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Primo Levi's Universe

A Writer's Journey

Palgrave Macmillan

A New Cosmos

Primo Levi could be deceptively modest. Despite the fact that he published some twenty books, in just about every literary genre, he sometimes cultivated the image of a nonliterary author, a scrittore non scrittore, as he once phrased it: a writer-witness, a writer-scientist, or an accidental writer. He wrote in solitude, unaffiliated with any universities, literary establishments, circles, or movements. He worked for thirty years as a chemist and manager at a paint and varnish factory. His most famous work is nonfiction, and its subject matter—Auschwitz—is so overwhelming that one can miss its literary depth. He wrote in an age that prized the novel, but his two novels, The Monkey's Wrench and If Not Now, When?, are not among his most important work.

Yet when we read all of Levi's writings together, we find that he has woven a great and terrifying testament, one of the most vital bodies of work in modern literature. We find that his various writings combine to make a bildungsroman rivaling Proust's. A bildungsroman, or "education novel," follows the moral and psychological growth of its main character. In a minor bildungsroman, we watch a character adapt to an adult reality that we, the readers, already know. In a major bildungsroman, like Proust's or Levi's, we watch as the character finds and creates not only a self, but also a cosmos—a new interpretation of the world.

Levi's main character is Primo Levi: a more or less factual version of himself created in a long series of memoirs, stories, essays, poems, and interviews. In Levi's core work, he focuses on his youth: the classic age for the bildungsroman, the age of adventures. Levi's youth included both adventure and tragedy; it did not end until his late twenties, when he returned from the war, married, and began working as an industrial chemist. But, as important as his youth was to him, Levi continued to grow and change—to re-work himself and his cosmos—until his death.

Levi's central concern was what makes—and unmakes—a man. He pondered this insoluble riddle in diverse ways. He studied the biology of Darwin and the psychology of Freud. He looked to myths and legends, spinning variations on Adam and Eve, the Golem, Frankenstein, and other creation tales. He translated anthropological studies by Claude Levi-Strauss and Mary Douglas. Although not a believer, he studied religious texts, placing the book of Job first in his anthology of favorite works, The Search for Roots. Most important, though, he sifted through his own experiences: how his humanity was shaped by Auschwitz, his nine-month odyssey returning from the war, his misadventures as a chemist, his chronic depression, and the challenges of ordinary life. As Levi writes in The Truce, "everybody's moral universe, suitably interpreted, comes to be identified with the sum of his former experiences, and so represents an abridged form of his biography."

Levi combined a gift for the lyrical, introspective, and autobiographical with an equally potent gift for the scientific, exploratory, and essayistic. One has to look to Michel de Montaigne to find another writer who reports on his life in a way that encompasses so much of the world. Levi had the tragic misfortune to be present at a crucial event in world history, to suffer personally an epochal, radical evil; but he also had the genius to transmute that experience into enduring literature.

In literary style, Levi is sometimes viewed as a traditionalist. And yet Levi's short stories are playful, ultramodern fables comparable to those of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. Some of his poems—such as "For Adolf Eichmann"—have a naked ferocity that could scarcely be called traditional. And Levi's central prose works—If This is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved —are innovative hybrids of many genres, including autobiography, short story, novel, poetry, essay, history, and sociology. Levi viewed himself as a hybrid, someone not identical with himself; he was like the narrator of The Monkey's Wrench, who says, "I felt as if I had two souls in my body, and that's too many."

Levi blurred the line between fact and fiction. While all his autobiographical narratives are more or less true, in some he keeps very close to the facts, changing only a name or a minor detail, but in others he takes considerable license. The results can be confusing. Many of his autobiographical essays, published in the United States in Moments of Reprieve, Other People's Trades, The Mirror Maker, The Periodic Table, and A Tranquil Star, read exactly like the short stories with which they are intermingled. In Italy, If This Is a Man is read as a novel about Auschwitz; in the United States, it is published under the title Survival in Auschwitz and presented as historical testimony. One might call it a nonfiction novel, but that hardly does justice to its complex and unstable richness.

Levi's style—so lyrical and yet so polyvalent—responded perfectly to his literary and historical context. By the time he began writing, the era of the great realist novel had passed. It no longer seemed appropriate or original to write in the objective vein of the nineteenth-century masters, surveying society as if from a mountaintop. The focus had shifted to a more subjective account of consciousness: the memories, reflections, dreams, and nightmares of single, often isolated, individuals. As a result, modern literature often runs the risk of solipsism, a retreat into private worlds and languages—something Levi strenuously resisted. His challenge was to write about the world and the self, and their fluctuating, mysterious interactions, in a way that avoided false objectivity and yet remained coherent.

