A Dying Life
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING A Dying Life By Stanley Edgar Hyman "ITALO SVEVO" (Italus the Swabian) is the unlikely pen name taken by Ettore Schmitz, born 1861, a prosperous Jewish businessman in...
...In a deeper sense, however, Macario was prophetic: Alfonso can seize his prey but he is incapable of holding on to it...
...Joyce praised them highly, and encouraged his pupil to return to writing...
...Like an Alger hero, Alfonso rises in the bank and wins the friendship of Annetta Maller, the boss' beautiful daughter...
...he kills himself...
...In 1907, James Joyce, who supported himself by giving private English lessons in Trieste, acquired Ettore Schmitz and his wife as pupils...
...Svevo constantly mocks the poignancy of his story by a style of cynical aphorism...
...When they go to bed together, he is disconcerted to find her "an obliging, passionate lover," and when he leaves her in the morning she is laughing with happy sensuality and promising many more such nights...
...the Alfonso who weeps as he declares his love to Annetta, not out of love but out of selfpity, might be an inadequate Pavese hero...
...Alfonso dreams of an old age in which "he would be able to describe having 'lived' in the sense that word was used by others...
...A remark about Alfonso is a typical example: "He knew from his reading that women always forgive a homage to their beauty in any, even criminal, form...
...If the book's ancestry is French, its progeny are Italian: the early Moravia of The Time of Indifference and the Pavese of The House on the Hill...
...Svevo was prescient to notice it then...
...Svevo published A Life at his own expense in 1892...
...One of Alfonso's fellows in the bank, Miceni, early in the book foreshadows Alfonso's eventual fall from grace and exile to the Siberia of the countinghouse...
...When he does come home to find her dying, she can only go to sleep if he holds her hands...
...What most people know about him is that he was the original of Leopold Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses, which is a partial truth, since Bloom takes some traits from Schmitz but takes many more from Joyce himself...
...If Annetta appears marble but is really full of passion, Alfonso is the reverse...
...It is amazingly good, and, for a book that appeared in 1892, amazingly contemporary and relevant...
...The demand on Alfonso is made most poignantly in a letter to him from Francesca, Annetta's confidante...
...From 1926 on, Svevo was one of the most acclaimed writers in Europe...
...Where there is no blood," Svevo reminds us, "it cannot be made to flow...
...it was a resounding failure...
...The autobiographical hero is now 35-year-old Emilio Brentani, who works for an Insurance Society and has published an ignored novel...
...Annetta is shallow and foolish, but I think that we are meant to see her love for Alfonso as real, and his denial of it as reprehensible...
...One night he goes to bed with her and they arrange to marry...
...a rival, Fumigi, whose proposal to Annetta is rejected, ends in business failure and madness, as Alfonso will end comparably...
...The Freudian novel that Svevo wrote late in life...
...The pathos of failure and betrayal does not keep A Life from being wryly funny throughout...
...But what he really wants, it becomes clear, is a mother, not Miss Trieste 1896, and after Angiolina has left him and his sister has died, he synthesizes the two into a happy memory of an idealized female figure...
...As a Man Grows Older tells the same Oedipal story in broader comic terms...
...Underlying the Angst and the death wish there is a model Oedipus complex...
...He acknowledged that Joyce had "renewed the miracle of Lazarus...
...WRITERS & WRITING A Dying Life By Stanley Edgar Hyman "ITALO SVEVO" (Italus the Swabian) is the unlikely pen name taken by Ettore Schmitz, born 1861, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Trieste...
...he promises that "they would always be together for the rest of their lives...
...In one of those perfect typographic errors that tell all, Knopf's A Life misprints Trieste as "Triste," and truly it is the land of Triste that Alfonso inhabits...
...a sickness of the moral will, asking gratifications without responsibilities...
...The revulsion and disgust Alfonso feels at Annetta's "fall" has been displaced from his mother...
...He had little time to enjoy his fame, however, since he was killed in an automobile accident in 1928...
...His ideal state is "renunciation and quiet," and after various inadequate tries at renunciation (he gives away money and passes up an available girl), he discovers "the renunciation of which he had dreamed"—it is the renunciation of his life in suicide...
...now it is epidemic...
...We can best judge Alfonso's misconception of Annetta by his reiterated conviction of her coldness: "He could not imagine an expression of affection or desire on her calm marmoreal face...
...As they watch some gulls, Macario tells Alfonso that one must be like a seagull and "drop like lead on prey at the right second by instinct...
...Alfonso's "state of boredom, of grayness and monotony," his world in which "everything bored him," is Moravia's...
...A Life is an exploration of something we had thought the monopoly of our own dispirited age: the intellectual's self-doubt, self-pity, tired blood, neurosis...
...she jealously warns him against the love of women, including Annetta...
