The Double Bond: Primo Levi
By Carole Angier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 898 pages, $40
By a fateful concatenation of youthful blunders, a largely unformed young Italian named Primo Levi stepped down from a packed freight car into the night of Auschwitz in February 1944. So ignorant was he, so protected from the world by his classical education and his training in chemistry, that when captured by a fascist militia, he had thought it prudent to identify himself as a Jew rather than as an anti-fascist partisan.
In fact, he wasn’t much of either. He was a freedom fighter only in the sense that he and a few friends had gone into their beloved mountains above Turin in hopes of connecting with one of the partisan bands said to be operating there. He was Jewish only in the festive, assimilated way of most well-off Turin Jews, a thoroughly integrated group respected for its role in Italy’s nation-building process. Until the racial laws of 1938 suddenly marginalized them, a fair number of Jewish industrialists and leaders had proudly held positions in the Italian Fascist Party.
It is no outrageous metaphor, therefore, to say that Levi was born into the present at the moment he stepped into Auschwitz. He was to become one of the great witnesses and great writers of the 20th Century. Between his deliverance in 1945 and his suicide in 1987, he meditated on the concentration camp as a laboratory of humankind. Though a very different writer, Levi is similar to Beckett not only in the cool rigor of his prose but more profoundly in his ability to confront the most degraded and horrifying aspects of life and bring forth artwork that is deeply affirming of the delicate, heroic struggle for human dignity.
In her new biography, “The Double Bond,” Carole Angier attempts to grasp and study every possible thread of the life of this complicated man who wrote so clearly, who described his own experience while remaining concealed behind a veil of self-protection.
Why write a biography of a man who has already told us so much about himself? First, because there remains the mystery of his death at 68. Did he throw himself down a stairwell at his house intentionally, or might it have been an accident? More importantly, Angier believes that Levi reveals in writing only part of his life, and a study of what he held back might better illuminate the life he chose to share. Plus, the act of writing and reading a biography of Levi can be a sort of homage to one of the most uncompromising moral thinkers of our time.
The implied question in the title of Levi’s first book, “Se questo e un uomo” (“If This Is a Man”), provides a fair introduction to the ethical foundation at the base of his account of life in Auschwitz. Written in a single, self-liberating burst (and famously rejected at first by Italy’s most prestigious and ethically committed publishing house, Einaudi), the book dramatically details the daily struggle to survive horror but takes the form of a dispassionate, almost scientific study of human behavior under conditions that deny humanity. “If This Is a Man” is an acute sociology of human behavior in Auschwitz, of how people lived rather than how they died.
Angier stresses that Levi instinctively believed that the only way to survive in that inferno was to dedicate himself, as the responsible chemist he was, to marking every reaction. Levi devotes constant attention to those lowest of the low in the camp society, the dead-eyed victims with strange hopping gait who succumbed to brutality by giving up the capacity to question. Soon after his arrival and desperately thirsty, Levi reaches out a window to break off an icicle; a guard snatches it away. Levi resorts to one of the few words he knows in German, “Warum?” (“Why?”) The guard’s answer is one of the most chilling and telling moments in the book: “Hier ist kein Warum” (“Here there is no Why”).
Asking “Why?”–the ability to stand back and wonder, and the effort to structure wonder into methods and truths–was at the root of Levi’s literary production throughout his life. His writing is always lucid, systematic without ever plodding, simple without ever being simplistic, controlled without ever losing its concentrated intensity. There is also an entirely positive sense that Levi is writing not as a professional but as an engaged, intelligent and sensitive amateur.
In fact, he was an amateur. Though well-regarded by some critics, “If This Is a Man” virtually disappeared after its release in 1947. Levi continued to write in private and even convinced Einaudi to republish his book in 1958, but his professional life was dedicated to chemistry. He was unable to publish a book again until 1963. “The Truce,” a fictionalized odyssey of his return from Auschwitz to Turin, garnered greater attention and won an important literary prize. But the press materials about the candidates for the prize still described him as a chemist. Levi worked for a paint firm until he was 58, and he played a cat-and-mouse game with his own ego as to whether to abandon science for writing. Could he dare to think of himself in the ethically imposing, risky role of writer?
This double, doubtful spirit, to which Angier refers in her title, brought great benefit to Levi’s writing. In another of his key works, “The Periodic Table,” published in 1975, Levi performs a kind of alchemy, combining chemistry with literature to examine people as manifestations of chemical properties. In chronological order, each chapter of the book tells an episode in the writer’s life by describing a crucial person as an embodiment of an element from the periodic table. Argon, mercury, nitrogen, carbon and others are thus personified and given a history, and at the same time his brilliantly sketched individuals work as chemicals do, manifesting elemental forces as their influence spreads into the world around them. The book’s epigraph, a Yiddish proverb that says, “Troubles overcome are good to tell,” suggests the optimism underlying Levi’s meditation on the Holocaust at this point in his life. But even as his literary career blossomed, external events and his own growing depression darkened his reflections, resulting finally in the stark and searing vision of his last great work, “The Drowned and the Saved.”
We are told that Angier spent nearly 10 years writing “The Double Bond,” and indeed it seems distinctly overcooked. In her preface she explains that she has combined two biographies; one of the rational and one of the irrational Levi. But in fact there are three or four different types of biography elbowing for space here.
The most successful is the exhaustive record of the subject’s life. We learn names, histories and destinies of dozens of relatives and friends. Sharp lines are drawn between real people in Levi’s life and the way he represented them in his writings. Contradictory versions of distant events are posed against each other, obsessively sifted for accuracy and resolved. Unfortunately, Angier spoils her achievement by failing to distinguish between the necessary and the extraneous. The impression is that virtually every note she took has found its way somewhere into her text.
Worse, she introduces herself into her story. Perhaps in response to the refusal of Levi’s wife and daughter to share their memories with her, Angier befriended as many of Levi’s surviving relatives and friends as would speak to her. She thus adopts the chummy habit of referring to people by their first names. It becomes difficult to remember across the book’s vast range who is Leonardo, who Lorenzo and who Luciano. She tells us her new friends’ lovable foibles in a cozy sotto voce. We learn when she laughed and when she wanted to cry. She tells us that she sees a shadow of herself in one of Levi’s stories. The effect is uncomfortably close and even recalls Edmund Morris’ disastrous 1999 biography of Ronald Reagan, in which the writer imagined himself as a character in his hero’s life.
Employing still another style, Angier carries out a detailed literary critique of Levi’s work, which she inserts here and there into the biography, sometimes slipping from one to the other without warning. Her analysis is well done and might even have worked as a book apart. But pages of plot synopsis of lesser-known short stories, or lengthy re-elaborations of chapters from his books, only make the reader long for Levi’s own far-more-deft prose.
As a last and weakest genre, Angier assays the form of scandal biography so popular of late. She has uncovered two women who seem to have had affairs of one sort or another with Levi. These she introduces with such a maladroit display of discretion that the reader can’t resist wondering whether Angier isn’t punishing Levi’s wife for not talking to her. But the handling is so confusing–one is spoken of not by her real name but as Lilith, a Levi character that Angier believes is based on the real woman–that any wished-for revelation is hopelessly blundered. And to think, rather than all these pages, we could have read several books by Levi!
A great witness, a great writer, a poor biography. Primo Levi will survive this too.
