Party in the Blitz: The English Years BY Elias Canetti TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY Michael Hofmann (New Directions, 2010) From the Publisher: “Elias Canetti’s Party in the Blitz captures the ‘torture’ and ‘needless humiliations’ of his years in exile in wartime London. Well known throughout mainland Europe, Canetti was ignored by British intellectuals, and he scorned them in turn. By force of will alone, he accumulated followers, but not before being christened ‘the godmonster of Hampstead.’ Party in the Blitz, like an X-ray, displays Canetti’s brief, scathing, brimstone sketches of the various people in his social circle: T.S. Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell. Gorgeously translated by Michael Hofmann, Party in the Blitz lives up to Canetti’s injunction that ‘when you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.'”

I was living in England as its intellect decayed. I was a witness to the fame of a T.S. Eliot. Is it possible for people ever to repent sufficiently of that? An American brings over a Frenchman from Paris, someone who died young (Laforgue), drools his self-loathing over him, lives quite literally as a bank clerk, while at the same time he criticises and diminishes anything that was before, anything that has more stamina and sap than himself, permits himself to receive presents from his prodigal compatriot, who has the greatness and tenseness of a lunatic, and comes up with the end result: an impotency which he shares around with the whole country; he kowtows to any order that’s sufficiently venerable; tries to stifle any élan; a libertine of the void… — Party in the Blitz: The English Years, p. 2 The fourth volume of Elias Canetti’s memoirs, Party in the Blitz: The English Years, represents a major departure from his first three books, which covered his intellectual development from an exotic background as a Sephardic Jew from Ruse, Bulgaria to his family’s numerous European wanderings and onto the cultural ferment of Vienna and Berlin in the twenties and thirties. The picture he painted of Central European cultural life is virtually unparalleled, with a parade of names including Broch, Musil, Brecht, Babel and the painter George Grosz among his many personal friendships and acquaintances. At the outset of the Second World War, Canetti and his wife Veza went into exile, choosing England because of the fond memories he had of living in Manchester for a brief period as a child. From being at the center of a modernist renaissance he was thrust into obscurity in the entirely different universe of wartime and then postwar England. The transition must have been a struggle, and the ensuing bitterness shows. Differences between this book and its predecessors are not only a question of subject. Whereas the earlier memoirs were organized chronologically in order to show the intertwining of personal, artistic and political changes taking place as Central Europe fell apart, Party in the Blitz is a series of portraits — about people Canetti encountered during his English years — interspersed with various observations on the English character and the modern day legacy of Thatcherite Britain. Because Canetti died before the book saw its final form, the writing contains some “rough edges” and seemingly unavoidable repetition. Yet the decline from his other memoirs has more to do with world history than his own writing, for gray postwar England simply could not compete with the mayhem and color of the modernist explosion in Vienna. While Canetti was in contact with an impressive range of British cultural figures — from Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine and Iris Murdoch to Herbert Read, William Empson and Bertrand Russell — he very likely didn’t see them as being in the same league as the luminaries of Central Europe. Furthermore, when he recounted meetings or relationships with Babel or Brecht, he never failed to add what he learned from them, a feature distinctly absent in this book, possibly because he was simply an observer.

The earlier memoirs contain portraits mixed with dialogue and anecdotes, while giving the reader a sense of the work writers like Broch were engaging in during their friendship with Canetti. In this volume, work takes a backseat. Often, it isn’t even mentioned at all. In fact, in the case of the composer Vaughn Williams, Canetti finds the space to praise his character and to hint at his wife’s infidelities. As to his music, Canetti confesses, “He has to be in this book about England. I have nothing to say about his music, I only know some of it, perhaps it is insignificant, I don’t know, anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

There are some brilliantly-drawn character sketches, the best ones being those that are more tangential to the main narrative lines, including an eccentric aristocrat who spends his days bedridden in his medieval Scottish castle with such a hatred of noise that he dismisses a pair of servants because of their tendency to laugh. The story of Geoffrey Pyke is also a classic example: an eccentric, largely bedridden genius who was appointed to Lord Mountbatten’s staff of advisers in preparing the Normandy landing. Among his ideas Churchill reportedly considered were the use of artificial icebergs in the landing process.

It would be easy to relegate some of Canetti’s dismissals as a reaction to the lukewarm reception he encountered in his adopted country, personal revenge against former lovers and friends, or plain bitterness against perceived rivals. I think there was much more at stake.

Most moving of all is the portrait of a street sweeper in Chesham Bois, whom Canetti met during the war. After thinking of the eighty-year-old man as someone outside world affairs, Canetti was surprised when the street sweeper asked him about the latest war news. Death camps and the fate of his own family and friends throughout Europe are practically never even alluded to in the book, yet he closes his portrait of the street sweeper with this scene: “One day, when we had learned of the most terrible things, in incontrovertible details, he took two steps up to me, which he had never yet done, and said: ‘I’m sorry for what’s happening to your people.’ And then he added: ‘They are my people too.’”

Two more exceptions to the general negativity displayed throughout the book are portraits of fellow exiles Oskar Kokoschka and Prague-born anthropologist Franz Steiner, the latter of whom seemed to provide Canetti with one of his most intellectually stimulating friendships in England.

It would be easy to relegate some of Canetti’s dismissals as a reaction to the lukewarm reception he encountered in his adopted country, personal revenge against former lovers and friends, or plain bitterness against perceived rivals. I think there was much more at stake. Milan Kundera has often written about Central European modernism being overshadowed by Paris-based modernism for reasons that have nothing to do with the works themselves. As was the case for most of his compatriots, Canetti left without anywhere to return to. Postwar Vienna was not even a shadow of its former self. Berlin was devastated and divided, while most of Eastern Europe was under Soviet occupation.

The real indignity, though, was the extent to which the modernism Canetti had been a part of was ignored. How else to explain starting out a volume of his memoirs with a rant against T.S. Eliot? Canetti does not make the comparison himself. In fact, the material of his early life is almost entirely unmentioned here. And while his dismissal of Eliot is certainly over the top, a belated attempt to redress the balance is more than justified.

One defining characteristic of writers like Broch, Musil and Canetti is a frustration with the limits of the novel form and literary art itself. During and after Hitler’s rise to power, these writers could not stop questioning the effectiveness of expressing their ideas through traditional literary forms, and neither avant-garde formal innovation nor “engaged” writing offered them an adequate way out. For Canetti, it drove him out of novel writing altogether. Broch struggled with the same debate and looked for ways to add essayistic writing into novels, while Musil engaged in the process of writing a virtually endless novel.

Today, the issue of a novel’s — and other art forms’ — limitations has become common currency, and the influence of Central European modernism in contemporary literature is gradually seeing new light. But for Elias Canetti, through his decades in England, even after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, it must have felt like he was a visitor from another world.