Zeno's Conscience Part 1

ZENO'S CONSCIENCE Italo Svevo.

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 Senilita (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 gla.s.sware; his mother was an Italian Jew. He was born in Austrian Trieste, now a part of Italy, educated in Wurzberg, 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 Reference books tell us that Joyce gave his pupil parts of Dubliners, unpublished, to read and that the pupil produced his own writing as if they were sharing gla.s.ses of ale, which no doubt they were.

Joyce read Senilita 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 Valery 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 psychoa.n.a.lyst. None of his doctors-many appear-comes off very well, nor does the a.n.a.lysis. 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 a.s.serted by a master of words. A first-person narrator is never modest.

The opening chapter bears the t.i.tle "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 t.i.tle "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, a.s.serting 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 courts.h.i.+p 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 fiance, playing on a piano Zeno has paid for. Still, the hapless Zeno will always have the last word. Time will pa.s.s, 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-a.n.a.lysis, 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 doc.u.ment 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, acc.u.mulate wealth, occupy public office: some were even enn.o.bled.

Francesco Schmitz was in the gla.s.sware 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 a.s.sumed 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 Erziehungsinst.i.tut, 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 cla.s.sics, including Shakespeare in German translation.

In 1878 Schmitz returned to Trieste and for two years studied, in a somewhat random fas.h.i.+on, at the Ist.i.tuto Revoltella, the closest thing Trieste then had to a university. At this time he also began writing, chiefly plays, evidence of an enduring pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociated 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, a.s.signed 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 t.i.tle 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-cla.s.s woman, whom he later portrayed in his second novel.

He completed the first novel, now ret.i.tled Una vita {A Life; Svevo was unaware of the Maupa.s.sant novel of the same t.i.tle). In December of 1892 (after the ma.n.u.script 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" alb.u.m ent.i.tled Bluthen und Ranken edler Dichtung (Blossoms and Tendrils of n.o.ble Poetry), handsomely bound and ill.u.s.trated 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 t.i.tle 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, a.n.a.lyzes his love of his fiancee, 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 a.s.sailed 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 Ma.s.s. 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-hearted 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 s.h.i.+ps (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 ret.i.tled Senilita). 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 publis.h.i.+ng Senilita 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.

His life at the bank continued to be unhappy, and, at just about this time, his supplementary teaching position at the Revoltella fell through. Unexpectedly, Olga invited-or commanded-him to work for the family firm. He was initiated into the secret of the paint formula. Veneziani submarine paint was in demand far beyond Trieste, and the family set up branches, first in Italy (at nearby Murano), then in England. Svevo was often deputed to organize and control these outposts of Olga's empire. To Olga's satisfaction (and his own), he proved good at his job; and in the course of time, he achieved financial ease. He and Livia and their daughter could live in near-luxury. In his leisure moments-partly as a subst.i.tute for writing-he devoted himself to the violin. His success as a musician was less than brilliant, but he was able to put together an amateur quartet, which performed at social gatherings at their hospitable Veneziani villa.

His foreign travels were putting his command of languages to the test, and he felt that his English, in particular, needed improvement. Toward the end of 1906, Svevo was told of a young tutor, James Joyce, an Irishman who had been in Trieste since the previous March and had achieved a certain popularity, especially among the Jewish haute bourgeoisie. Since the penniless Joyce and his wife, Nora, often had to change dwellings, Joyce taught his pupils at their homes. Sometime in the autumn of 1906 he and Svevo began meeting, with reciprocal pleasure.

Joyce had recently managed (like Svevo, at his own expense) to publish a collection of his poems, Chamber Music, and was completing the stories of Dubliners, for which he was having trouble finding a publisher. He was also trying to get on with his more ambitious work, the novel then thought of as Stephen Hero. He showed his work to Svevo, and at one of their meetings actually read aloud his great story "The Dead" to Livia and Ettore, who immediately felt its power. After the reading, Livia went into the garden, picked some flowers, and handed the bouquet to Joyce as a sign of her admiration.

