Literature – Page 2 – Literary Art and Illustration

Balthazar, by Lawrence G. Durrell – March, 1961 (August, 1958) [Unknown Artist]

The second novel of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” (which otherwise in order comprised Justine, Mountolive, and Clea), Balthazar – as well as the latter two novels – was never adapted for film, unlike the first volume of the series.

Though the cover artist of this 1961 edition of Balthazar is unknown, that anonymous person would s e e m to have been the same individual who created the cover of the other three 1961 Cardinal Edition Quartet novels: For each of the four books, a woman’s face – sometimes veiled; sometimes not – occupies most of the cover, while at the lower left appears a mosque and minaret. Each of the four novels also has its own distinguishing background color: Justine in pale yellow, Balthazar in blue, Mountolive in violet, and Clea in Brown.

He was at that time deeply immersed in the novel he was writing,
and as always he found that his ordinary life,
in a distorted sort of way,
was beginning to follow the curvature of his book.

He explained this by saying that any concentration of the will displaces life
(Archimedes’ bath-water) and gives it bias in motion.

Reality, be believed, was always trying to copy the imagination of man, from which it derived.

You will see from this that he was a serious fellow underneath much of his clowning
and had quite comprehensive beliefs and ideas.

But also, he had been drinking rather heavily that day as he always did when he was working.

Between books he never touched a drop.

Riding beside her in the great car, someone beautiful,
dark and painted with great eyes like the prow of some Aegean ship,
he had the sensation that his book was being rapidly passed underneath his life,
as if under a sheet of paper containing the iron filings of temporal events,
as a magnet is in that commonplace experiment one does at school:
and somehow setting up a copying magnetic field. (pp. 106-107)

References

Alexandria Quartet, at Wikipedia

International Lawrence Durrell Society

P.S.!… Here’s the cover – with a prominent and rather distracting bend in the lower right corner (ugh!) – that originally featured as the main image of this post. As you can see above, the cover image is now from a different, undamaged copy of Durrell’s book.

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The Art of The Review: Danilo Kis’ “Hourglass”, in The New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1990 [Illustration by Igor Kopelnitsky]

The art of books can be simple: The title, and, the author’s name.

The art of books can be literal: Whether fiction or non-fiction, an artist can depict a book’s characters, events, scenes, or setting, in as “real” a sense as possible.

And, the art of books can be symbolic: An artist can use emblems and signs drawn from history, legend, mythology, politics, religion, science, and technology – singly or in combination – to convey an idea, a message, or mood.

And if so for books, even more so for book reviews. (Well, at least some book reviews!) The example below, from the New York Times Book Review of October 7, 1990, being a case in point. Created by Igor Kopelnitsky to accompany Charles Newman’s review of Daniel Kiš’ Hourglass, the artist combined symbols of time (an hourglass, as per the book’s title); captivity, whether actual or immanent (the hourglass is composed of barbed-wire, and situated between two fence-posts); immutability, concealment, and passive (powerless?) observation (a eye embedded in a pyramid): All to symbolize – within a single composition – the novel’s multifaceted and complex nature as literature about the Shoah, and more.

____________________

How It Feels to Cease to Be
HOURGLASS
By Danilo Kiš

Translated by Ralph Manheim.
274 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $22.95.

By Charles Newman

____________________

Igor Kopelnitsky’s imagined hourglass, for Hourglass

____________________

THIS truly remarkable novel insists upon its uniqueness on every page, forcing you to reread constantly without resentment, becoming somehow simpler as its complexities deepen. It is also that rare occurrence in publishing these days, a book that gives ample evidence of an editor and a translator working hand in glove to bring a difficult text to light. (This is not an inappropriate place to acknowledge the immense service to literature that Ralph Manheim, the translator, has rendered over the years.)

____________________

D a n i l o K i š

February 22, 1935 – October 15, 1989

Illustration from CulturalOpposition.EU

____________________

Born on Yugoslavia’s border with Hungary in 1935, Danilo Kiš died last year in Paris of lung cancer. His complete works, in 10 volumes, appeared in his native land in 1984. “Hourglass,” first published in 1972, is the final volume of a trilogy recounting the story of his father’s life, disappearance and death in Auschwitz. The first volume of this masterwork, “Early Sorrows,” is yet to be translated from Serbo-Croatian into English. The second, “Garden, Ashes,” appeared in 1975, and American readers will be most familiar with Kiš’s highly praised collection of stories, “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” (1989).

It is most difficult to give a work of fiction like “Hourglass” a context. It certainly belongs to Holocaust literature, to the tradition of Central European ironic pathos, and it is unmistakably influenced by the techniques of the French “new novel.” But it would be a mistake to see Kiš’s work as either conventional protest or conventional avant-gardism. There are very few books that can be read simultaneously as a deracinated horror story and an esthetic tour de force. Kiš is both a contemporary writer’s writer and an ancient chronicler honoring vows made to the dead – though readers who have cut their eyeteeth on the baby talk of much recent American fiction will find him nearly impossible to follow. If Kiš is an experimentalist, his is an experiment in the true scientific sense: precise, verifiable, the triumph of a preconceived method. It is rather as if a classical ballerina wandered into a rehearsal of the most up-to-date modern dance, mastered all the moves in a minute and then demonstrated, not the breaks of history, but the continuity of our oldest concerns with the newest styles.

The novel begins with a particularly dense and detailed description of a man staring into an oil lamp – which, we do not discover until the last pages, is the flame of the Hanukkah miracle. It ends with an actual letter written by Kiš’s father, relating tragicomic misunderstandings with his relatives and the bureaucracy before he is rounded up to be sent off to the camps. We come very gradually to understand that E.S., a 53-year-old minor functionary in the Hungarian state railways, is attempting to find out why his pension is to be reduced. We are watching him over his shoulder, as it were, through a long night as he composes a letter “to the authorities,” one that ends with this postscript: “It is better to be among the persecuted than among the persecutors.” The letter in fact is the table of contents for the novel, an innocent real document, the meaning of which can only be grasped through the preceding fiction, which reads between the lines of the letter.

The resulting narrative is a kind of ingenious inquisition, which gradually moves from the letter writer, who poses questions to himself, to a mysterious third party, who grows irritated at both E.S.’s exhaustive evasiveness and his incredible specificity. By the end of the book, we realize that it is we, the readers, who are doing the interrogating, as in this passage:

“He caught the coachman’s attention at the last moment, when already the coachman was tugging at the reins and raising his whip, while he himself stood frozen, as though turned to stone.

“What did E.S. say to the coachman?

“He lowered his briefcase, which he had been pressing to his chest until then, and, without a word, pointed, in the vicinity of his mediastinum, to the Star of David, clearly visible in the wintry darkness.”

While the story proceeds without a single line of conventional dialogue, the static situation is so effortlessly transformed into the dramatic that the book could be easily transposed into a wonderful play.

