As a Man Grows Older by Italo Svevo

First published:Senilità, 1898 (English translation, 1932)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1890’s

Locale: Trieste, Austria

Principal Characters:

• Emilio Brentani, a clerk and novelist
• Stefano Balli, his friend, a sculptor
• Amalia, his sister
• Angiolina Zarri, his mistress
• Margherita, Balli’s mistress
• Elena Chierici, a widow

The Novel

Emilio Brentani is a man of thirty-five, a clerk in an insurance office, who lives in a drab apartment with his sister Amalia; he has literary pretensions and has published a novel which has had at least local success. He has fallen in love with a lower-class girl, Angiolina Zarri, who is remarkable for her blonde beauty and vibrant good health; she seems inclined to accept his attentions, though he is frank about his inability, or unwillingness, to marry. He begins to go for walks with her, during which she is affectionate enough, but already there are hints of trouble. From Sorniani, an older man with a bad reputation, Emilio hears that Angiolina was once engaged to a businessman named Merighi; the engagement was broken off, possibly because of Merighi’s business losses, possibly because Angiolina was detected in an intrigue. Emilio’s friend the sculptor Stefano Balli believes that there is danger in the affair.

Emilio visits Angiolina at her home and is well received by her mother, who seems a ruined version of Angiolina. The house is thoroughly shabby, except for Angiolina’s bedroom, which is comfortably furnished but displays some photographs which Emilio recognizes as the portraits of some rather fast men about Trieste. He presses Angiolina for complete possession, and she would be willing if there were a third party on whom any results could be blamed.

Shortly thereafter, Angiolina announces her engagement to a tailor named Volpini, a man neither young nor handsome, though jolly and likable. She met him at the Deluigis’, friends for whom she sometimes works. Though still trying to believe in Angiolina’s respectability, Emilio realizes that he cannot “enjoy without suffering,” cannot use Angiolina as a plaything without becoming emotionally involved. Balli refuses to give him any more advice but proposes that they should dine with him and his mistress, Margherita, a girl by no means as attractive as Angiolina, but meek and submissive. Balli treats both women rather coarsely, with the intention of discrediting Angiolina in Emilio’s eyes, but Angiolina shows no resentment and Emilio is merely irritated with Balli.

Balli is in the habit of calling at the Brentanis’, and this becomes the chief event in Amalia’s gray life; she does not even resent her brother’s affair, since it brings her in touch with romance. Balli has discovered that Margherita is unfaithful and in fact may be prostituting herself to support her family. Meanwhile, Volpini writes that he is unable to marry immediately but that if Angiolina will give him immediate enjoyment he will guarantee his good faith by a contract. Emilio still deludes himself about Angiolina and thinks of reeducating her.

It is now January, the time of the carnival, with all its tawdry gaiety, but also a time of wretched weather. Balli sees Angiolina in the company of a girl named Giulia and an umbrella maker, a man even less prepossessing than Volpini. Emilio confronts Angiolina and goes away, but his chief thought is that he could give her up more easily if he had once possessed her. Meanwhile, all is not well with Amalia, who has been talking in her sleep. Emilio discourages Balli’s visits, saying, falsely, that a relative suspects an engagement. Then, when Amalia seems discouraged, he persuades Balli to return, but his coldness does more harm than good. A visit to the opera merely confirms Amalia’s forlorn state.

Emilio begins a new novel, based on the reality of his affair with Angiolina, but finds it less vivid than the novel he wrote out of his fantasies. He believes that he can safely see her again, and a chance encounter is the beginning of an affair carried on in a sordid house of assignation. The affair is physically satisfying, but there are sour notes; she has given herself to Volpini, and she has taken a new lover whose personality Emilio can partially reconstruct: He is a student, apparently, for along with some indecent songs Angiolina has picked up a smattering of Latin. She maneuvers him into a confrontation with her father which only reveals the father’s madness. Volpini sends a letter breaking off the engagement; Emilio helps Angiolina draft a reply full of injured innocence.

Emilio returns home to find Amalia half naked and delirious. As her state worsens, it becomes obvious that the content of the delirium is erotic and concerns Balli; she even imagines a rival, Vittoria. In the emergency, Emilio gets help from a neighbor, Elena Chierici, who loyally undertakes to nurse Amalia. Balli too is loyal and procures a doctor, who diagnoses inflammation of the lungs but startles Emilio by indicating that Amalia is an alcoholic. In fact, Emilio discovers by chance that she has been taking ether. Though Amalia is obviously dying, he leaves her to break off the relationship with Angiolina. Whatever his intentions, they quarrel for the last time. Emilio, Balli, and Elena are present as Amalia dies. Emilio learns from Elena that the Deluigis are purely imaginary.

