The Review of Contemporary Fiction

As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo
Robert Buckeye

Italo Svevo. As a Man Grows Older. Trans. Beryl de Zoete. Intro. James Lasdun. New York Review Books, 2001. 235 pp. Paper: $12.95; Livia Veneziani Svevo. Memoir of Italo Svevo. Trans. Isabel Quigley. Preface P. N. Furbank. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 178 pp. Paper: $15.95.

“I only regret that you have wasted your talent on such a repulsive subject,” Paul Heyse wrote Italo Svevo about his second novel, As a Man Grows Older, and except for a brief comment in the paper Svevo wrote articles for, no Italian paper ever mentioned the book. Svevo published the book at his own expense and perhaps because of that was dismissed as a businessman who dabbled in literature. He also wrote in Triestine Italian, which was, one critic wrote, “the language of a bookkeeper.” When asked some years later whether he was the author of As a Man Grows Older, he answered, no, it was his brother Adolfo. It was not until he began English lessons with James Joyce, who read his first two novels and encouraged him, that Svevo began to write again.

Heyse was not wrong. The repulsive subject of As a Man Grows Older is Emilo Brentani, a clerk in an insurance company, who is in love (or so he tells himself) with Angiolina, a working-class woman. The love (sex) he wants from her she gives freely to other men, and how he understands her has nothing to do with her. “The woman he loved,” Emilo realizes at one moment, “was his own invention, he had created her by an effort of his own will: Angiolina had had no part in this creation.” Even though she finally gives him what she gives other men, she will not give him the only thing he desires: to control someone else, particularly someone beneath him in class, who has more life than he does. Brentani convinces himself nevertheless that he loved Angiolina, and that he still loves her. His life has played itself out, and “A love of quiet and of security sprang up again in him, and the necessity of looking after himself robbed him of every other desire.” The middlebrow, bourgeois audience—the reading public for novels—could not stomach such a book. In Brentani they saw themselves. Svevo looks into the eyes of the middle class and does not turn away. He shows us how much the drive for money, comfort, and conformity destroyed one and made one indifferent, craven, calculating. Livia Svevo notes that her husband “wore his own wedding-ring only for a short time, then took if off, saying, ‘It strangles me.’ ” Brentani is Everyman only if we see the life of the bourgeoisie “as ruins even before they have crumbled” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase). Joyce was not wrong. His own refusal to marry was a judgment against middle-class practices, and in the writing of Svevo he found his own attitudes reflected.

Svevo died in 1928, and in 1943 Livia Svevo had to flee Trieste for Treviso. Two of their grandsons, Piero and Paolo, were taken prisoner and died in Russia in 1943. Another, Sergio, “the youngest, the most like his grandfather in the breadth of his brow, the sweetness of his smile, and the thoughtful mind drawn to meditation and art,” was shot by Germans in a Trieste street during the uprising against the Germans on 1 May 1945. Previously, on 20 February 1945, the Svevos’ home, the Villa Veneziani, was destroyed by bombs. Livia Svevo salvaged Svevo’s manuscripts and correspondence, and her memoir of the life of Svevo as a writer keeps alive what war and death threatened to destroy. Northwestern has reprinted her memoir, first published in 1950, and it not only illuminates Svevo’s life as a writer, particularly in the years in which he did not publish, but also, with great reserve, their love for one another. [Robert Buckeye]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo Robert Buckeye Italo Svevo. As a Man Grows Older. Trans. Beryl de Zoete. Intro. James Lasdun. New York Review Books, 2001. 235 pp. Paper: $12.95; Livia Veneziani Svevo. Memoir of Italo Svevo. Trans. Isabel Quigley. Preface P. N. Furbank. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001. 178 pp. Paper: $15.95. “I only regret that you have wasted your talent on such a repulsive subject,” Paul Heyse wrote Italo Svevo about his second novel, As a Man Grows Older, and except for a brief comment in the paper Svevo wrote articles for, no Italian paper ever mentioned the book. Svevo published the book at his own expense and perhaps because of that was dismissed as a businessman who dabbled in literature. He also wrote in Triestine Italian, which was, one critic wrote, “the language of a bookkeeper.” When asked some years later whether he was the author of As a Man Grows Older, he answered, no, it was his brother Adolfo. It was not until he began English lessons with James Joyce, who read his first two novels and encouraged him, that Svevo began to write again. Heyse was not wrong. The repulsive subject of As a Man Grows Older is Emilo Brentani, a clerk in an insurance company, who is in love (or so he tells himself) with Angiolina, a working-class woman. The love (sex) he wants from her she gives freely to other men, and how he understands her has nothing to do with her. “The woman he loved,” Emilo realizes at one moment, “was his own invention, he had created her by an effort of his own will: Angiolina had had no part in this creation.” Even though she finally gives him what she gives other men, she will not give him the only thing he desires: to control someone else, particularly someone beneath him in class, who has more life than he does. Brentani convinces himself nevertheless that he loved Angiolina, and that he still loves her. His life has played itself out, and “A love of quiet and of security sprang up again in him, and the necessity of looking after himself robbed him of every other desire.” The middlebrow, bourgeois audience—the reading public for novels—could not stomach such a book. In Brentani they saw themselves. Svevo looks into the eyes of the middle class and does not turn away. He shows us how much the drive for money, comfort, and conformity destroyed one and made one indifferent, craven, calculating. Livia Svevo notes that her husband “wore his own wedding-ring only for a short time, then took if off, saying, ‘It strangles me.’ ” Brentani is Everyman only if we see the life of the bourgeoisie “as ruins even before they have crumbled” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase). Joyce was not wrong. His own refusal to marry was a judgment against middle-class practices, and in the writing of Svevo he found his own attitudes reflected. Svevo died in 1928, and in 1943 Livia Svevo had to flee Trieste for Treviso. Two of their grandsons, Piero and Paolo, were taken prisoner and died in Russia in 1943. Another, Sergio, “the youngest, the most like his grandfather in the breadth of his brow, the sweetness of his smile, and the thoughtful mind drawn to meditation and art,” was shot by Germans in a Trieste street during the uprising against the Germans on 1 May 1945. Previously, on 20 February 1945, the Svevos’ home, the Villa Veneziani, was destroyed by bombs. Livia Svevo salvaged Svevo’s manuscripts and correspondence, and her memoir of the life of Svevo as a writer keeps alive what war and death threatened to destroy. Northwestern has reprinted her memoir, first published in 1950, and it not only illuminates Svevo’s life as a writer, particularly in the years in which he did not publish, but also, with great reserve, their love for one another. [Robert Buckeye]

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