NOW, I hesitate to go into the following because it will make the book seem more forbidding and intellectualized than it is. Unlike much self-reflexive fiction, Kiš’s writing contains not one iota of coyness or overreaching. But for an audience that tends to read Central European fiction as simple-minded allegories of totalitarianism, and that has been overexposed to the stale and feeble fiction of language games, I am obliged to try to describe a project in which the most deadly serious subject matter and the most playful estheticism are not opposed. This is an act of “deconstruction” that not only really destroys one’s preconceptions, but also adds up to something much greater than the fragments it leaves in its wake.

What Kiš is at pains to delineate is the subtleties of mental processes – the differences, for example, among memory as an abstract form, memory experiencing itself and memory as expressed in language. The opening scene, which takes several readings to grasp, is in fact a description of having a thought – that space between registering a sense impression and finding the corresponding word. And the movement of the entire book is in one sense the tracing of the territory lying between the “heaven of pure abstraction” of the artistic mind at play and the “threshold of nothingness,” the climax of death where only the sentence remains: “I have therefore tried to condense this abstraction, to condense it by force of will, faith, intelligence, madness, and love (self-love), to condense it so drastically that its specific weight will be such as to lift it like a balloon and carry it beyond the reach of darkness and oblivion.”

____________________

I g o r K o p e l n i t s k y

August 12, 1946 – October 29, 2019

“Igor & Klavdia at an Inx holiday party at Royal Bangladesh Indian Restaurant in 2003”

(Photo and caption by Martin Kozlowski, at NowWhatMedia (uploaded November 3, 2019))

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The novel thus traces the bitter and poetic movement from the genesis of an individual impression to the dead letter of history, from the inchoate to the posthumous, from premonition to artifact, from the apocryphal to the actual, from the writer’s subconscious to posterity. Kiš’s descriptions of mental states – dreaming, drunkenness, the mind searching for the right word, making lists in order to orient itself through trial and error, the powerful interpretations we project upon inanimate objects – are among the most original and acute in all literature.

IN the hourglass of the book, we begin with a mass of claustrophobic sense impressions that are gradually condensed at the neck of the hourglass (in the 33rd of the 66 sections), in which E.S. realizes that the trap is closing about him. The section ends with the expansive and horrific half-comprehension of his future annihilation. The “crystalline particles of pure existence” are passed through the “filter of eternity” to become “hard crystals of being.” Lucidity becomes “madness (and the converse)”; “the egoism of life” becomes a counterweight to “the egoism of death.” The hourglass is at once an empty object (a vase) charged with mysterious historical significance (a chalice), but above all a time machine in which the dead E.S. is rushing to meet the living one, in which the split selves of the author are joined in passionate metaphor. The point of view is always doubled, so that the narrator has two profiles, face to face, and a voice inside, but not really interior, and outside, but not really omniscient – the aim being “to be at once the viewer and the viewed.”

“Hourglass” reflects attitudes toward history, philosophy and language that Kiš pursued throughout his career. For him, history does repeat itself, though never in the timing or the details. Images and experiences are endlessly repeated, but each apprehension of them is slightly altered so that they become unique. We are aware of pattern and trajectory, but also of each event’s singularity – “too luminous to be shadows, too diffuse to be light.” Literature lies in the slight intonations given to a handful of metaphors, and meaning comes to us largely through the accumulation of incomplete, slightly rewritten sentences. But each doubling, strictly speaking, is never a reflection; each has its own specific weight and obduracy. Kiš discards all those easy oppositions of appearance and reality so dear to restless literary minds.

If this sounds like the fuzzy relativism so characteristic of the post-modern, one should be aware that it is in fact a devastating critique of it – for Kiš is demonstrating that precisely because literary language is distanced from us, because it is both so allusive and elusive, in the right hands at the right moment it is the most accurate and subtle gauge of reality – which is why literature outlives us. What drives E.S. mad is his terrible lucidity, a state of mind both always and never, capable over time and infinite revision of making the past comprehensive, and even of divining the future.

It is perhaps best to end with a sample of the prose, one representative of Kiš’s lightly worn bookishness and his unsentimental humanity:

“Everything that is possible happens; only what happens is possible (Franz Kafka). Critical of his adversaries, he was uncritical of himself; he thought he had created a philosophy and was unable to transcend it. He will live on in our memory as an alienated man in an alienated society. As an example and a lesson (Karl Marx). He was only the embodiment of a dream; his psychological difficulties were related to dreams, and originated in dreams. Thank God that this was so rich a nightmare (Sigmund Freud). One way of solving the problem of existence is to come close enough to the things and beings that have struck us as beautiful and mysterious to discover that they are without mystery and without beauty; this is one form of hygiene that we may choose; it may not be very commendable but it gives us a certain peace of mind and makes life easier for us – because it enables us to regret nothing, for it convinces us that we have attained the best possible ends and that this best did not amount to much, and to make our peace with death. Was he one of those who knew this dangerous form of hygiene? I think he was (Marcel Proust).”

Charles Newman, who teaches literature at Washington University in St. Louis, is completing a new novel, “Lost Victories.”

References

Danilo Kiš

…at Wikipedia

…portrait, at cultural-opposition.eu

“A Conversation with Danilo Kiš”, by Brendan Lemon, at dalkeyarchive

…at goodreads

Hourglass, at goodreads

Hourglass, at nupress

Igor Kopelnitsky

…4 illustrations for The Nation, at TheNation

…531 illustrations, at illustrationsource

…4 illustrations, at Cartoonia

…caricatures for Radio Svoboda, at Svoboda

…at nowwhatmedia

…at livejournal

…at Original Art Studios

Words in Print: Aharon Appelfeld – Interview by Philip Roth – “Walking the Way of the Survivor”, The New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1988

In early 1988, a little over a year after his interview with Primo Levi (published in The New York Times Book Review as “A Man Saved by His Skills” in October of 1986 Philip Roth had an analogous encounter with Aharon Appelfeld at the latter’s Jerusalem home. Illustrated with two images by photographer Micha Bar-Am, Roth’s interview – or was it more accurately deemed a penetrating conversation? – touches upon a multiplicity of topics. These include Appelfeld’s home life in Israel; his literary and sociological perspective of Jewish writers such as Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz; the relationship of his body of work to the historical experience of the Jewish people – particularly those most assimilated and acculturated to the currents of European society from the late 1800s through the years before the Shoah (epitomized in Badenheim 1939 and Tzili, The Story of A Life); Appelfeld’s life in Israel subsequent to his arrival in the country as a youth after WW II; the “Jewish” perception of both Gentiles and Jews (from vantage points literary, religious, social, and symbolic) in light of the historical experience of the Jewish people before and after the Holocaust. The interview closes with ambivalently positive musings about the “place” of survivors of Shoah in contemporary (well, contemporary in the late 1980s!) Israel.

____________________ ____________________ ____________________

It took me years to draw close to the Jew within me.
I had to get rid of many prejudices within me
and to meet many Jews in order to find myself in them.

