The Complete Works By Primo Levi, edited by Ann Goldstein, introduction by Toni Morrison
By Sam Magavern
Primo Levi was a Renaissance man. Despite a full career as a chemist, he found time to publish some 20 books, including memoirs, novels, short stories, essays and poems. He commented on current events in Italian newspapers. He translated works of anthropology. He visited schools and taught students about his experiences as a prisoner in Auschwitz. And throughout his life and writings, he pondered one of the great Renaissance questions: what makes (or unmakes) a man?
There are many reasons to be grateful for the publication of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi” in a freshly translated, scrupulously edited and beautifully presented edition, starting with the fact that it brings English readers the correct titles of his books. Levi’s most vital book is titled “If This is a Man,” but the American edition was published as “Survival in Auschwitz,” a decision which obscured the literary and philosophical nature of the work. The jacket copy of the old American version praised it for portraying the “indestructible human spirit,” but the truth is darker and more complex. One of Levi’s core themes is, in fact, the fragility of the human spirit, as proven by the way the Nazis demolished not just the bodies but also the souls of many victims: by treating them like beasts, like “nothings,” and by pitting them against one another in a zero sum situation in which human solidarity became nearly impossible.
Levi was an original and ambitious thinker, and he had experienced directly a turning point in world history: a highly planned effort to unmake the humanity of millions of people. As a result, he was not content with any received dogma, whether religious, scientific or political; he would sift through the evidence himself, relying on years of reading and study and, even more, on his personal observations. But he profoundly distrusted all prophets and gurus, and wanted nothing less than to become one himself. And so the tool he chose was literature: a form that could provide coherence and meaning while retaining a radical sense of ambiguity, uncertainty, and open-endedness.
By gathering his scattered publications together, the “Complete Works” helps the reader to see Levi’s life project in all its literary complexity. Levi treated the same themes and material quite differently in his nonfiction, fiction and poetry. No one genre could do full justice to the truth. Often, Levi employed multiple genres within the same book. He frames “If This is a Man” as nonfiction testimony, an act of witness, but it starts with a poem; each chapter reads like a short story; and it has the artistic unity of a novel. All Levi’s work was hybrid; his short stories, for example, could be labeled “science fiction,” but, no matter how far-fetched their premises or how playful their style, they are haunted by real history: the Nazis’ grotesque misappropriation of science in the service of genocide.
Levi’s poetry is underrated, perhaps because the author himself judged it so severely. He told an interviewer that the value of his poems was “minimal” and that they came upon him like an infection. As a man who prized lucidity and reason, Levi was uncomfortable with poetry’s dependence on subconscious impulses, ungovernable emotions, and nonlinear thinking. And yet he returned to poetry throughout his life and included poems in several of his nonfiction books, understanding at some level that he needed them to do full justice to his themes. His first great works were the poems he wrote shortly after his return from the war, and his last great works (previously uncollected) were the poems he wrote shortly before his death in 1987.
Levi was not a believer, but his poetry helped him to engage with the Jewish tradition in some particularly complicated ways. He wrote the poem “Shema” in January 1946, soon after his return from Auschwitz, and it furnished the epigraph and the title for “If This is a Man.”
In it he boldly appropriates the most central prayer in Judaism, which affirms the unity and presence of God, to portray a godless world in which man has the power to destroy humanity:
Consider if this is a man
Who toils in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for half a loaf
Who dies by a yes or a no.
Much different is the beautiful poem, “Passover,” from 1982, in which Levi uses the imagery and language of the Passover Seder in a gentle, appreciative tone. He makes no explicit reference to his life or to recent history, but for any reader who knows his work, the final lines have a special resonance:
Each of us has been a slave in Egypt,
Has soaked straw and clay with sweat
And crossed the sea with dry feet:
You, too, stranger.
This year in fear and shame,
Next year in strength and justice.
Levi’s core premise, that the soul is a malleable, perishable human creation – that we are what we make of each other – has a positive pole as well as a negative one. Levi felt the joy and wonder of the humanist project to understand the world, to make one’s own way, to discover and create. He loved the pleasures of eating and drinking, hiking in the mountains and making scientific experiments. In his second book, “The Truce,” he describes his odyssey from Auschwitz through Russian refugee camps to home. While still haunted by the concentration camp, Levi also revels in the adventures of life on the road with a dazzling array of characters. Similarly, in his memoir from 1975, “The Periodic Table,” he combines dark stories from the war with humorous tales of finding his way as a young chemist.
As “Complete Works” vividly shows, Levi’s world view and style evolved together over time. In his early life and writing, he was markedly suspicious of women and nature, both of which he regarded as inherently chaotic and dangerous. He was an inorganic chemist and a mountain climber, at home among men and rocks.
As he aged and experienced love, marriage, parenthood, adultery, friendship and depression, his world grew increasingly complicated and rich. In his unfinished work, “The Double Bond,” he intended to do with organic chemistry what he had done with inorganic chemistry in “The Periodic Table” – make it a keystone for understanding his own life and life in general. He could not complete it, but he did write an increasing number of poems, essays and stories about animals, plants and human bonds, including the lovely poem, “The Thaw,” in which he says that we are tired of winter and ready for the thaw and exclaims, referring to ferns preparing to germinate, “Long live the bride and groom!”
Late in life, Levi told an interviewer, “Yes, I suppose I’ve wanted that too, without achieving it – to be myself, un uomo completo,” a complete man. Levi’s life, like his final book, remained, in a sense, unfinished. Suffering from a severe bout of depression, an illness he had experienced intermittently since his youth, he took his own life in 1987. And yet, as we read his collected works, we find a beautifully realized human spirit. To be complete is to be finished, and, for Levi, the work of becoming a man could never be finished; humanity could be found only in the incessant struggle to be human. Moreover, that struggle could not be solitary. The writer could only exist in conversation with his readers; the soul could only be forged in dialogue with other souls.
Levi once suggested that his epitaph be Homer’s description of Ulysses as “polla plankte,” which can mean either “forever erring” or “driven to wander.”
In perhaps the most memorable chapter of set reg ”If This is a Man,” “The Canto of Ulysses,” Levi describes befriending a fellow prisoner named Jean and offering to teach him Italian while they labor. Remarkably, the first Italian lesson starts with Levi reciting a canto from Dante’s Inferno. Dante’s story ends in disaster: God punishes Ulysses for hubris by shipwrecking him and placing him in hell. But, along the way, Dante allows Ulysses a magnificent speech exhorting his sailors to travel with him, telling them that they “were not born to live like mindless brutes but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge.” Recalling Dante and Homer in Auschwitz was one way for Levi to recall his soul to himself; to reaffirm his humanity and incipient greatness; but it was also a way for him to forge a friendship: to keep a fellow inmate human, too.
Now Levi is gone, and his gravestone, sadly, does not include the quote from Homer. But the complete works of this unfinished and unfinishable man will, for many generations, help to make us human.
Sam Magavern is the author of “Primo Levi’s Universe: a Writer’s Journey.” At 7 p.m. Friday, at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Ave., he will moderate a discussion with the team responsible for “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” publisher Robert Weil and editor Ann Goldstein.
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