The Torch in My Ear:
Manguel, Alberto
'The astonishing creature was myself' THE TORCH IN MY EAR Elias Canetti Farrar Straus & Giroux, $16.50, 372 pp. Alberto Manguel BY 1931, at the age of twenty-six, Elias Canetti had completed...
...they are the true first person singular which so easily becomes first person plural...
...Trying to resist this avalanche of names, Canetti finds strength in the others, in every person who has no name, in everyone who is "poor in name," and these become the characters who people his work...
...Half a century later Canetti has decided to find the young man he had been and to conjure up his remembrance of things past...
...And "He had a great respect for money...
...Here they are, each a "true book: each individual human being, bound in himself...
...You'll destroy something for yourself that you'll never be able to restore...
...Names are important: magically they reflect a person's secret qualities...
...as a token of faith we have been given another man's life to hold in our hands-and if that is not friendship, I do not know what is...
...Here is Fraulein Bunzel with "a somewhat whining voice, as though lamenting her ugliness with every sentence...
...Wait until you've had your own experiences...
...he finds Freud's name more alluring than Kraus's "because of its dark diphthong and the d at the end, as well as its literal meaning, "joy...
...He did not care much for people, but he put up with them...
...the only important thing was who received it and not where ' it came from...
...Finally he tires of names...
...Though Canetti confesses he admired, even loved Brecht's poems, Brecht the man repelled him, and the final outrage was to learn that Brecht had written a poem about Steyr Automobiles and had received a car in exchange...
...He feels "like a feeder goose, incarcerated and force-fed with names...
...not know what is...
...The result, The Torch in My Ear (together with the first volume of these hopefully unending memoirs, The Tongue Set Free) is a gift of friendship, as if one of the most delightful, intelligent, generous men of this century had pulled up a chair, patted us on the arm and begun to tell us stories about his love for life...
...In another, earlier book of memoirs (brilliantly translated by J. A. Underwood) The Voices of Mar-rakesh, Canetti describes himself looking at a curious beggar and being in turn stared at by the people on the street...
...His escape, as is to be expected, comes through literature...
...They want us to know them, their "essential core" and, what is stranger, they seem to want to know us...
...about friendship in (or through) Dostoevsky ("Can you imagine a better way of getting to know a person than discussing everything that happens in Dostoevsky...
...Then it can't harm you...
...In Die Blendung Kien, the hero who, like Emmanuel Kant, sets fire to his books and is burnt to death among them, declares his profession to be ' 'owner of a library...
...Few writers-Stevenson, Walt Whitman, maybe Chesterton-offer us, together with their work, their person...
...It is not only the spectacle of the world they see that they put in front of the reader...
...here is Hans Asriel who "was a distance builder...
...People: We are introduced to a pageant of characters-casual acquaintances, friends, relatives, nameless passersby, and famous figures like Kraus and Brecht and Isaac Babel and Grosz...
...here is Ibby Gordon, "a Malliol figure" who "never spoke fast" but "since she thought quickly, many things in her waited for their turn to come and were mirrored in their own joy before becoming visible...
...That is how Die Blendung was written...
...The astonishing creature was myself," he discovers with amazement "who stood so long uncomprehending...
...he is attracted to Veza-his future wife-because her name reminds him of one of his favorite stars, Vega, in the constellation of Lyra...
...this was his hidden talent, and he built distances so well it was impossible for others and for him to leap across them...
...He learns about caring for every human being ("not just my neighbor") and to stand up against the inevitability of death in the Epic of Gil-gamesh...
...And here the magic begins: it is not the names we know that we feel most concerned about-it is the others, the faces of forgotten dreams recalled by Canetti's peculiar urge for truth...
...Books: Canetti learns about love in Kleist's Penthesilea and Strindberg's A Fool's Confession ("Don't read that...
...his mother tells him...
...The chronicle is passionate and the passion twofold: books and people...
...Alberto Manguel BY 1931, at the age of twenty-six, Elias Canetti had completed what Iris Murdoch called "one of the few great novels of the century," Die Blendung (translated into English as Auto dafe...
...From the age of 14 up to the time of the writing of Die Blendung in Vienna, Canetti carefully chronicles the adventures of his "tongue set free" ("rescued" is perhaps a better word for "gerettete," rescued from silence), describing the world as perceived by his enlightened ear (The Torch of the title is a reference to Karl Kraus's journal, Die Fackel, which exercised so strong an influence on Canetti in Vienna...
...He did not look as if he had aged prematurely, but as if he had always been old...
...Only one name, that of Brecht, is spoken of unkindly...
...The young Canetti doubts Kraus's power before meeting him because of his "highly ordinary name...
...it is they themselves as observers who do not shy from being observed...
...In The Torch in My Ear we, the readers, have at last become the observers...
...Throughout his memoirs Canetti is nearly always generous...
...The Torch in My Ear begins when Canetti, his widowed mother, and his younger brothers arrive in Frankfurt, having left his beloved Zurich behind because, he later discovers, of the advice of a friend of his mother's, supposedly in the interests of the children's education...
Vol. 110 • March 1983 • No. 5
