Italo Svevo: life, works and thought

Who was Italo Svevo

Italo Svevo was the pen name of the writer Ettore Schmitz, born in Trieste on 19 December 1861 and who died on 13 September 1928 at Motta di Livenza, from the consequences of a car accident; he was buried in the Sant’Anna cemetery in Trieste. The pen name joins the two identities of his family: “Italo” for his Italian cultural belonging, “Svevo” for the German origins of his father, Francesco Schmitz.

Before becoming a writer, Svevo spent eighteen years as a clerk: on 27 September 1880 he joined the Trieste branch of the Unionbank of Vienna, a job he kept for years alongside writing his first novels, read by very few people. In 1896 he married Livia Veneziani in a civil ceremony; the marriage was also celebrated in a religious ceremony in August of the following year.

Three novels and the thread of the inetto

Svevo’s three main works are the novels A Life, As a Man Grows Older and Zeno’s Conscience, published years apart from one another, with success growing only with the last one.

A Life came out in Trieste in 1892, published by Vram, printed with the date 1893 on the cover. Its protagonist, Alfonso Nitti, is a clerk who never stops turning over his own every move and thought, and who ends up taking his own life, driven by his own inability to understand and accept the rules of the life around him. It is the first portrait of what critics call the “inetto”: a trait Treccani’s Enciclopedia dei ragazzi sums up by describing the protagonists of Svevo’s novels as anti-heroes “of an incoherent, inept and listless nature,” “the ordinary man, without qualities.” As a Man Grows Older, published in 1898, is the second novel in the same vein.

A practical example: to spot an “inetto” in Svevo’s sense, there is no need to look for a villain or an exceptional character. An ordinary man will do, like Alfonso Nitti, who spends more time watching and judging his own actions than actually living them, and who for that reason always ends up one step behind the unwritten rules of the people around him: at work, in love, in everyday life.

The third novel, Zeno’s Conscience, took shape after Trieste became part of Italy, and came out in 1923 after a very difficult start: it is the book that finally brought Svevo recognition for his literary merits, after the first two had gone almost unnoticed. Its protagonist, the Trieste merchant Zeno Cosini, tells in the first person the story of the psychoanalytic treatment he undertook with a doctor who signs the preface as “Doctor S.” and explains that he is publishing his patient’s memoir “out of revenge.” It is a different narrative structure from the first two novels, and it is also the book in which Svevo’s relationship with psychoanalysis shows most clearly.

Freud and the discovery of psychoanalysis

Svevo came into contact with Sigmund Freud’s theories, and he himself traced this knowledge back to the years between 1908 and 1910. It was an encounter that matured slowly alongside other influences before flowing into his writing: it is above all Zeno’s Conscience that shows how much that reading had changed the way Svevo built a novel, based as it is on his protagonist’s psychoanalytic treatment.

Meeting James Joyce

It was the demands of his work as a merchant that led Svevo, in Trieste in 1907, to start taking private English lessons from a twenty-five- year-old Irishman who had reached the city in October 1904: his name was James Joyce, a complete unknown there at the time. The relationship began for practical reasons, but it did not stay that way: over the years it grew into a lasting friendship, and only later, according to Treccani’s Enciclopedia dei ragazzi, did the friendship with the Irish writer “manage to become a spur” for Svevo’s writing.

Recognition that came late

For nearly all his productive life, Svevo remained an almost unknown author, far from official literary circles: he worked at the bank, wrote in the evening, and his first two novels never found a wide readership. The Museo Sveviano in Trieste describes the start of Zeno’s Conscience as “painfully slow” — a way of saying that even the third novel did not immediately change things.

In the story of early twentieth-century Italian literature, Svevo’s career sits alongside that of Luigi Pirandello, another major novelist who, in nearby years, staged the uncertainty of identity and the crisis of the ordinary self, though with different tools. His fiction, by contrast, stays fairly distant from the Verismo of Giovanni Verga, focused on a rural, regional world, and from the Decadentism of Gabriele D’Annunzio, which glorifies the exceptional individual in the figure of the superuomo: Svevo’s inetti are, on the contrary, ordinary men whom life seems always to push one step back.