The New Republic

The Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography

by Carole Angier

(Farrar, Straus %amp% Giroux, 898 pp., $40)

Click here to purchase the book.

I.Primo Levi, chronicler of the twentieth century's darkest inferno,
has been called a Dante for our time. Like Dante, Levi maps out the
full panorama of his hell, and like Dante he pays special attention
to its human inhabitants. Often in If This is a Man, his memoir of
his time in Auschwitz, Levi pauses to introduce characters as
pathetic and as terrifying as Francesca or Ugolino: the compulsive
Steinlauf, who believes that washing his face is a meaningful way
of asserting his power over the Nazis; Elias the dwarf, who has
superhuman strength and a variety of skills--tailoring,
woodworking, and the ability to "ingest ten, fifteen, twenty pints
of soup without vomiting and without having diarrhea"; Henri, the
supreme organizer, "once seen in the act of eating a real
hard-boiled egg," whose talent is for human exploitation, and who is
the only one of his fellow prisoners whom Levi says that he does
not want ever to see again.

Yet more terrifying than any of these characters is one who appears
after liberation, as Levi is recovering from scarlet fever. Nearby
lies a three-year- old child, "a child of death, a child of
Auschwitz," who may have been born in the camp, and who was never
taught to speak. An older boy, Henek, discovers that the child,
whom a nurse has named Hurbinek, can say a word, but it is a word
that nobody recognizes. "In the following days everybody listened to
him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were
speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek's word
remained secret." No one ever learns the meaning of Hurbinek's
word. He dies in March, 1945, "free but not redeemed."

Hurbinek embodies the survivor's nightmare: to speak and not to be
heard. While at Auschwitz, Levi himself dreamed of telling about
the hunger, the lice, the cruelty of the Kapos, to people who
ignore him; in the dream his sister "looks at me, gets up, and goes
away without a word." After his return from the camp, Levi would
spend the rest of his life testifying as compulsively as the
Ancient Mariner: a citation from Coleridge serves as the epigraph to
his final published book. But despite all the evidence to the
contrary--the schoolchildren who pestered him with questions, the
readers from many countries, including Germany, who sent him
letters--Levi, too, may have felt that he was speaking into a
void.

This is the thesis of Carole Angier's far-reaching, moving, yet
ultimately unsatisfying biography. Levi, Angier argues, lived a
double life: externally calm, rational, light-hearted; internally
conflicted, guilty, self-doubting. Though he exorcised the urge to
testify in his numerous books, in his personal life Levi remained
locked in an interior world, unable to overcome the barriers that
he set up between himself and others. This conflict, Angier says,
destroyed Levi from the inside out, crippling him with depressions
that recurred with increasing intensity throughout his life, until
his suicide in 1987.

Angier's book is not a critical biography or an intellectual
biography. It is an emotional biography. As such, much of her
version of Levi's life--though it omits some important details, and
includes some inappropriate details--is convincing. There can be no
doubt that the emotional dimension of Levi's story is an important
one, especially if we are to have some understanding of why, or
even whether, he killed himself. Even before his death, there were
suggestions that Levi's personal life was not as peaceful as it
appeared. He lived in the same apartment with his mother for nearly
all his life. Though his life was his own greatest subject, he was
fanatically secretive about both his wife and his mother, except to
complain about the latter's ailments. And his suicide was deeply
mysterious: since he died in a plunge from his third-floor landing
and left no note, there has been much speculation that his death
was an accident.

For a writer as intensely, compulsively autobiographical as Levi,
the personal can seem inseparable from the professional. The
problem is that Levi's life as a writer is open for inspection, but
his life as a man is not. Even in Levi's autobiographical writings,
the carefully constructed persona acts as an invisible wall to
shield the man within. At best, an emotional biography of a writer
as private as Levi will be founded upon doubts and speculations. At
worst, it will rely on the possibly mistaken assumptions of friends
and family members, many of whom may not have understood Levi or
may have been motivated by their own biases and jealousies. But
though the inner life of any person must always remain unknown to
others, a biography that betrays no hint of the personal is no
better than a death mask. A biography that intends to depict a life
in all its fullness must at some points shift between the verifiable
and the possible.

II.

Primo Levi's life as a writer began in earnest almost at the moment
he arrived at Auschwitz. "I was conscious of living the fundamental
experience of my life," he wrote later. "The idea of having to
survive in order to tell what I had seen obsessed me night and
day." He would say that he was "saved by my trade": as a chemist,
he was given preferential treatment and was eventually assigned to
a Kommando that worked indoors in a laboratory, with an extra
ration of soup. But it was also his vocation as a writer that saved
him. He may have survived in order to become a writer, but he also
became a writer in order to survive.

