James joyce, p.80
James Joyce, page 80
The central concept during Joyce’s time in Trieste was of irredentism, the idea of Italia irredenta, the incorporation within the newly united Italy of the ‘unredeemed’ Trentino to the north-west and, to the south-east, Trieste, Gorizia, and the lower Isonzo: the irredentist cry was for ‘Trento and Trieste’. For Italian nationalists, and for the Italian inhabitants of the regions, this was the unfinished business of the Risorgimento that had brought the modern Italian state into being. Yet there was an inherent tension between irredentism and the precepts of the liberal nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini predicated on the idea of national self-determination, which logically involved accommodating the right to self-determination of the Slovenes also living in the region Venezia Giulia. The politico-geographical issue of Italy’s ‘just frontiers’ was fraught, dividing, as well as European opinion, irredentists from more scrupulously liberal Italian nationalists. The historian Dennison Rusinow finely characterised Italian irredentism as the ‘eldest child of Risorgimento nationalism and half-brother of Italian imperialism’.57 If irredentism seemed mostly benign, the extravagant cult of its pre-eminent martyr Guglielmo Oberdan made clear that it had the capacity to become seized with fanatical zealotry. In 1882, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of Trieste’s submission to Austria, Franz Joseph I came to Trieste. Oberdan, an extreme nationalist, resolved to assassinate him but was arrested en route. The emperor most unwisely declined to pardon him, and Oberdan was hanged in a barracks cell in Trieste.58
Trieste commands a broad bay in the north-east Adriatic. Behind the city rises the great barren limestone plateau of the Carso that extends as far as the Isonzo River to the north-west, where the Triestines sought refuge from the summer heat. Established by the Romans as Tergeste, the city of Trieste belonged to Austria for more than five hundred years, from 1382 to 1918. From the late eighteenth century, it was the principal seaport of Austria-Hungary. It acquired an impressive merchant fleet, busy shipyards, and a thriving insurance and banking sector.59 In 1857 the Sudbahn reached Trieste from Vienna, and the railway link tightened the integration of Trieste into the Austro-Hungarian Empire.60 The city was transformed with the construction from the second half of the nineteenth century of handsome neoclassical and neo-historicist buildings in the Viennese manner,61 the imperial superimposition of an assertively confident second city on the creaking seaport that Trieste had once been.
The dominant culture in Trieste was Italian, and the Italian population tenaciously upheld the idea of the italianità of the city. Its younger writers and intellectuals looked to Florence. Cosmopolitan Trieste was at once hyper-modern and provincial. Freud and Ibsen were read with avidity, and the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss appreciated, but as the young writer Scipio Slataper impatiently proclaimed in the first of his ‘Lettere Triestine’ for the Florentine journal La Voce, ‘Trieste non ha tradizioni di cultura’.62 Something of the provincial ennui of Trieste is captured in its characterisation by its most important poet, Umberto Saba, as a city of ‘peevish grace’ (una scontrosa grazia).63 That property may have led Joyce to relativise his critical conception of the city of his birth.
