John Willett

Italo Svevo

It was Brecht, with his cynical mind, who remarked on the reluctance of 20th-century novelists and their readers to discuss the workings of business. Since this country alone publishes some eighty novels a week it is a bit difficult to generalize very reliably about them, and maybe there is the odd businessman hero lurking among all those spies, doctors, nurses, space-monsters, delinquents, advertising men and (God help us) writers. But one doesn’t get that impression. Where the Victorian novelist was unashamedly fascinated by the main motive force of bourgeois life people today prefer to leave such sordid matters to the Sunday Times’s excellent Insight team. Occasionally some work of fiction will put forward a fabulous caricature of business on the very highest level of tycoonery, as in Graham Greene’s England Made Me or Thomas Hinde’s For the Good of the Company, but the informed study from within, like Roy Fuller’s Image of a Society, is now extremely rare. Only Bristow, in the Evening Standard’s strip of that name, maintains a flimsy link between the world of the imagination and the facts of commercial life. Significantly, Bristow’s great work Living Death in the Buying Department was never published.

Living Death in the Buying Department. That could easily have been the title of a novel by Italo Svevo, the Triestine businessman-author who was born just over a hundred years ago and died as a result of a motor accident in 1928. Life, death (or more particularly old age) and business were three of his main themes, together with a closely lived and closely observed family life and its subversion, at any age up to and including the deathbed, by those beautiful girls for which Trieste is quite as famous as for its commerce or its shipping. It was as if a sceptical 19th-century bourgeois realist had somehow survived to grow 20th-century eyes; the social and professional miseries of a bank clerk in A Life, his first novel, literary ambition in a mercantile setting (a recurring subject), the catastrophically incompetent ‘Business Partnership’ that forms one of the long episodes of The Confessions of Zeno: all are seen with a marvellous mixture of intimacy and detachment, with great psychological insight but at the same time with an innocent lightness that dries out into patches, then whole areas, of a special self-deprecating ironic wit.

For a long while Svevo was a word-of-mouth author: the kind whose books are read because of unrelenting personal recommendation and published in defiance of commercial good sense by publishers who are themselves addicts. He never wrote much—the three novels (the third being Senilit`, or As a Man Grows Older), three novellas (of which The Hoax is the most brilliant), some early plays of no special distinction and a number of short stories, essays and fragments which remained unpublished even in Italy until the 1950’s. As with Thomas Love Peacock there was a long gap in his life when he wrote nothing at all. What he did write failed to please the critics, who virtually ignored him until he was in his middle sixties, then turned him into a kind of elderly problem child: il caso Svevo, a case. And if there is even now something extraordinarily personal about the discovery and enjoyment of his work it is perhaps because he put so much of his own character into his fictions. They seem above all the expression of a wise, likeable and refreshingly unpretentious man.

Ettore Schmitz, who took the pen-name Svevo, stands very much on his own at a special crossroads where Balzac meets Freud, the bourgeois world runs into modern scepticism, and Italian, German and Slav cultures all overlap. Trieste for a great part of his life was Austrian; his own education was partly German, hence his Italian-Swabian choice of name; one of the doctors in Zeno—health is both a preoccupation and a joke in Svevo—has the Triestine Slav-sounding surname of Coprosich. On top of all this he was Jewish, and as a result lived and worked within a family ambience that was close even by Italian standards, his father-in-law being both his employer and his first cousin by marriage. The smallness of the society round him is tacitly reflected in his concentration on quite small themes: the deaths of a mother (in A Life), a sister (As a Man Grows Older), a father (Zeno), the difficulty of giving up smoking, the unexpected twists of the market, the absurdities of love and of marriage. There is little direct description of Trieste or the surrounding countryside, and no indication of the writer’s Jewishness, even in his autobiographical notes. Yet both are present by implication in all his writings, which could have come from no other background. Few people have made such substantial and profound books out of such superficially slight and inconsequent material, held together by ridiculous small-scale interlockings and by a complete consistency of tone and outlook.

