Is it possible for an RW to become a GW? Certamente!
The case of Italo Svevo, and why Sept. 13 should be 'Zeno Day'
Ascolta!
Sento….un genio che fiorisce tardi!
For those of you (like me, who cheated on the above with Google translate) non-Italian speakers:
HARK!
I hear…a late-blooming genius!
Congratulazioni, to those of you who have already done the equation “Italian” + “late-blooming genius” = Italo Svevo.
Long before this name entered my consciousness, I started a Facebook group called Rejected Writers Rendezvous.
The typical member of that group, as I imagined it, would be someone who, after a few self-published novels that went nowhere, gave up on best-seller lists, critical acclaim, book tours, etc. The image so many of us dream of the acclaim, freedom and riches of being a celebrated author slowly deflates like a neglected beach ball, each rejection letter a pin prick.
Rather than living the passionate, artistic life imagined in youth, the Rejected Writer (RW) finds a mundane, non-creative way to make a living, by night reading the Great Writers (GW) who with seeming effortlessness turn mundane details into art, plumbing reality for inner struggles, emotional connections (or, often, disconnections), and, in the hands of the true masters, humor.
An RW can never turn into a GW, right?
Falso!
The existence of a newly-translated version of A Very Old Man (available through Changing Hands Bookstore by clicking here) is evidence of an astounding RW to GW transformation.
Ettore Schmitz is a late-19th Century example of an unfairly Rejected Writer: As a young man, he adopted the pen name Italo Svevo and, unable to convince publishers to take him on, self-published two novels, Una vita (A Life) in 1892 and Senilità (much later translated under the title As a Man Grows Older) in 1898.
An excellent biography written by his wife, Livia Veneziani–who proved to be every bit as practical as her husband was scattered, and who was also his cousin (things were a little different, back then…)–confirmed the legend: Schmitz was deeply hurt by the lack of response to his first two novels, swore off writing and reluctantly embraced the life of a white-collar professional, working in the correspondence department of a bank for 20 years before becoming a successful salesman in the family’s ship-painting business.
Schmitz is considered Italian, though he was born, raised and spent his entire life in Trieste, then a sort of no-man’s-land; though it was annexed by Italy after World War I, the key port city of Trieste was under Austrian rule in much of Schmitz’s lifetime, though it had a largely-Italian population, with Serbian, German and other influences. The city’s dialect is a mashup of Italian, Slovene, and German–indeed, Schmitz often complained (much like his characters would) that writing in Italian was unnatural, even foreign. Writing in the formal Tuscan Italian was a chore, for Schmitz.
Or, as Italo Svevo later put it, “Every Tuscan word we write is a lie.”
And, at least one of his early critics sneered that Svevo “writes like a banker.”
For two decades, Schmitz was quiet, publicly, and seemed to be committed to his vow of giving up writing–though, it later became evident, much like the way he swore off cigarettes on scores of occasions, only to puff away in secret, Schmitz was scribbling away behind closed doors.
In 1907, almost a decade after he supposedly “killed off” Italo Svevo, Schmitz was focused on his business career. Entrenched in his wife’s family business, he regularly traveled to London to service contracts.
Embarrassed by his poor English, on returning to Trieste Schmitz vowed to better his language skills, and was referred to an Irish transplant who was struggling to patch together a living as a teacher.
And that struggling young Irishman in Trieste was….James Joyce.
The two became friendly, talking of their love of literature, with the then-unpublished Joyce sharing his work with the older, wise man.
In Memoir of Italo Svevo, published in 1950, the writer’s widow writes of those early meetings at her family home:
Joyce, who had never spoken of his literary work to anyone, soon brought his manuscripts to Villa Veneziani. There were the poems in Chamber Music and some chapters of Dubliners. I remember going down to the garden after the story The Dead, the last chapter of Dubliners, had been read, to pick some flowers and give them to the author to express my admiration. My husband in turn gave Joyce the two forgotten volumes, first A Life, for which he had a special affection, and then As a Man Grows Older, as if to say, “I too, was once a writer.”
Joyce read them at once and during the next lesson said he felt Svevo had been unjustly neglected. He added warmly that some pages of As a Man Grows Older could not have been better done by the great masters of the French novel.
Joyce even recited several pages of the book from memory.
While “These unexpected words were a balm to Ettore’s heart,” as Livia writes, they did not lead to anything tangible–at least not in the immediate future. Schmitz returned his focus to business, and the life-changing interruption of World War I, which forced Joyce to flee Trieste.
