Well, that’s right. And since I’ll do anything to satisfy my curiosity, I find the reasons for the animosity between them. I will quote the Sephardic intellectual – inexcusable in social philosophy – to document the matter unequivocally. I note that the American-British poet and essayist – an eminent scholar of Dante and metaphysical poets – could not have known about Canetti’s bitter comments, which detracts from the belligerence of my notes. But they do not limit the hypotheses, which I will set out in the following paragraphs and at the end, when some opinions by Virginia Woolf conclude these notes.
I start from the texts collected in Party im Blitz (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich), when Johanna – Canetti’s only daughter and executor – proceeds to publish them in German, immediately followed by translations and editions. Such as that of Galaxia Gutenberg, edited by Kristian Wachinger, translated by Genoveva Dieterich and with an epilogue by Jeremy Adler, under the title Fiesta bajo las bombas. The English Years; which I quote here.
The first barb against T. S. Eliot appears in the opening text: “Of England”, he says, ‘I lived in England when its spirit disintegrated. I witnessed Eliot’s fame. Will we ever be ashamed enough of it? An American brings a Frenchman (Laforgue) with him from Paris, who disappears while still young, infecting him with his distaste for life; inconceivably, he lives as a bank clerk while evaluating everything that came before, belittling what always has more spirit than he does; he allows himself to be fobbed off by a spendthrift compatriot, who has the grandeur and tension of a madman, and presents the result: his impotence, which he transmits to the whole country; He surrenders to any order that is sufficiently ancient, attempts to suppress all impulse, a libertine of nothingness, a follower of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante (in what region of hell would he have locked him up?), with thin lips, a cold heart, prematurely old, as unworthy of Blake as of Goethe and of all lava, cooled before he had warmed up, neither cat nor bird nor toad, rather a mole, obedient to God, sent to England (as if I had returned to Spain), with critical points instead of teeth, tortured by a nymphomaniac woman – his only excuse – so tortured that he would have understood my book Auto de fe if he had dared to approach it, a chivalrous Tom in Bloomsbury, accepted and invited by the noble Virginia, having escaped from all those who, rightly, had reprimanded him, and finally distinguished with an award that neither Virginia, nor Pound, nor Dylan, nor anyone else who deserved it received, with the exception of Yeats.
This is followed by a categorical statement, somewhat unusual in a man who loved nuances, lateral wisdom, and the diversity of viewpoints taught to us by his monumental Mass and Power, a book to which I owe – since I lived in Havana – my fortunate escape from Marxism-Leninism. The following paragraph reads: ‘I witnessed the fame of this lamentable figure.’ Canetti blames a friend for giving him the Elizabethan Essays: ‘… (to him) I owe the name of the driest figure of the century, of whom I heard more and more later, at the end of the war, when he returned to the religion of his ancestors and then changed it for that of the kings, so much so that there was almost nothing else left.’
He later laments – pointing to Eliot – that the worst thing about England is mummification: ‘… life as a kind of mummy directed from a distance. It is not, as they say, the Victorian (the mask of hypocrisy can be torn off, and there is something behind it), it is the tendency to mummify everything, which begins with measure and justice and ends with the impotence of feelings.’
Canetti becomes obsessive: ‘Truly violent rejections are not softened, however, they are intensified with each memory: I am unable to write the name Eliot with a pencil without feeling compelled to revile him again,’ he confesses several decades later. He recounts: “The fact is that I never had anything to do with him personally. I met him fleetingly. For years, however, I ran into him at the home of John Hayward, Kathleen Raine’s watchdog, who lived with Eliot in Chelsea.”
One could launch – between textual quotations – a few arrows at the reasons for the antipathy. Perhaps a basic conjecture: we tend to like or dislike people we have only seen once or twice, while most leave us indifferent. Did Canetti reject Eliot as soon as he saw him? Perhaps… But from what we know from his memoirs, diaries and notes, from what we have read in this very Fiesta bajo las bombas, we can infer that Canetti was very sensitive to being noticed, to being noticed. The many dinners and meetings he attended attest to this interest, which was not reprehensible, but excessive or typical of an exile.
