Copyright 2002 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.  
The New Yorker
January 7, 2002
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 72

LENGTH: 4849 words

HEADLINE: THE REDISCOVERED NOVELS OF ITALO SVEVO, ITALY'S FIRST MODERNIST.

BODY:
TRUE CONFESSIONS

BY JOAN ACOCELLA

In 1907, Ettore Schmitz, a Triestine businessman, found himself in need of a language tutor. Every year he spent a couple of months in England-his company had a branch there-and it pained him that his English was so bad. Friends recommended a certain James Joyce, who had landed in Trieste two years earlier and was making his living as an English teacher. Joyce was twenty-five, poor and unkempt, a frequenter of taverns, a borrower of rent money. He had not yet published a book, but he was full of confidence. He thought he was a genius. Schmitz, by contrast, was in his mid-forties, and though he was a comfortably settled bourgeois, a partner in a marine-paint company, this was due to his having married the daughter of the firm's owner. Before that, he had worked as a bank clerk. He was a genial, witty man, but self-effacing, passive.

In the course of their tutorials, Joyce told Schmitz that he was a writer. He showed him the proofs of "Chamber Music," which was about to come out, and he gave him a few stories to read from a projected collection, "Dubliners." Eventually, Schmitz confessed that he, too, was a literary man, in a small way. Years before, under the pen name of Italo Svevo, he had written two novels, "Una Vita" and "Senilita" (they were later given the English titles "A Life" and "As a Man Grows Older"), and though the books were nothing, Schmitz said-published at his own expense, barely reviewed-perhaps Signor Joyce would be so kind as to accept copies of them? When Joyce returned for the next lesson, he declared that Schmitz was a marvellous writer, unjustly neglected, and that the great French realists could not have matched certain paragraphs of "As a Man Grows Older"-paragraphs that Joyce then recited from memory to the dazzled paint manufacturer.

There were no grammar lessons that day. Schmitz poured out his heart to Joyce, told him of his literary labors, his hopes, his disappointments. When the time was up, he could not bear to part with this fine man, and walked him almost all the way home, bending his ear some more. Nevertheless, he took no encouragement from Joyce's praise. After the failure of his second novel, ten years earlier, he had sworn off writing. (Once, when a business acquaintance asked him if it was true that he had published two novels, he said no-that was his brother Adolfo.) In 1915, Joyce left Trieste and moved to Zurich, then to Paris, but the two men remained in Christmas-card contact. Schmitz published nothing. The years passed.

Then came the First World War. Trieste was in an odd position. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-indeed, the empire's major seaport-yet historically it was Italian, and full of irredentists, ethnic Italians devoted to their homeland's reclaiming of its former territories. At the start of the war, many members of Schmitz's heavily irredentist family fled to Italy. His home, formerly crammed with relatives and servants, emptied out. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian authorities closed down the paint factory. Schmitz and his wife, Livia, were stuck in the house with nothing to do, whereupon Schmitz broke his vow and started writing again. When the war stopped, he didn't, and in 1922, in a lather of energy-smoking like crazy, and barely coming down for meals-he completed a new novel, "Confessions of Zeno" ("La Coscienza di Zeno"). It was published the following year, again at his own expense, and it had the same reception as its predecessors.

Schmitz was terribly disappointed, but he had one last thought. He sent the book to his old English teacher. Joyce was a different man now, a famous artist ("Ulysses" was published in 1922) and an expert literary publicist. He wrote back saying that Schmitz should immediately send "Confessions of Zeno," on his recommendation, to Ford Madox Ford and T. S. Eliot in London, Gilbert Seldes in New York, and Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Cremieux in Paris-an A-list of the literary arbiters of the day. Schmitz did as he was told, and two of these arrows hit the mark. In 1926, Le Navire d'Argent, a Paris journal devoted to modern literature, published excerpts from "As a Man Grows Older" and "Confessions of Zeno," translated by Cremieux and Larbaud, together with an enthusiastic essay on Schmitz by Cremieux. Suddenly, Italo Svevo was the sensation of Paris literary circles. The news made its way back to Italy, where the poet Eugenio Montale, alerted by the French, had just published a long essay in which he described Svevo's work as "the poem of our complex modern madness" and claimed that it was only because of the debased condition of Italian letters that he had been ignored. Soon Svevo's work was being translated into other languages. Dinners were given in his honor. When he entered literary cafes, people clapped him on the back and asked him to sit at their table.

