The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl

Italo Svevo, born Ettore Schmitz in 1861, was the son of a well-off Jewish couple in Trieste. When his father’s glassware business collapsed, teenaged Svevo took a job in a bank to help, abandoning his studies but not his desire to become a writer. He stayed at the bank for 20 years, concurrently writing books no one would publish. Finally, at 32, he self-published a novel, Una vita, under his pseudonym – meaning “An Italian of Swabia” – and five years later another, Senilità. Both were failures, and Svevo gave up publishing for the next 25 years. In 1898 he went to work for his father-in-law, a paint-manufacturer. Because the company did business in England, he signed up for English lessons at the local Berlitz School and was assigned a young James Joyce as his teacher. The two became so close that Joyce modeled the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, on Svevo. In 1923 Svevo self-published another novel, La Coscienza di Zeno. The autobiographical story of a man undergoing Freudian analysis while trying to quit smoking is now seen, like Svevo’s other works, as a pioneering work of psychoanalytic and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Joyce got it published in France — where it was a hit — but couldn’t interest an English publisher before Svevo, in 1928, was struck by a car while crossing the street. He died a few days later. Refused a cigarette on his deathbed, his last words were reportedly, “That would definitely have been my last cigarette.”