The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl

This deceptively light, fable-like story of an old man's sexual obsession with a young woman is the perfect distillation of Italo Svevo's life-long preoccupations: the attraction of an older man to a younger woman, individual conscience versus social convention, the phobias of aging, and---above all---the cost of sexual desire. It is, in short, a marvel of psychological insight.

But as it follows the old man's vacillations and tortuous self-justifications over the "pretty girl" to their tragic-comic end, this novella is also a showcase for what is perhaps Svevo's greatest gift: an ability to be utterly charming while writing about matters of life and death.

It is presented here in a translation first commissioned and published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf for their legendary Hogarth Press.

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art of the Novella Series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Italo Svevo, born Aron Ettore Schmitz in 1861, was the son of a well-off Jewish couple in Trieste. For twenty years, while working in a bank, Svevo wrote books that no one would publish. At thirty-two, he self-published a novel, Una vita, under his pseudonym---meaning "An Italian of Swabia"---and five years later another, Senilita. Both were failures, and Svevo gave up publishing for the next twenty-five years. In 1898 he went to work for his father-in-law, a paint-manufacturer. Because the company did business in England, Svevo began English lessons at Trieste's Berlitz School, taught by the young James Joyce, who later modeled the protagonist of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, on Svevo. In 1923 Svevo self-published another novel, La Coscienzo di Zeno. The autobiographical story of a man undergoing Freudian analysis while trying to quit smoking is now seen, like Svevo's other works, as a pioneering work of psychoanalytic and stream-of-consciousness narrative. Joyce got it published in France---where it was a hit---but couldn't interest an English publisher before Svevo, in 1928, was struck by a car while crossing the street. He died a few days later. Refused a cigarette on his deathbed, his last words were reportedly, "That would definitely have been my last cigarette."

Lacy Collison-Morley (1876-1958) was a translator also known for his books on Italian literature and Greek and Roman mythology.