by Primo Levi
What distinguishes my house is how undistinguished it is. It looks exactly like many other almost luxurious houses dating from the early twentieth century, built of brick just before the irresistible advent of reinforced concrete; it’s virtually devoid of decoration, with the exception of a few timid art nouveau vestiges in the friezes that run over the windows and in the wooden doors that open onto the landings. It’s unadorned and functional, inexpressive and solid: it gave proof of that during the last war, when it withstood every bombing raid, getting off with nothing more than a little damage to the window frames and a few cracks that it still bears with all the pride a veteran shows for his scars. It has no ambitions; it’s a machine for living, possessing almost everything that is essential to life and almost nothing that is superfluous.
I have an unnoticed but profound relationship with this house, and with the apartment I occupy, not unlike what you feel about the people you’ve lived with for many years. If I were uprooted from here, even if it were to move to a nicer, more modern, and more comfortable place to live, I’d grieve like a refugee, I’d wither like a plant that has been transplanted to a soil that doesn’t suit it. I read somewhere a description of one of the tricks of mnemonics, which is the art (long ago practiced by the learned and the scholarly, nowadays foolishly abandoned) of exercising and improving one’s memory. Anyone who wishes to memorize a list of thirty, or forty, or even more names, and perhaps astonish an audience by reciting that list backward, can achieve his goal by mentally linking (that is to say, by inventing some relationship) between each individual name and, in order, a place in his own house: proceeding, that is, from the front door, and then moving, say, to the right and subsequently exploring every corner of the house. By retracing the same route in your imagination, you can reconstruct the original list; if you walk through your apartment in the opposite direction, you can also produce the list backward.
I’ve never felt the need to undertake such a performance, but I have no doubt that generally speaking it works quite well. It wouldn’t work for me, because in my memory all the nooks and crannies of my home are already occupied, and the authentic memories would interfere with the contingent and fictitious memories demanded by this technique. The corner just to the right of the front door is where an umbrella stand was fifty years ago, and where my father, returning home on foot from the office on a rainy day, would deposit his dripping umbrella, or, on rainless days, his walking stick; where for twenty years a horseshoe that had been found by my uncle Corrado hung (in those days, you could still find horseshoes in Corso Re Umberto), an amulet that I couldn’t say whether or not it had properly exercised its protective force; and where for another twenty years there dangled from a nail a large key whose purpose everyone had long forgotten but which no one dared to throw away. The next corner, between the wall and the walnut wardrobe, was especially desirable as a hiding place when we played hide-and-seek; one unspecified Sunday in the Oligocene era, I hid there, knelt down on a shard of broken glass, and cut myself, and to this day I bear the scar on my left knee. Thirty years after me, my daughter hid there, but she couldn’t keep from laughing and was found immediately; eight years later my son hid there with a throng of his contemporaries, one of whom lost a baby tooth in that spot and, for mysterious magical reasons, decided to press it into a hole in the plaster, where it can probably still be found.
Continuing on this dextrorotatory tour, we find the door of a room overlooking the courtyard that has served an array of functions over the decades. In my earliest memories it was the formal parlor, where my mother, two or three times a year, would entertain important guests. Then for a few years it was the bedroom of a fabulous “live-in housekeeper”; later it became my father’s business office until, during the war, it served as an encampment and a dormitory for family and friends whose homes had been bombed. After the war (and after the confiscation required by Italy’s racial laws), my two children slept and played there successively, and my wife spent many a night in that room, watching over them when they were sick: not me, as I had the ironclad alibi of work to be done in the factory and the Olympian selfishness of husbands. It is currently a multipurpose workshop, where pictures can be developed, sewing can be done on a sewing machine, and amusing toys are made. Stories of similar transfigurations could be told for all the other rooms; not long ago, to my intense discomfort, I realized that my favorite easy chair now stands on the exact spot where, according to family lore, I came into the world.
