Two Jews wandering through European cities, to the delight of us all

Trieste is a movable city. Apparently.

In the early nineteenth century it was in the Austrian Empire. Not many people think of landlocked Austria as a naval power, but back then it was a significant maritime nation and Trieste was one of its great ports.

The great Austrian seaport of Trieste

In 1867, a Hungarian element was added to Trieste’s nature, when it became a major port of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

But then at the end of the First World War, it was finally shifted again, into Italy where it remains today.

And all those changes of citizenship, which affected the citizens as much as the city, happened without anyone having to move anywhere.

Most of the people of Trieste were in some sense Italian. They didn’t speak Italian, but then in the late nineteenth century the notion of an ‘Italian’ language was so fluid as to be practically non-existent.

My Italian professor at college liked to tell the story of the new King of Italy, previously King only of Savoy in the far North West, sending two officers to represent him at the court of his new territory, the erstwhile independent Kingdom of Naples. Before heading abroad to this posting, the officers spent some time learning the foreign language, Italian. It was only after they had been in Naples for six months that they realised the Neapolitans had taken them for English: they wore strange uniforms and spoke a language nobody knew, and the locals found no other way of accounting for them.

The Italians of Trieste spoke Triestino. And they thought of themselves as Triestini.

It was a hugely cosmopolitan city: though they were in a minority, there were more Slovenes in Trieste, on the border of Slovenia (then also Austrian and now a separate state), than in the Slovene capital of Ljubljana. There were of course many ethnic Germans too, since Trieste belonged to a German-speaking state, and naturally many Jews, as in most of the major cities of Europe of that time.

Now picture one of those Triestini, Aron Ettore Schmitz. His name tells you so much about him, doesn’t it? That Aron, together with the Schmitz, says German-Jewish, which came from his father. Ettore is pure Italian, as was his mother. He grew to manhood at the time Freud was publicising his new methods of psychoanalysis and became fascinated by the problems of consciousness and the sub-conscious. He would wander his great city of Trieste and think great thoughts, passing many of them through the filter of Freudian analysis.

Gradually those thoughts turned into books. At the cost of terrible effort, he mastered Italian and wrote them in that strange language. No one was interested in the rambling meditations of a Triestine Jew so he published the book himself, and it lay on a small number of bookshelves gathering dust. It was called La Coscenza di Zeno; later, when it gained the fame it richly deserved, it was translated into English, most commonly as The Confessions of Zeno or as Zeno’s Conscience. It’s a stream of consciousness narrative as this Jewish man wanders around Trieste struggling to understand life and his place in it; the strongest memory it left in me, especially at a time when I was still smoking to excess, was the theme of the “last cigarette” – whenever anything happens in his life, Zeno smokes his “last cigarette” which sadly turns out only to be the last only until the next one.

Italo Svevo

Schmitz didn’t publish the book under his own name. He adopted a pseudonym that reflected his ancestry: he chose the word for Swabian (from South West Germany) as his surname, and a word for Ialian as his forename – Italo Svevo.

By great good fortune, Svevo chose to learn English from a young Irishman in voluntary exile working at the Berlitz school in Trieste at the time. He found the notion of a Jew wandering around a city and commenting on it far more interesting than most Italian literary critics did. He must also have been an exceptional teacher of English – I wish I could have been taught by him, as I know no one who handled the language better than he did. His name was James Joyce.

He took up the cudgels for Zeno’s Conscience and made it his objective to ensure it received a proper publication in its French translation. The French being the French latched on at once to a great literary phenomenon and received the novel with extraordinary enthusiasm. The Italians being the Italians only needed the French to admire one of their own novels to realise that it must deserve a great deal more than the obscurity in which they had left it.

Svevo’s literary career took off. As did that of Zeno and the wonderful, sparkling, magical, comical story he inhabits.

And what about Joyce? Inspired by Zeno, who was in turn modelled on Schmitz, he too wrote a book about a Jew wandering around a city and commenting, in a stream of consciousness, on all the strange things happening in it. But as befits Joyce, the city’s not Trieste but Dublin, the Jew’s not Zeno Cosini but Leopold Bloom, and the book’s not Zeno’s Conscience but Ulysses – another wonderful, rambunctious, brilliant, hilarious epic.

I don’t really know why I told that story. Except that I find it charming. And it was brought to my mind yesterday by a fine Reith lecture on the BBC, given by Kwame Anthony Appiah.

To whom, many thanks.

In praise of aimlessness

‘If a fish came to me,’ the Mock Turtle tells Alice in Alice in Wonderland, ‘and told me he was going a journey, I should say, “with what porpoise?”’

The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon with Alice

Recently I’ve begun to realise, however, that some of the best excursions in life require neither a cetacean nor any other kind of purpose. That’s not a lesson that I’ve learned on my own: it took my dog Janka to teach me.

Natural indolence makes me generally unwilling to venture out of doors unless I have a pressing reason to do so. You know, something rewarding, like going to work or buying toilet paper. Otherwise I’d be perfectly happy just to stay at home and vegetate.

