by Clive James
In keeping with the election’s strange mood of misogyny, the whole demented Beeb scene was all but babe-free. Boys’ toys it had in plenty, but you looked in vain for the swell of a breast. Unfortunately for the cause of the banished women, David Dimbleby’s one and only female aidette completely missed the point about the return from Oldham West, which revealed the sudden and shocking electoral presence of more than 5,000 potential Nazis. David wanted to talk to her about that, but she wanted to talk about something else.
Elsewhere in the asylum, Jeremy Paxman was in charge of a mezzanine area called The Café. No refreshments were served, perhaps as a gesture to Paxo’s satiated state. (He was still digesting William Hague.) But the human conviviality was a welcome relief from the dingbat electronics. One of Paxo’s guests was Neil Kinnock. In a moment of brain-fade, Paxo drew Kinnock’s attention to the beamed-in image of Blair’s car arriving at the count in Sedgfield. Paxo said that the car contained Neil Kinnock. The delighted Kinnock said, ‘I should be so lucky.’ You could see what Kinnock has that Blair hasn’t: an unstudied amiability. You could also see what Blair has that Kinnock hasn’t: the Prime Ministership.
Over on ITV, David Dimbleby’s brother Jonathan had an out-of-body experience to match Paxo’s. Jonathan screwed up his commentary on the Torbay declaration by mixing up the parties. He owned up like a man. ‘I’m a complete nana.’ In all other respects he was running the superior studio. John Sergeant, all on his own, did the work of six people in the Beeb studio, and did it better. Losing Sergeant can be counted as one of those little triumphs that are steadily lobotomizing the Corporation. ITV had plenty of Beeb-style virtual hoo-hah but Sergeant’s presence made up for it. He is not beautiful, but he is bright. Mary Nightingale was there too, and she is both. Good looks ought not to matter in female television presenters, but at three o’clock in the morning I couldn’t see the harm.
The studios turned red as the night wore on, with proportionately less blue and a startling amount of yellow. As with the election campaign, there was much pizzazz but little tension. Speculation on the aftermath was already rife. At BBC1, Paddy Ashdown used a startling word about the Tory future. The word was ‘split’. He wasn’t pursued on the point, but he ought to have been. Surely the Europhile and Europhobe wings of the Conservative party can’t be reconciled: they spring not from two opinions, but from two separate views of the modern world. Here was a topic begging, nay barking, to be discussed. It was decided that the topic of when Hague would be dumped was more interesting.
The new era dawned with Blair’s arrival at Millbank. At 7 a.m. Blair was hailing Gordon Brown as ‘a brilliant chancellor’ but their warm embrace lasted 0.006 seconds on my laser chronometer. If they have made a secret deal about the succession, God help them both. A secret deal between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating bedevilled Australian politics for a decade. At Smith Square, Hague was closeted with his advisers. What were they advising now? Perhaps he was advising them. ‘Call to me all my sad captains,’ said Mark Antony at the moment when he, the saddest captain of them all, realized what he had to do. Hague came out, addressed the cameras, and fell on his sword. He went the way he fought, with bravery. What Sven Goran Eriksson said about David Beckham in victory applied to Hague in his defeat. ‘He behaved like a captain.’
