A Nobel Prize winner’s brilliant tirade against mortality

On Aug. 14, 1994, when he was 89 years old, the great writer Elias Canetti betrayed his most cherished principle: He died.

Canetti lives on in his work, of course, but that isn’t the kind of immortality for which he so ardently agitated. This was a man who named each of his memoirs after sense organs — “The Tongue Set Free” (1979), “The Torch in My Ear” (1982) and “The Play of the Eyes” (1986) — and posthumous fame, devoid of gristle, did not interest him. Nor was he tempted by the afterlife envisioned by Christians. He was an irreligious Jew, but he remained faithful to the materialism of his tradition, insisting that he craved “eternal life here rather than somewhere else.” What good was consciousness without its trappings? “Absent the body, the soul is a mockery,” he scoffed.

Both of these emphatic protestations appear in “The Book Against Death,” a captivating collection of Canetti’s notes that appeared in German in 2014 and that New Directions will publish in an English translation this fall. The jottings that make up the volume are learned and often allegorical, but Canetti’s refusal of death was no metaphor. “The totally concrete and sincere, constant goal of my life is the attainment of immortality for every human,” he wrote, and he meant it.

His vehemence was in part a response to the terrors he witnessed as a reluctant participant in the 20th century. Born in 1905 in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family that had passed through Spain, Italy and Turkey, he had an itinerant upbringing quintessentially of its time and place. His childhood smacked of sanatoriums (at which his sickly mother often stayed), Viennese doctors (who were revered in his community for their medical brilliance) and summers at picturesque Alpine lakes (the Canettis stayed in high style at the grand hotels of old Europe). He grew up in Bulgaria, England, Switzerland, Austria and Germany, and by adulthood he spoke Ladino, Bulgarian, English, French and, above all, German, the language in which he wrote the masterpieces that earned him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1981.

Yet death dogged him everywhere he went. First and most formative was the unexpected death of his father when he was 7, a blow from which he never recovered. “My father’s death was at the center of every world I found myself in,” he wrote in his memoirs. It set the emotional stage for the ensuing desolations of the two world wars. Canetti weathered the first in relative comfort as a schoolboy in Vienna and Zurich, the second as a literary eminence in exile in England. His survivor’s guilt is a frequent theme in “The Book Against Death.” “How shameful, shameful that I have outlived all the victims,” he laments. “Have I done enough, have I justified the fact that I was only a witness, not a victim?”

But ultimately, Canetti’s opposition to finitude was neither purely personal nor purely political. It was dispositional, almost primal. “The Book Against Death” advances a stray argument every so often, but for the most part it is one long shriek.

Canetti is a peculiar writer, difficult to categorize or even characterize. His sole novel, “Auto-da-Fé” (1935), is a nightmarish fable about a cathectic bibliophile. It is a brutal and disorienting book, reminiscent of the writings of Franz Kafka (whom Canetti admired) and Samuel Beckett (toward whom he was more ambivalent). But his most famous achievement, the monumental “Crowds and Power” (1960), is an idiosyncratic work of poetic anthropology unlike anything else in world literature. Canetti cites legends and rituals from an astonishing range of cultures as he seeks to demonstrate that crowds are the antidote to humanity’s primordial fear of touch. Many of his conclusions are dubious. Is it really true that crowds are equalizing forces that raze all hierarchy, or that they grow practically of their own accord, or that those who outlive others relish the victory over the dead implicit in their very survival? Yet the literal truth or falsity of the pronouncements in “Crowds and Power” is beside the point: Regardless of its plausibility, it has the stern and enthralling authority of a myth or a religious text. Canetti’s memoirs are something else again. In his sparkling recollections of a bygone Europe, he invented a lighter genre for himself.

If there is any thread that stitches these disparate projects together, it is their author’s respect for obsession. He initially intended “Auto-da-Fé” to be one in a series of eight books about monomaniacs, and his own monomaniacal fixation was always the rank injustice of mortality. For 65 years, this affront preoccupied him. He started compiling the notes later gathered in “The Book Against Death” in 1929 and stopped only when he succumbed to his subject.

Canetti once described his polemic against death as “the only book that I was born to write,” but it is also a book he could not finish, or even properly start. Eventually, he decided to begin by jotting down whatever popped into his mind. “I will record thoughts against death as they occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan,” he wrote. He intended to organize his reflections into a more conventional document someday, but he never had the chance. “The Book Against Death” was compiled by his editors and his daughter after he passed away.

