Inner Workings Read online

  About the Book

  Inner Workings is the second of three collections of literary criticism by J. M. Coetzee to be republished by Text. It includes essays on Musil and Beckett, Saul Bellow and Nadine Gordimer. These are concise, accessible introductions to some of the world’s greatest writers, by a contemporary master.

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  About the Book

  Title Page

  1. Italo Svevo

  2. Robert Walser

  3. Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless

  4. Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project

  5. Bruno Schulz

  6. Joseph Roth, the stories

  7. Sándor Márai

  8. Paul Celan and his translators

  9. Günter Grass and the Wilhelm Gustloff

  10. W. G. Sebald, After Nature

  11. Hugo Claus, poet

  12. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

  13. Samuel Beckett, the short fiction

  14. Walt Whitman

  15. William Faulkner and his biographers

  16. Saul Bellow, the early novels

  17. Arthur Miller, The Misfits

  18. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

  19. Nadine Gordimer

  20. Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

  21. V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life

  Notes and References

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  1 Italo Svevo

  A MAN – A very big man beside whom you feel very small – invites you to meet his daughters with an eye to choosing one to marry. There are four of them, their names all beginning with A; your name begins with Z. You call on them at home and try to make polite conversation, but insults come tumbling out of your mouth. You find yourself telling risqué jokes; your jokes are met with frosty silence. In the dark you whisper seductive words to the prettiest A; when the lights come on you find you have been wooing the A with the squint. You lean nonchalantly on your umbrella; the umbrella snaps in two; everyone laughs.

  It sounds, if not like a nightmare, then like one of those dreams that, in the hands of a skilled Viennese dream-interpreter, Sigmund Freud for instance, will reveal all kinds of embarrassing things about you. But it is not a dream. It is a day in the life of Zeno Cosini, hero of La coscienza di Zeno, a novel by Italo Svevo (1861–1928). If Svevo is a Freudian novelist, is he Freudian in the sense that he shows how the lives of ordinary people are filled with slips and parapraxes and symbols; or in the sense that, using The Interpretation of Dreams and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life as sources, he concocts a character whose inner life runs on textbook Freudian lines? Or is it possible that both Freud and Svevo belong to an age when pipes and cigars and purses and umbrellas seemed pregnant with secret meaning, whereas to the present age a pipe is just a pipe?

  ‘Italo Svevo’ (Italo the Swabian) is of course a pseudonym. Svevo was born Aron Ettore Schmitz. His paternal grandfather was a Jew from Hungary who had settled in Trieste. His father began as a pedlar and ended as a successful glassware merchant; his mother was from a Triestine Jewish family. The Schmitzes were observant Jews, but of an easygoing kind. Aron Ettore married a Catholic convert, and under pressure from her converted too (half-heartedly, it must be said). The autobiographical sketch issued under his name late in life, when Trieste had become part of Italy and Italy had become Fascist, is evasive about his Jewish, non-Italian antecedents. His wife Livia’s memoir of him – somewhat hagiographic in tendency, though thoroughly readable – is similarly discreet.1 In his own writings there are no overtly Jewish characters or themes.

  Svevo’s father – a dominant influence on his life – sent his sons to a commercial boarding school in Germany, where in his spare hours Svevo immersed himself in the German Romantics. Whatever advantage his German schooling was to give him as man of affairs in Austro-Hungary, it deprived him of a training in literary Italian.

  Back home in Trieste, aged seventeen, Svevo was enrolled at the Instituto Superiore Commerciale. Dreams of becoming an actor ended when he was turned down at an audition because of his faulty Italian elocution.

  In 1880 Schmitz senior suffered financial reverses and his son had to break off his studies. He took a job with the Trieste branch of Unionbank of Vienna and for the next nineteen years worked there as a clerk. Outside office hours he read the Italian classics and the wider European avant-garde. Zola became his idol. He frequented artistic salons and wrote for a newspaper with Italian nationalist leanings.