Postscript
From 19 May 2001 onwards, the above six pieces appeared in the Independent at various times during the two weeks of the General Election. Originally only three pieces were commissioned, but I got carried away, and the editor, Simon Kelner, generously went with the flow as my dispatches came pouring in. Later on, during the invasion of Iraq, the perfect word popped up: ‘embedded’. Following one party’s bus in an election campaign, even if that party is the likely winner, you are as effectively blocked off from a general picture of the action as a journalist embedded in an armed formation. The journalist tries to tell himself that the smell of a sweaty flak jacket and the nearby crunch of a mortar bomb are bringing him and his readers into an unprecedented intimacy with the action, but the prosaic truth is that neither he nor they would have a clue what was going on even if all the embedded reports could be combined into one. I really thought I was on to something when I chanced on the bumf about the ambulance unit: hence my gung-ho tone. The facts alas said that the Labour strategists had no intention of following up that particular lead: it was strictly a photo opportunity. On the other hand, I made the right guess when I suggested that the Conservative party was about to disappear. But I didn’t need to be at a tube station with Michael Portillo to figure that out. What was useful, about slogging along with the foot soldiers, was the reminder that politics is grinding work, best done by proper grown-up people who can survive without immediate applause. It really isn’t a bit like show business. Anthony Howard and several other qualified commentators said nice things in private about my potted analysis of recent British history, but once again I didn’t need to be out there meeting the people to get all that. I got most of it from books. For the politician to get out there, however, can be very handy, especially if he has the knack of taking in what he sees. Four years later, John Howard won his third Federal Election in Australia largely because he was a lot better than his opponent at telling what the average home owner was thinking. The Australian intelligentsia, stuck inside its jacuzzi of constantly recycled opinion, was convinced that the average home owner was motivated by nothing except the deadly fear of a hike in the mortgage rate. Howard knew better than to call 50 per cent of the population cowards. A stint on the bus or the zoo plane is still the best way to be reminded that human beings are not statistics, even when they vote.
PRIMO LEVI AND THE PAINTED VEIL
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 struggling 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, at the apartment block in Turin, he killed himself by throwing himself down the stairwell. 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. 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.
Called simply Primo Levi, Ian Thomson’s effort is already heavier than a housebrick. More mysteriously entitled The Double Bond, Carole Angier’s 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. Unvoiced appetencies, normally resistant to verbal notation, are transcribed at length. 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 direct 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 Carole 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 the remedial English course on the way to his honours degree. At school Levi had a friend called Giorgio. ‘Phlegmatic, lazy, sensitive and generous, Levi called him “Giorgione” . . .’ Surrounding evidence suggests that all those adjectives apply to Giorgio, not Levi, but the word order suggests the opposite. ‘To brutalise’ does not mean to treat like a brute; ‘exult’ does not mean ‘exalt’; ‘refute’ does not mean ‘rebut’; ‘contend’ does not mean ‘oppose’; and participles, if they are meant to dangle occasionally, ought not to dangle so far that that they confuse the sense. Of Natalia Ginzburg: ‘Born to an exemplary anti-Fascist family, her father was arrested in Turin in 1934 . . .’ But unless there were exemplary anti-Fascist families before the advent of Fascism, it was she, and not her father, who was born to the exemplary anti-Fascist family. These blemishes in written English would be less striking if Levi himself had not been a fastidious master of Italian prose, which he learned to write at a time when a mistake was a mistake and not a sign of free expression.
Luckily Thomson’s brio and sense of relevance are proof against his solecisms. Into his smaller space he packs with reasonable neatness most of the pertinent facts adduced by Angier, plus a few more that she somehow missed, perhaps because she was busy dreaming up code-names for the ever increasing crowd of women whose lips were sealed. She didn’t find out, for example, that in 1939 Levi’s parents enrolled him for English lessons with a woman called Gladys Melrose, a Londoner scratching an existence in Turin as a teacher for Berlitz. Gladys Melrose ignited Levi’s admiration for Aldous Huxley: an admiration which was to have large consequences later, when Levi formed the Huxleyan aim of studying the extermination camp as a laboratory of behaviour. Thomson also notes, as Angier does not, Levi’s fondness for Louis Armstrong. A taste for good-time jazz is not necessarily a sure sign of a sunny nature (Mussolini’s passion for Fats Waller was of no help to the Ethiopians) but it does suggest at least the capacity for lightness of spirit. It’s the kind of detail that adds to our picture of Levi’s character by making room for a quality he must have had but which is not often enough mentioned: a charming openness, on the mental level at any rate, to those easy pleasures from which, he was inclined to believe, his nature had shut him out. Did he snap his fingers as he listened to ‘Sugar Foot Stomp’? Did he hum along with ‘Savoy Blues’? Nobody ever asked, and at this rate nobody ever will, because not even Ian Thomson seems to realize that those little concrete details outrank any amount of abstract speculation.
