Tales of Vienna Between the Wars
THOMAS, BRIAN
Tales of Vienna Between the Wars The Play of the Eyes By Elias Canetti Translated by Ralph Manheim Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 329 pp. $22.50. Reviewed by Brian Thomas Free-lance critic, fiction...
...Then he notices a man in a cafe who bears a striking resemblance to Karl Kraus...
...He similarly relished the corrosiveness of Kraus' contempt for the unworthy—particularly the Neue Freie Presse, a bourgeois liberal daily that was regularly pilloried in Die Fackel for its stupefying banality, hypocrisy, toadying, and endless typos...
...He sees the man every day in the same cafe, and although he does not learn his identity, through an unspoken effort of imagination he transfers to him the veneration he used to feel for Kraus...
...Thus the detection of a like emotion in someone's work elicits a strong positive response from him...
...Out of sheer generosity Hoeppner offers to sponsor Auto-da-Fe with an Austrian publisher, despite the book's stark absence of sentimental uplift...
...He's our good man...
...James Joyce was in the audience, and although he could handle Hochdeutsch, Canetti's racy, allusive Viennese was beyond him...
...Canetti is an ardent, adhesive eavesdropper...
...His disenchantment with Kraus notwithstanding, Canetti continues to have contempt for popjournalism...
...and his enchantment with Karl Kraus, editor of Die Fackel ("The Torch") a biweekly publication central to the intellectual life of the city...
...Canetti finds that the absence of an idol leaves a vacuum in his life...
...His defenses penetrated, he starts giving her lessons in how to listen to Viennese dialect...
...On one occasion he gave a reading of Comedy of Vanity, a play written entirely in Viennese dialect, except for one scene done in literary German...
...It also employs a literary device the author calls an "acoustic mask"—a kernel of words and verbal tics that instantly identifies a character...
...Canetti wryly shrugs this off: "Evidently the linguist's frustration at failing to understand the Viennese exacerbated his annoyance, in the one scene he understood, with the idea that mirrors were indispensable...
...Don't look for help...
...His greatest work, though, has been nonfiction...
...his desultory study of chemistry...
...Auto-da-Fi recounts the madness and final destruction of a paranoid Sinologist who ultimately immolates himself and his library of ancient Chinese manuscripts...
...Proximity occasionally produces humorous results...
...Then he realizes the publisher has four gorgeous daughters, including a would-be writer who reveres Canetti's work...
...Those who enjoy the insights and memories of Elias Canetti's well-stocked mind will want to keep reading...
...The city's ease of social connection between the Wars is tokened by Canetti's reminiscences about the luminaries who rode the same streetcar line he did...
...On a different level, Canetti prizes the support of Fritz Wotruba...
...The fourth volume of his autobiography will presumably be set in London, where he spent the War and part of the '50s, and did the bulk of the work on Crowds and Power...
...His novel, plays, essays, and books of aphorisms abound in pungent, often searing revelations distilled from the remotest parts of experience...
...Sonne persuades Canetti to take his Jewishness seriously: "He never missed an opportunity to call attention to my origins, precisely because I attached so little importance to them...
...Whom did he meet, what did he do...
...Not all of Canetti's encounters with the literati are so edifying...
...The poet is no less insistent on the matter of Ladino, Canetti's Sephardic mother tongue: "He enabled me to take a language with me and to hold on to it so firmly that I would never under any circumstances be in danger of losing it.' In addition, Canetti receives encouragement and crucial advice from Sonne on the titanic project that will become Crowds and Power: "You've opened a door...
...In fact, the principal character in this autobiography might almost be said to be the human landscape of Vienna, rather than its author...
...former NL associate editor The winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature is markedly nondoctri-naire and sane-minded in his sociopolitical musings, but it is mainly for psychological illumination that one reads him...
...Canetti marvels at his tactfulness and the range and depth of his quiet scholarship...
...He also identifies with Siegfried Lenz, the author of Woyzeck, for his refusal to make peace with death...
...the cowardice, the slavishness that is imposed on them...
...One must do that kindof thing alone...
...When J oyce was introduced to Canetti after the reading, he scorned the play's premise, testily insisting that mirrors were quite dispensable, and stormed out...
