Forgotten, Famous and Favourite Nobel Literature Prize Winners, 1975 to 1981

Europe frees its captive mind: Montale, Bellow, Aleixandre, Singer, Elytis, Miłosz, & Canetti

The Nobel Prize for Literature between 1975 and 1981 went to European writers who found their homes free of nations. They freed their cultures of captive minds, whether communist ideology or American commercialism. They made their ideas far from the madding crowds.

The seven winners in this period included:

• Four major poets from outside the Anglophone world

• Two representatives of émigré Jewish American post-war culture

• Writers of the Other Europe forgotten and neglected in American ambitions for Western civilization in the post-1945 world.

Please join me as I read all 120 writers who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some are forgotten. Many remain famous. A few became notorious for reasons that might surprise you and change your understanding of modern history. Discover them all in the 120 Nobels Challenge and let me know your favourites.

This week, we read the winners from 1975 to 1981:

• 1975 Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) Italy

• 1976 Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canada/USA

• 1977 Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984) Spain

• 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Polish-born Jewish American

• 1979 Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996) Greece

• 1980 Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) Poland-Lithuania

• 1981 Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Europe

Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk.

Be sure to read to the end of this post where you will find links to bonus archival video footage of these Nobel Laureates. Or watch my YouTube channel after 8 pm Sunday (AEST).

1975 Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) Italy

Eugenio Montale was a major poet of twentieth century Italy. He was himself modest about how much his limited output really mattered. He published only five collections in his lifetime. He came to doubt the poet’s capacity to shape politics or the human capacity to steer history, despite his sympathy for liberal intellectual traditions that opposed fascism. 

Yet he made a life as a cultural authority through three difficult phases of Italian history: 

• the struggles over fascism and modernism in the 1920s and 1930s

• the difficult post-1945 years in which Italian and European societies were refashioned after Fascism and amid the American-led Cold War

• the “Years of Lead” from 1969 to 1980.

Montale won his Nobel Prize in the middle of those “Years of Lead.” Their violence plunged Italy back into the conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s, when Montale established his poetic identity and political persona. Assassinations, terror, ideological extremism, and Mafia collaborations again took centre stage. The divisions within Italy, and more widely Europe, between Christian Democrats and Eurocommunists, and between these establishment parties and the radical fringes, opened new wounds. Neo-fascist and fringe Marxist groups organised terrorist acts, ideological polarisation, and assassinations. The Red Brigades even kidnapped and murdered Aldo Moro, the Italian Prime Minister, in 1978. The Cold War, including through the CIA-led Operation Gladio, which sponsored some of these groups with the complicity of Italian politicians, poured salt into the wounds.

Montale emerged as a poet amidst the controversies between fascist modernists and politically liberal, culturally conservative elitists in the 1920s. The fascist modernists included the charismatic poet, soldier and political figure, Gabriele D’Annunzio. The liberal elitists included the philosopher, cultural historian and liberal politician, Benedetto Croce. Montale opposed the fascism of D’Annunzio, but embraced his modernism, and that of the wave of European writers of the 1920s, such as Joyce, Proust, and Eliot. He shuffled with Croce into the disappearing political centre, but resisted his arguments that modernism expressed fascist violence in the arts, and that history could be synthesised by the great and the good in the cultural elite into progress.

In these decisive decades for Italy, Montale wrote his poetry collections, Ossi di seppia/ Cuttlefish Bones (1925) and Le occasioni / The occasions (1939). Cuttlefish Bones was shaped in its aesthetics and outlook by Eliot, The Waste Land. Montale set his poems against the rocky Ligurian coast where he had holidayed as a child and young man. Like Eliot’s poem, Cuttlefish Bones caught the moods of Europe after the Great War (1914-1918), when it reeled from the shocks of mass society, industrialism, early consumer culture, urbanisation, and total war. The collection imagined the world as a dry, barren, hostile wilderness.

