by Primo Levi
In 1966 a theater version, written by Pieralberto Marché and Primo Levi, and directed by Gianfranco De Bosio for the Teatro Stabile of Turin, was staged. For this production, Levi sent the costume designer, Gianni Polidori, letters and notes accompanied by drawings in which he described certain concrete aspects of the camp, such as the uniform and the crude utensils available to the Häftlinge. The theater version of If This Is a Man was published by Einaudi; in the Preface Levi compared himself—for the first time publicly—to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The show’s national premiere, scheduled for Florence, was canceled because of the flood that year (which thus “drowned” Levi’s work in two different ways). The show finally opened in Turin two weeks later, on November 18, and had around fifty performances; it was awarded the Saint-Vincent prize as the best theatrical text of 1966.
In 1972 If This Is a Man was published in an edition for middle schools, as The Truce had been in 1965. In this case, too, Levi wrote a preface intended for students (it is included in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980, in volume 2). Levi also compiled explanatory footnotes and added two maps, representing Nazi Europe covered by Lagers and the system of camps and subcamps making up Auschwitz; finally, he provided a bibliography on the subject. In 1976 he added to the school edition another appendix, in which he responded to the most recurrent questions asked by readers, especially students. Starting in 1979, this appendix was included in all Italian editions of the work.
Levi’s final work, The Drowned and the Saved, is a meditation on the Lager forty years after the events. But Levi never stopped reflecting on his first book, and answering questions about it. In 1985, when the Australian writer Germaine Greer asked him to talk about the literary quality of If This Is a Man, he confessed that in the course of decades he had
constructed a sort of legend around that book, that I wrote it without a plan, that I wrote it on impulse, that I wrote it without reflecting at all.
The other people I’ve talked to about [it] accepted the legend. In fact, writing is never spontaneous. Now that I think about it, I can see that this book is full of literature, literature absorbed through the skin, even while I was rejecting it (because I was a bad student of Italian literature). . . . When the time came, and I needed to write this book, and I did have a pathological need to write it, I found inside myself a whole “program.” And it was that literature I’d studied more or less unwillingly, the Dante I’d to do in high school, the Italian classics, and so forth.
Levi’s “and so forth” hints at a long list of sources. The ideal guide for this exploration is the edition of If This Is a Man with commentary by Alberto Cavaglion, published in 2012 by Einaudi. Among other things, Cavaglion points out the changing presence of Dante in Levi’s work: the Dante of The Truce “is already no longer the same as that of If This Is a Man,” while “Biblical Scripture loses its function as a frame for the narrative.” Other presences, from Dostoevsky to Eliot and Vercors, “are reduced or eliminated . . . as the result of a ruthless operation of self-
revision. Not to mention Baudelaire, literally removed.”
This library of the Primo Levi of If This Is a Man leads back to the image of the book written “immediately.” In 1995, fifty years after the Second World War ended, the Times Literary Supplement drafted a list of the hundred most important books published in the world since then. There were three Italian titles: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and two works by Levi, If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. In the TLS chronology, If This Is a Man was placed in the 1950s, without, that is, account being taken of its first edition, written so soon after the events that it was narrating. “Immediately,” in 1947, Levi had been capable of describing Auschwitz to the entire world, with a unique balance of attention and vision, of empathy and detachment. It is often said that the horrors of the Lager are unspeakable and indescribable; people seldom consider, instead, the increase in expressiveness that, thanks precisely to Levi, has been gained from Auschwitz: the density of meanings, the patrimony of new images, the inexhaustible thesaurus of surprising and disturbing moral definitions that his deceptively clear pages offer.