...The overwhelming purity" of his language and his translations of Shakespeare into German had won Canetti's admiration...
...Sonne, of course, turns out to be the Kraus look-alike...
...He shuns the family as if he were an orthodox believer who discovers he has a heretic living next door...
...Now you must go in...
...Of one of Goya's "Horrors of War" paintings he says: "Since Griinewald's Christ no one had depicted horror as he did, no whit better than it was—sickening, crushing, cutting deeper than the promise of redemption—without succumbing to it...
...This section, to which he seemed to object on moral grounds, he took personally and reacted by assuring me that he needed no mirror for shaving...
...Crowds and Power, a haunting tour de force of social psychology that took 35 years to complete, exhaustively explores the role of crowds, masses and groups in history and politics...
...Canetti's literary career soon receives a timely push from an Alsatian newspaper publisher named Jean Hoeppner, who has an odd use for literature: He reads and rereads Adalbert Stifter because of Stifter's goodness and optimism, and turns to Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma to remind himself how implausible it is to portray humanity as depraved...
...The Play of the Eyes narrates encounters too numerous to detail with such major Viennese cultural figures as the bullying modernist conductor Hermann Scherchen, Alma Mahler and her daughter Anna, Robert Musil, Alban Berg, and Oskar Kokoschka...
...his family's move to Vienna and the consequent attenuation of their Sephardic roots...
...The first two autobiographical volumes— The Tongue Set Free and The Torch in My Ear—dealt with Canetti's boyhood in Bulgaria...
...But now Kraus is himself the object of derision for supporting the semi-Fascist regime of Engelbert Dollfuss...
...The pressure he put on the viewer, the undeviating direction he gave to his gaze, was the ultimate in hope, though no one would have dared call it by that name...
...The Play of the Eyes is the third volume of Canetti's autobiography, covering his career from the completion of Auto-da-Fe through the beginnings of his recognition as a writer and his research for Crowds and Power...
...The sculptor, he notes, shares his distaste for the way people "dither with words, trot them out and take them back, the way their contours are blurred, the way they are made to merge and melt though still present, to refract like prisms, take on opalescent colors, to come forward before they themselves want to...
...Displaying awesome erudition, Canetti accounts for the rise of Adolf Hitler (without ever mentioning his name) by drawing explicit connections between Ihe mental mechanisms of schizophrenics and the methods dictators use to crush freedom...
...The Play of the Eyes will perhaps resonate most of all for Canetti devotees familiar with the principal figures of literary Vienna in the period prior to World War II...
...Wotruba has the further appeal of speaking the very street Viennese that Canetti puts to striking use in his fictions...
...Like Canetti's other fictions, the novel is replete with sardonic hilarity and raging monologues by characters who never understand each other...
...My friend Sonne...
...Mostly the book dwells on his friendships with some of the best known figures in Central European arts and letters...
...Reviewed by Brian Thomas Free-lance critic, fiction writer...
...It ends with the death of his mother in 1937...
...The action of this play takes place in a world where mirrors have been abolished, causing chaos...
...It was the custom of the time for writers to advance themselves through public readings, and the future Nobel Prize-winner's skill as a mimic often combined with his bizarre imagination to baffle even the most sophisticated members of the audience...
...A recurring theme in Canetti's work is a dread of death that goes beyond fear to active hatred...
...Before long, Sonne becomes Canetti's model of integrity, the sort of creature w ho by his presence could redeem a city from destruction...
...When Canetti and his wife move to the suburbs, their neighbors turn out to be the family that publishes the Neue Freie Presse...
...It subsequently transpires that Sonne, using the name Abraham ben Yitzchak, had been one of the founders of modern Hebrew poetry...
...Later, Canetti and Hermann Broch (author of The Death of Vergil and The Sleepwalkers) are conducting a semiwhimsical search for a truly good man, a genuine pillar of rectitude, and Broch suddenly says: "I know one...
...By the early '30s, when The Play of the Eyes opens, Kraus has dwindled from the spellbinding presence he was in Torch in My Ear to a self-contaminated prophet...
Vol. 69 • August 1986 • No. 11
