Baylor Family Croatia, Slovenia and Trieste 2019, Chapter 18: James Joyce, Italo Svevo and Trieste in the literary sense.

The sun was shining on Tuesday, and we climbed a hill.

Trieste was a place I wanted to visit three decades ago. Accordingly I passed through the city in 1987, after a delightful two weeks in Italy. My dim memory of this very brief visit was that the preferred budget lodging in Trieste was booked; given that I was eager to cross into Yugoslavia, my decision was to keep moving.

In 1987 I'd have known about the Irish expatriate writer James Joyce, but not Ettore Schmitz, a native Triestine who used the pen name Italo Svevo. The story of how these two men met and became friends is the subject of a book I was reading as we were staying in Trieste in 2019.

James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship review, by Terence Killeen (Irish Times)

Stanley Price’s book describes how Svevo – real name Ettore Schmitz – gave Joyce Leopold Bloom, and how Joyce gave Svevo fame

The very name of Ettore Schmitz is a testimony to the multicultural nature of the Trieste in which he lived. The Christian name is Italian, the surname is German and the family was Jewish.

His parents had arrived in Trieste in the 1840s, and Ettore (born in 1861) went to a Jewish school there, so his Jewishness adds to the mix of Italian (linguistically), Austrian (by citizenship) and German (by origin) from which he came. In religion he was a nonbelieving Jew who became a nonbelieving Catholic in order to accommodate the anxieties of his wife, Livia Veneziani.

I'd submit that Trieste's multiculturalism is what makes the city fascinating even today.

Joyce came to Trieste in 1904 to take a job as an English teacher. Svevo was older, known not as a writer, but a businessman who ran his wife's family manufacturing firm.

This company had developed a secret formula for maritime paint that kept the hulls of ships free from fouling barnacles and rust -- at precisely the period prior to WWI when an international naval arms race was under way. In short, Svevo's company was making money hand over fist, and soon would land its biggest contract yet with the British navy.

Svevo knew he needed to speak better English, engaged Joyce, and so their friendship began as pupil and teacher.

Fairly early in their encounters Schmitz disclosed to Joyce, who he quickly realised was essentially a writer, that he himself was the author of two novels published under a pseudonym, which had sunk without trace. Joyce was most surprised and asked to see them. He told Schmitz how impressed he was with their dark power, thereby encouraging a delighted Schmitz to write again.

Joyce was too obscure at this time to be able to do much to aid his pupil: his efforts to promote him in Triestine literary circles fell on deaf ears. Later, though, when Schmitz produced his masterpiece, La Coscienza di Zeno, Joyce was much better placed to help him, the upshot being that Schmitz, under the name Italo Svevo, is now recognised as a major modern Italian novelist. Both he and Joyce are honoured in Trieste with statues and foundations devoted to them.

Those statues weren't there in 1987, and I'd have known no better, anyway. In 2019 the writers' memorials were easy to find, and this time I was mentally prepared for them.

Svevo:

Joyce (and above):

I reread Zeno's Conscience earlier this year, then Price's biography of the friendship between Svevo and Joyce. Presently I'm reading Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which he wrote while living in Trieste and during the time the two men became friends.

Taking all these factors together, I'm invigorated.

Triestine time was running out, and on Wednesday we hopped a bus to Miramare.

BOOKS: Zeno's Conscience and Comrade Baron.

Confessions of Zeno, these days properly rendered in English as Zeno's Conscience, is a novel written by Italo Svevo (a pen name), a businessman of Italian, German and Jewish ancestry, who for most of his adult life lived in Trieste. The city was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the time, but since the conclusion of World War I it has been Italian.

Svevo labored in obscurity as a writer until his friendship with James Joyce, a pre-war resident of Trieste who tutored English there, bore fruit at war's end. Joyce touted Zeno to his literary acquaintances in France, and their support brought overdue recognition to Svevo.

The central character in the novel is Zeno Cosini, a fiftyish Trieste businessman who has recorded remembrances of his life at the behest of his psychiatrist. We learn of his upbringing, unbreakable smoking habit, relations with father, the courtship of his wife, relations with his mistress, and business ties with a brother-in law. Zeno is a well-meaning but unreliable narrator. The single best review I've found of Zeno's Conscience is by James Woods at the London Review of Books. It's well worth your time.

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno (to give it its familiar English title), which first appeared in 1923. Italo Svevo’s novel belongs recognisably to the comic tradition of Don Quixote and The Good Soldier Svejk, a comedy defined by Schopenhauer (a great influence on Svevo) as residing in the incongruity between our concepts and objective reality. Both Quixote and Zeno are fantasists, the former antique, religious and chivalric, the latter modern, secular and bourgeois. Quixote wants to serve the world, to set it to rights, and fails in the task; Zeno wants only to serve himself, and largely succeeds, though not by trying. Quixote wills, and fails magnificently; Zeno waits, and succeeds farcically.

Confessions of Zeno moves between moral correction and tragic pathos, between the bracing spectacle of vanity and the sad prospect of an imprisoned self acting as if it were free.

In short, Zeno is a highly modern man.

Zeno continually assumes that he can control the terms of his freedom – which we can see are merely the terms of his imprisonment.

So very familiar.

I'd read this novel before, some twenty years ago, and decided to revisit it owing to our upcoming visit to Trieste in late fall. I recalled much of the narrative, though by no means all. However the final chapter was a genuine gut punch, of which I remembered very little.

This chapter is written by Zeno as a diary and a postscript, a few years after the bulk of the narrative. It is 1915 and Italy finally has switched sides from Germany and Austria-Hungary to the Allies (the UK, France and Russia), with the country's prime war aim the seizure of territories precisely like that of Trieste and environs.

Zeno becomes enmeshed in the local outbreak of war, at first almost comically, then with an almost dignified acceptance, concluding with an observation about mankind's propensity to pursue destruction that comes very close to summarizing the entirety of the time elapsing on this planet since Svevo composed the words, through the present day.

Next up for me is non-fiction: Comrade Baron: A Journey through the Vanishing World of the Transylvanian Aristocracy. As one reviewer notes, "Comrade Baron is a highly personalized defense of aristocracy."

A Dutch journalist arrives in Budapest just after the fall of communism, meets and marries a Hungarian countess with roots in Transylvania (prior to WWII an almost feudal domain of Hungary, with the Hungarians atop the ethnic jumble, and since then a part of Romania) and becomes fascinated by the now vanished Hungarian nobility.

My first and only visit to Transylvania (and Bucharest) came in 1997, and was duly transformative. I'll concede to giving no thought whatever during the visit to the plight of the landed aristocracy and their vanished way of life.

The book should be an interesting supplement.