Eventually Svevo confessed to his young teacher that he also had-or had once had-literary ambitions. Joyce asked to read Una vita and Senilita and was profoundly impressed. He even quoted some pa.s.sages of the latter work from memory to the thrilled author. (Svevo, it must be added, became one of several sources of "loans" to the young Irishman.) Joyce discussed his own work more and more freely with Svevo. As he began planning Ulysses, he frequently consulted his pupil about Jewish beliefs and practices; and thus Svevo contributed to the characterization of Leopold Bloom. Livia-or, at least, her much-admired long blond tresses-was later a model for the personification of Dublin's river Liffey, as Anna Livia Plurabelle.

As the First World War began, Joyce had to leave Trieste, but from his exiles-first in Switzerland and later in Paris-he kept in touch with his friend. Joyce's continued moral support may have contributed to Svevo's first great postwar undertaking, La coscienza di Zeno, which was begun in March of 1919, more than twenty years after the completion of Senilita.

The years of the war were profoundly disruptive for Svevo, for Trieste, and for the underwater paint business. Even before hostilities began, many Italians fled the city, where the Austrian authorities had imposed a number of restrictions, including a severe censors.h.i.+p of the press. Gioachino and Olga, both Italian citizens, left for England, so Ettore remained in charge at the factory. Wanting to be near her Italian fiance, Letizia-now in her teens -joined some family members in Florence.

The Austrians tried to confiscate the factory and wanted to know the secret formula; Ettore thwarted these efforts, first by concealing the ingredients and then by supplying a false formula. Finally he had to travel to Vienna to protest the confiscation of the factory. He was successful, but there was little business to be done in the beleaguered city.

Finally, well after the war's end and Trieste's annexation to Italy, the Schmitzes-including Letizia, now married and with a growing family-were able to take a vacation together. In the summer of 1922 they rented a villa in the hills north of Trieste. Here, in an access of fervid inspiration, Svevo went seriously to work on La coscienza di Zeno. Smoking furiously, he finished the book in a matter of months, and in May of 1923 the novel was published-again at the author's expense-by the firm Cappelli in Bologna. Once more Svevo's book aroused scant interest: a few local reviews, a brief and lukewarm notice in the Corriere della sera.

But the tide was soon to turn, dramatically. The last few years of Svevo's life would be radically different; he would come close to achieving victory in the battle of life. Though he had seen little of Joyce after his departure from Trieste and their correspondence had been desultory, Svevo had sent a copy of La coscienza di Zeno to his former English teacher. The response from Paris was immediate. Joyce's letter is dated 30 January 1924, and it reads, in part: Thank you for the novel with the inscription. I am reading it with great pleasure. Why be discouraged? You must know it is by far your best work. As to Italian critics I can't speak. But send copies to Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Cremieux, T. S. Eliot (Editor Criterion), F. M. Ford. I will speak or write to them about it also. I shall be able to write more when I've finished the book. So far two things interest me. The theme: I should never have thought that smoking could dominate a man like that. Secondly, the treatment of time in the book. You certainly don't lack penetration, and I see that the last paragraph of Senilita ... has been growing and blossoming in secret.

Joyce, who knew something about promoting literary work, especially his own, was as good as his word. He did speak with Larbaud and Cremieux, prodding them to read and publicize the book. An important new Parisian review, Le Navire d'Argent, was soon planning a "Svevo number" with an essay by Larbaud and a translation of excerpts from Senilita and La coscienza. Svevo was the talk of literary Paris, and a young Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, visiting the city, heard of him there for the first time. On his return to Italy, Montale procured copies of the three novels and took up the cause, writing articles on Svevo for Italian reviews and enthusiastically spreading the word. Soon Svevo was a prominent literary figure, or rather a "case," debated at length in papers and in literary cafes. On one occasion, when Svevo was to pa.s.s through Milan en route to Trieste during a return trip from abroad, Montale arranged for a group of young writers to gather at the Milan train station and pay him homage. Svevo was also feted by Florentine literary circles, and in Trieste he was now a respected member of the Caffe Garibaldi intellectual group.