Levi "distilled" (as he put it) his eleven months at Auschwitz into
the slim volume Se questo un uomo, or If This is a Man. (It was
published in America under the true but infelicitous title Survival
in Auschwitz.) He wrote that he considered the camp "pre-eminently
a gigantic biological and social experiment, " and the book is in
some ways similar to a laboratory report: it includes detailed
analyses of the soup and the bread served at Auschwitz, and the
"selections" in which the SS weeded out those not of obvious
utility, and the literally back-breaking labor required of even the
weakest of the prisoners chosen for work rather than for death. But
the book is also an experiment in itself, and like some of the
procedures that Levi recounts in The Periodic Table, its goal is to
distill. What it distills is the essence of Auschwitz: the
"demolition" of the prisoners' humanity, as Levi puts it. "It is
not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more
miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so," he writes
early on in If This is a Man. "Nothing belongs to us any more; they
have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak,
they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not
understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to
keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to
manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we
were, still remains."

When all the trappings of humanity are taken away, what does remain?
This question is at the heart of If This is a Man, starting with
the title, from a poem by Levi called "Shema," which serves as the
book's epigraph. Here are the relevant lines:

You who live safe

In your warm houses,

You who find, returning in the evening,

Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud

Who does not know peace

Who fights for a scrap of bread

Who dies because of a yes or a no....

"Consider if this is a man": if Auschwitz was a laboratory, then
this was Primo Levi's hypothesis. He argues convincingly that the
Nazis' intent to dehumanize was evident in every increment of their
plan, from the lack of latrines on the transports to Auschwitz to
the practice of addressing prisoners by number rather than by name.
Levi will ultimately conclude that a man cannot really be
dehumanized, which reveals the depth of the Nazis' depravity: they
tried to reduce people past the limits of reducibility. And yet
Levi's book also shows that a man can come very, very close to
ceasing to be a man; and even so it is impossible to say that he is
no longer a man, because to do so is to think like a Nazi.

For Carole Angier, the question of what makes a man was the central
question of Primo Levi's life. Levi, she writes, was beset from
childhood with doubts about whether he himself could be fully
considered a man. He was shy, he was not good-looking, he was
attracted to women and pathologically afraid of them. He dealt with
his doubts by repressing them, presenting a calm exterior and
hinting of them to only a few friends. Levi is often seen as the
supreme rationalist of the Holocaust writers, the decorous
humanist, his work dispassionate and rigorously reasoned. Angier
argues that in his personal life Levi was a rationalist to a fault:
he "chose to live only in the rational half of himself, and closed
the door on the other."

Angier takes the title of her book from a manuscript that Levi was
writing at the time of his death. This unfinished book, which
remains unpublished, was intended as a sequel to The Periodic
Table, his famous autobiography through chemistry, and it takes the
form of letters written by a chemist to a woman whom he is
instructing in basic chemistry. Levi titled the book Il doppio
legame, which can mean either "the double bond" or "the double
bind"; the first term from chemistry, the second term from
psychology. The double bond is the way in which organic molecules
attach to each other: they connect "at two or even more points,
making possible richer but also less stable combinations." The
double bind Angier defines as "a crippling conflict between
contradictory or unfulfillable requirements, which you can neither
escape nor win." She sees both--though primarily the latter--as a
metaphor for Levi's life.

Angier's approach will not appeal to everyone. She is unrelenting in
her pursuit of the personal, and she can be mawkish. Though she
comments very effectively on certain aspects of Levi's writing,
anyone looking for literary criticism should look elsewhere. Her
book has passages of much grace, but it is bloated. She assumes a
broad base of knowledge about Levi's books, failing to adequately
introduce much of his work. And her speculation about Levi's wife
and mother is astonishingly one-sided, utterly lacking the sympathy
with which she treats so many of the other figures in his life.

Most controversially, Angier confesses in the introduction that at
times she has "felt or imagined the past from a story, or from an
encounter." This is not as dubious as it sounds, because the
chapters in which she does this form a sort of "shadow biography":
they are set apart from the main text, with their headings in
italics, and anyone wishing to avoid speculation about Levi's life
could simply skip them. Angier comments that these chapters have an
"unstable bond" with Levi, but her own relationship with them is
slippery as well. By setting them apart from the text and
emphasizing their reliance on guesswork rather than scholarship,
she appears to disavow them; but at the same time she says that she
believes these "irrational chapters" to be "more true" than the
rational ones. Angier really does seem to believe that she has
gotten inside Levi's head, and maybe she has. But her perceived
intimacy with him dominates the book, leading to a sense that she
is too close to her subject, whom she refers to throughout by his
first name.