Anti-Semitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation.
I don’t know of any other nation so flooded with self-criticism.
Even after the Holocaust Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes.

On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims,
for not protecting themselves and fighting back.

The Jewish ability to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark
and castigate themselves is one of the marvels of human nature.

What has preoccupied me,
and continues to perturb me,
is this anti-Semitism directed at oneself,
an ancient Jewish ailment which,
in modern times,
has taken on various guises.

____________________ ____________________ ____________________

Walking the Way of the Survivor
A Talk With Aharon Appelfeld

By Philip Roth

The New York Times Book Review
February 28, 1988

Photograph by Micha Bar-Am

AHARON APPELFELD lives a few miles west of Jerusalem in a mazelike conglomeration of attractive stone dwellings directly next to an “absorption center,” where immigrants are temporarily housed, schooled and prepared for life in their new society. The arduous journey that landed Appelfeld on the beaches of Tel Aviv in 1946, at the age of 14, seems to have fostered an unappeasable fascination with all uprooted souls, and at the local grocery where he and the absorption center residents do their shopping, he will often initiate an impromptu conversation with an Ethiopian, or a Russian, or a Rumanian Jew still dressed for the climate of a country to which he or she will never return.

Photograph by Micha Bar-Am

The living room of the two-story apartment is simply furnished: some comfortable chairs, books in three languages on the shelves, and on the walls impressive adolescent drawings by the Appelfelds’ son Meir, who is now 21 and, since finishing his military duty, has been studying art in London. Yitzak, 18, recently completed high school and is in the first of his three years of compulsory army service. Still at home is 12-year-old Batya, a clever girl with the dark hair and blue eyes of her Argentinian Jewish mother, Appelfeld’s youthful, good-natured wife, Judith. The Appelfelds appear to have created as calm and harmonious a household as any child could hope to grow up in. During the four years that Aharon and I have been friends, I don’t think I’ve ever visited him at home in Mevasseret Zion without remembering that his own childhood – as an escapee from a Nazi work camp, on his own in the primitive wilds of the Ukraine – provides the grimmest possible antithesis to this domestic ideal.

A PORTRAIT photograph that I’ve seen of Aharon Appelfeld, an antique-looking picture taken in Chernovtsy, Bukovina, in 1938, when Aharon was 6, and brought to Palestine by surviving relatives, shows a delicately refined bourgeois child seated alertly on a hobbyhorse and wearing a beautiful sailor suit. You simply cannot imagine this child, only 24 months on, confronting the exigencies of surviving for years as a hunted and parentless little boy in the woods. The keen intelligence is certainly there, but where is the robust cunning, the animalish instinct, the biological tenacity that it took to endure that terrifying adventure?

As much is secreted away in that child as in the writer he’s become. At 55 Aharon is a small, bespectacled, compact man-with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head and the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard. He’d have no trouble passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat – it’s easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled: responding, in a string of elusively portentous stories, to the disappearance from Europe – while he was outwitting peasants and foraging in the forests – of just about all the continent’s Jews, his parents among them.

His literary subject is not the Holocaust, however, or even Jewish .persecution. Nor, to my mind, is what he writes simply Jewish fiction or, for that matter, Israeli fiction. Nor, since he is a Jewish citizen of a Jewish state composed largely of immigrants, is his an exile’s fiction. And, despite the European locale of many of his novels and the echoes of Kafka, these books written in the Hebrew language certainly aren’t European fiction. Indeed, all that Appelfeld is not adds up to what he is, and that is a dislocated writer, a deported writer, a dispossessed and uprooted writer. Appelfeld is a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own. His sensibility – marked almost at birth by the solitary Wanderings of a little bourgeois boy through an ominous nowhere – appears to have spontaneously generated a style of sparing specificity, of out-of-time progression and thwarted narrative drives, that is an uncanny prose realization of the displaced mentality. As unique as the subject is a voice that originates in a wounded consciousness pitched somewhere between amnesia and memory; and that situates the fiction it narrates midway between parable and history.

Since we met in 1984, Aharon and I have talked together at great length, usually while walking through the streets of London, New York and Jerusalem. I’ve known him over these years as an oracular anecdotalist and a folkloristic enchanter, as a wittily laconic kibitzer and an obsessive dissector of Jewish states of mind – of Jewish aversions, delusions, remembrances and manias. However, as is often the case in friendships between writers, during these peripatetic conversations we had never really touched on each other’s work – that is, hot until last month, when I traveled to Jerusalem to discuss with him the 6 of his 15 published books that are now in English translation.

After our first afternoon together we disencumbered ourselves of an interloping tape recorder and, though I took some notes along the way, mostly we talked as we’ve become accustomed to talking – wandering down city streets or sitting in coffee shops where we’d stop to rest. When finally there seemed to be little left to say, we sat down together and tried to synthesize on paper – I in English, Aharon in Hebrew – the heart of the discussion. Aharon’s answers to my questions have been translated by Jeffrey M. Green.

ROTH: I find echoes in your fiction of two Middle European writers of a previous generation: Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who wrote in Polish and was shot and killed at 50 by the Nazis in Drogobych, the heavily Jewish Galician city where he taught high school and lived at home with his family, and Kafka, the Prague Jew who wrote in German and also lived, according to Max Brod, “spellbound in the family circle” for most of his 41 years. Tell me, how pertinent to your imagination do you consider Kafka and Schulz to be?

APPELFELD: I discovered Kafka here in Israel during the 1950s, and as a writer he was close to me from my first contact. He spoke to me in my mother tongue, German, not the German of the Germans but the German of the Hapsburg Empire, of Vienna, Prague and Chernovtsy, with its special tone, which, by the way, the Jews worked hard to create.

To my surprise he spoke to me not only in my mother tongue but also in another language which I knew intimately, the language of the absurd. I knew what he was talking about. It wasn’t a secret language for me and I didn’t need any explications. I had come from the camps and the forests, from a world that embodied the absurd, and nothing in that world was foreign to me. What was surprising was this: how could a man who had never been there know so much, in precise detail, about that world?

Other surprising discoveries followed. Behind the mask of placelessness and homelessness in his work, stood a Jewish man, like me, from a half-assimilated family, whose Jewish values had lost their content, and whose inner space was barren and haunted. The marvelous thing is that the barrenness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theater, Hasidism, Zionism and even the idea of moving to Mandate Palestine. This is the Kafka of his journals, which are no less gripping than his works.

Kafka emerges from an inner world and tries to get some grip on reality, and I came from a world of detailed, empirical reality, the camps and the forests. My real world was far beyond the power of imagination, and my task as an artist was not to develop my imagination but to restrain it, and even then it seemed impossible to me, because everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional

At first I tried to run away from myself and from my memories, to live a life that was not my own and to write about a life that was not my own. But a hidden feeling told me that I was not allowed to flee from myself, and that if I denied the experience of my childhood in the Holocaust, I would be spiritually deformed. Only when I reached the age of 30 did I feel the freedom to deal as an artist with those experiences.

