A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  In his autobiography, Canetti writes:

  I bow to memory, every person’s memory. I want to leave memory intact, for it belongs to the man who exists for his freedom. And I do not veil my dislike for those who perform a beauty operation on a memory until it resembles anyone else’s memory. Let them operate on noses, lips, ears, skin, hair as much as they like; let them—if they must—implant eyes of different colors, even transplant hearts that manage to beat alongn for another year; let them touch, trim, smooth, plane everything—but just let memory be.

  Now, as I continue to dance about the memory of my foolish encounter with Canetti in Berlin, imitating Barth’s felicitous footfalls, the moment becomes as full of significance as it was noisy then, because it is noise that Canetti hates—social static, gabble, chatter. He says of Hermann Broch, but it is also true of himself, that he is most interested in the specific way a man makes the air shake; yet the air we stood in on that evening was already pulsating. The air we tried to shape and give voice to was a trembling air, beaten till bruised by a concerted instrumentalized huffing, by flatulent sounds called tunes, by arrangements that would never reach music, by the commercial culture that has consumed our everyday life. And in that eloquent 1936 tribute to Hermann Broch, Canetti speaks of the air as if it were free, unowned, “the last common property.” Today, however, our air has been subdivided, built on, leased, rented. Today, we know that when we breathe our last, that last breath will have been a chimney’s smoke before we breathed it, or the fume in an exhaust, a radioed wave, smoker’s cough; it will be wet with a clarinetist’s spit; it will have taken shape in a subway, somewhere between a paunch and a hip; it will have been bought, sold, renovated, washed, reused; and even then we’ll have to pay well in advance for it, like a seat for the World Series. Our last breath will be brought to us, very likely, through a rented plastic tube. Perhaps we won’t be able to put sufficient funds up front. In that case, our last breath may be denied us.

  Elias Canetti begins his autobiography (the first volume of which he has entitled The Tongue Set Free) with a characteristically arresting and symbolic episode that he says is his earliest memory. Every morning, as he steps out into the hall of the house where he is staying, in the company of the girl who is taking care of him, a smiling young man confronts him with a jackknife he has withdrawn from his trousers, and after commanding the boy to stick out his tongue, he places the cool blade alongside it, threatening to cut it off. Each morning the young man refrains—folds and repockets the knife—but promises to carry out the operation the following day. Suddenly (as it must have seemed), both young man and maid disappear from Canetti’s life. Much later, he learns that this knife-smiling youth has been having a vaguely defined affair with his nannie, and uses this frightening gesture to ensure the little boy’s silence. “The threat with the knife worked,” Canetti writes, “the child quite literally held his tongue for ten years.” A page later, we learn he was two at the time.

  This vividly drawn vignette is more than merely an apt and gripping beginning to the first volume of Canetti’s memoirs. It foreshadows many of his fundamental themes: the critical importance of the tongue and its freedom to speak, the intercourse of minds through conversation, hence the evil in lies, in misdirection, in enforced silence, in verbal mystification and every other offense against speech and its moving element, the word, especially death’s offense against it, against creation (since for all of us, it was the first curse cried; for each of us, it is the last curse carried out), because Canetti hears death as silence, the final flight of the breath, the triumphant rattle of the snake. However, there is also the evil born in the howls of the mob, the shrieks of the insane, who lost the ability to converse and cannot convey to others the condition of their consciousness. These are Canetti’s subjects—in sum: utterance and its inhibition, learning, listening, and the terrible dangers of the deaf ear.

  The deer is alert and turns to catch the wind and every sound. Our ears turn, too, always away from the signal. So that we shall not smell rot, we wear perfume; we spice our food to disguise its blandness or, contrarily, its decay; we fill our souls with sensation so we shall not have to see. Headphones smother our ears.

