Levi was caught between disciplines

Levi was caught between disciplines

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Originally published 24 June 2003

Few work­ing sci­en­tists, oth­er than physi­cians, have achieved Pri­mo Lev­i’s degree of lit­er­ary acclaim. Had he lived longer — he died in 1987 at age 67, an appar­ent sui­cide — he might have won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Levi was a chemist, but his desire to write was irre­sistible. An almost life­long res­i­dent of Turin, Italy, he soared to promi­nence in Amer­i­ca with the pub­li­ca­tion in 1984 of The Peri­od­ic Table, an episod­ic mem­oir hung on a metaphor­i­cal frame­work of the chem­i­cal ele­ments. Soon his oth­er works — poet­ry, fic­tion, and non­fic­tion — were wide­ly read in Eng­lish translation.

Levi was admired by read­ers for his lit­er­ary craft; he was also much loved for his ret­i­cence, his hon­esty, his gen­tle but dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of human behav­ior. He was a man who left the order­ly soli­tude of his lab­o­ra­to­ry with reluc­tance and was nev­er com­fort­able with fame.

In The Dou­ble Bond, her recent biog­ra­phy of Levi, Car­ole Ang­i­er gives us insight into his moti­va­tions as both sci­en­tist and writer. Her account is a les­son, too, in the rela­tion between sci­ence and art.

As a boy grow­ing up in Italy between the two World Wars, Levi was del­i­cate, painful­ly shy, lone­ly, and sen­si­tive. His clos­est friend and con­fi­dant was his sis­ter, Anna Maria. His par­ents were Jew­ish, but only nom­i­nal­ly reli­gious. His father, espe­cial­ly, cham­pi­oned the Euro­pean Enlight­en­ment rather than the ancient faith.

From an ear­ly age, Levi was inven­tive and curi­ous, qual­i­ties that served him well as a sci­en­tist. He read vora­cious­ly, works of both sci­ence and lit­er­a­ture, but he dreamed only of being a scientist.

The human­i­ties dom­i­nat­ed Ital­ian schools at that time, but Levi resist­ed their pull, per­haps because of the rise of fas­cism he saw all around him. Phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, and lit­er­a­ture were sub­jects that could be dis­tort­ed by ide­ol­o­gy, he thought; they were tan­gles of rhetoric and lies. He recoiled from school­room lec­tures on abstract phi­los­o­phy, pre­fer­ring instead a close exam­i­na­tion of the world around him.

He watched buds swell in spring, mica glint in gran­ite, the skin of his own hands, and said to him­self, “I will under­stand every­thing, but not the way they want me to. I will find a short­cut. I will pick the lock; I will force open the doors.”

As Ang­i­er states, his short­cut, his lock-pick, would be science.

But life had a sur­prise in store for the eager young chemist.

On the morn­ing of Feb­ru­ary 22, 1944, “all rea­son dis­solved,” Levi wrote lat­er, after 650 Jews held at an intern­ment camp at Fos­soli in Italy were herd­ed into cat­tle-cars by Ger­man SS troops and tak­en to Auschwitz. Pri­mo Levi, 24, was among them.

Of the hell that fol­lowed, there is no more mov­ing account than Lev­i’s Sur­vival in Auschwitz. That he lived to tell the sto­ry was a mat­ter of friend­ship, luck, and sheer grit. Curi­ous­ly, a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic detach­ment may have helped him stay sane in the camp when oth­ers suc­cumbed to madness.

When Levi returned to Turin after the Rus­sians lib­er­at­ed Auschwitz, he began to tell his sto­ry to his fam­i­ly and friends, even to strangers he met on the train. As Ang­i­er wrote, “He had found his task for the rest of his life.”

Sci­ence pro­vid­ed Levi with a rich stock of lit­er­ary metaphors, but sci­ence was of no use for explain­ing the extremes of evil and hero­ism he had wit­nessed at Auschwitz. Noth­ing he had learned in chem­istry could force the doors of under­stand­ing. There were no short­cuts, no lock-picks.

With lit­er­a­ture, he nib­bled away at the mys­tery, nev­er sur­ren­der­ing his alle­giance to rea­son. As a sci­en­tist, he was a dis­ci­ple of Mendeleev, the great Russ­ian chemist who devised the peri­od­ic table of the ele­ments, that splen­did mon­u­ment to order. As a writer, he fol­lowed Dos­to­evsky into the tan­gled labyrinth of the human heart.

Phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, and lit­er­a­ture, it turned out, had rel­e­vance after all. Ang­i­er wrote: “Pri­mo Levi always tried to remain on the cool, bright plain of his ratio­nal mind, and to avoid the abyss beneath. But the longer he tried, the more the ghosts and dark visions grew.”

In the end, they took his life.

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