ZENO’S CONSCIENCE
Italo Svevo
A Novel
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY William Weaver
Translation copyright © 2001
Originally published in 1923
ISBN 0-375-41330-8
CONTENTS:
Preface by Elizabeth Hardwick
Translator’s Introduction
Map of Zeno’s Trieste
ZENO’S CONSCIENCE
Preface
Preamble
Smoke
My Father’s Death
The Story of My Marraige
Wife and Mistress
The Story of a Business Partnership
Psychoanalysis
PREFACE
Sometimes the eye falls upon a dusty volume on the shelves, a book read more than once but not for some years. And there it was: Zeno’s Conscience, by Italo Svevo, published in Italian in 1923 and in English in 1930.* In 1923, Svevo (1861—1928) was sixty-two years old, but Zeno’s Conscience was not his first book. There were others, each published at his own expense, including the brilliant Senilità (As a Man Grows Older), published in 1898, when Svevo was thirty-seven. The gap would indicate disappointment or despair or perhaps a sensible financial calculation since Svevo was a burgher, a somewhat idle man of business, familiar with the bourse: a merchant of submarine paint.
Everything about Svevo was somehow split in two, his psyche and his very existence. His true name was Ettore Schmitz. As for his parentage, his father was a German Jewish businessman, a merchant of glassware; his mother was an Italian Jew. He was born in Austrian Trieste, now a part of Italy, educated in Würzberg, Bavaria. A cosmopolitan if he wished to make the claim, and yet so peculiar were his gifts that it seems altogether appropriate that he should have been a citizen of a disputed territory, Trieste.
The businessman had often to go to England, and thus he came to feel the need of a tutor in the language. It was 1907, and who should be in Trieste, down on his luck, fluent in English and other tongues? It was James Joyce. Reference books tell us that Joyce gave his pupil parts of Dubliners, unpublished, to read and that the pupil produced his own writing as if they were sharing glasses of ale, which no doubt they were.
Joyce read Senilità in 1907 and, according to Renato Poggioli’s introduction to the New Directions edition of the Beryl de Zoete translation, Confessions of Zeno, later brought Svevo to the attention of literary Paris, with the result that Valéry Larbaud translated part of Zeno’s Conscience for publication in Le Navire d’Argent, an important magazine. Although the novel gave him some recognition in his home country, Svevo’s diction did not always please the linguists and preservers of the Italian language. In English it reads in a straightforward manner, without locutions of dialect or regionalism, so perhaps it was the fatal German-Italian shifting landscape of Trieste that offended in Rome and Milan.
Reno’s Conscience is a curious book indeed, if in its straying way a family novel. Zeno, as the first-person narrator, is not a Stoic. He is a hypochondriac, a solipsist, a lover soon unfaithful, a sly fellow who pretends to be writing down his confessions at the urging of his psychoanalyst. None of his doctors—many appear—comes off very well, nor does the analysis. First-person narration—here, as elsewhere in fiction—is always a special dispensation. No matter that the narrator be described as timid, clumsy, a loser, on the page the “I” will be supreme. The details of his inadequacy, measliness, and folly are asserted by a master of words. A first-person narrator is never modest.
The opening chapter bears the title “Smoke.” And here we find Zeno writing: “ ‘Today, 2 February 1886, I am transferring from the school of law to the faculty of chemistry. Last cigarette!!’ ” The following chapter has the title “My Father’s Death.” It begins:
“ ‘15.4.1890 - My father dies. L.C For those who do not know, those last two letters do not stand for Lower Case, but for Last Cigarette.” The tone of the mind of the narrator is revealed in its perplexity by these brief asides. Zeno is in a condition of genuine mourning for the overwhelming patriarch who will take his time dying, asserting his right to a dramatic lingering as these formidable old men do, at least in fiction. Svevo does not omit the way they have of casting a dying curse of sorts on a wayward son. The father in his last moments is trying to rise from his bed and Zeno is, on the doctor’s orders, trying to hold him down. “With a supreme effort he managed to stand on his feet. He raised his hand high, as if he had learned he could endow it with no other strength beyond its mere weight, and let it fall against my cheek. Then he slipped to the bed and, from there, to the floor. Dead!”