  In his mid-thirties, having tasted what it was like to publish a novel (Una vita, 1892) at his own expense and be ignored by the critics, and on the point of repeating the experience with Senilità (1898), Svevo married into the prominent Veneziani family, owners of a plant where ships’ hulls were painted with a patented compound that slowed down corrosion and prevented the growth of barnacles. Svevo joined the firm, where he supervised the mixing of the paint from its secret recipe and took charge of the workforce.

  The Venezianis already had contracts with a number of the world’s navies. When the British Admiralty indicated its interest, they opened a branch in London, which Svevo oversaw. To improve his English he took lessons from an Irishman named James Joyce who taught at the Berlitz school in Trieste. With the failure of Senilità Svevo had given up serious writing. Now, in his teacher, he found someone who liked his books and understood what he was up to. Heartened, he pressed on with what he called his scribbling, though he did not publish again until the 1920s.

  Overwhelmingly Italian in culture, the Trieste of Svevo’s day was nevertheless part of the Habsburg Empire. It was a prosperous city, the principal seaport for Vienna, with an enlightened middle class running an economy based on shipping, insurance, and finance. Immigration had brought in Greeks, Germans, and Jews; menial work was done by Slovenes and Croats. In its heterogeneity Trieste was a microcosm of an ethnically various empire that was having more and more trouble keeping a lid on inter-ethnic resentments. When these burst out in 1914, the empire was plunged into war, and Europe along with it.

  Though they looked to Florence for their lead in cultural matters, Triestine intellectuals tended to be more open to currents from the north than their Italian counterparts. In Svevo’s case, first Schopenhauer and Darwin, then later Freud stand out as philosophical influences.

  Like any good bourgeois of his time, Svevo fretted about his health: what constituted good health, how was it to be acquired, how maintained? In his writings health comes to take on a range of meanings, from the physical and psychic to the social and ethical. Where does the discontented feeling come from, unique to mankind, that we are not well, and what is it that we desire to be cured of ? Is cure possible? If cure entails making our peace with the way things are, is it necessarily a good thing to be cured?

  In Svevo’s eyes, Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to treat those afflicted with the handicap of reflective thought as a separate species, coexisting warily with healthy, unreflective types, who in Darwinian jargon might be called the fit. With Darwin – read through a Schopenhauerian lens – Svevo carried on a dogged lifelong tussle. His first novel was to have carried a Darwinian allusion in its title: Un inetto, the inept or ill-adapted one. But his publisher baulked, and he settled for the rather colourless Una vita. In exemplary naturalistic fashion, the book follows the history of a young bank clerk who, when at last he has to face the fact that he is vacant of all drive, desire, or ambition, does the correct evolutionary thing and commits suicide.

  In a later essay entitled ‘Man and Darwinian Theory’, Svevo gives Darwin a more optimistic slant, one that carries over into Zeno. Our sense
of not being at home in the world, he suggests, results from a certain unfinishedness in human evolution. To escape this melancholy condition, some try to adapt to their environment. Others prefer not to adapt. The unadapted may look from the outside like nature’s rejects, yet paradoxically they may prove better fitted than their well-adjusted neighbours to whatever the unpredictable future may bring.

  Svevo’s home language was Triestine, a variant of the Venetian dialect. To be a writer he needed to master literary Italian, which is based on Tuscan. He never achieved this hoped-for mastery. To compound his problems, he had little feel for the aesthetic qualities of language and in particular no ear for poetry. To his friend the young poet Eugenio Montale he joked that it seemed a pity to use only part of the blank page when you had paid for the whole of it. P. N. Furbank, one of Svevo’s better translators, labels his prose ‘a kind of “business” Italian, almost an esperanto – a bastard and graceless language totally without poetry or resonance.’2 When it first came out, Una vita was criticised for its grammatical errors, for its unwitting dialectal usages, and for the general poverty of its prose. Much the same was said of Senilità. When he had become famous and Senilità was to be reissued, Svevo agreed to check the text and fix up the Italian, but did so in only a desultory way. Privately he seems to have doubted mere editing would achieve anything.

