The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  I’ll explain with an example. While reading a novel whose title I’ve forgotten, I happened on the Italian word siluetta, condemned by purists as a needless Gallicism, and a word I’d probably encountered countless times before without experiencing either curiosity or symptoms of intolerance. The purists suggest replacing it with model, profile, outline, figure; I’m no purist, and if the occasion presents itself, or if I find the occasion through some effort of my own, I will happily write siluetta, or even go back to the original French word, silhouette, because it’s one I especially like. It’s a painterly word: it’s slight and light, tapered (perhaps because I subconsciously associate it with siluro, “torpedo,” or with the French sillon, meaning “groove” or “furrow”?), and it has the distinct appearance of a graceful feminine diminutive, perfect for describing the body of a teenage swimmer standing out against the sky, for instance, as she dives from a board. But a diminutive of what?

  A diminutive of nothing. It is not a diminutive, it is feminine only in appearance, it has nothing to do with either siluro or sillon, and the lower-case first letter is an artifact. In any old Larousse you can find the true story of Étienne de Silhouette, of Limoges, the controller general of the sadly ruinous French public finances in 1759. It appears that he had the best of intentions but was heavy-handed. Obsessed with austerity, he issued decrees that were so hasty and bizarre that he quickly became unpopular, and in fact the king relieved him of his position just a few months after appointing him to it, perhaps in part because the reckless functionary had gone so far as to propose that the perquisites of the royal family be reduced. He was pilloried by the satirical broadsheets, and jokes, proverbs, and figures of speech circulated at his expense.

  It started with describing as “à la Silhouette” any decree that was half baked, clumsy, or foolish; then the term came to designate anything poorly suited to its function or designed too emphatically on the cheap, and in particular portraits reduced to mere outline were said to have been done “à la Silhouette.” In time, the outline itself came to be called a silhouette, and it was via this lengthy path, with the capital letter of his name lost to posterity, that the inspector went down in history, paradoxically not in spite of his wrongheadedness but precisely by virtue of it. All the same, there can be no doubt that, had his name been less elegant, this evolution would have had a different outcome or ended sooner. This is not the only case in which a lower-case letter perpetuates a poor reputation: the term “quisling” is used these days for someone who collaborates with the oppressor of his country by offering to serve as governor, and it will continue to be so employed long after Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian traitor in the Second World War, has been forgotten.

  As a rule, however, the initial capital letter is a tribute to the virtues or the ingenuity of the possessor of the name. The Maecenases of every time and place have kept alive for nearly two millennia the renown of Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, the learned friend of Horace and Virgil. For housewives everywhere on earth, the name of Justus von Liebig, a famous and versatile German chemist, is linked to the beef bouillon cube with which his name has become virtually synonymous: a liebig is a common noun for an everyday object. The fact is not without irony: Liebig was a pioneer in all fields of pure and applied chemistry; he is certainly one of the founding fathers of modern chemistry; and yet his name is inextricably linked to his one successful commercial undertaking, which might rather be called speculative, for in reality what is needed to obtain beef extract is capital rather than knowledge or a spirit of invention.

  For that matter, the handbooks for my previous profession teem with nouns that were once proper and have now become common, or used as common nouns: the Kipp generator, the Bunsen burner, the Buchner funnel, the Soxhlet extractor—clever objects developed in the chemical laboratories of the nineteenth century, which enjoy the decorous semi-eternity that was denied their inventors. Who still remembers Professor Soxhlet, the Moravian chemist, physician, and philosopher? He has been nothing but ashes for more than half a century, but the brilliant extractor he invented (the “Soxhlet”) still works away in laboratories everywhere, with that slow, intermittent, and silent rhythm that makes it so similar to an organ in our bodies.

  I felt, as I mentioned above, the giddy thrill of a mushroom hunter who finds a handsome porcini when I learned that derricks—that is, those metallic latticework structures that are used to drill into the earth to find and extract petroleum—take their name from a Mister Derryck, a hangman in sixteenth-century London: he loved his work, and invented a new model of gallows, latticed, tall and slender, that was clearly visible from a distance. This chance discovery so fascinated me that, in one of my books, I constructed a story around it. The case is significantly parallel to that of the guillotine, invented by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, that of the chassepot rifle, and many others: in every era the tools for killing tend to be updated and improved. Another fine mushroom, albeit more evanescent than the other ones mentioned here, is the Marie of the bain-marie: it is said that the inventor of the bain-marie was the first alchemist in history, none other than Mary, or Miriam, Moses’ prophetess sister.

  Few Frenchmen know that la poubelle, the word for trash can, immortalizes the name of a Monsieur Poubelle, the prefect who invented it, in the nineteenth century. In Italy, a certain kind of extension ladder, mounted on a trailer and made up of telescoping sections that can be deployed one after another by use of a winch, is called a scala-porta (ladder-gate, ladder-door) or even, oddly enough, vedova-porta (widow-gate, widow-door). These names have nothing to do with the fact that the ladder is portable (as porta-ladder might suggest), but instead commemorate (or were meant to commemorate) the Signor Porta who invented it, a century ago, and his widow, who long held the patent; but, in this case as well, if fate had chosen to assign Signor Porta a less strangely fitting surname, he might never have had the luck to lose his capital letter, and in all likelihood the ladder he invented would have been given a polysyllabic pseudo-Greek name, such as the periplanetic ladder or the anaptyctic ladder.

