The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband (review)

Veza Canetti's writings were first published in the 1930s and were all but forgotten until her husband, the Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti (1905–1994, Nobel Prize, 1981) released them in 1991, thirty-seven years after her death. Since then, her literary importance has been increasingly recognized and appreciated as one of the most significant female voices of Vienna during Austria's "Systemzeit" in the 1930s.

Veza Canetti was born as Venetia Taubner-Calderon in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and lived as an assimilated Jew in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's second district. In 1934, she married the seven-year younger Elias Canetti, who shared with her his Sephardic Jewish heritage. Between 1933 and 1938, she wrote extensively and published her work in the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The Canettis barely escaped the Anschluß in 1938. They fled to England, where Veza died in 1963. Veza Canetti was an unrivaled observer of the life of the disenfranchised in the Austro-fascist Vienna of the 1930s. Her oeuvre that survived nearly four decades of destruction, silence, and neglect consists of two novels, three plays, and several short stories.

Julian Preece is well known in the Canetti-research circles. He is the coeditor of a volume on Elias Canetti and has contributed several chapters on Canetti's work to scholarly essay collections. In 2006, Ariadne Press published "The Viennese Short Stories," which are Preece's translations of some of Veza Canetti's writings. Already in 1995, Preece published in Modern Austrian Literature the article entitled "The Re-Discovered Writings of Veza Magd-Canetti: On the Psychology of Subservience." The monograph that is under review here bears essentially the same title, yet its subtitle reads "Out of the Shadows of a Husband." In his introduction to his book The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti, Preece explains that he is strictly interested in what he calls the "literary marriage" between Elias and his wife Veza, their "private drama played out against the backdrop of European history and cultural politics." It is his intention to tell "the story of this literary collaboration and the conflict, hurt, revenge, reconciliation, renewed partnership, and finally, shared obscurity in exile" (p. 8), and he rejects the notion supported by several distinguished contemporary Austrian and German writers and scholars that Veza's "more famous and longer lived husband stifled her literary ambitions" (p. 33). Lastly, Preece deems the Nobel Laureate's claim believable that his wife chose the pseudonym "Veza Magd" (Magd means "maid"; she also used the pseudonyms Veronika Knecht and Martha or Martina Murner) not because she felt that she had to serve him but rather "to 'serve' the people she wrote about" (p. 33).

Preece's book is divided into eight chapters in which the author describes and discusses, analyzes, and interprets Veza Canetti's youth and the early years of the Canetti marriage when Veza successfully wrote for various journals of the Socialist Left in "Shared Beginnings" and "Worker's Writer: Veza at the Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1932–33," the difficult and terrifying time in Vienna before the couple's traumatic escape to England in 1938 in "Writing under Cover, 1934–38." In the chapter "Rivalry and Partnership," Preece describes the years in England where Veza wrote her novel The Tortoises in 1939 but could no longer find an audience for her work, a state of affairs that induced her to destroy most of her writings in 1956. The chapter "What's in a Name: On Maids" deals with the names Veza Canetti gave her protagonists and with her choice of pseudonyms, particularly with "Magd." In the chapter entitled "Portraits," the author discusses the fact that "Veza's literary characters often correspond closely with people who she knew" (p. 115), including her husband Elias who is portrayed in three of her works. Preece states that Veza's attitude toward Elias alias Knut Tell changed from tease and satire in Yellow Street...