Behind Elias Canetti’s vicious attacks of his peers is an inner warmth to his writing, says Gerald Isaaman

Party in the Blitz by Elias Canetti
Harvill Press, £17.99

HE sat in a corner of the terrace outside the Coffee Cup in Hampstead High Street, a grumpy-looking, dumpy man with moustache and a shock of hair, not given to smiling.
He wore, almost always, a gaberdine mack over his suit and tie, invariably a cardigan too, and carried a bulky briefcase that lay at his side, as he talked to the young crowd, often bright girls from St Godric’s down the road.
And he gave me an interview, once, at his flat in nearby Thurlow Road, in the shabby big room at the back where he and the then unknown Iris Murdoch had sexless sex together, according to his account in this sensational memoir of his Hampstead days.
Elias Canetti wasn’t forthcoming. He didn’t seem to understand that a young reporter was looking for something about his new writing, something beyond the two books, Auto da Fe and Crowds and Power, that had brought him limited fame but little else.
In 1981 they won him the Nobel Prize for Literature, but by then Canetti had deserted Hampstead, to live the life of a recluse in Zurich, where he died in 1994.
And left behind these uncompleted chapters he regarded as a modern version of Aubrey’s Lives. They were in German, like all his work, Canetti regarding English as a wooden language after arriving here from Bulgaria to live in Manchester as a boy, then ending up in Vienna before returning as a refugee from Hitler, and spending most of his time in Hampstead, first in King Henry’s Road, then Thurlow.
He hated Hampstead parties, being left glass in hand standing in a crowded room of people he didn’t know or care for wasn’t his idea of fun. Perhaps that was inevitable for such a complex man of intellect and prodigious learning whose razor-sharp appraisals of people make such devastating reading.
He was the intimate outsider, the benign spy with the eye of a hawk who came to dinner and cooked you in his icy glare, a perfectionist rattled by the ruling classes and their ability to flirt deliciously as the bombs dropped nearby.
He was a man who loved England but equally held it in contempt. The big names fall off the pages. Bertrand Russell, TS Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Empson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Enoch Powell, Herbert Read, Arthur Waley, Veronica Wedgwood, Kathleen Raine, JD Bernal, EH Gombrich, Henry Moore, Oskar Kokoschka, Freddie Uhlman cascade from this formidable memoir, and, in general, he dashes most of them to pieces with his poisoned pen dipped in additional acid, as if he refuses to be fair. Perhaps none more so than his lover Iris Murdoch, whom he describes as a vampire sucking out the life experiences of others so that she can reproduce them in her books, and meticulously scalps her like a savage.
“The couch I always slept on was to hand,” he records. “Quickly, very quickly, Iris undressed, without me laying a finger on her, she had things on that didn’t have anything remotely to do with love, it was all woollen and ungainly, but in no time it was a heap on the floor, and she was under the blanket…I barely felt myself enter her, I didn’t sense that she felt anything, perhaps I might have felt something if she had resisted in some form. But that was as much out of the question as any pleasure.”
He has the same contempt for Margaret Thatcher, declaring that having been saved from invasion by being an island, England decided “it would loot itself, and engaged an army of yuppies for that end”.
He writes with eloquence and daring, as always, and you await with pleasure for the next thrust. Yet, for all his scandal, it is wrong to give the impression that he was simply a cut-throat seducer, an angry old man, and will be remembered solely as that.
Surely not. For there is real warmth and understanding in Canetti’s final rampage. He writes with affection about those whose company – and love – he enjoys. For Hampstead. Perhaps the most poignant chapter is his one on Hampstead Parish Church and how he often sat outside for hours mesmerised by the tombs of the ancient dead he came to believe he knew. “Hampstead consists for me of those people I knew there, of those who were famous as artists in their time, and who still are, and of those whose names I learned from their stones,” he writes.
“It was like the discharging of a debt that no-one can repay, when I went there. I felt somehow lighter, and more righteous than I did in day-to-day life…I didn’t feel sorrow, but the question, in its immutable reality: how did they take to it, this thing to which there is no answer, and how will we take to it in our time?” Canetti provided his own answer. “The story of a life should contain many puzzles and leave much to guesswork,” he wrote a year before he died. “Some things should be presented in such a way that their nature is concealed. The story of life is as secret as life itself. A life that can be explained is no life at all.”
He lies buried alongside James Joyce.