The official literary establishment still regarded him with some suspicion and belittled his foreign fame, but that fame was undeniable. Translations of his works were already in progress. After his death an acquaintance, A. R. Ferrarm, recalled and quoted some remarks of his at this time: "Until last year I was the... least ambitious old man in the world," Svevo said. "Now I am overcome by ambition. I have become eager for praise. I now live only to manage my own glory. I went to Paris ... and all I could see was Italo Svevo: Italo Svevo among the treasures of the Louvre; Italo Svevo on the stage of the fifty-some Parisian theaters. Italo Svevo on the Elysees, and Italo Svevo at Versailles... The ville lumiere... seemed to exist only as a function of my glory."

Svevo, in the last, satisfying years of his life, often visited Milan and frequented the literary salons there. In 1926 he gave a lecture on Joyce at the offices of// convegno, an important review that also sponsored a club and a theater. Though Svevo, who had never spoken in public before, had grave misgivings, the occasion went well and reinforced his relations.h.i.+p with the review, which published some of his stories.

In the flush of excitement at his fame, he was not only writing stories but contemplating a sequel to La coscienza di Zeno. In the winter of 1927 a social event crowned this happy phase: Gremieux organized a dinner in Paris to honor Svevo, its guests including Isaak Babel, Ilya Ehrenburg, and other ill.u.s.trious Paris residents, with Jules Romains presiding. Ehrenburg's account of the dinner emphasized the bad food and marveled at Svevo's incessant smoking.

His fame could not dispel an increasing pessimism. His conversation and his writing now contained frequent premonitions of death; his concern with old age-his "senilita" which had been a spiritual more than a physical state-was now real. He had to cut down on his eating, for he had developed a heart condition. Nevertheless he continued to go to the office and, in good moments, to write. He did not give up smoking.

In late August of 1928, Ettore and Livia decided to spend some time at the Alpine spa Bormio, where he had previously taken a cure. They traveled by motorcar, their chauffeur at the wheel, and took with them their six-year-old grandson, Paolo. Having set out on 11 September, they broke the trip overnight and on the twelfth resumed the journey despite pouring rain.

As the car was crossing a bridge not far from Motta di Livenza, it skidded and crashed into a tree. Only Svevo seemed badly hurt, though Livia and Paolo were also bleeding.

Svevo had a broken leg, some cuts and bruises, but he was also suffering from severe shock; the doctor quickly realized that the injured man was dying. Letizia and her husband arrived the next morning. At a certain point one of his visitors was smoking, and Svevo asked him for a cigarette. It was refused. Svevo replied: "That really would have been the last cigarette." He died that afternoon at half past two.

Livia survived him for almost thirty years and became the alert custodian of his fame. His death was the first of many family tragedies. In March of 1943 Letizia's two eldest sons died as prisoners of war in Russia. Another son, Sergio, was killed in partisan street fighting in Trieste in 1945. Earlier that year the Villa Veneziani and the factory had been destroyed in an Allied bombing.

Livia herself spent much of the war hiding from the n.a.z.is. During that time she began writing a biography of Svevo. Later, a friend, Lina Galli, helped her complete it. But she had as much trouble finding a publisher as Ettore had had. At last it appeared, as Vita di mio marito (Life of My Husband) in Trieste in 1950. A charming, affecting, usefully informative work, it has subsequently been reissued and translated.

Svevo's widow lived to see her husband established as a modern Italian cla.s.sic, but the "Svevo case" continued to provoke discussion. One of the th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t questions surrounding Svevo was, quite simply, his Italian. In La coscienza di Zeno, the narrator complains about his own Italian. Like all his fellow Triestines, Zeno's first language is the local dialect. For Ettore Schmitz, his first language was also Triestino; his second, German. Italian was an acquired tongue, and from the beginning of his career critics have insisted that his Italian is clumsy. "The Italian of a bookkeeper" is a recurrent jibe. In his preface to a reissue of Livia's Vita di mio marito, Montale tackles the question: But the smell of warehouse and cellar, the almost Goldonian chatter of the Tergesteo, the unmistakable "late Ottocento" painting in some of his rare expanses of landscape and his numerous "interiors"-are they not the sure presence of a style? A commercial style, true, but also the only one natural to his characters.