My house has an enviable location, not too far from downtown and yet comparatively quiet; the proliferation of automobiles, which fill up every cavity, like a compressed gas, has now extended out to here, but only in the past few months has it become difficult to find a parking place. The walls are thick, and street noises are muffled. Once everything was different: the city limits were a few hundred meters south of here, and we would walk through the fields “to see the trains,” which at the time, before the excavation of the trenched tunnel system of the Quadrivio Zappata, ran on the surface. The controviali, or parallel access roads, were not paved with asphalt until 1935; before that they were cobblestone, and we were woken up every morning by the noise of wagons coming in from the countryside: the clatter of iron wagon-wheel rims on the cobblestones, the crack of whips, the voices of the drivers. Other familiar voices rose from the street at other times of day: the cries of the glazier, the ragman, the man who collected “hair from your combs,” and to whom the above-mentioned live-in housekeeper occasionally sold her long gray hair; and every so often the voices of beggars in the street as they sang or played the hurdy-gurdy, and to whom we would throw down coins wrapped in paper.
Through all its transformations, the apartment where I live has preserved its anonymous and impersonal appearance: or at least, that’s how it looks to us who live in it. But it’s well-known that people are poor judges of everything that concerns them, of their own personalities, their own virtues and defects, even their own voices and faces; others, perhaps, might see it as deeply symptomatic of my family’s reclusive tendencies. Certainly, I have never consciously demanded from my home anything more than to satisfy my primary needs: space, warmth, comfort, silence, privacy. Nor have I ever consciously tried to make it mine, to make it resemble me, to embellish it, enrich it, or trick it up. It’s not easy for me to talk about my relationship with my house: perhaps that relationship is catlike in nature; like cats I enjoy physical comfort, but I can also do without it, and I would be able to adapt pretty well to an uncomfortable place to live, as I have many times in the past, and as I do every time I stay in a hotel. I don’t believe that the way I write is affected by the setting in which I live and write, nor do I believe that this setting can be perceived in the things that I have written. I must therefore be less sensitive than most to the influences of my surroundings, and I’m not affected in the slightest by the prestige that a setting confers, preserves, or undermines. I live in my house the way I live inside my skin: I know of many skins more beautiful, roomier, sturdier, and more picturesque, but it would strike me as unnatural to exchange them for my own.
Aldous Huxley
The shelf on which I keep books by Aldous Huxley constitutes an ever-present temptation: the temptation to close whatever book I’m reading and to pull down and open at random one of his books. To do such a thing, to abandon a book you haven’t yet finished and open another, is reprehensible, and I’m well aware of the fact. It’s bad manners, a minor betrayal: you’ll never know what the author had in store for you on the pages you didn’t read, you’ve refused to follow along, to listen to him; you’ve been an unfair judge, silencing the witness before he’s concluded his testimony. Still, the temptation is strong, and encouraged by the example of Huxley himself, who confessed that “desultory reading” was his favorite vice.
I often give in to this temptation, and always in favor of his earlier works, those from the period between 1920 and 1940. The later books, written by a Huxley who was no longer a n
ovelist but a pacifist, a mystic, a sociologist, a scholar of religions, metapsychics, and psychotropic drugs, are less appealing to me and make me uneasy; I would venture to say that this postwar Huxley, mortally wounded by the war and sincerely concerned about humanity’s fate, fails to attain the essence of humanity.
In contrast, and in contrast to the views of many of his present-day readers, the books of his earliest period still strike me as rich in life-giving nourishment. Open, for instance, Point Counter Point and you’ll find, now perhaps more distinctly than ever, the Europe that fostered us, for better or worse: the Europe that was once the world, inventor and guardian of all ideas and all experiences and at the same time cynical, weary, and weak in the face of the new appeals to the irrational and the subconscious.
