Getting Inside the Mind of an Author

When Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981, journalists around the globe had to dig deep into their phone books to find academics who could give them information about the winner. Born in Bulgaria, descended from the Ladin-speaking Jews expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella, Canetti had been living in England since World War II, yet writing in German.

His masterful 1936 novel, “Die Blendung” (translated into English in 1946 as “Auto-da-Fe”), an examination of a descent into madness in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoyevsky, had been extravagantly praised by Thomas Mann yet was out of print. The remainder of his reputation rested on his magisterial 1960 “Crowds and Power,” an examination of the dynamics of masses and their leaders, from the fascists to the philharmonics. Off to the side were a handful of absurdist plays, a few notebooks of aphorisms.

The posthumous appearance of “Notes From Hampstead” (Canetti died in 1994) raises the hope of gleaning clues to the grandeur of the laureate. And there are clues, certainly, to his literary precursors:

“Without Cervantes, without Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Buchner,” he writes in 1965, “I would be nothing; spirit without fire or contour. But I could live only because there is Stendhal. He is my justification and my love of life.” Kafka comes in for exorbitant praise, as do the myths of the Jews, although these provoke an interesting ambivalence: “How can I be open to everything else if I become too absorbed with that which I already am?”

Some of the aphorisms sprinkled throughout are worth jotting down in one’s own notebooks. From 1962: “His sentences rub against and so erase each other. This drives him to despair. So he makes of every sentence its own cage.” Yet the best passages in the book are generally the most specific: the recounting of a trip to deep Wales, the suicide of the daughter of Arthur Schnitzler, the germ of a story about a man who visits his lover only after funerals.

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The most touching is a story of a young German woman who has kept a small piece of metal on which her father, a Nazi soldier, had embossed her name shortly before dying in a French prisoner of war camp.

“The young woman now has an eleven-month-old child, and she keeps the scrap of metal that her father embossed with her name hidden in her home. She hardly dares to look at it and has hidden it so well that all of a sudden she will forget where she put it and will live in mortal fear that it is lost. At which point she conducts a complete search of her entire, very large apartment; on finding it, she immediately hides it again.”

With the global interests of its author, “Notes From Hampstead” could be notes from anywhere. This is not a book of close observation of midafternoon widows on the High Street or schoolboys on the Heath, but a chronicle of thought, a map of an inner library, a Hampstead of words, a northern suburb of an unreal city.

But as Hampstead means nothing without its Underground link to London, so do these notes lack definition if the reader brings little independent knowledge of Canetti’s life or work to the reading chair. The editors have decided to frame the notes with only the sketchiest of flap copy, informing the reader that these selections date from “the troubled period following the death of his wife and the publication of his masterwork of social theory, ‘Crowds and Power.’ ”

A quick surf through the Internet reveals that his first wife, Veza, died in 1963, in fact, nine years after the beginning of these notes; 1971 is perhaps a more significant frontier, the year in which he married again to Hera Buschor.

“Notes From Hampstead” could have benefited from a few footnotes from New York.