The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  There’s no mistaking the fact that the book is childish in its appeal, and the nature of the readership that it has found over its century-long existence abundantly confirms this. Yet it’s childish in spite of itself—not by chosen topic but through ineptitude: there could be no clearer evidence than the clumsy, ham-handed sentimental adventure of Tartarin and the Moorish chanteuse. Nor can we say that it’s “also” childish: abundantly, universally childish—“also” childish—are such books as Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe, and yet they appeal to all ages; in contrast, a reader older than eighteen who takes pleasure in Tartarin must be either a bumpkin or a dimwit.

  Or a racist. This doubt, this suspicion of a subtle and subconscious hatred on Alphonse Daudet’s part, not only for Tartarin but for his sweet town and his fellow townspeople, persisted throughout my reading. Moreover, it seems to me that his aversion is part of a larger attitude, a vague and muddled rebellion and intolerance that arm the Nîmes-born author against his homeland and against himself: perhaps an echo of artistic dissatisfaction? Or the infinitesimal seed of that subversive animus, that reactionary frenzy that led his son Léon so badly astray, making him a regrettable tool of the right-wing monarchists and Action Française?

  Whatever the deeper motivations, the irony that Daudet employs in his portrayal of Tartarin, the Tarasconais, and the Méridionaux, while jocular on the surface, is profoundly acrimonious. “The man of the Midi does not lie, he deceives himself. . . . His untruth, for him, is not a lie, it is a sort of mirage”: this is not the sort of statement that we listen to or tolerate lightheartedly today. If we’ve learned anything in the past forty years in Europe, it is certainly this: that any generalization about the defects (or even the virtues) of this or that group of human beings is dangerous and reckless; that, when we speak of the Tarasconais, or the blacks, or the Russians, or the Italians in general terms, we are in danger of getting things wrong, and are certain to offend someone. Tartarin, however abortive and rudimentary he may be, has a fair claim to be defended from his own creator: if he was a coward, a liar, and a fool, then he was so in his own right, and not because of the blood in his veins, or the sun of Provence that “transfigures everything.”

  With all this, I have yet to show that Tartarin of Tarascon is a bad book: but it is, no matter how you want to look at it. I don’t believe that my negative judgment is a product of that phenomenon so frequently noted, whereby books read as an assignment in school (and for the most part, unfortunately, these are the greatest works the human mind has conceived) are as a result permanently discolored, or even poisoned and unreadable. This book is bad from start to finish, practically every page of it. If I were asked to spare a few pages, for an unnecessary anthology, I would have no doubts: the description of the harbor of Marseille, which is scanned with a lively and acute eye, and sketched without lengthy digressions, with unaccustomed confidence; and the curious and quick-moving encounter with the “real” hunter, Monsieur Bombonnel, the sole dignified character in the book (though he remains onstage for only a few minutes).

  Otherwise, the composition is dreary, devoid of verve and imagination: Algiers and Algeria are secondhand descriptions, all the human figures are cardboard, the adventures of the unfortunate hunter repeat themselves in the course of two hundred pages. And those feeble, worn-out sentence openers! “For instance,” “Picture this,” “Just imagine” (the reader must never be asked to imagine something: it is the writer’s job to make the reader imagine it), “I need hardly tell you,” “Calamity!”; and the profusion of ellipses. And yet this is France, in the years of Flaubert and Zola: Tartarin of Tarascon is a twin of Sentimental Education.

  Nor can the fact that the book is humorous be adduced as a mitigating circumstance. Any comic potential is restricted entirely to the first few pages and to the premise, and declines rapidly as description gives way to narrative. There is not a single scene that prompts open, liberating laughter; in fact, condensing around Tartarin (and this is perhaps the greatest surprise of this rereading), we see an increasingly grim aura of failure, of definitive shipwreck, of frustration; and we are tempted to think that if Daudet had fully understood this tragic vocation of his little man, instead of stubbornly perceiving in him a comic miles gloriosus, we would have had a different and better book.

  Going Back to School

  I overcame the stumbling blocks of shyness and laziness and, well after my sixtieth birthday, enrolled in a class at a respected language school to study a foreign language I know poorly. I wanted to learn that language better, purely out of intellectual curiosity: I had learned the basics by ear, under poor conditions, and later I’d used it for many years for professional reasons, focusing on the practical aspects, that is, understanding and making myself understood, but neglecting the specifics of the language, its grammar, and its syntax.

  My entrance into the classroom for the first lesson was traumatic: I was an outsider, an alien; I didn’t belong here. There were twenty or so students, only three of us males; two young women appeared to be in their thirties, all the others—female and male—were in their twenties. The teacher, who was also young, was educated, likable, intelligent, and very good at overcoming the inhibitions and shyness of the students, clearly experienced at his job, and familiar with the obstacles that interfere with the flow of learning.

