Remembering Places: A Memoir

Joseph Rykwert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315278278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Born in Warsaw in 1926, Joseph Rykwert is one of the best-known critics and historians of architecture. One of very few writers to be awarded the RIBA's highest honour, the Royal Gold Medal, in 2014, and author of countless books and essays, his influence over the past 60 years cannot be underestimated. In this memoir he tells for the first time of how his life's experiences shaped his working life. He addresses the dualities between which he had to navigate: Jewish/Polish, Polish/British and later, Practice/Scholarship. He spent most of his working life between the US and UK and worked both as a designer and a writer; as such his ground-breaking ideas and work have had a major impact on the thinking of architects and designers since the 1960s and continue to do so to this day.

Student Movement House

Being strictly professional, the AA School was not coupled to any other academy – so could offer little intellectual nourishment or variety. A remedy soon offered itself. A fellow student took me along to Student Movement House (known by its acronym, SMH) in Gower Street, half a mile north of the AA. Two brick terrace houses knocked together. There was a basement café to provide soup, cups of tea and sandwiches, and there was a large public room on the first floor, scattered with well-worn leatherette furniture, its walls an unmemorable grey, no pictures that I can recall. Qualification for entry was minimal – being either a graduate of, or student at, any academic institute. This drab setting turned out to shelter lively, almost exotic social activity.

An offshoot of the (Evangelical) Student Christian Movement, it was neither confessional nor missionary, and was by then run by a kindly but very strong-minded woman, the Eton-cropped and brisk Mary Trevelyan, a kinswoman of the Cambridge historian whom I mentioned earlier, and a friend of T.S. Eliot, whom she would occasionally inveigle to do a poetry reading. Having decided to take charge of me, she encouraged me to leave home, where tensions with my mother were making both of us edgy and miserable. She also introduced me to a respectable-seeming, but unalluring, ungainly figure – tubby, moustachioed, bespectacled, in an overlong gabardine waterproof and carrying a well-worn attaché case – Dr (always Dr) Elias Canetti. She obviously considered him a suitable mentor.

Within minutes, I realized how completely misleading those words I had used in summing up my first impression to myself, ‘tubby’ and ‘moustachioed’, were. If stocky, his muscles were knotted bundles of energy (like those of Rodin’s Balzac) and the moustache a bristle of alarming tentacles, while the thick mane through which he frequently ran his right hand I came to see as a leonine emanation. There was his English, too: his appearance, apparel, his manner all marked him as even more foreign than myself, yet his English was idiomatic and elastic, an undefinable foreign note sounding more in his articulation than in the accent. The power he exuded and exercised over me has been witnessed by many others – and power was his primary concern. The manipulative skill with which he used it echoed that of his friend Mary Trevelyan. I had an obscure sense of being an object in their hands.

He had no time for small talk. The first questions were brutally direct.

You want to be an architect. Whyever? What could interest you about it?

Architecture as communication. The building as a symbol (Lethaby was coming in handy).

Canetti could see that. Had I read any anthropology? Frazer, yes; but I was uneasy with his notion of magic as a proto-religion.

Very well. Had I read van Gennep? And Mauss? And, above all, Durkheim?

No. Then I should do so at once.

What I found startling in our early meetings was not so much the bibliographic urgency, but the sense that this earnest, astute and monstrously learned man was taking my jejune, 18-year-old ideas seriously. That strange humility of his, the ability to pay attention to (and so enthral) anyone at all was almost perverse in someone wholly obsessed with his own fame – or rather lack of it – in the alien English intellectual climate of the time. Inevitably, we talked of other writers: when I once ventured to mention my admiration for Brecht, he opined that Brecht was the better poet, though he, Canetti, was a better playwright …