Strangely enough, vegetating usually involves a screen of some kind: a computer, a Kindle, a TV. Particularly now that it’s turned cold, I’m much more inclined to glue myself to one of them than to take a chance on chilly streets and biting wind.

But we have a dog and dogs impose their own strict code. 

She’s very good at knowing when I’m getting ready to take her out. I haven’t worked out how she can tell that I’m not going out for fun, to the office or the shops, but somehow she can. I start to put my shoes on, and she comes over to watch me, expectantly. I put on my coat and she’s right next to me. I grab a handful of what I euphemistically think of as ‘doggy-bags’ and she’s barking.

And all for what? We’re not going anywhere. In fact on the face of it we’re about to do something as mindlessly unproductive as anything could be: walk a substantial distance through the cold only to end up exactly where we started from.

And yet, and yet. Luton has three parks that lead into each other, two on hills crowned with trees, the third flat and around an extended lake, or possibly just a widened stream – I'm not sure what the difference is. 

Today, all three parks were flooded with golden light which somehow made the cold less painful. Janka was darting around, clearly giving not a single thought to the futility of the exercise, merely enjoying the moment. And I was listening to Ulysses on my headphones which meant mixing two sources of pleasure at once, not something it’s always easy to do.

By the time we got back, Janka’s food was ready, which gave her a more than sufficient goal for the outing. And even I was refreshed and in good humour.

Which makes me think. Perhaps she’s the one that’s right. You don’t always have to do things with a view to achieving something else. It’s time to recognise the pleasure of the activity in itself, to let myself go with the flow and enjoy simple aimlessness.

You can learn a lot from a dog. Much more, it would appear, than you can from a Mock Turtle.

Sorry, Lewis Carroll. Happy to do things without a porpoise after all.

Janka has much to teach me.

Shakespeare at 14, Joyce at 60

It’s extraordinary how many self-appointed experts claim that what modern education needs is a proper grounding in the basics. You know. Shakespeare. Dickens. To say nothing of fractions. And dates in history.

Pontificating politicians from across the political spectrum make this claim. Pundits of the right unsurprisingly proclaim it, but to my disappointment so do people who ought to know better on the left.

In my view, those who feel kids ought to learn dates lack a fundamental quality for the study of history: a memory. They’re obviously incapable of recalling their schooldays and the murder of memorising dates, particularly at an age when dates are things you crave for not things you learn by rote. A sense of chronology is useful in history, but you could probably work out that the Second World War came after the First without precise knowledge of the dates of either.

The study of fractions is even more ghastly. Who on earth has ever needed to know, outside a classroom, what 4/17 of anything was? The only time you ever get anywhere near this kind of division is when you’re cutting up a cake and, hey, all you do is cut the slices small so it goes round with some left over for the greedy ones.

And it’s just as bad with literature. Great books? Oh, you mean Dickens? Or Shakespeare? I bet you the Bard would be mortified (if he weren’t already dead) at the idea of nearly twenty generations of kids being bored mindless by great chunks of incomprehensible blank verse. What fourteen-year old know or cares what it means to make your quietus with a bare bodkin?

A really inspirational teacher can bring all this stuff to life. I remember my boys quoting chunks of Macbeth to each other, at home. Forsooth. It was the most striking testimony to a fine teacher. But such teaching is rare and most kids leave school convinced that there is nothing duller than Shakespeare, except perhaps Dickens.

It’s curious, however, that there comes a time in life when you can suddenly discover a taste for all these things. I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I was about sixteen and was fascinated by it, as well as appalled by the description of hell. I switched to Ulysses. Utterly turgid. Stream of consciousness? It left me unconscious within minutes.

And that view stuck with me for over four decades. Until a couple of weeks ago when I downloaded an audio version of the book. What a fabulous novel! A pace that just whips along. Writing full of humour and charm. A real delight.

I had to get the Kindle version too so that I could check up on some of the material and it’s as much fun to read as to listen to. Turgid? You’ve got to be kidding.

That fine Dublin fellow Joyce.
Worth waiting to get to know

But I’ve realised all that as I approach my sixtieth birthday. Trying to foist Ulysses on me in my teens would have put me off completely. 

What we need to communicate to teenagers is simply a desire to read anything at all, a sense that there’s pleasure in it. And let them read what they like. Pride and Prejudice if they want, Harry Potter if they prefer.

So why is there this deadly consensus that we need to force kids to deal with the classics at a time when they have no interest in them? Why impose on them what we found deadly when we were their age? Why do we think that what we hated is good for others?

But here we’re at the central question of power in society. It’s wielded by people who have little feeling for other people’s concerns.

And the worst of it? Some of them get into positions of power precisely because they share those concerns and want to help. Somehow it’s the very fact of holding power that drives the fellow-feeling out of them.

My message? Wake up. Don’t tell others what they should be doing, particularly if you wouldn’t be prepared to do it yourselves.

And, in particular, stop forcing Shakespeare on fourteen-year olds. Let them decide when they want to get to know classic writing. Even if they only meet Joyce at sixty.