"No writer ever so enjoyed his fame," a friend of Svevo's wrote. Svevo acted as if he had won the lottery. He confessed to a journalist that on a recent trip to Paris, the birthplace of his celebrity, he could not see the ville lumiere. All he could see was himself: "Italo Svevo among the treasures of the Louvre. . . Italo Svevo at Versailles." Hailed as the author of Italy's first modernist novel-"the Italian Proust," a French newspaper called him-he now took a look at modernist novels. He read Proust, or said he did. He struggled through "Ulysses," even gave a lecture on it. He discovered Kafka's work, and was bowled over by it. In 1928, he embarked on a new novel, a sequel to "Confessions of Zeno." At the same time, he began having health problems. He went to a spa, to take a cure, with Livia and their little grandson Paolo. On the way home, in a driving rain, the chauffeur crashed the car into a tree. Everyone survived except Svevo. His heart stopped the next day.

He had been famous for two years, but, even in Italy, his fame was unstable. During his lifetime, it was the younger writers who lionized him; the established critics were not pleased to be told by the French that they had failed to recognize a prophet in their own land, and they defended their former position. Also, nobody knew how to place Svevo. In the words of his best biographer, P. N. Furbank, "Attempts have been made to claim him for a variety of sectional interests-for Triestine regionalism, Italian irredentism, and 'eternal-Jewishness' " (he was Jewish), but he always fell short of the required commitment. Furthermore, his best novel, "Confessions of Zeno," was a comic novel, and comedy was not something that people in the nineteen-twenties associated with profundity.

Those who wished to dismiss him had something substantial to point to: his graceless Italian. Svevo's native language was the Triestine dialect; his second language, the language of his schooling, was German. (Hence his pen name, Italo Svevo: Swabian Italian.) Standard, Florentine Italian was a foreign tongue to him. That's what he had to write in if he wanted a readership beyond Trieste, but he did not do it beautifully or even, on occasion, grammatically. "The Italian of a bookkeeper," critics said. There is an answer to this. Svevo's characters were bookkeepers. The world of his fiction was Trieste, an unpoetic commercial city, home of bankers and traders and manufacturers, of which he was one. As Montale put it, "The smell of the warehouse and cellar, the almost Goldonian chatter of the Tergesteo"-the stock exchange-"are they not the sure presence of a style?" They are to us, raised on Twain and Dreiser and Hemingway. But the critics of Svevo's time were raised on d'Annunzio, and to them Svevo's language was simply unliterary.

It wasn't just in Italy, though, that Svevo was treated as second best. His work was never installed, as it should have been, in the pantheon of the modernist novel. I know people who have read "The Man Without Qualities," both volumes, and "Remembrance of Things Past," all seven volumes, who have never opened a book by Svevo.

They now have a chance to correct that oversight. Svevo is undergoing a publishing revival. "A Life," in a perfectly decent 1963 translation by Archibald Colquhoun (Pushkin Press; $18), has just been reprinted. As for "Senilita" and "La Coscienza di Zeno," they were first translated into English in the thirties, by Beryl de Zoete, a dance scholar who fell in love with Svevo's work and offered her services to his widow. De Zoete's versions, entitled "As a Man Grows Older" and "Confessions of Zeno," are solid-they are what we have known for seventy years as Svevo-and they are still in print or, in the case of "As a Man Grows Older," back in print ($12.95), in New York Review of Books' excellent "classics" series. But they are old, older than Svevo in a way: fussy, Constance Garnett-ish. For years they have cried out for competition, and competition has now come. Beth Archer Brombert has produced a version of "Senilita," called "Emilio's Carnival" (Yale; $14.95)-Svevo's working title-that is faithful in a way that de Zoete was not. Brombert's language is very plain, and when she comes up against a knot in Svevo's prose she does not try to untie it. (De Zoete did.) We have to puzzle through it, just like the Italians. The same rules seem to have guided the distinguished translator William Weaver in his new version of "La Coscienza di Zeno"-"Zeno's Conscience" (Everyman; $20). I do not like his title. The Italian coscienza, like its French cognate, means both "conscience" and "consciousness." There is no good way to translate it, and de Zoete's throwing up of hands, with "Confessions of Zeno," was probably the best solution. But the title is the only thing wrong with Weaver's book. Its appearance is an event in modern publishing. In it-for the first time, I believe, in English-we get the true, dark music, the pewter tints, of Svevo's great last novel.

