Ettore Schmitz was born in Trieste in 1861 from a family of
German-Jewish descent, which had paradoxically Italianized itself
in the great harbor city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The future
writer was bound to feel the dualism of the elements composing his
intellectual and psychological background, and chose to express it by
selecting for his literary work the pseudonym Italo Svevo, or Italus
the Swabian. He left incompleted his studies in Germany, and returned
to his native city, first to work as a bank clerk, and later on, to
become a rather prosperous, even a rich, businessman. Death caught him
in a car accident in 1928, a few years after the writer had tasted, too
shortly, the wine of success.
Svevo was about thirty years old when he wrote his first literary work.
It was a novel which belonged more to the tradition of French realism
and naturalism than to the corresponding Italian school, Capuana’s
or Verga’s _verismo_. Naturalism meant in France the depiction of
urban life of the working classes on one hand, on the other of the
bourgeoisie, while its Italian counterpart coincided almost completely
with Southern regionalism, with the representation of the primitive
life of the shepherd, the peasant and the fisherman.
The literary sources of the first Svevo novel are betrayed by its title
à la Maupassant: _Una Vita_ (“A Life”); by its story, which is nothing
else but another _roman d’un jeune homme pauvre_, with the difference
that it is not concluded by a happy ending (as a matter of fact, the
protagonist ends in failure and suicide); finally by its intentions,
which were of narrating another _éducation sentimentale_. But Svevo’s
Frédéric Moreau, whose name is Alfonso Nitti, is not only far more
provincial, gray and dull than Flaubert’s hero, his Parisian model: he
is also a more introspective and literal self-portrait, as is proved by
the milieu, which is the banking world, seen from inside and from below.
In spite of the fact that it was published only locally, the novel
did not pass completely unnoticed in Italy, though it was soon and
easily forgotten. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Svevo’s first
masterpiece, _Senilità_ (“A Man Grows Older”), published five years
later in 1898. The fault lies to a certain extent with the author
himself, unable to realize, like all amateurs, that even literature is
a business of its own. Perhaps the first admirer of the second novel of
Svevo was James Joyce, who read it in 1906, when Ettore Schmitz found
a tutor of English in the person of the future author of _Ulysses_,
then an obscure language teacher at the Trieste Berlitz School.
The first of the many surprises this second novel, which is
autobiographical, offers the intelligent reader is its title. Its
protagonist, Emilio Brentani, is nearing middle age, but is still not
too far from the years of youth. In a charming and moving preface to
the second edition (1927), the already famous but still unspoiled Svevo
cites the opinion of Valéry Larbaud, according to whom the title was
not suited to the work. The author confesses his repugnance to follow
the advice to change it, even if it comes from such a connoisseur.
We think that the great French critic was wrong, and Svevo right. We
think also that the rendering of the English translation, _A Man Grows
Older_, reveals, if not the letter at least the spirit of the original
title and work. _Senilità_ is the novel of senility understood not as
a physical or psychic state, but of old age as a second nature, as a
vocation.
The last works of Svevo, written shortly before his death and published
posthumously, like the novelette _La Novella del Buon Vecchio e della
Bella Fanciulla_ (“The Tale of the Good Old Man and the Beautiful
Girl”), a masterpiece; or the beautiful short story _Vino Generoso_
(“Heady Wine”), still untranslated into English; or finally the
unfinished novel _Il Vecchione_ (“The Oldster”) of which we have
only the few pages of the beginning, are again variations about the
all-dominant theme of old age. _Senilità_ is therefore an anticipation,
a prophecy; and it apparently intends to show that people are not
_made_, but are _born_ old. And the man born old is nothing else but a
psychological counterpart of that type, which, when seen from a social
viewpoint, is called a bourgeois.
It is not extraordinary that _Senilità_ passed completely unnoticed in
Italy, since the Italian is the only modern literature which could be
defined as one for which the bourgeois, as a sociological condition or
a state of mind, does not exist. It is not extraordinary either, that
Svevo’s work went unrecognized in spite of the fact that its center
was Trieste, a city so dear to the Italian heart. If the man, Ettore
Schmitz, was an Italian patriot always active in the agitation for the
reunion of that city to Italy, the Trieste of the writer, as Svevo
sees it and feels it, has nothing to do with the Trieste of Italian
_irredentismo_, of the national dream. The Trieste of Svevo seems to
an Italian reader a foreign city not because there are Austrians or
Slavs (who almost never appear in Svevo’s world), but merely because
it is a city of burghers, very similar to the Lübeck of Thomas Mann’s
_Buddenbrooks_.
