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Canetti, Elias--Benedikt, Friedl (``Anna Sebastian''). Typescript in English of her novel ``The Monster'', an excoriating fictional portait of her lover elias canetti, apparently with manuscript corrections in Iris Murdoch's hand
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Description
the typescript, a mixture of carbon copy and top copy, divided into Part I (pp.1--57), Part II (pp.58-121), Part III (pp.122--180) and Part IV (pp.181--250), occasional corrections in blue ink (? in Iris Murdoch's hand) chiefly to spellings and punctuation, but including the alteration of the character ``Mrs. Smelly'' to ``Mrs Rose'' throughout, some other corrections apparently in another hand in pencil, c.250 pages, on white and yellow paper, 4to, partially gathered together with paperclips and fasteners, [c.1940s], some slight wear and soling, some minor tears to edges of some leaves, a few paperclip rust stains This lot contains 1 item(s).
Catalogue Note
The novelists Friedl Benedikt and Iris Murdoch both experienced passionate affairs with the celebrated thinker and writer Elias Canetti (1905--1994), both were colossally influenced by his thought and persona, and both drew fictional portraits of him in their novels, as well as dedicating them to him. This is the typescript for Friedl's surreal novel published as The Monster in 1944 (under the nom de plume Anna Sebastian), with its eponymous hero (a direct portrayal of Canetti) the insolent vacuum-cleaner salesman Jonathan Crisp, ``a contemptuous, demonic Lord of the Universe and of misrule...rent-racketeer, voyeur, ingenious solicitor of confidences, rapist, freeloader, liar, Casanova, Svengali...Sex is part of his will to power. Though intensely promiscuous, his attractiveness is a `given', never explained. He slowly amasses a crowd of bourgeois and workers as his slaves...Friedl confessed to Canetti, weeping, that Crisp was him. When Canetti told Iris of this, in May 1953, he quoted to her from The Monster: `Down on your knees, Kate!' laughing at her as he did so...Friedl wrote in 1944 to her parents in Sweden that The Monster was an attempt to show how Hitlers are made'' (Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life).
The present typescript contains a number of differences from the published text of the novel, indicating that further revisions and amendments were made at proof stage. For instance the surname of the couple ``Mr and Mrs Rose'' is changed again in the printed text to ``Mr and Mrs Neal'', and the final line in the typescript version ``She prayed a wild prayer to him'' is omitted. The corrections in pencil appear to have been incorporated.
Benedikt Friedl (1916--1953), the second daughter of Ernst Martin Benedikt, owner of the Neue Freie Presses and painter, had pursued Canetti to London in 1939 from Vienna, having fallen in love with him after the publication of the author's celebrated novel Die Blendung (later translated into English and published as Auto-da-Fé). Like Murdoch later, she became his mistress: ``My life and his are bound together for ever, he taught me to write and to live and has been good to me'' (quoted by Conradi, op.cit., p.348). The shaman-like and wildly possessive Canetti attracted a variety of apostles and embarked on a simultaneous series of intense love affairs, in addition to his marriage to the writer Venetiana Taubner-Calderon. Murdoch and Friedl were two of the most important. Physically they were very similar, and there seems to have been an unusually large degree of identification by Murdoch with the role previously played by Friedl, especially when Friedl lay dying in Paris in 1953: ``identifying with Canetti's dying ex-lover, whom Iris physically resembled, was one way of attenuating the guilt involved in `betraying' her own dead lover, Franz. Canetti methodically assisted this identification...Friedl was the leitmotiv of their love throughout 1953 and 1954'' (Peter Conradi, op.cit.).
All three of Friedl Benedikt's published novels, which were admired by Angus Wilson, were dedicated to Canetti. Apart from The Monster, they are Let thy Moon Rise (also published in 1944), and The Dreams (1950, dedicated to ``dem Dichter Elias Canetti, meinem grosser Meister''). All were published by Jonathan Cape.
The present typescript contains a number of differences from the published text of the novel, indicating that further revisions and amendments were made at proof stage. For instance the surname of the couple ``Mr and Mrs Rose'' is changed again in the printed text to ``Mr and Mrs Neal'', and the final line in the typescript version ``She prayed a wild prayer to him'' is omitted. The corrections in pencil appear to have been incorporated.
Benedikt Friedl (1916--1953), the second daughter of Ernst Martin Benedikt, owner of the Neue Freie Presses and painter, had pursued Canetti to London in 1939 from Vienna, having fallen in love with him after the publication of the author's celebrated novel Die Blendung (later translated into English and published as Auto-da-Fé). Like Murdoch later, she became his mistress: ``My life and his are bound together for ever, he taught me to write and to live and has been good to me'' (quoted by Conradi, op.cit., p.348). The shaman-like and wildly possessive Canetti attracted a variety of apostles and embarked on a simultaneous series of intense love affairs, in addition to his marriage to the writer Venetiana Taubner-Calderon. Murdoch and Friedl were two of the most important. Physically they were very similar, and there seems to have been an unusually large degree of identification by Murdoch with the role previously played by Friedl, especially when Friedl lay dying in Paris in 1953: ``identifying with Canetti's dying ex-lover, whom Iris physically resembled, was one way of attenuating the guilt involved in `betraying' her own dead lover, Franz. Canetti methodically assisted this identification...Friedl was the leitmotiv of their love throughout 1953 and 1954'' (Peter Conradi, op.cit.).
All three of Friedl Benedikt's published novels, which were admired by Angus Wilson, were dedicated to Canetti. Apart from The Monster, they are Let thy Moon Rise (also published in 1944), and The Dreams (1950, dedicated to ``dem Dichter Elias Canetti, meinem grosser Meister''). All were published by Jonathan Cape.