Zeno's Conscience, Page 2

  His life at the bank continued to be unhappy, and, at just about this time, his supplementary teaching position at the Revoltella fell through. Unexpectedly, Olga invited—or commanded—him to work for the family firm. He was initiated into the secret of the paint formula. Veneziani submarine paint was in demand far beyond Trieste, and the family set up branches, first in Italy (at nearby Murano), then in England. Svevo was often deputed to organize and control these outposts of Olga’s empire. To Olga’s satisfaction (and his own), he proved good at his job; and in the course of time, he achieved financial ease. He and Livia and their daughter could live in near-luxury. In his leisure moments—partly as a substitute for writing—he devoted himself to the violin. His success as a musician was less than brilliant, but he was able to put together an amateur quartet, which performed at social gatherings at their hospitable Veneziani villa.

  His foreign travels were putting his command of languages to the test, and he felt that his English, in particular, needed improvement. Toward the end of 1906, Svevo was told of a young tutor, James Joyce, an Irishman who had been in Trieste since the previous March and had achieved a certain popularity, especially among the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. Since the penniless Joyce and his wife, Nora, often had to change dwellings, Joyce taught his pupils at their homes. Sometime in the autumn of 1906 he and Svevo began meeting, with reciprocal pleasure.

  Joyce had recently managed (like Svevo, at his own expense) to publish a collection of his poems, Chamber Music, and was completing the stories of Dubliners, for which he was having trouble finding a publisher. He was also trying to get on with his more ambitious work, the novel then thought of as Stephen Hero. He showed his work to Svevo, and at one of their meetings actually read aloud his great story “The Dead” to Livia and Ettore, who immediately felt its power. After the reading, Livia went into the garden, picked some flowers, and handed the bouquet to Joyce as a sign of her admiration.

  Eventually Svevo confessed to his young teacher that he also had—or had once had—literary ambitions. Joyce asked to read Una vita and Senilità and was profoundly impressed. He even quoted some passages of the latter work from memory to the thrilled author. (Svevo, it must be added, became one of several sources of “loans” to the young Irishman.)

  Joyce discussed his own work more and more freely with Svevo. As he began planning Ulysses, he frequently consulted his pupil about Jewish beliefs and practices; and thus Svevo contributed to the characterization of Leopold Bloom. Livia—or, at least, her much-admired long blond tresses—was later a model for the personification of Dublin’s river Liffey, as Anna Livia Plurabelle.

  As the First World War began, Joyce had to leave Trieste, but from his exiles—first in Switzerland and later in Paris—he kept in touch with his friend. Joyce’s continued moral support may have contributed to Svevo’s first great postwar undertaking, La coscienza di Zeno, which was begun in March of 1919, more than twenty years after the completion of Senilità.

  The years of the war were profoundly disruptive for Svevo, for Trieste, and for the underwater paint business. Even before hostilities began, many Italians fled the city, where the Austrian authorities had imposed a number of restrictions, including a severe censorship of the press. Gioachino and Olga, both Italian citizens, left for England, so Ettore remained in charge at the factory. Wanting to be near her Italian fiancé, Letizia—now in her teens —joined some family members in Florence.

  The Austrians tried to confiscate the factory and wanted to know the secret formula; Ettore thwarted these efforts, first by concealing the ingredients and then by supplying a false formula. Finally he had to travel to Vienna to protest the confiscation of the factory. He was successful, but there was little business to be done in the beleaguered city.

  Finally, well after the war’s end and Trieste’s annexation to Italy, the Schmitzes—including Letizia, now married and with a growing family—were able to take a vacation together. In the summer of 1922 they rented a villa in the hills north of Trieste. Here, in an access of fervid inspiration, Svevo went seriously to work on La coscienza di Zeno. Smoking furiously, he finished the book in a matter of months, and in May of 1923 the novel was published—again at the author’s expense—by the firm Cappelli in Bologna. Once more Svevo’s book aroused scant interest: a few local reviews, a brief and lukewarm notice in the Corriere della sera.