To my regret, I came to Bruno Schulz’s work years too late, after my literary approach was rather well formed. I felt and still feel a great affinity with his writing, but not the same affinity I feel with Kafka.

ROTH: In your books, there’s no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim’s impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe. The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work has – for the power that emanates from stories that are told through such very modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm.

It’s occurred to me that the perspective of the adults in your fiction resembles in its limitations the viewpoint of a child, who, of course, has no historical calendar in which to place unfolding events and no intellectual means of penetrating their meaning. I wonder if your own consciousness as a child at the edge of the Holocaust isn’t mirrored in the simplicity with which the imminent horror is perceived in your novels.

APPELFELD: You’re right. In “Badenheim 1939” I completely ignored the historical explanation. I assumed that the historical facts were known to readers and that they would fill in what was missing. You’re also correct, it seems to me, in assuming that my description of the Second World War has something in it of a child’s vision. Historical explanations, however, have been alien to me ever since I became aware of myself as an artist. And the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not “historical.” We came in contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day. This world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations and engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented. I didn’t understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.

I was a victim, and I try to understand the victim. That is a broad, complicated expanse of life that I’ve been trying to deal with for 30 years now. I haven’t idealized the victims. I don’t think that in “Badenheim 1939” there’s any idealization either. By the way, Badenheim is a rather real place, and spas like that were scattered all over Europe, shockingly petit bourgeois and idiotic in their formalities. Even as a child I saw how ridiculous they were.

It is generally agreed, to this day, that Jews are deft, cunning and sophisticated creatures, with the wisdom of the world stored up in them. But isn’t it fascinating to see how easy it was to fool the Jews? With the simplest, almost childish tricks they were gathered up in ghettos, starved for months, encouraged with false hopes and finally sent to their death by train. That ingenuousness stood before my eyes while I was writing “Badenheim.” In that ingenuousness I found a kind of distillation of humanity. Their blindness and deafness, their obsessive preoccupation with themselves is an integral part of their ingenuousness. The murderers were practical, and they knew just what they wanted. The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up and finally falling in the trap. Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.

ROTH: Of all your translated books, “Tzili” depicts the harshest reality and the most extreme form of suffering Tzili, the simplest child of a poor Jewish family, is left alone when her family flees the Nazi invasion. The novel recounts her horrendous adventures in surviving and her excruciating loneliness among the brutal peasants for whom she works. The book strikes me as a counterpart to Jerzy Kosinski’s “Painted Bird.” Though less grotesque, “Tzili” portrays a fearful child in a world even bleaker and more barren than Kosinski’s, a child moving in isolation through a landscape as uncongenial to human life as any in Beckett’s “Molloy.”

As a boy you wandered alone like Tzili after your escape, at age 8, from the camp. I’ve been wondering why, when you came to transform your own life in an unknown place, hiding out among the hostile peasants, you decided to imagine a girl as the survivor of this ordeal. And did it occur to you ever not to fictionalize this material but to present your experiences as you remember them, to write a survivor’s tale as direct, say, as Primo Levi’s depiction of his Auschwitz incarceration?

APPELFELD: I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and given them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out and choose the words and the pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one’s life, but, ultimately, the creation is an independent creature.

I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified.

Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion. The created work, to my regret, cannot permit itself all that.

The reality of the Holocaust surpassed any imagination. If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me. But the moment I chose a girl, a little older than I was at that time, I removed “the story of my life” from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative laboratory. There memory is not the only proprietor. There one needs a causal explanation, a thread to tie things together. The exceptional is permissible only if it is part of an overall structure and contributes to its understanding. I had to remove those parts which were unbelievable from “the story of my life” and present a more credible version.

When I wrote “Tzili” I was about 40 years old. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me that without the naivete still found among children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. I tried to correct that flaw. God knows how successful I was.

ROTH: “Badenheim 1939” has been called fablelike, dreamlike, nightmarish and so on. None of these descriptions makes the book less vexing to me. The reader is asked, pointedly I think, to understand the transformation of a pleasant Austrian resort for Jews into a grim staging area for Jewish “relocation” to Poland as being somehow analogous to events preceding Hitler’s Holocaust. At the same time your vision of Badenheim and its Jewish inhabitants is almost impulsively antic and indifferent to matters of causality. It isn’t that a menacing situation develops, as it frequently does in life, without warning or logic, but that about these events you are laconic, I think, to a point of unrewarding inscrutability. Do you mind addressing my difficulties with this highly praised novel, which is perhaps your most famous book in America? What is the relation between the fictional world of “Badenheim” and historical reality?

APPELFELD: Rather clear childhood memories underlie “Badenheim 1939.” Every summer we, like all the other petit bourgeois families, would set out for a resort. Every summer we tried to find a restful place, where people didn’t gossip in the corridors, didn’t confess to one another in corners, didn’t interfere with you, and, of course, didn’t speak Yiddish. But every summer, as though we were being spited, we were once again surrounded by Jews, and that left a bad taste in my parents’ mouths, and no small amount of anger.

Many years after the Holocaust, when I came to retrace my childhood from before the Holocaust, I saw that these resorts occupied a particular place in my memories. Many faces and bodily twitches came back to life. It turned out that the grotesque was etched in no less than the tragic. Walks in the woods and the elaborate meals brought people together in Badenheim – to speak to one another and to confess to one another. People permitted themselves not only to dress extravagantly but also to speak freely, sometimes picturesquely. Husbands occasionally lost their lovely wives, and from time to time a shot would ring out in the evening, a sharp sign of disappointed love. Of course I could arrange these precious scraps of life to stand on their own artistically. But what was I to do? Every time I tried to reconstruct those forgotten resorts, I had visions of the trains and the camps, and my most hidden childhood memories were spotted with the soot from the trains.

Fate was already hidden within those people like a mortal illness. Assimilated Jews built a structure of humanistic values and looked out on the world from it. They were certain they were no longer Jews, and that what applied to “the Jews” did not apply to them. That strange assurance made them into blind or half-blind creatures. I have always loved assimilated Jews, because that was where the Jewish character, and also, perhaps, Jewish fate, was concentrated with greatest force.

ROTH: Living in this society you are bombarded by news and political disputation. Yet, as a novelist you have by and large pushed aside the Israeli daily turbulence to contemplate markedly different, Jewish predicaments. What does this turbulence mean to a novelist like yourself? How does being a citizen of this self-revealing, self-asserting, self-challenging, self-legendizing society affect your writing life? Does the news-producing reality ever tempt your imagination?

APPELFELD: Your question touches on a matter which is very important to me. True, Israel is full of drama from morning to night, and there are people who are overcome by that drama to the point of inebriation. This frenetic activity isn’t only the result of pressure from the outside. Jewish restlessness contributes its part. Everything is buzzing here, and dense; there’s a lot of talk, the controversies rage. The Jewish shtetl has not disappeared.

