by Primo Levi
In the space of barely two years, the idea of The Periodic Table proved to be effective: in October 1968, Levi confided to another interviewer, his Croatian translator Mladen Machiedo, that he had written “Hydrogen” and a first draft of “Carbon.” Among his stories, “Carbon” had the longest journey: from “Gold” we learn that the idea of writing it preceded his deportation to the Lager. And the testimony of Pikolo/Jean Samuel reveals that in Auschwitz Levi told him two stories: the first and better known, Dante’s canto of Ulysses, is a literary episode around which Levi constructed one of the finest chapters of If This Is a Man. The second was, in fact, the “story of a carbon atom.” Levi mentioned it frequently to Samuel, and the scientific idea made a stronger impression on him than did the lines of the Inferno.
Levi wrote “Carbon” in 1970 and published it in 1972 (Uomini e Libri, October) in a nearly final form, from which we can assume that the structure of the book had by then been established. Two years later, on November 12, 1974, Calvino (who, as an Einaudi consultant and by explicit wish of the author, was always the first to read Levi’s books) wrote from Paris, where he was living:
Dear Primo,
I’ve looked at the new draft of The Periodic Table and it seems to me it’s going very well. I read the new chapters “Iron,” “Phosphorus,” “Nitrogen,” “Uranium,” “Silver,” “Vanadium,” which enrich the “chemical” (and moral) autobiography.
Putting “Carbon” at the end, and having it symbolize the experience of the writer, is a good idea. And since the whole structure of the book is now stronger, the heterogeneity of “Lead” and “Mercury” (in italics) doesn’t disturb the whole.
As for “Argon,” I still have reservations about the fact that it’s at the beginning (in spite of its value as a prologue), because it’s the only chapter in which the chemical element is metaphorical; here, too, the structural difference wouldn’t be so obvious if the chapter were in the middle of the book. (For example: return from deportation; finding that the family has survived; reflection on the meaning of family continuity). But if the chapters are in order by atomic weight (with exceptions, I think) I won’t say anything else.
In short, in my view the book now exists, and I’m very pleased about it.
The letter tells us which stories were written last. Calvino, who names them in the same order in which they appear in the final table of contents, was also partly right about “Argon,” a story that is different from all the others in the book. Levi told a young student that he had started writing it in 1946, that is, at the same time as If This Is a Man. An early version of it, at least, must date from that time; others followed, in 1970 and 1973. Also in 1946, Levi had written the short poem “Ostjuden,” in which he paid homage to the Jews of Eastern Europe, whom he had met for the first time in the Lager. The two texts, “Argon” and “Ostjuden,” set up a sort of ethical and ethnic pairing.
It was Calvino who called The Periodic Table the most “Primo-Levian” of Primo Levi’s books. Levi, introducing “Carbon” in Uomini e Libri, explained that the future book had its origin in the same vein as Natural Histories and Flaw of Form: he thus emphasized the fantasy inspiration and the scientific content. Today, owing to the strength of the autobiographical elements, the reader tends to compare it, rather, to If This Is a Man and The Truce. (The chapters “Lead” and “Mercury” are exceptions, but they are historical fantasies, explicitly presented as youthful efforts; and so they, too, count as autobiography rather than as literary invention.) Perhaps it would be more balanced to conclude that The Periodic Table is “Primo-Levian” because, in twenty-one short pieces distributed along a chronological arc of more than thirty years, it gives expression to all of Levi’s talents as a writer. And yet, until a fairly late phase of its construction, Levi had an image of the book that was markedly different from the final result.
The Periodic Table was published by Einaudi in April 1975. It received excellent reviews (including one by Natalia Ginzburg, the author of Family Sayings, who praised in particular the linguistic and family epic “Argon”) and won the Prato Prize. In 2006, a contest sponsored by The Guardian awarded it a prize as “the best science book ever written.”
The Periodic Table was first published in the United States at the end of 1984 by Schocken Books.
