by Primo Levi
So, as early as 1961—that is, even before turning to the writing of The Truce—Levi wanted to present himself to the public as a writer, and as an author of fantastic stories. Calvino’s letter alludes to “Man’s Friend” and to an early version of “Quaestio de Centauris” entitled “The Centaur Trachi.” Both stories appeared in the Roman weekly Il Mondo, on January 16, 1962, and April 4, 1961, respectively.
Natural Histories was published by Einaudi in September 1966 under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila, but the journey of the fifteen pieces collected in the volume had begun at least twenty years earlier. Levi wrote “The Mnemagogs” in 1946, and it was published on December 19, 1948, in L’Italia Socialista, a left-wing daily. Between 1946 and 1947 he had the idea for “The Sixth Day,” which appeared in the September–November 1958 issue of Questioni, a Turin literary journal. Calvino confided to Levi that that story had provided the first inspiration for Cosmicomics; that was the reason for the dedication. “Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator,” broadcast by Italian radio in June 1961, went back to 1952. Finally, Calvino had surely also read “The Versifier” and “Censorship in Bitinia,” which appeared in Il Mondo on, respectively, May 17, 1960, and June 10, 1961.
These facts demonstrate that the chronology of Levi’s writings has some notable surprises for readers and scholars. One of the biggest is that the need to bear witness to Auschwitz before the world (and to create a language suitable for communicating the experience) was accompanied from the start—from 1946, at least—by another, complementary vocation: one that led Levi to compose fantastic stories based on a vast technical-scientific knowledge, stories that are transparent but complex, in which the spark of invention and the organizing logic have roles of equal importance.
Thus Levi the witness and Levi the writer were born simultaneously, and simultaneously began to function. In fact, after the publication of Natural Histories Levi often described himself as a centaur, identifying with Trachi, the most successful character in the collection.
Calvino concluded that 1961 letter to Levi by encouraging him to continue in the new direction. He also advised him to find a proper home for his fantasy stories, so that they could appear with regularity, establishing a dialogue with an audience that would appreciate them. From then on Levi was working mainly on The Truce, but in 1962 he published two more stories in Il Mondo: “Man’s Friend” and “Angelic Butterfly” (August 14). “Cladonia Rapida” came out in August 1964 in the Milan monthly Panorama, while the last story in the series, “Retirement Package,” was published for the first time in Natural Histories. In the meantime, however, Levi had found the right home, the Milan daily Il Giorno, in which five more stories appeared: “Order at a Good Price” (March 22, 1964), “Some Applications of the Mimete” (August 15, 1964), “The Measure of Beauty” (January 6, 1965), “Versamine” (August 8, 1965), and “Full Employment” (February 27, 1966). It should be noted that in 1965 (a year after Levi, then), Calvino had begun to submit many of his Cosmicomics to the same journal: a further reason for the dedication.
In his letter Calvino specified that, rather than “science fiction,” Levi’s stories were “biological fiction.” It was no accident that when, five years later, Natural Histories was published, it had a cover band with the blurb “Science fiction?” The reader was supposed to guess that the book contained inventions cast in the future or in a distorted present, but that there was also something very different. Science fiction reached Italy in the early 1950s; the Italian word, “fantascienza,” had been coined by Giorgio Monicelli, a director of the publishing house Mondadori and the founder of Urania, the widest-circulation Italian science fiction magazine. There were many others, but throughout the fifties sci-fi remained a literary genre without much prestige—pure entertainment, like crime novels. Furthermore, the few attempts at sci-fi on the part of Italian writers appeared weak and far-fetched; Urania refused to publish them, accepting only sci-fi in English. A shift occurred in 1959, when Sergio Solmi, an essayist and poet, proposed to Einaudi that he put together a big sci-fi anthology. The book was enormously successful; given that a first-rank publisher like Einaudi was responsible for it, the major Italian literary critics discussed it, and so sci-fi (at least, the best sci-fi) gained the sort of attention usually reserved for mainstream literary genres. In 1961 Einaudi published a second anthology, edited by the writers and translators Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, which was also successful.