This literary challenge corresponds closely to a modern philosophical challenge: how to create a cosmos—a view of the world—that is systematic enough to be useful and yet open and self-critical enough to avoid hardening into dogma. Secular thinkers have struggled to construct a philosophy that does not rely on God and yet resists the temptation to put man (or history, or some other grand force) in God's place. Scientists have crafted a periodic table (in Italian, il sistema periodico ), which offers a comprehensive system of natural elements. But what table, what tablets, can give us a comprehensive system of humanity? Or, as Levi asks, "would it not be better to acknowledge one's lack of a system?"

If the Ten Commandments are not divinely given, then it falls to individuals or groups to create their own ethics, their own decalogues. Benito Mussolini offered one response: his Fascist Decalogue, which included the commandment that Mussolini was always right. Levi offered his own ethos, but it included the commandment that he, like all sources, must always be doubted. He grappled with the question of whether we can judge good and evil confidently, and even authoritatively, without becoming authoritarian: whether we can create ourselves without dreaming of being supermen, transcending good and evil.

To respond to these literary and philosophical concerns required a modern Dante, a thinker who could combine stunning ambition with profound humility, bold innovation with "the search for roots." It required someone committed to purity, clarity, and the light of reason, yet capable of celebrating impurity, incoherence, and doubt. Perhaps, to be thoroughly convincing, it required someone with the authority of a firsthand participant: someone who had gone to the edge of the world, the edge of humanity, and seen with his own eyes, suffered with his own body and soul, the demolition and painful re-creation of mankind.

Frogs on the Moon

Primo Michele Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, a northern Italian city in the mountainous Piedmont region. His father, Cesare, was an engineer with a lust for life: he enjoyed claret, cigars, music, chess, literature, and a longstanding affair with his secretary. Cesare had a troubled family history. His uncle hanged himself, and his father, Michele Levi, leaped to his death from the second story of a house in 1888. After Michele's death, Cesare's mother married a doctor with whom she had been conducting an affair.

Levi's mother, Ester, came from the stable, established Luzzati family of Turin. Upon her marriage, Ester's parents gave her an apartment at 75 Corso Re Umberto, where she would live the rest of her life, and where Levi, too, would live almost all his life. Ester Levi, in contrast to her husband, was prim, proper, organized, and domestic: the queen of her household. She was emotionally reserved, and Levi once told a journalist that he could not remember a single caress or kiss from her.

Levi had one sibling, Anna Maria, who was two years younger, but bigger and stronger than he. Cesare openly preferred Anna Maria to Primo, who was too frail and serious for his taste. The children were very close growing up, thus setting the pattern for Levi's many friendships with more robust, socially confident people. Levi complained that his father had "no aptitude for the career of fatherhood"; he was often gone, and when he was home he tended to play piano, solve chess problems, or read. When he was a teen, Levi said, Cesare advised him to "drink, smoke, go with girls. But I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I had no girls." Although they shared a love of books, and Levi enjoyed his father's wide-ranging library, they did not communicate much.

Mussolini took power in 1922, when Levi was three, so he grew up entirely under Fascism. Mussolini, however, did not preach anti-Semitism until the late 1930s, when he was currying favor with Hitler, and up to that point roughly onethird of Italy's Jews, along with the vast majority of all Italians, were Fascists. Levi's father was a member of the party, if an unenthusiastic one, and he enrolled Levi in the Fascist youth movement known as the "Children of the Wolf" when he was five, and the "Avangardia" movement when he was fourteen. This show of loyalty was typical: in 1931 Mussolini required all schoolteachers, professors, and students to swear allegiance to Fascism, and almost all complied.

With few exceptions, Levi did not write about his first ten years. He was not much interested in humans until they began to reason for themselves and confront reality on their own. Even in The Periodic Table, which begins with a swirling, fanciful account of his ancestors and ranges through most of his life, Levi says surprisingly little about his early childhood. And while his family relations form an important subtext for his writings, he wrote almost nothing about his father and mother, and only one story about his sister. Even in his fiction, Levi rarely wrote about families and the relationships between parents, children, and siblings.

One of Levi's few writings about his early childhood is "Frogs on the Moon," in which he describes his encounters with nature during summer vacations. In this memoir-story, the young Levi enjoys learning the names of the grasses and flowers and listening to the birds sing; he even finds a leech gliding through the water to be "graceful, as in a dance." On the other hand, the mole-cricket is an "obese, repugnant, and menacing little monster." At the end of the sketch, he sets some pollywogs free, only to watch one get speared by a robin. The robin is then mangled by a kitten, who carries it off into a corner to toy with it. Over the course of the story, nature has changed from something pleasant to something terrible.

