{"id":96071,"date":"2022-07-03T17:05:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-03T15:05:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96071"},"modified":"2022-06-23T07:08:11","modified_gmt":"2022-06-23T05:08:11","slug":"24-05-76","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=96071","title":{"rendered":"Leopold Bloom\u2019s Real-Life Model"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Leopold Bloom\u2019s Real-Life Model<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

MITCHELL ABIDOR<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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The friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature\u2019s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

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Richard Hamilton, ‘The Transmogrifications of Bloom,’ 1985, printed by Aldo Crommelynck\u00a9 THE TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Jewish-born Triestine businessman Ettore Schmitz worked for his father-in-law\u2019s paint company. When he felt the need to perfect his English, he arranged for lessons with an Irishman living in Trieste who earned his living as an English-language tutor. Schmitz met this tutor, James Joyce, in 1907 and studied with him for several years. During their acquaintance, which went beyond the bounds of mere student-teacher relations, Joyce worked on a novel that would appear in 1922 and whose action transpired over the course of a single day, June 16: Ulysses<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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One of the two main characters of the novel is Leopold Bloom, an advertising salesman who feels remorse for his total abandonment of Judaism, which he had never practiced in any case. Leopold\u2019s father, a Hungarian immigrant, had converted from Judaism to Protestantism before his son\u2019s birth, and had married an Irish Protestant woman. Leopold, who had been thrice baptized, had himself converted to Catholicism to marry Molly Tweedy, who had been raised Catholic but was Jewish according to Halacha, her mother being a Jew from Gibraltar.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Joyce chose to have the non-Jewish Leopold viewed by all around him as a Jew and to have Leopold feel that identity, making the celebration of Bloom\u2019s Day a must in some Irish and Jewish literary circles. While fully attuned to Irish customs and habits, Joyce required assistance in matters Jewish, and it was his English student Schmitz who provided him with background information on the religion and mores of the Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But that was not all. According to Joyce\u2019s biographer, Richard Ellman, Schmitz was an important inspiration for the character of Leopold Bloom: According to Ellman, both men had mustaches, Catholic wives, and a daughter. More importantly, and unnoted by Ellman, is the conversion to Catholicism of both the fictional character and the Italian businessman, as well as the decidedly unliterary and unromantic fields in which they labored. So if Ellman is right, the celebrations of Ulysses<\/em>\u2019 centennial and Bloom\u2019s Day this year owe a nod to the Italian Jewish businessman Schmitz.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Italo Svevo<\/strong> PICTORIAL PRESS LTD\/ALAM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Yet it was not only Schmitz who assisted Joyce in his writings; Schmitz also had literary aspirations, which Joyce enthusiastically supported. In 1892, under the name Italo Svevo\u2014Italo-Swabian, a description of Schmitz\u2019s national background, since he had a German father and Italian mother\u2014he had self-published a novel, Una Vita<\/em>, followed in 1898 by Senilit\u00e0<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Both novels are important works and are still in print, but after their publication Schmitz took a lengthy break from writing. It was only in 1919, during his acquaintance with Joyce, that Schmitz\/Svevo set out to write his boldest work, Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em>. This novel of one man\u2019s struggle with moral weakness, indolence, and illness through analysis, both psycho- and self-, appealed greatly to Joyce, as had Schmitz\u2019s first two works of fiction: In fact, the most common English title of Senilit\u00e0<\/em> As a Man Grows Older<\/em>, was suggested by the Irishman.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Joyce encouraged Svevo in the writing of what would be his masterpiece. Once Svevo\u2019s book appeared in Italian, Joyce saw to it that it was translated into French by Val\u00e9ry Larbaud, who was also the translator of Ulysses<\/em>, and he promoted the book tirelessly. Svevo was at work on a follow-up to Zeno\u2019s Conscience <\/em>when he was killed in 1928 in an automobile accident. This follow-up, A<\/em> Very Old Man<\/em>, appearing in a new translation by Frederika Randall published by NYRB Classics, is an essential addition to Svevo\u2019s oeuvre, and allows us to see, not only how the character of Zeno would have developed, but also provides an occasion to examine Svevo in relation to one of the then-central ideas of his time, aside from Joycean literary modernism: Freudian psychoanalysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em> is not only the tale of a man\u2019s life: it is a critique of psychoanalysis. The book itself, we are told in its preamble, was written at the suggestion of Zeno Cosini\u2019s analyst, and it is the analyst who gets the first word. Dr. S\/ explains the origins of the book, and also the reason it was being published: \u201crevenge.