In The Occasions Montale broke from Eliot’s influence and wrote more experimental poems. They wrestled uneasily with how the artist could respond to the repression of Italy’s fascist years. Montale was neither hermetic, like many Italian writers of this period, including the 1959 Laureate, Salvatore Quasimodo. Nor was Montale politically engaged. He remained uncomfortable with politics most of his life. He focussed on his modest poetic practice. He was inspired by Dante and disciplined by modernist literary experiments. Above all, he sought the mystery of occasions of experimental poetic utterance. This experimentation culminated in the “notoriously difficult” poetry of La bufera / The storm (1956).

Montale did, however, play a major role as a cultural authority in post-1945 Italy. For 25 years from 1948 he wrote the culture column at the major Milanese daily, Corriere della sera. He found a perch of safety from the here and now. He continued his long argument with Croce about history, modernity, and progress. History is a flea market, he wrote. There was no progress. In “Cielo e terra” (“Heaven and Earth”), he mocked the Crocean idealist interpretation of history, which America has since installed as the orthodoxy of the liberal rules-based order.

Despite his position of influence, Montale professed modesty about the impact of poetry on the world. He was done with the dynamism of D’Annunzio and the elitism of Croce. Poets should not aspire with Shelley to be the legislators of the world. They can carry their burden alongside all the other human errors, as he wrote in this poem, “It’s only an error”.

IT’S ONLY AN ERROR

Clowns got up as poets,

Arrogant bureaucrats,

Pedantic criers,

You are the standard-bearers:

Carrying faded colours.

Being a poet isn’t a matter of pride.

It’s only an error of nature.

A burden to be shouldered

With fear.

You can read a selection of his poems in both Italian and English here.

1976 Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canada/USA

Saul Bellow was a North American novelist and cultural commentator.

His novels include The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Herzog (1964) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975). His non-fiction includes the memoir To Jerusalem and Back (1976).

He wrote picaresque novels reimagined for the post-war emigrant, educated society of America, that suddenly believed it led Western civilization. The Adventures of Augie March retold Mark Twain’s story of plucky American innocence, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with undertones of Cervantes, Don Quixote. Herzog’s central character is a kind of academic Don Quixote, who tilted at the modern world America had made. 

Bellow had a gift for social observation. He dramatised ordinary nobility, always at risk of relapse into pettiness, while it struggled with the “dismal insanities” of the 20th century. His novels were comic twentieth-century tales of wayward ambitions in the “melting pot of America”, which was then a common phrase for at least the European part of its immigrant society.

Bellow himself was an immigrant to America and a child of immigrants to Canada. He grew up as a child of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants in the largely French province of Quebec in Canada. He moved to Chicago for his education. It became his home. He loved to teach in the new prosperous institutions of the American university, which were then in their golden age. There he befriended Allan Bloom. He came to share many of Bloom’s conservative views on the decay of American culture. In 1987 Bloom wrote the celebrated elegy for the post-1945 American institution of higher learning, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.

Bloom’s influence on the American Right came to outweigh that of his friend, Bellow. It is a pity. Bellow had a sharper eye for social comedy, and a greater gift for prose. His observation from To Jerusalem and Back might have tempered his friend’s nostalgia for the lives of the sixties professor.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

His reflections on the common observation - that we live in an age of madness - is a Quixotic moral lesson for us all.

In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.

1977 Vicente Aleixandre (1898–1984) Spain

In June 1977 Spain held its first constitutional elections since the military coup and Civil War of 1936. General Franco had died in 1975, and his successor began the process to return Spain to democracy. He did so despite the arguments of diehard military Falangists and the direct actions of extreme Maoist leftists. It culminated in the adoption of a new constitution in a referendum in 1978. But by 1977 Spain’s return to civilised, democratic Europe was clear. 

It was a major moment for Spain and for the world. Spain was reintegrated into European culture and politics, without the stain of an authoritarian government that had stood apart from World War Two. Before long Spain entered NATO and the European Union. In 1977 the Nobel Committee celebrated the readmission of this major European culture by awarding the Prize to the Madrid poet, Vicente Aleixandre, who, despite his abhorrence for Franco’s regime, had never left Spain to live a comfortable life in exile.

It was as if the Swedish Academy had read Aleixandre’s lines from “A Poet’s Words.”