The major feat of Angier's biography is that at many points she does
convince even the skeptical reader of her good judgment. For a
start, she has been a scrupulous researcher, indefatigably tracking
down every living person who played a role in Levi's life. (His
wife and his children, as is their custom, did not speak to her,
and Levi's papers are still sealed.) No anecdote from any of Levi's
memoirs is repeated in her biography without independent
confirmation or clarification, often from more than one source.
Angier also freely confesses her own disappointment when a source
has denied a story about Levi that she has hoped to be true. By
revealing so much of her methodology-- particularly in the earliest
of the "shadow" chapters, in which she hikes with Levi's old friend
Alberto Salmoni, and delights in confronting a class bully with a
short story in which Levi portrayed him unflatteringly--Angier
allows the reader to see what her encounters with her sources must
have been like, and why Levi's friends and relatives might have
trusted her with intimate information. Though her speculations may
sometimes go too far into Levi's personal life, there is never a
sense of exploitation. Angier's goal is to tell the story of Levi's
life as completely as possible, because she believes that it is
what he wanted to do himself.

The book's major flaw is its heavy reliance on Il doppio legame, a
source that Angier takes as her book's counterpart: Levi's
emotional autobiography. (I will refer to this book by its Italian
title so as to avoid confusion with the title of Angier's book.)
Though she questions everything else that he has said about himself
in his books, in this last book she seems to take Levi at his word,
confirmed only by the most questionable of sources--two unnamed
women with whom Levi apparently had lengthy affairs. Angier
recognizes that the woman to whom the narrator of this book
addresses his letters has no direct correspondent in Levi's life:
she is a composite of several women he loved, a fiction. But Angier
takes what the narrator says about himself to be the literal truth
of Levi's life, when in fact there is no reason to believe that the
narrator of Il doppio legame has any more or less in common with
Levi than the narrators of any of Levi's other works of fiction.
Levi ended his preface to If This is a Man with the somber
statement, "It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the
facts are invented." But it is worth remembering that none of his
other books bears such a disclaimer.

III.

From the first chapter of The Periodic Table, in which Levi uses the
element argon to represent his ancestors--"noble, inert, and
rare"--it is clear that there is much we are not meant to take
literally. To begin with, the stories Levi tells in this chapter
are not limited to his own family members. "After The Periodic
Table was published, he said, friends frequently remarked to him:
'It's odd, but my grandfather said exactly the same thing as
yours,'" Angier reports. "The reason was, of course, that it was
their grandfather." When the stories do concern Levi's relatives,
they are carefully edited. He alludes to his grandfather's suicide,
but disguises the circumstances of his grandmother's remarriage;
and he does not mention at all the suicide of his great-uncle.

Levi was unhappy at school, despite his academic excellence: "Primo
Levi primo," a friend would say, reporting that he was first in the
class. He was close to his sister Anna Maria, and apparently also
to his mother, with whom he would live in the same Turin apartment
for his entire life (except for a brief period in Milan and the
year he spent at Auschwitz). Levi's parents' marriage seems to have
been unhappy. Cesare Levi, Levi's father, was a playboy, and
carried on a long affair with his secretary. Rina, as Angier calls
Levi's mother (her name was Ester, but the family called her Rina),
was, "like most Jewish women of her generation," a "regina della
casa," a queen of the house.; "...when the materials life provided
ran short, Levi improvised."

Levi never spoke nor wrote about his mother, giving as his reason
that she was still alive. (She outlived him by four years.) But
some family friends and relatives imply that there were other
reasons. Angier finds her version of the story in two novels, one
by Paolo Levi (Levi's first cousin), the other by Luisa Accati,
daughter of Levi's longtime employer and close friend. Both books
feature happy-go-lucky men married to puritanical, stern women. In
Accati's novel, the parents' honeymoon ends with the mother
claiming to be "not a normal woman," and the husband's infidelity
is the result of his "rejec[tion] by his frigid and punishing
wife." Though other sources confirm that something very similar was
the rumor in Turin about the Levis' marriage, Angier does not fully
acknowledge the dubiousness of basing her conception of the family
on these novels. And yet other evidence seems to confirm them. A
family friend, describing to Angier how strict Rina was, wonders
"if Primo had once been hugged by his mother." Late in life, Levi
would tell an interviewer that he could not remember a single
occasion on which his mother had kissed him.