“The Story of My Marriage” follows, and a sly, devilish mix-up of intention and consequence the courtship will be. Here the novel enters the Malfenti family, which will provide a panoramic picture of business and its wildly fluctuating seasons in Trieste. In the Malfenti family there are four daughters, each of whose name begins with A: Ada, Augusta, Alberta, and Anna, the last child. Zeno has made up his mind to marry one of the girls, their names linked like “a bundle, to be delivered all together.” The first he meets is Augusta, who is immediately scratched off the list. “The first thing you noticed about her was a squint so pronounced that if someone tried to recall her after not having seen her for a while, that defect would personify her totally”; and in his inventory he remarks upon her dull hair and a figure “a bit heavy for her age.”
He falls in love with Ada, the beautiful Ada, and pursues her with comic vigor scene after scene, chapter after chapter. But Ada is in love with a lout named Guido, a compulsive gambler on the bourse. At last Zeno proposes to her sister Alberta. “Listen, Alberta! I have an idea: Have you ever thought that you’re at an age to take a husband? … A short while ago I made Ada the same proposal I’ve made to you. She refused, with scorn. You can imagine the state I’m in … But I believe that if you would agree to marry me, I would be most happy, and with you I would forget everybody and everything else.” Alberta does not wish to marry anyone, and by a series of contretemps and follies Zeno and the homely Augusta will wed, have children, and go on. Go on with the help of a mistress, Carla, a singer with a large, loud voice without musicality. Zeno, conscience-stricken now and then, will attempt to break with Carla, make a last visit, and so on. At her door one day, he hears someone playing “Schubert’s Abschied, in the Liszt transcription.” It is her new lover, her fiancé, playing on a piano Zeno has paid for. Still, the hapless Zeno will always have the last word. Time will pass, and he does not fail to note that the beautiful, rejecting Ada has grown older, fat, and not improved by a goiter.
There is much more to Zeno’s Conscience than the amorous wanderings, the forgiving self-analysis, the talent for describing diseases and deathbed dramas. An ironical voice is sustained throughout, but in the end the novel is a rich and detailed study of Trieste families just before the outbreak of the First World War. It is a novel of money and an idle, introspective man’s way of hanging on to it. It is a brilliant psychological document about procrastination, beginning with the denied and then embraced cigarette, and the love and neglect of the once-spurned Augusta, who will at last define his life.
The Italian poet Montale wrote about Svevo: “La coscienza di Zeno is a strange book, stagnant and yet continually in motion.” In the demand for bold actions, self-awareness may be a crippling burden, but with Zeno’s Conscience the compensation is a cool, stinging dive into the days and nights of a gentleman from Trieste. Svevo-Schmitz was killed in an automobile accident in his sixty-seventh year of age. He could not have wished his sudden end, but it was more suitable to his nature than the doctors and nurses that probably awaited him.
Elizabeth Hardwick
TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION
Take a look at the author’s name (his real name): Ettore Schmitz. The first half is Italian and, significantly, it is the name of a Greek hero, not of a Catholic saint. The surname is German. Then consider the birthplace: Trieste, a city that has had many masters, from ancient Romans to Austrians to Italians. In 1861, when Ettore Schmitz was born there, Trieste was an Austrian city, a vital one, the great empire’s only seaport and a focus of trade between central Europe and the rest of the world. In this place of encounters and frontiers, young Ettore grew up to appreciate ambiguity, even contradiction; and, when he seriously began his career as a writer, he chose a pen name that reflected his complex background: Italo Svevo: Italus, the Italian; and Svevus, the Swabian (a duchy in medieval Germany, Swabia was also known as Alamannia).
His father, Francesco Schmitz, was a German Jew, born in Trieste but closely linked to the German-speaking world. Ettore’s mother was also Jewish and also from Trieste, but from an Italian family: her name was Allegra Moravia. Since the late eighteenth century Trieste had been a relatively serene place for its Jewish citizens, who were allowed to conduct business, accumulate wealth, occupy public office: some were even ennobled.
