The Last Cigarette

Letters

Vol. 11 No. 15 · 17 August 1989

John Bayley’s review of Livia Veneziani’s Memoir of Italo Svevo (LRB, 27 July) was a reminder of how slow the British public can be in recognising foreign literature. Svevo’s masterpiece’, The Confessions of Zeno, although it had immediate success in Italy and, only a little later, in France, had to wait much longer in this country. The English translation, published by Putnam in 1930, must have been one of the few books raved over by Arnold Bennett that flopped. When I worked at Putnam in 1945 I naively assumed that Penguin New Writing, Horizon and the other wartime publications had paved the way for it, and Beryl de Zoete’s translation, one of the few that has stood the test of time, was republished in 1948. Paeans of praise once again but paltry sales. It was only some forty years after its original publication that the English edition ‘took off’ in a Penguin edition and it is gratifying that, albeit late in the day, it has now been reprinted many times.

All admirers of Svevo must be grateful to John Bayley for this further recognition of a great comic novel and, no less, for repeating Svevo’s dying words after being refused his ‘last cigarette’ – a theme of the compulsive smoker in The Confessions of Zeno. What an enviable end for a comic writer – to die making his best joke!

James MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex