The basic facts of Joyce's friendship with Schmitz were first presented in the original Ellmann biography (1959). But while references to Schmitz as a model for Bloom have since become standard fare in Joyce studies, Svevo's status as a literary artist whose work influenced Joyce's constructions of “the Jew” has largely been ignored. Joyce's pre-Ulysses reading of Svevo's first two novels indeed begs investigation as a central moment of the former's awareness of how a character can embody a certain “Jewishness” without the necessary attributes of Halachic Jewish identity. To understand this intertextual influence, however, Svevo's own sense of “Jewishness,” as one who was raised in a Catholic culture, eventually converted to that religion, and yet professed atheism throughout his life, must be grasped. This chapter thus reviews Svevo's Jewish background and adult perception of his Jewish identity, the fortuitous meeting of Joyce and Schmitz, and finally the influence of the older Triestine's work on the younger Irishman.

As an outcome of the reputation he earned through his Berlitz tutorials, Joyce began in 1907 to tutor Schmitz, at the time an unread Triestine novelist who had written under the pseudonym “Italo Svevo.” Within two years of that meeting, however, Schmitz would play a critical role in the completion of A Portrait. But Schmitz's advice about the composition of A Portrait was only one of many positive outcomes of the relationship between himself and Joyce. From the beginning, the younger tutor and older student discovered they had an unexpected rapport. Schmitz's wife, Livia, explained that Joyce was delighted to find in Schmitz “a mentality similar to his own, an analytic method he found congenial.”