  To a degree the controversy about Svevo’s command of Italian can be ignored as a matter for Italians only, irrelevant to outsiders who read him in translation. For the translator, however, Svevo’s Italian raises a substantial question of principle. Should its defects, which run the gamut from wrong prepositions to archaic or bookish turns of phrase to a general labouredness of style, be reproduced or silently improved? Or, to put the question in converse form, how, without writing a deliberately clotted prose, does the translator get across what Montale calls the sclerosis of Svevo’s world, seeping up from his very language?

  Svevo was not unaware of the problem. His advice to the German translator of Zeno was to translate his Italian into grammatically correct German but not beautify or improve it.

  Svevo disparaged Triestine as a dialettaccio, a petty dialect, or a linguetta, a sub-language, but he was not being sincere. Much more from the heart is Zeno’s lament that outsiders ‘don’t know what it entails for those of us who speak dialect [il dialetto] to write in Italian . . . With every Tuscan word of ours, we lie!’3 Here Svevo treats the step from the one dialect to the other, from the Triestine in which he thought to the Italian in which he wrote, as inherently treacherous (traditore traduttore). Only in Triestine could he tell the truth. The question for non-Italians as well as Italians to ponder is whether there might have been Triestine truths that Svevo felt he could never get down on the Italian page.

  Senilità grew out of an affair Svevo had in 1891–92 with a young woman of, as one of his commentators delicately puts it, indeterminate profession, later to become a circus equestrienne. In the book the girl is named Angiolina. Emilio Brentani has an idea of Angiolina as an innocent whom he will instruct in the finer aspects of life, while in return she will devote herself to his wellbeing. But it is Angiolina who in practice dishes out the lessons; and the induction she provides for Emilio into the evasions and squalors of erotic life would be well worth the money he forks out, were he not too wrapped up in self-deceiving fantasy to absorb it. Years after Angiolina has run off with a bank clerk, Emilio will look back on his time with her through a rosy haze (Joyce learned by heart the wonderful last pages of the book, bathed as they are in romantic cliché and ruthless irony, and recited them back to Svevo). The truth is that the affair has been senile through and through, in Svevo’s unique sense of the word: not youthful and vital at all, but on the contrary lived from the beginning through the medium of the self-regarding lie.

  In Senilità, self-deception is a willed yet unrecognised state of being. The fiction Emilio constructs for himself about who he is and who Angiolina is and what they are doing together is threatened by the fact that Angiolina sleeps promiscuously with other men and is too incompetent or too indifferent or perhaps too malicious to conceal it. Along with The Kreutzer Sonata and Swann’s Way, Senilità is one of the great novels of male sexual jealousy, exploiting the technical repertoire bequeathed by Flaubert to his successors to enter and leave a character’s consciousness with a minimum of obtrusiveness and to express judgements without seeming to do so. Svevo’s exploration of Emilio’s relations with his rivals is particularly keen-sighted. Emilio both wants and does not want his male friends to make a play for his mistress; the more clearly he is able to visualise Angiolina with another man, the more intensely he desires her, to the point that he desires her because she has been with another man. (The eddying of homosexual currents within the triangle of jealousy was of course pointed out by Freud, but only years after Tolstoy and Svevo had done so.)

  The standard English translations of Senilità and Zeno hitherto have been by Beryl de Zoete, an Englishwoman of Dutch descent and Bloomsbury connections whose main claim to fame is as a pioneering student of Balinese dance. In the introduction to his new translation of Zeno, William Weaver discusses De Zoete’s versions and suggests, as gently as can be, that the time may have come to retire them.

