The Artist as Bourgeois

By TONY TANNER IN most people's mind: the name of halo Svevo will immediately evoke memories of the first chapter of Confessions of Zeno—`The Last Cigarette.' 'I thought: "As it's so bad for me I won't smoke any more, but must first have just one last smoke." I smoked my cigarette solemnly to the end as if I were fulfilling a vow. And though it caused me agony, I smoked many more during that illness. . . . The dance of the last cigarette which began when I was twenty has not reached its last figure yet. My resolu- tions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses. When one is old one can afford to smile at life and all it contains.'

But this is not an isolated comic episode: indeed, it touches on most of the central themes in Svevo's work—the comic impotence of the will, the comedy- of ineffective and entirely unsetf-correcting self-awareness, the strange in- timacy between a man and his weakness and sickness, and the ironic acquiescence achieved by the senile state of mind. What is rare in Svevo's work is not that his three main 'heroes' are all incompetent dreamers, alienated from the bourgeois business world, harbouring vague literary ambitions and addicted to a habit of self-analysis which only increases their inactivity —such figures have been common enough at least since the Romantic era. The rare thing is Svevo's ironic understanding and acceptance of this enfeebled yet enduring state.

True, in his first novel. A- Life, the self- defeating and neurotic bank-clerk Alfonso takes his alienation to the final extreme of suicide— 'He must destroy this organism of his which knew no peace; while it was alive it would con- tinue to drag him into the struggle, because that was what it was there for.' But this late-romantic gesture is not characteristic of Svevo's listless and incompetent 'heroes.' Emilio, in As A Man Grows Older, fumbles and messes up his actual life—losing his one mistress and selfishly allow- ing his sister to die—but he continues to live, in a very low-keyed way, and in time 'he looked back with a kind of enchanted wonder on that period, which had been the most important and the most luminous in his life. He lived on it like an old man on the memories of his youth.' And Zeno. the ailing, bungling, absent-minded Zeno, so far from fleeing from 'the struggle,' becomes a very successful businessman and emerges, in a very ironic way, as the 'healthiest' man in the book. To understand the uniqueness of Svevo's vision, it is important to realise that he nourished no ideas of the writer as 'rebel' or hostile 'outsider.' More generally, his drifting and estranged protagonists are not seen as either victims or opponents of the bourgeois world. They are, rather, its quintessence.

The great Italian critic, Renato Poggioli, wrote that 'In all his works Svevo's real protagonist is the bourgeois soul . . . the bourgeois spirit is in Svevo's fiction both its actor and marionette, its protagonist and antagonist, its hero and vic- tim, its subject and object.' In their senility and sickness, his figures reveal rather than reject the bourgeois soul. Zeno's symptoms of illness should not be mistaken for tokens of a radical inner disaffiliation from the bourgeois society' around him. 'In the modern world only the bourgeois may afford himself the luxury of being psychologically and physiologically ill . . . and the greatness of Svevo lies in that, after a cen- tury of romantic spleen, he was the first one to consider, like the ancients, the type of the self-tormentor as essentially a comic one.' There was nothing that Svevo did not know about the kind of floundering, dissociated consciousness coming into being in the modern bourgeois world.

There has been, hitherto, no full-length work on Svevo in English—which makes the appear- ance of Mr Furbank's truly admirable books even more important. Given the sort of claims Mr Furbank might have made for the sort of pioneering work he has done, he is to be praised and respected for the self-effacing and unpre- tentious way in which he introduces us to Italo Svevo—the man, and the writer. But this modesty of tone and method should not be allowed to obscure the fact that he has given us a book of singular merit and—for anyone interested in modern literature—of unusual im- portance. The method he has chosen—first a

biography, then a consideration of the works—

is particularly felicitous, because Svevo made himself the subject of his work to an unusual

degree. Thus to know about the man—apart from its considerable intrinsic interest—is to en- hance one's appreciation of the books. For Svevo was himself the neurotic bourgeois he so dazzlingly, and definitively, analysed.

`Halo Svevo' was a pseudonym meaning Talus the Swabian' (i.e., the Italian-Swabian) and Ettore Schmitz chose it, says Furbank, to express 'his feeling of being a hybrid, an Italian by language, an Austrian by citizenship and a German by ancestry and education.' Furbank then traces out that mixed ancestry and education, and Schmitz's subsequent life and his emergence as a writer, with an intelligent clarity which testifies to a good deal of patient research (there are, incidentally, a number of fascinating photo graphs which add to the pleasure of the book). He re-creates for us the city of Trieste around the turn of the century—an invaluable achieve- ment because Trieste provides- the world of Svevo's fiction—and stresses not only the im-

portance of the Jewish community there (Svevo himself was Jewish, though he seldom referred to the fact, maintaining that 'It isn't race which makes a Jew, it's life!'), but also the 'single- minded obsession with business' which prevailed, in the city.

