Wales in Central Europe: Elias Canetti’s Encounters with Raymond Williams, Dylan Thomas and Idris Parry

This article evaluates the interactions between Elias Canetti, the most original writer of German to flee Hitler for the UK (Nobel Laureate in 1981), and three mid-century Welshmen, the poet Dylan Thomas, the Marxist intellectual Raymond Williams, and the academic Idris Parry. Reproducing for the first time a pen portrait of Thomas contained in Canetti’s unpublished notebooks, it shows how the polyglot political refugee from multi-ethnic South-Eastern Europe in part recognised his own marginalisation in Thomas’ outsider status in literary London. It compares this encounter with the way that Williams championed Canetti’s novel Auto da Fé for its unflinching dissection of cultural collapse, which contrasted with the complacency that Williams identified in contemporary English fiction. Canetti’s friendship with Parry, who interpreted Canetti’s writings for Anglophone readers, demonstrates once again his appreciation of Welsh cultural and linguistic distinctiveness which is now documented in Canetti’s recently published Briefe (2018, Letters). Each encounter was ultimately unsatisfactory either because of misapprehensions of Canetti’s oeuvre or his own ambiguous attitude to his country of exile. The three sets of sources show too how the literary history of Wales, like that surely of most nations, has international dimensions and is sometimes written in languages other than those spoken here.