June 13, 2002

Looking for Every Mark Primo Levi Ever Left

By JANET MASLIN

THE DOUBLE BIND
Primo Levi. A Biography
By Carole Angier
Illustrated. 898 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.

In the preface to her mammoth biography of Primo Levi, Carole Angier explains that she has appropriated the title "The Double Bond" from Levi's last, unfinished work. She has, she says, "taken over his own title, like a torch from a previous runner." But there are reasons to wish she had put that torch down.

Ms. Angier carries a torch for Levi in more ways than one. Even allowing for the usual extent to which biographers may fall in love with their subjects, this is one worshipful tome. Acknowledging that she has a pathological knowledge of virtually everyone who ever met her subject, Ms. Angier declares, "I want to read every mark he left on paper, and every mark he left on people." Levi's widow, Lucia, still has some of her husband's papers, which Ms. Angier says she "guards like a Cerberus."

Ms. Angier, who also played the scholarly busybody in her exhaustive 1990 book about Jean Rhys, sets out to do battle with such obstacles. Often relying on her favorite phrase, which is "it seemed to me," she determines to probe every aspect of Levi's life and work, no matter how uncontroversial or small. The floodlight of her investigative powers is directed with equal vigor toward the low grade he once received in Italian class and his philosophical search for the meanings of manhood and survival.

From melting at the "tawny gaze" of Levi's friend Alberto Salmoni to patronizing the women toward whom Levi had tender feelings, Ms. Angier is nothing if not relentless. In one case: "I look at Gabriella, and I think, sadly: no. It wouldn't have worked. Primo needed sexual love, and she felt none for him. He needed unconditional love." With another woman, referred to as an "admirable opponent," Ms. Angier attempts flat-out badgering. "So really," the author says, "it's not him you blame, it's yourself." Then she comments to the reader: "She would never tell me her story; so I had decided to tell it to her." By way of ending this encounter, Ms. Angier adds, "She never asks about this book."

Just as Levi's experiences in Auschwitz in 1944 and 1945 are the bulwark of his own writing, they provide the core of Ms. Angier's portrait. Once again, she seeks the original models for those who figure in Levi's writing, provides reams of background information and systematically inflates small disputes. Claiming to cut through "these swirling mists of distortion and denial," Ms. Angier, for instance, gets to the bottom of a possible calumny about Lello Perugia, whom Levi called Cesare in "The Truce."

Was Lello made to appear too rough-edged on the page? He complains about this and also denies the suggestion that he ever used Levi's syringe to inject water into fish called ryba, making them appear fatter, or washed them with soap so they wouldn't smell. "Like the grasshopper to whom Primo so brilliantly compared him," Ms. Angier writes, to accompany her lengthy discussion, "Lello is hopping mad."

When it comes to a final assessment of this matter, "The Double Bond" characteristically waffles. "Curiously, it is Lello who makes me believe Primo, and Primo who makes me believe Lello," the author observes. And her thoughts are often similarly personal, verbose and vague. "And Primo himself?" she asks at one point. "He was writing too. And what he was writing, and what he said about it, are both very interesting." They are of course more interesting than water-treading like this.

In a theory that she treats as startling, Ms. Angier states that "the central, painful and paradoxical truth is that Primo Levi was depressed before and after Auschwitz, but not in it." She believes his death in 1987 to have been suicide induced by depression, and she finds evidence of other suicides in his family. Yet she says that he was able to feel fully, creatively alive, galvanized by the challenge to bear witness immediately after his concentration camp ordeal. Paraphrases of "The Periodic Table" and "Survival in Auschwitz" are legitimately invoked to support this analysis, and are used more freely than excerpts. But the rephrasing means that much of their spirit is lost in translation.

For a scholar who has spent 10 years on research for this book and has attended her share of Primo Levi conferences, Ms. Angier offers a surprisingly flimsy literary overview. She relies constantly and dutifully upon texts without successfully stepping back; as a consequence, "The Double Bond" has endless trees and not enough forest. Readers who are not intimately familiar with Levi's literary, scientific and moral achievements will not find them easily approachable here.

Finally, the book's psychological thoughts about Levi's isolation and depression wind up being amazingly mundane. As she probes the single biggest personal problem in his life, his controlling mother, Ms. Angier tries to coax suspense out of the stunningly obvious. She finds evidence that Rina Levi was not affectionate during Primo's boyhood. She coaxes forth the thesis that Primo was not hugged by his mother. "I do not think my mother ever hugged me," he apparently told someone. This book's conclusions, for all their heft, are not often more complex than that.

The Experiment

by Ruth Franklin

Post date: 06.24.02
Issue date: 07.01.02

The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography
by Carole Angier
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 898 pp., $40)

Read this review here

A HARD CASE

by JOAN ACOCELLA

The life and death of Primo Levi.

Issue of 2002-06-17
Posted 2002-06-10

Read this article here

A race to the bookshop

A rival biographer spurred Ian Thomson to complete his life of Primo Levi

Saturday March 1, 2003

Read this article here

Biographers' two-step

Carole Angier feared her rival was casting voodoo spells on her

Saturday May 17, 2003
The Guardian

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       The Jerusalem

Report .com

Books: The Chemistry of Havoc

Matt Nesvisky

Read this article here

July 12, 2002, 11:49AM

An Italian Jew caught by history

By PAUL MARX

THE DOUBLE BOND:
Primo Levi: A Biography.
By Carole Angier.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $40; 898 pp.

Read this article here

The agonised self
Book Reviews
Lavinia Greenlaw
Monday 1st April 2002

The Double Bond - Primo Levi: A Biography
Carole Angier Viking, 898pp, £25
ISBN 0670883336

Primo Levi admired his grandfather, who was known for never using more than six words at a time. So what would Levi, famous for his own concision and restraint, have made of these 1,522 pages? Does his entire oeuvre even add up to as much?

One of the finest writers on the Holocaust, Levi distilled his work from a great weight of metaphysical anguish, private disturbance, scientific knowledge and terrible fact. Although Carole Angier and Ian Thomson are unsurprisingly overwhelmed by all this, both biographies are worth reading. Angier actively occupies her pages, making this a live-action, opinionated and exhausting account. Thomson is more disciplined, coherent and respectful, but less imaginative and fluent.

Levi was born into the Turin bourgeoisie in 1919 and spent his life, with the exception of his war work and time in Auschwitz, in the same apartment. It was owned by his mother, who remained there with her son and his family, and outlived him. Set against such monolithic constancy were schisms between art and science, imperative and fear, and, above all, the personal and the historical. Within this last tension, the biographer is faced with too little information on the one hand, and too much on the other. As if to compensate, and confronted by a lot of closed doors, Angier in particular sets out to disinter secrets. Where Thomson is content to pass on what can sound like well-worn tales, Angier sets out to lift lids and turn tables.

Levi turned his life into art with a rare kind of success, perhaps because he understood the need to unanchor fact in order to illuminate truth. This freedom is what makes his testament so remarkable. Who else could take liberties with such subject matter? Some friends and fellow survivors were deeply hurt to see themselves altered - made more peasant-like, more flighty or more calculating - and to see important memories rearranged, but Levi was unrepentant. He called this "rounding out" a story, a method he applied to his own life. Both biographers are aware of what Thomson calls Levi's "elaborate autobiographical fictions", but it is Angier who teases them out, lapsing into excited italics when clues fall into place.

Thomson's starting point, his one meeting with Levi, is determinedly low-key. He describes the writer as ever in shirtsleeves, his Auschwitz tattoo visible, sitting "in a worn chintz armchair, smoking the occasional 'Alaska' menthol cigarette. His beard was neatly clipped and he wore metal-rimmed glasses." The last thing Thomson mentions is a sketch of a broken-down fence at Auschwitz. He reminds us that, for many years, Levi managed a paint and varnish factory outside Turin. He is also "struck by how stock Levi's answers seem".