We now view in a new light, practically symbolic of the years between the two wars, the weave of Huxley’s novels. Nothing, or almost nothing, happens in them: they’re packed with intelligent conversations and discussions, all in focus, all clear and distinct; “novels of ideas,” as Philip Quarles, Huxley’s own self-portrait, describes them. When we move from ideas to action, however, the logos dims, violence and sex prevail, and at the same time both plot and characters grow bloated, empty, less and less believable: consider, for instance, in Point Counter Point, Spandrell’s gratuitous murder of Webley, and his own theatrical suicide.
But how true, how solid these same characters remain as long as Huxley does no more than let them speak, sketch out and compare their origins, analyze their relations and opinions of one another! Here his touch is unerring, his skill and elegance magisterial: he bestows upon us a gallery of convincing portraits, some of the most vivid in all literature. Although his acuity seems unlimited, the field of his interests and sympathies is instead narrow; we meet in his pages simpletons or fools, and they, too, live their lives but in the background. They exist to serve as “stooges,” and Huxley is not indulgent toward them. His assortment is limited at the lower levels (even Quarles is “intelligent to the point of being almost human”): he couldn’t serve up a Babbitt or a Leopold Bloom.
In the depiction of his peers, that is, the superendowed, Huxley is, however, a master. His characters are all invariably witty, learned, and eloquent, all are noteworthy, even in failure; you can sense at their backs the opulence and solidity of an England more evolved, less naïve, and also less poetic than in Kipling’s day. They have no material worries, they suffer nothing more than the pangs of love or philosophical distress; they live only to communicate, to debate pointed ideas, and have no idea of silence and meditation.
They often keep a diary, which is a pursuit of solitary souls, but they also typically underline with care every trouvaille for later use in society. Huxley himself did the same thing: it is common, and slightly annoying, to catch him red-handed, to note an idea or an image in a short story, and then to see it reappear in a novel, exploited to a fault and, as it were, at second hand. This lavish, bountiful creator suddenly strikes us as miserly, careful not to squander a cent of his enormous fortune.
Levelheaded by temperament, Huxley expects and hopes to reconstruct through reason everything that is not reasonable in man, and often he succeeds. That is why the first reading of his books had such a powerful impact, in a Fascist, idealist Italy, where the exercise of reason was openly discouraged, where philosophers furrowed their brow in distaste when confronted with physicists or anatomists.
But Brave New World demands a different verdict. It’s a utopian novel, and one of the most coherent ever written. It contains no elegant divagations, no poetic elaboration, not even flesh-and-blood characters: the book is arid, tense, and bitter, but it abundantly rewards rereading. It describes with implacable precision a world that might then have seemed a delirious and arbitrary fantasy, but that seems to be looming larger on the horizon we are heading toward today. It is the best of all possible worlds, such as will exist if the technicians are given free rein: a world planned out to the last nook and cranny (and where even children are created according to blueprint, no longer birthed but built on an assembly line—singletons or in batches of identical twins, depending on the demands of the market), where totalitarian super-organization and capitalist productivism converge, along with Marx, Pavlov, Freud, and Ford. The latter pair, in fact, have blurred into a single deity, “Our Ford—or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason, he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters.”
The globe is united into a single supernation. There are no longer human races, but mankind is divided into strictly segregated castes that are conditioned in such a way as to be suited to the specific tasks assigned them: from the “Alphas,” destined from the “decanting” of the respective embryos to hold positions of the greatest responsibility, all the way down to the half-imbecilic “Epsilons” (treated with alcohol as embryos), who will be happy and contented to spend their lives as menial workers. Art and science, feelings and passions no longer exist; they would constitute threats to stability, which is the supreme, indeed the only value of this Brave New World. The education (or, rather, the “conditioning”) of young people is a state monopoly: all knowledge and moral principle are irresistibly injected into the sleeping brain. Even pain has vanished: all physical pain, thanks to medical progress, all spiritual pain, thanks to “emotional engineering.”
