The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Admittedly, ‘everything he could’ did not always mean everything he knew. There is such a thing as a decorum that goes out of date. As Thomson notes, Levi held back from evoking the pitiable scene at Fossoli when the SS gleefully photographed the prisoners as they squatted defecating in the railway siding before the train departed. Typically, the SS got a particular charge out of photographing the women. Luciana Nissim, who was there, recorded the moment in her Memoir from the House of the Dead, which was published before Levi had finished writing If This Is a Man. Thomson plausibly conjectures that Levi was held back by ‘some strange puritan stringency’, but to a man of his generation – and, indeed, of mine – it is the word ‘strange’ that would seem strange. Why add insult to injury by speaking of the unspeakable? That the SS could visit such barbarism on women was the proof that the Devil was loose. For all his determination to tell the whole truth, Levi thought he could not do it unless the Devil within himself was kept on a short leash: vengeance and hatred were his enemies, not his friends. And decorum: well, that was his friend. Look what had happened when it had been outlawed, in that militarized bedlam where anything went and only luck could save you.

  ‘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 the scythe. 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 kept him in the work camp and out 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 got 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 of his message 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 mandatory 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 fellow survivor Jean Améry drank poison. Levi had always been impressed by Améry’s contention that the man who has been tortured once stays tortured. Writing about Améry’s suicide, he returned to the same idea. Thomson quotes what Levi said:

  Suicides are generally mysterious: Améry’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. There is no notion that Levi might have been honouring his wife for her loyalty, love and sacrifice, and that the other women, in declining to twist his arm, might have been honouring him through respecting his real wishes. 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 looks 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.

  TLS, 21 June 2002

  Postscript

  In a book review there is room to say only so much, but perhaps I should have found room to say that Levi himself didn’t approve of the term ‘Holocaust’. Unfortunately, to open a question of terminology would have imposed the obligation of following it up, and in this case to no clear end, because a preferable term has been slow to present itself. When we tell people that they don’t know enough about the Holocaust, at least they have some idea of what it is we are saying they don’t know enough about. If we tell them that they don’t know enough about the Shoah, they aren’t even aware of what subject it is that we suppose them to be ignorant of. On this point it is important to remember that Levi, while never less than scrupulous in his personal use of language, was generously prepared to accept that other people could feel keenly even if they spoke clumsily. The American TV mini-series Holocaust was much derided by experts when it was first screened, but it was not derided by Levi. He thought its heart was in the right place. As he grew older, Levi found out the hard way that the precious truth he was trying to guard had more to fear from misplaced fastidiousness than from vulgarity. Were there such a thing as life after death, he would have found out from his biographies that the truth itself can be put to inhuman use, and not only by tabloid journalists. Reputable scholars can persuade themselves that duty requires a full disclosure of any truffle unearthed. Very few among even the more serious reviewers of these two books raised the question of what Levi would have thought about the prospect of the women in his life having their privacy intruded upon while they still breathed. Until the day
he died, he did his best to protect all concerned from the consequences of having loved him. The day after, all bets were off. It is offensive to pretend that we have a right to behave this way simply because Levi was a great man who gave us our best account of what it was like to share the fate of the anonymous millions, and that his life, therefore, is a proper object of study in all details, no matter how embarrassing they might happen to be for his family and intimate friends. Now that his protesting voice is supposedly silent (and how truly vulgar his biographers are to suppose that) his dearest wish – to restore and preserve the concept of a private life – is trampled upon simply and solely because he was famous. His loved ones are maltreated because he shared the fate of Elvis Presley. Thus the celebrity culture soaks upwards, like wet rot in a wall.

  A BIG BOUTIQUE OF AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS

  After only four annual volumes, The Best Australian Essays has reached the point where the law of increasing expectations begins to kick in. By now the series has done so much that we want it to do everything. Speaking as an Australian who lives offshore, I would be well pleased if each volume could contain, on every major issue, a pair of essays best presenting the two most prominent opposing views. This would give me some assurance that I was hearing both sides of the national discussion on each point, despite my being deprived of access to many of the publications in which essays, under one disguise or another, nowadays originate. (I leave aside the probability that most Australians living in Australia are deprived of access too, the time having long passed when any one person could take in all the relevant print.) But the editor, Peter Craven, could easily point out that my wish is a pipe-dream.

  Even in the United States, where the First Amendment theoretically rules, nobody now believes that everyone should be heard: that awkward ideal has now been replaced by a more realistic one, the town meeting at which the moderator merely ensures that everything worth hearing is said – an object which dictates that not everyone gets a say. Craven could add that he is not running a town meeting either. He is selecting for quality, and a criterion of quality automatically limits variety. There might be some views worth hearing but nobody has written them down with sufficient skill for the essay to rank as literature. At the risk of putting words into Craven’s mouth, I would suggest that he would suggest that the compiling of an annual literary anthology – a showcase for the essay as an art form in which Australians excel – is his first object, and that if I want to plug into the complete national discussion I should keep googling until I attain omniscience. He’s running a boutique, not a shopping mall. It’s a big boutique, but selectivity is still the selling feature.

