In My Good Books

by V. S. Pritchett

  Very little is known in England about the life of Italo Svevo. Such information as we have comes from the introductions to his novels which were translated in the late ’twenties, and from the brother of James Joyce, who knew him well in Trieste. Joyce is said to have put something of Svevo into the portrait of Leopold Blum. Svevo’s real name was Ettore Schmitz; he was born in 1861 and died in 1928. He lived most of his life in Trieste and was half-Italian, half-Austrian by origin. At the age of 32 he published his first novel, Una Vita, which was well received; five years later another novel, entitled Senilità, which was totally ignored. The fact that Svevo wrote in an Italian speckled by the impurities of the Trentino dialect was against him. He gave up literature for a business career in which he was very successful. Not until he was in his sixties did he write La Coscienza di Zeno (In English, The Confessions of Zeno), his most remarkable work, which he is said to have dashed off in a fortnight. The writing of this book and the fame it brought to Svevo owe something to the encouragement of Joyce, who, as a teacher of English in Trieste, had by chance been engaged by the business man to teach him our language. In his life the epicurean Svevo seems to have been robust, genial, solid, successful and urbane, the complete antithesis of the stoic Zeno, the brilliant, erratic hypochondriac, who is palmed off with marvellous skill as a self-portrait in The Confessions. Zeno was the hidden artist, an agile piece of mystification by an expert in loquacity. One can see a clue to the link between the solid Schmitz and the restless, forever enquiring and ever-deluded egoism of Zeno in the fact of Svevo’s divided birth. He was one of the frontier people of Europe, of divided temperament, and was therefore perfectly fitted for the analytical passion in which one part of our nature sits on the fence and observes the other.

  Senilità is itself not a very original book. It is the usual étude de mœurs on the favourite Latin theme of the p’tite maîtresse, the working-class girl who can be kept cheaply. The interest of the story lies in the humility of Svevo before his characters, in a studied naivety which foreshadows the manner of Kafka in the use of the method of unconscious revelation, i.e. of letting the psyche expose itself, and, finally, in Svevo’s gift of writing epitaphs upon human feeling: “The thought of death is like an attribute of the body, a physical malady. Our will can neither summon it nor drive it away.” The underlying subject of Senilità is illness—that is to say, the senility or second childishness of the illusions we live by, and this hidden subject gives the commonplace story its peculiar double plot.

  But when Zeno was written, thirty years later, it was totally original and mature, and like Adolphe, contained the essence of a lifetime. Throwing chronology away, Svevo writes an autobiographical novel divided into subjects. The book is split up into reminiscent essays on his father, his marriage, his mistress and his business partnership, and, naturally, many of the episodes are concurrent. This unconventional method has the attractive carelessness of conversation. Moreover, the story is held together by an amusing framework. Zeno writes in order to debunk his psycho-analyst. According to his analyst, all Zeno’s troubles—his troublesome love of his wife’s sister, his hypochondria, his will-lessness, his nervous crises, his mad, restless brainwaves, heroic moral illusions, and his suspicions—are all due to the Œdipus complex. Zeno sets out to show life slipping like an eel through the stiff hands of this theory. At the end of the book he gives up psychoanalysis because, by chance, he runs across a doctor who tells him that his real disease is diabetes. Zeno is delighted. A régime at last, a new theory, a new order, the solution of all his problems! His wife remarks:

  “My poor dear Zeno, you have talked so much during your life about illnesses that sooner or later you were bound to get one.” And she overwhelmed me with tenderness.

  However, neither Freud nor diabetes saves Zeno in the end. Obliged by the death and debts of his partner to attend seriously to his business, Zeno is saved by work. The intellectual is a natural gambler. He slaves (successfully) on the Bourse.

