I am the doctor who is sometimes spoken of in rather unflattering terms in this novel. Anyone familiar with psycho-analysis will know to what he should attribute my patient’s hostility.

About psycho-analysis I shall here say nothing, for there is quite enough about it elsewhere in this book. I must apologise for having persuaded my patient to write his autobiography. Students of psycho-analysis will turn up their noses at such an unorthodox proceeding. But he was old and I hoped that in the effort of recalling his past he would bring it to life again, and that the writing of his autobiography would be a good preparation for the treatment. And I still think my idea was a good one, for it gave me some quite unexpected results, which would have been better still if the patient had not suddenly thrown up his cure just at the most interesting point, thus cheating me of the fruits of my long and patient analysis of these memoirs.

I take my revenge by publishing them, and I hope he will be duly annoyed. I am quite ready, however, to share the financial spoils with him on condition that he resumes his treatment. He seemed to feel intense curiosity about himself. But he little knows what surprises lie in wait for him, if someone were to set about analysing the mass of truths and falsehoods which he has collected here.

Dr. S.

ITALO SVEVO

CONFESSIONS OF ZENO

TRANSLATED BY BERYL DE ZOETE

_With an Essay on Svevo by Renato Poggioli_

THE MODERN READERS SERIES A NEW DIRECTIONS BOOK

_Copyright 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc._

_New Directions Books Are Published by James Laughlin_ NEW YORK OFFICE--500 FIFTH AVENUE

INTRODUCTION 9 THE LAST CIGARETTE 11 THE DEATH OF MY FATHER 34 THE STORY OF MY MARRIAGE 62 WIFE AND MISTRESS 149 A BUSINESS PARTNERSHIP 257 PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 379

A NOTE ON SVEVO

Ettore Schmitz was born in Trieste in 1861 from a family of German-Jewish descent, which had paradoxically Italianized itself in the great harbor city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The future writer was bound to feel the dualism of the elements composing his intellectual and psychological background, and chose to express it by selecting for his literary work the pseudonym Italo Svevo, or Italus the Swabian. He left incompleted his studies in Germany, and returned to his native city, first to work as a bank clerk, and later on, to become a rather prosperous, even a rich, businessman. Death caught him in a car accident in 1928, a few years after the writer had tasted, too shortly, the wine of success.

Svevo was about thirty years old when he wrote his first literary work. It was a novel which belonged more to the tradition of French realism and naturalism than to the corresponding Italian school, Capuana’s or Verga’s _verismo_. Naturalism meant in France the depiction of urban life of the working classes on one hand, on the other of the bourgeoisie, while its Italian counterpart coincided almost completely with Southern regionalism, with the representation of the primitive life of the shepherd, the peasant and the fisherman.

The literary sources of the first Svevo novel are betrayed by its title à la Maupassant: _Una Vita_ (“A Life”); by its story, which is nothing else but another _roman d’un jeune homme pauvre_, with the difference that it is not concluded by a happy ending (as a matter of fact, the protagonist ends in failure and suicide); finally by its intentions, which were of narrating another _éducation sentimentale_. But Svevo’s Frédéric Moreau, whose name is Alfonso Nitti, is not only far more provincial, gray and dull than Flaubert’s hero, his Parisian model: he is also a more introspective and literal self-portrait, as is proved by the milieu, which is the banking world, seen from inside and from below.

In spite of the fact that it was published only locally, the novel did not pass completely unnoticed in Italy, though it was soon and easily forgotten. Nobody paid the slightest attention to Svevo’s first masterpiece, _Senilità_ (“A Man Grows Older”), published five years later in 1898. The fault lies to a certain extent with the author himself, unable to realize, like all amateurs, that even literature is a business of its own. Perhaps the first admirer of the second novel of Svevo was James Joyce, who read it in 1906, when Ettore Schmitz found a tutor of English in the person of the future author of _Ulysses_, then an obscure language teacher at the Trieste Berlitz School.