Svevo had a happy childhood and a miserable young manhood. The sixth of eight children, he was born in Trieste in 1861 to an adoring mother and a gruff, decent father, a successful glassware merchant. As a child, he was mad for literature, but his father didn't want to hear about that. At the age of twelve, he was shipped off to a commercial school in Germany, where he managed to read a lot of Shakespeare and Schiller after lights-out. At seventeen, he returned to Trieste, and soon, presumably at his father's strong suggestion, he went to work as a correspondence clerk-basically, he translated letters-in a local bank. There he remained for almost twenty years, bored out of his mind. He spent his nights in the dusty reading room of the public library, submitting call slips to a bizarre attendant who, according to the poet Umberto Saba, Svevo's friend, "waited beside a window from which he eventually jumped to his death."

Svevo was now a convert to French realism: Balzac, Flaubert, Daudet, Zola above all. "Zola was his god," his wife later wrote. (As part of the Svevo boom, her lovely, genteel biography, "Memoir of Italo Svevo," has just been reprinted by Marlboro Press, at $15.95.) The laws of life seemed to him harsh, and those authors agreed. He tried to write-mostly plays, mostly unfinished-but, according to the diary of his brother Elio, the person closest to him, he burned almost everything he produced. When Svevo was twenty-five, Elio died, followed by two of their sisters. Meanwhile, the father's business had declined precipitously, and the old man wandered around the house like a ghost, some days refusing to eat or speak. Svevo lived in a permanent, low-level melancholy. "My real strength always lay in hoping," he wrote on his twenty-eighth birthday. "I'm even losing my talent for that."

Two years earlier, he had begun his first novel, "A Life," and it was a mirror of his own life. It tells the story of Alfonso Nitti, a clerk in a Triestine bank, who spends his evenings in the public library, dreaming of writing books. Alfonso seduces a rich girl whom he does not love. (See "The Red and the Black.") His aged mother dies-a protracted business of bedsores and smells and people making off with the furniture. (See "Nana," "Le Pere Goriot.") Alfonso cannot seem to do anything; he is too self-conscious, too busy watching himself. Some of this is very smartly done, worthy of its French models, but the qualities at the heart of the story actually have little to do with French realism. There is too much grave, personal sorrow- the book throbs like a wound-to be processed by that cold machinery. Also, Svevo simply did not have enough certainty to join the ranks of Balzac and Zola. His world was not theirs, the world of causes-social, historical, economic-but something almost causeless, the mal du siecle, in its turn-of-the-century form: the crippling of action by thought, the erasure of the present by the future (fantasy) and the past (remorse). Like Joyce and Proust soon afterward, he had discovered the subject of the twentieth-century novel, the self-imprisonment of the mind, but he didn't know how to write anything but a nineteenth-century novel.

Nor, for a while, did he find out. After the failure of "Una Vita," something happened that changed Svevo's life. At his mother's deathbed, a second cousin of his, Livia Veneziani, seeing his distress, brought him a glass of marsala. He had never noticed Livia before. Now he did. She was blond and kind and rich. Over her parents' objections-he was poor and neurotic and thirteen years her senior-they married in 1896 and had a baby, Letizia ("Happiness"), the following year.

