For the civilised reader the psychological novel has been a most fascinating and flattering mirror, and egoism the delightful subject par excellence. But from Constant to Joyce and Proust the analysis of motive or of sensation has suffered from scientific priggishness and preciosity. Humour, in the sense of forgiveness, has not been the dominant trait. There is excellent humorous writing in Proust and Joyce, but the sustained note of those writers does not come from the dry, skipping, fiddle-strings of the comedians and buffoons. On the contrary, pitiless diagnosis is the note of Proust; and Joyce is driven on, not by laughter, but by a dishevelled hatred of the root of life. Disappointment and frustration seem to be inherent in the psychological approach, no doubt, because the assumption that we stand alone is fallacious. And in the novelists who have isolated themselves or their subjects, we cannot but observe that the analysis of character or sensation tends to degenerate into the desiccation of character; the surgery upon motives turns into a medical search for the diseased and monstrous ones.
To those who are in danger of reacting too violently against the great botanists of our hidden flora, I recommend the cure offered by the works of Italo Svevo. Here is laughter at last. Here Hamlet raises a smile, Œdipus is teased away from his fate like some figure of light opera, the malade imaginaire of the fag-end of the Romantic movement is made to get out of bed and run about in his pyjamas. The absurdities of life rescue us from the illusions of the intellect, from the grim stepmother-dom of our egoism and our brains. I do not mean that Svevo is a mere joker. He is far from that. He is no less sensitive or subtle in the elucidation of our feelings than the great botanists. The advantage of his laughter is that it makes his science humane and prevents his intelligence from dragging up our moral roots. And this is a point of huge importance to the development of the psychological novel. Over and over again we feel in such novels that the novelist is too knowingly superior to his people, his intelligence is too penetrating for the muddle of human nature. We suspect the sin of pride. That sin is entirely absent from the work of Svevo. He is the first of the psychological novelists to be beatified by a spirit of humility which recalls the battered but serene humility of Don Quixote, the humility of the comic tradition.
Very little is known in England about the life of Italo Svevo. Such information as we have comes from the introductions to his novels which were translated in the late ’twenties, and from the brother of James Joyce, who knew him well in Trieste. Joyce is said to have put something of Svevo into the portrait of Leopold Blum. Svevo’s real name was Ettore Schmitz; he was born in 1861 and died in 1928. He lived most of his life in Trieste and was half-Italian, half-Austrian by origin. At the age of 32 he published his first novel, Una Vita, which was well received; five years later another novel, entitled Senilità, which was totally ignored. The fact that Svevo wrote in an Italian speckled by the impurities of the Trentino dialect was against him. He gave up literature for a business career in which he was very successful. Not until he was in his sixties did he write La Coscienza di Zeno (In English, The Confessions of Zeno), his most remarkable work, which he is said to have dashed off in a fortnight. The writing of this book and the fame it brought to Svevo owe something to the encouragement of Joyce, who, as a teacher of English in Trieste, had by chance been engaged by the business man to teach him our language. In his life the epicurean Svevo seems to have been robust, genial, solid, successful and urbane, the complete antithesis of the stoic Zeno, the brilliant, erratic hypochondriac, who is palmed off with marvellous skill as a self-portrait in The Confessions. Zeno was the hidden artist, an agile piece of mystification by an expert in loquacity. One can see a clue to the link between the solid Schmitz and the restless, forever enquiring and ever-deluded egoism of Zeno in the fact of Svevo’s divided birth. He was one of the frontier people of Europe, of divided temperament, and was therefore perfectly fitted for the analytical passion in which one part of our nature sits on the fence and observes the other.
Senilità is itself not a very original book. It is the usual étude de mœurs on the favourite Latin theme of the p’tite maîtresse, the working-class girl who can be kept cheaply. The interest of the story lies in the humility of Svevo before his characters, in a studied naivety which foreshadows the manner of Kafka in the use of the method of unconscious revelation, i.e. of letting the psyche expose itself, and, finally, in Svevo’s gift of writing epitaphs upon human feeling: “The thought of death is like an attribute of the body, a physical malady. Our will can neither summon it nor drive it away.” The underlying subject of Senilità is illness—that is to say, the senility or second childishness of the illusions we live by, and this hidden subject gives the commonplace story its peculiar double plot.
But when Zeno was written, thirty years later, it was totally original and mature, and like Adolphe, contained the essence of a lifetime. Throwing chronology away, Svevo writes an autobiographical novel divided into subjects. The book is split up into reminiscent essays on his father, his marriage, his mistress and his business partnership, and, naturally, many of the episodes are concurrent. This unconventional method has the attractive carelessness of conversation. Moreover, the story is held together by an amusing framework. Zeno writes in order to debunk his psycho-analyst. According to his analyst, all Zeno’s troubles—his troublesome love of his wife’s sister, his hypochondria, his will-lessness, his nervous crises, his mad, restless brainwaves, heroic moral illusions, and his suspicions—are all due to the Œdipus complex. Zeno sets out to show life slipping like an eel through the stiff hands of this theory. At the end of the book he gives up psychoanalysis because, by chance, he runs across a doctor who tells him that his real disease is diabetes. Zeno is delighted. A régime at last, a new theory, a new order, the solution of all his problems! His wife remarks:
“My poor dear Zeno, you have talked so much during your life about illnesses that sooner or later you were bound to get one.” And she overwhelmed me with tenderness.
