The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  This brings us to the problem of whether all human beings are equally endowed with a teachable sense of smell, or whether there are also those who remain refractory, just as there are those who, well endowed in every other area, are unable to distinguish colors. I have no data, but, to judge from people’s behavior in the presence, respectively, of appealing or unpleasant odors, I would guess that the “anosmics,” whom I would exempt from my course, are a distinct minority, like those born blind. A good nose is much more the product of practice than a gift of nature, and as a rule our sense of smell is not so much atrophied as neglected.

  The degree to which our culture neglects it is demonstrated by the poverty of our language when it comes to odors: we have an assortment of specific adjectives that apply to clearly defined colors, even if some of them (“rosy,” “violet”) still betray, in Italian at least, their original exemplary nature; in contrast, we lack even a single independent term that describes a smell, and so we are forced to say “a fishy smell,” or “a vinegary smell,” or “a moldy smell.” The fact that practice brings results is shown by the olfactory discernment of chefs and perfumers; but even they lack a terminology unbound from its concrete substrata.

  Of course, no matter how hard we try, we’ll never be able to equal a dog’s sense of smell, shaped by millennia of natural and human selection, and constantly exercised: a bloodhound hot on a trail, muzzle to the ground and moving practically at a run, is performing with every second a complex qualitative and quantitative analysis of the air that challenges what the best gas chromatograph now made could do; moreover, that piece of equipment costs millions of lire, is unable to run (in fact, it’s fragile and difficult to transport), and will never learn to love its master.

  But even the most citified of dogs, even the most pampered and unambitious household pet* can find its way through the myriad messages that its fellow canines leave for posterity at every street corner. How the dogs must pity us! I quote from memory the verses that G. K. Chesterton, in The Flying Inn, attributes to the dog Quoodle: “They haven’t got no noses / they haven’t got no noses / and goodness only knowses / the Noselessness of Man!” (sic: the reader should remember that it’s a dog speaking, or, rather, singing).

  And about Flush, another, far more celebrated literary dog, Virginia Woolf has this to say: “Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see . . . there are no more than two words and perhaps one-half for what we smell. The human nose is practically non-existent. The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the one hand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between are unrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived. Love was chiefly smell; form and colour were smell; music and architecture, law, politics and science were smell. To him religion itself was smell.”

  It is likely that the human sense of smell has been crushed, in the course of evolution, by the senses of sight and hearing; in our social lives, those senses predominate, because we are capable of voluntarily broadcasting complicated visual signals (gestures, facial expressions) and auditory signals (words and so on), while we broadcast olfactory signals whether or not we wish to.

  Nevertheless, our greatly neglected noses are capable of alerting us when something is on fire, and they warn us when in their opinion something we’re about to put in our mouths smells suspiciously off, and any chemist can recognize by smell, without hesitation, the primary amine group, the nitrite group (which smells “like shoe polish”: though it would be more precise to say that shoe polish is traditionally scented with nitrobenzene), what our predecessors justly named the aromatic ring, the terpenes, and various other groupings.

  In this connection, it’s interesting to consider whether odors are more or less agreeable. Disagreeable in an absolute sense, and to everyone, are such destructive effluvia as ammonia and sulfur dioxide; for other odors, the criteria are cultural, and depend on the civilization one lives in. The dung that Woolf refers to may be repugnant to a city-dwelling poet, but not to a farmer who is accustomed to it and perceives it as a precious substance, bound up with fertility. The smell of gasoline irritates the pedestrian but pleases the car nut, who links it to the thrill of driving. Vance Packard writes about how men’s deodorants have often been commercial failures: many individuals perceive their own odor, unpleasant to others, as a part of their personality and a manifestation of power, and they subconsciously fear its elimination.

  But all odors, agreeable or otherwise, are extraordinary prompters of memories. It is obligatory to cite the fragrance of the petite madeleine that evokes in Proust, decades later, “the immense edifice of memory.” When I revisited Auschwitz nearly forty years afterward, the visual landscape instilled in me a reverent but distant emotion; in contrast, the “odor of Poland,” innocuous, released by the fossil coal used to heat homes, struck me like a sledgehammer: it reawakened all at once an entire universe of memories, brutal and concrete, that were lying dormant and left me gasping.

  With equal violence, “down there” we were struck by occasional smells of the free world: hot tar, evocative of boats in the sun; the scent of the forest, odorous of moss and mushrooms, carried by the wind off the Beskid Mountains; the fragrance of soap trailing a “civilian” woman encountered on the job.

  The Scribe

  Two months ago, in September 1984, I bought myself a word processor, that is, a device for writing that every time you reach the end of the line automatically goes to the next, and allows you to insert, erase, and change words and even whole sentences instantaneously; in other words, it lets you produce in a snap a finished, clean document, without any inserts or corrections. I’m certainly not the first writer who made up his mind to take the leap. Just a year ago, I would have been considered reckless or a snob: not anymore, which is a sign of how fast electronic time rushes along.