Levi, who for many years had been practicing his peculiar sci-fi, thus had to move within a fast-changing and tumultuous literary scene. His difficulty was twofold: to be accepted as an Italian writer of sci-fi, and to be accepted as a fantasy writer after publishing two memoirs that had their origin in the experience of deportation. Einaudi proposed a compromise, to which Levi agreed: to publish Natural Histories under a pseudonym, but let the identity of the author be evident from the jacket copy. As in the case of If This Is a Man and The Truce, it was Calvino who wrote the copy:
The fifteen “entertainments” that compose this book invite us to enter a future that is increasingly propelled by the frenetic impulse of technological progress, and is hence a theater of disquieting or utopian experiments, in which extraordinary and unpredictable machines act. And yet it’s not sufficient to classify these pages under the label of science fiction. Satire and poetry can be found here, nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future, epic and daily reality, scientific formulation and the pull of the absurd, love of the natural order and a taste for subverting it, humanism and polite malice. The author is a chemist, and his profession filters through in the interest in how things are constructed, how they are recognized and analyzed. But he is a chemist who knows human emotions no less than he knows the law of mass action, and he disassembles and reassembles the secret mechanisms that rule human vanities, winking at us from the ironic allegories, the smiling morals that he offers.
At this point, Calvino introduced a letter sent by the author to the publisher:
I’ve written some twenty stories and I don’t know if I will write others. I wrote them for the most part straight off, trying to give narrative form to a point of intuition, trying to recount in other terms (if they are symbolic, they are so unconsciously) an intuition that today is not rare: the perception of a gap in the world we live in, of a small or large fault, of a “flaw of form” that nullifies some aspect of our civilization or our moral universe. . . . In the act of writing them I feel a vague sense of guilt, as of one who consciously commits a small transgression.
What transgression? Let’s see. . . . I entered the world of writing (unexpectedly) with two books about the concentration camps; it’s not for me to judge their value, but they were undoubtedly serious books, addressed to a serious audience. To offer this audience a volume of joke-stories, of moral traps, entertaining, perhaps, but detached, and cold: isn’t this commercial fraud, like someone selling wine in oil bottles? These are questions that I asked myself, in the act of writing and publishing these “natural histories.” Well, I wouldn’t publish them if I hadn’t noticed (not right away, to tell the truth) that between the Lager and these inventions a continuity, a bridge, exists: the Lager, for me, was the largest of the “flaws,” of the distortions I spoke of earlier, the most threatening of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.
Levi’s “polite malice” is demonstrated by the German settings of two stories on the theme of eugenics, “Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator” and “Angelic Butterfly”: “There are reasons of an autobiographical nature that Germany has remained for me the country of violence. Setting a story of that type in that country is also a civilized form of reprisal.” His feelings of both uneasiness and confidence toward Natural Histories are revealed in the curious image of wine in oil bottles: why “commercial fraud,” if that wine and that oil are both genuine products? Levi’s new literary product was simply unexpected; and in Italy some attacked it as bad sci-fi, written, besides, by an author of much more seri
ous books. Yet in 1967 Natural Histories received the Bagutta Prize, a long established and important literary award.
It remains to explain the mysterious pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila. St. Damian is, with St. Cosmo, the patron of doctors and pharmacists: the nonbeliever Levi always drew confidently on Catholic religious texts, and two doctors (the younger of whom, Morandi, is around his own age) are the main characters in the earliest story, “The Mnemagogs.” As for Malabaila, it means “bad nurse” or “bad nourisher” in Piedmontese dialect. Levi explained it thus: “As for the pseudonym, I thought about it a lot. Then it came by itself. Every morning going to work and every evening returning home I pass . . . a car electrician’s called Malabaila. It struck me, I appropriated it. Only later did I realize that it was right on the mark: that there was underneath an almost Freudian significance. We’ve all had a bad nourisher and we can all be bad nourishers of what we do. In my Natural Histories there is this vague odor of food that has become tainted, an evil alchemy.”
