The Books: Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, ‘True Confessions’, by Joan Acocella

Next book on the essays shelf:

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays by Joan Acocella. The next essay is called ‘True Confessions’, originally published in The New Yorker.

This essay is an example of what Joan Acocella does best. Although she is mainly known for her dance writing, as I mentioned in my other piece about this book, it was her book reviews that were the revelation for me. She seems to have, as her focus, modernist novels, but not the ones in the accepted canon. She seems to love writers who were caught in the crossfires of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, writers whose books are magnificent but whose reputations have suffered over the years, due to being too obscure, or – more practically – just not translated into English, or translated badly. The upheaval of the First World War, and the years leading up to it, created an explosion in literature that changed the world. It was a paradigm shift. We changed how we thought about ourselves, and that was reflected in the writing. We lost our omniscient voice. We went inward. We were unsure, we were self-conscious, we were aware of ourselves. This is not to say that Man was never aware of himself before the First World War, that is obviously not the case. But the way in which language was used to express that awareness changed drastically. The old forms broke apart. The old traditions shattered. In the face of the devastation of that war, the old rules seemed too polite, too surface-oriented. A new form was needed. T.S. Eliot said of Joyce, “He killed the 19th century.” This may be too broad a claim (Gertrude Stein certainly thought so, since she thought SHE was the one who had killed the 19th century), but the thought was palpable at the time. Let us not rely on what our forefathers did. Let us find a new form to express the new and uncertain world in which we live. This was not just true in literature. The same happened across the board in all art forms. Dance, music, architecture, fashion. Let us not forget, too, the influence of Freud – which also may have been too broad – some would say he did more harm than good – but it cannot be denied that his work changed literature forever. There were always great novelists and artists who could express man’s interior. That was nothing new. There is nothing about the criminal mind and psychopathy that is not covered in Crime And Punishment. Hamlet is the most self-conscious character ever written. He is a “modern” man. But these examples stand alone, surrounded by the texts and tone of the day. In the teens and 20s of the 20th century, it became the trend, a giant wave that could not be stopped, and we still live in that world today.

You cannot imagine The Catcher in the Rye happening without there also being A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man almost forty years prior.The modernists were the future. They seemed to know it.

This is Acocella’s territory, and while the major names (Ulysses, Eliot, Pound) all show up in her writing repeatedly (these guys all knew each other and all intersected), she zeroes in on lesser-known writers, ones that did not “cross over” into the canon, those caught up in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, those not stylish enough, or English-speaking enough, to make it into our curriculum. I have her to thank for introducing me to Stefan Zweig. Joyce knew Zweig, and his name pops up in any Joyce biography, but I had never read his stuff. He’s phenomenal.

‘True Confessions’ is about Italo Svevo, the pen name of an Italian novelist (real name Ettore Schmitz). I am a well-read person. I had never heard of the guy. But now I have, thanks to Acocella. I haven’t read his books (there aren’t many, only three, I believe) but the way she talks about him is so fascinating I feel I must see what she is talking about. Has anyone out there read any Italo Svevo? I would love to hear from you!

‘True Confessions’ was published in The New Yorker in 2002, the occasion being a publishing revival of Italo Svevo’s work: new translations that Acocella finds wonderful, less old-fashioned than what we had before. So it was a literary event, to some degree.

While ‘True Confessions’ is a book review, it is also a literary biography. She opens with an arresting anecdote. In 1907, a 40-something Ettore Schmitz, living in Trieste, wanted to learn English and a young guy named James Joyce was recommended as a tutor. Joyce was 25. Dubliners wasn’t published yet, although it was complete. The two men hit it off. Joyce taught him English, and also showed Schmitz some of his poetry as well as a couple of stories from Dubliners. This was Schmitz’s opening. He unloaded on Joyce, telling him that he too was a writer, and he had written two books, years before, that had been ignored (small wonder: he had published them himself). Joyce asked to read them. Schmitz handed over the books. Joyce was blown away by them. He saw them in the tradition of French realism (certainly not modernist – not yet, that was to come), and told Schmitz he should send them off to get published for real. But Schmitz did not. He had been heartbroken by the lack of response to his books. He was a businessman, working in the family paint-factory business. He lived in a world of merchants and accountants. He was married. He had given up the childish dream of being a writer. And then came World War One. Acocella writes:

Trieste was in an odd position in the conflict. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – indeed, the empire’s major seaport – yet historically it was Italian, and full of irredentist, ethnic Italians devoted to their homeland’s reclaiming of its former territories. At the start of the war, many members of Schmitz’s heavily irredentist family fled to Italy. His home, formerly crammed with relatives and servants, emptied out. At the same time, the Austro-Hungarian authorities closed down the paint factory. Schmitz and his wife, Livia, were stuck in the house with nothing to do, whereupon Svevo broke his vow and started writing again. When the war stopped, he didn’t, and barely coming down for meals – he completed a new novel, Confessions of Zeno (La coscienza di Zeno).

