The riddle of Turin

PRIMO LEVI (1919-87) was an industrial chemist, a writer and an Auschwitz survivor. His first book, “If This Is a Man”, which came out in the United States as “Survival in Auschwitz”, and his last, “The Drowned and the Saved”, are among the best books of witness. Aside from the year in the camps—his first experience of foreign travel—another adventurous year returning to Italy by way of Russia (described in his book “The Truce”) and a year he was forced by Italy's fascist government to find work in Milan, he spent his entire life in his birthplace, Turin; his study was the room he was born in. He had one employer for 30 years, one wife, two children. It is—always excepting Auschwitz—one of the calmest, least rackety lives of a 20th-century writer. It gave the appearance of being completely, almost bizarrely, well-adjusted: Levi visited post-war German factories for his work, took courses at the Turin Goethe Institute and translated Franz Kafka and Gottfried Benn. And then, on a Saturday morning, his wife out of the house shopping, his infirm mother with her nurse, the (apparently harmless) post just delivered, he threw himself over the third floor banister into the stairwell and was instantly dead.

It was a great shock to the sage and saintly reputation that was accruing to Levi internationally, which he did not especially want and which probably put him under more strain. If not for the suicide, it is unlikely that two immense biographies would have come out together in a single week. Both books originate in Britain, the British being the biographer-ants of literary entomology. Both come to the same conclusion: that Levi died not from some late recrudescence of Auschwitz in the form of survivor guilt, but because of his own chronic, if not lifelong, depression. Apart from that, their exhaustiveness and their length (Carole Angier's is around 900 pages, Ian Thomson's a trim 600), the two accounts could hardly be more different. One is modest, useful, well-written, a credit to its subject; the other is not.

Ms Angier's book is not so much a biography as a traumatography—the story of a wound. She seems unable to touch something without making it a little confusing and quite a bit worse: Levi's ancestry, parents, home, childhood, friends, studies. In her narrative, she produces endless—and endlessly inferior—retellings, first of Levi's beautiful and tangential little autobiography, “The Periodic Table”, and then of the Auschwitz books. Her own style is sticky with vulgar intensifiers: “so”, “still”, “much”, “very”, “only”, “extraordinary”, “brilliant”, “supremely”. Like a cold-caller she refers to Levi, whom she never knew, as Primo. Her title is shamelessly taken from an unpublished manuscript of his on which he was working. This is biography as process, as quest. Great tracts of it are, in a phrase of the moment, touchy-feely. The biographer here is a weathervane inserted into the subject's soul, self-importantly spinning and rattling.

Mr Thomson, by contrast, endears himself to the reader by admitting right away (and then not again): “It is fantastically difficult to fashion a narrative out of the inchoate facts of someone's life.” A little later, he says, “It seemed to me dishonest, as well as dangerous, to recast Levi's printed words in a biography”—which, though he wouldn't have known it, is what Ms Angier does. He keeps some distance, at times a critical distance, from what he is writing about. There is “something rather priggish” about the young Levi, he was “in all likelihood not manifestly ‘exceptional'” at school; his verses are “syrupy”; the science fiction stories, “bagatelles really—are able but undistinguished.” After Ms Angier, for whom everything seems liable to be equally and simultaneously brilliant and terrible, this is a great relief.

Both biographers have certain coups they alone were able to pull off; Ms Angier got a sight of the manuscript of Levi's “Double Bond”, a sort of follow-up to “The Periodic Table”, and spoke to anonymous women friends of his late years. Mr Thomson met and interviewed Levi himself shortly before he died—attractively, it is not something he makes great play with; he was 24 and exceedingly nervous, he says—and also spoke at length to Levi's sister. He seems easier with Italy, and with Italian (Ms Angier herself confesses to not recognising a famous phrase from the opening of Dante's “Inferno”). His book is thickened and lit by more historical and cultural information, and by closer attention to what you might call healthy externals. It is only from Mr Thomson that you would know that Levi climbed Mont Blanc; that he visited Israel in 1968 and Sicily in 1980; that he drove, and what he drove; that he smoked, and what he smoked; that he liked his food and drink (his favourite dish was polenta and frogs). It is Mr Thomson who squashes the story that Levi was taught by Cesare Pavese, a great Italian novelist and poet; he who talks about the successful suit Levi brought against I.G. Farben, makers of Zyklon B, the gas used in the camps; he who gives us a sense of the man Levi might be to meet: sweet, witty, lucid, modest, small.

Levi was a great writer and a gifted chemist, but the thing he was best at—even as it most reduced him, and probably because it most reduced him—was Auschwitz. Unfortunately for him—in spite of loose talk from friends and biographers about his having imprisoned himself on the Corso Re Umberto, or of his home life with his wife and his old mother as a kind of laager—it was of limited application elsewhere in his life. An investigating magistrate looking into the many near-accidents at his chemical factory described him as “a dangerously unprofessional man”; a friend described him as “a chemist on loan to literature”; and Levi himself praised a group of stories he was sent as “best of all, clearly not the work of a so-called professional writer.” How such a man—slight, childlike, needy, private, shy away from his family and friends—ended up becoming at times almost a professional survivor and one of the earliest literary celebrities in translation is a fascinating and improbable story. He wanted to be a writer not a survivor, but it was being a writer that he could not survive.