At one time there was a strong anti-Diaspora tendency here, a recoiling from anything Jewish. Today things have changed a bit, though this country is restless and tangled up in itself, living with ups and downs. Today we have redemption, tomorrow darkness. Writers are also immersed in this tangle. The occupied territories, for example, are not only a political issue but also a literary matter.

I came here in 1946, still a boy, but burdened with life and suffering. In the daytime I worked on kibbutz farms, and at night I studied Hebrew. For many years I wandered about this feverish country, lost and lacking any orientation. I was looking for myself and for the faces of my parents, who had been lost in the Holocaust. During the 1940s one had a feeling that one was being reborn here as a Jew, and one would therefore turn out to be quite a wonder. Every Utopian view produces that kind of atmosphere. Let’s not forget that this was after the Holocaust. To be strong was not merely a matter of ideology. “Never again like sheep to the slaughter” thundered from loudspeakers at every corner. I very much wished to fit into that great activity and take part in the adventure of the birth of a new nation. Naively I believed that action would silence my memories, and I would flourish like the natives, free of the Jewish nightmare, but what could I do? The need, you might say the necessity, to be faithful to my self and to my childhood memories made me a distant, contemplative person. My contemplation brought me back to the region where I was born and where my parents’ home stood. That is my spiritual history, and it is from there that I spin the threads.

Artistically speaking, settling back there has given me an anchorage and a perspective. I’m not obligated to rush out to meet current events and interpret them immediately. Daily events do indeed knock on every door, but they know that I don’t let such agitated guests into my house.

ROTH: In “To the Land of the Cattails,” a Jewish woman and her grown son, the offspring of a gentile father, are journeying back to the remote Ruthenian countryside where she was born. It’s the summer of 1938. The closer they get to her home the more menacing is the threat of gentile violence. The mother says to her son, “They are many, and we are few.” Then you write: “The word goy rose up from within her. She smiled as if hearing a distant memory. Her father would sometimes, though only occasionally, use that word to indicate hopeless obtuseness.”

The gentile with whom the Jews of your books seem to share their world is usually the embodiment of hopeless obtuseness and of menacing, primitive social behavior – the goy as drunkard, wife-beater, as the coarse, brutal semi-savage who is “not in control of himself.” Though obviously there’s more to be said about the non-Jewish world in those provinces where your books are set – and also about the capacity of Jews, in their own world, to be obtuse and primitive, too – even a non-Jewish European would have to recognize that the power of this image over the Jewish imagination is rooted in real experience. Alternatively the goy is pictured as an “earthy soul … overflowing with health.” Enviable health. As the mother in “Cattails” says of her half-gentile son, “He’s not nervous like me. Other, quiet blood flows in his veins.”

I’d say that it’s impossible to know anything really about the Jewish imagination without investigating the place that the goy has occupied in the folk mythology that’s been exploited, in America, at one level by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason and, at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in “The Assistant” by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later attempts to rape Bober’s studious daughter, and eventually, in a conversion to Bober’s brand of suffering Judaism, symbolically renounces goyish savagery. The New York Jewish hero of Saul Bellow’s second novel, “The Victim,” is plagued by an alcoholic gentile misfit named Allbee, who is no less of a bum and a drifter than Alpine, even if his assault on Leventhal’s hard-won composure is intellectually more urbane. The most imposing gentile in all of Bellow’s work, however, is Henderson – the self-exploring rain king who, to restore his psychic health, takes his blunted instincts off to Africa. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, the truly “earthy soul” is not the Jew, nor is the search to retrieve primitive energies portrayed as the-quest of a Jew. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, and, astonishingly, for Mailer no less than for Appelfeld – we all know that in Mailer when a man is a sadistic sexual aggressor his name is Sergius O’Shaugnessy, when he is a wife-killer his name is Stephen Rojack, and when he is a menacing murderer he isn’t Lepke Buchalter or Gurrah Shapiro, he’s Gary Gilmore.

APPELFELD: The place of the non-Jew in Jewish imagination is a complex affair growing out of generations of Jewish fear. Which of us dares to take up the burden of explanation? I will hazard only a few words, something from my personal experience.

I said fear, but the fear wasn’t uniform, and it wasn’t of all Gentiles. In fact, there was a sort of envy of the non-Jew hidden in the heart of the modern Jew. The non-Jew was frequently viewed in the Jewish imagination as a liberated creature without ancient beliefs or social obligations who lived a natural life on his own soil. The Holocaust, of course, altered somewhat the course of the Jewish imagination. In place of envy came suspicion. Those feelings which had walked in the open descended to the underground.

Is there some stereotype of the non-Jew in the Jewish soul? It exists, and it is frequently embodied in the word goy, but that is an undeveloped stereotype. The Jews have had imposed on them too many moral and religious strictures to express such feelings utterly without restraint. Among the Jews there was never the confidence to express verbally the depths of hostility they may well have felt. They were, for good or bad, too rational. What hostility they permitted themselves to feel was, paradoxically, directed at themselves.

What has preoccupied me, and continues to perturb me, is this anti-Semitism directed at oneself, an ancient Jewish ailment which, in modern times, has taken on various guises. I grew up in an assimilated Jewish home where German was treasured. German was considered not only a language but also a culture, and the attitude toward German culture was virtually religious. All around us lived masses of Jews who spoke Yiddish, but in our house Yiddish was absolutely forbidden. I grew up with the feeling that anything Jewish was blemished. From my earliest childhood my gaze was directed at the beauty of the non-Jews. They were blond and tall and behaved naturally. They were cultured, and when they didn’t behave in a cultured fashion, at least they behaved naturally.

Our housemaid illustrated that theory well. She was pretty and buxom, and I was attached to her. She was in my eyes, the eyes of a child, nature itself, and when she ran off with my mother’s jewelry, I saw that as no more than a forgivable mistake.

From my earliest youth I was drawn to non-Jews. They fascinated me with their strangeness, their height, their aloofness. Yet the Jews seemed strange to me too. It took years to understand how much my parents had internalized ail the evil they attributed to the Jew, and, through them, I did so too. A hard kernel of revulsion was planted within each of us.

The change took place in me when we were uprooted from our house and driven into the ghettos. Then I noticed that all the doors and windows of our non-Jewish neighbors were suddenly shut, and we walked alone in the empty streets. None of our many neighbors, with whom we had connections, was at the window when we dragged along our suitcases. I said “the change,” and that isn’t the entire truth. I was 8 years old then, and the whole world seemed like a nightmare to me. Afterward too, when I was separated from my parents, I didn’t know why. All during the war I wandered among the Ukrainian villages, keeping my hidden secret my Jewishness. Fortunately for me I was blond and didn’t arouse suspicion.