In the years to come, I would discuss my ideas about architecture with him in a way even my closest friends at the AA would not have found congenial, and they were churned over in one-to-one meetings. He would take me out to dinner in a cheap but decent German restaurant in Charlotte Street, Schmidt’s, where he would nourish and quiz me. I did not then know that this was a sacrifice – that he lived on handouts himself and cash was short. Nor did I realize until our conversations had got more complex that my half-formed interest in symbol was a tributary to his much grander concern with the symbolism that attends human gatherings (crowds, packs, mobs, armies – but also more restricted ones like juries and parliaments) and the dynamic of group emblems. He was then working on Masse und Macht, which would appear in 1960 in German; an English translation – Crowds and Power – followed in 1962. He regarded the book as his masterpiece. Though barely noticed at the time, it was republished as a Penguin Twentieth Century Classic in 1992.

I got hold of his one published novel, Die Blendung (Auto da Fé in English – the translation was done by the distinguished historian C.V. Wedgwood, about whom he was not gracious in his own memoir) and was overpowered by the account of a learned sinophile Peter Kien, seduced by his housekeeper’s unctuous reverence for his books to marry her – and the wreckage of his life, which resulted in suicide by his burning himself on the pyre of his library. Once I recommended it to a young woman (thinking that we were out of his hearing), but he did overhear me, and taking me aside chided me: I was not to recommend the book to nice girls. He had written it, he said, to punish his readers.

Occasionally, he would instruct me to arrange a meeting by telephone. The call would follow an invariable routine.

Yes!

A woman’s angry voice would rasp.

May I speak to Dr Canetti?

Who’s that?

Another rasp.

Joseph Rykwert.

At a familiar name, the voice would soften.

Ah yes, Mr Rykwert. If you call tomorrow at 9.37, Dr Canetti may be in.

Now that the erratic ways of the Canetti household of that time have become public property – through a biography, and Canetti’s own, not always dignified memoir, Mrs Canetti, Veneziana Tauber-Calderon (known as Veza) has also been acknowledged; she published a number of books under pen names, as well as the translation of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory – and is now seen as an important writer who sacrificed her own work to help with the completion of Crowds and Power (which she regarded as a masterpiece, not just Elias’, but an absolute one) – so anger and resentment at an intrusion have become comprehensible. I would not know until some time later that there was another Canetti household, with the expressionist painter Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (a pupil of Max Beckman). I was then a relatively innocent 18- to 19-year-old, and that fierce response and the insistence on the precise minute of my call just seemed like another kind of initiation rite.

About the same time, I met another familiar of Canetti’s, the diminutive Oxford anthropologist Franz Baerman Steiner, who worked in the Oxford Institute of Anthropology, where he taught a generation of English students. He was a prolific poet (and the greatest German poet since Walter von der Vogelweide, Canetti once told me firmly); but virtually nothing was published in his lifetime. In 1952, as he was correcting the proof of a collection of his poems, he was told that the publisher had gone bankrupt and the type would be distributed; he had a heart attack the next day.

Through him, I also met his English landlords (he had a pied-à-terre in their Hampstead flat, which he occupied until his death), large, blond (but stymied by a dislocated hip) Eithne Wilkins (who would much later – in 1969 – publish a strange and lovely book on prayer beads, The Rose Garden Game) – and stocky, curly-haired Georg Kaiser, who were then engaged in the heroic enterprise of translating Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften, and who also became my friends. It was the Kaisers who made me realize that my treatment by Veza Canetti was ‘not personal’. It so happened that they had come into possession of a recent book that Canetti desired (and which they later translated as ‘The Millennial Kingdom’), Das Tausendjährige Reich by Wilhelm Fränger, a ‘gnostic’ interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch. Veza telephoned. Yes, of course they would lend the book.

Why don’t you come round tomorrow about 11, I will make some coffee and give you the book

said kindly Eithne.

I don’t want your coffee, I want the book!