In the deepest nights

words left behind or asleep

may find their connections.

In scattered papers, who knows or forgets them?

Someday perhaps they’ll resonate—who knows?—

in a few sympathetic hearts.

Aleixandre is less well-known than the iconic Federico García Lorca. But they came from the same cohort of Spanish writers, artists, and intellectuals (the Generation of ‘27) who were shaped by the ferment of surrealism, early modernism, social experimentation, and the Spanish republic. Aleixandre survived and endured through Franco’s regime, unlike Lorca, who was assassinated by Nationalist forces in 1936. His body was never found, but his legend rose after death. Lorca was the gifted, gay poet of passion who died too soon. Aleixandre suffered a different fate. His body was frailer. His sexuality was more ambiguous. His poetry was more difficult. But he stayed on. He aged into the perfect symbol in 1977 to honour Spain’s return to democratic Europe.

Aleixandre's early poetry was in free verse and surrealistic. His poems mourned the modern world’s loss of passion and the free spirit of nature. His collections include Passion of the Earth (1935), Destruction or Love (1933), Shadow of Paradise (1944), History of the Heart (1954), In a Vast Dominion (1962), and Portraits with Names (1965). Only two selections have been published in English translation.

He was deeply influenced by Freud, Joyce, the ‘discovery of the unconscious’ and the surrealists. He practised poetic experimentation and psychological exploration of the divided self. His poetry was stylistically complex, which made it harder to understand outside the Spanish language world.

He wrote on themes of fellowship, friendliness, spiritual unity, and unhappy love. Aleixandre also lived in divided love. He struggled to make a life as a bisexual man in conservative, Catholic Francoist Spain. His long-term relationship with a male poet was known among his friends, but he kept his sexual life private. He learned to live in the regime, despite his distaste for it. He became a mentor to many poets, and the living connection to Spanish literary culture, unstained by Franco’s dictatorship.

In old age he became the repository of Spain’s modern literary traditions, which Franco had repressed. In the post-1945 years, he had mellowed from his early Surrealist visions. While still writing meditative and hermetic poems, he articulated a grounded romantic vision of the poet. He sought to speak for everyone, not just the artistic, social, and political rebels. In “To whom I write”, the first poem in In a Vast Domain, he wrote:

I write for everybody. I write particularly for those who do not read my poetry.

Although little known in the Anglophone world, and unknown to me before this challenge, his poetry is deeply appreciated in the Hispanic world for its “luminous visions through verbal images.”

1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991) Poland/USA

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born near Warsaw at an uncertain date. His birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. He adopted “Bashevis” as a literary pseudonym, in honour of his mother, Bathsheba, the daughter of a rabbi.

Singer left Poland in 1935, before Nazi Germany invaded. But life as a Jew in Poland was already a struggle because of Poland’s own native authoritarian, militarist, and ethnically nationalist regime, initiated by Józef Piłsudski. Singer fled to the USA, and made a major career as a short-story writer in post-war emigrant Jewish New York. He wrote in Yiddish and for New York’s flourishing post-war newspapers and magazines, New Yorker, Playboy and Esquire.

WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant) America was a long way from multicultural, multiethnic, multifaith Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. The demands of the editors of Playboy were a long way from Singer’s literary models of Chekhov, who Singer read in Russian, and Maupassant. Singer’s major literary influence, however, was the 1920 Nobel Laureate, pan-Germanist, Nazi collaborator and great European modernist, Knut Hamsun. 

Singer felt lost in America. Indeed, he titled his memoir, Lost in America. His stories, however, came to dignify the “American Century” (coined by Henry Luce in Life magazine in 1941) with the appearance of high culture. He was one of many dislocated intellectuals from the European, Jewish, and Russian worlds who decorated the bare halls of American Gothic after 1941. This cohort of intellectuals stretched from Hannah Arendt through Hollywood, Henry Kissinger, and onto Zbigniew Brzezinski. Singer shared many of the sentiments of this conservative Cold War emigrant generation that continues to shape the foreign policy mentality of the USA until today.