‘Not an amateur of rare books, but an authentic living human being,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg, who met him rather surprisingly at a grimsounding French pen banquet in 1927. ‘He smoked one cigarette after another . . . . ’ The description is quoted in P. N. Furbank’s new book on Svevo, of which about a quarter is devoted to an analysis of the works and the rest to a biography of the writer. How far such biographies are of relevance to any artist’s works is always a debatable question, which right-thinking critics nowadays tend to meet with a stout denial, though there is also Picasso’s extreme view that he would not have bothered to look at Cézanne’s paintings if Cézanne had led a life like that of Gide’s friend the socialite painter Jacques-Emile Blanche. In Svevo’s case what matters is the stuff of his work, not the style, and such a lot of the stuff is himself—not his experiences so much as his problems, reflections and judgments—that his life is all of a piece with his writings. This was already evident, in an innocent kind of way that would surely have delighted him, from his wife’s small memoir published in Trieste in 1950; the photographs in particular were like illustrations to the novels, while the love and pride shown were just what might have been expected from Zeno’s Augusta, one of the most detachedly observed (and absent-mindedly acquired) wives in all literature. Furbank’s book naturally lacks this particular Svevian irony, but it is of the greatest interest to aficionados and a necessary complement to the (still incomplete) five-volume Secker and Warburg edition of the works. For the English reader it is the only study of its kind.

Here we can see what kind of a person Schrnitz really was. He really did suffer from cigarette trouble; he really did make promises to himself and see numerical significances in the calendar; he really did try to psychoanalyse himself. He was naïve, in the sense that he was always able to be surprised by commonplace things; he told his wife he would make an excellent brother; he wanted marriage to be ‘a free Socialist union’ in the tradition of August Bebel, whose work on Woman and Socialism he gave her to study before their wedding. When the difficult birth of their daughter made her afraid of dying he offered to have himself baptised for her peace of mind; she was so effectively relieved, he reported, that ‘I have never troubled to decide whether it was the Jewish God or the Christian who performed the miracle’. James Joyce thought him close with his money, but then Joyce had large ideas about what was due to himself from society, and all the other evidence seems to be that Schmitz was unusually generous, guaranteeing his friends’ debts (not excluding the Joyces’), supporting a number of lame ducks both inside and outside the family, helping the local artists and once in Venice buying a new gondola for a hard-up gondolier. On the day after his father-in-law’s funeral he wrote instructions for his own:

‘I want to be the least trouble possible to my friends and neighbours and for things to be done in the most simple and straightforward way, without ostentation of any kind, even of simplicity.’

Zeno himself could not have bettered that final twist, or his famous deathbed remark when he was not allowed to smoke: ‘That really would have been the last cigarette’.

One secret of Svevo’s extremely individual flavour was that Ettore Schmitz was not, in the current sense of the word, a writer. He was forced to go into a bank at 18 when his father’s fortunes (and personality too, it seems,) collapsed, and although he continued until his marriage trying to pursue a triple career as bank clerk, writer and teacher of commercial correspondence he thereafter pushed his ambitions underground. In part this was plain discouragement. A Life did not do too badly, though he had to publish it at his own expense, while as a contributor to the irredentist paper L’Independente over a number of years he made himself known and useful. But As a Man Grows Older, a much more interesting novel, fell absolutely flat outside Trieste, and when a few months later he entered his in-laws’ paint business he decided that he must give up. ‘Write one must,’ had been his first reaction, ‘what one needn’t do is publish’; indeed the novel itself had not originally been meant for publication. Once fully embroiled in paint manufacture he felt that he could no longer even write; what spare time he had he devoted to the less disheartening art of playing the violin. ‘I, here and now and for ever’, he wrote at the end of 1902, ‘have eliminated that ridiculous and damnable thing called literature from my life.’

The family had a successful and secret recipe for ship’s underwater paint, which they supplied to a number of the world’s navies, then rapidly expanding. One of these was the British, and from 1902 to 1912 Schmitz was sent to England for some months every year, first to plan and then to supervise a new family factory at Charlton in south-east London. The effect of this minor by-product of the arms race was twofold. On the one hand, according to the pamphlet Italo Svevo Scrittore (which he checked and amended himself), his experience of English suburban life led him to accept the idea of a society in which everyone had his useful, if unglamorous place.

‘Didn’t the literary adventure he had toyed with detract from his strength as an ordinary useful citizen? Certainly life in the English factory was a cure and a tonic for Svevo; he became increasingly happy at having resigned himself.’

He welcomed ‘the absence of any sort of literature’ there, got to know ‘the star footballer’ (of Charlton Athletic?) and reflected on the difference in prestige between an honourably defeated football team and a failed littérateur. At the same time, by a stroke of prosaic justice which must appeal to all dialecticians, the need to improve his English drove him to take lessons in Trieste from 1907 on with a young teacher called James Joyce. Joyce too, says Stanislaus Joyce’s introduction to the English translation of As a Man Grows Older, had a soul ‘full of decaying ambitions’, nor had he yet any works to his credit but a slender volume of 36 songs, a few articles in prominent reviews, and three short stories in an agricultural weekly, The Irish Homestead.