Francesco Schmitz was in the glassware business, and for much of Ettore’s childhood that business went well. The boy, like his seven brothers and sisters, lived in comfort, if not affluence. Their father was something of an autocrat, and—like most other fathers in Trieste—he assumed his sons would follow him into the world of commerce. Francesco was a man of firm convictions, and one of these was the belief that success in affairs was dependent on a total mastery of the German language. So when Ettore was twelve he was sent with his older brother Adolfo to board at the Brussel’sche Handels und Erziehungsinstitut, a trade and education academy at Segnitz-am-Main, near Wurzburg. Ettore did well there, but his real interest was reading, not commerce: he devoured Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Schopenhauer, and other classics, including Shakespeare in German translation.
In 1878 Schmitz returned to Trieste and for two years studied, in a somewhat random fashion, at the Istituto Revoltella, the closest thing Trieste then had to a university. At this time he also began writing, chiefly plays, evidence of an enduring passion for the theater that he was able to feed by attendance at the Teatro Comunale. After some performances of Shakespeare there in 1880, he published a first article, “Shylock,” in an Italian-language paper, L’Indipendente, an irredentist organ with which he was to be associated for several decades.
In that same year, after the failure of his father’s business, Schmitz abandoned formal study and found a position in the Trieste branch of the Unionbank of Vienna, assigned to deal with its French and German correspondence. He remained, unhappily, at the bank for almost twenty years.
He continued to write (but rarely complete) plays, as his contributions to L’Indipendente became more frequent. Finally, in December of 1887, he began a novel. Its working title was characteristic: Un inetto. This could be translated literally as “an inept man,” but perhaps Svevo meant something more like our modern term “a loser.” The story is set in a bank; Svevo later admitted the work was largely autobiographical.
After an unhappy love affair a decade earlier, Schmitz’s life seemed dully divided between home and office, but then he began meeting other young artists—notably the painter Umberto Veruda, who introduced him to Trieste’s bohemian circles. In the winter of 1891 he had a serious affair with a working-class woman, whom he later portrayed in his second novel.
He completed the first novel, now retitled Una vita {A Life; Svevo was unaware of the Maupassant novel of the same title). In December of 1892 (after the manuscript had been rejected by the prestigious Milanese firm of Treves), Una vita was published—at the author’s expense—by the firm of Vram in Trieste. The Trieste papers reviewed it benevolently; the critic of Milan’s Corriere della sera, Domenico Oliva, a sustaining pillar of the Italian literary establishment, offered it mild praise. But the book made no real impression.
Svevo’s father had died in 1892, a few months before the publication of Una vita. In October of 1895 Svevo’s mother died. At thirty-four he felt adrift. His brother Ottavio suggested that the two of them move to Vienna and go into business, but there were economic obstacles, and Schmitz was reluctant to leave his part-time job with Il Piccolo, a leading Italian daily paper, where he was responsible for scanning the foreign press.
And there was another reason to stay in Trieste. During his mother’s last illness, he had come to admire his young cousin, Livia Veneziani, who had impressed him with her gentle manner and her thoughtfulness. He began giving her books; at her insistence, he even promised to conquer his entrenched habit of smoking (a promise often repeated, but never kept). On 20 December 1895, despite strong objections from Livia’s parents, who considered the much older Schmitz a poor prospect, Livia and Ettore became officially engaged. As a festive gift, Livia presented him with a diary, a “keepsake” album entitled Blüthen und Ranken edler Dichtung (Blossoms and Tendrils of Noble Poetry), handsomely bound and illustrated with watercolor reproductions of flowers, each day’s page headed by a sentimental poem. The pages for January and February are dutifully filled in; a few March entries are written up, then the writing peters out. Published posthumously under the title Diario per la fidanzata, the diary offers many engaging insights into the character not only of Svevo but also of his fictional alter ego, Zeno Cosini. For instead of recording his day-today events, the diarist examines his conscience, analyzes his love of his fiancée, and describes his often wild fancies.