The first of the many surprises this second novel, which is autobiographical, offers the intelligent reader is its title. Its protagonist, Emilio Brentani, is nearing middle age, but is still not too far from the years of youth. In a charming and moving preface to the second edition (1927), the already famous but still unspoiled Svevo cites the opinion of Valéry Larbaud, according to whom the title was not suited to the work. The author confesses his repugnance to follow the advice to change it, even if it comes from such a connoisseur. We think that the great French critic was wrong, and Svevo right. We think also that the rendering of the English translation, _A Man Grows Older_, reveals, if not the letter at least the spirit of the original title and work. _Senilità_ is the novel of senility understood not as a physical or psychic state, but of old age as a second nature, as a vocation.

The last works of Svevo, written shortly before his death and published posthumously, like the novelette _La Novella del Buon Vecchio e della Bella Fanciulla_ (“The Tale of the Good Old Man and the Beautiful Girl”), a masterpiece; or the beautiful short story _Vino Generoso_ (“Heady Wine”), still untranslated into English; or finally the unfinished novel _Il Vecchione_ (“The Oldster”) of which we have only the few pages of the beginning, are again variations about the all-dominant theme of old age. _Senilità_ is therefore an anticipation, a prophecy; and it apparently intends to show that people are not _made_, but are _born_ old. And the man born old is nothing else but a psychological counterpart of that type, which, when seen from a social viewpoint, is called a bourgeois.

It is not extraordinary that _Senilità_ passed completely unnoticed in Italy, since the Italian is the only modern literature which could be defined as one for which the bourgeois, as a sociological condition or a state of mind, does not exist. It is not extraordinary either, that Svevo’s work went unrecognized in spite of the fact that its center was Trieste, a city so dear to the Italian heart. If the man, Ettore Schmitz, was an Italian patriot always active in the agitation for the reunion of that city to Italy, the Trieste of the writer, as Svevo sees it and feels it, has nothing to do with the Trieste of Italian _irredentismo_, of the national dream. The Trieste of Svevo seems to an Italian reader a foreign city not because there are Austrians or Slavs (who almost never appear in Svevo’s world), but merely because it is a city of burghers, very similar to the Lübeck of Thomas Mann’s _Buddenbrooks_.

For a cultivated Italian it is very easy to understand, but almost impossible to appreciate, the Italian of Svevo, perhaps the least literary and even the least literate, certainly the least polished Italian ever used by a man of letters in our time. It is not, like the Sicilianized Italian of Verga, influenced by the local vernacular (in Trieste’s and Svevo’s case, a stronger variant of the singing Venetian dialect), but it is a kind of Italian Esperanto or pidgin-Italian, an instrument of commercial exchange, a modern _lingua franca_. The poet Umberto Saba stated recently that Svevo could have written equally as well (or equally as badly, if one prefers to judge from the viewpoint of linguistic pedantry and grammatical purism) in German as in Italian, and that if he chose to write in Italian, he did so to show his predilection for Italian culture. We rather think that if Svevo chose to write in Italian, he did so to be a Triestino of his own kind and class. The Italianism of Svevo is a social and psychological case rather than a cultural and literary one.

It is therefore not extraordinary that the very few Italian critics who understood from the beginning the value of his work, were peripheric Italians like him; for instance Ferdinando Pasini and Silvio Benco; or later, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, European minds, like that of Eugenio Montale. But it was only natural that the real discovery of his work was due to foreigners, first to James Joyce, and in the second place to Valéry Larbaud, who, together with Benjamin Crémieux, presented to the French public in an issue of _Le Navire d’Argent_ a partial translation of the second masterpiece of Svevo, _La Coscienza di Zeno_ (“The Confessions of Zeno”), which had recently appeared, after a quarter of a century of silence, in 1924.

Svevo’s early recognition by Joyce, with the latter’s good memory for works and men, was the prime mover of the French revelation of Zeno and the reason for the writer’s European success. In the preface to the second edition of _Senilità_, Svevo spoke of that discovery as his own “resurrection of Lazarus.” It made him humbly grateful and innocently happy for the few remaining years of his life and he always considered it more as a bad debt which poetic justice or the literary exchange had belatedly but dutifully paid him, as a wonder and a miracle, an act of grace and an act of God.