  On its formal side Svevo’s originality springs from high spirits, from sheer wit and brain, such as are found in a comedy of Beaumarchais or Sheridan. When we turn to his matter, we see that Svevo belongs to that rare number of novelists—almost non-existent in modern literature—who like their characters and side with them instead of destroying them piecemeal. And in Zeno, Svevo is engaged in liking the kind of character who is most vulnerable to disapproval. For Zene is the egoist of all the egoists. How Meredith would havo detached the pomposity and complacency from that ubiquitous first person singular! Zeno is in love with explanation. He is perpetually button-holing and explaining. He would have been the supreme café bore of Trieste. Now he is fantasticating about his struggles to give up smoking; now he is being unguardedly complacent about his wife, his ideals as a seducer, his mental superiority to his more experienced business partner, and so on. But Zeno has one saving virtue; he never believes his own self-justifications. Zeno is just as happy when he is grotesquely wrong as when he is accidentally right. He is always on the damaging and humbling search for truth. Under the café gabble of Zeno’s enthusiastic tongue there lies a personal humility and tenderness, an exquisite ear for the true tune of human living, an unshockable wonder at each transient mystery of our feelings. Zeno appears to be a weak and vacillating mad-hatter—and obtuse critics have attacked the figure of Zeno as an example of the neurotic bourgeois who suffers from a kind of intellectual diarrhœa—but, in fact, the abiding impression he leaves is one of moral gravity.

  The exaggerations which spring from the tradition of Italian farce are the making of The Confessions of Zeno. The absurd is trained upon the serious in order to awaken our emotions from the conventional turgidity into which they habitually settle. Two episodes illustrate the macabre and disturbing effect of Svevo’s use of bizarre incident. The first occurs in the very moving and faithful account of the death of Zeno’s father. As usual, Zeno is overwrought, his emotions have got beyond him. In his love for the dying father with whom he has nothing in common, Zeno is quarrelling with everyone at the sick-bed. With the scorn of youth, he has always regarded his father as a weak man; but at the moment of dying the old man rises in his bed as if he is going at last to reveal the mystery of life and death to his son and to embrace him; instead, the old man inadvertently hits him a blow on the cheek and dies. It is unexpected, it is ridiculous, it is terrifying. Literature abounds in deathbed scenes. To this one Svevo has given a particularity which is memorable, not only because it is eccentric, but because its effect on Zeno’s character is shown with real perspicacity. From that moment Zeno’s haunting illusion of weakness is dated. It is as illusory, of course, as his earlier illusion of being stronger than his father.

  The second episode is more truly farcical, and not macabre at all. Svevo is again observing how life does not play up to conventional emotion, nor indeed to any theory at all. Guido, Zeno’s partner and brother-in-law, has died. Zeno has always disapproved of him because Guido was a chronic womaniser, but chiefly because Guido had married the sister whom Zeno had once wished to marry. Zeno could never in consequence be sure of the honesty of his disapproval, as indeed he could never be sure of anything in his life. But, obviously, now Guido was dead, the tangle had been cut. Moreover, to show that he was really devoted to Guido, Zeno slaves day after day at the office until the very hour of the funeral, in order to clear up the shady financial mess in which Guido had left his affairs and so preserve Guido’s good name. Give Zeno an illusion to preserve and he works for it with the fever of a lover. And then, when he is exhausted, Zeno suddenly remembers the funeral. He dashes out, hires a cab and begins a frantic search of the city for the funeral procession. His sister-in-law, whom he has always loved, will never forgive him if he fails to turn up at the funeral. At last the procession is found. The cab joins it and Zeno and his clerk sit back and relax to talk about the Bourse. Thank heaven. They are doing the conventional thing, for Zeno, like so many of the aberrated, has a longing for the convent
ional. And then they discover they are in the Greek cemetery. Guido was a Catholic. Obviously, they have followed the wrong funeral.

  Four books by Svevo are available in English and are admirably translated by Beryl de Zoete. They include two collections of short stories which suffer from being brief restatements of the longer books. They are The Hoax and The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl. I find the Svevo of the short stories too playfully charming and serene, though The Hoax does define his quality:

  … a humble life, endowed with a kind of strength that comes from absolute surrender….

  Svevo sees our lives hanging in suspense from minute to minute; we appear, as we must do to the psychologist, to be in continual process of disintegration. And yet, surveying the scene again in longer stretches of time, there is, under the breathless chasing of illusions, a process of reintegration, too. The fool becomes the strong man, the younger son marries the ugly sister, who turns out to be the beautiful princess. And the business man of Trieste, ignored by literary society, is avenged by the brilliant, serious and hypochondriacal clown.