If an older generation of Italian nationalists had sympathy and fellow feeling with the Slavs, irredentism in Trieste came to be intertwined with a fear of the Slavs. As Rusinow has written, ‘The Slovenes of the Kustenland were one of the nations traditionally considered “unhistorical”’, with little consciousness of their own heritage. Slovenes, or Croats, who migrated from working the land to become officials or enter the professions or go into business would once typically have shed their Slavic identities in favour of an Italian identity. That changed with the rapid development of Slav national self-consciousness that followed from the ‘Slav awakening’ of the mid-nineteenth century. Trieste’s hinterland was overwhelmingly Slovene (southern Slav), so that urbanisation as a force came to represent of itself a threat to italianità and was given a fillip of active encouragement by the Austrian authorities.64 The Triestine socialist Angelo Vivante appreciated but sought to inculcate resistance to the fear of ‘slavificazione … non piu gli slavi assorbiti dagli italiani, ma vice versa’,65 the livid and paranoid spectre of reverse assimilation. These developments prompted a shift from purely cultural irredentism or one that was suffused by a Mazzinian breadth of sympathy with other nations to a more radical annexationist irredentism. Slav resentment was also fostered by the fact that, in Istria and in the rural surrounds of Gorizia, the dominant mode of cultivation was sharecropping; while the owners, frequently absentee landlords, were invariably Italian, the peasants were typically Slav.66
Camillo Cavour’s proclamation of a united independent kingdom of Italy, of which he became the first head of government, in March 1861 was a culminating moment not just for Italy but for the liberal European nationalism to which Joyce subscribed. The problem was that for most Italians the kingdom was territorially incomplete. In the wake of the creation of the Italian state, the irredentist National Liberal Party was established in Trieste in 1868. Its leader, until his death in 1908, was Felice Venezian, who was related to Ettore Schmitz’s wife, Livia. L’Indipendente, established in 1877, was the principal irredentist organ, harried by the Austrian authorities, for which Ettore Schmitz wrote a large number of articles in the 1880s, his ‘most active commitment to the Irredentist cause’,67 though Schmitz also had some socialist sympathies.68
Trieste was politically splintered. According to Gatt-Rutter, ‘Piemontese describes how Trieste in the first decade of the century was uniquely gripped by fiercely exclusive political passions and allegiances. A Socialist would never step into an Irredentist café or hotel, while no Irredentist (National Liberal) would show himself in a Socialist, Slav or Austrian milieu. People lived in almost watertight social compartments, signalling their allegiance by their matchbox labels. “Tell me what matches you use, and I will tell you who you are”’.69
The political divisions of Trieste owed much to class. While the working classes were socialist, irredentists typically belonged to the upper and middle classes, a division that recalls Joseph Roth’s tart observation that in the Austrian empire ‘national self-determination’ was ‘an intellectual luxury for a group that has nothing else to worry about’.70 The intellectuals and writers hovered between ethnic pluralism and irredentism but, whenever it came to the point, veered in a nationalist direction. Thus in 1915 when the socialists still resisted Italy’s entry into the war, Scipio Slataper and the brothers Giani and Carlo Stuparich enlisted in the Italian army.71 The charismatic Slataper, born in Trieste in 1888, who wrote a haunted memoir of place titled Il mio carso, espoused the idea of a multi-cultural Trieste but could never shake off the idea of the intrinsic superiority of Italian over Slav culture. He favoured the Italian entry into the war in 1915, candidly with a view to Italy sharing the spoils with Serbia, but with a touch of exaltation. He died by an enemy bullet, fighting on his beloved Karst, at Podgora, a hill above Gorizia that the soldiers renamed Calvary, in November 1915. His female admirer Elody Oblath wrote of his circle that his death ‘shattered our fanaticism for ever’.72
Joyce’s pupil Attilio Tamaro, who had asked him to lecture in the Università Popolare, was an uncompromising hard-line irredentist and historian of Trieste. He was not merely an enemy of Austria-Hungary but a critic of the cosmopolitanism of Trieste which he saw as more or less an Austrian plot. In his polemical L’Adriatico—golfo d’Italia: L’italianità di Trieste (1915), he denounced the ‘scheming and lawless Germans, Illyrians, Greeks and Jews’, whose arrival threatened to deprive Trieste of its national (Italian) character. He rehearsed the well-worn line of the uncompromising irredentists that the Slavs in Venezia Giulia had no national claim: ‘The Slavs who immigrated into Julian Venetia have not succeeded in forming even an elementary civilization of their own … they have no civilization as they have no history’.73
The socialists challenged the irredentist National Liberals and won a great if ultimately not consequential victory in the parliamentary elections of 14 May 1907, held across Austria on universal male suffrage, itself an achievement of the Austrian Social Democrats.74 In Trieste the socialists took the four town seats, and the Slavs both the country seats.75 It was the high-water mark of Triestine socialism. Joyce had suffered a collapse in his health the day before; a couple of months earlier from Rome, he had pronounced, ‘The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me’.76 It is nonetheless striking that there is nothing to suggest that Joyce took any notice of the event, though that is consistent with the absence of any recorded observation of the quotidian politics of Trieste. When his interest in socialism was at its height, it seemed to bypass Trieste and was mediated through the columns of Avanti!, which was published in Rome, and his letters to Stanislaus made no mention of issues peculiar to Trieste and its environs.77 All of this attests to Joyce’s distanced attitude towards Triestine politics in general.