  He began the class with a frank and open discussion. There are many different reasons for studying a foreign language, and so there are many different methods of teaching it; strictly speaking, the teaching ought to be tailored to the aims, abilities, and previous knowledge of each individual pupil, but, since that wasn’t possible, a number of compromises would be necessary. There are those who want (or need) to learn a language only so that they can read it, or in order to study the literature, or to speak it as a tourist, or to do business in it, or to write business letters, or to hold a technical conversation in it with a colleague who is also a technician; but within this multitude of purposes it is possible to draw a boundary line between the passive command of a language (understanding without speaking) and active command (understanding and speaking). Well, have no illusions: the most talented among you may succeed in attaining an almost complete passive understanding of the spoken or written language; only a genius, at your age (and he was clearly referring to the age of most of the students), could succeed in speaking or writing the language without making mistakes, unless he or she could live abroad for at least six months in “total immersion,” that is, without hearing or speaking a word of Italian.

  From the first few classes I realized how cruelly different it is to learn at age twenty, age forty, and age sixty. I believed my hearing was normal: it is, but only for Italian. It’s one thing to listen to someone talking in your own language, where, even if you miss a syllable or a word here or there, you have no difficulty filling in the blank subconsciously, or guessing at it through a quick mental process of exclusion. But if the language in question is a foreign one, then missing a syllable means missing the bus: the person goes on talking while you scramble to reconstruct the missing link. Your understanding can be thwarted by something as minor as the echo of voices off the walls, or a trolley going by in the street outside, but your young classmates don’t seem to be having any difficulties. Other challenges arise from your vision. I would be unfair if I complained about mine; in daily life it gives me problems only perhaps in museums, where you are continually required to adjust your focus to see something from up close and then from far away. The same thing happens at school; agility in adjusting your focus is necessary at all times, your eyes must leap countless times from your notebook to the blackboard and to the teacher’s face. If you have bifocals, things go reasonably well; but if you don’t, your left hand is engaged in an exhausting workout of “on-and-off-and-on-again.”

  There are challenges that are more daunting because they run deeper. It is well-known that the process of learning can be broken down into three phases: impressing something in your
memory, preserving it, and retrieving it when needed. The last two hold up fairly well: once a concept is impressed, it stays there indefinitely; retrieving it isn’t hard, and, in fact, with the passing years you learn certain stratagems to ensure that the phenomenon of having a word or a concept “on the tip of your tongue” occurs less frequently. But it is etching it into the memory that becomes harder and harder. You have to “learn how to learn”: it’s no longer enough to let the concept find its own way to the warehouse and deposit itself there. It won’t stay there, or not for long: it enters but almost immediately departs, vanishing into thin air, and leaving behind nothing more than an irritating and indistinct trace. You have to learn to intervene with brute force, to hammer it into its notch; it can be done, but it requires time and effort. You have to take methodical notes, and to reread them as many times as needed, weeks and even months afterward. There’s more: you realize that, perversely, it is just as difficult to erase, that is, unlearn mistaken concepts. It’s all as if a hypothetical wax had hardened: harder to make an impression, harder to erase one. Those mistakes in vocabulary or grammar that are so easy to pick up when studying amateurishly later demand method, patience, and a great deal of energy to chisel away.

  On the other hand, age does not entail only disadvantages. You’ve managed to pick up a trick or two along the way; it’s easier to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, that is, which concepts should be accepted and recorded with care, and which can be glanced over and discarded. You have more time, greater calm, fewer distractions; you possess (possibly without being aware of it) a coherent body of knowledge into which new knowledge fits like a key in a keyhole. You have old curiosities that have been waiting ten or twenty years to be satisfied, and concepts that have been waited for and desired are remembered better.

  Most of all, our objectives are different. Even in the best cases, a student, even after he’s finished with his mandatory education (where motivation is usually minimal), has no more than an indirect motivation. He studies not to learn but, rather, to obtain a certificate or degree that will allow him to continue his studies, or to earn a living; it is rare that he becomes fully aware of the correlation that links learning to professional competence, in part because, unfortunately, it is often the case that no such correlation exists. But even when he is reasonably convinced of the long-term utility of his studies, any actual interest may be weak. In contrast, an old man who chooses on his own to undertake a course of study, without restrictions in terms of schedule, without required attendance, without fear of testing, grading, or even a negative evaluation, experiences a sensation of lightness, of free will, which the handicaps described above and the hard seats do nothing to poison.

  It is study, it is self-improvement and growth, but it is also play, theater, and luxury. Play—that is to say, exercise for its own sake, but orderly and governed by rules—is typical of children; but when you play at going back to school, you rediscover a taste of childhood, delicate and forgotten. The competition with your classmates, whether victorious or not, is a form of contact with young people on an equal standing, a fair and open race that would be impossible to undertake elsewhere. The fences separating the generations come down; one is forced to set aside the dull authority of an elder, and is led to pay homage to the superior mental resources of the young, who sit beside you without derision, commiseration, or scorn, and make friends with you. Moreover, giving oneself the gift of an enjoyable endeavor that has no immediate short-term objective is a luxury that costs little and pays rich dividends: it’s as if you had been given, free of charge or almost, a rare and beautiful object.

  Why Do We Write?

