The Life Endured and the Written Life: Elio Schmitz, Stanislaus Joyce and Their Brothers

What drew Italo Svevo and James Joyce together was in part a profound similarity in artistic sensibility. This similarity can be understood in fairly concrete terms if one examines the parallel relationships that these two writers had with their younger brothers. Both writers drew, in remarkably similar ways, from their younger brothers’ often painful experiences life. Both writers, in short, needed to maintain an indeterminate identity – something for which the city of Trieste was peculiarly suitable – in order to become and therefore to create the characters that would inhabit their imaginative writing.