On a bulky late Victorian house close to Charlton House and Charlton Athletic Football Ground, a blue plaque records the residence of the writer Ettore Schmitz, better known by his alias, Italo Svevo. Svevo was a friend of James Joyce and a great Italian Modernist, most famous for his novel Confessions of Zeno (1923).

CHARLTON LIFE

Svevo lived at 67 Charlton Church Lane between 1903 and 1913, and returned to the house regularly after the First World War up until the year before his death.

He came from Trieste to Charlton to help set up a small riverside ship’s paint factory, part of his father-in-law’s anti-corrosion composition works. The factory was in Anchor and Hope Lane, just north of Svevo’s Church Lane base. While walking the short distance to work, he struggled to make sense of his London neighbours:

In the space of that half kilometre I change my mind ten times according to the people whom I come across. One person strikes me as being worthy of the Romans, another as an indigestible morsel for the Ocean.

The Cockney accent, meanwhile, was ‘an insuperable difficulty’.

Svevo frequently travelled back and forth between Trieste and London and, although he initially thought Charlton the ‘drabbest and most out-of-the-way suburb’, he came to think of it as a home from home. He described Charlton Church Lane as ‘a neat street on a slope’ while also finding that ‘my Church Lane is one of the most variegated streets in the Realm’. He played in a violin trio with a workman from Woolwich Arsenal and a Charlton shopkeeper, and became a keen supporter of Charlton Athletic. During his time in the capital, Svevo wrote – but never published – ‘Soggiorno londinese’, which relates his experiences of Charlton.

LITERARY SUCCESS

A comic chronicler of the nature of consciousness, in his writing Svevo dealt with the place of the individual in an irrational world. His reputation stands principally on Confessions of Zeno, but he has been called ‘a truly great writer … not the chance author of one phenomenal work’.

Svevo’s first novel, A Life, published in 1893, was largely based on his unhappy experiences working in a bank. His next book, Senility (1898), was regarded as a failure and it was to be another 25 years until the despondent Svevo published again.

Crucially, in 1907 he made the acquaintance of James Joyce, who was living in Trieste and began giving Svevo English lessons. Joyce introduced Svevo to a wide range of English literature and encouraged him to start writing again. He arranged for Confessions of Zeno to be published in Paris in the 1920s and ensured that the work was widely reviewed. It was an instant success.

After the First World War, Svevo wrote a number of essays on England, the most important being a series on London after the War (1920–21). An unfinished story, Short Sentimental Journey, was also started in Charlton. Svevo was killed in a car crash in Italy in 1928.