Some time later Emilio hears from Sorniani that Angiolina has run off with an embezzler. He calls on Signora Zarri, and Angiolina’s younger sister flirts with him. Years later he looks back on the whole affair as one of the most luminous periods of his life, and in memory the figures of Angiolina and Amalia are somehow blended.

The Characters

The key to Emilio is his senilita, his inertia. Like Hamlet, he combines a fundamental inertia with spurts of misdirected energy. It is significant that he has made no effort to pursue his promising literary career, or to better his financial situation, which prevents him from ever marrying without abandoning Amalia. Another area of his inertia is politics. He is a Socialist and freethinker, and he dreams that under socialism he and Angiolina would have a better life; the only practical effect of his liberal ideas is that by banishing religion from his home he has deprived Amalia of its consolations.

The key to Emilio’s affair with Angiolina is his inability to “possess without suffering”—to treat her as a plaything without being troubled by jealousy. He cannot or will not marry her, and yet he expects her to be faithful, even after he in effect cuckolds Volpini. Aside from the moral ambiguity of the affair, the notable element is Emilio’s infinite capacity for self-deception with reference to Angiolina, or Ange (angel), as he calls her. The overwhelming evidence for Angiolina’s real character—the gossip, the suspicions of Balli, the photographs in her bedroom, the mysterious visits to the imaginary Deluigis—is brushed aside until the crucial episode of the umbrella maker. Even after that, Emilio still believes that he can associate easily with Angiolina while knowing about her promiscuity.

Emilio’s devotion to Amalia is creditable, and yet the clumsy and deceitful way in which he handles the affair with Balli in the end destroys her. The final irony is that the whole affair is not tragic for Emilio, who lives on with his pleasant, if distorted, memories.

Balli is offered as a foil for Emilio but should not be regarded as a simple opposite. As a sculptor he is not exactly a failure, and he certainly is no fraud, but he has never really been accepted by the official art world and his career is made possible by the capricious benevolence of an ignorant patron. As a lover, he seems a dashing success, at least in comparison with Emilio, but he settles for a mistress who is much less desirable than Angiolina and is himself cuckolded. Though he tries to demonstrate his power over Angiolina in order to disabuse Emilio, he himself falls under her power. He is, however, a devoted friend, and he expiates his careless treatment of Amalia by his vigil at her bedside.

Angiolina is a complex character who remains likable even after the exposure of her numerous deceptions. She is strikingly beautiful and notably healthy, and she manages to dress stylishly. It seems that she prostitutes herself to support her indigent family, but the evidence is inconclusive. From Emilio she gets little beyond sausages and cheese, and it must be assumed that much of her promiscuity arises from a compulsive need for admiration and approval. Her deceptions can be extremely ingenious but are sometimes so transparent that not even Emilio is fooled. Perhaps Emilio is right in regarding her as uncalculating; she might have used her beauty to make a good marriage, but instead she elopes with an embezzler.

Critical Context

When As a Man Grows Older was published in 1898, it could have been regarded as part of an advance in fiction: a movement from naturalistic fiction, in which details are accumulated for their own sake, to modern fiction, in which, as in Joyce’s works, details may be accumulated in a manner superficially naturalistic but in fact every detail is carefully selected for a total effect. Thus, for example, Svevo’s descriptions of the furniture of Emilio’s and Angiolina’s apartments, of the house of assignation, and of Balli’s studio are all significantly revealing. The novel, however, whether because it was privately printed in a city which was then part of Austria or because it was written in a kind of “business Italian,” received almost no attention, and Svevo wrote nothing further until after World War I. Something significant happened in the interval, however; from 1907 on Svevo took English lessons from Joyce, who had come to Trieste to work in the Berlitz School. The two became friends and literary confidants; the character of Leopold Bloom owes something to Svevo, and his wife Livia, with her magnificent blonde hair, was one of the models for Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake (1939). They maintained only casual contact after Joyce left Trieste, but when Svevo published La coscienza di Zeno (1928; Confessions of Zeno, 1930), only to have it fall flat, he appealed to Joyce, and Joyce appealed to the French critics. The novel was translated and reprinted, and Svevo’s fame spread back to Italy, where the younger novelists hailed him as “the aged great-uncle of our literature.” It is pleasantly ironic that the author of As a Man Grows Older should have ended his life in a blaze of glory.

Bibliography

Furbank, P.N. Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer, 1966.

Joyce, Stanislaus. Introduction to As a Man Grows Older, 1932.

Lebowitz, Naomi. Italo Svevo, 1978.

Staley, Thomas F., ed. Essays on Italo Svevo, 1969.