Thomson is more interested in the process and less in the implications. Both he and Angier pursue the story behind the suicide of Levi's grandfather, who jumped from a window. Whereas Angier tries to discover exactly why he did it, Thomson concentrates on newspaper and police reports. He notes the parallel with Levi's own "precipitazione dall'alto", or fall from a great height; Angier wrings it dry.

Either of these biographies will satisfy the reader's curiosity about Levi's milieu, but the man himself remains at a distance. His family would not talk to Angier at all, while Thomson met his son once and interviewed his sister. Angier, without any apparent embarrassment, launched campaigns to persuade the now elderly people who had been Levi's most private passions and confidantes to talk. She decides for herself how truthful they are being and worries that Levi's wife will destroy his papers, complaining with astonishing petulance that Lucia guards them "like Cerberus".

Descriptions of Levi at 16 or 60 suggest the same distinctly unheroic man: shy, physically agonised, acutely observant, repressed and fearful. These biographies are full of courage, sacrifice and salvation, but mostly other people's. Levi seems to have followed the crowd, becoming a compliant fascist youth when it was like joining the Scouts, and half-heartedly acting for the Resistance. He had an instinct for protecting himself, from marking his tennis balls with silver nitrate to ensuring that he could never leave home. It is suggested that he was a negligent boss who risked being held responsible for a number of industrial accidents; and he describes himself as having the "Olympian selfishness of all husbands". He never wrote about his invalid mother, and only briefly about his wife. His intense relationships with other women remained inert.

Locked into family, city and history, Levi was attracted to space and weightlessness: mountaineering, ice skating and astronomy. He seems as essentially volatile and superficially blanked out as ice, snow and stars. He pales beside large personalities: the chemistry professor who liked to wear a fez, the one who wove tapestries, and the one who sizzled steak over a gas flame, devised artificial lemon juice and disposed of bombs. Levi was an authority on lacquer-coated insulation cables. He worked at the same factory for almost 30 years.

He achieves a kind of artistic escapology. In an essay on his home, "My House", he borrows Le Corbusier's phrase "a machine for living" and describes the place as "characterised by a lack of character". He claims to be little affected by environment, but bumps into memories with every step: the key that hung on a hook for 20 years, or the realisation that his favourite armchair sits on the spot where he was born. The reader is immobilised, surrounded, while Levi slips out the door behind them.

The trajectory of Levi's life is not a natural one, which adds to the challenges of writing about it. His picturesque childhood prompts Thomson to unleash story-book caricatures: the grandmother who was a "sharp-tongued, sour-faced woman who did not suffer fools gladly"; the girl who had "dark curly hair, expressive eyes and a knowing smile"; and "a rock of a man with dark, intelligent eyes . . . a lone wolf with a wolf's snarl for the coming danger". Angier is also very taken with all the background characters, but then so was Levi, and they are best viewed in his work.

As the war closed in, Levi continued to study and take holidays. Thomson skilfully negotiates the wider context from the Nuremberg Laws to Kristallnacht and inexorably on, while emphasising the all-round failure to grasp what was to come. Some Jews took boxing lessons and others learnt English, while the Levi family hatched a scheme, never realised, to escape to Brazil.

Angier and Thomson have chosen to process their material so thoroughly that both books often read like fiction, leaving one to wonder "Who said?" and "How come?". The few direct observations stand out, such as this naive letter from an Italian-run holding camp: "Dearest Nella . . . The Jewish company is most dull; the Aryan, excellent . . . I'd like if possible to have a pair (or two) of shoes and a couple of dresses . . . a towel and a table cloth . . . good toilet and laundry soap!" A cousin describes Levi's father thus: "His arms were too long for his body, but he was so full of enthusiasm and bookish charm that you didn't notice how ugly he was." Thomson talks more crudely of his "bumpkin gaucheness" and "tendency to swank". Another cousin describes Levi and his sister as "poised between angels and nonentities", telling us more about Levi's nature than anything else.

The trajectory rises towards the climax of Auschwitz, which comes a third of the way through Levi's life, before he has written a single book. This leaves Angier and Thomson with the difficulty of making what follows as interesting. In fact, it is when dealing with Levi's later life and chronic difficulties that these biographies come into their own: his struggle for literary recognition, his depression and his pathologically symbiotic relationship with his mother. Angier is most alert to the poignancy of Levi's agonised self and the demands he made on others.

The ease with which we can now gather knowledge is reflected in such excess. Both books would be more lucid at half the length, especially that of Angier, whose valuable insights lie buried in runaway expanse. As the poet Elizabeth Bishop said, if you want to get to know a writer, by all means read their life and letters, but first read all of their work.

Lavinia Greenlaw is a poet and critic. Her novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, is out in paperback (Flamingo, £6.99)

The life in Levi's writing

25-3-2002

The Double Bond: Primo Levi, the Biography / Primo Levi
Carole Angier (Viking, £20) / Ian Thomson (Hutchinson, £

 Reviewed by Eric Griffiths

His uncle Oreste started Primo Levi climbing at about the age of eight. In search of alpine strawberries, they roamed the hills which cradle Turin; to make the going easier, his uncle would say, as Virgil says to Dante, "walk in my footsteps". As puberty loomed and Levi came in for his ration of bullying because he was puny, "a strange tiny animal" as he remembered he seemed to his classmates, and because he was Jewish (they told him circumcision was a form of castration), the mountains became for him both a place of refuge and a vast gymnasium in which he acquired the quiet power of endurance, a modest wiriness.

It was from their snows that he was taken by the fascist militia, shortly before Christmas 1943, first to the plains of Emilia-Romagna, to the detention-camp at Fossoli amid the orchards of Modena, and thence to Auschwitz, that low point where the most prominent verticals to which he might lift up his eyes were chimneys.

It seems to me superfluous to tell what happened to Levi there, as he did this himself in his piercing book, Se questo ë un uomo. The title in English is If This is a Man, but would be better rendered Whether This is a Man, or even Would You Call This a Man? for the phrase comes from one of his poems in which he asks his readers to "consider whether this is a man" and then describes himself as he was then, there.

He survived, but in the 40 years of writing which followed persisted in asking what he had survived as. This was not a merely personal question about the damage done to him and, even more, by him; he wrote with pained honesty about the shifts to which he was put to eke out those sparse days - the petty thefts, the bamboozling of less adept prisoners, all manner of connivance to ensure that he should be, as far as possible, first in any line that might sustain his life. He was ashamed of himself, but also, as he said in 1955, ashamed to belong "to the same species that had built Auschwitz". He had an unusually keen sense of what Marx called "species-being", of that human solidarity which the Bible expresses by saying that we are all descended from common parents. So the question Se questo asks the reader about Levi is also one the book asks each reader: what is left of your humanity?

While he waited for his writing to be recognised (it took a dozen years and a second, revised edition), he married and brought up two children in the apartment where he was born, his mother's rooms over which she continued to rule. He also returned to his second mother, matter itself, and to his work as a chemist; his less successful projects included an attempt to discover a tooth-dye so fashionable ladies could match their smiles to their other accessories and a scheme for synthesizing alloxan - essential to lip-stick - from python-droppings. Some of the older paintwork you now see in Italian hotels, and some of the insulated wiring that unnerves you in their showers, will be the indirect result of Levi's ingenuity and care.

His appetite came back. In the camp, he had eaten, among other things, cotton-wool and soup that "might contain a sparrow's wings, prune stones, salami rind, even bits of La Stampa newsprint"; now he could get the tripe he loved and not only frogs' legs but their heads too.

