"He spoke in roughly the style in which Horace Walpole wrote his letters."

- Elias Canetti on Bertrand Russell

The most extraordinary feeling left after reading Party in the Blitz is this rekindling of the necessity to reflect on how to approach and reconstitute the past and especially past lives and social settings. What constitutes an historical fact versus what constitutes a narrative better dissected by an etnographer? Is historical truth verifiable or should we look to the past as a narrative with several narrators and points of view? You wouldn't expect a highbrow gossip based memoir to raise such philosophical questions. Just as Aubrey's sketches are deemed historically inaccurate, so Canetti's unreliable memoir is full of factual mistakes which certainly have disappointed biographers looking for new angles on their subjects.

Canetti, when in doubt about a particular claim, acknowledges he didn't research the accuracy of his statements but seems to nudge the reader into believing that, somehow, the memoir will be closer to the truth this way. At least closer to Canetti's truth who was not writing biographies of people he met but documenting what he remembered of them and what he heard others say about them. His impressions are a more faithful image of the zeitgeist of an era than if he had picked up the Oxford Dictionary of Biography to edit the text. Bertrand Russell's fame for otherworldliness is well illustrated by Canetti's description of how the philosopher chose to forego the title of Duke of Bedford and how he also spent six months in prison during World War I for being a pacifist, for example. It's the merging of rumor, fact and personal opinion that turns Party in the Blitz into a window into Canetti's venturings into the London salons, so to speak.

A considerable portion of the chapters have a feeling of ephemera; those are the ones about the minor celebrities who will never get a volume of their own biography published and yet deserve a - as a rule very opinionated - few lines like a play which has been performed only once and all there's left of it is a short, damning review in the morning paper.

Some of the more memorable characters - for they become characters with a sweep of an indirect autofictional broom - are the very sociable Mrs. Phillimore to whom Canetti attributed the writing of a best-seller but failed to name the right title for it; Geoffrey Pyke, the inventor, whose depression Canetti heard was caused by a terrible romantic experience; Lord David Stewart and his cross-dressing butler. And then there's Iris Murdoch and her chapter written in bile - "Everything I despise in English life is in her" -, herself reduced to a successful literary poser. Lover's, professional resentment or both: we'll never know.