THE WRENCH
When Primo Levi published The Wrench, in 1978, he had been writing full-time for more than a year, having given up his job as a chemist in September 1977. The idea for the book had come to him, however, during a journey connected to his work: in the fall of 1972 he had spent several weeks in the USSR, in Tolyatti, where a Fiat plant was under construction, an immense city-factory rising out of nothing in the middle of a forest. In The Wrench he pays homage to Russia, stating, “My curious destiny had determined that my life’s most decisive moments would occur in that great and strange country.”
The Wrench was published by Einaudi in December 1978; two chapters, the first and the eleventh, had appeared independently in La Stampa (on March 13 and June 12, 1977, respectively). The book’s jacket copy, by Italo Calvino (not signed), reveals its significance with respect not only to Levi’s work but to Italian literature and Italian society at the time:
In recent years a great number of Italians have been spending varying periods of time in remote, exotic countries as skilled workers on projects undertaken by Italian companies. It’s a new type of experience that is showing up in our fiction.
The Wrench recounts the adventures of a rigger of cranes, metal structures, suspension bridges, oil-drilling installations: a highly trained technician, who is called on to carry out extremely difficult projects on all continents, a superspecialized worker who spends his life with contracts and international commissions like a great orchestra conductor, and whose work takes place amid flooding rivers in India, Alaskan ice, African forests, Russian tundras. Only Primo Levi could represent this character completely in his two principal guises: the man of impassioned professional expertise for whom every adventure is also the story of a technical performance, a battle (won or lost) with materials and environmental conditions; and the man who leads the picaresque life of the world traveler, confronting every adventure with an amused and ironic attitude, with a foretaste of the pleasure of telling it to his fellow countrymen, of transforming it into dialect and technical language.
For it is always his voice that we hear in these pages: the voice of the rigger Faussone, a Piedmontese whose dialect is enriched by an inexhaustible store of invented jargon and professional metaphors, which Primo Levi records and transcribes and Italianizes just enough. A dual passion for careful work and vivid language animates the book, thanks to which the boldest technology and a confidence in moving through the world come to us through the lighthearted, unpretentious voice of this character with tenacious local roots, who never retreats in the face of the new and unusual but filters every experience through a vernacular, traditional common sense. (Behind him is an old and formal Turin of which Levi gives us a glimpse when he visits the aunts, but also a dynasty of worker-artisans who migrated from the countryside to the city on the waves of our industrial revolution.) And yet this clever, talkative Faussone is also a man who pursues an ideal with obsessive rigor, a stylist with a clear, sharp morality, an inhabitant of the air, up on the pylons that he is building and checking with his “wrench”; a man always ready to enjoy the pleasures of the world below but only after he’s sure that the cables will support the tension of their loads.
Primo Levi, who with The Periodic Table gave us a book that is not only a model but rare in our literature, a book about the moral education of a man of our era, in this new volume offers an image (happily “outmoded” with respect to the current mood) of that almost unknown civilization of expertise that still exists in Italy, and in which the ancient nobility of the artisan who makes things with his own hands is revived. And the “allegro” of his narration has been familiar to us ever since the journey described in The Truce, whic
h was also picaresque but against a background of tragic devastation.
The chemist Primo Levi enters the book as well, conversing with his fellow Turinese Faussone, whom he encounters in far-off places, and comparing the experiences of the rigger of cranes with his own, in his two professions, as a “rigger of molecules” and as a “rigger of stories.”
The Wrench is better described as a cycle of stories rather than as a novel; Levi noted that the episode of the “sick duct” was entirely autobiographical, while only one story, about the monkey, was completely invented. For the language, he noted among his models Pier Paolo Pasolini, in particular the two novels The Ragazzi (1955) and A Violent Life (1959), both about the world of the Roman underclass.
