Party in the Blitz: The English Years

Party in the Blitz, a new volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography, comes as a surprise gift to celebrate the Nobel Laureate's 100th birthday.
At 85, beset by the desire to come to terms with his years of exile in Britain, Canetti wrote Party in the Blitz. He waited half a century to confront these memories, perhaps because "in order to be truthful, I should have to track down every needless humiliation I was offered in England, and relive it as the torture it was." Party in the Blitz (translated by Michael Hofmann) dissects that torture with a bracing vigor and unrestrained acerbity, as Canetti recounts his life in a new country where - with the single exception of Arthur Waley - not a soul knew his writing (which, home in Vienna, had ranked him with Musil and Broch).
But Canetti was not one to be ignored, and by sheer force of personality, "the god-monster of Hempstead" (as John Bayley dubbed him) soon knew everyone and everyone knew him. Enoch Powell, Bertrand Russell, Iris Murdoch, Empson, Wittgenstein, Kokoschka, Kathleen Raine, Henry Moore, Ralph Vaughan Williams: Canetti knew them all, and in Party in the Blitz he rakes some of them over the coals mercilessly. He detested T.S. Eliot and came to despise Iris Murdoch, with whom he had an affair: every word of his devastating portrait of her quivers with rage.