Friends in Exile: Italo Svevo & James Joyce by Brian Moloney

Abstract

Reviewed by: Friends in Exile: Italo Svevo & James Joyce by Brian Moloney John McCourt (bio) FRIENDS IN EXILE: ITALO SVEVO & JAMES JOYCE, by Brian Moloney. Leicester, England: Troubadour Publishers, 2018. 276 pp. £13.95. Friends in Exile is the first serious book dealing with the relationship between James Joyce and Italo Svevo. It follows Stanley Price's thin James Joyce and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friendship, which appeared in 2016 to understandably mixed reviews given its second-hand feel and Price's non-engagement with the bulk of critical material on the subject in Italian.1 Friends in Exile is an altogether more scholarly work and yet has garnered little critical attention thus far. This is a great pity, because few, if any, scholars are better equipped to jointly tackle Joyce and Svevo than Brian Moloney, Emeritus Professor of Italian at the University of Hull. He has spent a lifetime working on Svevo and played a key role in shaping contemporary Svevo studies and giving him his rightful place within the modernist canon. Unlike Price, he reads Svevo and his critics in the original Italian, which should be a prerequisite for anyone taking on the Italian Swabian. His handling in this book of the sometimes tense but always fecund relationship between the two writers is detailed, nuanced, insightful, and, at times, intimate. Even if a social gulf separated them—and meant that Joyce (not to mention Nora) was never invited to the Sunday afternoon musical gatherings at Villa Veneziani—at the core of their connection lay something more important than mere social pleasantry, that is, a "mutual recognition" that "led to the growth of a literary friendship" (39). Joyce, Moloney claims, "would have seen in Svevo a novelist who was consistent in his choice of themes, but also an artist who did not repeat himself" (37): in other words, a writer after his own heart. Although occasionally a little meandering and repetitive (the book gathers essays written over several decades that have been stitched, for the most part felicitously, together), the story unfolds winningly and gently with a carefully constructed Triestine context emerging vividly. Passing mentions of the greater Joyce family are often spot on, as when, for example, he quotes Svevo's niece as saying that Nora "a Trieste visse appartata" (lived a secluded life in Trieste) (43). The author makes ample use of memoirs not readily accessible (especially to the English reader), but is wise in treating such sources with caution. Friends in Exile will be of great interest to readers of Joyce and Svevo alike and would have brought renewed attention to Joyce's Triestine sojourn this year—2020—when the International James Joyce symposium was scheduled to return, for the third time, to the city; sadly, because of the pandemic, it has been postponed until 2021. Moloney points out that Joyce's encounter with Svevo was key to his remaining in Trieste for both personal and literary reasons (and [End Page 445] are the two areas ever really separate in Joyce?). He rightly asserts that Svevo was a key model, or perhaps the key model, for Leopold Bloom and the source of so much of the Jewish background in Ulysses. As Moloney writes, "Svevo had thought long and hard about his Jewishness and its meaning: he supplied Joyce with ideas and information about Jews and Jewishness" (xiii). If Svevo was both a source and a support for Joyce, it was not (unusually for Joyce) all one-way traffic; in fact, it was quite the opposite. Svevo had published Una vita in 1892 and Senilità in 1898 to general disinterest both in Trieste and beyond, and he was, in 1902, so disappointed that he resolved to give up publishing any more of his writings.2 Five years later, when Joyce read these two novels, he immediately saw their value, hailing Senilità as an unjustly unrecognized masterpiece. Moloney speculates that "Joyce very probably read Una vita as Svevo's 'chapter of the moral history' of Trieste" (35), which may be true. Even if it is not, there is little doubt that Joyce was so impressed by his friend's writing that he singlehandedly restored Svevo's...