In The Wrench, Levi filtered the Piedmontese dialect through the Italian language: the result is an Italian conceived in dialect. The syntax, the grammar, and many words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) of the dialect survive, along with a large repertoire of metaphors and idioms. To all this Levi adds humor and technical precision, his particular contribution. In an interview he explained that he had written The Wrench in “a demotic language, perhaps corrupted, which is the Italian of the factories. I had fun writing Faussone’s language: I’ve never written with such ease. . . . It would be very difficult to tell his stories in Italian. There are technical terms, which no one uses, or even understands. Man the maker speaks the language of men who are makers.” When, in 1983, Einaudi published an edition of the book for middle-school students, the linguist Gian Luigi Beccaria was brought in to provide notes.
The publication of The Wrench coincided with a dark phase of Italian history. A few months earlier, the terrorists of the Red Brigades had kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, which had headed every government since the war. The student protests against the political system were at their peak, as were the union struggles. Work, particularly factory work, was in those years considered a humiliating labor; that was why Calvino had written in the jacket copy that The Wrench was “happily ‘outmoded’ with respect to the current mood.” Levi in fact hinted at the possibility of freedom through work, if it was performed with passion and skill. He was also (in a book in which the Lager is absent) having a form of revenge against the sign Arbeit macht frei over the entrance to Auschwitz: Levi tells a story of work that really does make a man free.
The Wrench was very successful with the public and the critics (in 1979 it won the Bergamo Prize and the Strega), but it also stirred discussions and protests; some papers on the left and representatives of the working and union worlds judged it to be conservative. On January 14, 1979, La Stampa organized a debate on the book, with some of the most important sociologists and union officials in Italy participating.
The book appeared in English for the first time in 1986, under the title The Monkey’s Wrench, published by Summit Books.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1949–1980
The majority of the texts that Primo Levi wrote between the late forties and the late seventies, and which at his death had not been published in collections, look like a swarm of meteorites out of the head of the comet If This Is a Man. Even in a story like “The End of Marinese” (1949), about the Resistance—the partisan struggle that Levi took part in for only a few weeks—the role of the witness has a decisive importance. And it should be remembered that the first ten or fifteen years after the war were, for the former deportees, a desert: in Italy public memory of the war was fading, political life was slipping into a moral swamp in which the former Fascists swam confidently, and the specific horror of the extermination of the Jews held no interest for historians or for civilian society. Thus, in the fifties, a tone of grim disappointment dominates, as in the essay “The Deported. Anniversary” (1955), yet we also find unfailingly two enduring qualities of Levi the witness: the persistence of his commitment and the precision of his gaze, his moral judgment.
Gradually, during the sixties and seventies, the themes that Levi took up became more varied. Newspapers and periodicals continued to approach him about writing on subjects related to the Lager, to the Germany of yesterday and today, to totalitarianisms other than that of the Nazis, to the violence spreading through Italian society and in Europe (the terrorism of the Red Brigades, new episodes of anti-Semitism, the first incursions of the Holocaust deniers), while publishers asked him for prefaces to works of littérature concentrationnaire—concentration-camp literature—and in fact in some cases it was Levi himself who proposed that a book be published. Notable among these initiatives was the Italian translation, from Dutch, of The Night of the Girondists (1976), by Jacques Presser, in whose foreword we can glimpse for the first time the notion of the “gray zone,” the subject of the second chapter of The Drowned and the Saved. Two years later, in 1978, Levi wrote an obituary for Jean Améry, who in the same book becomes a posthumous interlocutor, both empathetic and polemical. Finally, in this period, Levi gave a talk that, starting with its paradoxical title—“The Non-Writer Writer”—should be placed among his most illuminating self-definitions.