Eventually he won so many awards for his books, a sensible person acquainted with the vagaries of literary-prize infighting might wonder whether he can have been that good a writer. He was. The Truce, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, along with a couple of handfuls of short stories, will die only with the language in which they are written. He became, alas, a celebrity, made public statements, gave interviews, undertook a lecture-tour of the US, where he admired the skyscrapers of Manhattan as "like Dolomites of light"; he was personally met at a reception in Broadcasting House by Sue MacGregor when he appeared on Woman's Hour.

He fell to his death down the stairwell of his birthplace on 11 April 1987 while deep in one of the depressions from which he had long regularly suffered. The Corso Re Umberto on which he lived runs parallel to the train-lines and the river Po; he could not see his mountains from his window.

These two biographies are more interested in Levi's life than in his writing, let alone the life of his writing. That is the main thing wrong with both of them. Carole Angier is actually more interested in her own intuitions about Levi than in her victim; in one six-page chapter there are 103 references to herself. She calls him "Primo" though she never met him; she understands him so well she can speak for him with confidence: "I don't know if Primo said anything to Paolo; but I'm sure he did", "So he always said, and I am sure he meant it."

Indeed, she fears we might mistake her for him and has to point out "this is me now, not Primo". She need not have feared. The atrocious shoddiness of her writing makes it easy to tell the difference, as in her addiction to "almost" - " almost certainly mostly Sephardic", "his almost superhuman detachment, which could seem almost inhuman as well", "still not finally true, but almost". "It is essential - this is Levi now, not me - to mistrust the almost-the-same, the virtually identical, the approximate".

Ian Thomson met and talked to Levi but does not flatter himself that they were on first name terms. The precise, biographical details in this review come from his thorough and patient study which, unlike its rival, inspires trust in a reader. Yet just as Carole Angier is shockingly and unabashedly ignorant of Dante (one of the two Italian writers most important to Levi), Thomson knows nothing of the Hebrew scriptures, as shows in the disgraceful slur that "the Old Testament does not recognise forgiveness", though Levi said the Bible was his favourite book: "It's an early version of the Brothers Grimm".

They are both sure he had a "humanist faith" or a "secular, universal spirit", whatever those cartoon-captions mean. "Their myopia is incredible," as Levi wrote of Darwin's detractors; in Levi's work, "a deep and serious religious spirit breathes, the sober joy of a man who extracts order from chaos, who rejoices in the mysterious parallelism between his own reasoning and the universe" (The Search for Roots).

Battle of the biographers

by David Sexton

26th March 2002

You wait for ages and then they all come at once. Buses and biographies both. This week, not one but two major biographies of one of the great writers of the last century, Primo Levi, are being published. Both the biographers, Ian Thomson and Carole Angier, have dedicated years to these books. And now here they are, suddenly thrust into the ring together, denied a solo appearance, forced to square up to one another like reluctant prizefighters, each hoping to knock the other out. It's a grotesque way for a life's work to be published.

Nobody wants it to happen. But once it has become apparent that biographies are going head to head, publishers often settle for simultaneous publication, rather than risk coming second and not being reviewed at all. There have been many similar bouts in the last few years, and some have turned nasty. In 1996, two substantial biographies of Samuel Beckett were published together: one, authorised, by James Knowlson, the other, Irish, by Anthony Cronin. A scholarly article has subsequently suggested that Cronin made numerous changes to the text of his book at the last minute, between the proof copy and the final hardback, using information he had evidently gleaned from an advance copy he obtained of his rival's book.

In 1994, a convoy of books on Graham Greene appeared. Norman Sherry was only part of the way through his enormous authorised biography when Michael Shelden ambushed him with a complete life of Greene in a single volume, thoroughly ridiculing the writer. Sherry has soldiered on. Other biographers retire hurt. In 1997, three biographies of Jane Austen hit the bookshops simultaneously. Claire Tomalin was generally declared the victor over David Nokes, after Valerie Grosvenor Myer had been eliminated at an early stage. But several other would-be Austen biographers were forced to abandon their work, losing years of labour.

So it goes on. A few years ago, Victoria Glendinning found herself in the middle of a Trollope collision. "When I began, I thought I was the only person in the world even interested in Trollope. Then I found not one, not two, but three American professors had been working on the same thing for years. I thought I'd cut my throat. Then a friend told me to think of these Americans as warming the bed for me," she says cheerily.

Some of these pile-ups are the simple result of a race to get a book out as soon as possible after the subject has died. Literary entrepreneurs attempt to beat the official biographers. A few succeed. Lisa Chaney managed to get her life of Elizabeth David out a full year before Artemis Cooper produced her authorised version. It seems that Garry O'Connor will perform the same feat with Alec Guinness, who died in August 2000. His life of the actor, disclosing his bisexuality, is due to appear in October. The authorised version by the novelist Piers Paul Read has been announced, optimistically, for autumn 2003, so O'Connor will get his season in the sun. Read is calm about the situation, even the prospect that O'Connor's paperback will end up competing with his hardback. "What can one do? 'It's just business', as they say in The Godfather. The books will be very different. There could be people who will choose to buy his book rather than mine," he says generously.

Many of the crunches are completely predictable to all concerned. Last year, Bob Dylan turned 60 and a gaggle of biographers joined the party, some uncovering previously unknown girlfriends, others hopefully repackaging old wares. But to other writers, the discovery of rivals comes as a complete shock. Ian Thomson only realised he had competition for the life of Primo Levi when he found that Carole Angier was interviewing the same people as him. One interviewee had booked them both in at the same time. "It was like a scene in a bad Woody Allen film," says Thomson, before reaching rapidly for a more elevated comparison: "the whole thing is Jamesian, these two biographers meeting ..."

Thomson calls the simultaneous publication no more than "rather galling" and "a little anxiety-making". His publisher, Anthony Whittome at Hutchinson-even welcomes the extra attention the coincidence might attract.

Angier, who knew she had a rival from the start, is much more agonised. "I'd never do it again, it's extremely painful," she says. "Of course, I think about his pain as well, but I mostly think about mine." Working on the book, she'd felt as though she had a doppelganger. When she was talking to an interviewee, "the telephone would ring and it would be the other one. It was like catching a glimpse of yourself in the mirror".

For now, neither has yet read the other's book - but they have agreed to appear together later this year at the Edinburgh Festival. Both reluctantly concede that their books have been thrust into a Darwinian struggle for survival. "It's not necessary only one survives; conceivably both could survive," Angier hopes.

Many years ago, the National Book League set up a register of biographies, so that inadvertent clashes could be avoided. It soon collapsed. Few writers cared to advertise their plans to their competitors. A good idea, or the discovery of a new source, for a biography is worth money. Biographers are among the age's "most successful literary realtors", as the poet Geoffrey Hill scornfully puts it, and biography continues to be an expanding genre, feeding the appetite for story left unsatisfied by so much modern fiction, addressing the whole human span, from beginnings to ends. So these tussles to dominate the market - to have a biography become, for a few years at least, the biography of the subject - will continue.

But then they are not new. Biography has always been a blood sport. Dr Johnson died in 1784. James Boswell had been collecting material for his "Life" ever since they met in 1763. And he set to work at once, but his rivals beat him into the bookshops. Hester Thrale published her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson just only years after his death. Sir John Hawkins produced his biography a year later. Boswell reacted with anguish as he toiled on. The Life of Samuel Johnson didn't appear until 1791 but, after more than 200 years, it has never been challenged as the finest biography in the language. Sometimes it's better to be late.