But the socialists are important for an understanding of Joyce’s attitude to irredentism. The leadership of the Triestine socialists was Italian, but their socialism was aligned with the Austro-Marxism of Karl Renner, Friedrich Adler, Max Adler, and Otto Bauer. Confronted with the daunting challenge of promoting socialism across a multi-ethnic political space, the Austro-Marxists did not uphold the Marxist shibboleth that nationalist identifications were only superstructural. They subscribed to what was termed a ‘personality principle’ of nationhood against the idea of nationhood prescribed by territory or history. At its conference in Brno in 1899, the Social Democratic Party espoused a programme under which Austria would be federalised as a nationally egalitarian, politically democratic state.78 The Triestine party leadership under Valentino Pittoni and the editor of the party’s Trieste daily newspaper Il Lavoratore, Angelo Vivante, were clear and reasoned in their opposition to irredentism, adamant that the interests of the working class were best served by a democratised Austria. The socialist programme, deriving from the Brno Congress of the Second International of 1906, was an autonomous Trieste: what that meant was a Trieste that was not ceded to Italy.79 Joyce said nothing or is not recorded as saying anything explicit on Triestine socialism or on irredentism. If Joyce post-Rome no longer identified himself as a socialist, he had not renounced socialist tenets or social analysis. There is nothing in what survives of Joyce’s observation of Triestine politics that relates to Triestine socialism. Yet Joyce’s holding back from irredentism was consistent with the principles of Triestine socialism that were largely supported by the city’s working class. In the end the revolutionary fervour unleashed by the Russian Revolution destabilised the Triestine Socialist Party, and the socialist conception of an autonomous Trieste was lost in the ceding of Trieste to Italy,80 even before Mussolini’s accession to power in Rome.
Joyce and Triestine Irredentism
Joyce’s social circles in Trieste were heavily tilted towards moderate irredentism. Presumably through Francini Bruni, whom he knew first as a fellow language teacher in Pola and Trieste, but who joined Il Piccolo in June 1906, he met Roberto Prezioso, political director of Il Piccolo and acting editor of its evening paper Il Piccolo della Sera, who asked him to contribute articles.81 That led to his meeting the writer and journalist Silvio Benco. The owner of Il Piccolo was Teodoro Mayer, a co-eval of Ettore Schmitz and, like Schmitz, a Jew of Hungarian antecedents. Mayer, a moderate irredentist drawn also to socialism, rapidly became ‘a member of the caucus of grey eminences who managed Trieste’s national and political life from the behind the scenes.’82 He collaborated closely with Felice Venezian, leader of the National Liberals, with whom he founded a Masonic lodge, Alpi Giulie.83 Mayer is mentioned by Ellmann, in a footnote, as a possible model for Leopold Bloom, though, if one wishes to engage in that indeterminate quest, then Ettore Schmitz (Italo Svevo) is a far more plausible candidate, as Ellmann himself believed.84 Joyce and Stanislaus taught members of the family of Felice Venezian,85 who also was a relative of Schmitz’s wife, Livia. Joyce’s friend and pupil Nicolò Vidacovich, lawyer, translator, and essayist, also an irredentist, provided a nexus to a younger generation of Triestine writers and intellectuals. He was president of the irredentist La Giovane Trieste (Young Trieste) and of the Società di Minerva.86 Triestines of all persuasions were much given to societies.
Joyce could not be said to have been a member of an irredentist circle. He did not frequent meetings of Triestine writers and intellectuals in the grander cafés of Trieste. His professional and personal acquaintances were not confined to Italians. He taught pro-Austrian Triestines, including the wife and children of the governor, Prince Konrad Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst.87 The assimilated Slovenes he taught included Count Mario Tripcovich, son of a Triestine shipbuilder, and he had closer relations with Nicolò Vidacovich, with whom he translated Synge’s Riders to the Sea in 1908, and the first version of Yeats’s Countess Cathleen in 1911.88 It was through Vidacovich that he found the four businessmen, also Slovenes, whom he enlisted in the project to establish a cinema in Dublin.89 Joyce taught Josip Wilfan, a leading figure among the Slovenes of Trieste and a post-war member of the Italian parliament;90 Boris Furlan, already mentioned, was an employee in Wilfan’s office and became a pupil and friend.91 Another pupil, Alois Skrivanich, was a Croatian gallant who was ‘a source of information about the corruptions and distortions of Slovene and Croatian words in the Triestine melting pot’92 (the triestino dialect). Skrivanich was killed early in the war in the Carpathians. He is honourably mentioned in Finnegans Wake, contributing to a surname for Shem as he is denounced by his sanctimonious brother Shaun, who accuses him of plagiarism: ‘Shem skrivenitch, always cutting my prhose to please his phrase’.93
If Joyce’s engagement with Slav culture was slight, as Ivo Vidan points out with measured acerbity in his authoritative treatment of the subject,94 it would be a mistake to conclude that his somewhat sceptical assessment of Triestine irredentism was not informed by a consciousness of its having pushed the Slovene population to the margins.
