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PARTISAN REVIEW
find something admirable in his stubborn refusal to submit to conven–
tional wisdom. Risking death is a familiar experience. The risks of
longevity might be worth taking, but they require a person of singular
capacities.
In the memoir
The Play of the Eyes,
Canetti reproduces an exchange
he had with his friend, the novelist Herman Broch. He had given Broch
a copy of his manuscript,
Kant Catches Fire,
the original title of
Auto–
da-(e.
Broch was struck, even scandalized by the grotesqueness of the
characters in the novel. Canetti admitted that he was influenced by
Gogol: "I wanted the most extreme characters at once ludicrous and
horrible. I wanted the ludicrous and the horrible to be indistinguish–
able." And he conceded that he had a desire to terrify people, because
he found everything around him terrifying. One of the terrifying char–
acters is the protagonist, Peter Kien, a bibliophile of monstrous propor–
tions-perhaps a parodic version of Canetti himself. The memoirs
create the impression of an extremely bookish person. Like D. H.
Lawrence, Canetti in his youth and young manhood was completely
absorbed by his mother with whom he shared a passion for books. She
had three sons, of whom Elias was the eldest, and never remarried.
Whenever a suitor came on the scene and threatened the family
romance, Elias made it clear to her that remarriage was out of the ques–
tion. He would not allow it. His own fidelity to her turned out to be less
reliable than hers to him. When women came into his life, he concealed
their presence. Eventually he broke the hold that mother and son had
on each other and married. His younger brother Georg took over the
role of the utterly devoted son. But the bookish bond between mother
and son was a permanent legacy and contributed to the kind of writer
he became. One might be tempted to say that his sense of reality has
been skewed by his bookishness, if it were not that he seems to be aware
of the danger of living in books. The novel ends in a book burning:
Canetti knows their dangerous combustible power.
There is violence enough everywhere around him, but what of the
violence in Canetti himself? In his childhood, when he was not yet lit–
erate, he had tried to murder his older cousin Laurica with an ax,
because she would not let him see her notebooks. The family assembled
to discuss "the homicidal child."
I could plead all I liked that Laurica tortured me bloody; the fact
that
I,
at the age of five, had reached for the ax to kill her-indeed,
the very fact that I had been able
to
carry the heavy ax in front of
me-was incomprehensible to everyone. I think they understood
