Elias Canetti, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood

Written by Nina Follows

An alluringly titled, forty-year-old volume lent to me by a charming stranger at a party, I found myself rather in thrall to Elias Canetti’s The Tongue Set Free before I even opened it. Once I did, the enchantment only intensified.

A German-language writer born in Bulgaria at the start of the century to a Sephardic Jewish family, Canetti (1905-1994) is perhaps best known for his 1960 non-fiction work, Crowds and Power — though he won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature for his extensive œuvre ‘marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power.’ The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood (1977), described by Der Spiegel as ‘one of German literature’s most beautiful childhood tales,’ is his autobiographical trilogy’s first instalment, tracing Canetti’s first sixteen years and the formation of this ‘broad outlook’ between Ruschuck (modern-day Ruse) and Zürich, via Manchester, Vienna, and various Central European lakes and spa resorts in their fading Austro-Hungarian glory.

Over the course of this odyssey, Canetti’s youth is conjured in distinct episodes, encapsulating the vivid discontinuity of a remembered infancy, centred around formative experiences of places, figures and stories. From his enigmatic earliest memory — ‘dipped in red’ — of an elinguation threat in a Bohemian guesthouse, to a passionate obsession with the cheeks, ‘like little apples,’ of an English classmate aged six, interspersed moments of wistful lyricism, humour and gravity convey childhood’s simultaneous innocence, emotional intensity and solemnity. As young Elias grows up, the rich colours, bustle and cultural polyphony of life in Ruschuck (1905-11), ‘loud and fierce,’ give way to the grey but cheery order of Manchester (1911-13), before a stint in Vienna (1913-16) — imperially grand and resounding with the beloved German language, but increasingly haunted by the violent echoes of war. Eventual migration to Switzerland (1916-1921) sees adolescent Canetti settle with satisfaction into the sheltered idyll of a girls’ boarding house on the banks of Lake Zürich.

More striking than Canetti’s vivid evocations of these places, however, are his sketches of the many characters encountered along the way, from his childhood friend, ‘the sad Armenian … the first refugee in my life’ (a family servant ‘who sang songs while chopping wood, which I did not understand, but which tore my heart’), to the handsome old gentleman observed on the streets of Zürich with his St Bernard, affectionately nicknamed ‘Dchoddo-come-to-Papa’ by local children in honour of his call to his dog. Canetti asserts that ‘the fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer,’ and indeed, his numerous relatives and teachers feel eccentric yet familiar in their passionate mannerisms, contradictions and gripes. Illustrating, as the book does throughout, the genesis of the adult intellect in his childhood experiences, Canetti describes wonderfully how his first critical understandings of humanity came from vivid experiences of a variety of teachers — these constituting ‘the first conscious school for the knowledge of human nature.’

The writer’s fervent attention to character seems fuelled by his childhood infatuation with stories — from fairytales told by Bulgarian peasant girls, to children’s history, fantasy and adventure books provided by his father, and ultimately the great literature to which his mother introduces him. ‘If there is an intellectual substance that one receives at an early age, to which one refers constantly, which one never escapes,’ Canetti writes, for him it was these stories. He judges his father’s early gift of The Arabian Nights to have ‘determined my entire life after that.’ And indeed, books assume a sacred, existential significance for him early on. So intense is his absorption in these stories that adult Canetti sees that ‘almost everything that I consisted of later on was already in these books.’ The characters encountered there ‘were the bread and salt of my early years. They are the true, the hidden life of my intellect.’ Having been reading a book about Napoleon when his father died, for instance, his ‘distaste for Napoleon has been unshakeable ever since.’ Somewhere between irony and gravity, Canetti conveys the powerful shaping of a character by such encounters, taken in all emotional seriousness, at this age. Perhaps, he remarks, he still considers fairytales true in old age.