What do we look for when we prepare to read Primo Levi? We look for truth: the truth of the facts. Yet there is a second truth: the truth of style, the presence of literature. Levi’s is not literature of the Shoah or on the Shoah. It is literature in the Shoah: as Umberto Saba saw, Levi’s first book speaks physically and mentally from within the Shoah, with the body, the voice, and the intellect of a witness, of a witness who discovers—as the reader, too, discovers—that he is a writer. If Levi is measured according to the dimensions of international literature, If This Is a Man really is a book written immediately: contemporaneously with Antelme’s Espèce humaine and Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, which also came out in 1947.
The first English edition of If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, was published in 1959 by Orion Press, in New York, and Bodley Head, in London.
THE TRUCE
“I had a railway guide, so to speak, of my journey home. A sort of itinerary: such-and-such a day in such-and-such a place, in such-and-such other place. I found it, and I used it as an outline, almost fifteen years ago, for writing The Truce.” Primo Levi had an excellent memory: he nurtured it by keeping his attention focused and by recording the important facts. Yet he had a reflective temperament, and he didn’t write immediately. Significantly, If This Is a Man and The Truce were not composed right after the liberation of Auschwitz, or during the journey home—a journey that in the last chapter of The Truce Levi defines as “an interlude of unlimited openness, a providential gift of destiny, never to be repeated.” These words explain the noun “truce,” telling us that, during the eight and a half months (from January 27 to October 19, 1945) that elapsed between the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Auschwitz and the return of the survivor Primo Levi to his home in Turin, the experience of Auschwitz was not over.
Before the completed act, there is the act that is being completed, the event in progress: this holds true for real events and for writing as well. A literary style is not ready-made, and certainly Levi’s was not. The Truce, published fifteen years after If This Is a Man, is a very different book. In a sense, Levi had to invent two languages, so as to be able to tell us about two worlds and two journeys, the downward journey of the Lager, the upward journey of freedom regained. We can identify the path of this work in one of the most famous episodes of the book, the story of Hurbinek, the child who cannot speak but utters “slightly different articulated words,” who carries out “experimental variations on a theme, a root, maybe a name,” and who “continued his obstinate experiments as long as he lived.” In this episode, Levi calls us to witness the very invention of language: a fundamental battle with the hunger to express oneself, a struggle for life that represents for the person describing it the invention of his own language, the construction of himself as a writer.
If This Is a Man ends in a state of suspension that is also a hope: with the name of a friend, Charles, with whom Levi has already, since the liberation, “exchanged long letters” (here is, again, writing), and whom he hopes “to see again one day.” His first book concludes at that point, but the impulse behind the story was not used up. It turns out that shortly after completing If This Is a Man, Levi had drafted at least the first chapter of the future Truce: “I had written one or two chapters . . . in ’47/’48, which became the first chapter of The Truce,” he said in an interview. A letter of December 4, 1947, from Levi to Arrigo Cajumi, the first reviewer of If This Is a Man, confirms his early intention of writing a second book, about the adventures of the journey home. Further evidence indicates that a first draft of the chapter “The Greek” goes back to 1954, while the episode of Ferrari, the ineffectual pickpocket of the chapter “Katowice,” appeared in the Turin daily Stampa Sera on December 19–20, 1959.
But writing, or the attempt to write, was in some sense secondary. For years Levi had bee
n telling stories of his adventures on the way home through a war-ravaged Europe to friends, relatives, and also—as soon as he became a public figure, a writer invited to speak in public—high school students. It was in those performances that the structure of the individual episodes took shape, along with their rhythm, their humor, their style. Levi told Philip Roth that he had “retouched” each episode “en route so as to arouse [the] most favorable reactions.” When he started on his third career, as the public witness (alongside the chemist and the writer), Levi presented himself not only as a guardian of memory and as a survivor of the Shoah but as a character in an adventure novel: an epic that he was able to relate with the talents of an anthropologist and a humorist. He also told Roth: “A friend of mine, an excellent doctor, told me many years ago: ‘Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and your travel home are in Technicolor.’”
