Ernesto Livorni
Italo Svevo, «Faccio meglio di restare nell'ombra».
«Sono qui tuttavia miracolosamente»: this is the first statement
in Svevo's brief correspondence (from March 1, 1926 to February 28, 1927)
with Enzo Ferrieri, founder of the cultural circle «Il Convegno» in
Milan. It is from this very first letter that Giovanni Palmieri, who has
just completed the related critical work Schmitz, Svevo, Zeno. Storia di
due "biblioteche" (Milano: Bompiani, 1994), extrapolates the title of
this slim volume of letters (Italo Svevo, "Faccio meglio di restare nell'ombra". Il carteggio
inedito con Ferrieri seguito dall'edizione critica della conferenza su
Joyce, a cura di Giovanni Palmieri, Milano - Lecce: Lupetti - Pietro
Manni, 1995, pp. 134).
«Faccio meglio di restare nell'ombra»: the same syntactic
construction had appeared in a letter Svevo wrote to his wife on May 22,
1899 (Epistolario, a cura di Bruno Maier, Milano: Dall'Oglio, 1966,
p. 164: «Gli altri sono tutti a dormire. Avrei fatto veramente bene di
andarci anch'io perché questa notte ho dormito assai poco»). And again,
at the beginning of his first novel (Una Vita, published, as known, in
1892), Svevo's protagonist Alfonso Nitti starts with a letter to his
mother: «Non farei meglio di ritornare a casa?» This sequence is very
telling: first, the protagonist's question asking his mother for approval
is later accompanied by a confession of the wrong choice, of the fatal
indecision which the writer makes to his wife, which leads to the final
firm proposal in the letter to Ferrieri to withdraw from the spotlight of
public life. But by that point the entire life of the writer had gone by.
Nevertheless, the resistance of the syntactic peculiarity runs through
the whole of Svevo's literary parable with moving fidelity. After all,
Giacomo Devoto in this regard had written in his essay "Le correzioni di
Italo Svevo" (in Letteratura, a.II, ottobre 1938, pp. 3-13; now "Decenni
per Svevo," in Studi di stilistica, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1950,
pp. 175-193): «Nelle particelle che legano un infinito alla forma nominale
o verbale che lo regge, Svevo rimane, più che sordo, indifferente».
The two sentences which emblematically open and close the very
first paragraph of the correspondence with Enzo Ferrieri («Sono qui
tuttavia miracolosamente» and «Faccio meglio di restare nell'ombra»)
reveal the shy and inept attitude of the Triestine writer when faced with
the prospect of appearing in public in order to speak of his own literary
activity. Obviously, the negative reviews written by Giuseppe Prezzolini
and Giulio Caprin influenced Ettore Schmitz's ability of «raccoglimento»
(pp. 11, 20) much more than the pioneering essay by Eugenio Montale.
According to Palmieri (p. 14), «neanche Montale può dirsi il vero
scopritore di Svevo, avendo ricevuto "l'imbeccata" decisiva da
Prezzolini, il quale, a sua volta, l'aveva ricevuta da Joyce». The
annotation is useful not so much in order to reestablish legitimate
paternities (Prezzolini, unlike the poet of Cuttlefish Bones, did not
understand the novelty of the narrative writing of the Triestine author
in the Italian panorama of those years); rather it is useful in order to
trace back the slanting vicissitudes of the literary friendship between
Joyce and Svevo, of which the lecture by the latter on the work of the
Irish writer is one of the most apparent instances. In other words, if it
is Joyce who stimulates interest for the then unknown novels by Svevo,
the Italian goes back to the author of Ulysses, dedicating to him that
lecture which for some time oscillated between two extremes as far as its
contents were concerned: at first, it ought to shoot the searchlight
beams on the work of the Triestine author himself; it then seemed to
orient itself toward a metacritical discourse on Sigmund Freud. Palmieri
explains (p. 29): «anche se non possediamo un'esplicita dichiarazione di
Svevo in tal senso, risulta evidente che in un primo tempo l'autore di
Senilità aveva deciso di parlare dei suoi rapporti (letterari e non)
con Freud» and he aptly quotes the beginning of Soggiorno londinese,
the protagonist of which is the very founder of «Il Convegno»: «Il Dr.
Ferrieri mi disse: Parli di quello che vuole, parli di quello che sa. Ora
io credo di sapere qualche cosa a questo mondo: Su me stesso. [...] Ma
c'è la scienza per aiutare a studiare se stesso. Precisiamo anche
subito: La psicanalisi» (Racconti, saggi, pagine sparse, a cura di
Bruno Maier, Milano: Dall'Oglio, 1968, p. 685).