Their experience of emigration, Holocaust and political persecution left scars on them all, including Singer. Yet he made his stories more individual and humane than grandiose liberal foreign policy ideals. In a 1977 interview, Singer commented that:

every human being, if he is a real, sensitive human being, feels quite isolated. It is only the people with very little individuality who always feel that they belong… Since I believe that the purpose of literature is to stress individuality, I also, unwillingly, stress human lonesomeness.

He also wrote on themes of witchcraft, mystery, and legend. His first novel in the 1930s was set against one of the more shameful massacres in the long history of Jewish persecution which took place on the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including parts of modern-day Ukraine. That historical novel, Satan in Goray, connects to the 2018 winner of the Nobel Prize, the Polish novelist, Olga Tokarczuk. It is set after 1648, the year of the Khmelnitsky massacres, which killed tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews. The story described the Jewish messianic cult led by Sabatai Zvi. The same cult figure appeared in what I regard as the best historical fiction of the twenty-first century, Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. More on that when we get to the 2018 Prize.

1979 Odysseas Elytis (1911–1996) Greece

Odysseas Elytis was a Greek poet, man of letters, essayist, and translator. He is regarded as the definitive exponent of romantic modernism in Greece. His Axion Esti (It Is Truly Meet) is widely seen as a monument of contemporary poetry.

It is an elaboration of the Hymn to Mary used in the Divine Services of the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches.  As such it reflected his deep commitment to develop a modern Hellenic culture rooted in its past. You can read a section of the poem in English translation here. This section from “The Genesis” begins

In the beginning the light And the first hour

When lips still in clay

Try out things of the world

Green blood and bulbs golden in the earth

And the sea, so exquisite in her sleep, spreading

Unbleached gauze of sky

Under the carob trees and the great upright palms

There alone I faced

The world

Wailing loudly

My soul called out for a Signalman and Herald

Axion Esti can be enjoyed in performance. Elytis collaborated with a modern Greek composer, Mikis Theodorakis, to set his poem to music as an oratorio. It is treated as an anthem by many Greeks. It opposes injustice and celebrates resistance to oppression. Yet the poetry and music together are renowned for their beauty. Through the wonders of YouTube you can enjoy the poetry off the page, and the music which elevates it, through this performance in Australia at the Sydney City Recital Hall.

Elytis led a fairly uneventful life. He went into exile in Paris in 1969 to 1972 during the years of the Greek military junta. But other than that small interruption his life was dedicated to literature and the expression of a modernist Hellenism. He sought to create a modernist mythology for the institutions, and rid people's conscience from unjustifiable remorse for the terrors perpetrated in their name during modern times.

You can listen to recitations of his poems in Greek here. The Poetry Foundation has a profile and selection of his poems in English translation to read here.

1980 Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) Poland or Lithuania

The fourth European, non-Anglophone poet in this set of seven Nobel Prizes is the one poet in this post I know well. Of the seven writers in this week’s post, Czesław Miłosz is the only one with whom I feel connected. He searched for home in writing and memory, and not in the nations that laid claim to his cultural identity. 

In a paradox of literary and political history, Miłosz would become the best-known Polish writer to win the Prize, despite his works being banned in Poland for decades after 1950. Yet later Polish nationalists resented his love of his roots in multicultural Lithuania, before German nationalists purged its diversity after 1939. Lithuanians claim Miłosz for their own for good reason. It was the land of his birth and youth. Yet they do not acknowledge his Polish language and resent his return late in life from American exile to Krakow, not Vilnius. Lastly, the Americans claim Miłosz, like some cultural loot, as an American writer, although until 1980 they left this teacher of Slavic literature in an obscure exile in California. With the Prize pinned to Miłosz’s chest, Americans displayed this loot of the Other Europe in the museums of the Free World which they believed the USA had saved.

I vaguely remember reading him in 1980, but memory may be playing tricks with me. I was in my last year of school and Poland was in the upheaval of Solidarity and the strikes led by Lech Walesa in the Gdansk shipyards. These uprisings led in 1981 to the imposition of martial law. But, when the Academy awarded Miłosz the Prize, Solidarity’s pressure had led to some relaxation of censorship in Poland. Miłosz’s books were published there for the first time since his defection in 1950. They have been published there ever since. Streets bear his name.

