ – expressing amazement to other women that they did not fall in love with Canetti.19 Iris at first took Canetti, as she did everyone, at his own valuation, reverencing Veza too, loving his ‘genius’ and ‘Viennese’ sophistication alike, charmed when he sagely remarked of Rene: ‘How young she is – and more than pretty. She could have a young lover any day yet she loves your father!’ He was what Germans call a Sitzriese, a short man who, sitting, manifests great power. His face resembled Strindberg’s, his hair standing on end as if made of bronze, his extraordinary eyes ‘some colour or other’, sometimes very ferocious, at others ‘suddenly full of glittering lights like a flirtatious milkmaid’.
Die Blendung was translated by Veronica Wedgwood and published to acclaim in Britain in 1946 as Auto da Fé.20 The novel is a Georg Grosz-like black comedy of justified paranoia. Susan Sontag, whose brilliant championing of his work helped win Canetti the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981,21 noted that it was impossible not to regard the derangement of its monomaniac hero, the book-man Peter Kien, as other than a variation on his author’s most cherished exaggerations; that it is animated by an exceptionally inventive, delirious, hatred of women (Canetti’s mother accurately predicted that women would worship him for its misogyny22). Kien resembles Aschenbach (in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) or Unrath (in The Blue Angel), full of intellectual vanity. The animal stupidity of his housekeeper Therese, and the fanatical greed of the grotesque dwarf Ost-Jude Fischerle, a portrait Canetti later regretted and uneasily defended, in the light of the ‘catastrophe’ that overcame all Europe,23 help destroy Kien and his library.
Canetti soon spoke to Iris of a good man called Abraham Sonne, who had shown him that the ‘evil’ that his book is replete with was ‘not the evil I have in me now':24 ‘He gave me the right to be what I am.’ Iris recalled Sonne in her own notebooks forty years later. Those wishing to honour Iris’s reputation must fight the temptation to blacken Canetti’s. Since he aroused strong emotions of admiration, subservience, fear and dislike, this is not always easy. Their friendship survived until his death in 1994, and he claimed to be proud to have lived to see twenty-five of her novels published, while she considered him always a genius to whom she introduced only close friends.25 The task of evoking him justly is made the harder by his investment in Verwandlung, or transformation – the great theme of his work and life – the poet being, in his view, Master of Transformations, or shape-shifter.26 His embargo on any biography being written until thirty years after his death is read by friends as a plea for the feelings of survivors; by others, since few will then be alive who remember the first-hand truth, as mythomania.
An experience of self-transformation, a ‘blooding’, a return journey to the underworld: these were what the writer in Iris was looking for. If there is something ‘willed’ about the untried Iris’s rapid subjection to the ‘monster’ whom she wished to tame, thus establishing her place in the cult, there is also something involuntary. Canetti, in one of his ‘transformations’, touches all her male enchanter-figures, from A Severed Head and The Unicorn to The Sea, The Sea. He would sometimes proudly claim to have been her discoverer. If he helped ‘make’ her a writer, it was not quite in the manner that he assumed: an argument with him is latent throughout. Oxford philosophy, in the very century of Stalin and Hitler, had tended to evacuate the ideas of Good and Evil and render them idle functions of the choosing will. Canetti claimed to the poet Kathleen Raine, who he felt was too starry-eyed to understand, to have introduced Iris to an understanding of evil: Iris ‘respected’ evil, Raine not. Through Canetti Iris discovered something about the workings of power, and her own complicity in this. If so, it made her a better writer.
3
Franz Steiner was said to have been on the phone when he collapsed and died, leaving the receiver dangling.27 Canetti, however, would say that Iris proposed marriage to Franz, whose heart, like that of the Duke of Gloucester in King Lear, unable to bear the strain of joy, ‘burst smilingly’.28 This proposal-tale is an expurgated, prettified version of the story that obsessed Canetti all his life, with which he shocked many, from the 1950s until shortly before his death.29 He claimed that lovemaking was too much for Franz’s heart, and, implausibly, that Iris laid out his body. He sometimes added, falsely, that she beat on his London door in distress, begging his help.30 True, Franz had not known love without pain since he was thirty-nine, and his doctor warned him against sexual excess. Much also casts doubt on Iris’s 1988 statement that she last saw him on the evening before his death, and that they parted happily in the expectation of meeting again soon.31 A January 1953 journal entry reads, ‘I haven’t seen death before,’ and a later recollection about awakening Franz, ‘coming into his room suddenly before he died, and how for a moment there was a look of fear on his face. How can I bear to remember this?’ not to speak of the sheer intensity of her grief and sense of responsibility alike, could support the view that he died in her arms. ‘Iris Murdoch’ appears on his death certificate as the person formally registering his passing. It was surely she who left open his manuscript poems at the ‘beautiful’ text which Louis Dumont, paying his last respects the following morning, recognised as related to the event: probably ‘Über dem Tod’.32
The exact circumstances of Franz’s death do not finally matter. Canetti’s need to retell the tale is more significant, disclosing as it does his own fear of women. It was for Canetti that love was fraught with mortal dangers. ‘How did I know so certainly that C. could never bear to spend a whole night with anybody?’ asked Iris in January 1953: a habitual pattern she would give to the misogynistic and power-obsessed Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea.
Franz’s death was followed by a great fog, one she recalled vividly forty years later. Fogs feature in Iris’s novels as a concrete metaphor for obfuscation, or a bewitchment of the intelligence, of which Canetti’s variant tales of Franz’s death are a first symptom. Both A Severed Head and The Time of the Angels contain enchanters and power-figures as well as memorable fogs. It is fitting that her relationship with the original enchanter should have begun during England’s worst winter-fog ever. Visibility was down to less than twenty yards.33 There were accidents on the roads, trains delayed; air traffic diverted, bus services suspended. Twelve thousand people died in central London alone of respiratory and heart failure.34 The fog penetrated indoors: at Sadler’s Wells La Traviata was halted when the audience could no longer see the stage.