Levi explores his feelings about nature and girls in a memoir- story called "Love's Erector Set." On a summer vacation, young Primo, age eleven, falls in love with nine-year-old Lydia, a homely, sickly, not-too-bright girl with little interest in him. For all her shortcomings, however, Lydia has an intimacy with nature that Levi lacks. Her rapport with animals seems magical, almost a divine gift. She reminds him of Circe in the Odyssey, which he has just read in school. Already, at age eleven, Levi feels distant from nature and females; and already he compares his experiences to those of Odysseus. Already, in contrast to a brutal boy named Carlo, whom Lydia prefers, Levi struggles to feel like a man.

Sickly and shy, Levi missed many days of school and once spent a whole year being tutored at home. He stood out in his primary-school class as the youngest, shortest, smartest boy, and the only Jew. His classmates, he says, looked at him as if he were a "strange tiny animal." As a teenager, Levi gained an interest in sports but remained small and awkward. He was fascinated with the tougher boys. In the memoir-story "A Long Duel," he describes his classmates as monstrous oafs, impermeable to knowledge. The most intriguing is Guido, with whom he forms a "polemical friendship":

Guido was a young barbarian with a sculptural body. He was intelligent and ambitious and envied my scholastic successes; I, symmetrically, envied his muscles, his stature, his beauty, and his precocious sexual lusts.

Levi describes the contests he and Guido devise for each other: slapping each other by surprise, running races at an abandoned stadium, and—Guido's final invention—stripping naked in the classroom when the teacher is not looking. The young Levi is far too modest, but Guido manages to strip and stand on his desk while the teacher is showing the class a skeleton; he is "provocative, Dionysiac, and obscene ... an ephemeral monument of terrestrial vigor and insolence." Even as a middle-aged man telling the story, Levi still feels competitive, writing that he does not know which of them has won the long-distance race of life.

As his school years went on, Levi became more athletic, taking up track and field, and made friends more sympathetic than Guido. All his life Levi cultivated close friends to whom he was deeply loyal. Often they were people with qualities he lacked. In The Periodic Table he describes his friend Enrico, a poor scholar but a good athlete, with dreams that are realistic, not cosmic:

He did not experience my tormented oscillation between the heaven (of a scholastic or sports success, a new friendship, a rudimentary and fleeting love) and the hell (of a failing grade, a remorse, a brutal revelation of an inferiority which each time seemed eternal, definitive).

But even Enrico, for all his "virile attributes," has been rendered impotent by his upbringing. When he and Levi sneak into the lab of Enrico's older brother to do chemistry experiments, they feel embarrassed by their lack of skill. Unlike their mothers, who know how to sew, cook, play the piano, and paint, the boys, like their fathers, are not handy. Their hands are coarse, yet weak; they can play and write, but cannot use the hammer and blade, which have been "too cautiously forbidden" to them. As a result, they feel deficient: "If man is a maker, we were not men: we knew this and suffered from it."

Levi attributes the boys' sense of physical inadequacy to Jewishness: what he calls an ancient atrophy of family and caste. In an interview with Philip Roth, he elaborates on this theme: "Some 'Aryan' schoolmates jeered at us, saying that circumcision was nothing but castration, and we, at least at an unconscious level, tended to believe it, with the help of our puritanical families." Levi's father, Cesare, the philandering bon vivant, was decidedly not puritanical. It seems to have been his mother whose attitudes he found repressive. But it was not just his mother and the anti-Semites who made Levi feel less than a man. It was also his looks and his personality; even one of his Jewish classmates described him as "a bit of a joke, frankly, something of a prig—his name was a byword for sexual backwardness."

As he was finishing high school in 1936, Levi suffered a major trauma, which he recounts in the story "Fra Diavolo on the Po." He was summoned before the War Ministry and falsely accused of having ignored a draft notice for the navy. Levi was terrified that he would be thrown in jail or sent to sea; he did not even know how to swim. The very next day, he had to write a final exam on the patriotic theme of Italy's entry into the Spanish Civil War vis-à-vis a quote from Thucydides: "We have the singular merit of being brave to the utmost degree." Levi, understandably, was feeling neither patriotic nor brave, and he failed the exam, which meant having to retake all his exams several months later. He describes his failure, the first bad grade he had ever received, as feeling like a death sentence. Although he does not say so explicitly in the story, he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown; it was, his sister said, a family tragedy.

Luckily, Levi's father was able to keep him out of the navy by signing him up for the Fascist militia. Thus, for his first year of university—until the Racial Laws of 1938 banished Jews from the militia—he went marching every Saturday morning with his troop. Levi comments that at the time he was neither a Fascist nor an anti-Fascist. He never learned to use a gun, the uniform gave him no pride, and the boots chafed his ankles raw, but he did enjoy marching in step to music: "It was a dance, and it gave me the sensation of belonging to a human alliance, of merging with a unified group." Not even this military dance, however, could make Levi feel like a complete man, when he had never danced with a girl.

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Excerpted from Primo Levi's Universe by Sam Magavern. Copyright © 2009 Sam Magavern. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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