\u201d writing of the novel was suggested to Zeno in the hope that \u201cthe autobiography would serve as a useful prelude to [Zeno\u2019s] analysis\u201d. Right from the book\u2019s opening pages we are made to see that everything about it is intended to demolish psychoanalysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In return, Dr. S. is publishing his patient\u2019s memories \u201cin revenge, and I hope he is displeased.\u201d Here, the greed of psychoanalysts is laid bare: the doctor is \u201cprepared to share with him the lavish profits I expect to make from this publication.\u201d There is, however, a condition placed on this profit-sharing: Zeno will be able to make money off the book he has written \u201con condition that he resume his treatment.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s not inaccurate to see Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em>, then, as a precursor to, of all books, Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em>. In both cases, it is without the assistance of the psychoanalyst that the title character confronts his issues. In Svevo\u2019s book the punchline that ends Portnoy\u2019s Complaint<\/em> is placed at the beginning: the story of the patient\u2019s life and struggles against his weaknesses is told before<\/em> the analysis even begins.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zeno\u2019s issues are many, and if they are not handled in the form of Jewish humor as Portnoy\u2019s are, Zeno\u2019s self-analysis is every bit as uncompromising, both towards himself and those around him, not least his wife and children. What is lacking from Zeno\u2019s Conscince<\/em> is any hint of Jewishness. Zeno and everyone around him is Catholic. Religion is not central to either of the Zeno books, and there is no hint of rebellion against religion. But Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen, in his brilliant investigation of the background of those who stretched out on Freud\u2019s couch, Freud\u2019s Patients: A Book of Lives<\/em>, makes an interesting suggestion on this matter.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The first of Zeno\u2019s weaknesses is his inability to stop smoking. He has the willpower to say he will cast cigarettes aside, but lacks the willpower to actually do so. His life is a series of dates upon which he smoked on what he each time called his \u201clast cigarette.\u201d The businessman Schmitz\u2019s relationship to cigarettes was tainted by the prohibition, reported by a member of Svevo\u2019s wife\u2019s family in his memoirs, against smoking at the paint factory he helped manage. Borch-Jakobsen proposes that \u201csmoking represented for Svevo the muffled resistance of the Jewish writer towards the world of work and bourgeois-Catholic respectability, just as it constituted for Zeno major \u201cresistance\u2019 to his psychoanalytic healing and normalization.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Throughout the two Zeno volumes Zeno, simply through his rigorous self-analysis, accomplishes what is perhaps the most important thing that any kind of analysis can accomplish: unillusioned self-awareness. In the preparatory notes for analysis that are The Conscience of<\/em> Zeno<\/em>, the title character says that \u201cNow that I am analyzing myself\u201d he suspects that his love for cigarettes, and thus his inability to set them aside, was due to the fact that \u201cthey enabled me to blame them for my clumsiness.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cigarettes are not only a convenient scapegoat for his failure to be all he might have been, however; his insight is far deeper than that. \u201cIf I had stopped smoking would I have become the strong, ideal man I expected to be? Perhaps it was this suspicion that bound me to my habit, for it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Cigarettes are only one of Zeno\u2019s many weaknesses. Women, more precisely the possession of a multitude of women, is a desire he is powerless to defeat. Zeno predicts that though only fifty-seven he knows what his final moments will be. He says that \u201cif I don\u2019t stop smoking or if psychoanalysis doesn\u2019t cure me, my last glance from my deathbed will express my desire for my nurse, provided she is not my wife, and provided my wife has allowed the nurse to be beautiful.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zeno hides nothing from himself. His story of his marriage reveals that his wife was one of four sisters, three of marriageable age. His wife was the least attractive of them all and was, in fact, unattractive. He had even gone so far as to propose marriage to the other two sisters and been rejected by them. Becoming aware of the remaining sister\u2019s interest in him, he had married her. For Zeno, the path of least resistance is always the one to take. But he blames no one else for this tendency. His strained relations with his father, whose final gesture before dying was what might have been a slap administered to Zeno, and his distaste for children in general and his own children in particular: he admits to and accepts them all.