4
Franz told Iris, ‘Everyone tells everything to Canetti!': ‘He could make a stone speak.’35 She found herself, on Monday, 12 January 1953, after he had boasted of how the St Ives painters had all rushed to tell him their secrets, seated on his knee, telling him much about herself (a thing she had vowed she never would), about events at Seaforth in 1943, her loss of MacKinnon,36 and ‘other even more secret things’. When she asked if he believed that she loved him, he replied, ‘Yes, but I don’t yet see which of various ways this will develop.’ ‘You are like God the Father,’ she replied angrily. ‘Whatever I shall do you will have foreseen it and understood it even before I have myself’ – a sentence repeated in The Right from the Enchanter where the leaves fleeing Shelley’s west wind, ‘like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’, are in fact driven by that wind. He replied, ‘You are speaking exactly like Friedl, even to the very words!’ On her leaving he gave her an American edition of Die Blendung, writing in it: ‘To Iris in great hopes, Elias Canetti. 12 January 1953.’ By day she tormented herself; at night there were nightmares about death. Canetti built up for her a picture of her relations with Franz, who had ‘captured her spiritually’,37 giving her as few self-reproaches as possible. After thus confiding in him, she felt better. He was a ‘liberating figure’.38
Many recall Canetti’s ability, like the shamans who fascinated him, to call to the surface memories, thoughts and secret wishes of which his acquaintances had been unaware, as if tapping or unlocking the unconscious itself. They felt elevated in the attention they received, and carried away.39 He had complete patience. He did not interrupt. He listened as if you had something vital to tell him, and he, everything to learn. His answers were never prepackaged or formulaic. He responded on the spot, here and now, in an answer tailor-made for you and for no one else, devoting himself with uncanny intensity to whomsoever he was speaking, with enormous intellectual-spiritual energy and imagination.40 He could prepare for a meeting by reading all of a writer’s works in advance. Thus he could, partly by flattery, enter into others and, through an intense power of curiosity, transform himself. Those who met him once only still recalled the experience fifty years later.41 Canetti wrote: ‘I love to tell people who they really are. I am proud of my ability to instil in them a belief in themselves.’42
Such Svengali-like power can be misused. Gunther Adler, when angered by Canetti, would describe him as a conceited hunter of human beings who, deliberately amusing and inspiring at the beginning, charmed people into his maw, playing unpredictably with them, keeping them at arm’s length, answering letters with a capricious unpredictability from which Franz and, later, Iris suffered.43
5
Canetti’s qualities, positive and negative, are so contradictory that it is hard to see how they belong within the same person. It is no accident that when Iris first portrayed him, in The Flight from the Enchanter, she gave him eyes of different colours and then divided him into two: cunning Mischa Fox, effortlessly superior and godlike, and Calvin Blick, his Smerdyakov-like double, manipulative and wicked.* The habit of the age is to assume that what is deepest must be what is darkest; Canetti had virtues too. He had a massive polymath intelligence and an original mind – neither qualities widely appreciated by the English. He could be self-sacrificingly generous, magnanimous in print about others, and funny, an excellent mimic. Though then very poor, he at once wrote a cheque for £100 when the writer Kay Dick, after a suicide attempt in 1963, was in financial difficulties. He was thoughtful in his gifts – often of valuable books. According to Kathleen Raine the most widely learned and intelligent man she knew, he prodigally expended his time, intelligence and (perhaps) compassion on others.44 Like Socrates, it was hard to imagine him away from the city. He didn’t think the universe a good place, and said the Day of Judgement would happen when the human race arose with one voice to condemn God – the Jewish God (Iris followed him in considering the Christian ‘lie’ about the conquest of death by Jesus deeply vulgar). He was both concerned that someone would speak a word for poor humanity, yet despised ‘us’ too. He was interested in ‘his creatures'; and would have liked to remake the world and do it better. He said to Iris in January 1954: ‘It’s not so much that I disbelieve in God – but I hate him.’
Canetti had abundant self-conceit. The novelist Dan Jacobson recalls him at a party held by Sonia Orwell for Saul Bellow, the two egotistical writers manoeuvring carefully around each other, Canetti playing prince-in-exile among the tepid English, and immovable. Neither was in any rush to reconcile his views with yours. Though distinctly a man of the left politically, Canetti had a great respect for power and a liking for the affluent and patrician: there were hostess-patrons – the author Gladys Huntingdon,45 with whose family in Hyde Park Gardens (and in Amberley) he lived when he first arrived in England in 1939; Diana Spearman in Lord North Street, Westminster, associated with the magazine Time and Tide; Flora Solomon in Mayfair, daughter of the Tsar’s banker and once mistress to Kerensky. He arrived knowing no one; ten years later he consorted with ‘painters, cabinet ministers, sculptors, intellectuals, film actresses’.46
Canetti, an acclaimed writer, attracted what Iris called ‘apostles’ or ‘creatures’. Oxford 1938 reappears in Hampstead transformed: David Hicks’s friend the ‘dashing’ Carol Stewart translated Canetti’s Crowds and Power (published in English in 1962); John Willett, who stage-lit Frank Thompson’s It Can Happen Here; the artist Milein Cosman, who drew Iris in 1941, and her husband Hans Keller: all were neighbours and friends of Canetti’s. So were the writers Bernice Rubens and Rudi Nassauer. Gwenda David, literary ‘scout’ for the American publisher Viking, lived at 44 Well Walk, Hampstead. At number 21 were Clement Glock, who painted scenery at Covent Garden, and her husband William, future head of music at the BBC. The poet Kathleen Raine and Sir Aymer Maxwell, Canetti’s travelling companion in Morocco, were other ‘apostles’. Probably Aymer47 and Flora Solomon helped support Canetti. Raine obsessively, unhappily loved the homosexual Aymer’s younger brother Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, another ‘apostle’, and also predominantly homosexual. Both he and Raine employed Canetti as confidant,48 although Gavin Maxwell said: ‘None of us needs Canetti as much as Canetti needs us.’49 Aymer called him ‘The Master’. Carol Stewart remembered: ‘He ruled over both men and women.’ As at court, not everyone stayed in favour. Close friends were given a code – ring three times, put the phone down, dial again – to distinguish them from bores and enemies.
Canetti could be intensely secretive. His memoirs typically report only that Veza ‘did not clap’ when he first saw her at the critic and satirist Karl Kraus’s lectures in Vienna. Many believed that one of her arms was deformed or paralysed; in fact she had lost it in a car crash at two years of age, and wore a prosthesis concealed by a brown leather glove. When she with stubborn persistence typed Canetti’s writings, or laid a tray, or made Apfelstrudel,50 it was with one hand only. (Asked on one occasion about Veza’s missing arm, Anne Hamburger – so terrifying did she consider Canetti – suggested that he had probably bitten it off.)