It seems that Eliot had no interest in the then exotic Jewish writer who had taken refuge in England, except for the protocol of greeting him. Also, on the other hand, Canetti found the already famous poems of the naturalised Englishman to be glacial. They had little to do with the expressive intensity that manages to project feelings and moods, and in general with the romantic poetry that Canetti always liked. The rationalist, punctual conceptualism transparently conveyed by the English-speaking modernists did not appeal to an admirer of baroque poetry.
There is not a single favourable line from Canetti about Eliot’s poetry. He rejected – with good reason – Eliot’s criticism of William Blake: “The arrogance of T. S. Eliot, so to speak, as the conquest of an American returning to the mother country after generations. It would be very difficult to describe what he was really like: deeply evil. It is not enough to recall his blatant judgement of Goethe and his inhuman, anti-poetic judgement of Blake. There is his stingy, minimalist work (all the little spittoons of failure), the poet of the impoverishment of feelings…”
But there is a greater cause: Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which Canetti does not mention in order to make the invective stronger, as Jeremy Adler explains in his essay on Fiesta bajo las bombas, which serves as an epilogue to the book. Without excluding other personal reasons, which we may never know… In another note from his English years, the author of Kafka’s Other Trial, the astute reader of the Memoirs of Albert Speer – Hitler’s architect – returns to his characterisation: ‘Arrogance is so ingrained in the English that it often goes unnoticed. They are the true artists of arrogance. Eliot is the best example.’
The two also differ in the stark contrast between Canetti’s agnosticism, which expressed a suspicious view of God and religion, bringing the Jewish Nobel Prize winner in German closer to a sceptical or irreligious stance, and the Anglo-Catholicism of the Nobel Prize winner in English, a fervent practitioner and connoisseur of patristics and scholasticism. Their artistic tastes and aesthetic assessments of a historical nature could also be considered far apart, with few coincidences, such as that referring to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan writers, although for Canetti more as a genius in reflecting the relationship between powers than as the most important playwright in the West.
Unfortunately, they agreed on their ‘problems with their partners’ – Canetti with Vesa and Eliot with Vivienne – which still provoke strong rejection of their respective morals, apparently documented as selfish and scandalous.
One afternoon, after crossing the Thames footbridge to the south to reach the Tate Modern, a London friend with whom I was chatting about the Bloomsbury Group told me that Virginia Woolf did not like Tom very much… Although she noted in her diary her impressions of Eliot as a ‘cultured and sophisticated’ young American after a gathering at the Woolfs’ house where he read his poems.
At the time, I didn’t look up the reference. Now I can put it into context: Eliot collaborated with Hogarth Press, hence his professional link with the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, among others). But when Canetti arrived in England in 1938, the group was already in decline, several of its members having died: Strachey in 1932, or committing suicide shortly afterwards, such as Virginia Woolf in 1941.
Today, an excellent admirer of the great novelist – who hears me writing these notes – is kind enough to offer me the quotes. They appear in her Diaries, magnificently edited and translated into Spanish by Olivia de Miguel for Ed. Tres Hermanas. There are several comments, the first of which adds another argument to Canetti’s opinion: “There is much to say about Eliot in various respects; for example, his difficulty in establishing contact with intelligent people and things like that; anaemia and affectation…‘ I choose this other one as characteristic: ’The truth is that he bores me a little, and I wish poor dear Tom had more guts and less need to drip his impotent uncertainties through fine muslin. One expects it, one understands it, but it is a sorry business. He is like a person on the verge of breaking: infinitely scrupulous, redundant and cautious‘ (Vol II, 1920-1924).
Nothing better than Virginia Woolf’s ’outburst” to conclude my journey through an antipathy that illustrates the animosity between artists and writers. So much so that sometimes we prefer to remain ignorant of the biographies of authors we admire. A preference – I confess without blushing – that I never fulfill.