In all his works the real protagonist of Svevo is the bourgeois soul. But the bourgeois of Svevo is a very different kind from the type described in sociological or ideological literature. Svevo is always studying the bourgeois during his free time, while he does not work. The best definition which may be given of the bourgeois both on the social and psychological plane is perhaps the one according to which the bourgeois is that type of man for whom time is money. In the novels of Svevo there are no instances of a problem so frequently treated in the novels of Balzac and Zola, the _question d’argent_. Of Zeno Cosini and the anonymous old man who is the protagonist of the _Novella del Buon Vecchio e della Bella Fanciulla_ we merely know that they are rich; of Alfonso Nitti and Emilio Beltrani, that they are poor. Generally it is a matter of indifference to know whether Svevo’s heroes have money to spare: the only important thing is to realize that they always have a little or plenty of time to lose. And Svevo tells us how they employ their time, how they lose or kill it.

Actually some of his heroes, like Alfonso Nitti, have little time to spare. But Svevo has always time for them, even if he visits them preferably when they are free. He is not, like Mann or Proust, preoccupied with the old man Chronos, or like Kafka, with eternity. He is interested only in that aspect of our time’s consciousness, which Bergson (without Svevo knowing it) used to call _durée_, and which could be defined as the very antithesis of the quantitative conception of time, of time as _duration_. Time is the terror of youth. But Svevo, always a wise man, looks upon time as a foolish and amusing prankster, a clown or a practical joker, playing everybody a kind of recurring and successful “hoax,” _una burla riuscita_, to use the title of one of his most amusing works. A hard-headed business man, Svevo also knows that man too can play with time and against it, that for each one of us time is always both _perdu_ and _retrouvé_. We must merely accept it as the medium in which one breathes and lives.

The translator of the present novel has been well advised in changing its original title, _La Coscienza di Zeno_, into “The Confessions of Zeno,” because in that title, as in the Italian language, the common noun means both conscience and consciousness, and its suggestion and cogency lie in the equivocal meaning of that very word, which no literal translation in a non-Latin tongue could render. In a certain sense one might say that the aim of Svevo’s works is to express conscience in terms of consciousness, and consciousness in terms of conscience.

If there is a writer for whom the resurrected William James formula (“stream of consciousness”), and its French and literary equivalent, coined by Valéry Larbaud (_monologue intérieur_), are particularly apt, that writer is Italo Svevo. But his method and imagination have nothing to do, either from the viewpoint of effective influence (which does not exist), or from the viewpoint of the congeniality of kindred spirit (which may be argued or even denied) with the method and imagination of Joyce and Proust. The world of Joyce is a world where the bourgeois spirit withdraws into the background for intellectual reasons; in Proust’s, for sentimental ones. Leopold Bloom and Swann are not actors but marionettes of that world, not protagonists or heroes, but antagonists and victims, not objects, but subjects. The bourgeois spirit is in Svevo’s fiction both its actor and marionette, its protagonist and antagonist, its hero and victim, its subject and object.

The only intellectual influence which may have been decisive in Svevo’s writing, at least in the case of _Zeno_, is psychoanalysis. As we know, he was directly acquainted, thanks perhaps to the uninterrupted cultural relations between Trieste and Vienna, with Freud’s teachings and the medical treatment of his school. Certainly he used psychoanalysis more literally than Joyce ever did, for instance, with the doctrines and methods of Jung. But if we look at _Zeno_ with attention, we see that in that book psychoanalysis is more a matter of content than of form.

Psychoanalysis is par excellence a bourgeois fad. From Molière on, the bourgeois has been often depicted as the only social type who may become that very sick kind of man generally called _malade imaginaire_. In the modern world only the bourgeois may afford himself the luxury of being psychologically and physiologically ill, like Hans Castorp in Thomas Mann’s _Zauberberg_. Proust’s bourgeois characters are too snobbish, Joyce’s too bohemian, for this. Zeno, being a member of the leisure class, uses his leisure to torment himself. And the greatness of Svevo lies in that, after a century of Romantic spleen, he was the first one to consider, like the ancients, the type of the _Heautontimoroumenos_, the Self-Tormentor, as essentially a comical one.