However, neither Freud nor diabetes saves Zeno in the end. Obliged by the death and debts of his partner to attend seriously to his business, Zeno is saved by work. The intellectual is a natural gambler. He slaves (successfully) on the Bourse.
On its formal side Svevo’s originality springs from high spirits, from sheer wit and brain, such as are found in a comedy of Beaumarchais or Sheridan. When we turn to his matter, we see that Svevo belongs to that rare number of novelists—almost non-existent in modern literature—who like their characters and side with them instead of destroying them piecemeal. And in Zeno, Svevo is engaged in liking the kind of character who is most vulnerable to disapproval. For Zene is the egoist of all the egoists. How Meredith would havo detached the pomposity and complacency from that ubiquitous first person singular! Zeno is in love with explanation. He is perpetually button-holing and explaining. He would have been the supreme café bore of Trieste. Now he is fantasticating about his struggles to give up smoking; now he is being unguardedly complacent about his wife, his ideals as a seducer, his mental superiority to his more experienced business partner, and so on. But Zeno has one saving virtue; he never believes his own self-justifications. Zeno is just as happy when he is grotesquely wrong as when he is accidentally right. He is always on the damaging and humbling search for truth. Under the café gabble of Zeno’s enthusiastic tongue there lies a personal humility and tenderness, an exquisite ear for the true tune of human living, an unshockable wonder at each transient mystery of our feelings. Zeno appears to be a weak and vacillating mad-hatter—and obtuse critics have attacked the figure of Zeno as an example of the neurotic bourgeois who suffers from a kind of intellectual diarrhœa—but, in fact, the abiding impression he leaves is one of moral gravity.
The exaggerations which spring from the tradition of Italian farce are the making of The Confessions of Zeno. The absurd is trained upon the serious in order to awaken our emotions from the conventional turgidity into which they habitually settle. Two episodes illustrate the macabre and disturbing effect of Svevo’s use of bizarre incident. The first occurs in the very moving and faithful account of the death of Zeno’s father. As usual, Zeno is overwrought, his emotions have got beyond him. In his love for the dying father with whom he has nothing in common, Zeno is quarrelling with everyone at the sick-bed. With the scorn of youth, he has always regarded his father as a weak man; but at the moment of dying the old man rises in his bed as if he is going at last to reveal the mystery of life and death to his son and to embrace him; instead, the old man inadvertently hits him a blow on the cheek and dies. It is unexpected, it is ridiculous, it is terrifying. Literature abounds in deathbed scenes. To this one Svevo has given a particularity which is memorable, not only because it is eccentric, but because its effect on Zeno’s character is shown with real perspicacity. From that moment Zeno’s haunting illusion of weakness is dated. It is as illusory, of course, as his earlier illusion of being stronger than his father.
The second episode is more truly farcical, and not macabre at all. Svevo is again observing how life does not play up to conventional emotion, nor indeed to any theory at all. Guido, Zeno’s partner and brother-in-law, has died. Zeno has always disapproved of him because Guido was a chronic womaniser, but chiefly because Guido had married the sister whom Zeno had once wished to marry. Zeno could never in consequence be sure of the honesty of his disapproval, as indeed he could never be sure of anything in his life. But, obviously, now Guido was dead, the tangle had been cut. Moreover, to show that he was really devoted to Guido, Zeno slaves day after day at the office until the very hour of the funeral, in order to clear up the shady financial mess in which Guido had left his affairs and so preserve Guido’s good name. Give Zeno an illusion to preserve and he works for it with the fever of a lover. And then, when he is exhausted, Zeno suddenly remembers the funeral. He dashes out, hires a cab and begins a frantic search of the city for the funeral procession. His sister-in-law, whom he has always loved, will never forgive him if he fails to turn up at the funeral. At last the procession is found. The cab joins it and Zeno and his clerk sit back and relax to talk about the Bourse. Thank heaven. They are doing the conventional thing, for Zeno, like so many of the aberrated, has a longing for the conventional. And then they discover they are in the Greek cemetery. Guido was a Catholic. Obviously, they have followed the wrong funeral.
Four books by Svevo are available in English and are admirably translated by Beryl de Zoete. They include two collections of short stories which suffer from being brief restatements of the longer books. They are The Hoax and The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl. I find the Svevo of the short stories too playfully charming and serene, though The Hoax does define his quality:
… a humble life, endowed with a kind of strength that comes from absolute surrender….
Svevo sees our lives hanging in suspense from minute to minute; we appear, as we must do to the psychologist, to be in continual process of disintegration. And yet, surveying the scene again in longer stretches of time, there is, under the breathless chasing of illusions, a process of reintegration, too. The fool becomes the strong man, the younger son marries the ugly sister, who turns out to be the beautiful princess. And the business man of Trieste, ignored by literary society, is avenged by the brilliant, serious and hypochondriacal clown.