  It often happens that a reader, usually a young one, will ask a writer, in all simplicity, why he wrote a certain book, or why he wrote it a certain way, or even, in more general terms, why he writes and why all writers write. It is no easy matter to answer this last question, which contains all the others: a writer is not always conscious of the reasons that lead him to write, he is not always driven by a single motive, and sometimes there are different motives behind, say, the beginning and the end of a single work. It seems to me that at least nine motivations can be discerned, and I will do my best to describe them here; the reader, whether he is a writer or not, will have no trouble coming up with others. Why, then, do we write?

  1.Because we feel the urge or the need. This, at first glance, is the most disinterested motivation. The author who writes because something or someone inside him compels the words is not working toward a given goal; his work may bring him fame and glory, but those will be a plus, an added benefit, not something he consciously desired: a by-product, in other words. Of course, the case sketched out here is extreme, theoretical, and asymptotic; it is doubtful whether such a pure-hearted writer, or such an artist in general, ever lived. The Romantics saw themselves in this light; it is no accident that we believe we are able to descry such examples among the great men of the more distant past, about whom we know little, and who are therefore easier to idealize. For much the same reason distant mountains all appear to us to be the same color, one that often blends with the color of the sky.

  2.To entertain others or oneself. Fortunately, the two variants almost always coincide: it is rare that someone who writes to entertain an audience does not also have fun writing, and it is rare for someone who enjoys writing to fail to convey to his readers at least some share of that enjoyment. In contrast with the previous case, there do exist pure entertainers, who are often not writers by profession, strangers to ambition, literary or otherwise, free of burdensome certainties and dogmatic rigidity, as light and limpid as children, and as lucid and sage as someone who has lived for a long time and to good purpose. The first name that comes into my mind is that of Lewis Carroll, the shy Anglican deacon and mathematician who lived a blameless life, and who has fascinated six generations with the adventures of his Alice, first in Wonderland and later Through the Looking-Glass. Confirmation of his affable genius can be found in the popularity that his books still enjoy after more than a century in print, not only among children, for whom they were theoretically intended, but also among logicians and psychoanalysts, who never seem to tire of finding new meanings in their pages. It is likely that this unbroken popularity of his books is due precisely to the fact that they never sneak anything in—neither moral lessons nor educational chores.

  3.To teach someone something. To do this, and to do it well, can be invaluable to the reader, but it’s essential that there be a clear understanding. With only rare exceptions, such as Virgil in the Georgics, didactic intent tends to eat into the narrative fabric from beneath, tainting and deteriorating it: a reader in search of a story should find a story, not some unwanted lesson. As I said, however, there are exceptions, and those with a poet’s blood in their veins know how to find and express poetry even when speaking of stars, atoms, the breeding of livestock, and the keeping of bees. Let me scandalize no one by mentioning in this context Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, by Pellegrino Artusi, another pure-hearted man who never daintily covers his mouth with one hand: he doesn’t pose as a man of letters, he passionately loves the art of cooking so scornfully dismissed by hypocrites and dyspeptics, he intends to teach it, he says so, and he does so with the clarity and simplicity of someone who knows his topic thoroughly, spontaneously attaining the level of art.

  4.To improve the world. As you may see, we are moving further and further away from art for art’s sake. It may be appropriate here to point out that the motivations we’ve been discussing have very little to do with the worth of the work they produce; a book may be fine, serious, lasting, and enjoyable for reasons that are entirely different from the ones that led the author to write it. It is possible to write despicable books for eminently noble reasons, and also, though it happens less often, noble books for despicable reasons. All the same, I personally feel a certain degree of mistrust for anyone who “knows” how to improve the world; often, though not always,
such a person is so enamored of his system that he becomes impervious to criticism. We can only hope that he lacks an outsized force of will, otherwise he may be tempted to improve the world with deeds instead of just words: that’s what Hitler did after writing Mein Kampf, and I’ve often thought that many other utopians, if they had had sufficient energy, could have unleashed wars and mass slaughter.

  5.To spread one’s ideas. Those who write for this reason constitute only a smaller-scale—and hence less dangerous—variation on the previous instance. The category in fact corresponds to that of philosophers, whether they are brilliant, mediocre, or overweening, lovers of the human race, dilettantes, or madmen.

  6.To rid themselves of some source of anguish. Often writing is an equivalent of the confessional or Freud’s couch. I have no objection to those who write because they are driven by some inner tension: indeed, I wish them success in freeing themselves of it, as I was able to many years ago. I do ask, however, that they make an effort to filter that anguish, to refrain from hurling it, rough and raw, into their readers’ faces: otherwise, they risk infecting others without giving any relief to themselves.

  7.To become famous. I think that no one but a fool would sit down to write with the sole objective of becoming famous; but I also believe that no writer, not even the most modest, not even the least boastful, not even the angelic Lewis Carroll mentioned earlier, has been immune to this motivation. To possess fame, to read about yourself in the press, to hear others talk about you is sweet, without a doubt; but few of the joys that life can offer demand such effort, and few labors promise such an uncertain outcome.