...Instead of a dying mother, he is burdened with a dying virgin sister...
...She is now Angiolina Zarri, a big, healthy, beautiful blonde who is having simultaneous affairs with Emilio and with most of the male population of Trieste, so that she generally comes running to him warm and flushed from someone else's bed...
...In these terms...
...In 1898 he similarly published a second novel, Senilità (translated, at Joyce's suggestion, As a Man Grows Older...
...The greatest change is in the life symbol...
...Disgusted by Annetta's unchastity, Alfonso goes back to his village, where his mother dies...
...La Coscienze di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno), has a deserved popularity...
...Deserted by Alfonso, Annetta turns against him, and agrees to marry her cousin...
...What A Life most closely resembles are the new American novels of our time, the fiction of the '60s that I tried to characterize in a review of Thomas Pynchon's V. in these pages [March 18, 1963...
...How familiar we have become with the despairing cry in A Life: "To be treated decently...
...The ancestry of A Life is the tradition of French psychological realism about l'amour that runs from Madame de la Fayette and Constant to Flaubert and Proust...
...Annetta symbolizes Life, and when Alfonso sees her after his return to Trieste, "it seemed impossible that he had ever possessed such a splendid creature...
...Emilio feels senile at 35, and Angiolina represents youth and life to him...
...Tirelessly promoted by Joyce, Zeno was a great success...
...Now Svevo's first and favorite novel, Una Vita (A Life), achieves its first American publication (translated from the Italian by Archibald Colquhoun, Knopf, 398 pp., $4.95...
...Svevo observes that in his self-description Alfonso "seemed to be suffering from some world-wide disease...
...Most ironically, Alfonso seduces Annetta in the Mailer library, redolent of "a strong smell of glue"—but even the strong glue of sexuality cannot hold these lovers together...
...Details are grotesquely inconsistent: Alfonso becomes the friend of Annetta's cousin because "he was so small and insignificant that Macario felt fine beside him...
...he too foreshadows Alfonso's fate...
...he is challenged to a duel by Annetta's brother...
...Only your presence here can save you, save us," she writes...
...In another aspect, Alfonso embodies the death wish...
...after her death he dreams of "his mother, still young, and humming as she worked for him...
...calculation marked the limits of the tiny whiffs of passion which the young lady allowed herself...
...Is that too much...
...A number of strong ironic foreshadowings frame its dramatic action...
...He sometimes dreams of going back to his village to work in the fields, but his true ideal is the Diaspora Jewish ideal of a life of culture wholly divorced from nature, a life of books and the mind, not acts and the body...
...In one aspect, Alfonso's Angst is very Jewish, and his blood is tired because his creator's blood is tired, after 18 centuries of dispersion...
...Alfonso is in love with his widowed mother, as she is with him...
...When Alfonso is returning to Trieste from the country he sees a man thrown off the train because he cannot pay the fare...
...Zeno is a bitterly honest and wonderfully funny treatment of the same Oedipal story, this time fully aware of psychoanalysis...
...Alfonso is transferred to the bank's "Siberia...
...It is the sickness of Yossarian in Catch-22, of the protagonist in David Knudsen, of Jack Boiling for most of The Moviegoer, of Benny Profane in V., of Gabe Wallach at the end of Letting Go...
...it was similarly unsuccessful...
...at other times he is "tall and quite well set up...
...You've found a way of calling your own coldness 'dignity'," Francesca, his severest critic, tells him...
...For an author who had killed himself off symbolically at 30 and passed into imaginary senility at 35, how ironically apt...
...A Life is the story of Alfonso Nitti, a doctor's son from the provinces, who works as a correspondence clerk in a Trieste bank...
...The book begins with Alfonso's letter to her, asking permission to give up his job and come home to live...
...reviews and articles everywhere proclaimed Svevo's mastery...
...Alfonso daydreams of "self-mastery, wealth, and happiness," but when wealth and happiness are offered him he flees from them (Francesca calls it "escaping from the consequences of your good luck"), and the only self-mastery he attains is in the act of taking his own life...
...It is told as a series of autobiographical essays written by Zeno—a compulsive smoker and adulterer—for his psychoanalyst...
...Schmitz confessed that he had once been a writer, and showed Joyce his two novels...
...In this aspect, Annetta is Nature, an opulent body, and Alfonso samples it and flees...
...Alfonso takes this advice with Annetta, and decides that Macario was wrong in thinking him "incapable of fighting and seizing his prey...
...then everything suddenly disintegrates...
...But Alfonso stays in the country with his mother, and all is lost...
...Schmitz, become Svevo again, took his time about it, and in 1923 he published Confessions of Zeno, once more at his own expense (Stanislaus Joyce claims that it was written in a fortnight...
...Like all the great works of realism, A Life shows a mastery of symbolism too...
Vol. 46 • July 1963 • No. 15