The encouragement which he gave his middle-aged pupil both then and later has passed into literary history. It had a decisive effect, if not in starting Schmitz writing once more, certainly in his ultimate success.

In a small way Schmitz had helped sow the wind of war, and after 1914 he reaped, not the whirlwind exactly, but the baffling stillness at the centre of the storm. Like Zeno he was caught between the lines: his inlaws were Italians and took refuge in England, leaving him, a suspiciously pro-Italian Austrian, to look after a business which the Austrian authorities first hoped to exploit, then closed down. The group of friends with whom he had played string quartets—he was of course the second fiddle—had left Trieste and he got bored with practising on his own. ‘It was impossible to scrape away all day long; if nothing else he had to consider his neighbours’ nerves, already badly strained by the war.’

So he began writing again: a ‘project for universal peace’, sketches for his memoirs, and then, with the arrival of the Italian forces in 1918, articles for the new pro-Italian daily La Nazione edited by his friend Benco. He was now nearing 60; the war had sucked him out of all his ruts and resolutions; ‘the machine had been lubricated’, (in the words of Italo Svevo Scrittore) and in ‘a moment of overwhelming inspiration’ he planned a third novel.

‘There was no way out. That novel had to be written. It needn’t of course be published, he said. At last the inhabitants of his house would be spared the unrhythmical sounds of his violin.’

The result was The Confessions of Zeno, the longest and best, and at first the most unappreciated of all his works.

Twenty-five years earlier As a Man Grows Older was already a strikingly original novel, as Joyce, who had parts of it by heart, was the first to see. To Schmitz’s Triestine friends it was a roman ` clé, based on his friendship with the painter Umberto Veruda and his love affair with a girl called Giuseppina Zergol, who later, according to Mr Furbank, became a rider in a circus. Its origins however were curious, several chapters having been written for the girl’s own moral edification and not at first intended to be published at all. The German critic Paul Heyse, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1910, who had found A Life too much like ‘a scientific exercise ` la Zola’, asked him whether it was necessary to study moral weakness in such minute detail and if he could not get away from ‘this suffocating atmosphere of decadence’. Zeno goes even farther in the same direction; its construction is more episodic, its concentration closer, its irony more biting and its eye for detail sharper. The kind of people he wrote about were ‘a living protest against that ridiculous conception of the Superman, which has been so much drummed into us (particularly us Italians)’. No novelist ever set out to be more basely prosaic; he was from the first the exact opposite of the rhetorical and self-dramatising d’Annunzio, whom Joyce had admired, and in Zeno he made less concession than ever to literary elegances. Some of this is in line with Zola’s Le Roman expérimental, which claimed that ‘nous sommes actuellement pourris de lyrisme’ and called for novelists to model themselves on the physiologist Claude Bernard, analysing humanity with scientific scepticism; Zola indeed was Schmitz’s first master. Since writing As a Man Grows Older however he had come across a scientist who was doing exactly that. Zeno reflects his reading of Freud.

Many incidents in Zeno are like a fictionalized version of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; thus Zeno proposes to the wrong sister, he turns up late for his wedding, after a long love-hate relationship his brother-in-law commits suicide by mistake and he himself goes to the wrong man’s funeral, he is furthermore the inevitable victim of absurd psychosomatic pains. Schmitz began studying Freud’s works around 1908, apparently because he was worried about the mental condition of one of the family. This was no doubt his wife’s brother Bruno Veneziani, who in 1910 was analysed by Freud without success. The interest remained, closely bound up with the Zeno-like hypochondrias from which Schmitz himself suffered; he was always concerned with an elusive ‘health’. In the last year of the war, when his doctor nephew Aurelio Finzi was laid up at the family villa and time was no doubt heavy on both men’s hands, they began translating On The Interpretation of Dreams, after which he made his attempt at self-analysis. ‘He had no idea of the technique’, says Italo Svevo Scrittore, ‘as anybody can see from reading his novel.’ Thereafter his own view of psychoanalysis became increasingly sceptical. For all its fascination he did not think that it had much therapeutic effect, and in 1927 he told a correspondent that it was more use to writers than to patients. He actually sent a copy of Zeno to Freud in Vienna, but without getting an acknowledgement. It is not known whether Freud even read it.

