The Play of the Eyes

In this third volume of memoirs the tone shifts a bit from describing Canetti’s life to portraits of the people around him. We meet Canetti in 1931 when he is in a slump after finishing the novel that became Die Blendung/Auto-da-fé (then still provisionally titled Kant catches fire), and follow his life in Vienna up to his mother’s death in June 1937.

Reading Büchner’s Woyzeck gets Canetti out of post-novel slump and inspires him to write a play, and that in turn brings him into contact with the writer Hermann Broch, who becomes a kind of mentor, and the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who slightly oddly invites him to a contemporary music congress in Strasburg. Through Scherchen he meets Anna Mahler (sculptor and daughter of Alma show more and Gustav), with whom he seems to have had a brief affair.
He also becomes close friends with Anna’s teacher, the working-class sculptor Fritz Wotruba.
But his most important friendship in this period seems to have been with the Hebrew poet Avraham Ben-Yitzhak (“Dr Sonne”), the quiet, scholarly figure he portrays as the antithesis of Karl Kraus, and with whom he had the sort of coffee-house friendship in which despite long, serious discussions both parties avoid seeking out personal information about the other.

The novel is eventually published in 1935, and Canetti starts to win recognition as a writer. He also finally gets around to marrying Veza and moving into an apartment with her in Grinzing — there is comedy when it turns out that Karl Kraus’s publisher, Benedikt, lives across the road, and Canetti finds himself annexed by one of Benedikt’s young daughters, who has ambitions to become a novelist herself.

The Spanish Civil War gives Canetti a push to reconnect with the language he spoke in childhood and his family’s Spanish roots (before 1492), and to reflect on the nature of exile — something that was to help him deal with his coming exile from the German-speaking region. Not that we get to hear anything further about that in this book, of course, that’s for next time… show less

I did not enjoy this third part of the memoirs of Elias Canetti as much as the first two, but nonetheless a very well-written book. Too much reportage in this third, name-dropping the norm, but still the ending was well worth my time.