REVIEW BOOK
THE INNER LIFE OF ELIAS CANETTI

Author: By Robert Taylor Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, September 22, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

The second volume of Elias Canetti's odd yet oddly compelling memoirs distills the moral force of high Central European culture of which he is a noble example. He also conveys the confinement and oppressive weight of that tradition. Profound, passionate, highly readable, his memoir, in the style of much mid-European thought, displays a dense and abstract texture.

Canetti's has been an unusual career. Surprise winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize, he is the author of disparate masterworks: "Auto-da-Fe," titled in German "Die Blendung," or "The Blinding"- a reference to the blinding of Samson - an acute, dark novel concerning the motives of fascism; and of "Crowds and Power," a brilliant study of the psychology of mass phenomena. The memoirs are not in this class. They are episodic, of high quality, but too discursive as a whole. The English translation is barely adequate; the independence of Canetti's mind struggles against the prosiness of the text.

The title proclaims the range of the author's intellect on three symbolic levels: "The Torch In My Ear," expresses the conversion of sight into sound, the writer's craft; moreover, "The Torch" was the journal of Karl Kraus, the fearless Viennese critic of society and language whose presence is germane here. Much of Canetti's life during the '20s consisted of a continuous inner dialogue and debate with Kraus, his spiritual father. Finally, the title carries overtones of July 15, 1927, the burning of the Palais of Justice witnessed by Canetti, influencing his study of crowd behavior and presaging the destructive historical fires that leap through the pages of "Auto-da-Fe," destined to consume Europe.

Three settings dominate the book as well: Frankfurt, Vienna and Berlin. By far the most arresting is the Berlin of 1928. The ersatz disenchantment of the musical "Cabaret" never enters these pages where the arid, calculating Bertolt Brecht and the vulgar sexist George Grosz emerge most unattractively and the opening night of "Threepenny Opera" is viewed as a tragedy for Berliners applauding a dramatization of their swinish complacence.

Less censorious portraits highlight Isaac Babel ("Berlin would have consumed me like lye if I hadn't met him") and the actor Ludwig Hardt who inspired readings of Tolstoy. The outstanding characters, though, are Canetti's possessive mother, a bluestocking of immense literary learning and patrician Sephardic Jewish lineage, reduced to genteel penury; and Veza, an alluring woman of culture, who has constructed a haven of art and beauty in one of the rooms of the apartment where she lives with her senile, sinister father.

The jacket tells us that Veza is Canetti's first wife, but we don't see the relationship mature. He is a penetrating social observer; minor figures, however, receive as much stress as major ones, including, of all things a pack of burglars with whom the future laureate becomes entangled, the social types in a graduate school chemistry lab (a sardonic dwarf may well have instigated the dwarf in "Auto-da-Fe"), and a chambermaid with a sensuous body, a cheeping voice and eerie sexual tastes. So much emphasis is given these sideshows Canetti diverts attention from the main event, his inner life. The memoir, a mosaic of powerful passages, lacks cohesion; still what he chooses to reveal, while not enough, is nevertheless substantial.

RTAYLO;09/17,15:40 MFEENE;09/23,13 B07799800