20th-century writers

The riddle of Turin

Apr 11th 2002
From The Economist print edition

He worked in the room where he was born and led an uneventful life, even for a writer—if you ignore the concentration camp
 

PRIMO LEVI (1919-87) was an industrial chemist, a writer and an Auschwitz survivor. His first book, “If This Is a Man”, which came out in the United States as “Survival in Auschwitz”, and his last, “The Drowned and the Saved”, are among the best books of witness. Aside from the year in the camps—his first experience of foreign travel—another adventurous year returning to Italy by way of Russia (described in his book “The Truce”) and a year he was forced by Italy's fascist government to find work in Milan, he spent his entire life in his birthplace, Turin; his study was the room he was born in. He had one employer for 30 years, one wife, two children. It is—always excepting Auschwitz—one of the calmest, least rackety lives of a 20th-century writer. It gave the appearance of being completely, almost bizarrely, well-adjusted: Levi visited post-war German factories for his work, took courses at the Turin Goethe Institute and translated Franz Kafka and Gottfried Benn. And then, on a Saturday morning, his wife out of the house shopping, his infirm mother with her nurse, the (apparently harmless) post just delivered, he threw himself over the third floor banister into the stairwell and was instantly dead.

It was a great shock to the sage and saintly reputation that was accruing to Levi internationally, which he did not especially want and which probably put him under more strain. If not for the suicide, it is unlikely that two immense biographies would have come out together in a single week. Both books originate in Britain, the British being the biographer-ants of literary entomology. Both come to the same conclusion: that Levi died not from some late recrudescence of Auschwitz in the form of survivor guilt, but because of his own chronic, if not lifelong, depression. Apart from that, their exhaustiveness and their length (Carole Angier's is around 900 pages, Ian Thomson's a trim 600), the two accounts could hardly be more different. One is modest, useful, well-written, a credit to its subject; the other is not.

Ms Angier's book is not so much a biography as a traumatography—the story of a wound. She seems unable to touch something without making it a little confusing and quite a bit worse: Levi's ancestry, parents, home, childhood, friends, studies. In her narrative, she produces endless—and endlessly inferior—retellings, first of Levi's beautiful and tangential little autobiography, “The Periodic Table”, and then of the Auschwitz books. Her own style is sticky with vulgar intensifiers: “so”, “still”, “much”, “very”, “only”, “extraordinary”, “brilliant”, “supremely”. Like a cold-caller she refers to Levi, whom she never knew, as Primo. Her title is shamelessly taken from an unpublished manuscript of his on which he was working. This is biography as process, as quest. Great tracts of it are, in a phrase of the moment, touchy-feely. The biographer here is a weathervane inserted into the subject's soul, self-importantly spinning and rattling.

Mr Thomson, by contrast, endears himself to the reader by admitting right away (and then not again): “It is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone's life.” A little later, he says, “It seemed to me dishonest, as well as dangerous, to recast Levi's printed words in a biography”—which, though he wouldn't have known it, is what Ms Angier does. He keeps some distance, at times a critical distance, from what he is writing about. There is “something rather priggish” about the young Levi, he was “in all likelihood not manifestly ‘exceptional'” at school; his verses are “syrupy”; the science fiction stories, “bagatelles really—are able but undistinguished.” After Ms Angier, for whom everything seems liable to be equally and simultaneously brilliant and terrible, this is a great relief.

Both biographers have certain coups they alone were able to pull off; Ms Angier got a sight of the manuscript of Levi's “Double Bond”, a sort of follow-up to “The Periodic Table”, and spoke to anonymous women friends of his late years. Mr Thomson met and interviewed Levi himself shortly before he died—attractively, it is not something he makes great play with; he was 24 and exceedingly nervous, he says—and also spoke at length to Levi's sister. He seems easier with Italy, and with Italian (Ms Angier herself confesses to not recognising a famous phrase from the opening of Dante's “Inferno”). His book is thickened and lit by more historical and cultural information, and by closer attention to what you might call healthy externals. It is only from Mr Thomson that you would know that Levi climbed Mont Blanc; that he visited Israel in 1968 and Sicily in 1980; that he drove, and what he drove; that he smoked, and what he smoked; that he liked his food and drink (his favourite dish was polenta and frogs). It is Mr Thomson who squashes the story that Levi was taught by Cesare Pavese, a great Italian novelist and poet; he who talks about the successful suit Levi brought against I.G. Farben, makers of Zyklon B, the gas used in the camps; he who gives us a sense of the man Levi might be to meet: sweet, witty, lucid, modest, small.

Levi was a great writer and a gifted chemist, but the thing he was best at—even as it most reduced him, and probably because it most reduced him—was Auschwitz. Unfortunately for him—in spite of loose talk from friends and biographers about his having imprisoned himself on the Corso Re Umberto, or of his home life with his wife and his old mother as a kind of laager—it was of limited application elsewhere in his life. An investigating magistrate looking into the many near-accidents at his chemical factory described him as “a dangerously unprofessional man”; a friend described him as “a chemist on loan to literature”; and Levi himself praised a group of stories he was sent as “best of all, clearly not the work of a so-called professional writer.” How such a man—slight, childlike, needy, private, shy away from his family and friends—ended up becoming at times almost a professional survivor and one of the earliest literary celebrities in translation is a fascinating and improbable story. He wanted to be a writer not a survivor, but it was being a writer that he could not survive.

LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS

Primo Levi's last torments

Clive James

6/19/02

Levi's life and death bring out the worst in modern biography

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Ian Thomson
PRIMO LEVI
624pp. Hutchinson. £25.
0 09 178531 6
Carole Angier
THE DOUBLE BOND
Primo Levi - A biography
898pp. Viking. £25.
0 670 88333 6

What do we need to be told about Primo Levi that he doesn’t tell us himself? In his middle twenties he spent a year in Auschwitz. Later on he wrote a book about it, the book we know as If This Is a Man : one of the great books of the twentieth century, and possibly the greatest among its sad category of great books we wish had never needed to be written at all. The book is beyond anybody else’s power to summarize, since it is already a summary. The same might be said of his other writings, which were published intermittently during the remainder of his life and cumulatively suggested that one of the best reasons to continue living, after one had seen the world at its worst, was to get things written that would establish a place for the introspective self even in a context of overwhelmingly destructive historic forces.

But a commercial exploitation of his personal history was the last thing on his mind. Slow to commit himself as a full-time professional writer even after he was famous, he went on earning a salary as an industrial chemist. Though his waxing fortunes would have permitted a move up, he never left the flat in Turin where he had spent his whole life except for those fateful two years away when he was young: one year in Milan, the other in Poland. Everyone who knew him knew that his home life was hard. Having assigned to his wife the duty of looking after his ailing mother, and having thus made sure that they would spend a claustrophobic day with each other before he came home to them in the evening, he had created conditions for himself that might have been considered too obvious a stress-inducing mechanism even by Goldoni. And it all went on for years, whereas a Goldoni play only seems to.

But Levi never complained in public. Though Turin is a tight-lipped town, there were friends of friends who said that he complained to certain women, some of whom in turn complained that he was never allowed out for long. It seemed a fair inference that his reasons to stay were better than his reasons to leave, always granted that his wife was not herself grappling with the question of whether to keep him or kick him out. In his creative work there were hints at personal unhappiness, but the obliquity served only to bolster the impression that to preserve a decent reticence was a condition for creating at all. He must have struck some kind of workable balance, because he never stopped writing for long. In Italy, where there is a Booker committee around every corner, literary prizes count. He won them all. In the wider world, he was on his way to the Nobel Prize; it was only a matter of time. His life was a testament to the virtues of getting the past in proportion. All over the world, his admirers took solace from his true success, which was to grow old gracefully in spite of everything: think of what had happened to Primo Levi, and yet he still wanted to create, to live a life of order, to stick with it to the end.

Thus it was doubly, shockingly unexpected when, at the age of sixty-seven, he killed himself by throwing himself down the stairwell of the apartment block in Turin. Though the possibility should not too soon be ruled out that he told us quite a lot about this before he did it, there is certainly no denying that he couldn’t tell us much about it afterwards. Previously, he had left little room for other commentators to be more profound about his life than he could. Now they had space to operate. They also had what looked like an open invitation: there was a mystery to be investigated. Why, exactly, did he kill himself? Auschwitz had been ages ago. Could it have something to do with that other mystery, the mystery of his private life?