Levi entered Turin's Chemical Institute in 1937, just before the
racial laws were established in Italy. Zinc becomes the metaphor in
The Periodic Table for this point in his life, in a chapter that
focuses on questions of purity and impurity, in both metals and
romance. Zinc, Levi learns, resists interaction when it is in a
very pure state; he finds this imperturbability "disgustingly
moralistic," and prefers the zinc impure, "which gives rise to
changes, in other words, to life." When he discovers that Rita, to
whom he is attracted, is working on the same experiment, he has
something to bridge the racial barrier that separates them: "I ...
am Jewish and she is not: I am the impurity that makes the zinc
react, I am the grain of salt or mustard." He endeavors to walk her
home, and in the last image of the chapter he triumphantly takes her
arm. But Angier has tracked "Rita" down--her real name is Clara
Moschino--and she does not remember the walk home, or Levi taking
her arm. "Perhaps [Angier interjects] he did do it, on another
occasion.... She can see that I would like at least this to be
true. So she says firmly but gently that she does not think so. He
may have wanted to do it, or dreamed of doing it, but he did not."
And so, of course, both Rita and the story's narrator are fictions.
As Angier discovers again and again, Levi's stories were
autobiographical, but they were not autobiography.

Levi graduated in 1941 with high honors, but due to the racial laws
he had difficulty finding a job. Eventually he was offered
employment in a mine, where he had to work under a false name so as
to hide "my abominable origin." Two percent of what the mine
produced was asbestos; the rest was detritus, from which Levi was
supposed to extract nickel. This alchemical dream of extracting
"gold from dung" becomes a central metaphor of The Periodic Table,
as well as of other books. But Levi quickly grew tired of this
futile task and moved to a factory outside Milan. Here, too, his
work was nonsensical: he was to measure the phosphorous levels of
plants and then inject them into rabbits in the hope of finding a
cure for diabetes. And here he again fell in love, this time with
Gabriella Garda, a former classmate. In the climax of the
"phosphorous" chapter of The Periodic Table, he takes her on the
handlebars of his bicycle to her fianc's house, where she must
convince his parents to allow her to marry their son. Levi waits
outside, hoping she will not succeed, but of course she does. This
chapter, Angier finds, is almost entirely true. Yet a crucial detail
is invented: that Garda threatened to scream, "Get your hands off
me, you pig!" when Levi refused to accompany her home from the
cinema. When Levi showed her the manuscript, Angier reports, Garda
asked him to remove that part, but he refused, telling her that it
revealed her nature better than anything that actually took place.
Again, when the materials life provided ran short, Levi
improvised.

On September 8, 1943, the Nazis occupied Italy, and Levi returned
home to Turin. He joined a band of partisans fighting in the
mountains, but lasted only a month and a half before they were
betrayed. He was arrested and held briefly in prison, then sent
with three friends to Fossoli, a holding camp. If This is a Man
begins on Levi's last night in Fossoli, before his deportation to
Auschwitz.

IV.

"Without any deliberate effort, memory continues to restore to me
events, faces, words, sensations, as if at that time my mind had
gone through a period of exalted receptivity, during which not a
detail was lost," Levi would write many years later to describe his
unusual mental capacities during his time at Auschwitz. Among the
many former prisoners Angier interviews, not one disputes the
substance of Levi's account--even Henri (whose real name is Paul
Steinberg) acknowledges the truth of Levi's ugly portrait of him.
Levi said numerous times that not a single word or episode of If
This is a Man was invented. He wrote the first draft in the first
year after the war, and the only changes that he made later were to
add characters or his own commentary.

But despite its adherence to fact, If This is a Man is a
fundamentally literary book, with a highly stylized use of
language. Levi always refers to the camp as the "Lager" and to the
prisoners as "Hftlinge": "the Lager's language was a German apart,"
he explained later. He portrays Auschwitz as a "perpetual Babel, in
which everyone shouts orders and threats in languages never heard
before, and woe betide whoever fails to grasp the meaning." From
the start, all official information is disseminated in German, and
those who cannot understand it are more likely to be sent to the
wrong side. People died "at first sight of hunger, cold, fatigue,
disease; on closer examination, of insufficient information."
Language works its perversity until the end; in his last days at
Auschwitz, spent in the infirmary, Levi hears dying men around him
succumb to delirium: one mutters "Jawohl" for two days straight,
another mimics the speeches of a Kapo.

But amid the Babel Levi is formulating exact, potent phrases. The
Germans run the camp with "absurd precision." The prisoners,
stripped and shaved, are "a hundred miserable and sordid puppets."
His book is so detailed that one wishes prisoners entering the camp
could have used it as a manual. All the rules are elucidated: how
many buttons one must have on one's shirt, how to exchange
ill-fitting shoes, where to stand in line to receive the heartiest
portion of soup. Levi does not shrink from the disgusting: there is
an extended passage on the importance of properly timing one's
nighttime visits to the latrine bucket so as to avoid being the one
who must empty it, since the contents will inevitably overflow onto
one's feet.