On the account of a phrase in the letter of October 18, 1926, to
Ferrieri («Non di Freud vi parlerò ma di Joyce», p. 34), Palmieri (p. 29)
can «situare la stesura del Soggiorno londinese tra la fine del
settembre e la metà di ottobre 1926». This apt reconstruction of the
interlacing between autobiography and literary fact, however, does not
help us to explain the dynamics of the mechanism of replacement that
prevailed either in the short story (in which the psychoanalytic topic is
replaced by the narration of a trip to London), or in the decision to
present the work by Joyce rather than that by Freud (whose work, in turn,
is succintly discussed at the end of the lecture, as we shall see). In
this respect, a passage of the ltter by Ettore Schmitz of April 8, 1926
(p. 25), is important. Here, the writer definitely abandons the intention
of speaking about his own work:
«Proprio non fa per me. Prima di scriverle per rifiutare provai anche a predirmi dinanzi ad uno specchio. Una noia ineffabile cominciò ad incombere su me e sulla mia immagine. Ella gettò un germe che potrebbe svilupparsi. Forse l'inverno prossimo. In nessun caso parlerei di me stesso perché sarebbe un doppio esibizionismo».
Palmieri's fine annotations allow the reader to establish a network of relations on some peculiarities of the language by Svevo: as the term «raccoglimento» «allude a quegli esercizi di recueillement e di autosuggestion proposti dallo psicologo ginevrino Charles Boudouin proprio per vincere il panico del pubblico» (p. 20), so «La forma verbale 'predirmi' è in questo caso il risultato di un calco dal verbo tedesco 'vorsagen' che possiede anche la forma riflessiva e che in una delle sue accezioni significa 'dire (prima) davanti a qualcuno'». Hence a further and suggestive moment of contact between the epistolary and Soggiorno londinese springs out: the image of the mirror, contemporaneous to that reflexive situation which unfolds a novel such as Luigi Pirandello's Uno, nessuno e centomila, is «metafora freudiana (e lacaniana avant la lettre) di un imperfetto, se non impossibile, accesso a se stessi» (p. 27), as the editor notes. If one keeps in mind the following: Stanislaus Joyce has left us an important testimony in his own introduction to the English translation of Senilità (As a Man Grows Older, Translated by Beryl de Zoete, with an Introduction by Stanislaus Joyce and an Essay on Svevo by Edouard Roditi, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993; the translation was prepared in 1949, whereas the essay by Joyce's brother was written in 1932); his article "James Joyce e Italo Svevo" was published in Il Popolo di Trieste, on January 24, 1923; moreover, Stanislaus Joyce is the translator of the lecture in question held by Svevo on the Irish writer (Milano: Officine Grafiche Esperia, 1950); Joyce gave an enigmatic answer to Daniel Brody who in a 1954 interview asked him «I can understand why the counterpart of your Stephen Dedalus should be a Jew, but why is he the son of a Hungarian?:» «Because he was;» Harry Levin observed (regardless of the denial by Svevo's wife, Livia Veneziani Svevo) that between Bloom and Stephen there was the same difference in age than that between Svevo and Joyce; one cannot but agree with what Richard Ellmann states in his extraordinary biography on James Joyce (1959; New and Revised Edition, Oxford - New York - Toronto - Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 374): «This prototype was almost certainly Ettore Schmitz, whose grandfather came from Hungary, and who wore the mustache that Joyce gave to Bloom, and like Bloom had a wife and daughter». It is well known, however, that Livia Veneziani Svevo offered the flowing name as well as the tawny hair to Anna Livia Plurabelle. As though that were not enough, it will be noteworthy to remember that Ettore Schmitz entrusts his own conscience to Italo Svevo and that James Joyce, just while he completes in Trieste A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and is about to start Ulysses, scribbles on a notebook which bears the title, jotted down by another hand, «Giacomo Joyce». Ellmann, in his introduction to the little volume (London - Boston: Faber & Faber, 1968, pp. xvi-xvii), lingers over the figure of Svevo as probable instigator of the drafting of the notes for a work on the city of Trieste, but perhaps it should not even be neglected the mention of a work such as La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla and the materials for the fourth novel gathered around the sketches Le confessioni di un vegliardo. By no chance, at the beginning of the lecture Svevo writes (pp. 76-77):
«Nel 1903, al momento di lasciare Dublino, il Joyce si sposò e i suoi due figlioli nacquero a Trieste. S'intende come a noi Triestini sia concesso di amarlo come un poco nostro. E anche come non poco italiano. [...] Un grande titolo d'onore per la mia città è che le strade di Dublino s'allungano nell'Ulisse per certe tortuosità della nostra vecchia Trieste. Recentemente il Joyce mi scrisse: Se l'Anna-Livia (il fiume di Dublino) non fosse inghiottito dall'Oceano, sboccherebbe certamente nel Canal Grande di Trieste».
