Ian Thomson: Primo Levi

By MARGIE THOMSON

Primo Levi was an Italian Jew whose family was firmly assimilated into mainstream, bourgeois Turin society. He grew up between the wars, enjoyed an excellent classical education under Mussolini's fascist system, belonged (as did almost everybody) to Fascist youth groups, studied at university to become a chemist.

He endured the increasing weight of anti-Jewish measures adopted by Mussolini during the late 1930s and early 1940s, but in the end was forced to flee from his home to the mountains, where he and some friends joined the Italian resistance.

Betrayed, Levi was arrested in December 1943, imprisoned briefly at Fassoli and then taken by crowded cattle car to Auschwitz. Of the "650 pieces" (Italian Jews) who were transported with him, only 24 survived. Levi thus regarded himself as a witness, not only of man's inhumanity to man, but of the human spirit which can endure even in the darkest places.

In the enormous literature that exists about the Holocaust (a term, incidentally, that Levi always felt was mistaken, implying as it does in its original Greek a kind of ritual offering to the gods), Levi's work stands out. His 1947 work If This Is A Man (chronicling his journey through darkness, followed in 1963 by his journey back to light in The Truce) is a classic not only in his native Italy where it is a required text in schools, but - since its 1984 re-release - in many other countries, especially the US and Britain. American author Philip Roth, for instance, believed it "one of the century's truly necessary books" and its author "a magically endearing man".

For Levi, writing was always a path to "personal stabilisation", an attempt to make sense of his life and the world around him. He took pride in not being wholly of the literary world - a chemist by day, a writer by night. While it slowed his output, it gave a context and richness to his life that he wouldn't be without, and his 1975 book The Periodic Table reflects this.

In 1987, at the age of 67, he committed suicide, throwing himself into the stairwell from the third floor apartment where he had been born and had lived almost all his life.

Many people believe to this day that he died in a kind of delayed reaction to Auschwitz, but Thomson identifies other reasons.

Thomson's biography is huge, detailed and sensitive. You can tell from the acknowledgments that he has made the most of the many people who knew Levi. Thomson has surely interviewed them all, except for the members of Levi's immediate family who did not make themselves available (but neither did they hinder him).

Because of his refusal to speculate to any great degree (or to draw conclusions from Levi's own semi-autobiographical work, which Thomson considers factually unreliable), this biography has an inevitably slippery feel to it. That despite the torrents of words and facts, the person himself has somehow evaded us. Yet we learn much.

It will not surprise his fans to learn he had a humble nature. On his 1985 tour to the US, for instance, where he was appalled by the beggars while being, to his horror, feted like a Hollywood movie star, he was provided with a limousine when he would have preferred a taxi. Nevertheless, Thomson judges that tour as being behind his "immense international reputation".

Yet he was no self-deprecating saint. Tortured sporadically by depression, he sometimes exhibited "a moodiness, a dissatisfaction often close to self-pity". He knew his own value as a writer. He railed against being described as "a forgiver". "Though Levi wanted justice, and the guilty to be judged, he never forgave the crimes committed, or those who committed them," Thomson notes.

He was extraordinarily devoted to his mother, with whom he lived his whole life (it was when she became increasingly ill that he killed himself). His homelife was terribly unhappy, but this was largely his own doing. He forced his wife Lucia to live her married life in the same apartment as his mother, even though the two never got on.

As a weedy, bookish adolescent he suffered a crippling shyness towards women and endured a lifelong reticence about sexual intimacy which probably damaged his marriage.

How did he survive Auschwitz when nearly everyone else died? It was a combination of luck and the generosity of others, as Thomson shows. Psychologically, he explains it this way: "In Levi's view, while luck had helped him to survive thus far, what had saved him above all was his fierce desire to observe and make sense of the authoritarian system. Levi was only able to exercise his curiosity because of his fierce will to live. He was a young man with his life before him, he had no dependants who were suffering; and somewhere he must have found the belief that he could hold out to the war's end."

All his life Levi hated labels. Although Jewish, he abandoned the idea of God soon after his Bar Mitzvah, and was disturbed at being paraded as a kind of Jewish martyr while he was in New York. While he initially supported the creation of the State of Israel, he became an outspoken critic of its militaristic policies, and thus came to occupy a paradoxical place in Jewish opinion.

Aspiring writers may be comforted to read that Levi had tremendous trouble getting published to begin with - a matter of timing, it now seems. If This Is A Man was published by a small, impoverished company, to be published more reputably only much later. The Periodic Table was rejected by 27 British publishers before Sphere picked it up shortly after acquiring the rights to If This Is A Man and The Truce for a song from Penguin. Before long, The Periodic Table was at the top of the bestseller lists there, along with Dick Francis.

The issue with biographies such as this is that they force us to try to define the relationship between the writer and his work.

Sure, we're left with an impression of an engaging, shy, tormented man. But his central message or meaning to us was in his books, not in his life per se. Perhaps the best thing about literary biographies is that they send us back to the works which inspired our interest.

Hutchinson

$75