After Veza’s death in 1962 Canetti lived part-time for eleven years with his second wife Hera Buschor and their baby daughter Johanna in Zurich before his long-term London mistress Marie-Louise von Motesiczky discovered the extent of the change in his situation. He was jealous, paranoiac and a mythomaniac who, in the words of Friedl’s sister Susie, ‘loved creating and undoing human relations and toying with people, watching their reactions as a scientist might watch his white mice’.51 Susie once saw Canetti drill Friedl in preparation for a grand party, probably at the Glocks’. She had never witnessed such a detailed set of instructions, of warlike strategies and tactics. It was like Clausewitz, Friedl acting as delighted lieutenant to Canetti’s dictator.
He liked to appear a man of the highest moral scruple,52 yet spoke offensively of friends,53 and, being intensely suspicious, was not a fount of truthfulness, adroit at making mischief. Michael and Anne Hamburger were shocked, on April Fool’s Day 1952, when his cruelty uncharacteristically lacked finesse. They were with Franz in his Notting Hill flat when Canetti rang up to announce, ‘Congratulations! Your book of poems has appeared!’ Canetti knew that Franz’s health was broken, and that publication of his poems meant everything to him. When the trick was explained, Franz changed colour but carried it off with courage, and his last journal suggests he bore no grudge. Iris regretted, decades later, what she termed this ‘hurtful joke’.54 To explain why he preferred to be invited out alone, Canetti sometimes claimed his wife was schizophrenic. As to other tricks – claiming that the painter Milein Cosman had a glass eye, or trying to talk into existence an affair between two St Ives painters55 – the malignity, as Coleridge observed of Iago, seems motiveless.
In November Iris’s first book, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, was published in tiny print on what resembled wartime austerity paper by Bowes & Bowes, in their series ‘Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought’, which ran from Samuel Beckett to Zamyatin. It was praised, and deservedly so. If Iris had, as a thinker, two modes, one lapidary and compressed, the other discursive or rambling, this study belonged in the first category. It is a brilliant work, authoritative and, despite its brevity, wide-ranging. It revealed a novelist’s capacity to sink and merge her personality within the mind of another, and criticised Sartre’s ideas and novels accessibly. It is still among the very best studies of Sartre in English.
Canetti scorned Iris’s implicit use of the Tolstoyan novel as an appropriate modern paradigm, and they discussed the need for the modern novel to invent its own myth. What most disturbs in Canetti rests on a confusion of life and literature. He seems to belong inside a novel, as when claiming that the English bored him because they were ‘not wicked enough’. Kathleen Raine observed that he had ‘studied evil more closely’ than she, had ‘specialised in it’. She saw him as a puppet-master lacking any sense of the sacred, thinking himself invisible. Not for nothing are the characters in Auto da Fé tormented worms. Iris spoke often of the type of the artist – to which she opposed the saint – as the man consciously, aesthetically, creating his own myth; making, in other words, of his life a work of art, and in so doing risking becoming an arch-individualist or ‘demonic egotist’. Canetti told her that myths came out of the region where religions come from, and took hold of him with a sort of authority so that he could not see things otherwise: ‘Either a situation has this quality or not.’
6
Those who liberate, Iris noted in A Severed Head, can also enslave. She knew whereof she spoke. She had recorded to David Hicks ‘a deep irrational desire to be dominated, to be held – together with a savage joyous disinclination to submit easily’. Canetti satisfied such fantasies. On 8 February 1953 she noted how he ‘held me savagely between his knees & grasps my hair and forces my head back. His power. He subjugates me completely. Only such a complete intellectual & moral ascendancy could hold me.’ Her descriptions of lovemaking with Canetti (often, as he preferred, in an armchair) are noteworthy, first of all, because – as she acknowledges with amazement – out of character. ‘Why do I now write down such things? I never have in the past. A measure of my love for C. & my certainty.’ Secondly because of the sheer oddness, even by bohemian standards, that Veza should let Iris into the flat, and later make a meal for the three of them. While Veza and Friedl became enemies, Veza and Iris stayed friends. Veza appears here a mixture of wise white witch and kindlier Madame Merle from Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, colluding in middle life with the affairs of the man she loves, inviting Iris after her own death to take care of Canetti (which, through friendship, Iris attempted). Lastly the sado-masochism of the relationship carries for Iris an electrifying charge. In his forceful lovemaking Canetti was a Zeus, a ‘great superb beast’. 24 March 1953:
C. has all possible mythological meaning for me. And he reaches far far beyond my view. Physically, he is violent, never quiet, with me. He takes me quickly, suddenly, in one movement as it were – and he kisses me restlessly, & savagely draws back my head. There is no tender quiet resting, as there was with Franz. When we are satisfied we do not lie together, but contemplate each other with a sort of amused hostility. He is an angel-demon, terrible in his detachment and the mystery of his suffering.
When she wrote on 30 March that ‘I sometimes feel that C. doesn’t believe a word that I say. But people oughtn’t to believe me so readily. A lot that I say isn’t true,’ or that she was not interested in his estimate of her own real wishes, all she was interested in was the state of his inclinations, we seem to find ourselves – apart from the reversal of sexes – inside the world of Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. She did not judge a proclivity for masochism harshly; it was one part only of her highly complex nature. Indeed, when in The Black Prince Bradley Pearson announces, ‘Of course Shakespeare was a masochist,’ masochism is idealised as one aspect of the mystery of negative capability itself, of that healing surrender to the otherness of the world which is for Iris an aspect of virtue.56 But Canetti, as John Bayley observed, was one who ‘had an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’.57 Small wonder that Iris, who with other men felt her acts to have a sort of grace and ease, with Canetti felt clumsy, a dolt.
7
Franz noted to Gunther Adler that, despite his childish atheism, Canetti was ‘really important, a very rare human being, passionately engaging as a friend, selfless, and quite unreliable’.58 Canetti liked to talk with Franz about life-myths, Franz holding in his head ‘all the myths of humankind’ and Canetti playing father to him. Both wrote aphorisms. Canetti liked the way Franz spoke slowly, with reticence, always thinking carefully about what he was saying. All three – Adler, Canetti, Steiner – to some degree resented England.
Franz had quarrelled bitterly with Canetti during the war about who owed more in his writings to the other – which of them was the greater poet – but in his final weeks he compared Canetti favourably with Kafka.59 Canetti blamed their quarrel on the ‘very desirable’ Friedl, on her life-loving mischievousness and sensuality; she had been full of her triumph over the quarrelling friends, both of whom wanted her, and when Canetti told her the story, Iris felt ‘oddly responsible’ for Friedl, angry with her too. After the quarrel Franz sent Canetti a quotation from the Talmud: ‘No man can consent that another have dominion over his soul.’ Canetti ‘cut’ Franz for two years. Mastery was at stake; power, too.