  Let me hasten to add two clarifications. In the first place, those who want or have to write can certainly continue to do so with a ballpoint pen or a typewriter: my gadget is a luxury, it’s fun, it’s even exciting, but it’s unnecessary. In the second, let me reassure the hesitant and the ignorant: I myself was, and in fact continue to be, even as I write on my screen, ignorant. I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going on behind it. At first, this ignorance of mine was deeply humiliating. A young man came to my aid, paternally offering me his guidance, and said, You belong to that austere generation of humanists who still expect to understand the world around them. That expectation has become ridiculous: let habit take over, and your discomfort will vanish. Think about it: do you know, by any chance, or do you have the illusion of knowing, how a telephone or a television works? Yet you use them every day. And, aside from a few learned people, how many of us know how our heart or kidneys work?

  Despite this advice, my first encounter with the device was upsetting: the fear of the unknown, something I hadn’t experienced for many years. The computer came with an assortment of manuals; I tried studying them before touching the controls, and I felt lost. It seemed to me that they were apparently written in Italian but were actually in an unknown language; in fact, a prankish, misleading language, in which familiar words, such as “open,” “close,” and “exit,” are used in unaccustomed ways. There is a glossary that attempts to define them, but it proceeds the opposite way from ordinary dictionaries. Those define abstruse words by using more common terms; the glossary tries to give a new meaning to falsely familiar terms by making use of abstruse words, and the effect is devastating. How much better it would have been to invent a decidedly new terminology for these new things! Once again, however, my young friend intervened, and pointed out that it’s as foolish to expect that you can learn to use a computer from a manual as it is to think that you can learn to swim by reading a treatise, without going into the water—in fact, he specified, without knowing what water is, having only heard vague talk of it.

  And so I set to work on both fronts, that is, checking the instructions provide
d by the manuals against the device, and I was immediately reminded of the legend of the Golem. The story goes that many centuries ago a rabbi-magician created out of clay an automaton possessed of herculean strength and blind obedience, to protect the Jews of Prague from pogroms; but it remained inert, inanimate, until its creator slipped into its mouth a scroll of parchment upon which a verse from the Torah was written. Thereupon the terra-cotta Golem turned into a wise and willing servant: it wandered the streets and was a good watchman, except that it turned to stone again when the parchment was removed from its mouth. I wondered whether the builders of my device might not have known this strange story (no doubt they are well-read people with a sense of humor); in fact, the computer even has a mouth, off-kilter, half open in a mechanical smirk. Until I insert the program disc, the computer won’t compute a thing—it’s nothing but a lifeless metal case. But when I switch on the power a polite blinking light appears on the small screen, and this, in the language of my personal Golem, means that it’s eager to swallow the floppy disc. When I’ve satisfied its hunger, it buzzes quietly, purring like a contented cat, then it comes alive and immediately displays its personality: it is responsive, helpful, stern when I make mistakes, stubborn, and capable of many miracles that I don’t yet know and which intrigue me.

  As long as it’s fed the proper programs, it can manage a warehouse or an archive, translate a function into its diagram, compile histograms, and even play chess: all exploits that for now are of no interest to me, and which, in fact, make me as gloomy and grouchy as the swine before which pearls were cast. It can even draw, and for me this is a problem of the opposite kind: I hadn’t drawn a thing since elementary school, and to find myself with a servomechanism at my disposal that will produce for me, to measure, pictures that I don’t know how to draw, and at my command print them for me right under my nose, amuses me to an indecent extent, distracting me from the machine’s proper uses. I have to force myself to “exit” the drafting program and go back to writing.

  I’ve noticed that when you write this way you tend to be wordy. The effort of the old days, when writing meant chiseling away at stone, led to a “lapidary” style. Now the opposite takes place; there is practically no handwork, and if you aren’t careful you can veer into prolixity. Fortunately, there is a word counter, and it should not be lost sight of.

  As I look back on my initial anxiety, I realize that it was by and large groundless: it consisted in part of the writer’s age-old fear, a fear that the words you labored over, the unique, invaluable words destined to bring you eternal fame, might be stolen or flushed down a sewer. Here you write, the words appear distinctly on the screen, in neat rows, but they are shadows: they’re insubstantial, deprived of the reassuring foundation of paper. “La carta canta”—“Paper talks”—but the screen doesn’t; when you’re satisfied with what you’ve written, you “copy to disc,” where it becomes invisible. Does it still exist, hiding in some corner of the hard drive, or have you deleted it with some erroneous command? Only after days of experimenting with “vile bodies” (that is, pretend texts, not written but merely copied) can you bring yourself to believe that the catastrophe of lost words has been fully taken into account by the clever gnomes who designed the word processor: deleting a text entails a series of steps that has been made intentionally complicated, and along the way the device itself warns you: “Look out, you’re about to commit suicide.”

  Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a humorous short story in which, after extensive ethical misgivings, a professional poet finally makes up his mind to buy an electronic Versifier and successfully hands off all his work to the machine. So far, my device hasn’t got that far, but it does lend itself very well to the composition of verse, because it lets me revise endlessly without the page becoming untidy or splotchy, while reducing to a minimum the manual effort of the draft: “And thus in me one sees the law of counter-penalty.”1 A writer friend of mine points out that this means we will lose the philologist’s noble joy of painstakingly reconstructing, through a succession of erasures and corrections, the path that led Leopardi to the perfection of “L’Infinito”: he’s right, but you can’t have everything.

