The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James

dissipating the mystery. The chief mystery was about his reason for not going back to German-speaking Europe. Before the mysterious W. G. Sebald there
was the even more mysterious Elias Canetti. While the Nazis were in power, Canetti had excellent reasons to be in London. But now that the Nazis were gone, why was he still there?
    Like Sebald later on, Canetti might have found Britain a suitable context for pulling off the trick of becoming a famous name without very many people knowing precisely who he was. Canetti even
got the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, and people still didn’t know who he was. He was a Viennese Swiss Bulgarian Jewish refugee with an impressively virile moustache; he was Iris
Murdoch’s lover; he was a mystery. Apart from a sociological treatise called Crowds and Power which advanced a thesis no more gripping than its title, his solitary pre-war novel Die
Blendung, known in English as Auto da Fe, was the only book by Canetti that anybody had ever heard of. Hardly anybody had read it, but everybody meant to. Those who had read it said it
was about a mysterious man in a house full of books, and that the house, in a symbolic enactment of the collapse of a civilisation, fell down, or almost did, or creaked a lot, or something.
    While living in Britain, Canetti wrote three books of memoirs about his life in pre-war Europe. He wrote them in German. (All three volumes are now available in English, although readers are
warned that the translations lose some of the effortless pomposity of the original.) They were full of literary gossip: hard material to make dull, even for a writer with Canetti’s knack for
colourless reportage. He proved, however, that he had a long memory for the frailties of his colleagues. He had a good story about Robert Musil, author of The Man Without Qualities. In the
circumscribed world of the Vienna cafe´s, Musil reigned unapproachably as the resident genius. But Musil was eaten up by resentment of the international recognition accorded to Thomas Mann.
When, in 1935, Canetti published Die Blendung to some acclaim in the press, he entered the cafe´ to find Musil, who had previously barely noticed his existence, rising to meet him with
a congratulatory speech. Canetti was able to say that he had a letter in his pocket from Thomas Mann, praising him in exactly the same terms. Musil sank back into his chair and never acknowledged
Canetti again.
    The story shows how Canetti could recognise self-obsession in others. But there is no account of his ever recognising the same failing in himself. His memoirs not only take him to be the centre
of events – a standard strategy in autobiographical writing, and often an entertaining one – they proceed on the assumption that no events matter except those centred on him. Hitler
scarcely gets a mention. The story is all about Canetti, a man with good reason, we are led to assume, for holding himself in high esteem.
    Canetti spent the last part of his life in Zurich. In his last year he was at work on his memoir about London. (Now, in Elysium, he is probably working on his memoir about Zurich.) The
unfinished book, Party in the Blitz , is the story of his years in and around Hampstead during the war and just after. We are fortunate that there is no more of it, lest we start wondering
whether Canetti should not have received another Nobel Prize, for being the biggest twerp of the twentieth century. But a twerp must be at least partly stupid, and Canetti wasn’t even a
little bit that. Instead, he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and
recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority. Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the
Battle of Britain taking place above him – the completeness with which he fails to