For modern biographers, who increasingly feel less inhibited about writing to a journalistic brief, the prospect was hard to turn down. Two of them moved into the Turin area and got on the case. We must try to be grateful that they proved so diligent. They interviewed everybody except each other. (A bit odd, that, since they must have passed each other often, going in and out of apartment blocks to grill Levi’s surviving friends, acquaintances and putative mistresses.) The diligence, however, has produced two books which, arriving at the same moment, weigh on the spirit almost as much as they do on the muscles. You can just about hold one of them in each hand, but not for long.

Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi is already heavier than a housebrick. Carole Angier’s The Double Bond is heavier than Ian Thomson’s, partly owing to the abundance of material yielded by her talents as a mind-reader. To increasingly comic effect, women pining for the allegedly maladroit Levi (“like a child in matters of the heart”, even though – perhaps because? – “a Colossus of thought”) show up under sobriquets to protest that nothing will make them speak, little knowing that Angier has access to their brainwaves by telepathy. Even on the level of ascertainable fact, rarely can she make a point in less than a page. She turns subtlety into a blunt instrument. She refuses, for example, to be fooled by the seemingly obvious connection between Levi’s experience of Auschwitz and his suicide forty years later. She is confident on the subject. “Not Auschwitz, but his own private depression, killed him in the end.” If she means that the memory of Auschwitz might not have been enough to kill him without his private depression, there could be some sense to what she says, and thus reason for the confidence. But if she means that the private depression would have killed him even without Auschwitz, she is being confident about what she can’t possibly know. She could be in a position of certainty only if Levi had killed himself before he got to Auschwitz. But he killed himself afterwards. It was long afterwards, and in the interim he had accumulated plenty more experience to be depressed about; but to assert that his most terrible memory played no crucial part in the decision that sent him over the balustrade is to make a far larger claim to knowledge about the way his mind worked than he ever did.

Ian Thomson is less given to speculation, which is the main reason why his book is considerably shorter than Angier’s. Since life, too, is short, and time reading about Primo Levi will probably be time taken away from reading Primo Levi (unless the reader is devoted to no other subject), it should logically follow that if either book is to be recommended, Thomson’s should be the one. Apart from his harder head, another reason for Thomson’s comparative conciseness is that he simply writes with more snap than his rival can command, although like many another in the new generation of serious literati he somehow dodged remedial English on the way to his honours degree. . . .

“Only luck could save you” was a favourite admonition of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s to anyone cherishing the illusion that in Stalinist times there might have been a strategy for dodging fate. Solzhenitsyn knew that it was only the accident of his being a mathematician that saved his life. Levi knew that it was his qualification in chemistry that got him selected for the work camp instead of the gas chamber. But a lot of other lucky breaks were necessary as well. He had a few words of German; he fluked a double soup ration; and, at the end, the scarlet fever he almost died of saved him from the forced march on which he would have died for certain. One of the many great things about him was that he never attributed all these strokes of fortune to a benevolent fate. When, after the war, someone in Italy said that Providence had intervened so that Levi might bear witness, Levi became uncontrollably angry for one of the few times in his life. Here lies the full meaning of the “Kuhn’s prayer” sequence in If This Is a Man : a full meaning which Angier goes on worrying at in an unnecessary attempt to make it fuller still.

Kuhn thanked God for sparing him. When Levi said that, if he had been God, he would have spat at Kuhn’s prayer, Levi was saying that there was no such thing as divine intercession for an individual case. The point isn’t really all that hard to understand. Levi, after all, devoted the best of his magnificent literary powers to driving it home. Levi also made the uncomfortable point that when it came to surviving the initial selections, high qualities of character were more likely to be a drawback than an advantage. Angier, when praising the “bold” personality of one of Levi’s female contemporaries, does so by imagining her being caught up in the Holocaust: “I think she might have survived.” But Levi spent a good part of his last book, The Drowned and the Saved , pointing out that the Lager system punished any signs of fighting back with certain death. So, unless her boldness had been accompanied by a prophetic capacity to keep it concealed, Levi’s friend wouldn’t have lasted five minutes. Angier’s intuitive grasp of survival potential is the very kind of sophisticated incomprehension which added to Levi’s despair in the later part of his life.

The question remains of how desperate he was already. It will always remain, because it is unanswerable. For all we know, suicide is the inevitable escape route for anyone with clear sight, and the rest of us get to die in bed only because we have the gift of regrowing our cataracts from day to day. Seen steadily and seen whole, life is hard to bear even in conditions of civilized normality. In Levi’s case, there was the Holocaust. Later on there were all the forms of its denial: forms that he tirelessly analysed, but with a growing sense that he was trying to mop up the incoming tide. It could be argued that these later disappointments would have been enough to tip him over the edge even if he had never had direct experience of the Holocaust in the first place. But since he did have such experience, it seems perverse to subtract it from the equation, especially when Levi himself made a famous statement on the subject as long after the event as 1978, the year in which his friend and fellow survivor Jean Amery drank poison. Levi had always been impressed by Amery’s contention that the man who has been tortured once stays tortured. Writing about Amery’s suicide, he returned to the same idea. Thomson quotes what Levi said:
Suicides are generally mysterious: Amery’s was not. Faced by the hopeless clarity of his mind, faced by his death, I have felt how fortunate I have been, not only in recovering my family and my country, but also in succeeding to weave around me a “painted veil” made of family affections, friendships, travel, writing and even chemistry.

Carole Angier is very bold to leave this crucial passage out, although one can see that it might have interfered with the main thrust of her original research, in which it is established, to her satisfaction at any rate, that Levi, if he recovered his family, certainly did not succeed in weaving around himself any kind of veil whether painted or otherwise when it came to family affections. Not only was the young Primo Levi “pathologically shy” (not just shy) but the older, post-Auschwitz Primo Levi stayed that way, torn between the wife he was unable to leave and the women he could not allow himself to love. Early or late, he was the victim of a sex problem – a view Angier sticks to even while, on her own evidence, the ageing hero seems to be grappling with the same sex problem as Warren Beatty. The child was the father of the man, and the man was a child in matters of the heart. Why? Because he was depressed all his life. What depressed him? Depression. Thus Angier reduces a moral genius to a helpless plaything of his own childhood and adolescence, a message we might find comforting. But we should watch out for that kind of reassurance. In the democratic component of liberal democracy, there is a sore point called egalitarianism, and the craze for biography might be one of its products. The craze for biography puts the reader on a level with superior people. Part of the effect of Thomson’s book, and the whole effect of Angier’s, is to suggest that Primo Levi was a bit like us; which is only a step away from suggesting that we are a bit like him. Magari , as the Italians say: if only it were true.

The Chronicle Review

From the issue dated June 21, 2002

Searching for Primo Levi

By JULIA M. KLEIN

The lot of biographers is to be stymied by imperfect evidence -- missing letters, reluctant witnesses, fading memories, and the greatest silencer of all, death. How they react to such obstacles may reveal as much about themselves as their subjects. In recent years, the frustrations of biography have called forth some wonderfully unorthodox responses.

Perhaps the most unusual case is that of Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris, as the authorized biographer of Ronald Reagan, was granted unprecedented access to the then-sitting president -- but said he found Reagan's conversation incoherent and his persona impenetrable. His response, after 14 years and considerable depression, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), in which an older, fictional version of the author and other heavily footnoted fictional characters relate their imaginary encounters with the elusive Reagan. Morris's pastiche of fact and fiction was a postmodernist conceit worthy of John Barth, but, for the most part, the critics were not amused.

By contrast, Robert A. Caro, the Newsday investigative reporter turned biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, has taken refuge in obsessive research. At once passionately opinionated and addicted to detail, he has spent decades courting witnesses and scouring archives in order to lay bare Johnson's darkest secrets. While his anti-Johnson tendentiousness may have marred Means of Ascent (Volume 2 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson), Caro's latest, Master of the Senate, has garnered widespread praise for its depiction of the majority leader's legislative legerdemain.

