Here in London the horrific attacks on the Underground on July 7 and 21 have inevitably revived memories of the Blitz. This time, however, the bombs are not dropping from the sky but exploding deep underground or on double-decker buses, and those who wield them are not Luftwaffe pilots but native-born murderers, British in all but ideology. Under the circumstances, Elias Canetti’s posthumously published memoir of his 40 years in England, which has just appeared, has taken on unexpected urgency. Canetti and his wife Veza lived through the Blitz in Hampstead; his descriptions ripple with weird premonitory echoes of the present moment.

“Party in the Blitz” (New Directions, 266 pages, $22.95), the fourth, unfinished segment of his great autobiography, possesses an immediacy due as much to its rather ragged state, compounded as it is of diary jottings, character sketches, and drafts of chapters, as to the events it evokes. The translation of the original, which appeared in 2003, has been carried out with wit and delicacy by the poet Michael Hofmann, easily the finest translator from Germany now active, and it is accompanied by a superb introduction by Jeremy Adler, the leading scholar of 20th-century German exile literature.

Published to mark the centenary of Canetti’s birth in 1905, “Party in the Blitz” is a puzzling book, repellent and mesmerizing in almost equal measure. I read the German original when it first appeared and felt that certain chapters, especially Canetti’s brutal chapter on Iris Murdoch, should never have been published; I feel this even more strongly now in reading the English version. But I can’t really claim dispassion. Canetti’s writings, over some 30 years now, have provoked, inspired, consoled, and needled me to such an extent that for long intervals I simply had to refrain from reading him at all.

Sometimes an author touches us so deeply that he or she becomes a secret tutelary spirit to whom we turn, as if by instinct, at difficult moments. We might not share any obvious affinity with the author; in fact, we may be, and often are, poles apart. Yet through the insinuation of a style or the cadence of a thought, “our” author becomes part of that interior colloquy of disparate voices we carry around inside our heads. Such was the effect Canetti’s writings have had on me since I first encountered his work in the early 1970s.

This sort of symbiosis isn’t invariably pleasant. After all, who wants a bossy, know-it-all like Canetti butting in during some furious internal debate? My own “Canetti voice” displays a smug assumption of authority, and I resist it with all the strength I possess. But this, too, forms part of the importance of such internalized influences: They live robustly enough inside us to be struggled with. Our opposition to them is as crucial to us as any guidance they might offer.

Everyone will have a different list of such seraphic parasites, lodged in the crevices of our consciousness like sand fleas in shifting dunes. In my own case, these indwelling voices have a pronounced moralistic bent; I’m more likely to hear myself exhorted or chided by Thoreau or Emerson, for example, than by Poe or Melville (though all have infested me since childhood). The moralist, by design, comes armed with burrs; his thoughts are self-adhesive and they stick.

Canetti is a moralist of a bizarre stripe. His great theme is power – metaphysical as well as political – in all its dimensions and ramifications. “Crowds and Power,” his magnum opus of 1960, is a relentless, rather mad, dissection of power in categories of Canetti’s own devising. To complete it he renounced his earlier literary projects (not only his plays but a 10-volume series of novels, of which only the first, “Die Blendung,” published in 1935 in German and in 1945 in English under the title “Auto-da-Fe,” was ever written). It is one of those anomalous works that irritates as much as it impresses; though I haven’t reread it for many years, its insights and formulations come back unbidden to haunt me and ring ever truer.

Canetti begins “Party in the Blitz” with the statement: “I am confused about England,” and this sets the tone for what follows. He felt unbounded admiration for English aplomb during the Blitz, but he didn’t much like the English. This dislike in large part arose from his obscurity as a writer in England; resentment, envy, and sheer rage at his neglect are much in evidence in these pages. But he also detested English coldness of feeling, what he terms “impotence of emotion.” Some of his funniest, and most telling, pages here are devoted to English party life during the Blitz. Conversations continued blithely as dogfights raged in the skies or as bombs detonated in gardens, and no one deigned to be ruffled.

Canetti found this sangfroid utterly admirable, but what went on in the parties themselves left him baffled, bemused, and outraged. English literary parties of the time were weird impersonal gatherings, the perverse principle of which entailed withholding as much of one’s inner (and outer) self as possible. Canetti coins a phrase for this, which is as witty as it is untranslatable; he calls such parties “Nichtberuhrungsfeste.” Mr. Hofmann renders this as “ritualized celebrations of non-contact,” which is accurate but lacks the punch of the German. The point is that at these parties the chief pleasure lies in the avoidance of touch, not only of self to self but of skin to skin, and the phrase stings because of its mischievous, pseudo-anthropological formulation. (I’ve racked my brains for several days over this but can’t do better than Mr. Hofmann: “fleshless revels,” “prophylactic parties,” “no-touchy-no-feely festivals” don’t quite catch it either.)

Canetti himself was anything but cool or untouchable. These pages brim with palpable affection as well as passionate rage. His hatred of T.S. Eliot, for example, borders on the demented. In Eliot, the outsider who succeeded in becoming the consummate English insider, Canetti saw nothing but a malignant desiccation, the culminating rot of all he most detested in England. That Canetti’s loathing of Eliot was nourished by his own sense of exclusion adds a certain inadvertent piquancy to his tirades. By contrast, his vivid sketches of Arthur Waley or Ralph Vaughan Williams or Bertrand Russell – was there anyone of significance Canetti didn’t know? – bring those figures to startled life and they almost seem to breathe again in his depictions.

Eliot apart, Canetti is harshest on those he once loved. The portrait of his friend Franz Baermann Steiner, a brilliant anthropologist and great German poet (whose work is only now receiving just recognition), is the most curious melange of malice and affection I’ve ever read. But Murdoch, to whom Steiner became engaged in the last painful year of his life, receives a drubbing more savage than Canetti ever lavished in his essays on the likes of Hitler or Albert Speer. She and Canetti were lovers, and there is something of the spite of the disillusioned paramour in these appalling pages. But her chief offense seems to have been, as in the case of Eliot, her success. Canetti spares her, and us, nothing in this account, which even describes Murdoch’s sexual clumsiness in graphic detail.

I’m no fan of Iris Murdoch, whose novels I find unreadable, but this is a despicable chapter; no gentleman, either English or of the Confucian type Canetti so admired, would have wanted it made public. Clearly Canetti wrote it to get Murdoch out of his system; I doubt he would have included it in the finished memoir. Now, however, whenever Canetti injects his meddling moralizing into my interior colloquies, I have only to whisper the name “Iris Murdoch” and he shuts up.

I don’t know if the English are still as Canetti described them. I suspect they’ve become as touchy-feely as the rest of us. But I do hope that their fabled unflappability survives. Canetti’s memoir, flawed and fragmentary as it is, of the years when England “stood alone” against murderous fanatics, is all the more powerful for exposing their individual foibles while extolling their cool collective gallantry.