This love for stories is inextricable from the memoir’s central linguistic motif. From his origins in Ruschuck, where ‘on any one day you could hear seven or eight languages,’ Canetti speaks vernacular Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) with his family, learns Bulgarian — later forgotten — from the local servant girls, and yearns to understand the German spoken by his parents: the language of their adult importance and intimacy, of their ‘happy school days in Vienna’ and his mother’s beloved literature. While Ladino initially symbolises his family’s rich cultural heritage, German assumes an immense significance after his father’s death; with great effort, he learns it so as to answer his grieving mother’s ‘profound need’ to speak the language of her love: ‘it was a belated mother tongue, implanted in true pain … promptly followed by a period of happiness, and that tied me indissolubly to that language. It must have fed my propensity for writing at an early moment.’ An intimate and intellectually rigorous relationship emerges between mother and son — and ‘the language of our love — and what a love it was! — became German.’

His father’s legacy, meanwhile, is a life-long aversion to violence and war. Eight-year-old Elias is convinced that he was killed by the morning paper’s announcement of the Balkan War, and his shock and horror at this death has a profound, lasting impact: ‘war was the multiplication of that death, absurdity intensified to massiveness.’ Over the course of his childhood, Canetti bears albeit fairly distanced, innocent witness to the development of European catastrophe via insidious details, such as ‘little hate slogans, which found their way down to the youngest pupils’ at school, and eventually unfathomable anti-semitism among his classmates. Surely the basis for his life-long preoccupation with hysteria, power and masses, he describes his incomprehensible, ‘indelible’ first experience of a hostile crowd at the outbreak of the First World War, as he and his young brothers are beaten for innocently singing the English national anthem instead of the German. Other lucid moments of intellectual and emotional awakening include his realisation of ‘the wide range and universality of national hatreds’ when his mother’s Turkish passport provokes Rumanian border guards to confiscated her suitcase, and, perhaps most strikingly, his ‘discovery of evil’ in himself, in his cruel teenage shunning of a close friend.

Despite increasingly fraught encounters with humankind, however, Canetti remains enamoured by human nature. He confesses this paradoxical optimism from the get-go: ‘I have spent the best part of my life figuring out the wiles of man … There is almost nothing bad that I couldn’t say about humans and humankind. And yet my pride in them is so great that there is only one thing I really hate: their enemy, death.’ In Switzerland, he describes feeling ‘quite certain that every human being mattered, that each one counted’ — and indeed this humanist conviction accounts for the resounding power of The Tongue Set Free.

As teenage Elias becomes increasingly absorbed in his academic studies, the memoir’s latter parts might prove somewhat dry for those less versed in or passionate about Classical and German literature — which is to say probably most of us. But even young Canetti is ultimately forced to realise the limitations of a purely literary existence. Though hurt by his mother’s tearing him away from his ‘paradise in Zürich’ —  the site of ‘the only perfectly happy years’ —  the narrator concedes with profound, conclusive lyricism that in the end he, ‘like the earliest man, came into being only by an expulsion from Paradise.’

            If perhaps not particularly radical — arguably amounting to the indulgent recollections of a sensitive boy with an inflated sense of self-importance and little grasp of reality — The Tongue Set Free conjures painful nostalgia for the peace and thoughtful sensitivity of childhood, so often lost in adulthood’s harsh exposure to reality. Ultimately most poignant, however, is its wistful, if somewhat rose-tinted,  conjuring of a harmonious pre-war Europe: rich in cultural diversity, unscarred by the forthcoming horrors of ethnonationalism and genocide. A deeply personal reconstruction of lives lived in a prelapsarian temps perdu, Canetti, who never returned to his birthplace so as to preserve its past form in his memory, immortalises this precious Ruschuk here in one ultimate flight of fancy. Though ostensibly an escapist,sentimental read, Canetti of all people should be able to convince us of the value of such escapism. At once wide-eyed and profoundly wise, The Tongue Set Free is a life-affirming reminder of the marvellous variety, fervour and fascination of mankind, the reprehensible absurdity of violence and war, and literature’s existentially significant capacity to foster wise, sensitive humanity.