Into this arena, with its inevitable pitfalls and increasingly self-conscious solutions, has stepped Carole Angier with The Double Bond (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a massive, important, and quirky new biography of Primo Levi. Angier, the author of an award-winning biography of Jean Rhys, employs a touch of both Morris's literary imagination and Caro's journalistic intrepidity, but she exercises more restraint than the former and more discretion than the latter. The result is occasionally precious, meandering, and overwrought -- but also indispensable to anyone seriously interested in Levi.

Born in 1919 in Turin, where he lived nearly all his life in the same apartment, the great Italian-Jewish memoirist of the Holocaust killed himself in 1987 by jumping off the third-floor landing. Suicide was a fate he shared with many other famous survivors of Nazi concentration camps, including the poet Paul Celan and the memoirist Jean Améry. And yet Levi had seemed an unlikely victim. (Some few, though not Angier, still speculate that the fall might have been accidental.)

In If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved, Levi cast a cool eye on life and death, heroism and villainy -- and the gray zone in between. His best works are essentially memoirs, leavened with gentle humor and irony, and composed with a novelist's gift for character, metaphor, and narrative structure. He seemed to have mastered, if anyone could have, the experience of Auschwitz, to have contained it in words, if not in memory.

So the task of any Levi biographer -- Myriam Anissimov attempted it, too, in her 1996 account, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist -- is to connect his life, his work, and his death in a way that makes sense of all three. Angier's focus is both wider than Anissimov's -- she spends far more time and space recounting the lives of Levi's friends and relatives -- and deeper. Depression alone can account for suicide, but Angier seeks the psychological roots of Levi's depression, even though a family history of suicide suggests a genetic predisposition.

She takes the title of her book from Levi's own final, unfinished work, which, like The Periodic Table, employs metaphors borrowed from his day job, as an industrial chemist. Angier notes that the Italian Il doppie legame has two possible meanings, referring to both the double bond in organic chemistry and the double bind in psychiatry. Levi's psyche -- his hidden inner life -- is her ultimate prey, and Angier proves a determined hunter.

The barriers to understanding that she faced were common ones -- above all, the refusal to cooperate by the writer's widow, Lucia, who also barred Angier from seeing Levi's personal papers. The tragedy and mystery of his death no doubt made an outsider's probing particularly unwelcome. Another obstacle was what Angier describes as Levi's typically Piedmontese reserve, which kept him from commenting in detail about his wife, his mother, and his children in his writings (even as he immortalized many of his friends and more-distant relatives).

The Double Bond alternates between traditional third-person narration, rich in detail and literary analysis, and first-person accounts of Angier's sometimes faltering quest for information. She is especially good at pinpointing the ways in which Levi embroidered the exploits of his friends and others in his memoirs. Cesare, the good-hearted con artist and fellow Auschwitz survivor in The Truce, is modeled, for instance, on Lello Perugia, a former Communist partisan, a Jew, and a fellow Auschwitz survivor whom Levi met in the camp infirmary. But Levi, Angier says, made him into a character -- "rougher, poorer and simpler than he was." The famous story of Levi's correspondence with the German chemist he encountered in the Buna laboratory of I.G. Farben at Auschwitz is also not quite as he relates it in The Periodic Table. Levi was, in reality, less harsh with the man -- who had helped him in small ways -- than the book indicates, Angier says.

But, in both of these cases, as elsewhere, some details remain elusive. And Angier makes their elusiveness and her own doubts part of the story. What she calls her "irrational chapters" are honest and sometimes surprising. In them, she herself is the principal character, the confidante of many of Levi's surviving friends. At one point, she climbs a mountain with the ebullient, 75-year-old Alberto Salmoni, with whom she says she is "half in love." After the dangerous expedition, she feels the same exhilaration that she imagines Levi must have felt in climbs with Salmoni long ago. The present falls away, revealing the past -- or so Angier hopes.

Angier also gets close -- closer, at least, than past biographers -- to Levi's many intimate women friends. The core of her argument about Levi's "double bind" is that he struggled with both sexual desire and repression; that he both hated women and loved them; that he often feared acting on his impulses; and that he suffered as a result. After numerous crushes, he found in Lucia his first taste of sexual love, Angier tells us. Yet despite this promising start, she says, the couple was badly, even tragically, matched.

How does Angier know this? Her sources include a novel by a local historian loosely based on rumored family history, a single Levi poem, and, more convincingly, quotes from various relatives and friends. Already pathologically tied to his aging mother, according to Angier, Levi felt imprisoned in his marriage to Lucia, an attractive art-history student who, in the postwar years, taught him how to dance. "Neither of them knew yet how strong he really was, and how much he would need his freedom; nor how weak he was, and how little he would dare to seize it," Angier writes, with her characteristic fondness for paradox. Later, Angier says, Lucia -- who was shyer and more withdrawn even than her husband -- would grow jealous of his friendships and seek to bind him more tightly to home.

And yet Levi did seize his freedom, and not just through the serene brilliance of his writing. Angier suggests that he may have been, briefly, the lover of Tullia Ami, an interpreter at the chemical plant he managed and his travel companion on two trips to Russia in the 1970s. (Ami died of cancer in 1991.) Angier speaks also of his lifelong love for Gabriella Garda, a fellow chemist (and, later, chemistry teacher) whom he wrote about as Giulia Vineis in The Periodic Table. "She was his opposite, but also his twin. She was everything," gushes Angier. For Levi, Garda was the road not taken, and they fantasized about marrying after their spouses were gone. But theirs was not a sexual bond, and they were never lovers, she tells Angier.

Angier really hits tabloid pay dirt when she finds -- and leaves partially hidden -- two pseudonymous women who loved Levi in his middle and later years. The extent of the relationships remains unclear, though they were probably platonic. Angier allows the women -- she calls them Lilith (Levi's name for her as well, because of the temptation she posed) and Gisella -- to dole out scraps of information but withhold far more. Lilith, says Angier, was "an admirable opponent," beautiful, mysterious, sad. As for Gisella: "She had known him well, and tried to help him, towards the end. But that was all she could say."

But Angier, though deeply protective of her sources, pieces together clues: Levi told others that Gisella was his "last, best love"; Lilith tells the author that "he loved me to the very end." Gisella finally decides to share her copies of his unpublished work, as well as notes made from her diary that shed light on Levi's chronic bouts with depression. They make clear that he experienced considerable mental anguish near the end -- and that, amazingly, he had felt stronger and more alive even in Auschwitz.

None of those revelations is likely to bring any comfort to the already defensive, privacy-minded Lucia, the most important source on Levi who is still mute. And yet embedded in Angier's bleak assessment of their marriage -- and her kid-glove treatment of his other loves -- is a lesson about the wisdom of cooperating with biographers. Had Lucia done so, had she at least tried to relate her side of the story, would Angier have dared to be so unkind?

In any case, without Lucia, this most conscientious of biographers is still often reduced to informed guesswork. At least she is forthright about the quicksand on which she -- and we, her readers -- are trying to find a footing.

Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic based in Philadelphia.

Scotland on Sunday

Sunday, 7th April 2002
The survivor’s story

Carole Angier
The Double Bond
Viking, £25
 

IF WE could save only one chapter from one book of the 20th century, which should it be? Many titles were proposed as "book of the century" in the rash of lists that greeted the millennium; but one that kept recurring was Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, his eyewitness account of Auschwitz. Its single greatest chapter, according to Carole Angier in her magnificent biography of the Italian author, is ‘The Canto of Ulysses’.