"I will love you forever," Svevo wrote to Livia, "as far as the fin de siecle will allow." It allowed only so much. He drove her crazy with his jealousy and hypochondria. Nor could she understand his weird ideas. He gave her Schopenhauer to read, and August Bebel's "Women and Socialism." She looked at him as if he were insane. Also, why did he have to be Jewish? Anti-Semitism wasn't much of an issue in Trieste at that time, and Livia herself was one-quarter Jewish. Nevertheless, she was emphatically Catholic, a convent girl. After giving birth to Letizia, she fell ill and was terrified by the thought that she would die with the sin of having married a Jew on her conscience. Svevo gallantly went out and got himself baptized, though he refused to take religious instruction and never, later, described himself as anything but Jewish. (After his death, Livia returned the favor. In the late thirties, the "race office" in Rome balked at registering her as an Aryan-a problem she was told she could solve with a large bribe. Indignant, she declared herself a Jew. As a result, she had to flee Trieste in 1943. She spent the remaining war years in Treviso province, in great danger.) Yet, whatever their occasional bewilderment with each other, they were a happy couple. "My blonde," he called her, "my one great, great hope, of true, solid happiness." He might be "ill"-assailed by doubts and fears-but that was all right as long as he could orbit her "health." When he was downcast, she comforted him. When he took Letizia to the fair and came back alone-he was almost pathologically absent-minded-she went and got the child. In return, he became a regular person, a family man.

According to Svevo, Joyce used to say that a novelist had only one book in him; if he produced more, they were the same book, in a new key. No one demonstrates this principle better than Svevo. Emboldened by his happy marriage, he wrote a second novel, "Senilita." As the title tells us, it was once again about illness, but it breathed an utterly new assurance. Where "Una Vita" wandered about a lot, "Senilita" has one subject, the love affair between its hero, Emilio Brentani, a clerk in an insurance company (who once wrote a novel), and a high-class tart named Angiolina. With no introductory fuss, we meet the two of them on the first page, walking down the street, as Emilio, pedantically discoursing on his feelings for Angiolina, begins winding himself in a knot of obsession, jealousy, and contempt that will bind him to her for the rest of the book, and as she, tapping her pretty parasol in the gravel, looks at him to judge how she should play this game. The novel is perfectly realistic and, again, partly autobiographical. (Svevo had had such a girlfriend. She later became a circus performer.) As in Proust's tale of Swann and Odette, the love affair is a metaphor. Emilio is the mind; Angiolina is the world. Or, to put it in Svevo's terms, Emilio is "sickness," and Angiolina is "health." Neither comes off well, but the business of the novel is the portrayal of Emilio's feelings, fantastically mixed, with each new impulse undermined by its opposite. In other words, this is the same story as "Una Vita," but it is far more concentrated, subtle, and disturbing. As Emilio suffers over Angiolina, his spinster sister, Amalia, by way of participating, falls equally in love with a friend of his who barely notices her. In bed at night, Emilio hears through the walls the love cries she utters in her dreams.

"Senilita" is also far more confident in its tone, which is steadily distanced. At the end, Emilio, having lost both Angiolina and Amalia-Amalia dies, Angiolina runs off with a bank teller-lives on rather comfortably. In his mind, he combines the two women into one, whom he worships: "He saw her before him as on an altar. . . . She represented everything noble that he had thought and observed during that period." The irony is both soft and lethal. There was nothing noble in his relations with either of those women.

Furbank calls "Senilita" "one of the solidest masterpieces of nineteenth-century fiction." I think that it is a fine piece of work, but also that Svevo still had somewhere else to go. The novel's irony is heavy; it protests too much. (Whatever his comments on the fin de siecle, Svevo may still have hoped, with his marriage, to throw off his "illness.") And there are many things in the novel that grate against that tone. One small example: Angiolina has a younger sister, a scrawny little thing whose name we are never given. When we first encounter her, early in the narrative, she is ten years old. She opens the door for Emilio and, seeing a stranger, raises her hand "to close the edges of her jacket across her chest-the buttons were missing." At the end of the book, Emilio calls on Angiolina's family again. He is received by the mother, but she promptly exits, and then the sister, maybe twelve now, enters the room and curtsies. Emilio tells her what he meant to tell her mother, that he will never come again. She protests, and covers his face with "kisses that were anything but childish." Clearly the mother is thinking that if she can no longer offer Angiolina's services (Emilio helped support the family), perhaps the sister's will do. Emilio is disgusted and gets up to go. But first he leans down and pats the head of the little girl, "whom he did not want to leave disheartened." He remembers that she is a child. This is not the stuff of which Zolaesque novels are made. Likewise, throughout the book there are notes of sweetness and drollery which suggest that a different novel, one more forgiving of "sickness" and of life itself, is fighting to get out. It got out-in "La Coscienza di Zeno"-but not for twenty-five years.