In _Zeno_, Svevo does not operate with psychoanalysis, but on it. It is true that the novel was written under the impact of the discovery of Freud by the man Ettore Schmitz: but it is equally true that the writer Italo Svevo psychoanalyzed psychoanalysis itself. In other words, his writing, or at least his vision, has always been potentially or actually psychoanalytic. Ettore Schmitz and his heroes, who are, at least in part his self-portraits, had always been doing psychoanalyses, as Monsieur Jourdain made prose all the time without knowing it. But Svevo the writer has never been unaware of this and therefore is able to give a caricature of both psychoanalysis and himself. Such a detached self-awareness was his lifelong amusement and contentment. One might say that Svevo was that wonder: a bourgeois really interested in his own soul; however, being a wise man, he used to consider one’s soul, rather than imagination itself, _la folle du logis_.

To speak in scholastic terms, human soul is not for Svevo a substance, but merely a series of accidents. The most important accident in substance of life is love. Love is life both perpetuating and destroying itself. In this conception Svevo has been certainly influenced by his early reading of Schopenhauer. But for a bourgeois Schopenhauer, love is neither a chaotic force nor a cosmic evil: it is merely something both charming and bad. It is not a sin, but a forbidden fruit in the literal sense of the word. It is not forbidden by one’s priest, but by one’s doctor, who knows better than his patient what is good for him, and who orders him to abstain from it as from that “heady wine” from which the protagonist of the story so entitled gets sick and drunk. Sometimes, as in the matter of smoking, abstention is self-inflicted, like a taboo perpetually violated and reinstated by the patient himself. Love is a temptation dangerous to one’s peace of mind and body health. But temptation is real only to those who yield to it. Love is like the last cigarette of Zeno: Man, a creature eternally condemned to death, lights it up again and again.

In other words, Svevo looks always at love, at least beginning from his second novel, which was written in his early maturity, from the viewpoint of old age, from the perspective of an old man. This attitude is not merely social and psychological, but sexual as well. Like Leopold Bloom with Gerty MacDowell, Svevo’s heroes are fascinated only by young girls. This predisposition also leads to logical consequences on the practical plane: Zeno and the protagonists of Svevo’s last works regularly “keep” young mistresses. While Zeno’s wife conspires with others, for her husband’s good, to prevent him from managing his fortune, and thus treats him like a minor, Zeno supports Carla with his pocket money. In other terms, he becomes at the same time the “protector” and the “father” of his mistress, and the “son,” “ward” and “protegé” of his own wife. The latter situation, not less than the former, is an evident symptom of his spiritual if not actual senility. Old age is very often nothing else but a second childhood. Like an adolescent and an old man, Zeno is interested especially in the beginnings of love; later, only in his own torments and feelings, doubts and self-deceit.

For Ettore Schmitz, the man, and for the characters depicting or mirroring him, love is very often nothing else but a tonic and an intoxicant for their nerves. The other hobby, literature, seems rather to be an opium and elixir for man’s brain. Both activities or pastimes are treated as habits, manias, or fixed ideas, like a not too harmful drug addiction or a rather innocent vice. In other words, neither literature nor love acquires, in the psychological economy of his characters, an obsessive quality; and this is the reason why the work of Svevo is far less consciously “esthetic” and morbid than the work of Joyce and Proust. The literary experience of his protagonists, even if, as in the case of _Una Burla Riuscita_, it is very often based on Svevo’s life, is nevertheless less autobiographical (or at least less literally so), than any other element in their _curriculum vitae_.