Here, the 24-year-old Levi recites Dante to a fellow prisoner: the story of Ulysses, leading his men to the edge of the Earth, then urging them still further. "You were not made to live like brutes," Levi quotes, "but to follow virtue and knowledge." The message is a flash of hope. At the very limit of human suffering, Levi and his companion are reminded that literature can save their spirits from destruction. Yet for Levi, there is a deeper message. Ulysses is in Hell, sent there for his presumptuousness; and Levi - a secular, free-thinking Jew - is in Hell also. As Angier says, "Primo Levi determined to be the new Dante of this new earthly Inferno."

He always maintained that he had no ambition to be a writer. He was an industrial chemist who happened to witness the Holocaust and survived to report it. This, as Angier shows, was false modesty. Levi was ambitious from his earliest years: initially to be a great scientist. Auschwitz gave him literary material, but Levi fully appreciated the debt he owed the victims. For understandably complex reasons, he could never fully acknowledge his own need for success; and even after he became world famous, he continued to work at the paint factory that hired him soon after the war. Levi’s last work was to have been called The Double Bond: Angier takes it as her own title. It refers to a phenomenon of chemistry; but in Italian it also means a "double bind": a conflict of desires. This, Angier argues, is the key to understanding both Levi and his art.

The Dante he recited in Auschwitz was imprinted in his memory during his schooldays in Turin. His teacher was a lover of literature who shared her enthusiasm with her pupils; but she never recognised Levi’s talent, nor did she have much sympathy for science, which fascinated Primo from an early age. He made mechanical models, and gazed at ditchwater through a microscope. The "two cultures" divide was heavily demarcated during Levi’s education; ironically so, given that Dante himself had used cosmology to frame his great poem. Levi would later replace Dante’s circles with the retinue of chemical elements in The Periodic Table.

Some of that book’s chapters may already have been in Levi’s head before the Second World War, though they did not appear in print until more than 30 years later. The opening chapter, Argon, describes Levi’s own ancestors; and it provides Angier with a perfect way to begin her biography, since her account of Levi’s background is also a dissection of one of his best-known works. We learn two important things here. One is that much of Argon is fiction; or rather, the ancestors Levi describes are not necessarily his own. The other thing we learn is that the spectre of suicide hung over Levi’s family more heavily than Argon might indicate. Levi was aware of rumours about his grandfather’s suicide; but Angier has established the details - a story of financial ruin and humiliation - and they provide a portent of Levi’s own eventual fate.

As for the man himself, we have the testimony of numerous friends and colleagues, and of his own inimitable writing. "Primo Levi’s most characteristic and unvarying trait," Angier says, "was his reserve." She ascribes this in part to geography. We are used to thinking of the Italians as an ebullient lot, with "reserve" being an English invention; yet the Turinese are often described as pesci morti - equivalent to "cold fish" - and their town is nicknamed "the refrigerator of Italy" in reference to the people, not the climate.

Turinese reserve was one of the barriers Angier faced in the course of her massive research for what is genuinely one of the most eagerly awaited biographies of recent years. Levi’s family refused to speak to her; the author’s widow Lucia keeps his papers under lock and key, and will possibly take them to her grave. It was to the other women in Levi’s life that Angier had to turn. Fortunately, he gave them many manuscripts.

Levi plunged to his death in 1987, on the staircase of the house he and his wife shared with his ailing, domineering mother. Many refused to believe it was suicide. Even worse, some said that the Holocaust survivor’s past had finally caught up with him; he had given way to the despair of Auschwitz. Angier’s answer to this is an emphatic ‘no’. Levi beat Hitler, but depression was a greater foe.

Levi was deeply depressed when he arrived at Auschwitz. He had been with a partisan group that was betrayed; one of his companions was a woman he was in love with, and would never see again. Initially, Levi was held in an Italian detention camp, where prisoners ate spaghetti and promenaded in the sun. Italian fascism was authoritarian, but not particularly bloodthirsty. Then the Germans arrived; and for the rest of his life, Levi would struggle to understand how they could do what they did.

In Auschwitz, tortured by thirst, he once reached out of a window to clutch an icicle. The guard beat Levi’s hand. "Warum?" Levi asked. The guard’s reply, in If This is a Man, is one of the defining phrases of Auschwitz. "Hier ist kein warum" - "Here there is no why."

Yet this scene was not included in the first version of the book, which was rejected by the major Italian publishing houses, and sold little more than half its small print run when it appeared in 1947. It was only a decade later, once the book had acquired a word-of-mouth following - and once Anne Frank’s diary had shown there to be a market for Holocaust memoirs - that Levi’s book was reissued, in a version that allowed more of the author’s own feelings to be revealed. Then he began the slow path to fame, and to recognition as one of the 20th century’s greatest, most essential writers.

Despite his renown, Levi became a virtual prisoner in his own home, his energy sapped by caring for his mother and mother-in-law. His wife’s jealousy only added to his frustrations. As he sank further into depression, he admitted to a friend that his misery was "worse than Auschwitz", because now he had no strength to overcome it. Even Dante could not save him.

Carole Angier acknowledges the moral difficulty of probing a life that many still prefer to keep veiled. Yet her superb work does full justice to the dignity of its subject; reminding us of everything that Levi, above all, sought to preserve. Some survivors never forgave him for the way he appropriated and altered their stories; yet all acknowledge the deeper truth of his message. Angier has given us a Primo Levi who is more human, more complex than his saintly public image; and who is also, if anything, even greater for it.

Andrew Crumey is Scotland on Sunday’s literary editor.

Review by Andrew Crumey
 

ELEMENTS OF GENIUS
Passionate biography of Primo Levi says Auschwitz gave him a reason to live

Reviewed by Kenneth Baker

Sunday, May 26, 2002

The Double Bond

Primo Levi: A Biography

By Carole Angier

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX; 898 PAGES; $40

Were the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded posthumously, Primo Levi (1919- 1987) would surely have won it by now. If Levi's own writings alone did not make the case, Carole Angier's overpowering biography would.

A survivor of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, Levi is justly revered as the finest literary witness to one of the 20th century's worst atrocities.

An industrial chemist before and after the war, Levi also solved one of the great literary problems of his age: how to reconcile scientific and humanistic sophistication in one voice.

All his skills and themes converge in "The Periodic Table" (1973). A memoir incorporating many of his camp experiences, it uses the properties of chemical elements to illuminate the temperaments of the characters it portrays.

The book gains some of its power, Angier believes, from the purposes it served in Levi's inner life. " 'The Periodic Table' healed the breaches in Primo between chemist and writer, between hybrid writer and complete one," she writes, "and perhaps even, for a while, between the man who needed recognition and the one who could not endure it."

When Levi died at the age of 67 in a fall from the balcony outside his third-floor apartment in Turin, Italy, the possibility of suicide suddenly threatened to undermine the example of moral strength and freedom from bitterness that countless people had found in his writings. Since then, every commentator on Levi's work has had to decide whether his death was a suicide,

and if so, how that ought to affect our reading of him.

The circumstances did not conclusively rule out an accident. No suicide note was found, and although depressed by the failure of his own health and that of his 91-year-old mother, with whom he and his wife still lived, Levi seemed composed and almost cheerful to those in the household who saw him last.

Angier, however, is convinced that he did kill himself. In assembling evidence for this conclusion, she persuaded one of Levi's fondest confidantes to share a journal of her last contacts with him. A late entry quotes him saying, "I want to end it. But the third floor is not high enough."

Angier argues forcefully that Levi's suicide in no way taints his moral authority or literary legacy. "Primo Levi's death is not part of his testimony, " she writes, "but only of his disease. . . . Primo Levi's depression caused his suicide. But only if Auschwitz caused his depression is there any reason to take [this] step: to say that even Primo Levi could not survive Auschwitz after all. People simply assumed the link from the start."

Angier's thorough study seems unremittingly invasive of the privacy that Levi needed and insisted upon. She admits to "a pathologically detailed knowledge of everyone he ever met." And she is well aware of Levi's own admonition in "Moments of Reprieve": "What the true image is of each of us may be in the end is a meaningless question."