Only by learning these unofficial rules of the Lager can anyone hope
to survive. But this presents Levi with a "double bind," which, in
Angier's reading, would be a source of guilt for the rest of his
life. In The Drowned and the Saved, his last published book, Levi
wrote that "the worst--that is, the fittest--survived. The best all
died." The "worst" are not necessarily the brutes, but those
prisoners, such as Elias and Henri, who play the system without
scruple. And "the best" are not necessarily those who courageously
resisted--such as Lorenzo, a civilian who worked alongside Levi in
the Buna factory at Auschwitz and often brought him extra food and
posted letters to Italy for him, who would survive--but "the most
delicate, the most innocent," who "could not bear to see
degradation and bestiality everywhere, to lie and steal," as Angier
writes. One wishes that she had acknowledged the perversity of this
idea: surely many good people also survived and many bad people
also died. Needless to say, the best did not all die, and to say
that they did is an insult to all survivors. Levi may have felt
that he himself was among "the worst," but no one who knew him
would have agreed.

The germ of this terrible idea, sadly, is evident as early as If
This is a Man. Nothing is so easy at Auschwitz as dying: "it is
enough to carry out all the orders one received, to eat only the
ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp," Levi
writes. To survive, one has to be prepared to take special
measures: to steal, to seek out preferential treatment for oneself
at the expense of others. Levi ended The Truce, the sequel to If
This is a Man, with the observation that "only after many months
did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground,
as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to
sell for bread." He eventually manages to finagle a privileged role
for himself on the Chemical Kommando, which enables him to work
indoors, with a larger daily ration and more comfortable clothing.

But Levi felt that he was singled out in another way as well. In the
climax of If This is a Man, Levi and Pikolo, the Kapo's assistant,
have gone to collect the day's kettle of soup. Pikolo mentions that
he would like to learn Italian, and Levi seizes the opportunity to
recite from Dante. As Levi recites the story of Ulysses, he
explicates:

Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to
understand, for my sake:

"Consider your seed:

"You were not made to live like brutes,

"But to follow virtue and knowledge."

As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a
trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and
where I am.

The implications of these lines in the Lager are obvious. "A man was
made to pursue virtue and knowledge--he was mind and will, ideal
and reason," Angier writes. But Levi does not want to stop with
reciting Dante; he has a glimpse of the possibilities for his own
future. "If Dante had looked into Ulysses as into a mirror, so in
turn did Primo.... Now his ambition was far from ordinary. It
was--as he told Pikolo then, many times--to record and report
Auschwitz to the world."

He would begin to do so almost immediately. Levi contracted scarlet
fever in early January, 1945. The camp was evacuated on January 18,
and almost no one survived the subsequent death march. Levi waited
out the evacuation in the infirmary. In a final Allied raid, the
power and water lines were cut, and the SS fled, leaving the
prisoners behind. Levi and two others were able to salvage a stove.
After the room was warm, one of the inmates proposed that everyone
give a piece of whatever bread he had left to the three workers.
"Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable,"
Levi wrote. "The law of the Lager said: 'eat your own bread, and if
you can, that of your neighbor,' and left no room for gratitude. It
really meant that the Lager was dead."

The Truce (published in America as The Reawakening) begins with the
arrival of the Russians to liberate Auschwitz. As soon as Levi is
well enough, he is sent to a transit camp in Krakw. Here he meets
"the Greek," the first of the fantastic characters to accompany him
on his journey. The Greek leads Levi to the market and tells him to
find out the going rate for shirts. Whereas in the Lager language
barriers meant death, in the post-Auschwitz world they are the
stuff of comedy. And so Levi makes his way around the market,
learning the Polish for "how much" and "what time" and "gentlemen."
He stops a priest to find out where the soup kitchen is, and with
no other language in common they converse in Latin: "Pater optime,"
Levi asks, "ubi est mensa pauperorum?"