We will never know what happened to Svevo in those years to lead him out of realism and into modernism. Perhaps it was just age and self-acceptance, or perhaps it was the war. But one thing that we know made a difference-not as a cause but as a trigger-was Freud. During his idle war years, Svevo became interested in the sage of Vienna; he even made a stab at translating him. Some critics believe that "La Coscienza di Zeno" is a Freudian book-that to Svevo, as to a psychoanalyst, the hero, Zeno, is "sick," his reasoning is self-delusion, and if he would just confront the true causes of his behavior he would be cured. It is hard to understand how anyone coming up against the desperate comedy and muted tragedy of "Zeno" could imagine that any of this had "causes," or could be cured. It doesn't look like an illness; it looks like life, and art. According to Furbank, Svevo thought psychoanalysis was worthless as a treatment. (His crazy brother-in-law Bruno was analyzed by Freud and came back two years later crazier than ever.) What interested him in Freud was the theory of defense mechanisms: rationalization, displacement, the whole arsenal of self-justification. This is what he himself had been analyzing for years, in "Una Vita" and "Senilita," and in his own life.

More than confirming his ideas, Freud suggested to Svevo a new kind of novelistic structure. Before, Svevo had given us his heroes' mental processes in standard third-person narrative. Emilio felt this, Emilio felt that, sometimes at tedious length. But what if, instead of observing the modern mind from the outside-its immersion in thought, its paralysis of will, its tangled motives, its confusion of time planes-what if the novelist were to record this from the inside, let the hero tell his own story, in a way that reflected as faithfully as possible the movements of his psyche? In other words, what if the novel, instead of describing a cat's cradle, became a cat's cradle? And so, jumping the gun on "Portnoy's Complaint" by almost fifty years, Svevo made "La Coscienza di Zeno" the hero's confessions to his psychoanalyst.

The book opens with a preface by the psychoanalyst, Dr. S., who informs us that the following material is a testimonial by his patient Zeno Cosini. Zeno, whose father believed him incompetent to manage his inheritance and therefore put an accountant in charge, is a man with little to do. He entered psychoanalysis to find out why that little was being done so badly. Dr. S. got him to write up his memories, but then, just as the doctor was about to dig in to this delicious material-so full of truths and lies, he says-Zeno suspended treatment. Dr. S. is publishing the manuscript in revenge.

There follows the manuscript, Zeno's account of crucial episodes in his life: his efforts to stop smoking; the death of his father; his love for a beautiful girl named Ada Malfenti and his marriage to her homely sister Augusta; his affair with a singer named Carla; and his business partnership with Guido Speier, the man who won Ada. All this happens in five chapters. Then comes the final chapter, again written by Zeno, but a year later, after the beginning of the First World War. In it, he announces that everything he wrote for Dr. S. was a tissue of lies. He is no longer neurotic; he has been cured, by the war. He needs to get the manuscript back and rewrite it, this time accurately.

And so the modernist novel was born in Italy. Chronological time is gone. As in Joyce and Proust, the past is folded into the present. Also gone, as in the work of Svevo's colleagues, is truth. If we want Zeno's real story, we can choose among the conflicting accounts of three witnesses: Dr. S., the earlier Zeno, and the later Zeno. Even within the individual narratives, every story casts doubt on itself. Zeno's confession begins with a comedy, the story of his going to a sanatorium in order to stop smoking. But, without ever ceasing to be comic, the tale gently tips over into pathos. A nurse, Giovanna, assigned to supervise Zeno's detoxification, ends up giving him a handful of cigarettes because she is old and lonely and the wily Zeno has convinced her that when he is primed with nicotine no woman is safe in his presence. He smokes them all and then escapes from the sanatorium.

In the next chapter, "My Father's Death," the logic is the opposite. The story is scathing-Zeno's account of how insensitive he was to his dying father-but it is also very funny, and it has a real tragic grandeur. At one point, the father, unable to get comfortable in bed, moves to an armchair and gazes out the window at the starry sky:

The father is trying, before he dies, to pass on to his feckless son some important truth that he has discovered. But the very discovery, as Zeno points out, was "the first symptom of a cerebral hemorrhage." The father has found the meaning of life, and it is death.