On the page for 3 January, under a soppy little poem by Georg Ebers, he wrote:
A man can have only two strokes of good luck in this world. That of loving greatly or that of combating victoriously in the battle for life. He is happy either way, but it is not often that fate grants both these happinesses. It seems to me therefore that… the happy are those who either renounce love or withdraw from the battle. Most unhappy are those who divide themselves according to desire or activity between these two fields, so opposed. Strange: thinking of my Livia I see both love and victory.
A few days later, on 7 January, he wrote:
At the moment of waking I surely do not remember either the face or the love of Livia. Sometimes to recall one and the other in their entirety I need to see the photograph that has remained calmly watching me sleep. And then the serenity of waking is broken all at once by the recollection of life, of all life, and I am assailed simultaneously by all the joy of possession and the uneasiness that has always accompanied and will always accompany my love. Then I recall all the discussions of the day before in your company or else my just being silent, beside you. I am then calmed, and when I get up, I am whistling Wagner, the musician of love and of pain but I feel only the former, I leave the house with my hat at a jaunty angle and … a cigarette in my mouth. Poor Livia! Every pleasure and every displeasure that you give me increase my pharyngitis.
The frankness of the diary—which was submitted to Livia as he was writing it—did not diminish her love for her quirky future husband. She had developed a maternal fondness for his weaknesses, and she could smile at his many jokes and fancies.
Though she was one-quarter Jewish by birth, Livia had been brought up a Catholic and regularly attended Mass. So the prospective marriage involved a central conflict. Livia, after much debate, unhappily agreed to a civil ceremony. It took place on 30 July 1896. After a honeymoon—a month spent partly along the Adriatic coast and partly in Vienna—they moved into the large, somewhat pretentious villa of Livia’s parents, in the outlying industrial town of Servola, where the Veneziani paint factory was also located. At first, Ettore and Livia occupied an independent apartment on the third floor of the villa. Later they moved downstairs and formed a single household with Olga and Gioachino, the senior Venezianis.
Svevo’s in-laws played important roles in his life (and, to some extent, in his fiction). Gioachino is clearly the model for the ebullient, great-hear
ted Giovanni in La coscienza di Zemo.
Olga—to whom Svevo sometimes referred, behind her back, as “the dragon”—was the moving force in the family and in the business (which, though founded by Gioachino, was to some extent descended from the chemicals firm of her father). It was Olga who ordered the workmen about, and it was she who—alone—mixed the secret ingredients of the formula for the underwater paint, used to protect the hulls of ships (including many naval vessels), that the Veneziani company produced and successfully marketed throughout Europe.
Despite Svevo’s occasional ridiculous jealousy, the marriage was profoundly happy, and in 1897 Livia became pregnant; in that same year Svevo began a second novel, which he called Il carnevale di Emilio (Emilio’s Carnival,later retitled Senilità). After the birth of their daughter, Letizia, Livia fell seriously ill, and Svevo decided to be baptized. On Livia’s recovery they went through a marriage ceremony in church, though there is no evidence that Svevo took his new religion seriously.
Amid repeated vows to give up smoking, Svevo developed briefly another vice: gambling on the Exchange. In the spring of 1898, when he had lost 1,000 florins, he wrote out a solemn oath to give up trading and added that, to recoup the loss, he would “do without tobacco, coffee, and wine for the next ten years!” As he meticulously dated his frequent written resolutions to give up smoking, so he solemnly dated this sheet of paper: “7 March 1898.”
Three months later, L’Indipendente began publishing Senilità in installments, and in the autumn of 1898, again at the author’s expense, Vram brought out the volume. Again it caused no stir. Not for the first time, Svevo thought of giving up writing. But for him, writing was a vice as deeply rooted as smoking, and though he later claimed he had stopped writing for a long period, he was not telling the whole truth. While it was many years before he essayed another novel, he constantly wrote little stories, fables, observations.