Levi declared repeatedly that he had written If This Is a Man in a rush, as if an interior voice were dictating it, sentence by sentence. Today we know that, on the contrary, a rich library of literary and figurative allusions stands behind the book, and that the author’s attention to his style was meticulous. And yet that sensation of being guided by a prompter was in some sense well founded: the naturalness of expression, the urgency to tell coincided with the creation of a literary language. When Levi finally decided to put into writing the stories of The Truce, the experience was diametrically opposite: “I had described that return journey a thousand times: it was as if I had dictated it.” This time, then, it was he himself who was dictating, guiding events with the consciousness of the professional writer. And it was he who decided when to begin: “Finally the moment arrived in which the equation between free time, desire, and the pressure from others was perfect.” At the end of the text we read the dates “Turin, December 1961–November 1962.”
The title that Levi initially gave the work was Vento Alto, or High Wind. The image is of regeneration after catastrophe, and contains a religious allusion: the high wind that God sent over the earth to dry it after the Flood: “And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged.” The title The Truce was suggested later by Giorgio Lattes, an engineer who was a childhood friend of Levi. The book was published by Einaudi in April 1963. The Truce belongs to the so-called era of détente, the era of Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Pope John XXIII, which marked a truce in the cold war. Levi explained to Roth that “in Italy, for the first time, you could speak of the USSR in objective terms without being called a philo-Communist by the right wing and a disruptive reactionary by the powerful Italian Communist Party.”
The jacket copy, not signed, was by Italo Calvino: “As the miracle of If This Is a Man was a classical equanimity in the face of the atrocious material of the story, here, in The Truce, in this lively, colorful account of an unexpected springtime of freedom, there is a poignant note of anguish, of an incurable sadness.” This dark state of mind is most evident at the end of the book, with the dream of the Lager as the only permanent reality. That nightmare is not connected only to the first page, where Levi lays out the theme of the “shame of the survivor,” a theme that he returned to in The Drowned and the Saved. The dream in which “nothing outside the Lager was true” also corresponds to a line of the poem that opens If This Is a Man, in which Levi expresses the wish “May your house fall down,” addressing those who refuse to listen to and reflect on his story. This is exactly what happens in the final dream of The Truce, where “everything collapses and is destroyed around me. . . . I am alone at the center of a gray and murky void.” The wish comes true, but for the very person who flung it at his recalcitrant listeners. The detail is striking, as is the fact that “gray” is the color evoked. In fact, The Truce contains vivid examples of the two principal themes of The Drowned and the Saved: at the start of his investigation into “Shame,” Levi directly transcribes the first page of The Truce; and the “gray zone” is also represented, and not only in the color that pervades the final nightmare.
In The Truce Levi presents himself as a spectator-actor who lives in an in-between state: he is no longer a prisoner who has been stripped even of his name, but he is not yet a man fully reintegrated into his own life and the life of his country. This state is called “limbo,” or “Purgatory,” in the same pages in which Levi tells the story of Hurbinek. The only person in the entire Big Camp—the main Auschwitz camp—who is capable of communicating with Hurbinek, of offering him concrete help, is Henek, the fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy who “spent half his days beside Hurbinek’s bed,” and knew how to be “maternal rather than paternal.” Right after the conclusion of the story of Hurbinek we learn that Henek, during his months in Auschwitz, was the Kapo of the children’s Lager. “When there were selections in the children’s Block, it was he who chose. Did he not feel remorse? No: why should he? Was there another way to survive?” Henek, the only person in the entire limbo of the Big Camp who could have taught Hurbinek to speak, is a perfect representative of the “gray zone,” though in 1963 it did not yet have a name.