And so one and all are happy, obligated to happiness, in this new order that to us, the “non-conditioned,” can only appear despicable. Unmistakably, this is a nightmare, but more realistic and more intelligent than all other positive (Plato’s Republic) and negative (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) utopias. The book is profoundly ironic and pessimistic: if you want prosperity, freedom, and peace, this is the solution, even for a rational human being, the temple of knowledge, the image of God. This: the constitution chosen millions of years ago by ants and termites, and never amended since then.
In 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley could write: “In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. . . . Twenty-seven years later . . . I feel a good deal less optimistic. [My] prophecies . . . are coming true much sooner than I thought they would.” What other prophets have been granted the grim distinction of seeing the Brave New World that they foretold spring up around them?
Ex-Chemist
The bonds that tie a man to his profession are similar to those which tie him to his country. They are just as complex, frequently ambivalent, and usually understood fully only when they are broken: by exile or emigration, in the case of his homeland; by retirement, in the case of his profession. I gave up my career as a chemist several years ago, but only now do I feel I possess the necessary detachment to look back on it in its entirety, and to understand how much it influenced me and how much I owe it.
I don’t mean to refer to the fact that, during my imprisonment at Auschwitz, it saved my life, or the fair salary I earned for thirty years, much less the pension to which it entitled me. Instead, I’d like to describe other benefits that I believe I got from that career, all of which can be applied to the new profession I’ve taken up, that of writer. A stipulation is called for immediately: writing is not strictly speaking a profession, or, at least to my mind, it ought not to be—it’s a creative pursuit, and is therefore ill suited to schedules and deadlines, commitments to clients and higher-ups. Nonetheless, writing is a form of “production,” or, rather, of transformation: a person who writes is transforming his experiences into a form that is accessible and enjoyable to the “customer” who will be reading it. Experiences (in the broadest sense: life experiences), therefore, are a raw material: the writer who lacks them will work in vain, and though he believes he is writing, his pages are empty. Now, the things that I saw, experienced, and did in my previous incarnation are currently, for me as a writer, an invaluable source of raw materials, of stories to tell, and not stories alone: they are also the source of those fundamental emotions that go with measuring yourself again
st matter (matter, an impartial judge, impassive but unforgiving: if you make a mistake, it punishes you mercilessly), winning, facing defeat. Defeat is a painful but healthy experience, without which it is impossible to become a responsible adult. I think that any of my fellow chemists will bear me out: you learn more from mistakes than from success. For example, to formulate an explanatory hypothesis, believe in it, grow fond of it, check it (oh, the temptation to falsify data, to give them a push of the thumb!), and in the end to find it wrong is a cycle one encounters all too often in “the pure state” in the course of working as a chemist, but it’s easy to see the same thing in countless other realms of human endeavor. Anyone who experiences this with honesty emerges a more mature person.
There are other advantages, other gifts that the chemist proffers to the writer. The habit of delving into matter, the yearning to probe its composition and structure, to predict its properties and behavior, leads to insight, to a certain mental habit of being concrete and concise, the persistent desire not to stop at the surface of things. Chemistry is the art of separating, weighing, and distinguishing: these three exercises are equally useful to those setting out to describe events or give form to their imaginings. What’s more, there is an immense patrimony of metaphors that a writer can derive from the chemistry of both past and present, which to those who have never spent time in either a laboratory or a factory can be known only vaguely. Even the uninitiated know what it means to filter, crystallize, and distill, but only at a certain remove; they can’t know the “imprinted passion,” the emotions that are bound up with these actions, they haven’t glimpsed their symbolic shadows. On the plane of comparisons alone, a militant chemist finds himself the possessor of unsuspected riches: “black as . . .”; “bitter as . . .”; sticky, tenacious, heavy, fetid, fluid, volatile, inert, inflammable—these are all qualities that a chemist knows intimately, and for each of them he can select a substance that possesses the quality to a preeminent and exemplary degree. As a former chemist, though by now I might be out of practice and bumbling were I to return to the laboratory, I still feel something like shame when in my writing I make use of this repertory: it is as if I enjoyed an unfair advantage over my new writer colleagues, who do not have a militance like mine behind them.