  But the tide was soon to turn, dramatically. The last few years of Svevo’s life would be radically different; he would come close to achieving victory in the battle of life. Though he had seen little of Joyce after his departure from Trieste and their correspondence had been desultory, Svevo had sent a copy of La coscienza di Zeno to his former English teacher. The response from Paris was immediate. Joyce’s letter is dated 30 January 1924, and it reads, in part:

  Thank you for the novel with the inscription. I am reading it with great pleasure. Why be discouraged? You must know it is by far your best work. As to Italian critics I can’t speak. But send copies to Valéry Larbaud, Benjamin Crémieux, T. S. Eliot (Editor Criterion), F. M. Ford. I will speak or write to them about it also. I shall be able to write more when I’ve finished the book. So far two things interest me. The theme: I should never have thought that smoking could dominate a man like that. Secondly, the treatment of time in the book. You certainly don’t lack penetration, and I see that the last paragraph of Senilità … has been growing and blossoming in secret.

  Joyce, who knew something about promoting literary work, especially his own, was as good as his word. He did speak with Larbaud and Crémieux, prodding them to read and publicize the book. An important new Parisian review, Le Navire d’Argent, was soon planning a “Svevo number” with an essay by Larbaud and a translation of excerpts from Senilità and La coscienza. Svevo was the talk of literary Paris, and a young Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, visiting the city, heard of him there for the first time. On his return to Italy, Montale procured copies of the three novels and took up the cause, writing articles on Svevo for Italian reviews and enthusiastically spreading the word. Soon Svevo was a prominent literary figure, or rather a “case,” debated at length in papers and in literary cafés. On one occasion, when Svevo was to pass through Milan en route to Trieste during a return trip from abroad, Montale arranged for a group of young writers to gather at the Milan train station and pay him homage. Svevo was also feted by Florentine literary circles, and in Trieste he was now a respected member of the Caffè Garibaldi intellectual group.

  The official literary establishment still regarded him with some suspicion and belittled his foreign fame, but that fame was undeniable. Translations of his works were already in progress. After his death an acquaintance, A. R. Ferrarm, recalled and quoted some remarks of his at this time:

  “Until last year I was the… least ambitious old man in the world,” Svevo said. “Now I am overcome by ambition. I have become eager for praise. I now live only to manage my own glory. I went to Paris … and all I could see was Italo Svevo: Italo Svevo among the treasures of the Louvre; Italo Svevo on the stage of the fifty-some Parisian theaters. Italo Svevo on the Elysées, and Italo Svevo at Versailles… The ville lumière… seemed to exist only as a function of my glory.”

  Svevo, in the last, satisfying years of his life, often visited Milan and frequented the literary salons there. In 1926 he gave a lecture on Joyce at the offices of// convegno, an important review that also sponsored a club and a theater. Though Svevo, who had never spoken in public before, had grave misgivings, the occasion went well and reinforced his relationship with the review, which published some of his stories.

  In the flush of excitement at his fame, he was not only writing stories but contemplating a sequel to La coscienza di Zeno. In the winter of 1927 a social event crowned this happy phase: Grémieux organized a dinner in Paris to honor Svevo, its guests including Isaak Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and other illustrious Paris residents, with Jules Romains presiding. Ehrenburg’s account of the dinner emphasized the bad food and marv
eled at Svevo’s incessant smoking.

  His fame could not dispel an increasing pessimism. His conversation and his writing now contained frequent premonitions of death; his concern with old age—his “senilità” which had been a spiritual more than a physical state—was now real. He had to cut down on his eating, for he had developed a heart condition. Nevertheless he continued to go to the office and, in good moments, to write. He did not give up smoking.

  In late August of 1928, Ettore and Livia decided to spend some time at the Alpine spa Bormio, where he had previously taken a cure. They traveled by motorcar, their chauffeur at the wheel, and took with them their six-year-old grandson, Paolo. Having set out on 11 September, they broke the trip overnight and on the twelfth resumed the journey despite pouring rain.

  As the car was crossing a bridge not far from Motta di Livenza, it skidded and crashed into a tree. Only Svevo seemed badly hurt, though Livia and Paolo were also bleeding.