Already primed by reading Solzhenitsyn and other Russian literature, these events in Eastern Europe on the cusp of my adulthood caused me to read the writers of the Other Europe to free my mind from the captivity of bloc thinking, party lines and naive assumptions about the home of freedom. Ever since I have read Miłosz, and post-war “Second Culture” writers of Eastern Europe and the Russian World, including Herbert, Brodsky, Szymborska, Havel and more. 

Miłosz was a poet of Greater Poland. He wrote in Polish, served as a diplomat of Poland after 1945, and returned from California to live in the beautiful old city of Krakow in his late life. But Miłosz was born in the city now known as Vilnius, in Lithuania. In 1911, it was Wilno or Wilna, then in Imperial Russia. Vilnius was then a multinational, multireligious, multilingual city. Its citizens were Lithuanian, Jewish, Polish, Belorussian, and Russian. Miłosz was attached through personal memory to living well with those differences. Twentieth century nationalism, two world wars, the Holocaust, and the ideological polarisation of the Cold War undid that plurality.

Miłosz testified to how modernity destroyed that plurality. He survived the German occupation of Warsaw during World War II. He wrote poems in 1943 that bore witness to events of the Holocaust. He became a cultural attaché for the Polish government in the USA between 1945 and 1950. When his differences with the communist authorities grew perilous, he defected to France. There he wrote The Captive Mind, which critiqued the partisan, Utopian deceptions of both Soviet and French intellectuals. In 1960, he reluctantly chose exile in the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued his complex encounter with American culture, both attracted by its free individualism and repelled by its “inner sterility” and aggression “channelled into the struggle for money.” As a dislocated European he wondered why Americans believed “their country was the norm to which the rest of humanity should aspire.” He observed, learned from, and chided the counterculture of the sixties and seventies. Its revolutionary slogans, chanted on the streets by crowds, reminded Miłosz of the authorities he had fled. 

In 1980 the Nobel Prize lifted him from exiled obscurity. It coincided with the successes of other Eastern European dissidents who had stayed behind the Iron Curtain. It brought Miłosz transnational fame. Yet he remained humble, generous, gregarious, grounded, and devoted to literature. In 1991 he visited his homeland after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2000, after the first decade of turmoil of post-communist transition, he returned to Poland. There he died in 2004 and was interred in the Skałka Roman Catholic Church cemetery, where many honoured Poles rest. 

Miłosz was primarily a poet. Even in his last years, after he was struck by blindness, he would dictate morning poems to his assistant and sometimes to his caring son. His writing carries traces of many streams of world literature. It reflects on history, morality and how to live a learned, loving life amidst adversity and the delusions of the crowd. Two of his poems are known as among the earliest literary responses to the Holocaust by a non-participant. “Campo dei Fiori” and “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” were written in 1943 from outside the gates of the Warsaw Uprising.

His poems reflect on the history he witnessed. Among my favourites is “Higher Arguments in favour of discipline derived from the speech before the Council of the Universal State in 2068.” It displays Miłosz’s ability to pierce the armour of political speech. It begins:

We call for discipline not expecting applause.

Because we do not need their cheers.

Loyal citizens can enjoy our protection

And we demand nothing in exchange, except obedience.

I would read this poem for consolation during the years of COVID lockdowns. Miłosz had a diction that could connect poetic language, common experience, and historical tragedy. He was a modern poet, deeply influenced by European, Asian, and even American poetic traditions. Yet he was always a poet of a shared language, grounded in humane experience. His poetic persona is not the Romantic or Modernist prophet. It is not Patrick White’s eternal stranger who desires revenge for his exclusion. Miłosz is closer to many Japanese poets in seeking a style of discovery, observation, chance, and imperfection. He expressed this style in “Ars Poetica?” from City without a Name (1969)

I have always aspired to a more spacious form 

that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose

and would let us understand each other without exposing

the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:

a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,

so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out

And stood in the light, lashing his tail.