  Canetti’s use of this little adventure is typical of his technique as an autobiographer, too, because he concentrates on those events of his life that were to become models for others—prototypes—and that would therefore reappear often, much as a persistent thought does: this first fear, for instance; yet he does not pretend to write of it in the ignorance and simplicity of its onset and scant survival (although the child recalls only the red of walls and stairs, the knife and its threat, and not a bit of the hanky-panky he was presumably a witness to); nor does he use it to prognosticate, subjecting it to analysis and noting an early connection between tongue and phallus in his psyche, talk, and intercourse, or an alliance of power and interdiction, which later became severe; instead, he strikes a perfect balance between his present knowledge and his childhood ignorance, and allows us, his readers, to learn of his life as he does. Canetti’s tact with time and knowledge is one of the artistic triumphs of these memoirs.

  The idea of the model, moreover, is important to Canetti in other ways. He is a seeker and builder of them, a worshiper of heroines and heroes: initially his mother, then the cultural critic Karl Kraus, next his future wife, Veza (who will receive the dedication of Auto-da-Fé), still later, writers like Hermann Broch, Isaac Babel, both of whom he meets, and Franz Kafka, whom, of course, he cannot. All his models are people who teach, whose speech or writings are their blackboard, chalk, and rod. Similarly, then, he treats the events of his life as instructors, as occasions to be “lived up to” in reliving them, to be passed through like phases of one’s education, and to be freed from finally, so that others, always higher, more excellent, more demanding, may be met, heard, spoken to, learned from, and, possibly, surpassed.

  Canetti was born to proud and well-to-do Sephardic Jews in Ruschuk, a port city on the lower Danube, in 1905. It was, as he notes, a city full of the babble of many tongues, not simply Bulgarian, but Turkish, Romanian, Russian, Greek, and Armenian as well, in addition to the Ladino dialect that his family spoke, a Spanish Yiddish of, to me, unimaginable exoticism and oddness. His parents, however, had spoken German to each other during the days of the somewhat difficult courtship, and they continued to do so after their marriage, linguistically preserving a privacy and a past that meant much to them. Young Canetti is angry with those who can read and appear to be denying him this accomplishment (it provides him with one of his archetypes: first feeling of murderous rage), and he is jealous of a language he cannot understand, phrases of which he begins to memorize without knowing what they mean. Language is something for which he has an exceptional need, and he associates, from his earliest years, his basic passions with it. Not only that, he also links various of life’s activities with different tongues: Ladino, for instance, with all the dramatic events of his upbringing, Bulgarian for fairy tales and the world of the peasants, German for intimacy and love. Only later do many of these areas of existence become German.

  He is six when his father moves the family to Manchester, where the Canettis had a profitable business, and seven when his father dies suddenly of a stroke, a newspaper reporting the outbreak of a war in the Balkans in his hands. His father’s horror at reading of the war had killed him, people said. That was the first lie, a solicitous one, to protect a child from a truth he could not, it was said, understand. The truth bespoke a different calamity. Shortly after their arrival in England, his mother, clearly of a high-strung, even hysterical, somewhat cruel nature, fell ill and was sent to Bad Reichenhall for a cure. Young, intelligent, attractive, well-read, she charmed and was charmed by one of her doctors, who urged her to leave her husband and become his wife. She is too frank with her husband about the doctor’s attraction to her, and he orders her back to England, where, on the morning following her arrival, and after a serious quarrel the night
before, he continues to refuse to speak to her until she finally confesses the whole affair (which he insists must have occurred, although there was none), and dies abruptly in the midst of his silence. The boy, who has never fancied his mother much and has not especially missed her, is gathered to her with an oedipal ease, which must account for some of Canetti’s dislike of Freud, for if ever a psychology seemed best understood in those terms, it is his. The boy had learned English while in Manchester, of course, and begun lessons in French, but his mother now takes him away to Vienna; begins to teach him the native language of her marriage; feeds his neurotic hunger for knowledge; becomes his demanding tutor, confessor, führer finally. Their conversations are exhilarating, exhausting, loving, cruel, interminable. Canetti grows up to be a book, but his mother meanly teases him, too, accusing him of knowing nothing because he knows only the word and nothing of the world.