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Taken together, Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em> and A Very Old Man<\/em> are a chronicle of a life lived reflectively and honestly, even in its dishonest moments. Zeno hides nothing from himself and us, not doing so in order to excuse himself, but to explain himself to himself. Zeno complains that his analyst warned him that \u201cduring my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the brakes that inhibit my sincerity.\u201d Following these orders resulted in his finding himself \u201cunbalanced and sicker than ever.\u201d It is writing and writing alone that has had a curative effect, for \u201cit is only through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zeno knows that he suffers still from his weaknesses at the end of Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em> and they will carry over to A Very Old Man. <\/em>He has been told by his analyst that he \u201cwas cured, [and] I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didn\u2019t believe in my pains, which still afflicted me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Writing Zeno\u2019s Conscience<\/em> and A Very Old Man<\/em> was as close as Svevo himself came to psychoanalysis, though he did attempt an Italian translation of Freud\u2019s The Interpretation of Dreams<\/em>. Psychoanalysis was still a young art during Svevo\u2019s lifetime, not yet subjected to the many attacks that have been made against it in our time. The Zeno books are essays in self-analysis and rejections of psychoanalysis. What was the source of Svevo\u2019s animus towards psychoanalysis?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The tension between literary art and psychoanalysis is one source. But there were others. Svevo learned of Freudianism from a fellow-Triestine Jew, Edoardo Weiss, who would later found the Italina Psychoanalytic Society, and whose older and younger sisters underwent analysis with Freud. In 1911. Svevo met Wilhelm Stekel, an early Freud disciple, at the resort of Bad Ischl. Svevo, who knew German, also read Freud\u2019s works. So well before writing The Conscience of Zeno<\/em> and A Very Old Man<\/em> he was quite familiar with psychoanalysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But there was an even more direct connection between Svevo and Freud: his wife\u2019s brother, Bruno Veneziani was a patient of the Viennese doctor. According to Borch-Jakobsen in Freud\u2019s Patients<\/em>, Veneziani, a young man whose family hoped he would enter their business, \u201cwas unable to carry anything out, for lack of will. He was idle and abulic, like Zeno\u201d. Veneziani\u2019s similarities to Zeno go further: he and Svevo swore a joint pact to quit smoking, the loser paying the other 130 Austrian crowns, a pact repeated in Zeno\u2019s Conscience <\/em>by the title character and his financial adviser, Olivi.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Veneziani was one of Freud\u2019s many cases of failed analysis, the relationship between patient and analyst growing so strained that Freud would claim that his patient made antisemitic remarks to him. Freud terminated the analysis, having written to Edoardo Weiss that Veneziani \u201cis a bad case, one particularly not suitable for free analysis [that is without institutionalization].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Veneziani did ultimately spend time in a sanatorium, accompanied upon admission by Svevo, but the treatment accomplished little. He was sent for treatment because of his preference for idleness, his homosexuality, and his drug addiction. No attempted treatment for these conditions worked. Freud could just as well have been speaking of the fictional Zeno Cosini when he said of Veneziani that \u201cI can heal those who seek healing, not those who refuse it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Svevo\u2019s disenchantment with psychoanalysis nourished his masterpiece and its title character just like Joyce did, and just as Ettoire Schmitz nourished Joyce\u2019s construction of the character of Leopold Bloom, establishing a kind of serpentine link between Joyce and Freud running through the creator of Zeno. What does this connection tell us? As is recounted in Freud\u2019s Patients<\/em>: \u201cAs Svevo told [a friend], psychoanalysis is good material for the novelist, not a good way to heal: \u2018From a literary<\/em> standpoint [Svevo\u2019s emphasis], Freud is certainly much more interesting. I wish I had had treatment with him. My novel would surely have benefited from it; it would have been more complete.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Mitchell Abidor<\/strong> is a writer and translator who has published over a dozen books on French radical history.<\/em><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Leopold Bloom\u2019s Real-Life Model MITCHELL ABIDOR The friendship of James Joyce and his student and instructor in Jewish customs, the Italian businessman Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist Italo Svevo, gave birth to one of literature\u2019s greatest characters. It also unites the giant of literary modernism with the founder of psychoanalysis. . Richard Hamilton, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96071"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96071"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":96291,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96071\/revisions\/96291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}