Memoir: After a poetry reading in Maastricht I found myself among hospitable friends in the Hague. My amiable host, hearing that I was attempting autobiography, introduced me to the work of Elias Canetti, beginning with The Tongue Set Free.
I thought its technique - revelation through anecdote - quite dazzling, and when we were leaving he presented me with the other volumes, The Torch in My Ear and The Play of the Eyes.
Now we have a fourth volume, assembled posthumously. It deals with Canetti's years as an exile in England, a country he finds already in decline, as exemplified by its laureate, TS Eliot, "thin-lipped, cold-hearted, prematurely old". Was his dislike coloured by Eliot's anti-Semitism, since Canetti was a Sephardic Jew? "I cannot form the letters of Eliot's name without needing to inveigh against the man," he declares in any case, "the driest figure of the century", who exudes a "stink of enfeeblement".
Empson comes off better, and indeed William was a wonderful eccentric, with his Chinese beard and his eyes disappearing into his head as he analysed a line of poetry. Perhaps his hold over Canetti was that he never bothered to enquire who he was, but talked at him as he would to any audience. He was also an amateur Sinologist, after his journeys to the East, a subject that fascinated Canetti, whose only novel, Auto da Fe, describes the ordeals of a hermetic Sinologist.
Canetti seems to have been taken aback by the way the English partied as the bombs were falling. He was torn between admiration for their tenacity ("The worse things stood, the more determined people were") and annoyance at their arrogance ("For their own protection, the person sheathes itself in ice"). How the English managed to combine the contraries of love and war, embracing as the fires blazed, perplexes him utterly. He seems not to understand how mortal fear can enkindle desire, that ancient play of Eros and Thanatos.
Paradoxically, the only man Canetti "wholeheartedly loved" was an aged street-sweeper, perhaps because he spoke an older English, of the 17th century, which he regarded as England's greatest period. So he shows some affection for Veronica Wedgwood, probably the most literary historian of the period, although Canetti says he "very rarely" has "any regard for historians". He is snobbishly fascinated, though, by her "extended family: the Darwins, the Wedgwoods, Macaulay, Trevelyan, Francis Galton and Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father".
He has it in for Kathleen Raine, however, declaring that while he "often went to her parties in Chelsea, she was among the people I knew for many years without ever really liking". It was her insistent spirituality that annoyed Canetti, and indeed Raine could be more than a trifle high-minded. But the very spirituality that he derides informed her beauty and dignity, and while she believed in "Poetry", she was also sweet and homely, serving coffee and biscuits - or at times something stronger - and relishing a bit of literary gossip.
He mocks her hopeless devotion to Gavin Maxwell, younger grandson of the Duke of Northumberland. But the story has already been told by Kathleen herself, and obliquely by Maxwell in A Ring of Bright Water. Canetti dearly loved a lord, being fascinated by Maxwell's elder brother, Aymer, with his passion for fast cars. He barrelled Canetti through Provence, Morocco and Greece, barely listening while his passenger described the beauties they were sweeping by, stopping only for lunch. Why does the highbrow Eastern European Elias submit to this brainless upper-class sadism?
HIS GREATEST VENOM is reserved for his most famous mistress, Iris Murdoch, whom he loathes even more than Eliot. He begins slowly: she is "a gushing philosophy mistress in the bubbling Oxford stewpot", who then transforms, like Kafka's insect, into "a kind of all-in-one parasite". They met over a dying friend, who she loved and had hoped to marry. But soon she is divesting herself of her bloomers. Like George Moore, and later Austin Clarke, Canetti seems fascinated by old-fashioned female underwear, "all woollen and ungainly". And he goes on relentlessly to describe her "grotesque sandals, which showed off her large flat feet". And she makes the social mistake of appearing before Lord Aymer in a see-through blouse!
In any case, "in the arrogant way of the English upper classes, he despised her for being Irish, which she mostly was, but not from the attractive part of Ireland, her father came from Belfast, if I remember correctly, and nothing could have been further from a real Paddy". I think that we are entitled to find that hilarious - Murdoch as a large-limbed Belfast Protestant as opposed to an "attractive" colleen with red hair, a red petticoat and little bare feet. (She was also, with "the huge flat feet and big legs excluded from the society of tall, slender beautiful Englishwomen".)
Who escapes whipping? Mainly men, because this human toad is a genuine misogynist, although many princesses succumbed to his fierce intellectual charm. Among those who escape his wrath are Ralph Vaughan Williams, the ancient serene composer who accepts that his wife has a live-in lover (Hetta Empson had several), and philosopher Bertrand Russell for the sparkle of his mind and his incorrigible goatish lust. There is also Arthur Waley, the translator of Chinese poetry, perhaps because he had read Canetti's novel, with which he might have identified.
CANETTI'S PREVIOUS, MARVELLOUS books of autobiography were each dominated by one of the five senses. This one could be the sense of smell, because much of the book reeks of rage. It is the chronicle of a grumpy old man, compiled but not completed, from the leavings on his desk. He was fascinated by England, where he lived for so long, but he felt that he could never get a real purchase on it, perhaps because of age. If I am spared into my mid-80s, should I spend my time retailing the failings of my contemporaries, the craftiness of X, the sex mania of Y, the meanness of Z? Auden once said that good gossip aspires to an art form, but while Elias Canetti has succeeded in the past, I would hesitate to present this irascible volume, or bilious book, to that hospitable host in Holland who had introduced me to his work.
Poet John Montague is completing the second volume of his autobiography, The Pear is Ripe. His most recent collection of poems, Drunken Sailor, was published last year by Gallery Press
Party in the Blitz By Elias Canetti Translated by Michael Hofmann. Harvill Press, 266pp. £17.99