For a cultivated Italian it is very easy to understand, but almost
impossible to appreciate, the Italian of Svevo, perhaps the least
literary and even the least literate, certainly the least polished
Italian ever used by a man of letters in our time. It is not, like the
Sicilianized Italian of Verga, influenced by the local vernacular (in
Trieste’s and Svevo’s case, a stronger variant of the singing Venetian
dialect), but it is a kind of Italian Esperanto or pidgin-Italian, an
instrument of commercial exchange, a modern _lingua franca_. The poet
Umberto Saba stated recently that Svevo could have written equally as
well (or equally as badly, if one prefers to judge from the viewpoint
of linguistic pedantry and grammatical purism) in German as in
Italian, and that if he chose to write in Italian, he did so to show
his predilection for Italian culture. We rather think that if Svevo
chose to write in Italian, he did so to be a Triestino of his own kind
and class. The Italianism of Svevo is a social and psychological case
rather than a cultural and literary one.
It is therefore not extraordinary that the very few Italian critics who
understood from the beginning the value of his work, were peripheric
Italians like him; for instance Ferdinando Pasini and Silvio Benco;
or later, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, European minds, like that of
Eugenio Montale. But it was only natural that the real discovery of
his work was due to foreigners, first to James Joyce, and in the
second place to Valéry Larbaud, who, together with Benjamin Crémieux,
presented to the French public in an issue of _Le Navire d’Argent_ a
partial translation of the second masterpiece of Svevo, _La Coscienza
di Zeno_ (“The Confessions of Zeno”), which had recently appeared,
after a quarter of a century of silence, in 1924.
Svevo’s early recognition by Joyce, with the latter’s good memory for
works and men, was the prime mover of the French revelation of Zeno and
the reason for the writer’s European success. In the preface to the
second edition of _Senilità_, Svevo spoke of that discovery as his own
“resurrection of Lazarus.” It made him humbly grateful and innocently
happy for the few remaining years of his life and he always considered
it more as a bad debt which poetic justice or the literary exchange had
belatedly but dutifully paid him, as a wonder and a miracle, an act of
grace and an act of God.
In all his works the real protagonist of Svevo is the bourgeois soul.
But the bourgeois of Svevo is a very different kind from the type
described in sociological or ideological literature. Svevo is always
studying the bourgeois during his free time, while he does not work.
The best definition which may be given of the bourgeois both on the
social and psychological plane is perhaps the one according to which
the bourgeois is that type of man for whom time is money. In the novels
of Svevo there are no instances of a problem so frequently treated
in the novels of Balzac and Zola, the _question d’argent_. Of Zeno
Cosini and the anonymous old man who is the protagonist of the _Novella
del Buon Vecchio e della Bella Fanciulla_ we merely know that they
are rich; of Alfonso Nitti and Emilio Beltrani, that they are poor.
Generally it is a matter of indifference to know whether Svevo’s heroes
have money to spare: the only important thing is to realize that they
always have a little or plenty of time to lose. And Svevo tells us how
they employ their time, how they lose or kill it.
Actually some of his heroes, like Alfonso Nitti, have little time
to spare. But Svevo has always time for them, even if he visits
them preferably when they are free. He is not, like Mann or Proust,
preoccupied with the old man Chronos, or like Kafka, with eternity. He
is interested only in that aspect of our time’s consciousness, which
Bergson (without Svevo knowing it) used to call _durée_, and which
could be defined as the very antithesis of the quantitative conception
of time, of time as _duration_. Time is the terror of youth. But Svevo,
always a wise man, looks upon time as a foolish and amusing prankster,
a clown or a practical joker, playing everybody a kind of recurring and
successful “hoax,” _una burla riuscita_, to use the title of one of his
most amusing works. A hard-headed business man, Svevo also knows that
man too can play with time and against it, that for each one of us time
is always both _perdu_ and _retrouvé_. We must merely accept it as the
medium in which one breathes and lives.
The translator of the present novel has been well advised in changing
its original title, _La Coscienza di Zeno_, into “The Confessions of
Zeno,” because in that title, as in the Italian language, the common
noun means both conscience and consciousness, and its suggestion and
cogency lie in the equivocal meaning of that very word, which no
literal translation in a non-Latin tongue could render. In a certain
sense one might say that the aim of Svevo’s works is to express
conscience in terms of consciousness, and consciousness in terms of
conscience.
If there is a writer for whom the resurrected William James formula
(“stream of consciousness”), and its French and literary equivalent,
coined by Valéry Larbaud (_monologue intérieur_), are particularly
apt, that writer is Italo Svevo. But his method and imagination have
nothing to do, either from the viewpoint of effective influence (which
does not exist), or from the viewpoint of the congeniality of kindred
spirit (which may be argued or even denied) with the method and
imagination of Joyce and Proust. The world of Joyce is a world where
the bourgeois spirit withdraws into the background for intellectual
reasons; in Proust’s, for sentimental ones. Leopold Bloom and Swann are
not actors but marionettes of that world, not protagonists or heroes,
but antagonists and victims, not objects, but subjects. The bourgeois
spirit is in Svevo’s fiction both its actor and marionette, its
protagonist and antagonist, its hero and victim, its subject and object.