  Svevo had a broken leg, some cuts and bruises, but he was also suffering from severe shock; the doctor quickly realized that the injured man was dying. Letizia and her husband arrived the next morning. At a certain point one of his visitors was smoking, and Svevo asked him for a cigarette. It was refused. Svevo replied: “That really would have been the last cigarette.” He died that afternoon at half past two.

  Livia survived him for almost thirty years and became the alert custodian of his fame. His death was the first of many family tragedies. In March of 1943 Letizia’s two eldest sons died as prisoners of war in Russia. Another son, Sergio, was killed in partisan street fighting in Trieste in 1945. Earlier that year the Villa Veneziani and the factory had been destroyed in an Allied bombing.

  Livia herself spent much of the war hiding from the Nazis. During that time she began writing a biography of Svevo. Later, a friend, Lina Galli, helped her complete it. But she had as much trouble finding a publisher as Ettore had had. At last it appeared, as Vita di mio marito (Life of My Husband) in Trieste in 1950. A charming, affecting, usefully informative work, it has subsequently been reissued and translated.

  Svevo’s widow lived to see her husband established as a modern Italian classic, but the “Svevo case” continued to provoke discussion. One of the thorniest questions surrounding Svevo was, quite simply, his Italian. In La coscienza di Zeno, the narrator complains about his own Italian. Like all his fellow Triestines, Zeno’s first language is the local dialect. For Ettore Schmitz, his first language was also Triestino; his second, German. Italian was an acquired tongue, and from the beginning of his career critics have insisted that his Italian is clumsy. “The Italian of a bookkeeper” is a recurrent jibe. In his preface to a reissue of Livia’s Vita di mio marito, Montale tackles the question:

  But the smell of warehouse and cellar, the almost Goldonian chatter of the Tergesteo, the unmistakable “late Ottocento” painting in some of his rare expanses of landscape and his numerous “interiors”—are they not the sure presence of a style? A commercial style, true, but also the only one natural to his characters.

  If Svevo—or rather, Zeno Cosini—writes like a bookkeeper, that may be because he is a bookkeeper. At the suggestion of the Bolognese publisher Cappelli, Svevo actually took the step of having a professional, non-Triestine writer, Attilio Frescura, examine his manuscript. For some time Svevo’s papers have not been accessible. They are in packing-cases stored in the Trieste library, which is being “renovated” (renovation, in institutional Italy, is likely to be an endless process). So we have no idea what Frescura’s proposed revisions were, nor do we know to what extent Svevo accepted them.

  In making this translation—and here I must adopt the first person singular—I have steadfastly resisted the temptation to “prettify” Svevo’s prose. And as I progressed, the temptation became less frequent, as that prose worked its charm on me. What could sometimes at first seem flat, unaccented, even opaque was, I realized, an essential part of Zeno’s character, like his subtle irony, his cockeyed ratiocination, his quiet humor. In his important study, In Praise of Antiheroes, Victor Brombert devotes an acute chapter to Zeno, an antihero in the great European tradition, where the bumbling importer Zeno Cosini ranks with that other great creation, the good soldier Schweik.

  I first read Svevo’s novel when I was a college senior, in the English translation by Beryl de Zoete, under the title Confessions of Zeno. I fell in love with the book, and a few years later, when my Italian was more fluent, I read it again in the original and loved it even more. Beryl de Zoete must have been a fascinating woman. Her published works include scholarly studies of Oriental dance; she was the companion of the great translator and scholar Arthur Waley, and thus lived in the magic circle of Bloomsbury. She also translated Senilità and, later, one of Alberto Moravia’s early novellas, the splendid Agostino.

  In the 1920s, when she worked on La coscienza di Zeno, she was translating the work of an eccentric, virtually unknown Italian writer. Seventy years later, when I began my translation, I was dealing with a text of world renown, universally loved. There are times when a translator must also be something of a salesperson, and I suspect that Beryl de Zoete, in her admiration for Svevo, was also eager to sell him to an uninstructed public. Her translation did just that, and she must have been pleased, rightfully, with her achievement.

