I knew little of Elias Canetti’s life until yesterday. Now I feel I know too much. A couple of interesting links (there is no shortage of highly polarised opinion pieces):

The God-monster’s version:

There was one very obvious drawback to Canetti’s purist approach to the written word: nobody in the London literary circles he penetrated with such apparent ease had heard of him. The only Englishman who had read Die Blendung was the Sinologist Arthur Waley: “Imagine what it means in a large country, which for me was the country of Shakespeare and Dickens, to have one single reader.”

A gossipy egotist:

Expecting reverence, Canetti was greeted in England by blank stares. So far as he could tell, his only novel, Auto-da-Fe, swiftly banned after publication in German in 1935, had exactly one English reader, Arthur Waley, the great expert on Chinese literature. Canetti’s life became a campaign to find psychic support for his princely self-regard. He evaluated every cocktail party according to whether people knew of him. If they didn’t, he felt humiliated.