Starting in 1979, the book was reprinted with Levi’s name on the cover. Eleven of the stories in Natural Histories were published in English for the first time in 1990 in The Sixth Day and Other Tales by Summit Books; “Censorship in Bitinia” appeared in A Tranquil Star, published by Norton in 2007; in this edition, which matches the original Italian text, “The Versifier,” “Cladonia Rapida,” and “Quaestio de Centauris” appear for the first time in English.
FLAW OF FORM
Levi wrote the twenty stories in Flaw of Form in a short period of time, between 1967 and 1970. For Italy these were years of upheaval in society, in the economy, in politics, in public morality. “Sessantotto”—a date, 1968, written in letters—was the year of the student protests, while 1969 was marked by the union struggles of the so-called hot autumn and, just a little later, on December 12, in Milan, by a neo-Fascist act of terrorism: a bomb went off in a bank, leaving seventeen dead and eighty-eight wounded. Fears of a reactionary coup were widespread, and a period of extreme political tension began: what came to be called the “years of lead.” Politics was dominant, yet it doesn’t seem to trouble the stories in Flaw of Form, where Levi gives voice to other preoccupations. Here is the jacket copy (anonymous but surely written by the author) of the first edition, published by Einaudi in February 1971:
Will there be historians in the future—even, let’s say, in the next century? It’s not at all certain: mankind may have lost any interest in the past, preoccupied as it will surely be in sorting out the tangle of the future; or it may have lost the taste for works of the spirit in general, being focused uniquely on survival; or it may have ceased to exist. But, if there are historians, they will not devote much time to the Punic Wars, or the Crusades, or Waterloo, but will instead concentrate on this twentieth century, and, more specifically, the decade that has just begun.
It will be a unique decade. In the space of a few years, almost overnight, we’ve realized that something conclusive has happened, or is about to happen: like someone who, navigating on a calm river, suddenly observes that the banks are retreating backward, the water teeming with whirlpools, and hears the thunder of waterfalls close by. There is no indicator that is not soaring upward: the world population, DDT in the fat of penguins, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, lead in our veins. While half the world is still waiting for the benefits of technology, the other half has touched lunar soil and is poisoned by the garbage that has accumulated in a decade: but there is no choice, we cannot return to Arcadia; by technology, and by that alone, can the planetary order be restored, the “flaw of form” repaired. Before the urgency of these problems, the political questions pale. This is the climate in which, literally or in spirit, the twenty stories by Primo Levi presented here take place. Beyond the veil of irony, it is close to that of his preceding books: we breathe an air of sadness but not hopelessness, of distrust in the present and, at the same time, considerable confidence in the future: man the maker of himself, inventor and unique possessor of reason, will be able to stop in time on his path “heading west.”
At an early point, the book was to be entitled Anti-Humanism. In a television interview in the spring of 1971, Levi explained the ultimate title, Flaw of Form, saying that, by using that bureaucratic formula, he wanted to allude to an “error of substance”: to the failure, serious but perhaps not irremediable, of technology as a factor in progress. And he was careful to emphasize the importance of the science fiction model—visionary inventions based on technical-scientific knowledge—which turned out to be particularly well suited to confronting current sociological problems. Levi declared that he was opposed to despair, which “is surely irrational: it resolves no problems, creates new ones, and is by its nature painful.” He continued, rather, to claim a “faith that I would call biological, that saturates every living fiber,” but at the same time he said of the language of his new stories that it is “a language that I feel is ironic, and that I perceive as strident, awry, spiteful, deliberately anti-poetic.”