The Truce was immediately popular among Italian readers. Sales were high, reviews numerous and admiring. It came in third for the Strega Prize, and won the Campiello Prize, which, though only in its first year, was already prestigious. A professional jury made up of nine writers and critics chose five finalists, and, from among these, three hundred ordinary readers, from all over Italy, chose the winner. Levi was awarded the prize at the Campiello’s headquarters, at the Fondazione Cini, in Venice, on September 3, 1963. A journalist happened to observe Levi on the train to Venice: he was reading Isaac Asimov in English, “with the same devout scruples with which one would read a breviary.” Although The Truce was Levi’s second book, he didn’t frequent literary circles. Asimov was not mainstream literature (and Levi himself wrote and published science fiction stories), and Levi felt alien among professional writers.
Starting with The Truce, however, literature was destined to be, for Levi, an increasingly absorbing activity. He had described the adventure of the journey—even before his return—in a letter written in Katowice on June 6, 1945, and addressed to his friend Bianca Guidetti Serra: “I’m dressed like a tramp and I may arrive home without shoes, but in exchange I’ve learned German, and a little Russian and Polish, and also how to get by in many circumstances, not to lose courage, and to endure moral and physical sufferings. I’ve grown a beard again, to save on the barber; I know how to make cabbage-and-turnip soup, and can cook potatoes in a lot of different ways, none with seasonings. I know how to set up, light, and clean a stove. I’ve done an incredible number of jobs: mason’s helper, digger, garbage collector, porter, gravedigger, interpreter, bicyclist, tailor, thief, nurse, fence, stone breaker—even chemist!” From these vividly descriptive lines we have the proof that, if the writer did not yet exist, the narrator was already at work for the people close to him. This work continued through the years. In 1965, Einaudi published a version of The Truce for students, for which Levi wrote notes and an introduction (the latter can be read here in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980); in that edition the brief passages having to do with sexual desire, although innocent, were cut. In the spring of 1978, Italian radio’s Channel 1 broadcast a radio version of The Truce, under the direction of Edmo Fenoglio. Here, too, as for the radio and theater versions of If This Is a Man, the aim was to reproduce the book’s Babel of languages.
The first English translation of the work, by Stuart Woolf, was published in England in 1965, by Bodley Head, with the title The Truce and the subtitle A Survivor’s Journey Home from Auschwitz, and the same year in the United States by Atlantic Monthly Press, under the title The Reawakening.
NATURAL HISTORIES
In late 1965, Italo Calvino gave Primo Levi a copy of his book Cosmicomics, signing it: “To Primo Levi, who traveled down this path before me.” At that point, Levi had published only If This Is a Man and The Truce, but Calvino knew what he was talking abou
t, because some years earlier, as an editor at Einaudi, he had considered a group of stories by Levi that had a completely different source. From his opinion as a reader, dated November 22, 1961, we can deduce what they were:
Dear Levi,
I finally read your stories. The science fiction, or rather biological fiction, ones, always appeal to me. Your fantasy mechanism, which takes off from a scientific-genetic starting point, has a power of suggestion that’s intellectual but also poetic, just like the genetic and morphological digressions of Jean Rostand. Your humor and your elegance easily save you from the danger of falling to a level of subliterature, a danger that those who use literary molds for intellectual experiments of this type often run into. Some of your inspirations are first-rate, like the Assyriologist who deciphers the mosaic of tapeworms; and the evocation of the origin of the centaurs has a poetic force, an impressive plausibility (and, my goodness, one would have said that writing about centaurs is impossible today, and you’ve avoided the Anatole France–Walt Disney–type pastiche).
Naturally, you still lack the confident hand of the writer who has a complete stylistic personality, like Borges. . . . You move in a dimension of intelligent digression on the edges of a cultural-ethical-scientific panorama that reflects the Europe we live in. Maybe the principal reason I like your stories so much is that they assume a common culture notably different from the one assumed by so much of Italian literature.
Calvino had thus hesitated for some time before reading the stories, fearing that they were “subliterature.” Now he could say to his colleague that they were authentically literature and, in addition, in a genre very different from what was being practiced at the time in Italy and elsewhere. The mere fact that he mentions Borges as a term of comparison attests to the sincerity of his opinion.