His publisher, alas, shares the same obtuseness. Louis Armstrong, though present on page 118 of Thomson’s book, is missing from its index. So are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They are in the text, but they don’t make it to the status of a fact that a scholar might want to look up later on. Yet there is a danger of depopulating Levi’s imagination if we automatically assume that his principal mental symbols for two lovers swept away by passion were Paolo and Francesca from Canto V of the Inferno. The Fascist regime had banned Hollywood movies by 1941, but in Milan there were bootleg screenings. At one of those screenings, Levi marvelled at Fred and Ginger dancing in Top Hat. It was one of the last things he did before he went off and joined the doomed little group of young resistenti who behaved as if they had been trained for nothing else except to get arrested. He fell in love with one of them. Her name was Vanda. What did he see in his mind’s eye, in the last hour they ever spent together? Was it Paolo and Francesca riding on the storm, or was it Fred and Ginger floating a magic millimetre above a white floor, touching each other with the lyrical chasteness that reduces the soul of a shy young man to a sob of longing? Because Levi is a classic, there is a bad tendency to think that he was raised on a strictly classic diet. But he took everything in: probably the main reason why he was able to take in even Auschwitz. Dreadful grist, but a brilliant mill.
You know you are getting old when the biographers scramble the most elementary facts about World War II, as if it all happened before their time: which, of course, it did. Thomson gives us a picture of Levi, in the Lager infirmary, finding out from German and Polish newspapers that the Allies were ‘moving towards Normandy’. No newspaper of any nationality could possibly have carried such infor
mation. The newspapers might have said that the Allies were moving further into Normandy, or else were moving out of it as they expanded their bridgehead south and east; but if the newspapers had said that the Allies were moving towards Normandy they would have been privy to the biggest Allied secret of the war. On the other hand, Thomson has a sure sense of what Jewish bourgeois society was like in Turin before Mussolini made the unforced error of copying the Nuremberg laws.
Thomson paints a picture of assimilation rather than persecution. In Germany and Austria, it was the very success of the assimilation that got the anti-Semitic intellectuals so excited, with disastrous consequences: but for Italy this had never been true. Anti-Semitic theorizing had never been powerful enough to infect even the Church, whose rank and file were later to behave very well during the Nazi round-up, with the result that the Italian branch of the Final Solution was a relative flop. The theory being lacking, there had never been much practice. Thomson’s version is young Primo is bullied because he is a shrimp, not because he is a Jew: is bullied, in fact, even by other Jews. Angier can’t resist wheeling the anti-Semites on early, as if Fascism had always been bound to bring them to power. But not even the Fascists, some of whom were Jews, had harboured any such expectation until Mussolini fell prey to the brainstorm that did as much as anything else to demoralize the country. (Most of the more intelligent Fascist hierarchs realized that their dream was on its way downhill from the moment that Mussolini issued the Manifesto of Racial Scientists in 1938, but they were counting on the usual gap being maintained between rhetoric and actuality.) In Angier’s book, the Holocaust is practically waiting to grab Levi in the school playground. Levi told his Italian biographer, Fiora Vincenti, a story about his being given a hard time at school by a pair of athletic boys. Making it clear that a more powerfully equipped biographer is now on the scene, Angier goes on interpreting the story until the athletic boys end up as Jew-baiters. The interpretation is longer than the story; and anyway, if that was what Levi meant, why wouldn’t he have said it? She puts herself continually in the untenable position of knowing more than he does about the one subject he knew more about than anybody, and of wanting to get more said when saying everything he could was his principal object.