  As far as I’m concerned, ever since I put saddle and bridle on my word processor, I’ve felt the boredom of being a giant moa, a survivor of a species on the path to extinction, fade inside me: the ennui of being a “survivor of my own time” has practically vanished. The ancient Greeks used to say, of an uneducated man, “He can neither swim nor write”; nowadays, we would have to add “nor use a computer.” I still don’t know how to use it very well, I’m not an expert and I know I never will be, but I’m no longer an illiterate. And then there’s the delight of being able to add another item to your personal list of memorable “first times”: when you first saw the sea; left the country; kissed a woman; breathed life into a Golem.

  1. Inferno XXVIII:141–42.

  To a Young Reader

  Dear Sir,

  I hope that you will forgive me for replying publicly to your letter dated ______, though of course I am leaving out your name and any other information that might reveal your identity. Still, for the benefit of others who may find themselves in your situation, or in similar circumstances, and who—like you—have written to me, I do feel obliged to reveal here at least the following: you are twenty-seven years old, you live in a small city, you completed the Liceo Classico (classical high school) without enormous effort, and you have managed to secure for yourself a modest position, which provides you with not much money, a certain degree of security, and little satisfaction.

  You would like to become a writer, specifically an author of narrative fiction, and, indeed, you do write, but you’d like me to give you advice and some direction: how best to write. You neither ask me, nor ask yourself, the fundamental question, that is, whether or not to write at all, and you thus put me in an awkward position from the outset. In fact, from what you tell me I gather that you think of writing fiction as a profession, which in my opinion it is not.

  In today’s Italy, every profession comes with a certain guarantee: if you write for a living, then you have no guarantees. Therefore, pure narrative authors, those who eke out a living from their creativity alone, are very few: no more than a few dozen or so. The others write in their spare time, dedicating the rest of their days to advertising, journalism, publishing, film, teaching, or other pursuits that have nothing in common with writing. Therefore, let me first of all recommend, indeed, let me order you, to hold on to your current position.

  If you truly have writing in your blood, you’ll find the time to write one way or another—it will expand around you. What’s more, your day-to-day work, dull though it may be, can hardly fail to supply you with invaluable raw materials for the writing you do at night or on Sundays, just the human interactions, just the boredom itself. Boredom is boring by definition, but writing about boredom can be a gripping pursuit, and one that may fascinate a reader: you studied the classics, and so you surely know this already.

  But you skip over this fork in the road and expect me to provide you with specific practical advice: the secrets of the profession, or, rather, of the non-profession. They exist, I cannot deny it, but luckily they are not universally applicable; I say “luckily” because, if they were, then all writers would write in exactly the same way, thus producing a volume of boredom so immense that any attempt to palm it off as Leopardian ennui would be useless, and would ultimately overwhelm the circuit breakers of even the most indulgent of readers. Therefore I can do no more than impart to you my own secrets, at the risk of creating with my own hands the rival who, on the very strength of my own “letter of introduction,” will chase me out of the market.

  The first secret is to let the writing rest in a drawer, and I believe that this is valuable in general. Let several days pass between the first and the final drafts; for reasons unknown to me, for a certain period of time the writer’s eye is not very sensitive to what he’s just written. It
is necessary, as it were, to let the ink dry thoroughly; return to it too soon, and you tend to overlook the defects—repetitions, gaps in logic, inaccuracies, sour notes.

  An excellent surrogate for that period of rest might be a test-reader, in possession of common sense and good taste, and not too indulgent: one’s spouse, a friend. Not another writer: writers are not typical readers, and they will have their own preferences and personal whims, they will be dismissive of bad writing, envious of good. I am right now violating this precept to let your writing rest, because as soon as I’ve written this letter I will mail it; you will therefore have an opportunity to test the precept’s validity.

  After ripening, a process whereby a piece of writing comes to resemble a wine, a perfume, or a medlar, the time comes to strip away the excess. Almost inevitably, a writer realizes that he or she has overdone things, that the text is pompous, repetitive, wordy: or, in any case, as I said, this is what happens to me. Unfailingly, in my first draft I am addressing a rather dull reader, and ideas have to be hammered into his head. Once the text has been put on a diet, it is more nimble: it comes closer to what is, more or less consciously, my goal, the greatest amount of information in the smallest space.

  It is worth noting that there are different ways to achieve the greatest amount of information, some of them quite subtle; one fundamental method is to select from an array of synonyms, which are almost never truly equivalent to one another. There’s always one that’s “righter” than the others: but you often have to go in search of it, depending on the context, in the old Tommaseo dictionary, or among the neologisms in the Nuovo Zingarelli,1 or among the barbarisms foolishly abhorred by traditionalists, or even drawing directly on the vocabulary of other languages; if there’s no word for it in Italian, why tie yourself in knots?