SPRING BOOKS

Valetudinarian

By MARTIN ESSLIN

1 N the recently published reissue of Livia Svevo's I charming memoir of her husband, there is a facsimile of a letter by Svevo addressed to her and dated May 14, 1897, in which he proudly announces that he has 'smoked his last cigar- ette.' Zeno Cosini, the ironical, self-analytical , narrator of the Confessions of Zeno, is also motivated by his desire to cure himself of the habit of smoking. It is this which drives him to a psychoanalyst; and it is the psychoanalyst who advises him to search his memory for a possible cause of his vice and so induces him to write the story of his life. It is typical of the subtlety of Svevo's approach that the answer to the problem can be found at the very beginning of this very long book when Zeno-Svevo asks himself : Did 1 really love cigarettes 30 much because I was able to throw all the responsibility for my own incompetence on them? Who knows whether, if 1 had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man 1 imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness. So the vice, the weakness of smoking is seen a•+ a great convenience : a perpetual excuse for falling short of one's .own ideal self. The very effort of ridding oneself of the vice, however, has its own sweet utility. For as Zeno adds to his reflections : 'I am sure a cigarette has a more poignant flavour when it is the last.' Hence Svevo derives the maximum enjoyment from his affair with the beautiful but poor Carla. for whose singing lessons he is paying in the cause of charity, by making up his mind every time he goes to make love to her that this will be the last time and that he will then return to his plain but dearly beloved wife for ever after, only

• to abandon that resolve on his way home.

Svevo is a writer who has long been unjustly neglected in this country, and it is heartening to see the two first volumes of a uniform edition of his works in English appear in the book- shops.* There are few novelists of Svevo's stature who are equally entertaining, poignant and profound at the same time, few writers who Can sustain the delicate balancing act on the narrow ridge between the tragic and the comic with equal assurance. In the Confessions of Zeno the description of his father's death, for ex- ample, has all the sadness and horror of the human condition, and yet somehow, miracu- lously, appears irresistibly funny. It is the nar- rator's, and the author's, ability to be involved in the event and at the same time to see it from a safe and detached distance which accounts for this effect. That is how the split image of irony is produced.

Svevo's irony places him apart from the main- stream of the Italian tradition which glories in the grand heroic gesture. Italian critics have

* CONFESSIONS OF ZENO and As A MAN GROWS OLDER. By ltalo Svevo. Translated by Reryl de 4.0ete. (Seeker and Warburg. 25s ••end 18s.) pointed out that his very language in its dryness eschews the sonorities, the rhetorical flights to which the beauty and resonance of the Italian language irresistibly draws most Italian writers. Svevo himself has explained this by the fact that his language was not the classical Tuscan but the Triestine dialect. This is undoubtedly correct. But the true reason lies deeper. Svevo, whose real name was Ettore Schmitz (his family on the grandfather's side had German-Jewish origins), and Trieste itself, in the first fifty- seven years of Svevo's life the largest seaport of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have strong links with the cultural tradition of Central Europe. Svevo himself spent five years at a boarding school in Bavaria and was well read. in the German and Austrian classics.

His attitude to life and his literary approach immediately fall into place if he is seen as belong- ing to the social and intellectual climate which produced Arthur Schnitzler, Musil, Broch, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Freud. The very ricketi- ness of the political structure of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, the very imminence of its collapse sharpened the analytical faculty of its intellectuals, made them search for the causes of the sickness of their world, which was merely more acute but in no way essentially different from that of the rest of Europe, and so turned these minds into the first mirrors of the coming .crisis of Western man. And yet, the life of the upper middle class of the declining decade of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was one of leisure, refinement and pleasure. The intimations of the cataclysm to come, among the amenities and delights of an epoch and a class which knew how to live as well as any in history, produced the peculiar flavour of this spiritual climate.

No wonder that health and sickness, indul- gence and guilt, the tension between appearance and reality, are the central preoccupations of the period. In Svevo's case the social and political aspects of decline and dissolution are relegated far into the background. But they are there nevertheless: Svevo's irony is, precisely, based on the self-evident fact that the social life against which his characters move is unreal, irrelevant and absurd. His central characters, as those of Kafka in a totally different convention, are, by virtue of their sensibility and awareness of this absurdity, unfit for the life of their society and therefore maladjusted.