  That being accepted, what wealth is here: so much that there is little point in complaining about what is absent. In the 2001 volume I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Hall’s assault on Keith Windschuttle’s view of Aboriginal history, but I was still at the stage of thinking that an essay by Windschuttle should have been in there too. Windschuttle, however, best advances his arguments in book form, rather than through the essay. His The Killing of History is an important book about the disastrous effect of Cultural Studies on the proper study of history, and his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History is at the very least considerable, or so many people would not have rushed to consider it. For my own comfort, I would like to believe that his argument against the use of the genocide concept when it comes to the crimes committed against the Aboriginals is a necessary correction to a vocal but slipshod consensus. On the other hand, Richard Hall the hard-nosed foot-slogger was undoubtedly right to point out the dangers of a scholar’s trusting the reliability of official reports. As well as being right about that, he could write. ‘The revisionist historians have dug themselves into their trenches and want to stay there.’ Launched with the economical accuracy of an old-time brawler, Hall’s sentences hit home. If you had only his essay to go on, you would think there was a good case for regarding the behaviour of modern Australia towards its Aboriginals as being in grim parallel to the behaviour of modern Turkey towards its Armenians. Make way for the Pilger vision of the irredeemably racist land in the South. But now, in this year’s volume, we have Noel Pearson’s essay ‘The Need for Intolerance’. After duly praising Paul Keating’s legacy on Aboriginal policy, Pearson enters his caveat.

  Federal Labor is dominated by what I call the progressivist intellectual middle stratum. They have played a role in achieving recognition of Aboriginal people’s property rights, but I contend that the prejudice, social theories and thinking habits of left-leaning, liberal-minded people make them unable to do anything further for Aboriginal people by attacking our real disadvantage factors. The only answer to the epidemics of substance abuse that devastate our communities is organised intolerance of abusive behaviour.

  This is not impeccable prose. Pearson was never trained in the punchy, unadorned directness of Hall’s hot-metal hinterland. Those ‘disadvantage factors’ sound like sociology, and academic sociology at that. But taken as a whole, the piece is a powerful example of how a book review (in this case, of Don Watson’s monograph on Paul Keating) can be a good way for an essay to begin its life. The piece gets you right into the true centre of the national debate, by reminding you that on this point the national debate is a local branch of an international debate, the one about whether, beyond a certain point of restitution, welfare can ameliorate injustice without furthering it. And just because it is Pearson talking, the argument against the genocide concept is given useful reinforcement. It is unlikely that any Armenian has ever addressed a Turkish audience in the same way, per media an annual collection called Best Turkish Essays. So however bad the past was, the present must be in better shape, must it not? I put the point as a rhetorical question because I have been mentally fighting a court case ever since The Rabbit-proof Fence was premiered in London. After the screening I tried to reassure a hovering television news camera that things had come on a bit in recent years. An Australian woman overheard me. ‘How can you say such things after seeing a film like that?’ She proved impervious to the argument that the film was set in the past, and could scarcely have been made if the present were not different. The concept was too subtle for her to grasp. It turned out that she was a lawyer. She can attack me as often as she likes, but I hope to God that she never defends me.

  John Button’s fond reminiscence of John Gorton, ‘A Knockabout Bloke’, continues the good work of adding nuance to Australia’s political past. After Paul Hasluck and Diamond Jim McClelland, we are no longer surprised that there should be politicians who know how to write for the page as well as they shout from the stump or characterize the Right Honourable Member for Woopwoop as a galah. But once again subsequent riches make it hard to imagine the initial poverty. Donald Horne, when he personally inaugurated the modern tradition of wide-ranging political commentary with his book The Lucky Country in 1964, took it for granted that Australia’s politicians had always been a second-rate, semi-articulate bunch at best. There was reason even at the time to think that he had misstated the case. Whatever Menzies’ prose style lacked, it wasn’t a literate background, and right back at the beginning of the federated nation stood Deakin, one of the most learned public men of his time. But Horne was pretty much correct about the confinement of the political mind to politics itself, as if the practical business of running for office and keeping it could have no general resonance in the surrounding culture. Written in a fruitful retirement, the example of McClelland’s newspaper column was enough to show that things needn’t be that way, and now here we have Button bringing out Gorton’s complexity – and by extension the complexity of the interchange between the parties and the factions – in a book review of Ian Hancock’s book on Gorton that adds a lot to the book. In calling such a book review by its right name, an essay, and in placing it where we can all see it, this collection is doing exactly the kind of work that it should be doing. Whether it should be doing more is reduced to a side issue.

  Apart from the politicians and activ
ists, the political commentators are present and, where appropriate, incorrect. Mungo MacCallum celebrates Gorton too, with an enchantingly tasteless account of his funeral. ‘For sensitive organisations such as the Mafia, or even the Labor Party, it might have seemed a bit uncouth.’ Just how couth MacCallum is might seem to be in question, but in fact he operates in a tradition that stretches back to Alfred Kerr in Berlin in the 1890s. On a bad night in the theatre Kerr would review the audience. Showing a similar gift for facing the wrong way at the illuminating moment, Mungo, louche bearer of a laurelled surname, brings out the all too human in the all too political. If only there were room, we could probably stand a bit more of that approach. After four annual volumes Patrick Cooke has not yet turned up, yet I can think of at least a dozen of his Bulletin columns that went through a current political contretemps like an angle grinder through balsa. I suppose there are better reasons for shutting out Bob Ellis. It could be said that his elephantine compendia of bits and pieces, far from subverting the conventions of reasoned discourse, are intent on their final destruction. But all his books are in my shelves beside me as I write this, and I have followed his personal saga with guilty fascination. The guilt comes from the way he has never been tempted to clean up his act, whereas the rest of us who started off with him at Sydney University in the late 1950s have been glad enough to be gazetted as official Establishment figures. Somehow he saw a cold future on the way, and refused to join it. It was instructive, however, that when politicians in Canberra suffered from aching conscience in the night, they would join him.