A touching story of writer-to-writer support

“It was only then that he ceased to look upon his novels as youthful mistakes.”

Dear readers,

In the next issue of this newsletter, in two weeks, I’m planning to officially announce my next book, which I started working on right around the time I launched this newsletter in February 2020 (and which comes out next year, on March 31st). I’m excited and a little nervous—and a little in disbelief—to unveil what I’ve been wriggling toward over these last five-plus years; I hope you’ll find it worth the wait.

But, please, save your applause for later! In today’s issue, I want to share a story I ran across during my book research that I found incredibly touching but that ultimately didn’t make it into the book.¹ It involves Ettore Schmitz, an Italian-Hungarian writer born in 1861 who published under the name Italo Svevo.

(Umberto Veruda/Mondadori via Getty Images)

Schmitz began writing short stories in his twenties. In his thirties, he self-published two novels, but they received very little notice and sold poorly. Discouraged, he stopped writing entirely. By his mid-forties he was working as the manager of a paint factory in the port city of Trieste (now part of Italy, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) and considered himself a failed writer. But this changed in late 1907 after he began taking English lessons from a younger writer then living in the city, a not-yet-famous Irishman named James Joyce.

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Joyce was in the habit of reading some of his own fiction to his pupils. After one of their lessons, Schmitz admitted that he, too, had been a writer once. Curious, Joyce asked to read his work, and Schmitz lent him his two novels. At their next lesson, Joyce arrived with an urgent question: “Do you know that you are a neglected writer?”

This single act of recognition—and the excited literary discussions between the two writers that followed—changed everything for Schmitz. According to a memoir written by his wife:

Joyce’s admiration and agreement were a miraculous balm to the deep wound which Ettore’s self-esteem had suffered, a wound still tender and burning; and it was only then that he ceased to look upon his novels as youthful mistakes. Unrecognized, his talent had remained buried under what he called the “sadness of silence.” And now, here was a friend who awoke the writer in him, this time for good.

Schmitz didn’t immediately return to writing—but eventually, thanks to Joyce’s encouragement, he began again. Over the next decade and a half, he completed a third novel, Confessions of Zeno, his masterpiece and one of the great works of twentieth-century literary modernism (which was only recognized as such because of Joyce’s vigorous championing of it).

Joyce benefitted from their friendship, too: At the time of their meeting, he had finished the first three chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but then stalled out on the novel. Schmitz’s detailed, sympathetic feedback on those chapters spurred Joyce to get back to work. And Schmitz later became one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the hero of Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses.

You can probably guess why I love this story: It shows what an incredible difference a single person’s understanding, empathy, and enthusiasm can make to a doubting writer or artist—and what writer or artist is not in a state of doubt most of the time?

Let’s end with some advice that Schmitz/Svevo later gave to a young writer named Cyril Ducker, in September 1927, which perhaps shows the enduring influence of his fortuitous encounter with Joyce a decade earlier, and which I’ll leave you with today:

I think (and hope) that younger people can better stand fortune and misfortune. For them misfortune is not as great an evil, and fortune cannot spoil them as much as it can older folk. Therefore, my young friend, you must attain your aim as soon as possible. Stick to prose, please. It is so extravagant to use only partly the piece of paper which you were obliged to pay for in full. I do not think the fact that you have written thoughts and phrases and can see no value in them, is proof that they have no value. You have not yet acquired an essential quality: to love yourself. Only after you have done do others follow your example. . . . In order to acquire this love of themselves women look in a looking-glass. The writer must do the same, and write every evening the history of his day. It is the only way to get a great sincerity—the most important quality, I guess. For the first time since the creation of the world it is you that writes.

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1. This story didn’t make it into the book because the book is about how artists through the ages funded their creative work, and this story is not really about money, though in a way it still fits: The secret theme of the book—spoiler!—is how artists found the confidence, courage, and/or tenacity to extend to themselves permission to make their work when the world didn’t much care if they made it or not, or was even actively impeding their efforts to make it. So this story matches the energy of the book even if it didn’t quite fit the stated theme. But, like I said, more on all that next time!