It took me years to draw close to the Jew within me. I had to get rid of many prejudices within me and to meet many Jews in order to find myself in them. Anti-Semitism directed at oneself was an original Jewish creation. I don’t know of any other nation so flooded with self-criticism. Even after the Holocaust Jews did not seem blameless in their own eyes. On the contrary, harsh comments were made by prominent Jews against the victims, for not protecting themselves and fighting back. The Jewish ability to internalize any critical and condemnatory remark and castigate themselves is one of the marvels of human nature.

The feeling of guilt has settled and taken refuge among all the Jews who want to reform the world, the various kinds of socialists, anarchists, but mainly among Jewish artists. Day and night the flame of that feeling produces dread, sensitivity, self-criticism and sometimes self-destruction. In short, it isn’t a particularly glorious feeling. Only one thing may be said in its favor: it harms no one except those afflicted with it.

ROTH: In “The Immortal Bartfuss,” your newly translated novel, Bartfuss asks “irreverently” of his dying mistress’s ex-husband, “What have we Holocaust survivors done? Has our great experience changed us at all?” This is the question with which the novel somehow engages itself on virtually every page. We sense in Bartfuss’s lonely longing and regret, in his baffled effort to overcome his own remoteness, in his avidity for human contact, in his mute wanderings along the Israeli coast and ha enigmatic encounters in dirty cares, the agony that life can become in the wake of a great disaster. Of the Jewish survivors who wind up smuggling and black-marketeering in Italy directly after the war, you write, “No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved.”

My last question, growing out of your preoccupation in “The Immortal Bartfuss,” is, perhaps, preposterously comprehensive, but think about it please, and reply as you choose. From what you observed as a homeless youngster wandering in Europe after the war, and from what you’ve learned during four decades in Israel, do you discern distinguishing patterns in the experience of those whose lives were saved? What have the Holocaust survivors done and in what ways were they ineluctably changed?

APPELFELD: True, that is the painful point of my latest book indirectly I tried to answer your question there. Now I’ll try to expand somewhat The Holocaust belongs to the type of enormous experience which reduces one to silence. Any utterance, any statement any “answer” is tiny, meaningless and occasionally ridiculous. Even the greatest of answers seems petty.

With your permission, two examples. The first is Zionism, Without doubt life in Israel gives the survivors not only a place of refuge but also a feeling that the entire world is not evil. Though the tree has been chopped down, the root has not withered despite everything we continue living. Yet that satisfaction cannot take away the survivor’s feeling that he or she must do something with this life that was saved. The survivors have undergone experiences that no one else has undergone, and others expect some message from them, some key to understanding the human world – a human example. But they, of course, cannot begin to fulfill the great tasks imposed upon them, so theirs are clandestine lives of flight and hiding. The trouble is that no more hiding places are available. One has a feeling of guilt that grows from year to year and becomes, as in Kafka, an accusation. The wound is too deep and bandages won’t help. Not even a bandage such as the Jewish state.

The second example is the religious stance. Paradoxically, as a gesture toward their murdered parents, not a few survivors have adopted religious faith. I know what inner struggles that paradoxical stance entails, and I respect it. But that stance is born of despair. I won’t deny the truth of despair. But it’s a suffocating position, a kind of Jewish monasticism and indirect self-punishment.

My book offers its survivor neither Zionist nor religious consolation. The survivor, Bartfuss, has swallowed the Holocaust whole, and he walks about with it in all his limbs. He drinks the “black milk” of the poet Paul Celan, morning, noon and night. He has no advantage over anyone else, but he still hasn’t lost his human face. That isn’t a great deal, but it’s something?

Philip Roth’s autobiographical work, “The Facts,” will be published in September.

Some References

Aharon Appelfeld, at Wikipedia

Philip M. Roth, at Wikipedia

The Philip Roth Society

Philip Roth, at Open Library

Guide to the Jerome Perzigian Collection of Philip Roth 1958-1987, at The University of Chicago Library

Micha Bar-Am, at Wikipedia

A Relative Stranger, by Charles Baxter – 1990 [Wendell Minor] [Updated post! – February 15, 2021]

[Updated again! I’ve now included William Ferguson’s 1990 book review of A Relative Stranger from The New York Times.]

______________________________

Dating back to November of 2016, this is one of my earliest posts at this blog. It’s now been updated to better present illustrator Wendell Minor’s cover art, and, to include an excerpt from one of author Richard Baxter’s stories: “The Disappeared.”

The Timid Life

A RELATIVE STRANGER

By Charles Baxter.

223 pp. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company. $17.95.

By William Ferguson

The New York Times
October 21, 1990

THE 13 stories in “A Relative Stranger,” all quietly accomplished, suggest a mysterious yet fundamental marriage of despair and joy. Though in one way or another each story ends in disillusionment, the road that leads us to that dismal state is so richly peopled, so finely drawn, that the effect is oddly reassuring.

The much-praised author, Charles Baxter, has published a novel, “First Light,” as well as two previous collections of stories, “Harmony of the World” and “Through the Safety Net.”

Many of the male protagonists in this new collection are confused and timid souls in search of something to believe in; they are all intelligent and sensitive, yet somehow unexceptional. By contrast, the women around them tend to be strong and colorful people who accept life easily – and whose impatience with the men is manifest.

In “Prowlers,” Pastor Robinson manages to tolerate a visit by his wife Angie’s lover, an abrasive person named Benjamin; when the visit is over, Angie muses to her husband that she and Benjamin know all each other’s secrets. Robinson gently protests: “You know my secrets.” Angie: “Sweetheart, you don’t have any secrets. You’ve never wanted a single bad thing in your life.”

Characters like Robinson have the fatal transparency of goodness, a passive blamelessness that may in itself be a tragic flaw. This hapless virtue has a parallel in Cooper, the hero of a story called “Shelter.” Cooper is a generous soul who becomes so involved with the homeless – entirely out of brotherly love, a quality he refuses to recognize in himself – that he puts the autonomy of his own family in danger.

* * *

Anders, a Swedish businessman in “The Disappeared,” finds his childish expectations of America are crippled by his relationship with a stranger in Detroit. Fenstad is a teacher whose pallid devotion to logic is no match for his mother’s irrational vitalities (significantly, the story’s title is not “Fenstad” but “Fenstad’s Mother”). Warren, in “Westland,” is hanging around the zoo one day when he meets a teen-age girl who announces that she wants to shoot a lion. She doesn’t do it, but in a bizarre echo of the girl’s words, Warren later fires shots at the local nuclear reactor to protest the fouling of the environment. It’s another portrait of impulsive, undirected goodness, and again its medium is a heartbreaking ineffectuality.

One story that stands out from all the others, in both style and theme, is “The Old Fascist in Retirement,” an elegant fictional imagination of Ezra Pound’s latter days in Italy. The bitterness of the title contrasts with the rather sympathetic portrait the story contains; the underlying message (so familiar) may be that Pound was not really evil, only deeply confused. If so, then the old poet begins to look like a version – augmented, to be sure, by his peculiar genius – of Fenstad or Cooper or Robinson: a good, articulate man who tragically failed to understand something fundamental about the social contract.