These hilarious episodes recur as Levi winds his circuitous way from
Poland to Belarus and finally down through Romania, Hungary, and
Austria to Italy. After the Babel of Auschwitz, Levi cannot repress
his glee at being able to make himself understood in language after
language. When the war ends, he is in a transit camp in the Polish
town of Katowice, and can follow the news even without
understanding Polish. "We read 'Vienna,' 'Koblenz,' 'Rhine'; then
'Bologna'; then, with emotion and joy, 'Turin' and 'Milan.' Finally,
'Mussolini, ' in enormous letters, followed by an awesome and
indecipherable past participle; and at last, in red ink, covering
half a page, the final, cryptic, and exhilarating announcement:
'BERLIN UPADL!'" Even miscommunication, when it occurs, is largely
for comic effect. The huckster Cesare wants Levi to teach him
German so that he can woo a Polish girl, but "the things he wanted
to learn from me are not taught in any German language course, nor
had I had the slightest occasion to learn them in Auschwitz;
moreover, they were such subtle and idiomatic questions that I
suspect that they do not exist in any language other than Italian
and French." Much of this comedy is almost certainly exaggerated
for effect, and Angier's interviews with "Cesare" turn up a number
of discrepancies. Levi was playing with a much looser hand than in
If This is a Man.

Levi's newfound language skills are providential, because he is
seized with the desire to speak about his experiences to anyone he
sees. He tells his tale for the first time on a train platform in
Trzebinia. (It is, uncannily, the station where travelers visiting
Auschwitz today change trains.) He speaks "at dizzy speed" of all
that has happened; but he suddenly realizes that his interpreter is
identifying him as a political prisoner, not as a Jew. When he asks
why, he is told: "La guerre n'est pas finie." As if on cue, his
listeners begin to disperse; his nightmare has come true.

The ending of The Truce quietly annihilates the comedy that has
preceded it. "A dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit
me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals," Levi
writes.

I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work,
or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed
environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a
deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending
threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally,
each time in a different way, everything collapses and
disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while
the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything
has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a gray and turbid
nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know
that I have always known it. I am in the Lager once more, and
nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause,
a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my
home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in
the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice
resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It
is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and
expected: get up, "wstawa."; "How could anyone living under the
weight of such great despair not commit suicide?"

V.

"Nothing is true outside the Lager." This, as much as the fear of
not being understood, is the survivor's nightmare. Tadeusz Borowski
wrote of it in poetry he published soon after the war; he killed
himself in 1951. Sarah Kofman wrote of it in her remarkable memoir
Rue Ordener, Rue Labat, published in 1994; she killed herself the
same year. It seems self-evident: how could anyone living under the
weight of such great despair not commit suicide? Primo Levi's son
was quoted after his father's death as saying, "Read the ending of
The Truce and you'll understand."

But his remark was probably flippant. It is too easy to say, as the
newspapers at the time did, that "Auschwitz killed [Levi] forty
years later." And it is a non sequitur. The fact that both Kofman
and Levi killed themselves shortly after writing their last
books--Kofman was writing about her experiences in the Holocaust
for the first time, Levi was returning to the topic after a long
break--certainly does not mean that it was writing about the
Holocaust that killed them. It could just as easily be the other way
around: that Auschwitz kept Levi alive for forty years as a writer,
and that after The Drowned and the Saved he was unable to regain a
sense of purpose in life.

Angier argues that "the untold story" of Levi's life, and of his
death, was depression. "Primo Levi was depressed before and after
Auschwitz, but not in it, " she writes. "It is even possible to say
that without the experience of surviving Auschwitz, and without the
mission to understand and testify to it, [suicide] might have
claimed him sooner." His first major depression, she says, occurred
in winter 1946-1947, after he had finished the first draft of If
This is a Man, which was promptly rejected by Natalia Ginzburg at
Einaudi. Angier finds the root of this depression in an encounter
Levi had with Nico Dallaporta, a former professor. Dallaporta told
Levi that God must have spared him so that he would bear witness.
Levi was horrified, and said that the very idea was monstrous and
unjust. "The suggestion had touched 'an exposed nerve,' he wrote
later," Angier comments. "Of course he had never imagined that God
had chosen him to testify; but he had chosen himself, which made
the injustice his own." He, who did not believe that any man had a
right to be spared at Auschwitz instead of any other, had secretly
hoped for just that: to live in order to be its chronicler, "the
new Dante," as he had realized when reciting the Canto of Ulysses.

Levi came out of this depression when he met Lucia Morpurgo; they
were married in September, 1947. If This is a Man was published the
following month. It initially sank into oblivion, but Levi began
work on The Truce immediately. At the same time he was also writing
fiction: some of the stories destined for The Periodic Table, as
well as others that Angier describes as moral fables about science,
which Levi published under the title Storie naturali, "natural
histories." She convincingly reads many of these as metaphors for
Levi's internal struggles. In "L'amico dell'uomo" ("Man's Friend"),
a professor discovers that the cells of certain tapeworms reveal
patterns that correspond to terza rima. The parasites, he realizes,
have made themselves into poems addressed to their hosts. Alas,
they go unread, since the hosts are uninterested in missives from
their intestines. Angier hears in this an echo of a lament Levi
made years later of the difficulty of communication: "whoever
writes ... writes in his own code, which others do not know."

