Charlton Athletic and literature

Off_it said:

I asked my grandad and he remembers him. 

Apparently he used to stand behind the goal and was well known for demanding the managers get sacked every time we didn't win a game.

Henry Irving said:

Interesting stuff.

Would love to know what his source is that he visited the Valley?

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.

My favourite Svevo 'fact' is that he gave up smoking on numerous occasions.  Apparently each time he gave up, he felt great exhilaration and considered that he was starting a new life without the burden of unpleasant old habits.  So great was this feeling that he felt obliged to experience it as often as he could.