  Writing a Novel

  After thirty-five years of apprenticeship, and patent or camouflaged autobiographical writing, I decided one day to cross over the barrier and write a novel, without much interest in the debate now raging over whether the novel is dead or alive and, if alive, in good health. Now that the undertaking is complete, and the book is in print and in bookstores, I have the agreeable impression of having returned home from an exotic voyage and, like any returnee, I feel the desire to talk about the things I’ve seen and invite my friends over for a “slide show.” Of course, one’s friends are often bored by these unasked-for displays; if so, in this case they need only turn the page.

  What does it feel like to write things you’ve made up? Writing about something you’ve seen is easier than inventing, and less rewarding. It’s both writing and describing: you have an outline, you delve into your memories, whether recent or distant, you organize your various finds (if you have the talent), you catalogue them, then you take a sort of mental camera and start clicking. You may be a mediocre photographer, or a good one, or even a “fine art photographer”; you may ennoble the things you depict, or portray them in an impersonal fashion, understated and honest, or even give a distorted, flat, blurry, off-center image of them, under- or overexposed, but in any case you’re being guided, led by the hand, by the facts, and you have your feet on the ground.

  Writing a novel is quite another matter, it is a form of super-writing: you no longer touch earth, you’re in flight, with all the thrills, terrors, and excitements of an early aviator in a biplane made of canvas, twine, and plywood; or perhaps, more accurately, in a tethered balloon whose moorings have been cut. The initial sensation, destined to wane soon enough, is of boundless, almost licentious freedom. You can pick out the topic or story you like, whether tragic, fantastic, or comic, lunar or solar or saturnine; you can situate it in any era, from the First Day of Creation (or even earlier, why not?) to
the present day—or even the most far-flung future—which you’re free to shape as you please. You can set your story wherever you please: in the living room of your home, in the empyrean, at the court of Tamerlane, in the hold of a fishing trawler, inside a red corpuscle, in the depths of a mine, or in a bordello—in short, any place you’ve ever seen, or places you’ve heard about, or read about, or seen in photographs, or in the movies, or imagined, imaginary, imaginable, unimaginable.

  The whole world belongs to you, no, the cosmos; and if this cosmos cramps your style, then you can invent a new one that suits your purpose. If it obeys the laws of physics and common sense, good; if it doesn’t, that’s fine, too, or perhaps even better. In any case, you won’t unleash a catastrophe of any kind—at most, some nitpicking reader will write to express in the most urbane terms his disappointment or disagreement. In short, aside from any time you might have wasted, you run no greater risks than those which face a student turning in a classroom essay: at worst you get a bad grade. Nice work, isn’t it?

  As for the characters, here things get more complicated. Concerning this subject—the ménage à trois between the author, the character, and the reader—truckloads of books have been written, but, since I am now an expert, I am going to have my say, that is, put on my slide show. Where characters are concerned, too, at first you have an impression of unfettered liberty. Theoretically, you have absolute power over them, such as no tyrant has ever enjoyed on the face of this earth. You can create them as midgets or giants, you can afflict them, torture them, murder them, revive them; or endow them with the eternal beauty and youth, the strength, and the wisdom that you don’t have, delight in every passing minute (but could you ever describe such a thing without boring your reader?), as well as love, riches, genius. But only theoretically, because you’re tied more closely to them than might appear.

  Each of these phantoms is born of your flesh, has your blood in its veins, for better or worse. You propagated it through budding. Even worse, it’s a gauge, it gives indications about a part of you, the tensions inside you, like those glass telltales that are cemented into a wall to determine whether a crack is likely to spread. They’re your way of saying “me”: when you move them or have them speak, you think twice about what you’re doing, for they might say too much. They might even outlive you, perpetuating your bad habits and errors.

  Truly, characters in a book are strange creatures. They have no skin, no blood, no flesh, they have less reality than a painting or a dream at night, they possess only the substance of words, black curlicues on a blank sheet of paper, and yet you can pass the time of day with them, converse with them across the centuries, hate them, love them, fall head over heels for them. Each of them is a depository of certain elementary rights, and knows how to assert them. As an author you have freedom in appearance only. If, once you have conceived your homunculus, you try to defy him, if you attempt to impose upon him an act contrary to his nature, or prohibit him from performing an act that would suit him nicely, you’ll encounter a form of resistance, invisible but unmistakable: as if you were to command your hand to touch a red-hot iron, or an object that you (or your hand) finds repugnant. He, the nonexistent one, is there, present, exerting his weight, pushing back against your hand: willing and unwilling, wordless and stubborn. If you insist, he pines away. He grows remote and uncooperative, he stops suggesting to you his lines; he dwindles, flattens out, becomes thin and blank. He’s paper, and he turns back into paper.

