Joyce’s continued moral support may have contributed to Svevo’s first great postwar undertaking, La coscienza di Zeno, which was begun in March of 1919, more than twenty years after the completion of Senilità.

The years of the war were profoundly disruptive for Svevo, for Trieste, and for the underwater paint business. Even before hostilities began, many Italians fled the city, where the Austrian authorities had imposed a number of restrictions, including a severe censorship of the press. Gioachino and Olga, both Italian citizens, left for England, so Ettore remained in charge at the factory. Wanting to be near her Italian fiancé, Letizia—now in her teens —joined some family members in Florence.

The Austrians tried to confiscate the factory and wanted to know the secret formula; Ettore thwarted these efforts, first by concealing the ingredients and then by supplying a false formula. Finally he had to travel to Vienna to protest the confiscation of the factory. He was successful, but there was little business to be done in the beleaguered city.

Finally, well after the war’s end and Trieste’s annexation to Italy, the Schmitzes—including Letizia, now married and with a growing family—were able to take a vacation together. In the summer of 1922 they rented a villa in the hills north of Trieste. Here, in an access of fervid inspiration, Svevo went seriously to work on La coscienza di Zeno. Smoking furiously, he finished the book in a matter of months, and in May of 1923 the novel was published—again at the author’s expense—by the firm Cappelli in Bologna. Once more Svevo’s book aroused scant interest: a few local reviews, a brief and lukewarm notice in the Corriere della sera.

But the tide was soon to turn, dramatically. The last few years of Svevo’s life would be radically different; he would come close to achieving victory in the battle of life. Though he had seen little of Joyce after his departure from Trieste and their correspondence had been desultory, Svevo had sent a copy of La coscienza di Zeno to his former English teacher. The response from Paris was immediate. Joyce’s letter is dated 30 January 1924, and it reads, in part:

Thank you for the novel with the inscription. I am reading it with great pleasure. Why be discouraged? You must know it is by far your best work. As to Italian critics I can’t speak. But send copies to Valéry Larbaud, Benjamin Crémieux, T. S. Eliot (Editor Criterion), F. M. Ford. I will speak or write to them about it also. I shall be able to write more when I’ve finished the book. So far two things interest me. The theme: I should never have thought that smoking could dominate a man like that. Secondly, the treatment of time in the book. You certainly don’t lack penetration, and I see that the last paragraph of Senilità … has been growing and blossoming in secret.

Joyce, who knew something about promoting literary work, especially his own, was as good as his word. He did speak with Larbaud and Crémieux, prodding them to read and publicize the book. An important new Parisian review, Le Navire d’Argent, was soon planning a “Svevo number” with an essay by Larbaud and a translation of excerpts from Senilità and La coscienza. Svevo was the talk of literary Paris, and a young Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, visiting the city, heard of him there for the first time. On his return to Italy, Montale procured copies of the three novels and took up the cause, writing articles on Svevo for Italian reviews and enthusiastically spreading the word.