When I wrote that Canetti ‘desired’ a book, I was perhaps understating. He conveyed the sense that select books were inexorably his – magically so. Some years later, he came into the room in which I worked and saw on my table two books I had found on a bookstall the day before. One was a collection of Indian folktales called, I think, Tales My Amah Told Me; the other was a literal translation of – a crib to – the writings of the Emperor Julian. His wanting them exuded from him as a blatant and viscous desire that seemed almost tangible, as enveloping and threatening as any tentacles of ectoplasm emanating from a Victorian medium. Those books were no longer mine. I handed them over.

Franz Steiner was quite different. Canetti describes him as physically very ugly in his memoir – but I do not remember him that way. He was too gentle, too withdrawn to be anything as obtrusive as ‘ugly’.¹⁶ He and Canetti would use Student Movement House as their private reception room – not as a club – and could be seen there from time to time in intense conversation, which was like a symbiosis into which others would sometimes be pulled. The attaché cases might be opened to show some book one or the other had just found, or which he was reading, usually some collection of legends or myths. The passionate devotion to the multiformity and inexhaustible richness of myth united them. To me, they formed almost a single person on those occasions, though I did have more intimate conversations with Steiner at other times, when he would talk about the Junoesque (his word) girl he loved in Oxford (called Iris Murdoch, as I later learned). Yet, it was Canetti, the Enchanter (Iris used the soubriquet as the title of her novel, which she dedicated to him), who dominated my life, as he did that of several other people.

For all Canetti’s benevolence and repeated kindnesses, a cloud hung over our relation – his barely contained, lava-like, consuming anger at the world, at his place in it, at the lack of recognition. But above all, at the ever-present foreknowledge of his death. ‘I hate death’, he remarked to me once with a shudder, but familiarly, as one might say ‘I can’t stand that woman’.

Although I was lucky to escape its blows, I was once the innocent cause of his anger erupting. It happened at a Hampstead party where he was ensconced in an armchair while I was having a mild bicker with the sculptor William Turnbull (whom he regarded as his protégé) in another part of the large room, and who answered some comment of mine with:

Don’t talk like a Central European intellectual, Joseph!

His remark fell into a moment of silence such as may sometimes occur in a crowded room. Canetti heard it. He gripped the arms of his chair and spoke with cold fury:

What did you say? What did you say? How dare you use that expression in my presence!

The sculptor and I both panicked, as we and other guests tried to pacify him:

We were only joking, it was just a casual remark …

But he would only repeat with mounting fury, as if uttering a curse:

How dare you! How dare you! How dare you!

until the wretched Turnbull had no alternative but to say:

I suppose I had better go,

which Canetti answered:

Yes. You had better go. And you had better not come back!

After which the room emptied gradually, almost furtively. ‘The godmonster of Hampstead’, the incisive and polyglot critic John Bayley (Iris Murdoch’s husband and memorialist) so rightly called him.

The essential lenitive for Canetti’s probing was provided by another figure who entered my life then, Franz Elkisch, a psychoanalyst who refused the label of a school, though I suppose he was primarily a Jungian. I remember him saying of a dream of mine:

You can see how a Freudian would look at it; but perhaps there is another way …

His English was more accented than Canetti’s, but equally idiomatic as his method demanded. I once recounted a puzzling but vivid dream (still vivid, 60 years later) of little white-smocked dark men (Indians?) bustling about a wounded me in a basement laundry room. Lifting a lump of rusty metal off my back, they dabbed the wound with scarlet Mercurochrome (a heavily tinted disinfectant very popular in Latin countries). At my anxiety about septicaemia, they reassured me that there was no such danger. Elkisch found it funny, and I was mildly miffed.

But don’t you see what they were doing?

he asked.

They were taking a chip off your shoulder …

Not the tone in which an analyst should talk to a patient, to be sure. And if I did start as a patient, our relation shifted after two or three years when he said that I could manage on my own (that also is hardly orthodox analytical talk), but if I was interested, we could continue to meet. I was very interested indeed. We therefore continued to talk round analytical and other psychological matter...