The results are heterogeneous. Some of Canetti’s meditations span several pages; others are brisk aphorisms. Many are straightforward; a handful are downright gnomic. “He only wants to be kissed by very old ravens,” one particularly mysterious entry reads. Canetti sometimes chronicles his personal life in the book — he writes wistfully about his first wife, who died in 1963, and he cannot resist a few joyful remarks about the birth of his daughter — but he also includes short, grotesque fictions. In one, he imagines “a people made up of individuals who have kangaroo-like pouches, into which they stuff their shriveled dead and carry them around with them.” Another vignette is as bizarre as it is charming:

And although Canetti is generally high-minded, lovers of German-language literature will be delighted to discover that he is not above a touch of gossip about his peers: “The Book Against Death” contains digs at the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard and the German novelist (and fellow Nobel Prize winner) Günter Grass, whom Canetti described as “a complete idiot” with “dictatorial airs.”

For all their formal diversity, however, the fragments in “The Book Against Death” are largely consistent in content. Though they are ordered by year, they have no real trajectory. Canetti’s concerns at the end of his life were the same as his concerns in youth. The deities who permit mortality were his perennial antagonists. “God looks on as one person after another dies,” he wrote. Years later, he was still fuming: “I have approached a hundred gods, and I looked each straight in the eye, full of hatred for the death of human beings.”

It is not hard to understand why Canetti is so often eulogized as an airy intellectual. His memoirs are full of passionate accounts of his omnivorous reading, and in “The Book Against Death” he is capable of referencing a scholarly article about elephants in one breath and the writings of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin in the next. “Rarely has anyone been so at home in the mind,” Susan Sontag approvingly wrote.

Yet “The Book Against Death” serves to remind us that Canetti’s mind was firmly embedded in his flesh. Even writing struck him as a kind of calisthenics: “Write because you are still breathing and your heart, which is probably already diseased, still beats,” he instructed himself as he aged. The life he loved so much was a gantlet of appetites. “His home consists of all the places where he has eaten,” he wrote. “His friends are all the people who gave him something to eat.”

Accordingly, it was not spiritual illumination but everyday banality that he could not stand to lose. No line better distills the tender spirit of “The Book Against Death” than this: “Above all, when I am dead, what I will miss: the voices of people in a restaurant.” Canetti did not fret about the state of his soul; he worried himself sick about the fate of all the detritus that makes up a life:

How is it to be preserved? “Would it be at all possible to love more?” Canetti wondered. “To revive a dead person through more love, has no one ever loved enough?” In one of his recurring fantasies, we succeed in abolishing the word for death, thereby the idea of it, and thereby the thing itself. (For Canetti, a writer to his core, naming was talismanic.) “Can any language be made viable that does not know the word ‘death’?” he asked. The ideal society, he proposed later, would be one “in which people suddenly disappear, but no one knows that they are dead, as there is no death, there is not even a word for it.”

Of course, Canetti could not abolish the word “death” any more than he could abolish the phenomenon: It occurs hundreds of times in the very document in which he dreamed of its abolition. In 1971, he admitted: “It could indeed come to pass that someday I may yield to death. I ask anyone who might hear of it for forgiveness.” Twenty-three years later, he suffered defeat at the hands of his nemesis, but I don’t think he yielded.

“He would like to die while writing,” reads one of his notes from 1986. “Before he’s entirely finished, he’d like to complete a sentence, exhale before the next sentence, and die exactly between the two.” And this is exactly what he did. His very last entry contains no acknowledgment that death is even possible. “It is time for me to sort matters out again within myself. Without writing I come undone. I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write down what is on my mind.” Then came the luminous final sentence, flush with undimmed hope: “I will try to change that.” As if he would have time.

If death involves fixity, then life demands movement. “The Book Against Death” refuses finality by remaining forever on the cusp of transformation. It will await its final revision until the end of time. It can’t save all of us, as Canetti longed to, but there is a small portion of immortality to be found in it nonetheless. An unfinished book is the only thing I know of that never dies.

The Book Against Death

By Elias Canetti, translated from German by Peter Filkins

New Directions. 432 pp. $19.95, paperback