A Bookish Man's Book of Himself
"The Torch in My Ear" is the second volume of [Canetti's] autobiography; the first was "The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood."… The most arresting passages in both books deal with his mother and the long battle between them. But neither book is as important as "Auto-Da-Fé" or "Crowds and Power." As the very titles indicate, Canetti is more at ease writing cultural history than offering us personal revelation.
"The Tongue Set Free" was about his literary ambitions and his efforts to avoid the business career that his wealthy relatives all over Europe designated for him after the sudden death of his father as a young man. "The Torch in My Ear" refers to the overwhelming influence on the young Canetti of the powerful satirist Karl Kraus, who not only wrote every word in his own magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch), but gave public readings that spellbound young intellectuals in Vienna….
My complaint about Canetti as an autobiographer is that he is analytic about many individuals in his life who did not have the emotional influence on him of his strident mother and intrusive relatives. He seems to be so reclusive by nature that he is not only hostile to crowds but unwilling to report any erotic relationships in life. He is so dedicated to the analysis of marginal personalities—a type with which he must identify—that too many pages of the autobiography are concerned with strangers, oddballs and freaks, who are presented not because they had any marked effect on him but because he is proud of being able to confront them sympathetically. He is too much the cultural historian to be interested in such powerless people; he is just setting himself up as a rival to Freud. Ironically, it is Freud the physician and not Canetti the novelist who really captures this sort of person on the page.
Canetti is significantly memorable about people he considers stronger than himself [such as Karl Kraus]. (p. 11)
The most vivid character in both of Canetti's volumes of autobiography, his mother, was also strong enough to dominate him. She was a constant reader, a constant hysteric after her husband's early death, a devotee of Strindberg and a snob. If she had not taught her son the best kind of German and insisted on his keeping up the highest standards in it, he might not have become the writer he did. At the same time, she tried to keep him from a literary career and was constantly at him to see the world in less theoretical and bookish terms. Yet arresting as this portrait is, it is somehow never whole; he reproduces her in bits and pieces, outburst by outburst, as if he had never quite recovered from her impact.
Recalling the 20's in Berlin, Canetti also gives us slashing portraits of Bertolt Brecht and Georg Grosz, neither of whom ever tried to be a nice fellow by Canetti's standards and who appear in this book as tyrants. The one totally sympathetic writer in Canetti's portrait gallery of the time is Isaac Babel, with whom Canetti identified not as a writer or as a Jew but because Babel, who came from the Russian city Odessa on the Black Sea, seemed to connect with Canetti's birth in a country that also bordered on the black Sea. Which goes to show you what Bulgaria, of all places, finally did for the strangely gifted Elias Canetti, whose autobiography is as odd as the circumstances of his life. (pp. 11, 34)
Alfred Kazin, "A Bookish Man's Book of Himself," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1982 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), September 19, 1982, pp. 11, 34.
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