Meanwhile Levi had begun working at SIVA, the paint and varnish
factory where he would remain until his retirement in 1977,
eventually becoming director general. Despite its initial failure,
he pushed to have If This is a Man republished, especially with the
swell of interest in Holocaust memoirs around 1955, the tenth
anniversary of liberation. Einaudi finally accepted it, bringing
out a revised version in 1958; it was published in the United States
a year later, and in Germany in 1961. The Truce, which Levi called
his first "consciously literary" book, appeared in 1963; and after
that Levi never stopped publishing. Storie naturali appeared in
1966, followed by Vizio di forma--another, less successful,
collection of stories--in 1971. (Neither exists in its entirety in
English.) Levi's masterpiece The Periodic Table appeared in 1975.
After his retirement from SIVA in 1977, there came a burst of
productivity: the novel The Monkey's Wrench in 1978, another book of
stories in 1981, the novel If Not Now, When? in 1982, the essay
collection Other People's Trades in 1985, and finally The Drowned
and the Saved in 1986.

Despite Levi's professional success, the final chapters of Angier's
book make painful reading. Levi's fame, she says, was a source of
anguish for his family, particularly his wife, who was
pathologically jealous of anyone or anything that took him away
from home. Angier theorizes that Lucia's jealousy stemmed from her
intense competition with Levi's mother. Their war of wills robbed
Levi of his freedom, forcing him continually to negotiate the two
women's conflicting demands. "Primo built himself a Lager," Angier
quotes a cousin of Levi's as saying. After he retired, the
situation worsened, as he had no excuse for contact with other
people, especially women. Soon his mother's health became much
worse, and he could no longer leave Turin at all.

This story is fascinating and disturbing, but it leaves many
questions unanswered. Certainly many people suffer from unhappy
marriages and difficult parental relationships, but rarely is
ordinary life so melodramatic as this. And from other sources one
can glean details that are missing from Angier's account. If Lucia
Levi were truly so opposed to her husband's success, why would she
celebrate with him and give him gifts when his books won prizes?
Ian Thomson, the author of a biography of Levi published in England
this spring but yet to appear in the United States, writes of
Levi's "tender" relationship with his mother; perhaps he has missed
the real story, but surely no man can live in an apartment with his
mother for his entire life if he does not feel some affection for
her.

If the grim picture is to be believed, however, then it is hardly
surprising that the frequency of Levi's depressions increased
toward the end of his life. They often came at times when Levi was
aware of his own fragility; he suffered from debilitating attacks
of shingles, and he had "a terror of physical ailment" of any kind.
A diary kept by a woman with whom (according to Angier) Levi had a
long relationship, from 1974 until his death, makes for
heartbreaking reading. "I have nothing more to say," he reportedly
told her during a deep depression in 1982. "I don't know what to do
with myself.... My novel has won three prizes, but the very thought
of it makes me sick....I want to end it. But the third floor is not
high enough."

VI.

Il doppio legame, written in the last year of Levi's life, is the
true revelation of Angier's book. She describes and discusses
several chapters of it, all given to her--some in censored form--by
two of the women with whom Levi had close relationships. Since none
of the book has ever been published, it is impossible to evaluate
Angier's account of it. It is thus also impossible fully to
evaluate her reading of Levi's life, since so much of it is based on
this manuscript. But one thing seems certain. If this book is
anything like Levi's other autobiographies, the persona that he
creates is just that--a deliberate construction. Just as it would
be nave to take at face value the persona of The Periodic Table, it
is equally problematic to accept uncritically Levi's description of
himself in this work--especially if, as a sequel of sorts to the
chemical autobiography, it is similarly semi-fictional.

One hopes that Angier's description of the first chapter, written in
January 1986, is reductionist. Levi begins with a discussion of the
definitions of "volt" and "ampere." Both, he says, are like anger:
a volt is "a touch of anger, rather than a great rage." (I cite
Angier's paraphrase; she appears not to have been allowed to quote
from the manuscript.) More important are voltage and amperage, and
"the work that can be extracted from them": Levi goes on to discuss
kilowatts and kilowatt-hours, other ways of measuring work. Angier
calls this "a delightful start," but the "pleasure and irony" she
speaks of seem to have gotten lost somewhere. The second chapter,
which Levi wrote in August of that year, treats the process by
which a boiled egg becomes hard: it includes a paean to the egg as
well as a physical description of what happens to the egg's
molecules when boiled. It also includes some suggestions about the
relationship between the writer and the lady--she is not Jewish, he
has known her for many years, he is in love with her.