But Miłosz wrote more than poetry. He wrote prose, in many forms. He wrote novels about his experiences of wartime and Soviet Poland. He wrote memoirs and an autobiography. He wrote essays full of sharp cultural observations, which approached anthropological notes in the manner of Clifford Geertz. For example, his essay collection, Visions from San Francisco Bay, painted the counterculture from his personal encounters in “Hippieland”. He wrote letters, essays and even a few memos, with the eye of a diplomat, that sought to make sense of the alien nation of the USA in which he lived in exile.

His Captive Mind blended all these forms of prose writing. It was written during his exile in France following his defection from Communist Poland. Miłosz disliked how he had been treated as an anti-Communist pariah by the leftist intelligentsia, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Albert Camus, however, supported Miłosz, and encouraged him to write the book. It shares themes with The Rebel. The Captive Mind is a critique of Soviet and all totalitarian intellectual cultures. It is a response by Miłosz not only to the Polish Communists he had fled, but to the French leftist intelligentsia who “placed their hopes on a new world in the East, ruled by a leader of incomparable wisdom and virtue,” as he wrote in the preface. 

Minds can be captured by all styles of absolute doctrine and many promises of progress in the future. Miłosz wrote this celebrated book to explore

the vulnerability of the twentieth-­century mind to seduction by socio-­political doctrines and its readiness to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of a hy­pothetical future.

It presented portraits of Polish intellectuals who deceived themselves with their own ideas. In doing so they compromised truth and compassion to serve unreasonable power. They did so out of a desire for importance, position or just to confirm their belief that they were on the right side of History. The book is not a museum piece on Soviet totalitarianism or the 1950s Western left. We can all see the same mind games today among ideologies and utopias of all flavours.

There was something in Miłosz’s personality, his culture, or even his early experiences of life in a multicultural non-nation of Lithuania that protected him from the ideological partisans of History. He was open to the world and sought to respond to it with responsible care, as only he could and in the art form that was his refuge from the many disasters of the twentieth century. 

This personality came through in his support for other writers, his friendships, his translations of poets in many cultures and his anthologies. A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry (1996), edited and introduced by Miłosz, is one of my most treasured possessions in the Burning Archive. He gathered there not the Western canon, modernist schools, favoured doctrines or the latest fashions, but 

poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable, and to use a compromised term, realist, that is loyal towards reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. Thus, they undermine the widely held opinion that poetry is a misty domain eluding understanding.

A Book of Luminous Things: an International Anthology of Poetry (1996), p. xv

Miłosz’s true home was not any nationality, ideological bloc, misty future, new continent, or past civilization. His home was writing and literature itself. In a late piece of poetic prose, he wrote of his long wandering to return to that home.

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for forms, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.

You can read more about Miłosz in many books, including Eva Hoffman, On Czeslaw Miłosz : Visions from the Other Europe (2023), which I have used for some of this material, and at this Polish culture website. 

1981 Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Europe

Elias Canetti was a German-language writer yet allocating him a nationality is not a simple act. I have nominated his identity as European. His story reveals the growing split in the 1970s between Europe and the hubristic USA. North America believed it had “saved” Europe in World War Two to take the leadership of the Western world. Europe knew the story was different.

The twists of his life story show his transnational identity. Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria to a Sephardic Jewish family. They moved to Manchester, England, but his father died in 1912. Canetti’s mother took Elias and his brothers back to continental Europe. They settled in Vienna. They left the empire of shopkeepers to return to the great multinational Austro-Hungarian empire, so brilliantly portrayed at exactly this time in Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities. World War One and Woodrow Wilson’s principles of ethnic self-determination broke that proud hegemon into national pieces. In the 1930s, he wrote his early renowned modernist novel Auto-da-Fé (1935) in the capital of Mitteleuropa. He fled after the Anschluss in 1938, when the German national socialists made their claim for the new nations of the Habsburg empire. In Britain he joined other continental émigré intellectuals, such as Isaiah Berlin. In 1952, when the Cold War heated up, he became or was granted citizenship of Britain. But in the early 1970s, as détente and Ostpolitik reconnected family, cultural and diplomatic bonds between the governments and people of Central Europe, Canetti returned to his spiritual home. He lived in Zurich from the mid-1970s to his death two decades later, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

