Day 4: The Scenery Is Gorgeous

(According to N.B. Notewell, weekdays are the only days. I’m not as far behind as it seems.)

Three sentences in to “True Confessions,” James Joyce pops up in what is, I think, a successful bid for Supportingest Supporting Character in the book. This time around, he’s tutoring Ettore Schmitz, a Triestine businessman, in English. When Schmitz finds out that his tutor has literary ambitions (this is before Chamber Music, even), he brings to lessons one day copies of his two novels, Una vita and Senilità, published under the name Italo Svevo. Joyce reads them and loves them, and when World War I and the closure of his paint factory leave Schmitz with nothing to do but write, he passes the final product on to Joyce again. This novel, called La coscienza di Zeno (translated into English as The Confessions of Zeno, and then recently again, in a William Weaver translation Acocella highly recommends, as Zeno’s Conscience), so impresses Joyce that he persuades Schmitz to send it on to some of the most influential literary editors of the day in London, New York, and Paris, with the end result that Italo Svevo becomes known as the Italian Proust. He’s famous for two years, then his chauffeur crashes the car; Schmitz is the only one who dies.

The essay has some more biography in it, but it’s not all that interesting, outside of the sweet romance between Schmitz and his cousin Livia. The rest is a breakdown of Svevo’s novels, which Acocella strongly (and persuasively) advocates for. She praises their modernity, unprecedented in Italian literature at the time, and, particularly in the case of Zeno, their humaneness. It’s a good overview of Svevo’s work, but it honestly isn’t one of the stronger essays in the book. Acocella seems to hint in the introduction to Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints that she included this one because it illustrates what part luck can play in a writer’s life, and that’s true, as far as it goes: Schmitz got lucky in having Joyce as a tutor, and unlucky in dying just as he was super-famous. In the end, though, the essay basically amounts to “These are good books; here’s why; you should read them,” which is fine, but apparently I’m looking for something else this time around.

Here’s what I’ll say: It’s a fine essay, and I have nothing substantive to say against it, even if I’m having to scrounge for reasons to recommend it. Perhaps I need to give it another shot.