IN the powerful title story, “A I Relative Stranger,” a man discovers late in life that he has a brother. Both men, as infants, were given up for adoption. It appears that two lost souls are headed for a joyful reunion. Yet fraternity turns out to be a burden, another of nature’s unpardonable hoaxes; the two brothers are wholly incompatible. One of the brothers says: “I was always homesick for the rest of the world. My brother does not understand that. He thinks home is where he is now.”

Few of the protagonists in this collection would make the brother’s mistake (if it is one). They are the temperamentally homeless, the ones who look on in amazement as other people accept the conditions of the everyday world without even the murmur of an existential question. If these stories have a common theme, it may be this abiding failure, in leading characters, to imagine what is most real. By contrast, Charles Baxter’s chronicling of such human debilities represents a continuing triumph of the imaginative will.

William Ferguson is the author of “Freedom and Other Fictions,” a collection of stories.

____________________

Contents

Fenstad’s Mother, from The Atlantic
Westland, from The Paris Review
Prowler, from Grand Street
A Relative Stranger (published as “How I Found My Brother”), from Indiana Review
Shelter, from The Georgia Review
Snow, from The New Yorker
Silent Movie
The Old Fascist in Retirement, from Denver Quarterly

THREE PARABOLIC TALES

Lake Stephen, from PEN Syndicated Fiction
Scissors, from PEN Syndicated Fiction
Scheherazade, from Harper’s
The Disappeared, from Michigan Quarterly Review
Saul and Patsy Are Pregnant, from The Iowa Review

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(From “The Disappeared”, pp. 180-181)

HE FELT itchy: he went out running, returned to his room, and took another shower. He did thirty push-ups and jogged in place. He groaned and shouted, knowing that no one would hear. How would he explain this to anyone? He was feeling passionate puzzlement. He went down to the hotel’s dining room for lunch and ordered Dover sole and white win but found himself unable to eat much of anything. He stared at the plate and at the other men and women consuming their meals calmly, and he was suddenly filled with wonder at ordinary life.

He couldn’t stand to be by himself, and after lunch he had the doorman hail a cab. He gave the cabdriver a fifty and asked him to drive him around the city until all the money was used up.

“You want to see the nice parts?” the cabbie asked.

“No.”

“What is it you want to see then?”

“The city.”

“You tryin’ to score, man? That it?”

Anders didn’t know what he meant. He was certain that no sport was intended. He decided to play it safe. “No,” he said.

The cabdriver shook his head and whistled. They drove east and then south; Anders watched the water-ball compass stuck to the front window. Along Jefferson Avenue they went past the shells of apartment buildings, and then, heading north, they passed block after block of vacated or boarded-up properties. One old building with Doric columns was draped with a banner:

PROGRESS! THE OLD MUST MAKE WAY
FOR THE NEW
Acme Wrecking Company

The banner was worn and tattered. Anders noticed broken beer bottles, sharp brown glass, on sidewalks and vacant lots, and the glass, in the sun, seemed perversely beautiful. Men were sleeping on sidewalks and in front stairwells; one man, wearing a hat, urinated against the corner of a burned-out building. He saw other men – there were very few women out here in the light of day – in groups, gazing at him with cold slow deadly expressions. In his state of mind, he understood it all; he identified with it. All of it, the ruins and the remnants, made perfect sense.

________________________________________

1980s portrait of Richard Baxter by poet Michael Lauchlan

November 16, 2016, November 27, 2019, and January 28, 2020

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Book Review by Victor Brombert – “174517”, The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1999 [Andrea Ventura and Tullio Pericoli]

Victor Brombert’s review of Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, Primo Levi – Tragedy of an Optimist, appeared as the cover review (not “cover article” as such, I guess!) of the January 24, 1999 edition of The New York Times Book Review. As such, the review presents a bold portrait of Levi by Italian artist (and sometime Berlin resident) Andrea Ventura, and a whimsical sketch of Levi by Tullio Pericoli, whose variations on a theme of another sketch of Levi can be viewed here.

Professor Brombert’s concluding paragraph has as much relevance in 2020 as it did in 1999:

“The deeper message of Levi goes beyond the honesty, dignity and self-respect of his testimony. It demonstrates humanistic pride in the power of words and in the human struggle against matter. It speaks of the essential fragility of human institutions and of tragedy when they are allowed to collapse. For without civilized institutions, human nature is naked and raw.”

________________________________________

174517
A biography of the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz to bear witness to the Holocaust.

PRIMO LEVI
Tragedy of an Optimist.
By Myriam Anissimov.
Translated by Steve Cox.
Illustrated. 452 pp. Woodstock, N.Y.:
The Overlook Press. $37.95.

By Victor Brombert

The New York Times Book Review
January 24, 1999

Illustration by Andrea Ventura

THE voice of Primo Levi (1919-87) is perhaps the most moving to have come out of the hell of the Nazi death camps. Its special resonance has much to do with tragic paradoxes at the core of his work. Levi wanted to speak for those who did not survive, yet he questioned his trustworthiness as a witness. He saw it as a sacred duty to tell the story of those who had reached the bottom of abjection, but considered himself unworthy, even guilty, because he came out alive. He felt compelled to denounce the horrors perpetrated, but preferred to understand rather than judge. At Auschwitz he had stared into the face of irrational cruelty, but he did not give up his optimistic faith in rationality. After the lager, or camp, there was no way for him to believe in divine providence. Yet the same man who referred to the stories that emerged from the camps as a “new Bible” ended up committing suicide.

Sketch by Tullio Pericoli

When Myriam Anissimov’s biography of him appeared in France in 1996, it was hailed as an important event. It was the first full-length account of the salient episodes of Levi’s life: his growing awareness of the personal threat of Fascism, his capture by the Fascist militia in a Resistance hideout in the Alps, his deportation to Auschwitz, his liberation a year later by Soviet troops, the railway odyssey of his return to his native Turin, his work as a chemist and then as the manager of a chemical factory, his gradual emergence as a major writer and intellectual figure. Anissimov’s book, now appearing in a shortened English translation, provides a serious, lively, at times fervently told story that is always sympathetic to Levi’s shy personality and restrained tone.

Anissimov is at her best evoking Levi’s gentleness, his somewhat puritanical and introverted reserve, his compulsion to talk about what he saw and suffered in the camp. She deals perceptively with his rude awakening to anti-Semitism in the late years of Mussolini’s rule, when the unexpected racial laws of 1938 stunned not only Italian Jews (some of whom had been loyal Fascists since the early days of the regime) but most other Italians as well. Levi belonged to a thoroughly assimilated, well-to-do Piedmontese Jewish family. Like most of his friends, he attended the liceo classico, and then obtained a doctorate in chemistry. (This later saved him from the gas chambers at Auschwitz when he was put to work as a specialized slave laborer in a laboratory.) His cultural references were Dante and Manzoni, even Melville and Conrad, rather than Jewish lore, with which he was altogether unfamiliar. Auschwitz, with Yiddish as the dominant language, was for him a culture shock.

