Canetti's mother - she forgot about the time, we kept reading and reading

I should write something about Elias Canetti and his mother.  Early in The Tongue Set Free, just a fifth of the way into the memoir, Canetti’s father suddenly dies.  Canetti is eight, I think.  He ends up moving into his father’s role in some ways.  The mother’s psychology is the curious thing, how she demands from her young son some of the intellectual and emotional satisfactions she once got from her husband.  Thus her insistence that he learn German instantaneously, or her course of reading Shakespeare and Schiller with Canetti – German was the language she shared with her husband, theater was the art the loved together.

I hate to think what this would do to a kid less tenacious and brilliant than Canetti, but she likely would have demanded less in that case.

She made an effort not to influence me.  After each scene, she asked me how I understood it, and before saying anything herself, she always let me speak first.  But sometimes, when it was late, and she forgot about the time, we kept reading and reading, and I sensed that she was utterly excited and would never stop…  Her wide nostrils quivered vehemently, her large, gray eyes no longer saw me, her words were no longer directed at me.  I felt that she was talking to Father when she was seized in this way, and perhaps I, without realizing it, had become my father.  (83)

A break is inevitable; thus Canetti’s confusion between the Schnitzler-like doctor who pursues his mother and the forbidden sexual content of the Schnitzler books his mother reads in place of Schiller.  Canetti’s own move toward independence occurs in Switzerland, in part due to his discovery of Swiss literature.  He first has contempt for it, as when, at the celebration of the Gottfried Keller centennial, he cannot believe that this writer he has never heard of can be any good:  “but what struck me to the core of my naïve attitude was the lofty claim for a writer whom not even mother had read” (168).  This bit of the story has a happy ending, by the way: “at the time, I couldn’t guess with what delight I would some day read Green Henry.”

The Zurich poet and historical novelist Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (who I have not read) breaks through Canetti’s resistance, as does Jeremias Gotthelf’s nightmarish The Black Spider (“I felt haunted by it, as though it had dug into my own face,” 253), which leads to some sort of break with his mother, who uses the novella as a weapon to attack Zurich, Switzerland, and her son (“nobody with any understanding took Gotthelf seriously today,” 254).  The memoir ends with the mother’s long, brutal attack on Canetti’s Bildung, his education, his interest in Switzerland, and the writers he likes.   It is wild; neurotic, cruel and misguided and, psychologically, of high interest, however strange.

And it is only half as strange as the story Canetti tells his mother about a circle of dancing mice:

“You’re being unfair,” she said, “that’s just like you.  You expect too much.  Mice aren’t people, after all, even if they do have a kind of dancing.”  (221)

Good point, Mom.

Canetti’s memoir and mother often reminded me of Romain Gary’s Promise atDawn, as different as the books are, as different as the mothers are, two stories of powerful but displaced Jewish mothers and their brilliant sons wandering across Europe, searching for not just a home but a culture.

I never had to skip a single day of reading - Elias Canetti's childhood reading plan

Elias Canetti’s childhood memoir The Tongue Set Free follows his education, which means, mostly, his reading.

A few months after I started school, a thing solemn and exciting happened, which determined my entire life after that.  Father brought home a book for me.  He took me alone into a back room, where we children slept, and explained it to me.  It was The Arabian Nights, in an edition for children…  My father spoke very earnestly and encouragingly to me and told me how nice it would be to read.  (39)

Wait, it gets better.

Once I’d finished the book, he’d bring me another…  He kept his promise, there was always a new book there; I never had to skip a single day of reading.  (40)

Canetti is six, and has just learned how to read in school.  Think of the abundance of books so many children have today, books piled on them from birth in the hopes that their brain development will be stimulated to the point of Nobel-prize winning.  Futile, obviously; unnecessary.  Just wait until kiddo is six and give him kiddie versions of Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, Tales from Shakespeare, Dante – although the seventy year-old Canetti is skeptical of that one:  “I wonder how it was possible to adapt Dante for children.”  He has bad dreams, and his mother scolds his father – “’it’s too early for him.’”