But in the book's final pages, if not well before that, the reader recognizes Angier's decade of devotion to Levi as a rescue mission, to save him and his work once and for all from the stigma of suicide.

"The central, painful and paradoxical truth of Primo Levi's life seems to me this," Angier writes, "that for him Auschwitz was an essentially positive experience. It gave him a reason to live, to communicate, to write; it gave him the subject for the contribution he had always known he could make. . . . [He] was depressed before and after Auschwitz, but not in it. He thought of suicide before and after Auschwitz, but not in it. Depression and suicide were in him from the start. . . . Without the experience of surviving Auschwitz, and without the mission to understand and testify to it, they might have claimed him sooner."

Angier took her title, "The Double Bond," "like a torch from a previous runner," from the book that Levi left unfinished at his death. The term "double bond" refers to the valence of carbon atoms, more stable and complex in organic than in inorganic compounds, but Angier, following Levi, loads it with other implications.

She believes, for example, that even Levi's commitment to inorganic, rather than organic, chemistry expressed his decisive choice "to live in only the rational half of himself."

The inner split caused by his conscious brilliance and his intense shyness and long-unexpressed sexuality made doubleness a theme of his life and writings and of Angier's biography.

Levi presents tremendous obstacles to any biographer, not only because of his intelligence and compulsive reserve, but also in being a paragon of moral seriousness. Angier's life study succeeds because, beyond its diligence and probity, it is an exhaustive exercise of moral imagination. She openly subjects many of her own insights and conjectures to the question of how her subject might have reacted to them. Her narrative has an intimate intensity that puts in the shade Myriam Annissimov's honorable but unimpassioned effort in her "Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist" (1998).

Angier shares with the reader many of the encounters with people and the interpretive quandaries into which her research lead her.

Though writers have various ruses for suppressing questions of trust, it never abates in biography: Can the biographer be trusted to give due weight to facts and anecdotes, to keep her own agenda at bay, to confess the limits of knowledge and speculation?

Not only can we trust her, but Angier's reader also believes at the end of "The Double Bond" that even Levi might have.

November 30, 2003

'Primo Levi': The Art of Self-Effacement

By MICHAEL R. MARRUS

PRIMO LEVI
A Life.
By Ian Thomson.
Illustrated. 583 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $32.50
 

Of the two long biographies of the Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi to be published in less than two years (the other by Carole Angier), Ian Thomson's methodical, respectful work most reflects the preferences of his illustrious subject. Lucid and guarded in expression, Levi had deep and abiding things to say about human nature, science and the Nazis' genocidal attack on European Jews. On all of these, he spoke with quiet authority, as someone who endured a terrible year in Auschwitz, who had a career in applied chemistry and who constantly ruminated on these things as a brilliant writer of prose, fiction and poetry. Inescapably, Levi's life also poses the troubling question: why should this modest, self-effacing man, whose personal triumph over dehumanization was the leitmotif of his work, have apparently killed himself in 1987 when he was succeeding impressively in communicating to the world what he and others had endured?

Levi spent almost his entire life in his birthplace, Turin, a solidly bourgeois city, known to be introspective and subdued, but also with a darker side, reputedly a center for the occult. Levi's origins became problematic only with Mussolini's racial laws, in 1938, when as a student he was allowed to finish studies in chemistry but not to continue. The Levis felt 95 percent Italian, they said, and only 5 percent Jewish. The 5 percent was not insignificant, however. Levi's friends were mainly Jewish, and with them he gravitated toward resistance as careers ended, families lost standing and insults accumulated. His Jewish loyalties strengthened under persecution: not yet 20, he joined a Jewish study group and, in a first act of resistance, helped guard the Turin synagogue in 1941. Although a pacifist, he drifted into active resistance together with his friends. Ill-organized, his ragtag band fell into the hands of the Fascists, and after he spent a few months of captivity in an Italian camp the Germans deported him to Auschwitz in February 1944.

Levi survived Auschwitz through luck, but also as a result of specific circumstances. As a chemist, he worked as a slave laborer in the synthetic oil and rubber subcamp, temporarily sheltered from the gas chambers. A fellow Piedmontese, Lorenzo Perrone, a non-Jewish construction worker, smuggled soup to him. Fortuitously, Levi contracted scarlet fever just prior to the Germans' evacuation of the camp and thus escaped a terrible march westward, which few survived. Following liberation, Levi wandered in Eastern Europe for months before returning home -- an odyssey described years later in ''The Reawakening.'' At 26 he made it back to his mother's apartment in Turin, where he was to live for the rest of his life.

His homecoming was difficult. He was burdened with guilt for having survived. ''Perche io e l'altro no?'' Why me and not the others? he asked. He spoke compulsively, even to strangers, about what he had seen. Gradually, order asserted itself. He wrote his painfully honest, meticulous memoir of Auschwitz, ''If This Is a Man'' (unsatisfactorily entitled ''Survival in Auschwitz'' for the American market), ''a teeming, intensely literary work of great complexity,'' as Thomson rightly describes it. He found a job in a paint and varnish factory, where he remained for nearly 30 years. He married, and moved his wife into his mother's apartment on the fourth floor, from which, when he was 67, he plunged to his death in the stairwell.

For nearly three decades Levi wrote only in his spare time, and for years his books were little read. He thought of himself as on the margins. He made a one-sentence speech when he retired as manager of his factory: ''I believe I have always tried not to get on anyone's nerves.'' And when fame and recognition came at last, when awareness of the Holocaust became widespread, Levi remained troubled: he worried about Italian political squalor, hawkish Israeli policies, revisionist interpretations of the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, misinterpretations of his work and a trivialization of the catastrophe of European Jews.

From a North American standpoint, Levi is an angular Jewish figure. He traveled to Israel in 1968, and while he admired the country's intellectual vitality, he found its culture ''rather provincial'' and came to dislike what he thought was its bellicose spirit. He preferred the Diaspora. During the war in Lebanon in 1982, he denounced Prime Minister Menachem Begin's aggressive policies and his use, in justification, of the rhetoric of victimization. American readers will note how ill at ease Levi was when he visited the United States in 1985. He refused to appear on television, fearing he would make a fool of himself. He protested that he was a lowly chemist, he insisted he was a bore when speaking English, he disliked being pigeonholed as a Jewish writer and he felt snubbed by Saul Bellow.

With Levi's papers apparently still closed to researchers, Thomson, a British journalist, built his biography on interviews -- more than 300, collected over a decade. My main criticism of this excellent book is how little he draws upon Levi's own writing; mostly what we hear are opinions of friends, family, correspondents and acquaintances. They point in one direction on the central question of Levi's suicide. The conclusion that emerges is not dissimilar from that of Carole Angier, who in contrast to Thomson is effusively engaged with her subject and excessively prone to theorize: Levi was depressed before and after Auschwitz; as he struggled to survive, Auschwitz may have been the one place where he was not depressed. Levi could not disentangle himself from his mother, who outlived him by several years, and he seems to have had unsatisfactory sexual relations with women.

In addition, for a survivor whose life's work was to be a witness for Auschwitz, he was understandably distressed when the world did not see things as he did. He suffered health problems acutely -- prostate operations, memory loss and debilitating depressive episodes. ''His suicide was provoked by his clinical depression,'' Thomson concludes, ''which was compounded by a complex web of factors. . . . The real causes for suicide always remain fugitive, because the suffering of those who kill themselves is private and inaccessible.'' He closes his book with the wise observation of Antonio Paccagnella, a carpenter who was also a prisoner in Auschwitz. It might stand as a motto for this modest but imposing work: ''Nobody has the truth in their pocket.''

Michael R. Marrus is the dean of the graduate school of the University of Toronto and the author of ''The Holocaust in History.''

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