The twentieth century, our world, it has often been observed, is the work of Hitler.60 Just as Franz intended his doctorate on slavery as an atonement for and an attempt accurately to apprehend the Holocaust, and as Gunther Adler wrote his monumental, pioneering Theresienstadt 1941–4561 scrutinising the Nazi machinery of genocide – transports, administrative structures, accommodation, diet, health – with a systematic eye, so Canetti at the outbreak of war devoted himself exclusively to writing his parallel study of the phenomenon of mass behaviour, Crowds and Power.62 It was triggered by his experience in Vienna in July 1927 of witnessing a bloody demonstration against the acquittal of two murderers of Social Democrats, which ended with ninety wounded or shot dead and the Palace of Justice set alight, and took him twenty years. Franz, Canetti and Adler – friends of each other and of Iris – were thus all moved by the temper of the times to look into the workings of power at its most extreme.
Adler’s increasingly desperate, detailed pleas to Canetti from April to August 1939 to help him escape from Prague and the Nazi threat there went unanswered. There might have been many such claims, and underwriting an incoming refugee’s solvency cost £500; Canetti would not have had the means to help with one. His silence was a source of bitterness: after the war Adler during a heated moment felt reproached by Veza for having survived without Canetti ordaining that survival. In an interview Adler said Veza was disturbed by the events of the war, and never recovered. How could Canetti and Veza not be disturbed by the cataclysm? In the copy of Crowds and Power that Canetti gave Adler, survivor of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt, he wrote, ‘To Günther, who experienced what I wrote about’. But in Canetti the emphasis on power and victimhood fell differently. He wrote in German, the language he stayed fiercely loyal to – ‘the Germans had had so much taken away from them, it was not right that they should lose their language too’.63 He might have enjoyed the savage quip that the Germans would never be able to forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. Many saw in Crowds and Power ‘a message of forgiveness from a Jewish writer to the German people’.64 But had Canetti earned by suffering, as Franz and Adler unquestionably had, the ‘right’ to offer such forgiveness? (Of Adler it was once said that he forgave the Germans everything, and Canetti nothing.) Canetti had not,65 unlike them, lost his country, his family, nor – since he knew English before German – his language. But his authority to speak for a whole culture was that of the Dichter or authoritative ‘seer’ who owns all available truth. That this is a convention actively mistrusted in these islands was one reason he hated the English and their accursed ‘modesty’, and forbade publication of his autobiographies in Britain. The story Canetti told of travelling to Auschwitz in 1945 with the Red Cross, and speaking to surviving children in German, was probably apocryphal: ‘Meine Name! Meine Name!’ they begged, having forgotten their names – he purportedly telling them what those names once were.66 It sounds in magisterial character, but was typical myth-making. The travel he preferred was in his mind. With disarming apparent candour he wrote: ‘I would have a purer relationship to Machiavelli if I were not also interested in power; here my path crosses his in a complicated and intimate way. For me, power still is evil absolute.’67 That he, more than most writers, was a Macht-Mensch – one who seeks, consolidates, and hangs onto power – renders such high-minded protestation rhetorical, or fatuous.
Readers of Crowds and Power, which is partly an anti-religious tract, will recognise Saul Bellow’s satire in Herzog of Banowitch’s ‘gruesome and crazy book’ on power-systems as psychosis, reflecting Hitler’s and Stalin’s achievements in corpse-making, and relating them to the way we all masticate and chew each other:
Fairly inhuman, and full of vile paranoid hypotheses such as that crowds are fundamentally cannibalistic, that people standing secretly terrify the sitting, that smiling teeth are the weapons of hunger, that the tyrant is mad for the sight of (possible edible?) corpses about him.68
One leaves Crowds and Power overwhelmed by the reduction of the entire panorama of human history to what Lenin termed ‘Who: Whom': the triumph of survivors who delight in cruelty. Canetti’s crowd is as much a sub-human monster as a community offering fellowship and resistance to tyranny,69 and his brief final piety about being ‘against power’ reads feebly. Why should we believe it? He has offered no analysis of how the power-instinct – whose tenacity over millennia he spent twenty years remorselessly demonstrating – can be attenuated. Here is history reduced to slaughterhouse, blood-lust, will to power. The secret mythologies upon which all human affairs permanently rest are delight in power, and joy in killing.
8
One source of obfuscation in Iris and Canetti’s love-affair was that each was trying to survive the death or dying of a former lover, and experiencing survivor-guilt, that great – not merely Jewish – theme of the day. Canetti never paid attention to his own Nietzschean decree that survivors feel lasting triumphal joy at outliving others. When Veza died in 1962 he contemplated suicide, and made of her flat in Thurloe Road, Hampstead70 (to the disgust of some71) a shrine to her memory. And Iris was touched and obsessed by the fact that Canetti’s mistress Friedl Benedikt was dying, aged thirty-six, in the American Hospital in Paris, of Hodgkin’s Disease. Perhaps identifying with Canetti’s dying ex-lover, whom Iris physically resembled,72 was one way of attenuating the guilt involved in ‘betraying’ her own dead lover, Franz. Canetti methodically assisted this identification. On 10 January 1953, when Iris spoke of how he was bound in her mind to Franz, he replied by speaking of Friedl, and said – which pleased her profoundly – ‘I feel that you are helping to keep Friedl alive.’
He has clearly been meditating a lot about Friedl & me. He said he had written ‘hundreds of pages’ about me, about the myth, the story. I don’t feel any fear at this. After all, I am working at this also. I told him he knew all the things that I wanted to know. He said and very much more! Let us have none of this English modesty!