After The Great War, Schmitz–after years of scribbling stories and plays, many abandoned–tinkered with the idea for a novel.
His wife describes the process:
Ettore had been working on his new novel for some time, and in July 1922, when we went to spend the summer at Poggioreale, in the Corso, he was able to give his full attention to the definitive version of The Confessions of Zeno. He would shut himself in the sitting-room for the whole day, and type. No one interrupted or disturbed him. He smoked a great deal.
That last detail will amuse fans of Zeno, who, like his creator, struggles with quitting smoking, only to eventually embrace his weaknesses.
In any case, once he finished the novel, Schmitz again had to pay for its publication. “The book was published at his own expense in 1923 by the firm Cappelli. The Italian critics barely mentioned it,” Livia writes.
This remains baffling, as The Confessions of Zeno is such a delight, hilarious yet insightful as it follows the strange hero Zeno, who ricochets between pedantry and humiliation, something of a cross between Toole’s Ignatius Reilly and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, with a side of Freud.
Listen as Zeno ponders whether to confess–a recurring theme–a longtime affair, which has just ended, leaving him (as usual) feeling sorry for himself:
But then it would also be necessary to confess that now-ancient infidelity. It was purer than this latest one, but (who knows?), for a wife, more offensive.
Through studying myself, I arrived at more and more rational resolutions. I thought to avoid the repetition of a similar misdeed by hastening to organize another attachment like the one I had lost and of which I obviously had need. But the new woman also frightened me…
Zeno sheds tears over Carla, his former mistress, who at one point demanded Zeno point out his wife so Carla could see her; instead, Zeno pointed out to Carla his wife’s sister.
…Carla the sweet, the good, who had even tried to love the woman I loved and who had failed only because I had put before her another woman, precisely the one I didn’t love at all!
Where we chuckle and marvel, the author’s contemporary critics merely shrugged and yawned. Disheartened yet again by the fizzle of his literary work, Schmitz “became melancholy, and his heart troubles grew worse.”
Re-enter James Joyce.
In early 1924, Schmitz sent a copy of Zeno to his old friend, who instantly recognized its brilliance and urged Schmitz to send copies to some influential critics–who were fans of Joyce, who was the king of the literary scene, following the publication of Ulysses.
Schmitz followed Joyce’s advice, and those critics who had been trumpeting Joyce’s genius soon had a new subject of triumph.
In his sixties, Schmitz finally savored the praise that had so long eluded him.
“For the next three years,” as Nathaniel Rich’s introduction to the new A Very Old Man translation describes it, “Svevo tried to make up for lost time. He edited translations of his work, campaigned for the republication of Senilita, conducted a lively correspondence with editors and critics and patrons, lectured on Joyce, read Kafka and Proust, wrote new stories and plays and, as early as January 1927, began a new novel…”
Svevo went with him when Schmitz died on Sept. 13, 1928, after “a minor automobile accident that overstrained his heart,” according to Rich.
Fortunately, thanks to the extraordinarily faithful and resourceful Livia, who saved her husband’s manuscripts, A Very Old Man–published this Aug. 30, by New York Review Books Classics–revives Svevo and his Zeno.
Though brief at barely over 100 pages, this incomplete Zeno sequel is funny and delightful, right through its last lines, with Zeno being admonished for innocently gazing at a much-younger woman:
My face must have taken on an odd look while I was gazing at the amphora. But it wasn’t lechery; what I was thinking about was death. Others, though, saw desire in me. And when she got down from the tram, I realized that the girl, most likely from a well-to-do family, was accompanied by an elderly woman, a chaperone. And this woman, as she passed me, looked me in the eye and hissed, “You old satyr.” Old, she called me. To mention it was to provoke death. “You old fool,” I said. But she went on her way without saying another word.
Shortly after writing this, the author lay near death in a hospital. His family gathered around him, and, gasping for breath, Ettore Schmitz asked for a smoke. He was denied.
As his wife described, in words that will make fans of the chain smoking, ever-quitting Zeno chuckle:
“Then Ettore said, his voice already muffled: ‘That would really have been the last cigarette.’”
Perhaps Sept. 13 should be celebrated worldwide as 'Zeno Day,' a day to revel in the unique humor of Italo Svevo, while remembering that an RW can indeed become a GW, that there are second and third acts in life--and a good day for your last (fill in the blank)...