This book, which to its admirers is one of the most subtly funny and ingeniously planned of all novels, would soon have been forgotten if Joyce had not read and admired it in Paris in the winter of 1923–24, and recommended it to the two critic-editors Valéry Larbaud and Benjamin Crémieux. With rare exceptions, such as Montale and Umberto Morra and the late Renato Poggioli, Italian critics outside the immediate Triestine circle failed to see beyond its stylistic awkwardnesses and ambling construction; others (like the TLS critic of 1926, alas,) thought it ‘negative’ in the modern Soviet sense, unworthy of New Fascist Man. But the Paris literary world has two immense virtues which can still today, however erratically, change the course of a writer’s (or artist’s or musician’s) history; it genuinely wants to assimilate work from abroad, and it is capable of single-minded enthusiasms such as are not elsewhere associated with the critic’s trade. In those days the judgments of Paris still had considerable prestige elsewhere, and as a result the Svevo books not only began filtering into foreign languages but became a matter for the home critic to take seriously, whether he accepted the Paris verdict or not. The last three years of Schmitz’s life were suddenly happy and productive; the novelle, of which The Hoax, with its alternations of fable and story, is particularly brilliant, were written in 1925 and 1926, and he was working on a successor to Zeno when he died.

The proof of the pudding is in the reading; you must turn to the books. Besides Furbank’s study Secker and Warburg have brought out the three novels; Zeno and As a Man Grows Older are also in Penguins, and two of the late novelle which will be in the Secker fourth volume were published before the war by the Hogarth Press. Oddly enough Svevo today is less well served in France, while he is hardly known at all in Germany, despite being in many ways much closer to Kafka and Musil than he is to Joyce and Proust, with whom he is often and wrongly compared. For us in the 1960’s he is perhaps the most subversive of all writers, because he so inverts our ideas of the literary proprieties. This is not so much a matter of episodic structure, low-level vision and unpolished language, for such features have now become quite palatable to critics, who are apt indeed to pigeonhole the Svevian protagonist as the first anti-hero in a line leading down the slope through Lucky Jim to almost any of the week’s 80 novels. No: where Svevo tacitly wrecks our conventions is in showing that in the long run a truly original writer may contribute more if he is not patronised by society or given a special status and licence to make a writer of himself. For we now tend to believe—or at least not to query those who assure us—that anyone who writes has a right to live by his work, more or less irrespective of its long-term merits. The assumption is that writing has to be a full-time job, and that it is only writers who know how to write. As for the effect, the evidence lies before us every week: novels that are neither competent entertainment nor high art, and seem to belong, by their standards, attitudes and interests, to a self-centred literary half-world remote from everyday life.

Possibly if Svevo had got grants and awards on the strength of his first novel he might have become a writer of this dreary second-rate sort. Certainly it is much the most ‘literary’ of his books: it moves into less unexpected regions than the others, and except in the village scenes the outlook is not unfamiliar. But as things were he simply became less and less like anybody’s idea of an author; all three of his novels were published at his own expense, while everything he wrote was a by-product of a full business career. This is what makes him so original, explaining his cavalier treatment of the novel form and the Italian language as well as his suicidal remoteness from the literary life of his own time. Sometimes during his quarter-century of silence he actually seemed to glory in his solitude; he told his daughter, for instance, that he disliked all poets and that ‘if you go on describing, day in and day out, and all the time you’re making nothing, day in and day out, you are bound to end up describing all wrong’. Discouraging as such principles may be to dispensers (and even recipients) of patronage under the modern system of welfare culture, the freshness and depth of Svevo’s own descriptions could be very heartening to all who hesitate before their typewriters because they feel that they are not qualified to use them.

We live in a country full of potential Svevos, and there is no reason why they should not be as articulate as people who work in the characteristic novelist’s jobs of teaching, journalism, advertising and the bbc—not to mention the retired generals who often write so well. The alternative perhaps is to take a leaf out of the Soviet book business and send our professional writers out in shock brigades to report how Capitalism is being preserved: in Throgmorton Street, perhaps, or on the Slough Trading Estate or in the unspeakable new headquarters building of Barclays Bank.

It couldn’t be done, of course, because Public Relations would at once take over. But it is the kind of drastic inversion of ideas that occurs once you see that the ‘writer’s dilemma’ (that recurrent horror) is not how to write but what, and even whether. A short course of Svevo suggests that what we need is fewer writers and more people who can write.