Friedl was the leitmotiv of their love throughout 1953 and 1954. Othello wooed Desdemona with tales of derring-do; Canetti wooed Iris with tales of Friedl. In March 1951 he had written to Friedl’s sister Susie: ‘Ich liebe Friedl nicht mehr. Ich werde nie mehr mit ihr leben’ ('I don’t love Friedl any more. I will never live with her [again]'). This can have made him feel no less guilty when, that year, Friedl became seriously ill. This guilt Iris, willingly, if unwittingly, took upon herself. She was an ideal scapegoat: credulous, soft-hearted, masochistic, intensely imaginative. When she wrote to console him about Friedl’s illness, Canetti replied that her letters had helped, adding, ‘You did what she would have done.’ Soon she was writing constantly, sometimes twice a day, to Canetti: ‘What a sad air a letter can have when it records momentary things which are past when the other person gets it … But writing down such things is a kind of charm to bring you into the present …’.73 Friedl was a leading topic: ‘How strangely little I resent C’s identifying me with Friedl,’ Iris early noted: ‘I continue her for him, through me he enjoys her again.’ He told her her arms ‘were just like Friedl’s’. When she half-playfully struck him in the face he said Friedl had never dared do the same, while implying that Friedl needed and liked a degree of physical duress. He told Iris, on one of his madder lifelong hobbyhorses74 (which she would address in The Good Apprentice): ‘There were times when I thought I had come into this world to abolish death.’ And: ‘I loathe & despise myself for not being able to stop death.’ Where Jesus Christ failed, Canetti was to succeed. Iris wrote to say she wanted to give Friedl her blood.
In March 1953 Iris dreamed that Friedl telephoned her and they chatted at length. This dream-Friedl was very friendly, called Iris by her first name, wanted to meet. ‘I didn’t ask her surname,’ Iris noted, after discussing Friedl with Veza the same month. Soon Canetti, in Paris, wrote to Iris that he had sat beside Friedl and had lied to her that Aymer Maxwell was making a ballet of her first book, had even taken a theatre. At the end of the month Friedl seemed a little better, and Iris recorded her sense of devastation: ‘I am a rotten thing. The “aesthetic” conclusion was that she should die & C. should console himself with me.’ There are two ways of overcoming jealousy, she noted: one, by becoming absorbed in one’s own activity, the other by trying to love the person concerned. She prayed for Friedl and ‘went in spirit to her aid'; and wrote, ‘About Friedl. What evil there is in me …’
On the last day of March Canetti told Iris the tale of Friedl’s love-affair with a ‘dwarf in Sweden’ – the Hungarian painter Endre Nemes – who tore her clothes to ribbons (a scene Iris would write into A Fairly Honourable Defeat) before raping her and slashing his own pictures. When the affair turned to knives and murderous hatred, Canetti wrote Friedl a letter ordering her to leave Nemes at once. She soon found a kind and generous lover in the American Allan Forbes. Now writing about Friedl all the time, Canetti advised Allan to do the same (he did not). Iris wept, her tears partly sympathetic, partly jealous, when Canetti romanced that Allan had won Friedl by promising her a Caribbean island, just as Friedl had once offered Canetti ‘one of her islands’ off Sweden. (Allan belonged to the old ‘brahmin’ Boston Forbeses, who owned a small island, Naushon, off Martha’s Vineyard; Friedl’s mother’s family owned one island only: Ångholm. Neither island was within either’s gift.75) Three days later, at 5 p.m. on 3 April, Good Friday, in the middle of a tremendous thunderstorm, and with Susie by her side, Friedl died. Her sufferings had been terrible.76 Susie’s last conversation with her, on Maundy Thursday, was about how the intention of an act may be good and its result evil, and vice versa (perhaps even Canetti had genuinely intended good by Friedl …). Allan and Susie, though wishing to have her cremated on the spot, drove Friedl’s body in awful procession back for burial to the tilted graveyard of Grinzing, outside Vienna. Canetti had decreed this by phone.
Friedl’s death did not end Iris’s identification. She noted, ‘The thing that one forgets. That one doesn’t face death in the fullness of one’s strength.’ The two continued to meet in Iris’s dreams, and she and Canetti went on pilgrimage around the places in Hampstead associated with her. Friedl and Canetti had made love on a bench in the gardens of St John’s College. Had anyone else ever made love in broad daylight in an Oxford college garden, he wondered? Iris carved Friedl’s name into that bench. In June Canetti ‘lashed out’ and terrified her over something she had written to him about Friedl. Weeping, Iris wrote a reply at once, angry with him too, telling him again that he was like God, ‘passing by my good deeds & striking me for a bad one’. When Allan Forbes came to England after Friedl’s death, Canetti wondered if he would see the resemblance between Iris and Friedl. (What he in the event said was, ‘How marvellously beautiful she looked'; and ‘You won’t change about Iris, will you?’ She recalled to him the actress Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc: a Gothic/Renaissance look, naïve, simple, strong.) On New Year’s Eve 1953, Iris recorded that she wanted ‘to be Friedl’, while Canetti reassured her early in 1954 that he did not love her merely ‘because of that’, fearing she might identify herself too much. As late as November 1954, after a holiday in Italy when Iris angered Veza, Canetti patiently explained: ‘your appearing suddenly like that in Milan, just as we arrived, made her identify you with Friedl. F. used always to do that, having waited perhaps for hours at a corner.’
Friedl’s last, unpublished novel concerns an adolescent whose persona is being stolen by an older man. Iris admired Friedl’s books. All three of her published novels – written under the nom de plume ‘Anna Sebastian’, and admired by Angus Wilson77 – are dedicated to Canetti. Iris’s dedication of The Flight from the Enchanter ‘To Elias Canetti’ imitates Friedl’s ‘dem Dichter Elias Canetti, meinem grossen Meister’ – ‘to the poet Elias Canetti, my great master’ (in her 1950 novel The Dreams). So does her attempt to evoke Canetti through the central character Mischa Fox, just as Friedl had done with the hero of her surreal novel The Monster (1944). Jonathan Crisp is an insolent, contemptuous, demonic Lord of the Universe and of misrule, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, rent-racketeer, voyeur, ingenious solicitor of confidences, rapist, freeloader, liar, Casanova, Svengali. He has elegant mistresses and a nostalgia for the working class. Sex is part of his will to power. Though intensely promiscuous, his attractiveness is a ‘given’, never explained. He slowly amasses a crowd of bourgeois and workers as his slaves, who finally kneel, one after another, to kiss his shoes. He communes with God as with an envied sibling, God having more worshippers than he. Friedl confessed to Canetti, weeping, that Crisp was him. When Canetti told Iris of this, in May 1953, he quoted to her from The Monster. ‘Down on your knees, Kate!’ laughing at her as he did so. He then told her how much he’d liked Under the Net, ‘its pattern of overlapping pairs … & the pupil-teacher couple’. Friedl wrote in 1944 to her parents in Sweden that The Monster was an attempt to show how Hitlers are made.