His writing crossed as many genres as his passport crossed national borders. He was a novelist, playwright, memoirist, and nonfiction writer. His memoirs are the highly reputed trilogy: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, and The Play of the Eyes. They recall his childhood and cultural life in Vienna in the early twentieth century. The Austro-Hungarian empire may seem a lost cause of no interest today. But when I recently read Musil, The Man without Qualities, I was struck by the affinities of this world, fixated on reasserting its greatness, with the North American empire of our own era.

I know Canetti principally for his work, Crowds and Power, a psychological study of crowd behaviour, ranging from mob violence to religious congregations. It was, of course, a response to the history Canetti and central Europe suffered in the twentieth century; but that was not unique to them. When I was at university this book was everywhere; and I assumed I would have no trouble borrowing a copy from the public library. But Canetti’s star has faded, and the book is nowhere to be found. It is a pity; I may yet return to Canetti’s reflections on the psychology of crowd behaviour to reflect on the experiences the world has shared since 2020.

I did recover, however, one quotation from the book that expressed a recurrent truth about the rhetoric of wars and politics.

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

― Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Canetti’s book was in the European tradition of essays that span boundaries of discipline, genre, and language. It adopts a pose of explaining humanity’s recurrent “mass delusions,” persecutions, wars, communal enthusiasms, and mob violence to an intelligent visitor, who had encountered the behaviour for the first time. I belong to this European tradition, and I admire it. I write that way too, even if dislocated in an outer province of the American Empire in the deep south of the Pacific.

But academic America, which so embraced Saul Bellow, did not like the mongrel intellectuality of the central European tradition. In my search for the full text of the book I came across the 1963 review of Crowds and Power in the New York Review of Books. Titled “History on the Couch”, it began with a remarkable flex of imperial intellectual vanity.

Sooner or later, Europe was bound to break the American monopoly in the manufacture of new social theories and facts. Since the war, the study of society has become an American industry, and though the sociologists have naturally been the biggest producers, a few historians, some glossy journalists, and a number of freelance thinkers have also made their contribution to the national effort. There were of course some solid works, but most of the new studies were little more than progress reports on the growth of American society.

Brzezinski and Kissinger may have been defining the foreign policy of the empire in denial. But no European was going to tell an American how to think about society, let alone how to implement the rudimentary institutions of a welfare state. Unsurprisingly then, the reviewer did not like the book. He compared it to that accursed part of literary culture, in the mind of plain-speaking, pragmatic, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans.

In this sense, he has written a poem. The trouble, however, is that it is a bad poem, far too long, cluttered up with home-made jargon, and much too pretentious.

Thankfully, the Swedish Academy had a better appreciation of the contribution of European literary traditions and the patterns of central European thought in which Canetti wrote. 

Over six years to 1980, they had chosen two Americans formed by emigrant European cultures, and four great poets from outside the Anglophone world. The European-American split grew further with the choice of Canetti in 1981. It was this year, after all, that the American crowds had invested with the power of the Presidency a B-grade Hollywood actor who ranted about the evil empire and turned complex social facts into saccharine moral fables. Europe reasserted its cultural leadership of the Western world. It had freed its captive mind.

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Nobel Laureates YouTube Archival Footage Links

Writers Uncensored: Czeslaw Milosz: The Sweep of Time (1991)

Wilna Project

Elias Canetti - ein Porträt in Dokumenten (1994)

VICENTE ALEIXANDRE

Odysseas Elytis: on Europe and what it means being Greek

Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish Speech at a dinner celebrating his Nobel Prize in Stockholm 1978

A memory of Isaac Bashevis Singer with Dvorah Menashe in 1977, New York

Saul Bellow. The World of the dangling man.

Eugenio Montale (Archives du XXème siècle, 1971)

Intervista ad Eugenio Montale (1966)