Meanwhile, Levi’s books began to travel in geographic space (German editions of If This Is a Man, 1961 and 1979, both with prefaces by him), in the temporal space between generations (the school edition of The Truce, 1965), and between different literary genres (a dramatic version of If This Is a Man, 1966). And Levi himself traveled; in 1968 he published his impressions of Israel. Starting in the midseventies, his presence in the pages of the daily newspapers became more regular. When he decided to put together a collection of his essays, Other People’s Trades (1985), he chose to document his passion for an encyclopedic knowledge, and he left out the texts—many written on commission—having to do with Auschwitz and its legacy. Thus, this first part of the uncollected essays might compose a new work of Levi’s on the Lager, a companion to the greater testimonies—from If This Is a Man to The Truce and the autobiographical chapters of The Periodic Table. This new book might even be titled, emulating an editorial that appeared on the front page of La Stampa in 1975, This Was Auschwitz. The last essay here is the text that Levi wrote in 1978 for the Italian Memorial at Auschwitz. It’s a succinct and powerful reconstruction of the depraved political acts that made possible fascism, then Nazism, and finally the Shoah. Here at last it can be read and reflected on in its entirety: in 1980, the project for the memorial was modified and only the concluding paragraph was posted at Auschwitz.
The pages of this section are translated and collected for the first time in English as a unit, based on the Italian edition of Levi’s complete works, Opere, published in 1997 by Einaudi and edited by Marco Belpoliti.
LILITH AND OTHER STORIES
Lilith and Other Stories was published by Einaudi in October 1981. Primo Levi wrote the concise jacket copy himself: “These stories, written between 1975 and 1981, have a variety of subjects and tones. I tried to sort them, and though I sometimes had to force the terms, I’ve made them into a first group that takes up themes from If This Is a Man and The Truce; a second that continues Natural Histories and Flaw of Form; and a third in which the characters are, to a certain degree, flesh and blood. I hope that each story properly fulfills its task, which is simply to condense into a few words, and convey to the reader, a precise memory, a state of mind, or even just a thought. Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad. As far as I know, there are no vital messages or revelations in them; if the reader finds them, it’s of his own goodwill.”
There are thirty-six stories: twelve in the first section, “Present Perfect”; fifteen in the second, “Future Anterior”; and nine in the last, “Present Indicative,” whose title partly refutes the intention not to send messages, since “indicative,” in this context, could also have the sense of “pointing to” something. Twenty-nine of the stories appeared in La Stampa or its cultural supplement Tuttolibri, eighteen of them—half the book—in the years 1977–78. The most recent (August 23, 1981) was “The Soul and the Enginee
rs,” but Levi had subjected the two earliest stories to intense revisions. “Capaneus,” the story that opens Lilith, came out in Il Ponte in November 1959. That first version was saturated with literary references, including the title. Rappoport, the story’s protagonist, is compared to Dante’s Capaneus (Inferno XIV:63–72), the proudest and most hostile to God among the seven kings who attacked Thebes.
But in the few pages of the first draft of “Capaneus” there were also quotations from François Villon, Rabelais, and the Edda, and even a brief burlesque in Latin, confidently performed by Rappoport. In the new version that appeared in La Stampa on May 28, 1978, all this had disappeared, along with the first version’s singular opening: “Me, you know me. It may be that at that time and in that place, in those zebra-striped rags, with my beard rougher than usual and my head shorn, I looked very different from the way I do today; but it’s not important, the essence hasn’t changed.” Thus, before describing Rappoport, the narrator Primo Levi introduced himself, a man proud of no longer being the Auschwitz deportee (Levi was sending readers back to If This Is a Man, which in 1959 was the only book he had published) but also of having been that deportee without losing his dignity and his faculty of attention. Those initial words, which in Italian sound abrupt, colloquial, and proud—“Me, you know me”—recall another book very dear to Levi, Moby-Dick, and its opening: “Call me Ishmael.”
“A Disciple,” originally published in 1961 in Secondo Risorgimento, an anthology intended to commemorate both the Resistance and the centennial of the unification of Italy, was also rewritten, appearing in La Stampa on June 1, 1975. When, that year, Levi gave Calvino a group of stories to read (see the section on Natural Histories, above), “Capaneus” and “A Disciple” were undoubtedly among them. Calvino told him sincerely that the stories about the Lager were merely “fragments of If This Is a Man, which, detached from a broader narrative, have the limitations of the sketch.” Levi must have thought he was right, since he rewrote them; and later, signing a copy of Lilith for a friend, he described the stories altogether as “slightly faded.”