The only intellectual influence which may have been decisive in
Svevo’s writing, at least in the case of _Zeno_, is psychoanalysis.
As we know, he was directly acquainted, thanks perhaps to the
uninterrupted cultural relations between Trieste and Vienna, with
Freud’s teachings and the medical treatment of his school. Certainly he
used psychoanalysis more literally than Joyce ever did, for instance,
with the doctrines and methods of Jung. But if we look at _Zeno_ with
attention, we see that in that book psychoanalysis is more a matter of
content than of form.
Psychoanalysis is par excellence a bourgeois fad. From Molière on,
the bourgeois has been often depicted as the only social type who may
become that very sick kind of man generally called _malade imaginaire_.
In the modern world only the bourgeois may afford himself the luxury
of being psychologically and physiologically ill, like Hans Castorp
in Thomas Mann’s _Zauberberg_. Proust’s bourgeois characters are
too snobbish, Joyce’s too bohemian, for this. Zeno, being a member
of the leisure class, uses his leisure to torment himself. And the
greatness of Svevo lies in that, after a century of Romantic spleen,
he was the first one to consider, like the ancients, the type of the
_Heautontimoroumenos_, the Self-Tormentor, as essentially a comical one.
In _Zeno_, Svevo does not operate with psychoanalysis, but on it. It
is true that the novel was written under the impact of the discovery
of Freud by the man Ettore Schmitz: but it is equally true that the
writer Italo Svevo psychoanalyzed psychoanalysis itself. In other
words, his writing, or at least his vision, has always been potentially
or actually psychoanalytic. Ettore Schmitz and his heroes, who are, at
least in part his self-portraits, had always been doing psychoanalyses,
as Monsieur Jourdain made prose all the time without knowing it. But
Svevo the writer has never been unaware of this and therefore is
able to give a caricature of both psychoanalysis and himself. Such a
detached self-awareness was his lifelong amusement and contentment. One
might say that Svevo was that wonder: a bourgeois really interested
in his own soul; however, being a wise man, he used to consider one’s
soul, rather than imagination itself, _la folle du logis_.
To speak in scholastic terms, human soul is not for Svevo a substance,
but merely a series of accidents. The most important accident in
substance of life is love. Love is life both perpetuating and
destroying itself. In this conception Svevo has been certainly
influenced by his early reading of Schopenhauer. But for a bourgeois
Schopenhauer, love is neither a chaotic force nor a cosmic evil: it
is merely something both charming and bad. It is not a sin, but a
forbidden fruit in the literal sense of the word. It is not forbidden
by one’s priest, but by one’s doctor, who knows better than his patient
what is good for him, and who orders him to abstain from it as from
that “heady wine” from which the protagonist of the story so entitled
gets sick and drunk. Sometimes, as in the matter of smoking, abstention
is self-inflicted, like a taboo perpetually violated and reinstated by
the patient himself. Love is a temptation dangerous to one’s peace of
mind and body health. But temptation is real only to those who yield to
it. Love is like the last cigarette of Zeno: Man, a creature eternally
condemned to death, lights it up again and again.
In other words, Svevo looks always at love, at least beginning from
his second novel, which was written in his early maturity, from the
viewpoint of old age, from the perspective of an old man. This attitude
is not merely social and psychological, but sexual as well. Like
Leopold Bloom with Gerty MacDowell, Svevo’s heroes are fascinated only
by young girls. This predisposition also leads to logical consequences
on the practical plane: Zeno and the protagonists of Svevo’s last
works regularly “keep” young mistresses. While Zeno’s wife conspires
with others, for her husband’s good, to prevent him from managing his
fortune, and thus treats him like a minor, Zeno supports Carla with
his pocket money. In other terms, he becomes at the same time the
“protector” and the “father” of his mistress, and the “son,” “ward”
and “protegé” of his own wife. The latter situation, not less than
the former, is an evident symptom of his spiritual if not actual
senility. Old age is very often nothing else but a second childhood.
Like an adolescent and an old man, Zeno is interested especially in
the beginnings of love; later, only in his own torments and feelings,
doubts and self-deceit.
For Ettore Schmitz, the man, and for the characters depicting or
mirroring him, love is very often nothing else but a tonic and an
intoxicant for their nerves. The other hobby, literature, seems rather
to be an opium and elixir for man’s brain. Both activities or pastimes
are treated as habits, manias, or fixed ideas, like a not too harmful
drug addiction or a rather innocent vice. In other words, neither
literature nor love acquires, in the psychological economy of his
characters, an obsessive quality; and this is the reason why the work
of Svevo is far less consciously “esthetic” and morbid than the work
of Joyce and Proust. The literary experience of his protagonists, even
if, as in the case of _Una Burla Riuscita_, it is very often based on
Svevo’s life, is nevertheless less autobiographical (or at least less
literally so), than any other element in their _curriculum vitae_.