  De Zoete’s 1932 translation of Senilità under the title As a Man Grows Older is particularly dated. Senilità is very much about sex: sex as a weapon in the battle between the sexes, sex as a commodity to be traded. Though his language is never improper, Svevo does not pussyfoot around this subject. De Zoete’s rendering is too decorous. For instance, Emilio broods on the sexual doings of Angiolina, imagining her leaving the bed of the rich but repulsive Volpini and, in order to rid herself of the infamia (disgrace, but also horror) of his touch, plunging straight into bed with someone else. Svevo’s phrasing is barely metaphorical: by a second act of sex Angiolina will be trying to wash (nettarsi) traces of Volpini off herself. De Zoete delicately passes over the self-cleansing: Angiolina goes ‘in search of a refuge from such an infamous embrace’.4

  Elsewhere De Zoete simply elides or synopsises passages that – rightly or wrongly – she decides do not contribute to the sense, or are too colloquial to get across in English. She also overinterprets, filling in what she thinks is going on between the characters where the text itself is silent. The commercial metaphors that characterise Emilio’s relations with women are sometimes missed. On one occasion De Zoete gets the sense calamitously wrong, attributing to Emilio a decision to force himself sexually on Angiolina (possess her), whereas all he intends is to clear up the question of who owns her (possesses her).

  The new translation of Senilità by Beth Archer Brombert is a marked improvement. Unerringly she picks up the submerged metaphors that De Zoete passes over. Her English, though firmly of the late twentieth century, has a formality that reflects an earlier era. If there is one criticism to be made, it is that in an effort to be up to date she uses expressions that are likely to age quite rapidly: ‘the bottom line’; to ‘be there for someone’; to be ‘all excited’.5

  Svevo’s titles have always been a headache for his translators and publishers. As a title, A Life (Una vita) is simply dull. On Joyce’s recommendation, Senilità first appeared in English under the title As a Man Grows Older, though it is not at all about growing older. Brombert reverts to an earlier working title, Emilio’s Carnival, despite the fact that for the revised Italian edition Svevo refused to let go of Senilità: ‘I would feel I were mutilating the book . . . That title was my guide and I lived by it.’6

  Svevo’s writing career stretches over four turbulent decades in Trieste’s history, yet strikingly little of this history is reflected, whether directly or indirectly, in his fiction. From the first two books, set in the Trieste of the 1890s, one would never guess that Trieste’s Italian middle class was in the grip of Risorgimento-like fervour for union with the motherland. And though Zeno’s confession purports to be a document written during the 1914–18 war, the war casts n
o shadow over it until the last pages.

  Through contracts with the government in Vienna, the Veneziani family made a great deal of money out of the war. At the same time they presented themselves at home as passionate Italian irredentists. John Gatt-Rutter, Svevo’s biographer, calls this ‘a hypocritical sham’ and finds that Svevo himself at the very least played along with the sham. Gatt-Rutter is highly critical of Svevo’s politics during the war and after the Fascist takeover of 1922. Like many upper-class Triestines, the Venezianis supported Mussolini. Svevo himself seems to have accommodated the new regime in what Gatt-Rutter calls ‘perfect bad faith’, on the grounds that Fascism was a lesser evil than Bolshevism. In 1925, in the person of Ettore Schmitz, he accepted a minor award from the state for his services to industry. While he never became a card-carrying Fascist, he did as an industrialist belong to the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists. His wife was an active member of the women’s Fascio.7

  If he was morally compromised by his association with the Venezianis, Svevo/Schmitz at least did not, to judge from his writing, hide this from himself. Consider the old man in the story ‘The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl’, written in 1926 but set during the war: ‘Every sign of the war that struck [him] reminded him, with a pang, that, thanks to it, he was making so much money. The war brought him wealth and humiliation . . . He had long grown accustomed to the remorse caused by his business success and he went on making money in spite of his remorse.’8

  The moral atmosphere in this late piece may be darker, and the self-criticism more mordant, than we get in the essentially comic Zeno, but it is only a matter of degrees of darkness or mordancy. From Socrates to Freud, Western ethical philosophy has subscribed to the Delphic Know yourself. But what good does it do to know yourself if, taking your lead from Schopenhauer, you believe that character is founded on a substratum of will, and doubt that the will wants to change?