9
Friedl’s sister Susie had alerted Canetti when Endre Nemes went mad. Iris wrote: ‘The thought I might one day meet, not Friedl, that would be too much, but even Susi [sic] or Allen [sic] is like thinking of meeting a character out of a Greek play. “Oh, let me introduce you. Have you met Antigone?"’ Nothing shows so clearly Canetti’s ability to turn his life into myth, into literature, as well as how intensely Iris was under his spell.
Nearly fifty years after Friedl’s death, both Susie, who knew Canetti from 1936 until his death in 1994, and Allan Forbes thought her illness grew from guilt. Forbes ascribed it to survivor-guilt, Susie to guilt over her treatment of Canetti, who could neither be fully with her, nor let her grow up and be happy elsewhere. Friedl wrote in her diary: ‘I have lived in your light, but could not find my own.’78 Unlike Iris, who angered Canetti by recovering, Friedl never got over her childish awe and quasi-religious love of Canetti. He invented rules and punishments for her that governed most aspects of her day, especially writing. Doubtless Friedl, who was bohemian and chaotic but strong of will, gave as good as she got. Their relationship, in current jargon, was ‘co-dependent’. The rules included love-affairs. He did not believe she should be allowed full sexual happiness (it might impede her creativity), yet personally choreographed a number of her affairs. Forbes found a way of co-existing with Friedl’s fixation on Canetti. Nemes was maddened by it. A Sephardi Swede (Ivar Iverus) with whom Canetti decreed Friedl should have an affair for her own protection while fleeing Austria was also badly hurt. Susie turned against Canetti when he spoke of ‘giving up’ Friedl to Allan: he never really let go of her, wanting both her and Allan within his power – thus Iris recorded – treating them ‘like little dogs’, another aspect of Canetti that Iris would exploit in The Sea, The Sea.
Friedl’s tales that Canetti imprisoned, beat79 and spied on her may be partly fantastical. What is certain is that when she became happily pregnant by the writer Willy Goldman, Canetti told her he would never see her again if she had the child.80 The threat worked. He thought a child sapped creativity; and he was certainly jealous of Goldman too: ‘Another had replaced him in a most sensitive role,’ thought Forbes, and the abortion was Friedl’s ‘punishment’.81 The story gives substance to Veza’s claim that Canetti put her through abortions too.82 He offended the Benedikts in The Play of the Eyes by insinuating that the girl who had really attracted him in Vienna in 1936 was Susie, not Friedl at all. In the American Hospital in February 1952, the dying Friedl was so ashamed of her appearance that she refused to let Canetti see her. So his story (of lying to Friedl that Aymer Maxwell was turning Friedl’s novel into a ballet) was for Iris’s benefit. Meanwhile, waiting in the hospital corridor, he distressed Susie by praising her walk, which he said excited him.
Mischa Fox’s only public act of power in The Flight from the Enchanter consists in his buying up the Suffragette paper The Artemis.83 The novel itself never explains why, though Fox is described as ‘not, to put it mildly, a supporter of female emancipation’.84 Canetti, though somewhat of a prude,85 was attracted to many women, and Gwenda David was anxious for her teenage daughter when he was around; making love to a woman, Canetti believed, was one way of mastering her. When Allan Forbes arrived in London, Canetti took him under his wing, showed him about, and, to help console him, installed him in a room opposite Bernice Rubens, choreographing an affair between them. Since he simultaneously aided and abetted the affair Rubens’s husband Rudi Nassauer was engaged in, this arrangement had the advantage of symmetry, one Nassauer explored in a roman-à-clef, The Cuckoo (1962), in which Canetti appeared, to his disgust, as the fanatically tidy, over-defended character Klein, or ‘Small’ (Iris used the name for two power-figures, Honor Klein in A Severed Head and the tyrannical General Klein in her play The Servants and the Snow). Rubens came to detest Canetti’s puppet-mastering, and found in his fascination with the maimed and suicidal a repellent mixture of sentimentality and cruelty; Susie believed that Canetti was genuinely torn between wishing to be a good man and the proclivities of novelist, inventor and fabulist. Things took off and went their own way.
10
Friedl and Iris were two of many Galateas whom Canetti fostered. But, Pygmalion-like, he would often claim to have made Iris a writer as he had done for Friedl. He advised her sagely to write for an hour a day, ‘perhaps half-formulated thoughts, anything’. She had been keeping such a journal for a decade. As often with Canetti, truth has to be detected within a fog of myth. He told John and Anne Willett that he had rummaged through Iris’s belongings and, finding unpublished writings, decided something should be done with them. In his final book, Aufzeichnungen, Canetti credited Franz with having ‘discovered’ Iris, claiming that Franz’s last letter commended Iris’s first novel to him.86
Iris’s journal is matter-of-fact about lending Canetti the first notebook of her novel, ‘small & dry as a walnut’. On 28 March 1953 she finished the entire second draft and noted, ‘I can see very clearly how bad it is. It is very romantic & sentimental, even what is intellectual in it is intellectual in a romantic way. If anything saves it from complete wreck it is a sort of vitality & joy that lifts it a little – perhaps,’ adding, ‘I shall let C. have it’87 Gwenda David, talent scout for Viking, never learnt who had posted what became Under the Net through her large letterbox designed for manuscripts at 44 Well Walk. This has all the marks of mystification associated with Canetti, but Iris would surely have been published sooner or later, without such intervention. Gwenda David danced with Ian Parsons from Chatto & Windus at a dinner Victor Gollancz was giving – infuriatingly, she had to buy full evening dress for £11 – and told Parsons she had a novel that might interest him, sending it to Norah Smallwood at Chatto on 5 August. By 3 October Iris noted, ‘Chatto’s taking my novel – and Viking Press. But sadness over all.’ This is the sole reference to either publishing house,88 and her only reference to the literary life, in sixty years of journals: her success was instantaneous. She was unsure what to call this novel, playing with such awful titles as ‘Up the Ladder and Down the Wall: A Reflective Pursuit’, or (from Addison’s version of Psalm 19) ‘In Solemn Silence All’. Gwenda David came to stay in Iris’s smart new top-floor flat in Beaumont Street, Oxford, where the dust was so thick Gwenda wrote her name in it, and a writer-protégée called Winnie Scott proposed the tide Under the Net instead.