If Svevo-or rather, Zeno Cosini-writes like a bookkeeper, that may be because he is a bookkeeper. At the suggestion of the Bolognese publisher Cappelli, Svevo actually took the step of having a professional, non-Triestine writer, Attilio Frescura, examine his ma.n.u.script. For some time Svevo's papers have not been accessible. They are in packing-cases stored in the Trieste library, which is being "renovated" (renovation, in inst.i.tutional Italy, is likely to be an endless process). So we have no idea what Frescura's proposed revisions were, nor do we know to what extent Svevo accepted them.

In making this translation-and here I must adopt the first person singular-I have steadfastly resisted the temptation to "prettify" Svevo's prose. And as I progressed, the temptation became less frequent, as that prose worked its charm on me. What could sometimes at first seem flat, unaccented, even opaque was, I realized, an essential part of Zeno's character, like his subtle irony, his c.o.c.keyed ratiocination, his quiet humor. In his important study, In Praise of Antiheroes, Victor Brombert devotes an acute chapter to Zeno, an antihero in the great European tradition, where the b.u.mbling importer Zeno Cosini ranks with that other great creation, the good soldier Schweik.

I first read Svevo's novel when I was a college senior, in the English translation by Beryl de Zoete, under the t.i.tle Confessions of Zeno. I fell in love with the book, and a few years later, when my Italian was more fluent, I read it again in the original and loved it even more. Beryl de Zoete must have been a fascinating woman. Her published works include scholarly studies of Oriental dance; she was the companion of the great translator and scholar Arthur Waley, and thus lived in the magic circle of Bloomsbury. She also translated Senilita and, later, one of Alberto Moravia's early novellas, the splendid Agostino.

In the 1920s, when she worked on La coscienza di Zeno, she was translating the work of an eccentric, virtually unknown Italian writer. Seventy years later, when I began my translation, I was dealing with a text of world renown, universally loved. There are times when a translator must also be something of a salesperson, and I suspect that Beryl de Zoete, in her admiration for Svevo, was also eager to sell him to an uninstructed public. Her translation did just that, and she must have been pleased, rightfully, with her achievement.

But, more than novels, translations age. The translators whose work illuminated my youth-Constance Garnett, Helen Lowe-Porter, Dorothy Bussy, C. K. Scott Moncrieff-have all been challenged and, in some cases, replaced. And I expect-admittedly without enthusiasm-that a new generation will retranslate the works of Gadda, Calvino, Eco, whom I introduced to English readers.

While I was working on this translation, I left my old, college-days copy of Confessions of Zeno on the shelf. When I had finished, or almost finished the job, I took two or three peeks at de Zoete's work, to compare a few of her solutions to mine. It was clear to me that she had had similar trouble with pa.s.sages that troubled me. I had been ready to use (and duly acknowledge) any felicitous solutions of hers, but as it turned out, her words regularly drove me to press on and find new solutions of my own.

The first and perhaps greatest problem is the very t.i.tle of the book. In Italian, "coscienza" means both "conscience" and "consciousness," and the word recurs often in the body of the novel. De Zoete's choice of "confessions," skirting the original word deftly, was inspired but, I felt, finally misleading, placing Zeno Cosini in a line descended from Augustine and Rousseau. (To one of my Catholic background, the word also had a religious, sacramental connotation that I felt was unsuitable.) Then, one day, in an article in The Times Literary Supplement, I read that in the past, the English word "conscience" had also had the meaning of "consciousness." The article quoted Shakespeare ("conscience doth make cowards of us all"). And I decided that my t.i.tle would be Zeno's Conscience.

Translation is often described as a lonely profession. I have never found it so. True, during most of the work, I am alone in my study, facing the blank screen and the printed page. But I also have the pleasure of discussing work and words with others, with colleagues and friends. I began this translation years ago in Italy and completed it at Bard College, where the campus teems with Svevians, always ready to talk about his great novel. At Bard, I must thank my valued colleagues James Ghace, Frederick Hammond, Robert Kelly, William Mullen, Maria a.s.sunta Nicoletti, and Carlo Zei. I am also grateful to my student Jorge Santana for his help, and to my former student Kristina Olson for collaborating on the bibliographical note. In New York, my old friend Riccardo Gori Montanelli (who helped me with some of my first translations, in Charlottesville, Virginia, fifty years ago) came to my a.s.sistance with some stock-market terminology, and my editor, LuAnn Walther, and her a.s.sistant, John Siciliano, helped with the final stages of the long process of seeing Zeno's Conscience into print.