Svevo dreaded the idea of .a business career and cherished secret notions of becoming a

writer; but after the collapse of the family for- tunes he was forced to take his place in the business world and joined a bank (which later resulted in A Life). He married Livia Veneziana

(whose name and golden hair Joyce took for Anna Livia Plurabelle) and joined her parents' business—which was based on the manufacture of a very successful submarine paint. From then

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* ITALO Svevo. By P. N. Furbank. (Seeker and Warburg. 45s.) on his life appears to be a gradual rising in the hierarchy of the firm—mastering the secret for-

mula of the paint, visiting and overseeing the English branch (during these visits he became a dedicated follower of Charlton Athletic), and defending the main factory in. Trieste with some bravery during the First World War. It sounds like a bourgeois success story—and so it was.

But his ironic self-awareness never atrophied —indeed it flourished. And it is to his amused sense of the strange relationship between his business success and the bemused meandering and self-torturings of his private consciousness that we owe his completely original contribution to modern literature. From the start—as Furbank shows—he was deeply influenced by Schopen- hauer, and a sense of cool ironic detachment from life never left him. Before his marriage he kept -a diary and filled it with dispassionate self-scrutiny. His wife always amazed him be- cause she had such a serene belief in the serious- ness and reality of the existing world : he even wrote to her: 'indifference towards life is the essence of my intellectual life. Whatever's worth- while in my own talk comes from irony, and I'm afraid lest the very day you managed to make me believe in life (but you never will) I should find myself diminished by doing so. .

I have a great fear of happiness making me stupid.' He was well aware of how much `stupidity' there was in the bourgeois world, even, perhaps, in his wife. But another part of him appreciated this world, he deeply loved his efficient Livia, and he would praise the 'dear, good bourgeoisie' which made her his wife.

He had to give up his aesthetic ambitions for the sake of business, and this sometimes hurt him; at other times he made vows to give up writing—like smoking—as _though it was a bad habit. But write he did, if only `to get to know myself better,' and out of this incurable addic- tion came some books which made an important contribution to the self-consciousness of twen- tieth-century Europe. That these books were not appreciated at the time is hardly surprising— and it is interesting to note the tone of the criticisms which greeted each of his novels. The

complaint always about the excessive care devoted to the analysis of such morbid and morally feeble creatures. It took someone as sensitive as Joyce to realise the importance and originality of what Svevo was doing, and not the least interesting and entertaining parts of Furbank's book describe the strange relationship between this oddly-matched pair, and how Joyce finally secured some much belated recognition of Svevo's genius—an act which Svevo referred to as repeating 'the miracle of Lazarus.'

Turning to the novels, Furbank sees them all as .`studies in weakness,' a weakness for which Svevo's key metaphor was 'senility.' Furbank develops the point perceptively: 'Senility, in this metaphorical sense, is an infection of the will, a withdrawal from reality into day-dreaming. an incapacity for taking real decisions combined with the constant illusion of doing so. . Furbank makes the fascinating point that Svevo's protagonists fit the type described by Max Nordau in his pessimistic work Degeneration. in which he laments the emergence of a new degenerate type of man 'who shuns action, and is without will-power.' But Svevo moved towards an ironic optimism, or at least a sort of humane evolutionary stoicism. Perhaps these feeble neurotics are a new kind of survivor. Zeno may seem sick, but he is cured—cured by the business life itself.

In addition to his many illuminating and sen- sitive insights, Furbank might have mentioned the significance of making Zeno the first-person narrator of his story. Instead of Svevo telling the tale omnisciently (as in his earlier work), the author and his subject—artist and bourgeois —now speak with one and the same voice. That voice has its pessimism, indeed it ends the book by affirming that 'our life today is poisoned to the root' and predicting that man will blow up the world. But, implies the voice, meanwhile we must live with as much tolerance, self-honesty and stoic irony as we can muster. There can even be enjoyment in that life. Just as we enjoy the cigarette we know may kill us. We should wel- come Mr Furbank's book with gratitude and esteem.