  There is another way in which your freedom of invention is only apparent. Just as it is impossible to transform a person of flesh and blood into a character, that is, create an objective, undistorted biography of him, so it is impossible to perform the inverse operation, to create a character without infusing into him, along with your own authorial whims, fragments of people you have met, or of other characters.

  The first impossibility is demonstrated by millennia of literature. The return on a written portrait is invariably low, even in the finest of works: the entire Odyssey is not sufficient to give us a picture of Ulysses, but not even in a full-scale, classical novel, or an openly avowed biography, in which the author strives to bring you a description of his subject’s stature, the color of his hair, eyes, and complexion, his physique, the way he talks, laughs, walks, and gesticulates. Even here, one never attains the level of mimesis, and the reason lies in the basic inadequacy of our means of expression. Film and television come closest to achieving it; in fact, footage of people who are dead tends to move us more deeply than a written profile. It disturbs us: the person we see move and speak on the screen isn’t really dead. And if holograms ever prove capable of bringing us a third dimension, it will be all the more disturbing, it will carry overtones of sorcery. For a writer, it’s a waste of time to try to compete with these media.

  But the impossibility of creating a character out of nothing seems to me equally ironbound. I have already said that the author invariably transfers into a character (consciously or not, intentionally or not, in some cases coming to the realization that he has done so only when he rereads his pages years after writing them) a part of himself; but the rest, the non-self, is never entirely invented. It teems with memories: these, too, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or not. The character that you naïvely think you’ve fashioned in your workshop turns out to be a chimera, a mosaic of tiles, of snapshots taken who can say when and relegated to the attic of your memory. An agglomeration, in other words, and you can take credit for having rendered it vivid and credible; but for this art, of extracting an organism from a coacervate, I do not believe clear rules can be established.

  We can try to set out some negative rules: it is not necessary for your character to be virtuous, or likable, or wise; nor is it necessary for him to be consistent; in fact, perhaps the opposite is true. A character who is too consistent becomes predictable, that is, boring: he makes no sudden moves, he is programmed, he has no free will. He should be inconsistent the way we all are, have shifting moods, make mistakes, lose his way, grow from page to page, or decline, or pass away. If he remains unvaried he will be not a simulacrum of a living creature but, rather, the simulacrum of a statue, that is, a double simulacrum.

  Let there be no mistake: beneath this inconsistency lies a more profound consistency, but to define it is more than I can do; whether or not it has been respected becomes clear only later, when the words have been written, and the signal is given by the reader’s blood, which for a brief moment flows a little warmer and a little faster.

  Stable/Unstable

  I read with genuine pleasure that the headquarters of the fire department for greater metropolitan Turin is planning to distribute (through the schools, I would guess) ten thousand copies of a handbook on how to prevent accidents, and especially fires in the home. With pleasure, along with astonishment that no one had ever thought of it before, as well as a small shiver of nostalgia for my old profession, in which fear of fire was a constant concern of all my working hours (and even of many hours of rest and relaxation); in compensation, though, it also made us quick and alert, and harked back to the days when that fear was instilled in children and lasted the rest of their lives, because houses were built of wood.

  Anyone who has had occasion to work with wood, for professional or artistic reasons, or for amusement, will know that it is an extraordinary material, unequaled even by the most modern plastics. It has two great secrets: it is porous, and therefore light, and it has sharply differing qualities along or against the grain; suffice it to imagine the different effects caused by an ax blow delivered to the top or the side of a log. There is no such thing as “bad” wood and there is no variety of tree whose wood has failed to find some specific application: cedar for pencils, basswood for piano keys, balsawood for the long-ago watercraft that set sail from South America into the mysterious west, but also for the chairs that movie actors break over one another’s heads in brawl scenes.

  For millennia wood has been the construction mat
erial, “material,” by definition, to such an extent that in some languages the same word is used to mean “matter” and “wood.” There can be no doubt that our forebears, ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, learned to work with wood long before learning to cast bronze. And yet beside their bones we find flints, shells, bronze, silver, and gold, but never (or only under the most exceptional circumstances) wood, and this ought to put us on the alert.

  It should remind us that wood, like all organic substances, is stable only in appearance. Its excellent mechanical properties go hand in hand with an intrinsic chemical fragility. In our oxygen-rich atmosphere, wood is roughly as stable as a billiard ball perched on a shelf edged by a rim no higher than the thickness of a piece of tissue paper. It may remain there for a long time, but all it takes is a tiny unnoticed push, or even a breath of air, to knock it over the barrier and onto the floor. Wood, in other words, is eager to be oxidized, that is, to be destroyed.

  Its progress toward destruction may be exceedingly slow and take place in silence and cold, as is the case with buried wood, with the agency of air, aided by the bacteria found underground; or it can be instantaneous and dramatic, when the impulse is provided by a heat source. Then fire breaks out: a rare event in our cities of cement, iron, and glass, but common in the past. The memory remains strong in places where people still build with wood. Many years ago in Norway I spent the night in a wonderful hotel made entirely of wood, in the midst of a vast and silent forest. In the corner of each room there was a coiled length of heavy rope, one end of which was loose, while the other was secured to the floor: in case of fire, this would be used to lower oneself through the window down to the ground.