All these biographical data seem to converge to a construction of an intellectual friendship which both in its reciprocal exchange of comments on the respective works and in the reciprocal availability to help each other from the practical viewpoint, is founded on a specularity of intentions which the lecture by Ettore Schmitz on James Joyce fixes in the characters of the critical reflection, from which the Triestine in vain defends himself. Of this it is a small, but significant example the coincidence of what Svevo writes, venting, to Montale on December 6, 1926 (in Italo Svevo, Carteggio con James Joyce, Valery Larbaud, Benjamin Crémieux, Marie Anne Comnène, Eugenio Montale, Valerio Jahier, a cura di Bruno Maier, Milano: Dall'Oglio, 1978, p. 195): «Rimpiango di essermi impegnato per Joyce. Io non sono un critico e non voglio nemmeno presentarmi come tale». The perplexity regarding his own critical ability comes back in the lecture (p. 128), just as he is about to end his talk with «Una sola constatazione critica» (p. 129) on the knowledge of psychoanalysis by the Irish writer:
«Io non sono un critico e rivedendo quello che annotai dubito di avervi dato una chiara idea di questo romanzo che non mi pare lodato abbastanza quand'è detto il romanzo più caratteristico di questo principio di secolo. Mai pensai di saper stabilire il posto che nel mondo delle lettere spetti all'opera del Joyce e scoprire la sua relazione con quanto la precedette; da lettore ingenuo tentai soltanto di comunicarvi la mia ammirazione».
On the other hand, in the very brief correspondence with Ferrieri there are striking quotations that will return in the lecture and that are intertwined under the sign of the paraphrase of those that may be called jokes of Joyce himself. Worried about the lecture, on February 9, 1927, only a month ahead of the crucial date of March 8 set for the evening appointment before the audience of «Il Convegno», Svevo writes (p. 43): «E come ci si veste per dire al Convegno? Marsina? Sia tanto buono di dirmelo stabilendo la serata per il mese di Marzo. Forse prima mi farò fare l'operazione di Voronoff di cui dicono che chiarisca la voce». The good and informative note by Palmieri educates on the surgical practice of Doctor Voronoff that aimed at reviving the sexual performances and the youthful appearance of the old patient by transplanting a testicle of a monkey into the human body: with a clever move, Svevo's motto displays the veil of humor over the uncertainties of the lecturer, who reassures himself and the addressee of the letter about the miraculous remedies by now available, but at the ame time he turns upside down the very effect of the surgery, as the results will not be felt on the level of a regained sexual efficiency, nay on that of a clearness of the voice which will certainly render more suitable the exposition of the lecture, but will also ratify the soprano high pitch of the voice itself, with what follows on the level of the sacrifice of one's own virility. The shadow of such genetic experiments hovers aout in a passage of the lecture in which Svevo gives examples of the rapidity and richness of the style in Ulysses (pp. 115-116):
«Non è per un lettore sbadato tale lettura. Si capisce quale densità di contenuto dia al lungo romanzo tale pensiero che guizza e si manifesta in una breve parola. è tale la densità che quando Dedalo pensa: La storia, un incubo da cui non riesco a destarmi. Oppure: Per allungare tutto ciò sprecano le ghiandole delle scimmie, si soffre di più perché molta parte della vita derisa è ricordata nel libro».
«Non è per un lettore sbadato tale lettura». Reading this remark
of the critic and keeping in mind the very deictic perspective that leads
it, according to Joyce's method remembered by Palmieri as well in the
modes discussed by T. S. Eliot in "Ulysses", Order, and Myth" (p. 116:
«nell''Ulisse' questa frase ha due significati compresenti: il primo,
quello "locale", [...]; il secondo, quello "globale"»), one is tempted to
giv it not only a "local" meaning which may refer to Joyce's text from
which only a few instances are offered, but also a "global" meaning which
ends up reflecting upon Svevo and his literary work. With great
precision, in fact, Palmieri states that the allusions to the
prescriptions of Doctor Voronoff occur in many works by the Triestine
writer: from the 1904 short story Lo specifico del dottor Menghi to
Corto viaggio sentimentale, from the fragment Il mio ozio to the
comedy La rigenerazione. In sum, following the conclusion of the
editor, «La principale novità critica che emerge dalla pubblicazione
di questo carteggio inedito riguarda l'argomento della conferenza che
Ferrieri propose a Svevo»; if «si ignorava infatti che lo scrittore
triestino fosse stato inizialmente invitato a parlare della propria opera
narrativa»; if «il primo tema scelto da Svevo era Freud» (p. 57); it
remains significant the slipping of the refusal to talk «di me stesso
perché sarebbe un doppio esibizionismo» (p. 25). Such «esibizionismo»
masks itself first in the features of the father of psychoanalysis, then
in those of the brotherly friend. That «germe che potrebbe svilupparsi»
(p. 25) needs a period of incubation in order to allow the most lucid
transfer operation of the critical reflection from Svevo's own literary
work to that of the Irish writer.
