Laurels for an Obscure Wanderer

By J.D. Reed

Widely praised but little known, Elias Canetti cops the Nobel

A more ideal recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature than Elias Canetti, 76, would have to be invented. When the Bulgarian-born novelist, play wright and essayist, with his Einsteinian white mane and mustache, arrives in Stockholm on Dec. 10 to claim the $180,000 award, he will precisely fit the Swedish Academy's taste in laureates. Canetti's sensibilities, like those of last year's winner, Polish Poet Czeslaw Milosz, are survivors of Europe's prewar culture. A poly lingual resident of England, who writes exclusively in a high, lapidary German, he is fashionably obscure. He was praised by Thomas Mann and a host of lesser literati as a son of Kafka and a father of Ionesco, and seven of his books are avail able in English translation from Continuum Publishing Co. in the U.S. But, while Canetti's landmark novel Auto-da-Fe, originally The Dazzlement, and nonfiction magnum opus Crowds and Power have been occasional bestsellers in Central Europe, they never garnered a wide audience elsewhere.

A Sephardic Jew and self-willed Euro-citizen, Canetti once wrote, "You can't keep living in a truly beautiful city: it drives out all your yearning." Accordingly, he has been a wanderer -- to Paris, Rome, Lon don, Berlin, North Africa, always on the move, always observing with a cold eye. He has never endorsed any political line, and although his '40s antiFascism is a matter of record, Canetti is neither a NATO hardliner nor an Iron Curtain apologist: his Nobel cannot be totted on either Scoreboard in the East-West propa ganda Olympics. Canetti embodies a more important quality often omit ted in the literature committee's global approach. He is a major writ er, gifted with a unique talent and an original, if sometimes grisly humanism.

"One can touch the unhappiness of the whole world in one single man," he wrote. "And as long as we don't give him up, then nothing is given up." The aphorism is a frag ment of autobiography. Born in 1905 in a Danube port city in Bulgaria, Canetti claims that his Turkish-raised grandfather boasted of knowing 17 languages. After his fa ther died in Manchester, England, Canetti zigzagged between the Zu rich of Dada, Lenin and Joyce, and the Vienna of Freud, finally earning a Ph.D. in chemistry. But the young doctor chose literature instead of laboratories. Auto-da-Fe (1935), published on the eve of Hitler's Anschluss, initiated the theme that would obsess Canetti over four decades: how to pay close attention to the world.

The novel's hero, a professor of Sinology, Dr. Kien, is unaware of the world outside his 25,000-volume library. When he marries his housekeeper, a consuming mother figure, his hermitage, like the Vienna around him, turns berserk. Kien is driven from his jade tower into the night gallery of prostitutes, beggars and thieves, and his dream of completing a volume on Oriental thought becomes a demented Psychology of Trousers. Finally regaining his library, Kien sets it ablaze, immolating himself in the flames. This disturbing tale was to be the first of eight, a cycle titled The Human Comedy of Madmen.

Instead, Canetti fled to England and remained locked in thought for a quarter of a century. The result was Crowds and Power (1960), a kind of post-Holocaust Anatomy of Melancholy, with debts to Freud, Frazer, Burton, Gandhi and Jung.

Like Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, Canetti's labor is charged with idiosyncratic observations:

"Fire is as dangerous to human beings as it is to animals, it is the strangest and oldest symbol of the crowd." The book suffers from the same fate as Melancholy, however:

Crowds and Power fails to cohere into a unified vision. Typically, Adolf Hitler haunts every page. But Canetti understands the value of silence. In the many examples of autocratic power, der Fuehrer is mentioned only once.

Yet Canetti's most accessible book for American readers is full of worldly noise. In The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit (1967), Canetti plunges into the sun-dazzled vitality of North Africa. His attention to beggars, bazaars and blind men is a transforming act of literature, where philosopher, aphorist, poet and storyteller collaborate in a hymn to humanness. Wrote the author of this technique: "I am not interested in grasping precisely a man I know.

I am interested only in exaggerating him precisely." That distortion has become a part of Canetti's own psyche. As Critic Susan Sontag observed, "His real task is not to exercise his talent for explanation, but by being witness to the age, to set the largest, most edifying standards of despair."

Canetti also sets standards for shyness. Believed to be at a Bavarian resort when the prize was announced, Canetti has refused all interviews. "He is a very private man," said his London agent, John Wolfers. Canetti, always Delphic, would probably prefer another explanation. As he once protested, "1 am tired of riding the high horse of this pretense. I am not yet even a human being."

--By J.D. Reed

Excerpt

"What is there in language? What does it conceal? What does it rob one of ? During the weeks I spent in Morocco I made no attempt to acquire either Arabic or any of the Berber languages.

I wanted to lose none of the force of those foreign-sounding cries. I wanted sounds to affect me as much as lay in their power, unmitigated by deficient and artificial knowledge on my part. I had not read a thing about the country. The little that one picks up in the course of one's life about every country and every people fell away in the first few hours.

But the word Allah remained; there was no getting round that. With it I was equipped for that part of my experience that was most ubiquitous and insistent, and most persistent: the blind. Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless."

-- The Voices of Marrakesh

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