EUGENE GOODHEART
The Power of Elias Canetti
I
MET ELIAS CANETTI in a cafe in Hampstead in
19
65 while on a fel–
lowship in London. The photo on the book jacket of a recent edi–
tion of his memoirs brings him back to me with a fidelity you rarely
expect from photographs. He was stocky with a round well-fed face, a
full head of hair, and a mustache. In the photo he is dressed in a three–
piece suit and is seated behind a desk upon which lies a manuscript. He
stares at the reader with what seems an attentive skepticism, the very
picture of a cultivated European. At some point during our acquain–
tance, he presented me with a copy of his masterwork,
Crowds and
Power
(1962),
Masse und Macht
(1960)
in its original German version,
the product of a thirty-five-year devotion. I dipped into the book, but
never read it through until now. His other famous book is
Auto-da-fe
(1935)
in which the library of its bibliophile hero, the paranoid sinolo–
gist Peter Kien, goes up in flames. Canetti would have appreciated the
fate of my copy of
Crowds and Power.
It
survived a fire in my own
house, its cover permanently darkened by a smoke stain.
Canetti was born in
1905
in Bulgaria, the son of Sephardic parents.
The vicissitudes of his family fate brought him to Vienna, Berlin, Lau–
sanne, Zurich, and eventually to England, where he lived until his death
in
1994.
Fluent in several languages, he wrote exclusively in German . In
addition to
Auto-da-fe
and
Crowds and Power,
he is the author of a
number of plays
(Comedy of Vanity, The Numbered,
and
The Wedding,
among others), books of what he calls "jottings" (most notably,
The
Human Province)
and three remarkable memoirs
(The Tongue Set Free,
The Torch in My Ear,
and
The Play of the Eyes) .
He has not been want–
ing in admirers, among whom are writers of the distinction of Iris Mur–
doch, John Bayley, Salman Rushdie, Susan Sontag, and George Steiner.
And he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature in
1981.
But
he has remained a singular and diffident figure without a large follow–
ing who has avoided one of the great pitfalls for intellectuals and artists,
celebrity.
In
The Torch in My Ear,
Canetti locates the source of his lifelong
obsession with crowds in "one of those not too frequent public events