  The Nobodies

  If my guess is right, this year or next is the centenary of Mr. Pooter and maybe of Mr. Padge, Mr. Gowing and Mr. Cummings as well. The patriotic historians of Holloway should be at work, scheming for a plaque to be placed over the doorway of The Laurels (No. 12), Brickfield Terrace. There Mr. Pooter with his “dear wife” Carrie and his atrocious son, Lupin, finally settled, and, in ’91, when Mr. Pooter’s “grand old master” presented the freehold of the place to his faithful clerk, he must have been 50. That, as the saying is, takes one back; indeed, it is so far back for some of us that we cross the frontier of comedy and enter into the wilderness where family ends and history begins. The joke dims and dims until it ceases to be a joke and becomes a fact.

  The fact, neutral, normal, pathetic, is the essence of the humour of The Diary of a Nobody. Gentility was the illusion; the grim fact was that Mr. Pooter was not very well off, that he tripped on doorscrapers, that he ate Wednesday’s blancmange on Thursday and Friday in holy matrimonial privacy and was caught doing the same on Saturday by the brutal Gowing who shouted out while the servant was in the room, “Hulloh! The remains of Wednesday.” Facts were the fly in Mr. Pooter’s ointment, the Gowing in the laurel bush. Off pops his made-up tie at the ball, out “in Society” he is horrified to meet his ironmonger, the laundry returns his coloured handkerchief without the colour, and his wife violates the sanctity of marriage by complaining, “in company”, that every morning she has to listen to his “blessed” dreams. For years he has laboured and reached that summit where a man can at last open a bottle of three-and-sixpenny champagne with an air both festive and refined, only to discover that this is not a summit but a foothill. Indeed he has to listen to Mr. Hardfur Huttle saying that it is insult and murder to give your guests even a six-shilling champagne. Mr. Pooter’s life is one long humiliation at the hands of triviality and God gave him no gift of laughing at himself. Far from this, the only things he can laugh at are his own jokes—puns brought forth after long preparation which only “dear Carrie” sees and then not always—and though as sensitive in the trills of decorum as the Cid was on the point of honour, he is doomed to be pestered all his life by the enraging bites of petty indignity. A boob, a fool, a tedious and touchy old bore, Mr. Pooter has the innocence but not the stature of the comic martyrs; he is a study in the negative; he is a good man in the sense that the Devil evidently regards him as being too dull for temptation. The Evil One is content to put hard peas in the shoes of the pilgrim on the trim avenues of gentility and to leave him to it.

  The foreigner who picked up The Diary of a Nobody would be bound to note that there must have been something especially dreary about English lower middle-class life in the ’nineties. I hear echoes of elderly relatives saying “Poor So-and-so” was a “cure” or “a caution”, that he or she was always saying and doing things which were “too real”. Reality was the joke, its awful, dreary greyness. People who, like “dear Carrie”, turned the leg of mutton over and covered it with parsley so that the unexpected visitor would not notice the joint had been cut, laughed at the little comedy when they read about it or saw it on the stage. There is a pathos in a joke so small, a Cockney whine, a cringing suggestion of the prison house. Yet it would be a mistake to regard the humour of the Grossmiths as a sedative to its audience, an aid to complacency or resignation. Looking down upon snobbery, we see the comedy of snobbery; looking up to it, we see what a dynamic romantic force it has been in English middle-class life, how it is natural to an expanding society. The words “too real” are not a pathetic acceptance of life’s little domestic ironies only; they are an idealistic protest against reality, a call to push on with the illusion, to afford a really uncut shoulder of mutton in the house next time. The moral impulse in the English character takes peculiar and generally vulgar forms. Like the go-getting Japanese, we dare not lose face, and the cultivation of dignity, ambivalence and vulgarity to this end is automatic with us.

  As “too-realists” the Grossmiths were salutary historians. They recorded the paralysis of middle-class living, the horror when the preoccupation with etiquette, with good manners and bad manners, was upset by someone like Mr. Padge who had no manners at all, not even bad ones. Mr. Padge, that low man who seemed all moustache, who took the best chair and would not budge from it all the evening, who stared at everybody, smoked a dirty pipe and whose only words were “That’s right” and who had a coarse, vacuous laugh, is a great character:

  I was so annoyed at the conduct of Padge, I said: “I suppose you would have laughed if he had poked Mr. Gowing’s eye out?” to which Padge replied “That’s right”, and laughed more than ever.

