Diary: Elias Canetti on Literary Mortality and Immortality

I am filled with a deep reluctance against every form of cultural criticism. It only increases the closer it gets to my own sphere. I cannot tolerate it when it comes off as entirely cold and righteous. An example of this in modern English literature is Eliot, whose essays on poetry I occasionally encountered. I don’t quite under­stand why they so quickly give rise to pointed revulsion within me. And yet I still feel it, even after one or two pages, and with mount­ing disgust, attentive to every word that increases it, I read to the end what I should put down, and for days afterward I feel as if I am in an ancient and awful torture chamber.

These essays always take up the question of rank. The ranking of names is earnestly taken up like a carefully considered transaction. Does this one or that deserve his place in the anthology? Does he take up too much or too little space? It’s clearly understood that writers live and die most of all through anthologies. The humble judgment of a somewhat animated and self-satisfied persona is posed at the start. It must be a genuine pleasure to knock down the dead like bowling pins. Indeed the judgment of the living is a very precarious undertaking, and there are those who would rather have their tongue cut out than to use it to lower judgment on oth­ers. But then one comes along who is not afraid to do it to the dead at all. He fetches ten pins, preferably those who have slumbered a good while in anthologies, stands them up and bowls his ball. He can then explain why he knocks down six, while those left standing are summed up and their fates precisely approved. The four that re­main he praises with restraint. For if he has thrown a good ball, he knows very well that the four will be grateful for their placement, though it would be just as easy for him to also kill them off.

This undertaking is repulsive for many reasons. It betrays how little the bowler thinks of them as poets, something he purports to be himself. For otherwise how could he so coldly go about the business of organizing their posthumous reputations. Why battle over how many lines one gets in anthologies! If his stroke was truly strong then he would leave the bowling lanes and torment living human beings or the gods. But he sits there in his shirt sleeves and takes measure of the dead, whom he stands up and knocks down himself. If he has a heart, it’s not in these paragraphs written for hire. But he became a poet, simply because his heart beats less than others, and through clarity he wishes to offset what he lacks in obsession. But if clarity were important enough to him, then he would turn it toward making sense of the real world: He would think rather than just examine, and he would be ashamed most of all to always be ranking reputations simply because he feels it important to do so. He does not think; clarity is for him only a means. Among those who are possessed he plays the clear-headed one, among the clear-headed the possessed.

Who could hold against him the urge to make discoveries in the realm of letters? He only needs to follow his curiosity; to present the material itself, to content himself with what impresses him; to feel joy and annoyance; to grab hold and to shove away, to kiss and discuss; and not to hold court.

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The price of fame is the exalted mistreatment of the famous one after his death. How surprised, even amazed he would be to hear, if only he were able, all he said and thought. For there will be people who will have inhabited his body, be it his lungs, his heart, his kidneys, his bowels. They can reinvent him from the inside out into something he won’t even recognize. They will have been there when he embraced his wife and will know how he wooed her. They will have seen him weep and will know why he wept. He will have told everything to each of them alone, having not a single secret among a hundred people. Each will know the truth, and what the others say will be false.

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How can you know if you will mean anything to future generations. You might bore them to death. You might stir them in the marrow of their bones. You might pet them or whip them. You might in­spire the worst in them, or you might become their conscience.

But you can never know how it will be, and the hope that your life will have meaning is indeed necessary, though also comical. The only figure who could inspire me would be the defender of death. To stir myself out of the torpor of my hatred of death, I must invent a friend of death.

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I don’t regret these orgies of book-buying. It feels like the time when my library expanded while writing Crowds and Power. Ev­erything back then also occurred through the adventure of books. Back in Vienna, when I was penniless, I still shelled out money I didn’t have for books. In London, in the worst of times, I still managed somehow to buy books from time to time. I have never learned anything systematically, as have others, but instead in sud­den bursts. It always began with my eyes falling upon something that I just had to have. The feeling of pulling a book off a shelf, the joy of shelling out money, then taking it home or to a café, gazing at it, sizing it up, thumbing through, tucking it away for years, eventu­ally discovering it anew, when it really mattered—all of it is part of the creative process whose hidden particulars I do not understand. But that’s the way it is with me, and until my dying day I must buy books, especially when I know for sure that I will never read them again.

I believe this also has to do with my defiance of death. I never want to know which of these books will remain unread. Right to the very end it’s not clear which those will be. I have the freedom to choose, for amid all the books surrounding me I am free at any time to choose and through that choice hold the course of life in my hands.

Translated by Peter Filkins

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Elias Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1905, and died in Zurich in 1994. He is the author of the 1960 study Crowds and Power, the novel Auto-da-Fé, and three volumes of memoirs. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. These passages are drawn from his unfinished life’s work, The Book Against Death, published recently in English for the first time by New Directions.

Peter Filkins is the translator of the collected poems of Ingeborg Bachmann as well as three novels by H. G. Adler. His the author of H. G. Adler: A Life in Many Worlds and the volume of poems, Water / Music.

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Image: Raoul Hausmann, Elasticum (1920)