Was Joyce an irredentist, or rather, as a non-Triestine, was he pro-irredentist? It was an issue on which he contrived to remain adroitly non-committal. Some weight is to be given to his silence. It seems clear that he had significant reservations about irredentism,95 but as an Irishman living in Trieste he did not feel obliged to give expression to them, and thereby cause offence to his Triestine irredentist friends. He was conspicuously non-irredentist rather than anti-irredentist. Silvio Benco was almost alone in posing the issue of whether Joyce was pro-irredentist. Having discussed Joyce’s Irish political concerns as manifested in his Triestine journalism, Benco concluded with astuteness and tact, ‘He could not suffer in the same way over Trieste’s dogged effort towards national freedom. But precisely because he was not passionately and painfully involved, he could consider it with intelligent sympathy.’96
One might approach a consideration of Joyce and irredentism from two perspectives, the first to do with Joyce’s status in Trieste, and the second at the level of political judgement. On the first, exile defined a relationship to the place of exile, as well as to the country of departure. There was an issue about the appropriateness of intervention in a country where Joyce was present for some years but in which he might not remain, an issue of exilic protocol. There was Joyce’s characteristic epistemological scruple: he knew he could not know Trieste or Triestine politics as intimately as he comprehended the sullen polity that was Dublin and Ireland. To pronounce on the politics of a place implied something greater than transient presence. Somewhere at the back of Joyce’s mind was perhaps the recollection of Skeffington’s unbounded espousal of radical causes.97 There were therefore several considerations to warrant what was Joyce’s first (and consummately successful) sustained experiment in more or less complete political silence.
From the second perspective, that of the substantive politics of irredentism, there was much to demarcate the position of Trieste from the situation of Ireland: Joyce’s inner measuring of Trieste was significantly against Ireland rather than against Dublin, so that they could never be quite commensurate. Objectively there were major differences. The most obvious is that between Trieste as a city denied inclusion in the newly united Italian state and Ireland as a nation denied freedom. Moreover, not merely was the yoke of Vienna comparatively light,98 but the connection to the empire was undeniably the motor that propelled the economy of Trieste, while it was a tenet of Griffith’s Sinn Féin and of the wider Irish nationalism, fully subscribed to by Joyce, that the union with Britain had retarded Ireland’s economic development. Two entries in Stanislaus’s Triestine diary in April 1907, in the immediate prelude to Joyce’s transformative lecture ‘L’Irlanda: Isola dei santi e dei savi’, which he delivered on 27 April, suggest that Joyce was fully alert to and had discussed with Stanislaus the economic difference. Stanislaus recorded on 20 April that in relation to Ireland his brother believed that ‘no intellectual or artistic revival is possible until an economic one has already completed because people haven’t the time or the stomach to think.’99 This was almost two months after Joyce’s admission to Stanislaus in a letter that socialism had ceased to interest him; it suggests that if he was no longer studying socialism, he had not renounced its precepts. In the second entry two days later, on 22 April 1907, Stanislaus wrote, ‘[The irredentists] don’t count of course that now Venice is under Italian government, and is poor, that Trieste was under Italian government and was poor, but Trieste is under Austrian government and is rich.’100 This admittedly is a comment of Stanislaus only, who evidently believed—in what was a pretty significant error, reflecting the struggle to apprehend the history of Trieste while living there and perhaps a false Irish assumption translated to Trieste from conversations with irredentists—that there was a time when Trieste had been Italian. It is hard to resist the suspicion that for Joyce there was something complacent and facile about irredentism, and perhaps somewhat passive (irredentism was less a liberationist than an annexationist concept, in which irredentists, if they sought to hasten the hour, awaited deliverance by Italy), that left him not so much cold as somewhat bored.