The author has been able to reach such a paradoxical result by dissociating Svevo the writer, not from Ettore Schmitz the man, but rather from the man of letters who was in Ettore Schmitz, and in his heroes. Practically all his characters, perhaps with the exception of Zeno, are men of letters in their spare time. Such is the case of Alfonso Nitti in _Una Vita_, of Emilio Brentani in _Senilità_, of Mario Samigli in _Una Burla Riuscita_. In other cases, like the protagonists of _Vino Generoso_ and _La Novella del Buon Vecchio e della Bella Fanciulla_, they are naïve reformers or platonic ideologists. They are never without some intellectual interest (in Zeno’s instance, psychoanalysis). But generally, with the exception of Zeno, who after all is not a writer, they never denounce, reflect or betray the intellectual interests of their creator: Alfred Nitti, Emilio Brentani and Mario Samigli limit their literary curiosities and sympathies to Carducci and traditional Italian literature, without revealing in the first case how Svevo was interested in French naturalism and Schopenhauer; in the second, that he had been reading Russian writers; in the third, his recent acquaintance with Freud.

Is it arbitrary to affirm that the writers who are his characters are to a certain extent a satire of the contemporary Italian literary mind, exactly as Zeno is a parody of psychoanalysis? The Mario Samigli of _Una Burla Riuscita_ perhaps entitles us to think so. The suspicion seems reasonable because in that story Svevo also makes fun of the writer within himself. Even more interesting is the fact of the appearance in one of his last works of the “good old man” of the novelette so entitled, a character affected by literature without knowing it, and who writes a pseudo-philosophical and edifying work by which he belatedly tries to save the soul of his young mistress and to teach her the conduct of life, even after his own death. In the literary vocation of his heroes, therefore, Svevo seems to see an attempt to escape from life, perhaps from consciousness, and even from conscience itself. By this attitude he did not mean to condemn literature; as a matter of fact this is the very reason he approved of it.

This explains why between the literature of Svevo and the literature of his characters there is neither relationship nor contrast. The conflict between the bourgeois spirit and the literary mind is perhaps the dominant theme of modern and contemporary writing. The ideologist and the reformer on one side, the esthete and the individualist on the other, solve that conflict by submitting the bourgeois spirit to the literary mind. Such was the solution of Flaubert and Nietzsche, of Wilde and Shaw, of Joyce and Proust. Thomas Mann reversed the position, granting the bourgeois spirit the right of questioning the validity of the literary mind and of opposing it. But Svevo was perhaps the only one among modern writers unable even to conceive of such a conflict. He accepted the bourgeois spirit as a frame or state of mind, as a datum or fact, as our own version of what Montaigne used to call “the condition of man.”

Exactly because he does not judge the bourgeois spirit, Svevo amuses himself, tremendously and naïvely, by looking at it. A perfect bourgeois as a man, as a writer he is almost alone in not looking like one. Instead of descending or condescending to the bourgeois spirit within his own soul, he raises and uplifts it along with himself to the sphere of imagination, to a world of fancy and dream, which is at the same time the world of reality itself. Once Stendhal asked for a literature written by bankers and industrialists able to understand, lucidly and cynically, the economy of life, the business of society, the value of man. Svevo was certainly a writer of this brand, and furthermore, endowed with such bourgeois honesty and common sense as to refuse to transform his indulgent egoism into any set of theories, any “egotism.” A kind of innocent wisdom was the real source of his greatness and originality. He was with everybody, including himself, a man of the world. This makes him, more than an Italian Joyce or Proust, a kind of contemporary Henry James, without the latter’s snobism and narcissism.

This is why from the naturalistic and Schopenhauerian pessimism of his youth he gradually grew to a kind of olympian serenity, and acquired that “merry wisdom” which is so alien to the modern mind. His first novel is gray and sad: in his second, there appears already what Gogol used to call “smiling through tears”; in _Zeno_ and in his last stories, one may see the very uncommon realization of that poetic ideal which the German poets of the beginning of the past century used to call “romantic irony.” This explains why the man born old always grew younger with time: and the same is already happening to his work, through the wonders of glory and the miracle of death. In the annals of literature very few books will remain so youthfully fresh as the pages of a writer like Svevo, who spent all his life in drawing a “portrait of the artist as an old man.”

_Renato Poggioli_

CONFESSIONS OF ZENO