7 - Portraits

Summary

Veza on Canetti

IT WAS CANETTI'S MOST PERSISTENT CRITIC who first suggested in a review of Yellow Street that “Knut Tell, Poet” was a satirical portrait of the author's future husband. Being reminded of his first wife's gentle satire reportedly upset him. What the reviewer could not know was that Tell appears two more times in Veza's writings, in a short story entitled “Lost Property” (“Der Fund”) which first appeared in the Arbeiter-Zeitung in April 1933, and in The Tiger, which makes him her single most enduring character. What is striking in the context of the Canettis' literary marriage is that by the time of her second play Veza's attitude towards him changes dramatically. He is transformed from a well-meaning and mildly ridiculous figure to the upholder of artistic integrity in the face of commercial philistinism and worse.

Veza's literary characters often corresponded closely with people she knew. Canetti's benefactor, the Straßburg journalist Jean Hoepffner, features in one unpublished story as “Herr Hoe,” which was their nickname for him. In her letters to Georg, Veza tells him that he appears as “the young doctor” in The Ogre (August 1946; BG:221) and that she has written a number of other plays or stories about people in her life. “The Tiger,” for instance, “tells the story of your cousin Mathilde” (16 December 1933; BG:14) and her accounts of the real-life Mr. and Mrs. Milburn and the fictional couple in “Toogoods or the Light” are as good as identical.