Svevo took his psychoanalytic model seriously. Often we see the defenses working quite openly, yet they operate with a truth that is not just psychological but literary. When Zeno falls in love with Ada Malfenti, he never notices that she is utterly wrong for him. He is a nut; she is a serious girl. She can't stand him. Finally, one night, he proposes to her:

I have forgotten the many scornful words she addressed to me, but not her beautiful, noble, and healthy face flushed with outrage, its lines made sharper as if chiseled by her indignation. This I never afterwards forgot, and when I think of my love and my youth, I see again the beautiful and noble and healthy face of Ada at the moment when she dismissed me definitively from her destiny.

A psychoanalytic mechanism, repression, has become a literary mechanism, omission, and Ada's words, however deleted, are burned on our brains.

Elsewhere, the situation is more mixed, unsettlingly so. Once Zeno is happily married, Augusta, who knew of his love for Ada, has a moment's vestigial jealousy, and imagines that Zeno is still pining for her sister. By this time, Ada is ill with goiter-her beauty is destroyed-and Zeno, thinking to reassure Augusta, cruelly puffs out his cheeks and bugs out his eyes in imitation of Ada's ruined face. Augusta laughs and is immediately ashamed, but that is nothing compared with what takes place in Zeno's mind. Painfully, even as he is mocking Ada's face, he feels as though he were kissing her. Later, he says, "When I was alone, I repeated that effort several times, with desire and repulsion." Nothing like this, nothing so psychologically exact and so morally confounding, had ever been recorded in the Italian novel-indeed, in the European novel.

With Svevo's shift from realism to modernism came an enormous gain in charity. In "Una Vita" and "Senilita" the mistress is a bitch; the death in the family is a nightmare; the hero can barely endure his self-contempt. In "Zeno" the mistress, Carla, is a sweet girl, with shining braids; the father's death is leavened with comedy; and the hero's shame is seen with a wise eye. Before Zeno beds Carla, he has a dream about her, in which he is kissing her white neck, then eating it. But her neck never bleeds; it remains whole. Furthermore, Augusta is there, and Zeno says to her, "I won't eat it all; I'll leave a piece for you, too." This is a psychological truth, a negotiation between desire and guilt, but it is also a moral truth. Everyone gets a bite; no one is hurt. Augusta never finds out about the affair, and it is Carla who eventually breaks it off. She dumps Zeno and marries her singing teacher.

In his later years, the years surrounding "Zeno," Svevo had a few things to say about Mother Nature. She was not on our side, he claimed, but neither was she against us. She just had a lot on her mind, and we reaped the benefits of her inattention. "Mother Nature," he wrote, "created sexual pleasure to guarantee reproduction. If, having obtained that, she allows the capacity for pleasure to go on existing, she does so only out of absentmindedness, just as certain insects go on wearing their mating colors after the mating season is over. Running a business of that size, you can't attend to every detail." And so it is in "Zeno." Zeno loses Ada but gets a better woman, Augusta. He is defeated by Guido, but then he has the satisfaction-and the pain, he protests, the pain!-of seeing Guido defeat himself, indeed commit suicide, by accident. Guido takes Veronal, but he meant to be rescued. He was only trying to pressure Ada into investing some money in his business. But the doctor arrives too late. Zeno, standing over Guido's corpse, sees on his face "a great stupefaction at being dead without having wanted to be"-a perfect Svevianism.

But there are perfect Svevianisms on every page of Svevo. Why does Carla drop Zeno? Well, Carla asks to see his wife, and he agrees, but at the last minute, for some reason-ask Dr. S.-he arranges for Carla, waiting on a street corner, to see Ada rather than Augusta. Unfortunately, as Zeno does not realize, Ada knows her husband is having an affair, and she is heartbroken-a fact that the good-hearted Carla understands instantly. If Zeno had allowed Carla to see Augusta-happy, dumpy, unaware of her husband's derelictions-everything would have been O.K. But no, Carla sees Ada, and believes herself to be the cause of that poor woman's grief, and tells Zeno to go back to her. Zeno cannot bring himself to confess his ruse, so that's the end of his relationship with Carla of the shining braids. This is something that could have been imagined only by Svevo. He is a thorny item, a one-masterpiece master, but a master nevertheless. (c)

LOAD-DATE: January 8, 2002