  His mother’s mysterious malaise returns; she goes off to a spa, so their complex affair now has to be carried on through the post, though with undiminished intensity, until she begins to reenact her little play of seduction with yet another doctor and with her son now in the role of the jealous husband. When mother returns from the sanatorium, her suitor soon follows, and his attentions are torture to Canetti, who behaves like an inspired brat in order to defeat his opponent. Mother and son collapse into reconciliation and flee further intrusions into their life and love by traveling to Zurich, where Canetti’s studies are continued in still another country, in yet another temporary lodging.

  These developments are rendered with great honesty, humanity, and understanding, in an uncharacteristically lean, straightforward German prose. Canetti’s style is almost continuously declarative, and his comprehension of human affairs remains amazingly outside any system, for he does not psychoanalyze his relationship with his mother, but simply, wisely, has it; and this is one reason why his account is so unmuddled, immediate, and moving.

  Canetti, like his scholarly sinologist, Professor Kien, the central figure of Auto-da-Fé, seems to remember clearly everything he wants to, although his recall of conversations brings to mind Thucydides’ marvelous oratorical inventions in which historical figures are allowed to speak as they ought to have, rather than as they probably did. Still, I feel no uncertainty about their essential truthfulness, and this accuracy of fact (also a characteristic of Professor Kien) has no doubt been greatly helped by Canetti’s habit of making personal memoranda, taking notes, and keeping diaries, inscribing the latter in a coded stenographese to ensure privacy. (These types of writing he distinguishes for us in a charming essay, “Dialogue with a Cruel Partner,” collected in The Conscience of Words, a volume that also contains his magnificent study of Kafka’s letters to Felice, as well as his thoughts on Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch, Georg Büchner, Hiroshima, Speer, and Nazi architecture. The musings, notes, aphorisms, and reflections Canetti set down during the decades of the composition of Crowds and Power [1942 to 1972] have been gathered together in a very stimulating volume called The Human Province.)

  It seems clear that this autobiography was intended to be a major work: first on account of its length (The Tongue Set Free takes his life only to its sixteenth year, The Torch in My Ear brings it barely to 1931 and the composition of Auto-da-Fé, while the physiognomy of The Play of the Eyes puts us in Vienna from the crucial years of 1931 to 1937, and ends, as the work ends, with the death of his mother); and second because of the quality of its conception and composition. What Canetti says of the Analects of Confucius is also true here: “… everything it contains and indeed everything it lacks is important.” Now the three volumes have been handsomely boarded together as The Memoirs of Elias Canetti by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  Episode after episode is drawn with unforgettable vividness, and although literature and painting continue to provide him with permanent objects of study (Kafka, Gilgamesh, Grünewald, Bosch), Canetti’s sensitivity to the external world has been sharpened to the point of pain by the taunts of his mother, who has accused her sixteen-year-old son of being “a coward who refused to look life in the face because of mere books, an arrogant fool stuffed with false and useless knowledge, a narrow-minded, self-complaisant parasite, a pensioner, an old man who hadn’t proved himself in any way, shape, or form.”

  Canetti was as convinced as I am that this rough reality we are so often urged to confront, as though it were our fate, is not always worse than the word in its harshness, or greater in its degree of reality; because the word, whether it merely scrapes the nerves or shatters the soul, can live through many seasons in its sentence, even in the shortest phrase; it does not sting singly and die like the bee, but it multiplies throughout history as though lengths of time were its queen; it stings, therefore, incessantly; it poisons with a vicious persistence. Still, Canetti feels compelled, like a sissy who seeks fights, to go out against the world, to yield it pride of place. Yet the glare of that world affronts the cloistered eye: A woman faints in the street; the face of a friend suddenly registers for you the profoundest hate; a protesting crowd is fired on and figures fall softly in the street; you wake to find your landlady, a widow, in your room, quietly sniffing and licking the backs of the photographs of her husband that normally honor the walls. So have you gone out of doors to go mad, as Professor Kien does? Have you slipped from between the covers of your books to be dazzled by daylight and blinded by things? In any case, Canetti’s tenderness toward existence, his shock, his surprise at the way the world is, his grave and humorless naïveté before facts he already knows and has read about, continues to yield him epiphanies and prototypes of all kinds, riddles and knots and confusions he will spend the rest of his life patiently trying to understand—unravel and sort out.