The author has been able to reach such a paradoxical result by
dissociating Svevo the writer, not from Ettore Schmitz the man, but
rather from the man of letters who was in Ettore Schmitz, and in his
heroes. Practically all his characters, perhaps with the exception
of Zeno, are men of letters in their spare time. Such is the case of
Alfonso Nitti in _Una Vita_, of Emilio Brentani in _Senilità_, of Mario
Samigli in _Una Burla Riuscita_. In other cases, like the protagonists
of _Vino Generoso_ and _La Novella del Buon Vecchio e della Bella
Fanciulla_, they are naïve reformers or platonic ideologists. They
are never without some intellectual interest (in Zeno’s instance,
psychoanalysis). But generally, with the exception of Zeno, who after
all is not a writer, they never denounce, reflect or betray the
intellectual interests of their creator: Alfred Nitti, Emilio Brentani
and Mario Samigli limit their literary curiosities and sympathies
to Carducci and traditional Italian literature, without revealing
in the first case how Svevo was interested in French naturalism and
Schopenhauer; in the second, that he had been reading Russian writers;
in the third, his recent acquaintance with Freud.
Is it arbitrary to affirm that the writers who are his characters are
to a certain extent a satire of the contemporary Italian literary
mind, exactly as Zeno is a parody of psychoanalysis? The Mario
Samigli of _Una Burla Riuscita_ perhaps entitles us to think so. The
suspicion seems reasonable because in that story Svevo also makes
fun of the writer within himself. Even more interesting is the fact
of the appearance in one of his last works of the “good old man” of
the novelette so entitled, a character affected by literature without
knowing it, and who writes a pseudo-philosophical and edifying work
by which he belatedly tries to save the soul of his young mistress
and to teach her the conduct of life, even after his own death. In
the literary vocation of his heroes, therefore, Svevo seems to see
an attempt to escape from life, perhaps from consciousness, and even
from conscience itself. By this attitude he did not mean to condemn
literature; as a matter of fact this is the very reason he approved of
it.
This explains why between the literature of Svevo and the literature
of his characters there is neither relationship nor contrast. The
conflict between the bourgeois spirit and the literary mind is perhaps
the dominant theme of modern and contemporary writing. The ideologist
and the reformer on one side, the esthete and the individualist on
the other, solve that conflict by submitting the bourgeois spirit to
the literary mind. Such was the solution of Flaubert and Nietzsche, of
Wilde and Shaw, of Joyce and Proust. Thomas Mann reversed the position,
granting the bourgeois spirit the right of questioning the validity of
the literary mind and of opposing it. But Svevo was perhaps the only
one among modern writers unable even to conceive of such a conflict.
He accepted the bourgeois spirit as a frame or state of mind, as a
datum or fact, as our own version of what Montaigne used to call “the
condition of man.”
Exactly because he does not judge the bourgeois spirit, Svevo amuses
himself, tremendously and naïvely, by looking at it. A perfect
bourgeois as a man, as a writer he is almost alone in not looking like
one. Instead of descending or condescending to the bourgeois spirit
within his own soul, he raises and uplifts it along with himself to
the sphere of imagination, to a world of fancy and dream, which is at
the same time the world of reality itself. Once Stendhal asked for a
literature written by bankers and industrialists able to understand,
lucidly and cynically, the economy of life, the business of society,
the value of man. Svevo was certainly a writer of this brand, and
furthermore, endowed with such bourgeois honesty and common sense as
to refuse to transform his indulgent egoism into any set of theories,
any “egotism.” A kind of innocent wisdom was the real source of his
greatness and originality. He was with everybody, including himself, a
man of the world. This makes him, more than an Italian Joyce or Proust,
a kind of contemporary Henry James, without the latter’s snobism and
narcissism.
This is why from the naturalistic and Schopenhauerian pessimism of his
youth he gradually grew to a kind of olympian serenity, and acquired
that “merry wisdom” which is so alien to the modern mind. His first
novel is gray and sad: in his second, there appears already what
Gogol used to call “smiling through tears”; in _Zeno_ and in his last
stories, one may see the very uncommon realization of that poetic
ideal which the German poets of the beginning of the past century used
to call “romantic irony.” This explains why the man born old always
grew younger with time: and the same is already happening to his work,
through the wonders of glory and the miracle of death. In the annals of
literature very few books will remain so youthfully fresh as the pages
of a writer like Svevo, who spent all his life in drawing a “portrait
of the artist as an old man.”
_Renato Poggioli_