  And yet the Grossmiths are just; they are never savage, never unkind; they trip Mr. Pooter but they help him up afterwards; they leave to insipidity its native pathos. The fact that Mr. Pooter himself is recording his daily hopes and disasters in all their shattering mildness, keeps us on his side. One cannot kick a man when he is down; one cannot ridicule a man who is already making an ass of himself in his diary. One feels protective towards the Mr. Pooter who is so childishly engaged in curling the whiskers and adjusting the coat-tails of the proprieties that, when life breaks through in the form of a slapstick bread fight, a row with the butcher or “words” with his son, he is always helpless and hides his nakedness with indignation. And indignation, of course, makes it worse. English humour on its cheerfully vulgar course always ends in knock-about:

  They then commenced throwing hard pieces of crust, one piece catching me on the forehead, and making me blink. I said: “Steady, please; steady!” Frank jumped up and said: “Turn, turn, then the band played.”

  I did not know what this meant, but they roared and continued the bread battle. Gowing suddenly seized all the parsley off the cold mutton and threw it in my face. I looked daggers at Gowing who replied: “I say, it’s no good trying to look indignant, with your hair full of parsley.” I rose from the table and insisted that a stop should be put to this foolery at once. Frank Mutlar shouted, “Time, gentlemen, please, time,” and turned out the gas, leaving us in complete darkness.

  Yes, one feels protective to Mr. Pooter; he is innocent. The truly comic character always is. From Don Quixote down to Pickwick, Pooter and Beachcomber’s Mr. Thake.

  The Diary of a Nobody was the sane answer to the sentimental realism of Gissing. The “too real” had reached a stage in Gissing which was altogether too real. There is an incredible story of Gissing’s which describes how a young lady from Balham broke off her engagement and ruined her life because of the shame of discovering that a photograph of herself as a baby had appeared in the public Press to advertise a Baby Food. The need for laughter was obviously urgent. But each age provides its own antidote in the younger generation. In the Diary there is nothing so fascinating sociologically as the character of the awful son Lupin, that bouncing, insubordinate and loud young man who is always b
eing sacked from his jobs only, against all desert, to get much better and also much shadier ones. Lupin is a symptom. The prim mid-Victorians have given birth to the effusively vulgar Edwardians, the exuberant business man is succeeding to the industrious clerk and “the grand old master”; just as the stucco and yellow brick of Brickfield Terrace is to be abandoned—shortly to become a slum—and will be superseded by the red brick, balconies and Tudor of the next ring of suburbia. The sulking, the shiftiness, the flashiness of Lupin are perfect. He is of his time and yet he has touches of the eternal.

  Much of The Diary of a Nobody is dated in fact and in general atmosphere. The happy ending, so natural, is quite dated. At 50 the present-day Pooters do not get a rise of £100 a year; they get the sack. They are too old. As for “the grand old master”, the Pooters of to-day never see their employers, hardly know who they are. Most of us would be glad to know our ironmongers. The humorous writing which was a kind of comic game of chess with the English class system survives in only the feeblest artificial comedy of the commercial stage, and the commercial stage is usually a generation behind the times. With the loss of class as a comic subject, kindness has gone because stability has gone. Our own humour is more cruel. It is speedier and prefers fantasy, as is shown by a glance at Beachcomber—the Grossmiths’ successor. Why, then, does the Diary still amuse? Like an old fashion, of course; but also because it was the most economical, the least wordy, the most limpid and crystalline of its kind; because it anticipated the sans commentaire method which is characteristic of today. Its popularity with the older generation of whom Mr. Pooter was the ridiculous father, where to us he is an archaic and hardly known grandparent, springs from the general relief it brought to the mid-Victorian strain; it was a new humour of the lower middle-class which Wells and Bennett (a pair of Lupins in their time) were to carry further, and which was disapproved of by the refined. It is interesting to read of the disgust which this new voice of the lower middle-class aroused when it became heard at the beginning of the century. The objection of the aristocratic critic of the Morning Post, for example, to Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, was to the lowness of its people. The subtle Diary disarmed that critic by satirising the gentility he had taught them.