Once again, Svevo self-published Confessions of Zeno and, same as so many years before, nobody read the damn thing. But he had not forgotten Joyce. He sent the manuscript to Joyce. Ulysses was published by Shakespeare & Co. in 1922 and Joyce was now a giant star. Joyce received the manuscript from Svevo (Schmitz), and flipped. Told Svevo to send it to Ford Madox Ford and T.S. Eliot, to Gilbert Seldes, to Parisian publishers – Joyce hailed it as a great modernist novel. Svevo took Joyce’s advice (I love Joyce’s generosity), and the book was published and Svevo, after a long long period in a cocoon (almost 30 years) found himself a star. He was hailed as the first great Italian modernist writer. Confessions of Zeno was translated into other languages. Svevo hob-nobbed with his own idols, who all treated him as an equal. Acocella quotes one of his friends as saying, “No writer ever so enjoyed his fame”, a great quote. Sadly, in 1928 he was killed in a car crash. He had been working on a sequel to Confessions of Zeno.

So that’s the set-up. Acocella describes it all in elegant fascinating prose (far better than I just described it), and you really get the sense of this humble slightly melancholy Jewish Italian businessman, who had literary ambitions, crushed by his father, but who got his shit together enough to write two books, and then lay in wait for twenty, thirty years, before exploding onto the scene with another book – Confessions of Zeno, which brought him fame. His first two books, apparently, were brilliant but still in a 19th century painterly style. There was a third-person narrator, all that. But once Svevo discovered Freud (and he had mixed feelings about Freud: a family member had been analyzed by Freud and came out of the analysis crazier than before), and he was fascinated by Freud’s work in defense mechanisms, and self-justification. If there is anything we know as modern people, it is that when we narrate our own stories we are often not reliable, due to our justifications, our defense mechanisms. When literature utilizes that (as it rarely did prior to the 20th century), sometimes explosive results can occur. Svevo gave up the third-person narration entirely and made Confessions of Zeno into a first-person monologue spoken by a man to his psychiatrist. VERY modern. Psychology revealed.

I must read Confessions of Zeno. Thank you, Joan Acocella!

Here is an excerpt from this wonderful essay.

Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays, ”True Confessions’, by Joan Acocella

He had been famous for two years, but, even in Italy, his fame was unstable. During his lifetime, it was the younger writers who lionized him; the established critics were not pleased to be told by the French that they had failed to recognize a prophet in their own land, and they defended their former position. Also, nobody knew how to place Svevo. In the words of his best biographer, P.N. Furbank, “Attempts have been made to claim him for a variety of sectional interests – for Triestine regionalism, Italian irredentism, and ‘eternal-Jewishness'” (he was Jewish), but he always fell short of the required commitment. Furthermore, his best novel, Confessions of Zeno, was a comic novel, and comedy was not something that people in the 1920s associated with profundity.

Those who wished to dismiss him had something substantial to point to: his graceless Italian. Svevo’s native tongue was the Triestine dialect; his second language, the language of his schooling was German. (Hence his pen name, Italo Svevo: Swabian Italian.) Standard, Florentine Italian was a foreign language to him. That’s what he had to write in if he wanted a readership beyond Trieste, but he did not do it beautifully or even, on occasion, grammatically. “The Italian of a bookkeeper,” critics said. There is an answer to this. Svevo’s characters were bookkeepers. The world of his fiction was Trieste, an unpoetic commercial city, home of bankers and traders and manufacturers, of which he was one. As Montale put it, “The smell of the warehouse and cellar, the almost Goldonian charter of the Tergesto” – the stock exhcange – “are they not the sure presence of a style?” They may be to us, who have soldiered through the unpoetic prose of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis. But the critics of Svevo’s time were raised on d’Annunzio, and to them Svevo’s language was simply unliterary.

It wasn’t just in Italy, though, that Svevo was treated as second best. His work was never installed, as it should have been, in the pantheon of the modernist novel. I know people who have read The Man Without Qualities, both volumes, and Remembrance of Things Past, all seven volumes, who have never opened a book by Svevo.

They now have a chance to correct that oversight. Svevo is undergoing a publishing revival. A Life, in a perfectly decent 1961 translation by Archibald Colquhoun, has just been reprinted. As for Senilita and La consienza di Zeno, they were first translated into English in the thirties, by Beryl de Zoete, a dance scholar who fell in love with Svevo’s work and offered her services to his widow. De Zoete’s versions, entitled As a Man Grows Older and Confessions of Zeno are solid – they are what we have known for seventy years of Svevo – and they are still in print or, in the case of As a Man Grows Older, back in print, in the New York Review Books’s excellent “classics” series. But they are old, older than Svevo in a way: fussy, Constance Garnett-ish. For years they have cried out for competition, and competition has now come. Beth Archer Brombert has produced a version of Senilita, called Emilio’s Carnival – Svevo’s working title – that is faithful in a way that de Zoete was not. Brombert’s language is very plain, and when she comes up against a knot in Svevo’s prose she does not try to untie it. (De Zoete did.) We have to puzzle through it, just like the Italians. The same rules seem to have guided the distinguished translator William Weaver in his new version of La conscienza di Zeno – Zeno’s Conscience. I do not like his title. The Italian conscienza, like its French cognate, means both “conscience” and “consciousness.” There is no good way to translate it, and de Zoete’s throwing up of hands, with Confessions of Zeno, was probably the best solution. But the title is the only thing wrong with Weaver’s boo. Its appearance is an event in modern publishing. In it – for the first time, I believe, in English – we get the true, dark music, the pewter tints, of Svevo’s great last novel.