  Although there are brief, sharply drawn portraits of Brecht, Grosz, and Babel, three other figures dominate the second volume. The first is Karl Kraus, a professional dominator anyway, whose magazine, The Torch, Kraus writes entirely himself, and which gives to this period of Canetti’s life its name, The Torch in My Ear; the second is Veza, the woman we know will eventually become his wife, whom he meets at a Kraus “concert” the way, almost too perfectly, one might meet one’s future spouse at church, or a Communist cell meeting, and the person who will soon replace his mother in those endless conversations that, for Canetti, are surrogates for courtship, and, as far as we know, every kind of caress; while the third is a paralyzed young man, a student of philosophy it turns out, who lives near Canetti in Vienna and whom he encounters being wheeled by his mother through the street.

  Our author does not have to put asterisks at either end of this conjunction of signs: mother, helpless body, philosophy, active mind.

  Many were drawn to Karl Kraus. Some, like Canetti and Adorno, Adolph Loos and Alban Berg, came to study his scorn, and grew to admire his moral and intellectual courage, his hatred of everything cheap and vulgar, of stupidity, violence, and death. Others came to experience the movement, like a dancer’s, of a fine mind. Karl Kraus was a moral model by profession, a rhapsode in the old Greek sense, a speaker of insidious power, a reviler who condemned his enemies out of their own mouths. He whipped them with what they wrote, stoned them with their own sounds. Kraus believed that Vienna’s corrupt society could be read like the periodicals it published; that cliché and carelessness and lack of taste ought to burn the pages they were placed on; and he taught Canetti to look for human weakness in words, and to demand a style that made no concessions to sect, sex, or marketplace in its pursuit of sincerity, honesty, and truth.

  Nowadays we are likely to think, so far have we fallen, that ideals of this kind are only useful to stuff a shirt.

  To Thomas Marek, the paralyzed student, Canetti begins to speak, for the first time fully, of his obsession: the crowd, its character, control, significance (it is a subject Canetti has come to in the same way he has all his others—through an initial shock, a prototypical experience of riot and violence); but Canetti is impressed by the triumph of Marek’s mind ov
er his body, by this man who must turn the pages of his philosophy texts with his tongue (more of the same symbolism); and with Marek, Canetti learns to listen, too, for Marek is almost pure voice, a living anticipation of Samuel Beckett.

  Karl Kraus despised the trivial; he was satisfied to expose the fraudulent, the glib, to nail the hypocrisies of the Viennese to the local trees; but there is something easy about all that, even though it is necessary. Canetti begins to hear a real heart beating in that silent pudding we so often are; he starts to discover, in the trivial and fleeting, the steadfast human things; and perhaps he even heard my irritation at the noise that murdered our meeting, even sensed my tendency to shrivel like a spent balloon in people-packed places.

  While working in a chemistry lab (for he is obediently pursuing a useful career), Canetti is, of course, surrounded by the tics and japes and oddities of others. But, as he writes:

  I did not realize how much I learned in the laboratory from seemingly absurd or insignificant conversations. I encountered advocates of all opinions that were affecting the world. And had I been open to all concrete things (as I mistakenly imagined myself to be), I might have gained a good number of important insights from these supposedly trivial conversations. But my respect for books was still too great, and I had barely set out on the road to the true book: each individual human being, bound in himself.