Aphorism man

In her novel The Tortoises (1939), Veza Canetti depicts the relationship between the aspiring author Hilde and her loving but complicated mentor, Kain. In reality, the two protagonists were Friedl Benedikt (1916-1953) and Veza’s husband, Elias Canetti. Benedikt had read Canetti’s novel Auto-da-Fé soon after it was published in 1935, prompting her to embark on her own writing career in her native Vienna and to follow Canetti into exile in Hampstead. In her short life, Benedikt published three novels in English with Jonathan Cape between 1944 and 1950, under the pseudonym Anna Sebastian. Throughout this period, Canetti remained her mentor, as these diaries and notes written for him between 1939 and 1953 attest.

Early reviews have hailed this book, which has come to light as part of Canetti’s estate, as a sensation. This is no doubt an over­statement, but the volume contains some notable insights. First are the sharp pen portraits of the Hampstead set in the early 1940s, including a hilarious caricature of Stephen Spender (“He always seems to say to himself: ‘I really am a poet’”). Given their acerbic quality, it would not be too far-fetched to see in them a model for Canetti’s later account of his life in England, Party in the Blitz. Second are the descriptions of Benedikt’s time in Sweden between 1946 and 1949, with interludes in France and, again, London, where she has nothing good to say about the “sleazy old fool” Jonathan Cape. Above all, these notes served Benedikt as exercises in attempting to jump over her own shadow – and that of Canetti. As a result, there are two literary highlights: her critical engagement with Hemingway and Proust. The former, she notes, indulges in an excessive use of repetition and “going in circles”; the latter excels in finesse and subtlety at the expense of “genuine passion”.

Perhaps the most striking feature of these accounts, however, is the fact that Benedikt refers so rarely to Nazism and the war. When she returned to Vienna for a short while after 1945, she was irritated by the softness and lilting of the local dialect, given that before it had lent itself to such brutal commands. By the same token, she wondered “what the war pilots knew of the cities onto which they dropped bombs”. The traumatic effect of exile, equally, is only occasionally present in her diary, for example when she refers to the poet, translator and journalist Helmuth Faust, who in his Swedish exile was “torn to pieces by Germany”.

One of the most amusing episodes in the book is a portrait of an unidentified “aphorism man”, who can only think in, and communicate through, aphoristic sentences, but who now feels compelled to write a book with a coherent narrative. Canetti, curiously, developed the other way around, from a novelist and dramatist to an acclaimed aphorist. The longest shadows for writers are their own texts, over which they will always fail to jump.

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