Some months into her affair with Canetti Iris started to understand him, and herself, better. In the first month she wrote: ‘I have considered the possibility of your turning out to be completely diabolical!’ She reflected on her need for an unhappy love, which Canetti, with his ‘separateness and brutality’, satisfied. Canetti confessed he came into the Porcupine pub on Charing Cross Road and watched Iris and Momigliano unobserved on 21 March 1953.89 That he is partly a figure of light, partly of darkness preoccupied Iris: ‘Is his flattery of me a cunning way of keeping me close, while not committing himself to me at all? I must have been very impressed by his demonishness today to be able to suspect this.’ On 1 April she noted: ‘Canetti claimed “Good has to become demonic, in our age, in real life. Unless it can live idyllically …” What is it for C. to be a manichee? He believes in real forces of evil – & is ready to use evil to serve good, if he can.’90 ‘Is his positive idea of good subject to anything transcendent?’ Iris’s and Kathleen Raine’s views tally closely. On 29 May Iris, distressed by recognising him in Friedl’s Jonathan Crisp, wrote Canetti a ‘foolish’ letter about good and evil, noting that he took a positive pleasure in lying and deceiving, ‘tho’ always for the best of motives … great power inspires fear, even when it’s not misused, and one considers it evil or a sort of defence’. However he misused her, she could not stop belonging to him completely. Yet she quoted Franz’s remark, ‘One man cannot be God to another.’ On 28 June she notes that she believes in a kind of unseen reality, he does not, and connects this with his willingness to deceive people for their own good.
Clement Glock identified a Holy Family in the coterie, with Canetti – of course – as God the Father, and Veza the Madonna. The atmosphere of power-play and paranoia awoke Iris further. On 13 May she records Canetti as having asked: ‘What would you say if I told you I had been to Oxford to watch you? And if I found you had deceived me, what a scene! A tornado would be nothing. And how you would enjoy it! When C. speaks so I feel sad. He is almost capable of such a thing. And this is something in him I find hard to understand.’ On 10 July Aymer Maxwell feared Canetti might destroy him with a thunderbolt, and pushed Iris into admitting Canetti was a ‘great writer’. Soon Canetti warned her against Aymer, who would ‘do anything he could to drive a wedge between us, even to trying to seduce me’. He added, ‘If you do do anything you regret, remember that I am merciful! I should be furiously angry – but I am merciful.’ Iris ‘was exasperated extremely by this – but touched too, in an absurd way’.
More of the atmosphere surrounding Canetti is evoked by a scene in the Cosmo café-restaurant in Swiss Cottage in December 1953, where Aymer Maxwell seemed to Iris gentle and faunlike. She was touched by Aymer’s devotion: missing Canetti for a moment in the restaurant he said, ‘Where is the master? (Canettic’est le maître.)’ Canetti later protested, ‘Aymer is a werewolf – I am taming a werewolf.’ Spirited, coltish-looking Clement Glock was cruel both to Aymer – ‘you are weak!’ – and to Canetti, savagely: ‘When you are dead I will draw you, when you are lying dead. And I’ll publish a book about you, and how I helped you!’ Canetti, unperturbed connoisseur of the instincts, said to Iris later: ‘Her desire to survive; she really saw me lying dead and exulted.’ For many years Iris remembered a conversation at Carol Stewart’s at 8 Kent Terrace, Regent’s Park, when Canetti had said how deep was the desire to survive, outlive.
In January 1954 she had been moved, turning the dial on the radio, suddenly to hear Canetti from Stuttgart recite his play The Comedy of Vanities: she was then translating it into English. The same month she recorded a comic, happy dialogue at Compayne Gardens. Canetti was playing Mozart on the gramophone, and when she told him he looked like a pirate in repose, he riposted that he would sell her for two hundred doubloons.
I. But think – the nearest white woman is 500 miles away! C. Not at all! I captured three yesterday. They’re in the next cave. All virgins.
I. Well I don’t care – I’ll take a look at the buyer, & then decide whether I’ll argue!
C. Now you’ll go! And I was just beginning to think I’d disguise one of the others as you. The buyer is a horrible old Turk.
I. Yes, please do that! Think how useful I could be – I could darn your socks & do the accounts of your raids. C. Well, you’d have to teach this woman English. I’ve described you to the Turk – & he’s a man I do a lot of business with.
I. He won’t have minded your descriptions – he probably knows what a dreadful liar you are. But you turn the women over to me. I’ll train them for you. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll be your slave.
C. You are my slave! Ho Ho Ho! But now I’m in two minds. What else can you do?
I. I can write you a poem – now if you like.
C. A woman, write poetry!
Sitting up, she then wrote, very rapidly, a sonnet, her ‘first poem for C, of which she later recalled only scattered lines. ‘C. after holding it upside down, & saying “is this writing?” and “It’s a message to my enemies,” made me read it. Then he said – all right, you stay? I said how long? He said, forever.’
Earlier she had told him of how Gunther Adler saved his life in the concentration camp by writing love poems for the Nazis. The connexion between her love poems and Adler’s is not obvious. But she came to see that the Jewish expatriates whom she loved, who fought as expatriates will, who had undergone the worst their century had to offer, carried within themselves, as it were, an understanding that she and other British people lacked. What Canetti showed in Crowds and Power, and what he was, were, in Iris’s view, challenges to English liberal humanism. Even the best of expatriate lives showed that ‘those to whom evil is done, do evil in return’.91 The intensity of what they had undergone carried ‘truth'; their experience of ‘enslavement’ suggesting something about us all, especially to one already fascinated by Plato’s allegory of the Cave and the Sun, which proposed enslavement as the human norm, a myth which (for Iris) illuminated the disturbances of the age. Jews in her novels are sometimes idealised; and the notable Jew who is not – Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – is demonised instead. Canetti was what she termed an ‘alien god’, whose entry into situations altered them.
It is the main point of The Flight from the Enchanter that those enslaved to Mischa Fox/Canetti are enslaved voluntarily. The ‘alien god’ can rule only because his creatures surrender their will. Virginia Woolf once noted: ‘Hitlers are bred by slaves.’92 The karmic ‘blame’ of power is thus shared between bully and victim, resting on an act of collusion, and the victims of power, as Iris expressed this in The Unicorn, ‘infected too’, passing on the virus to others. Some of what is monstrous in Canetti may be symptomatic of what is monstrous in all of us, and in the last century. Henry James opposed European corruption and American innocence. Iris’s novels often oppose English ignorance and European understanding.