The critical edition of the lecture prepared by Giovanni Palmieri
makes possible the reconstruction of the original text of the oral
delivery (of which the original manuscript is kept at «Fondo manoscritti
di autori contemporanei» of the University of pavia), even respecting its
fatic function: to this result, Palmieri had to sew up again the elisions
by the editors of «Il Convegno» and at the same time he had to isolate
the additions of some pages of notes found among the papers of the
Triestine writer and that Umbro Apollonio had thought of inserting, under
the title of Scritti su Joyce, in the new publication of the lecture in
the volume of Svevo's Saggi e pagine sparse he edited (Milano:
Mondadori, 1954, pp. 199-261). The summarizing list offered by Palmieri
about the editorial corrections made by «Il Convegno» first, and then by
Apollonio may be exemplified by the approximation with which a peculiar
term such as «sucido» has been edited. In fact, it occurs four times in
the lecture: in the description of «Stefano Dedalo, il bardo sucido»
(p. 100); in Stephen's reflection in Ulysses according to which he is
convinced «di dover ritenere che priva di fede l'umanità non possa esser
considerata altro che un allevamento di animali sucidi» (p. 106); about
«quella visione tragica della vita inferiore del proprio corpo mal
vestito, mal nutrito, sucido» (p. 108); about, at last, the «squallida
realtà del bordello» described «come un'isola sucida dal mare
misterioso» (p. 126). The first three occurrences are included in the
group of pages 7-14 which Apollonio integrates in the text; the critic,
however, inexplicably normalizes only the second one («sudici»). It is a
confirmation, if one needed it, of the complex linguistic question in
Svevo's prose: in the specific case, the learned form he constantly
preferred over that which, by metathesis, has taken the upper hand in the
lexical normalization. But the lecture offers other motives which rotate
around the overall specularity of the two artistic personalities in
question, some of which are stressed by the editor himself (pp. 111, 113).
Let us take Svevo's discussion of Stephen Hero: «Ammetto che questo non
sia una vera autobiografia» (p. 99). The passionate defense of the
literary operation is supported in these terms (p. 99):
«[...] Quando un artista ricorda, subito crea. Ma la propria persona che resta tuttavia il perno della creazione, è una parte importantissima e vicinissima del mondo, e la virtuosità non arriva a sfalsarla. Nell'ispirazione io direi che si muta perché si fa più intera. Ed è un'esperienza vastissima».
After defending such experience as «l'autobiografia del Joyce artista» (p. 100), the Triestine writer, though, concludes with a statement revealing the introspective character of his analysis (p. 101): «Del resto i primi scritti che il Joyce pubblicò egli li firmò Stefano Dedalo. È una confessione». Finally, Svevo cannot avoid going back to that which could have been one of the possible topics of the lecture: psychoanalysis. The confident statement the «il pensiero di Sigismondo Freud non giunse a Joyce in tempo per guidarlo alla concezione dell'opera sua» (p. 129) finds Richard Ellmann (The Consciousness of Joyce, Toronto - New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 54; cfr. Id., James Joyce, cit., p. 340; in the same volume cfr. Joyce's comments to Svevo about psychoanalysis: pp. 468, 472) in disagreement:
«But his [Joyce's] possession of the three pamphlets I have mentioned [Carl Gustav Jung, "The Significance of the Father in the Destiny of the Individual;" Sigmund freud, "A Childhood Memory of Leonardo da Vinci;" Ernest Jones, "The Problem of `Hamlet' and the Oedipus Complex"] strongly suggests that he knew about psychoanalysis several years before, I suspect from the time that Italo Svevo's relation by marriage, Edoardo Weiss, introduced psychoanalysis into Italy, that is, by 1910».
Svevo's concluding wish «che venga un forte psicanalista a studiare i suoi libri che sono la vita stessa, ricchissima e sentita e ricordata con l'ingenuità di chi l'ha vissuta e sofferta» (pp. 131-132) cannot but be addressed to his own literary work: after all, in march 1927 Svevo was beginning to enjoy that critical attention in the important literary circles in Paris and Milan and that invitation, transfered onto the work of the Irish friend, once again reflected itself on his own writing intentions.
W-bol, settembre 1996 - 2007, n. 1
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