William Weaver.

MAP OF ZENO'S TRIESTE.

PREFACE.

I am the doctor occasionally mentioned in this story, in unflattering terms. Anyone familiar with psychoa.n.a.lysis knows how to a.s.sess the patient's obvious hostility toward me.

I will not discuss psychoa.n.a.lysis here, because in the following pages it is discussed more than enough. I must apologize for having suggested my patient write his autobiography; students of psychoa.n.a.lysis will frown on this new departure. But he was an old man, and I hoped that recalling his past would rejuvenate him, and that the autobiography would serve as a useful prelude to his a.n.a.lysis. Even today my idea still seems a good one to me, for it achieved results far beyond my hopes. The results would have been even greater if the patient had not suspended treatment just when things were going well, denying me the fruit of my long and painstaking a.n.a.lysis of these memories.

I am publis.h.i.+ng them in revenge, and I hope he is displeased. I want him to know, however, that I am prepared to share with him the lavish profits I expect to make from this publication, on condition that he resume his treatment. He seemed so curious about himself! If he only knew the countless surprises he might enjoy from discussing the many truths and the many lies he has a.s.sembled here!...

Doctor S.

PREAMBLE.

review my childhood? More than a half-century stretches between that time and me, but my farsighted eyes could perhaps perceive it if the light still glowing there were not blocked by obstacles of every sort, outright mountain peaks: all my years and some of my hours.

The doctor has urged me not to insist stubbornly on trying to see all that far back. Recent things can also be valuable, and especially fantasies and last night's dreams. But there should be at least some kind of order, and to help me begin ab ovo, the moment I left the doctor, who is going out of town shortly and will be absent from Trieste for some time, I bought and read a treatise on psychoa.n.a.lysis, just to make his task easier. It's not hard to understand, but it's very boring.

Now, having dined, comfortably lying in my overstuffed lounge chair, I am holding a pencil and a piece of paper. My brow is unfurrowed because I have dismissed all concern from my mind. My thinking seems something separate from me. I can see it. It rises and falls... but that is its only activity. To remind it that it is my thinking and that its duty is to make itself evident, I grasp the pencil. Now my brow does wrinkle, because each word is made up of so many letters and the imperious present looms up and blots out the past.

Yesterday I tried to achieve maximum relaxation. The experiment ended in deepest sleep, and its only effect on me was a great repose and the curious sensation of having seen, during that sleep, something important. But it was forgotten by then, lost forever.

Today, thanks to the pencil I'm holding in my hand, I remain awake. I can see, or glimpse, some odd images that surely have nothing to do with my past: a puffing locomotive dragging countless coaches up a steep grade. Who knows where it's coming from or where it's going or why it has now turned up here?

As I doze, I remember how my textbook claims that this method will allow you to recall your earliest infancy, your cradle days. I see immediately a baby in a cradle, but why should that baby be me? He doesn't look anything like me; on the contrary, I believe he was born a few weeks ago to my sister-in-law, who displayed him as a miracle because he has such tiny hands and such big eyes. Recall my infancy? Hardly. Poor baby! I can't even find a way to warn you, now living in your own infancy, how important it is to remember it, for the benefit of your intelligence and your health. When will you discover that it would be a good idea to memorize your life, even the large part of it that will revolt you? Meanwhile, unconscious, you are investigating your tiny organism in search of pleasure, and your delightful discoveries will pave the way toward the grief and sickness to which you will be driven even by those who would not wish them on you. What is to be done? It is impossible to keep constant watch over your crib. In your breast-you poor little thing!-a mysterious combination is forming. Every pa.s.sing minute provides a reagent. Too many probabilities of illness surround you, for not all your minutes can be pure. And besides-poor baby!-you are the blood relation of people I know. The minutes now pa.s.sing may actually be pure, but all the centuries that prepared for your coming were certainly not.

Here I am, quite far from the images that precede sleep. I will make another attempt tomorrow.

SMOKE.

the doctor with whom I discussed the question told me to begin my work with a historical a.n.a.lysis of my smoking habit.