Unlike Natural Histories, published under a pseudonym, Flaw of Form came out with the author’s name on the cover. It’s an unusually unified work. Only one of the stories, “Observed from a Distance,” had appeared earlier, in an anthology, before being collected in the volume. Among the literary models for these stories Levi mentions Samuel Butler, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, and he dedicates to Calvino the story “His Own Maker”; Levi had in fact expressed the intention of asking Calvino whether he could borrow the protagonist of Cosmicomics, the petulant Ofwfq, to play a role in one of the stories. Although he gave up this idea, the story he alludes to is “His Own Maker,” which, like the stories in Cosmicomics, has the structure of a monologue.
Twelve of the stories in Flaw of Form appeared in English in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, published by Summit Books in 1990, and two others in A Tranquil Star (Norton, 2007), while six stories appear here in English for the first time: “Protection,” “The Synthetics,” “Vilmy,” “Creative Work,” “Our Fine Specifications,” and “Written on the Forehead.”
THE PERIODIC TABLE
“I tried to write some stories about my life in the factory. They’re the worst. No, I’ll never succeed,” Levi made this gloomy confession to an interviewer in 1966, immediately adding, “It’s the other world that is realized in my books. The world that includes my experiences as a young man, the racial discrimination, my attempts not to be different from my schoolmates, and then my discovery of the Jewish tradition (Judaism as opposed to fascism, as freedom is to terror, because I also discovered that many principles of freedom are found within the substance of the purest Jewish tradition), and the partisan war, and, finally, the Lager.”
This passage contains allusions to many of the stories in the future Periodic Table, starting with the stories about the factory. The harsh judgment was justified. Shortly after If This Is a Man came out, Levi published two stories about work, “Maria and the Circle,” in L’Italia Socialista (September 19, 1948), and “Night Shift,” in the Piedmontese edition of L’Unità (August 31, 1950), and although they became chapters of The Periodic Table—with the titles “Titanium” and “Sulfur”—he was aware of their weakness. He had always harbored the ambition of writing stories based on his profession, but he lacked the right narrative key, as well as a structure that would provide some consistency. We know that in 1961 Italo Calvino had encouraged him to pursue his particular science fiction, but the rest had left Calvino puzzled: “There are fewer possibilities for the other kind of story. The ones about the Lager are fragments of If This Is a Man, which, detached from a broader narrative, have the limitations of the sketch. And the attempt at a Conradian mountain-climbing epic appeals to all my sympathies, but for now it remains an intention.” The “Conradian attempt,” titled “Bear Meat,” was published in 1961, in the August 29 issue of the weekly Il Mondo. It’s a first draft of the chapter “Iron,” less compact than the final version (it can be found in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980).
Calvino’s mention of other “stories about the Lager” leads us to hypothesize that Levi had already showed him what became the chapter “Cerium,” whose date of composition is unknown. Speaking about “Cerium” to Turinese readers in 1975, Levi implicitly agreed with Calvino: “I did not put that episode in If This Is a Man so as not to contaminate it, because the episode is cheerful. Cheerful . . . well, the background isn’t cheerful, but it’s the story of a victory, of an audacious and risky undertaking, carried to its conclusion. And so it would have been jarring within that other context, which is, rather, a context of defeats, a context of tragedies, a dramatic context. I didn’t exactly reason it out like that; but, intuitively, it seemed to me that it didn’t belong in that other place.”
When Levi finally had the idea of linking to chemical elements some stories he had already written and other stories that he had wanted to write for a long time, he found the context that had been missing: the periodic table not only was an organizing principle but gave a new coloring to each narrative component. In the 1966 interview cited above, it’s not hard to recognize “Argon,” “Zinc,” “Gold,” and “Potassium” (none of which had been published in the fifties or sixties), plus the already mentioned “Iron.” We can deduce that at the time Levi didn’t think these stories could be part of a cycle that also included the stories about work: they were of a different type, autobiographical tales devoted to his upbringing, to his Jewish identity, to the struggle against fascism. The idea that turned out to be crucial for the new book had therefore two components: first, the bond between each story and a particular chemical element; second, the welding together of Levi’s two inspirations, private, autobiographical memory (which produced successful texts) and the experience of work (which until 1966 had produced disappointing texts).