The third and fourth chapters are the most personal. In the third
the chemist talks about his "long, lonely sexual suffering": his
youthful horror of genitalia, his many platonic friendships with
women in which he feared touching or being touched, the schoolboy
taunts of "circumcision is castration," "remaining trapped in his
untouched solitude for years, overcome every so often with such
despair that he thought of suicide." The fourth chapter takes
depression as its main topic. Depression, he says, is "the desire
for desire: though that is an illusion too, since even if
[sufferers] find something reasonable to desire, and achieve it,
the next moment they will be as unhappy as before." His own case,
he says, has to do with the fact that success no longer satisfies
him. It is (in Italian) a past participle, which means that it is
always already over. It requires conferences, festivals, and other
obligations, which he must continually refuse. And he is overwhelmed
by letters: "every morning when the post arrives is a moment of
dread." This, at least, is echoed in one of Levi's interviews. "How
do you experience fame?" the interviewer asked. "In fits and
starts," Levi replied. "In particular at ten o'clock in the
morning, when the post arrives."

The events of April 11, 1987, Levi's last morning, are well
established. A friend came to see his son, who lived next door, and
they both stopped by. At half past nine Levi's wife left to go
shopping. At around ten, as usual, the concierge, Jolanda Gasperi,
brought up his mail. Sometime afterward, he told his mother's nurse
to answer the phone if it rang, because he was going down to
Gasperi's office. At around quarter after ten, Gasperi heard a thud,
and discovered Levi's body.

Many have found it difficult to accept the idea of Levi's suicide,
preferring the theory that he suffered a dizzy spell and fell. There
appears to have been nothing alarming in the day's mail. He did not
leave a suicide note. And in the last days before his death he was
still making plans for the future. He was in the process of being
interviewed for an authorized biography; the work had been
interrupted, but on the day before his suicide he told the
biographer, "We can go on now," and said to phone him back the next
week. But as Ian Thomson points out, many people who commit suicide
experience a sharp improvement in mood in the days just before
death.

After reading Angier's account of Levi's last days, it is hard to
think that his death could have been anything but suicide. While he
was writing Il doppio legame, Levi was diagnosed with an enlarged
prostate, which provoked another depression. For a few months he
was treated with anti-depressants, as he had been in the past, but
they interfered with his prostate medication. In March, he had a
prostate operation, which sent his depression spiraling out of
control. Angier reports friends' accounts of anguished
conversations with Levi in the days before his death, in some of
which Levi was so depressed he could barely speak. She has
interviewed a physical therapist who treated Levi and became his
friend, who says that after she told him of her own close call with
suicide, they often discussed the topic: "he talked about suicide
without fear," and was "very interested in it, even fascinated by
it." And if the mail reminded him of the obligations that he felt
unable to meet, its arrival would have been enough to evoke his
horror, even if nothing upsetting was delivered.

Despite her many conversations with Levi's friends and relatives,
however, it is clear from the beginning of Angier's book that much
of her conception of his depression and suicide--and of his life,
since she sees depression as its basis--rests on her reading of Il
doppio legame, which she seems to regard as the key to his psyche.
This would be questionable regarding any writer, but it is all the
more so with regard to Levi, who allowed his life to appear in his
work only in disguise. If Angier has subjected Il doppio legame to
the strenuous interrogation she has conducted on Levi's other
works, confirming his statements through interviews with others or
information about his life, it is not evident. Her reports of her
interviews with Levi's two longtime lovers are brief and focus
mainly on whatever she can discern about their affairs. As we have
seen with his other books, when Levi changed the details of his life
for his fiction, he did so to improve upon the story. For all we
know, the truth behind Il doppio legame's sexual intrigue is
considerably more mundane. But if the fact that Levi published a
book about the Holocaust before committing suicide does not mean
that the Holocaust was responsible for his suicide, then the fact
that Levi was writing a book about sexual repression and depression
at the time of his suicide cannot imply a causal link either.

In his last interview, Levi spoke of "the difference between the
writer as he appears in his books, and the man as he really is."
Despite the surface transparency of Levi's books, the "man as he
really is" will always remain unknowable. And this is as it should
be. The contradictions of Levi's writing-- the continual
questioning of whether the prisoners are or are not men, the
mixture of fiction and reality in The Periodic Table--are a part of
what makes his work so rich. These contradictions cannot be
unraveled through a posthumous psychoanalysis of Levi, no matter
how empathetic or convincing. Perhaps after his wife's death Levi's
private papers will be published for all to see, and Angier's
theories will be confirmed or disproved. Until then, we have only
his books, which all lead to a single incontrovertible conclusion,
with all the paradox that it implies: this was a man.

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