"Write it down! And you'll see yourself whole! Try it!"

I believe I can write about smoking here at my desk, without having to sit and dream in that chair. I can't seem to begin, so I must seek help from my cigarettes, all very like the one I am now holding.

Today I discover immediately something I had forgotten. The cigarettes I first smoked are no longer on the market. Around 1870 in Austria there was a brand that came in cardboard boxes stamped with the two-headed eagle. Now, around one of those boxes I see a few people gathering, each with some characteristic, so distinct that I can recall their names, but not distinct enough to prompt any emotion at this unforeseen encounter. I want to delve deeper, so I go to the armchair: the people fade and are replaced by some clowns, who mock me. Dejected, I return to the desk.

One of those figures, with a somewhat hoa.r.s.e voice, was Giuseppe, a youth my own age, and with him was my brother, a year younger than I, who died many years ago. It seems Giuseppe received a generous allowance from his father, and used to give us some of those cigarettes. But I am certain he offered more of them to my brother than to me. Hence I was faced with the necessity of procuring some for myself. So I stole. In summer my father hung his waistcoat over a chair in the breakfast room, and in its pocket there was always change. I procured the ten pennies necessary to purchase the precious little packet, and I smoked its ten cigarettes one after the other, rather than hold on to the compromising fruit of my theft.

All this lay in my consciousness, within reach. It resurfaces only now because previously I didn't know that it could be of any importance. So I have recorded the origin of the filthy habit and (who knows?) I may already be cured of it. Therefore, I light a last cigarette, as a test; perhaps I will throw it away at once, revolted.

Then, I remember, one day my father caught me with his waistcoat in my hands. With a shamelessness I could not muster today, which still disgusts me (perhaps-who knows?-that disgust is highly significant in my life), I told him I had felt a sudden impulse to count the b.u.t.tons. My father laughed at my mathematical or sartorial leanings, failing to notice that I had my fingers in the watch pocket. It should be said, to my credit, that this laughter, inspired by my innocence when it no longer existed, sufficed to keep me from ever stealing again. Or rather... I stole again, but unawares. My father left some half-smoked Virginia cigars around the house, perched on table edges and armoires. I believed this was how he threw them away, and I believe our old maidservant, Carina, did then fling them out. I carried them off and smoked them in secret. At the very moment I grabbed them I was overcome by a shudder of revulsion, knowing how sick they would make me. Then I smoked them until my brow was drenched in cold sweat and my stomach was in knots. It cannot be said that in my childhood I lacked energy.

I know perfectly well also how my father cured me of this habit. One summer day I returned home from a school outing, tired and soaked in sweat. My mother helped me undress, and wrapping me in a big towel, she made me lie down to sleep on a sofa where she was also seated, busy with some sewing. I was almost asleep, but the sun was still in my eyes, and it was taking me a while to lose consciousness. The sweetness that, in those tender years, accompanied repose after great weariness is clear to me, like an image on its own, as clear as if I were there now, beside that beloved body that no longer exists.

I remember the big, cool room where we children used to play; now, in these times when s.p.a.ce has become so precious, it is subdivided into two parts. In this scene my brother doesn't appear, and I am surprised because I think he must also have partic.i.p.ated in that excursion, and should have shared in the rest afterwards. Was he also sleeping, at the other end of the sofa? I look at that place, but it seems empty to me. I see only myself, in the sweetness of that repose, my mother, then my father, whose words I hear re-echoing. He had come in and hadn't immediately seen me, because he called aloud: "Maria!"

Mamma, with a gesture accompanied by a faint sound of the lips, nodded toward me, whom she believed immersed in sleep, though I was only afloat on the surface, fully conscious. I was so pleased that, for my sake, Papa had to control himself that I kept absolutely still.

In a low voice my father complained, "I think I'm going mad. I could swear that, not thirty minutes ago, I left half a cigar on that cupboard, and now I can't find it. I'm getting worse. I'm losing track of things."

Also in a low voice, yet betraying an amus.e.m.e.nt restrained only by her fear of waking me, my mother replied, "But no one's been in that room since dinner."

My father murmured, "I know that, too, and that's why I feel I'm going mad!"