11
Iris thought she was weaker than Friedl. Certainly she struggled with Canetti’s influence, too, throughout her life. His radical atheism probably played its part in her leaving the Anglo-Catholic Metaphysicals in 1953.
Even in January 1953 she wrote:
I notice already his influence upon me – about ‘power’ for instance. (Should the virtuous have power? I discussed with two political theory pupils!) I shall have to remake my attitude to religion. (Am I excessively ‘open to influence'? Franz influenced me very much. Now C’s influence operates in a rather different way.)
She told him about Momigliano, and about Asa Briggs, who would comfort her about the various complications of her life and teach her modern history in front of a blazing log fire at Worcester College. She told Canetti, too, about her tendency to collect around her what she termed a ‘family’, her divided ‘loyalty’ to the members of which had caused her to be unfaithful to Franz. It was surely from her anguished remorse about this that he helped liberate her.
Doubtless she came to fear him as her own darker ‘double’. His genius for collecting ‘creatures’ funds The Flight from the Enchanter and, more darkly, A Fairly Honourable Defeat; hers lies behind Morgan’s feckless emotional greed in the same novel and behind the figure of Hannah Crean-Smith, Anglo-Irish half-ascetic, half-vamp, centre of a court of admirers in The Unicorn. Both Iris and Canetti were secretive, leading complicated private lives, keeping friends and lovers in compartments. ‘Holding them & yet hurling them away. A sort of solar system. Until they are suspended at a certain distance by a force of gravity. Until they find an orbit,’93 could describe either Canetti or herself. Both had within them, as well as warmth and vulnerability, that ice-splinter without which art is not made. Both were highly attractive to others, and neither always told the truth. On 23 May 1953 Iris reflected: ‘How for years one might keep up a facade of casualness & deceive others about one’s relations with a certain person. I do this – or hope I do!’ Precisely one week later she complained that Canetti ‘has no right to deceive me for my own peace of mind. It is a deep offence.’ The juxtaposition is ironic; months later she lamented ‘that I have told lies to all those I loved most deeply, not once but continually’.
Both loved animals. Both were spellbinding enchanters who elicited intimacy by holding themselves intact, aloof. To the hostile they were ‘wreckers’, who ‘ate people up’. Iris’s Cambridge contemporary Olivier Todd, who then confided only in her about his illegitimacy, later wondered whether her reserve betokened the odour of ‘sulfur ou des roses’.94 Of Anna Quentin in Under the Net, Iris wrote: ‘to anyone who will take the trouble to become attached to her she will give a devoted, generous, imaginative and completely uncapricious attention, that is still a calculated avoidance of self-surrender’. Anna was one aspect of Iris. Of Momigliano’s putting himself in her power, she noted, ‘terrifying … To wield such power is wicked.’ The love-victims of Anna Quentin become resigned to the liberal scope of her affections while remaining ‘just as much her slave as ever’.95 How was love-energy to be purified so that one did good, rather than enslaving? What distinguished Iris’s love-affairs from Canetti’s?
Her friend and co-philosopher Patrick Gardiner intuited that something in Iris’s past had introduced her to the idea of evil.96 The events of 1943–44 – her abandonment of Michael Foot and taking up with Thomas Balogh – started that process; those of 1952–56 continued it. Canetti represented the artist-as-manipulative-and-sadistic-mythomaniac who had struck a Faustian bargain, the mystifier-enchanter Iris feared turning into, whom indeed she might have become. Her assertion that the structure of good literary works is to do with ‘erotic mysteries and deep, dark struggles between good and evil’97 owes much to these years. As Kathleen Raine accurately observed, Canetti’s quarrel with God is an ancient Jewish tradition going back as far as the Book of Job. Iris’s quarrel with Canetti reflects that tradition; the Hebrew ‘deuteragonist’ was Satan. Canetti acts deuteragonist in many of Iris’s novels. Her unpublished poem-cycle of the 1950s, ‘Conversations with a Prince’, at one stage had the working title ‘Conversations with a Tyrant’. Her novels oppose ‘Good’ and ‘Power’, asking questions of ‘authority’ which Canetti rendered urgent. In The Bell the Abbess defines Good as, not powerless, but ‘non-powerful'; in The Unicorn only the good man stands outside and magically heals power-conceived-of-as-sickness. And power, though most critics failed to see this, was as deep an obsession in Iris’s work as in Canetti’s.
In 1964 Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Iris were sitting quietly in Marie-Louise’s Hampstead studio, she painting Iris’s portrait for St Anne’s,98 when Canetti suddenly appeared through the side door. He startled them both – ‘on purpose of course’, Iris objectively reported. Then he made Marie-Louise show her the portrait. Iris thought it ‘wonderful, terrible, so sad and frightening, me with the demons. How did she know?’ Canetti had done her lasting service. He had shown her to herself; and something of the corruptible relationship between pity and power.
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During a talk Iris gave at Wedgwood Memorial College in 1955, John Wain and Richard Lyne,99 who had been carelessly tilting back in their chairs, were so electrified by the measured elegance of her response to one question, its truth and incisiveness – ‘I am not persuaded that being in love is necessarily a mode of knowledge of the beloved’ – that their chairs overbalanced and both crashed to the floor. Iris glared at them.100
If enslaved herself, an improbable rescuer was to hand. On 5 February 1954 she noted the laughter of a new admirer who lived at St Antony’s College. His name was John Bayley, and he came to fear Canetti as ‘Pluto, god of the Underworld, with a crocodile smile, wanting to whisk Iris off to Hades’.101 A poem Iris wrote that March depicts Canetti ‘always elsewhere: maybe in an aeroplane or in someone’s Bentley/Or standing like Socrates in a London street’. Bayley, by contrast, was accessible and here.
Meanwhile Iris had underestimated her own strength, which came from different sources. When Ferruccio Rossi-Landi described ‘women’, she recognised herself.
They have no hierarchy of interests. Each thing is an absolute then they pass on. That is why a woman is stronger than a man. She puts her whole being into getting some momentary thing.
Iris felt that she too underwent the impression of the moment, then passed on. Her own native good sense, that of a cheerful, prudent Ulsterwoman, played its part, too, in the coming struggle.
*Friedl used her sister Susie as a lookout to alert her when Canetti was approaching, so she could prepare herself. Susie Ovadia (née Benedikt), letter to author.
*In The Brothers Karamazov the illegitimate Smerdyakov carries out the murder of his father that he intuits his half-brother Ivan desires.