Canetti’s mother had a powerful sense of what was too early.  He had long readings and discussions with her of plays, of Schiller and Shakespeare, but when she becomes interested in contemporary writers who work with sexual material, she forbids her son to know anything about them.  He complies, refusing to glance at the contents even when he buys her volumes of Strindberg as gifts.  He suppresses all sexual interest through at least his sixteenth year, when the memoir ends, on his mother’s orders.  It is possible that not everything in the memoir is true, but more interestingly it is possible that everything is exactly as Canetti remembers.

The hilarious culmination of the two themes occurs in Vienna.  The mother falls ill and attracts the romantic attention of a bearded doctor, Herr Professor, who little Canetti entangles with the other claim to his mother’s attention:

I saw books by Schnitzler, and when she happened to tell me not only that he lived in Vienna and was really a physician, but also that Herr Professor knew him and that his wife was Sephardic like us, my despair was complete.  (122-3)

His mother tells him that “’[t]he best thing is to be both a writer and a doctor,’” which infuriates poor Canetti, although he is old enough at this point that he never takes after Herr Professor with an ax, although he does fantasize about the doctor’s death in a balcony collapse, the very balcony where Canetti and his mother used to read Shakespeare.

Strindberg comes later.  I can’t seem to write about this book in order.  Tomorrow, Canetti discovers Swiss literature.

The important thing was the letters, on which he knocked his fingers - Elias Canetti, young reader

If I am reading the first volume of Elias Canetti’s memoir, The Tongue Set Free (1977), tr. Joachim Neugroschel, it is in part for passages like this, from which I learn the most important thing I can learn from any book, that I was right:

She had intellectual interests and an ironic way of talking about things with Mother, none of which I understood.  She lived in the Viennese literature of the period and lacked Mother’s universal interest…  She was Viennese if for no other reason than because she always knew, without great effort, what was happening in the world of the intellect.  (111)

Right, I mean, about that marvelous, obsessive Viennese artistic culture and its literature, art, and music.  Canetti only lived in Vienna for about three years, 1913 to 1916, and he was only eight or nine when he arrived, but he was the perfect sponge for the city.  He was an unusual kid with an unusual mother.

I have never read anything else by Canetti, to my knowledge, nor do I know much about him or his work, and some of what I do know, like gossip about his sex life, is almost embarrassing to know.  I knew about his unplaceability, though.  He was born in Bulgaria, into a family of merchants, Sephardic Jews who spoke Ladino – they even had Ladino newspaper written in Hebrew characters.  Canetti eventually adopted German for his writing, but German was his fifth (!) language (but he came from a place where “[e]ach person counted up the languages he knew”).  The chapter in which his mother teaches him German by means of memorization and insults is hair-raising.  The memoir travels from Bulgaria to Manchester to Vienna to Zurich, which turns out to be in some ways paradise, and of course paradise is the place from which one is expelled, providing a good place to end a childhood memoir.

Canetti’s memoir is, broadly, about two things, his family and his education.  The latter mostly means books, literature, reading.  The Tongue Set Free is a memoir of reading (Canetti must be three or four here):

I tried to find out what fascinated [his father] in the newspaper, at first I thought it was the smell; and when I was alone and nobody saw me, I would climb up on the chair and greedily smell the newsprint.  But then I noticed he was moving his head along the page, and I imitated that behind his back without having the page in front of me, while he held it in both hands on the table and I played on the floor behind him.  Once, a visitor who had entered the room called to him; he turned around and caught me performing my imaginary reading motions…  [he] explained that the important thing was the letters, on which he knocked his fingers.  Soon I would learn them myself, he said, arousing within me an unquenchable yearning for letters.  (26-7)

The newspaper is of course Viennese.  A page later, in a chapter titled “The Murder Attempt,” Canetti tries to murder his cousin with an ax because she won’t show him the writing in her notebook, “letters of the alphabet in blue ink, they fascinated me more than anything I had ever laid eyes on” (28).  I believe this is one of the early predictors of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, as Canetti did seventy years later.