Svevo's first novel, Una Vita (which is also due to appear in this uniform edition), was originally called Un inetto (An Inept Individual). Its hero, Alfonso Nitti, is driven to suicide by the stupidity and insensitivity of society around him. Emilio Brentani, the central character of Svevo's second novel, Senilita (As a Man Grows Older—it was James Joyce who suggested the translation of the title), does not die; but he feels a sick man in a world of well-adjusted, healthy people. Brentani's sickness is his in- ability to see the world as sordid as it really is : Angiolina, the girl of the people whom he loves as an angel, is in reality a cheap amateur tart who deceives him with all and sundry. It is a typical touch of Svevian irony that when Brentani, the middle-class idealist, speaks to Angiolina of the injustices of the social order and of the struggle of the poor for their rights, the proletarian girl immediately takes the side of the rich against the poor. And in the end she runs away with a bank-clerk who has em- bezzled a large sum of money.

Brentani survives his love affair. He finds his adjustment in the senility of the title of the original, which does not stand for 'senility' or 'old age' in any physical sense, but for the abandonment of the idealism of youth, passive acceptance of the world, assent to a state of sick- ness in one's own life which matches the sick- ness of society.

If Brentani's adjustment is a tragic process, Zeno Cosini in the Confessions of Zeno finds it painful perhaps but nevertheless a subject of gentle irony. Senilita was completed in 1898, when SveVo was thirty-seven years old. Con- fessions of Zeno was started in 1919, twenty- one years later, and the difference in tone rep- resents Svevo's own adjustment to reality, his enjoyment of his ability to look down at the idealism of his youth. It may be argued that Senilita, which is shorter, is a more perfect work of art. Confessions of Zeno on the other hand represents a far more mature, if cynical, mellow- ness. It is a comical masterpiece, the Tristram Shandy of the twentieth century.

How strange, moreover, that its author, the wealthy Triestine businessman, who had married into directorship of a profitable firm producing ships' paints, should not only have met the author of the other great comic novel of our age, but have served as one of the models at least of its central comic character. James Joyce had come to Trieste in 1905. In 1907 Svevo engaged the young man as his private tutor of English. Joyce showed him the manuscript of The Dead, and the older man confessed that he too had written two novels in his youth. Joyce read the two books and his enthusiasm, par- ticularly for the end of Senilita, which he con- sidered equal to some of the best passages of the great French novelists, so encouraged Svevo that he eventually resumed his writing and pro- duced his masterpiece. Joyce, on the other hand, later declared that, only two Italian writers had ever influenced his work, Vico and Svevo. He plied Svevo with questions on his Jewish back- ground and it has been suggested that some features at least of Leopold Bloom are based on Svevo. And Anna Livia Plurabelle owes her middle name, and some of her characteristics, to Svevo's majestic wife Livia Veneziani. There can have been few literary friendships stranger and more fruitful. It was Svevo who, in 1921, was asked by Joyte to rescue a folder with manuscripts from his last Triestine lodgings and to bring it to Paris. It was Joyce who, after the publication of Confessions of Zeno, drew the attention of Valery Larbaud and Benjamin Crernieux to Svevo and who was thus respon- sible for his long-overdue recognition in the world of French and international letters.

In France, Svevo immediately fitted into the main tradition : Brentani's determination to find romantic love was seen as a manifestation of bovaryisme; and Angiolina was recognised as a sister of Proust's Odette and Albertine.

The parallels beween Svevo and Proust are indeed striking. Confessions of Zeno spans the period between the heyday of the doomed pre- war world and the bleak aftermath of the col- lapse of the Europe of 1918 exactly as Proust's vast novel does. There are many similarities between the sensibility of Marcel and Zeno, particularly in their emphasis on, and use of, their own sickness. Both Proust and Svevo wrote under the influence of psychoanalysis. They both display an acute feeling for the inevitable rav- ages of time. But if Proust is more profound, Svevo is more concise and more amusing. If Proust is Parisian and metropolitan, Svevo glories in his provincialism, which, however, never detracts from his universal significance.

On September 11, 1928, Svevo, his wife and his six-year-old grandson Paolo set out to re- turn to Trieste from a holiday at Bormio. It was a rainy day, the car skidded, the chauffeur lost control and it crashed into a tree. For two days Svevo lay severely injured in a village hospital. On the last morning, Svevo watched the doctor light a cigarette. He made a feeble sign that he would like to smoke. The doctor refused. With a supreme effort he spoke: 'This really would have been the last cigarette!' A few hours later he was dead.