  But, more than novels, translations age. The translators whose work illuminated my youth—Constance Garnett, Helen Lowe-Porter, Dorothy Bussy, C. K. Scott Moncrieff—have all been challenged and, in some cases, replaced. And I expect—admittedly without enthusiasm—that a new generation will retranslate the works of Gadda, Calvino, Eco, whom I introduced to English readers.

  While I was working on this translation, I left my old, college-days copy of Confessions of Zeno on the shelf. When I had finished, or almost finished the job, I took two or three peeks at de Zoete’s work, to compare a few of her solutions to mine. It was clear to me that she had had similar trouble with passages that troubled me. I had been ready to use (and duly acknowledge) any felicitous solutions of hers, but as it turned out, her words regularly drove me to press on and find new solutions of my own.

  The first and perhaps greatest problem is the very title of the book. In Italian, “coscienza” means both “conscience” and “consciousness,” and the word recurs often in the body of the novel. De Zoete’s choice of “confessions,” skirting the original word deftly, was inspired but, I felt, finally misleading, placing Zeno Cosini in a line descended from Augustine and Rousseau. (To one of my Catholic background, the word also had a religious, sacramental connotation that I felt was unsuitable.) Then, one day, in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, I read that in the past, the English word “conscience” had also had the meaning of “consciousness.” The article quoted Shakespeare (“conscience doth make cowards of us all”). And I decided that my title would be Zeno’s Conscience.

  Translation is often described as a lonely profession. I have never found it so. True, during most of the work, I am alone in my study, facing the blank screen and the printed page. But I also have the pleasure of discussing work and words with others, with colleagues and friends. I began this translation years ago in Italy and completed it at Bard College, where the campus teems with Svevians, always ready to talk about his great novel. At Bard, I must thank my valued colleagues James Ghace, Frederick Hammond, Robert Kelly, William Mullen, Maria Assunta Nicoletti, and Carlo Zei. I am also grateful to my student Jorge Santana for his help, and to my former student Kristina Olson for collaborating on the bibliographical note. In New York, my old friend Riccardo Gori Montanelli (who helped me with some of my first translations, in Charlottesville, Virginia, fifty years ago) came to my assistance with some stock-market terminology, and my editor, LuAnn Walther, and her assistant, John Siciliano, helped with the final stages of the long process of seeing Zeno’s Conscience into print.

  William Weaver

  MAP OF ZENO’S TRIESTE

  PREFACE

  I am the doctor
occasionally mentioned in this story, in unflattering terms. Anyone familiar with psychoanalysis knows how to assess the patient’s obvious hostility toward me.

  I will not discuss psychoanalysis here, because in the following pages it is discussed more than enough. I must apologize for having suggested my patient write his autobiography; students of psychoanalysis will frown on this new departure. But he was an old man, and I hoped that recalling his past would rejuvenate him, and that the autobiography would serve as a useful prelude to his analysis. Even today my idea still seems a good one to me, for it achieved results far beyond my hopes. The results would have been even greater if the patient had not suspended treatment just when things were going well, denying me the fruit of my long and painstaking analysis of these memories.

  I am publishing them in revenge, and I hope he is displeased. I want him to know, however, that I am prepared to share with him the lavish profits I expect to make from this publication, on condition that he resume his treatment. He seemed so curious about himself! If he only knew the countless surprises he might enjoy from discussing the many truths and the many lies he has assembled here!…

  Doctor S.

  PREAMBLE

  review my childhood? More than a half-century stretches between that time and me, but my farsighted eyes could perhaps perceive it if the light still glowing there were not blocked by obstacles of every sort, outright mountain peaks: all my years and some of my hours.

  The doctor has urged me not to insist stubbornly on trying to see all that far back. Recent things can also be valuable, and especially fantasies and last night’s dreams. But there should be at least some kind of order, and to help me begin ab ovo, the moment I left the doctor, who is going out of town shortly and will be absent from Trieste for some time, I bought and read a treatise on psychoanalysis, just to make his task easier. It’s not hard to understand, but it’s very boring.