Levi’s background helps explain why, at one of the high moments in “Survival in Auschwitz” (the correct title is “If This Is a Man”), he refers at length to the 26th canto of Dante’s “Inferno,” dealing with the figure of Ulysses, and describes his own victorious struggle to reconstitute in his mind half-forgotten lines of poetry. Some readers might have wondered why a Jewish victim of the Shoah should have turned to a medieval Christian poem when bearing witness to a collective atrocity that could not possibly be justified in theological or poetic terms. But for Levi the recourse to Dante’s poem in order to teach Italian to a French-speaking Alsatian fellow inmate in a German extermination camp deep inside Polish territory became a symbol of universality and of the possible survival of meaning.

Levi’s reputation is largely based on his account of the monstrous Nazi machine for reducing human beings to beasts before dispatching them to the gas chambers. The lager is described as a geometric nightmare filled with the cries of hunger and pain in all the languages of Europe. With a sobriety made more sharply painful by occasional humor, Levi depicts the unspeakable: the deportation of entire families in sealed wagons, the beatings, the gruesome work, the cold and filth, the merciless struggle for survival, the “selections” for extermination. But Levi’s most original contribution, later elaborated in “The Drowned and the Saved,” is the analysis of what he called the “gray zone,” the contaminating conditions under which victims are tempted into becoming accomplices in the atrocities committed against them.

The existence of such a gray zone is corrosive of moral values and moral choices. To be a victim does not exclude guilt. Levi deals lucidly with a particularly dehumanizing reality of the camps, where the SS structured a hierarchy of violence that delegated to selected prisoners, known as Kapos, arbitrary and often homicidal power over others. At the lowest rung of this hierarchy of degradation were the Sonderkommando squads of Jews forced to stoke the crematoriums with the gassed Jewish victims.

It has been suggested that Levi’s love of science and his training as a chemist explain his disposition to observe, describe and analyze under the most appalling circumstances. His faith in rational understanding led him to view the lager experience, in his own terms, as a “gigantic biological and social experiment.” He detected fundamental truths about human nature in the social structures of the camp, claiming that this “cruel laboratory” was a “ferocious sociological observatory.” He concluded, hoping not to be misunderstood, that for him and others the lager, the camp, “had been a university.” Rather than indulge in self-pity, Levi preferred to exercise, perhaps as a form of self-preservation, an anthropologist’s curiosity. Throughout his life, he retained his faith in the clarity of thinking, his reverence for language and communication. His love of philology went along with a durable distaste for obscure writing. In “Other People’s Trades” he denounced the cult of the ineffable and of hermetic literature as a form of suicide.

IT is not easy to write a biography of an author whose books are largely autobiographical. Paraphrase is a constant danger. But Anissimov has done conscientious research and provides valuable background on the Jewish community in Turin, the details of camp brutalities (about which Levi is himself often reticent), the involvement of the industrial empire I.G. Farben in the exploitation of cheap slave labor in the camps, the slow recognition in Italy of Levi’s literary accomplishments. She makes sound use of interviews and newspaper accounts. And she can be moving, as when she recounts the last night 650 Jews spent in the Italian transit camp in Fossoli di Carpi before they were deported by the Germans.

This important book is not always served well by Steve Cox’s translation. Rendering into English a study written in French about an author who wrote in Italian poses certain problems. It does not help that the English version makes cuts, and often reshuffles the materials in an obvious effort to shorten the original at the risk of producing discontinuities. Even more damaging are the liberties taken with the text by sometimes adding parts of sentences to what the author said, or by making her say what she did not say.

Levi’s range is wider than is generally known. He wrote some poetry – not technically ambitious, but expressive in a dark mood of the recurrent anguish and anger of the survivor. In addition to the two books devoted to the death camp experience and to the colorful narrative of his homeward journey through Eastern Europe in “The Reawakening” (better translated as “The Truce”), he has written short stories (“Moments of Reprieve”), cautionary tales in the form of science fiction (“The Sixth Day and Other Tales”), two significant novels (“If Not Now, When?” – a colorful story of Jewish guerrilla fighters in the forests of Belarus – and “The Wrench,” about the epic technological adventures of an expert rigger), as well as an un-classifiable masterpiece, “The Periodic Table,” which blends autobiographical elements with a humorous essayistic fantasy.

LEVI led an essentially sedentary existence. Auschwitz had been the one adventure of his life. After his return to Turin, he continued to live in the apartment where he was born, and he died in the same building. He remained attached to his Piedmontese roots and his Italian heritage. Like most Italian Jews, he continued to feel at home among his countrymen, the vast majority of whom were not anti-Semitic and who, even in the darkest moments of the war, had shown much humaneness. But he had learned to be critical, retrospectively, of political blindness. He deplored the lethargy of his generation, which had viewed Fascism with distaste and ineffectual irony without actively opposing it. Auschwitz taught him a political lesson. It also taught him a great deal about the broader community of Jews, especially the almost eradicated Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe, which he came to admire. Before writing “If Not Now, When?” he set out to learn Yiddish.

His eagerness to listen and understand has appeared to some as a limitation. His generally optimistic stance, it is true, does not seem to come to grips with the irrational. But his hope that problems can be solved by good will and reason also explains his deep frustration, even despair, as he began to realize that the younger generation no longer wanted to listen to him. His depression over revisionist denials and the impossibility of a meaningful dialogue with the young may be related to his suicidal impulse, though Anissimov is ever so delicate about suggesting any clear causal relation.

The deeper message of Levi goes beyond the honesty, dignity and self-respect of his testimony. It demonstrates humanistic pride in the power of words and in the human struggle against matter. It speaks of the essential fragility of human institutions and of tragedy when they are allowed to collapse. For without civilized institutions, human nature is naked and raw. In that sense, Levi was hardly a naive optimist. And we might do well to ponder the warning given in his last book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” of how stripped we are when we allow the ideology of death to take over: “Reason, art and poetry are no help in deciphering a place from which they have been banished.”

Victor Brombert teaches romance and comparative literatures at Princeton University. His new book, “In Praise of Antiheroes,” will be published this spring.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Retrospective by Irving Howe – “The Utter Sadness of the Survivor”, The New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1988

After the publication of John Gross’ review of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved in the “weekday” New York Times on January 5, 1988, Irving Howe’s review of the book appeared the following Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review. Given the very format of the Review, Howe was by definition able to delve at length into Levi’s biography and origins as a writer, and draw upon the book’s text to discuss the “world” described by Levi – the world physical; the world psychological; a world inexpressible but consequently demanding expression – of existence in Germany’s concentration camp system.

In the conclusion of his review, Howe makes passing reference to the book’s brevity. This is true: it’s not that long in terms of measured length, but its power, attributable to Levi’s literary skill in confronting personal experiences and historical events – the nature of which can neither be captured in words nor by accepted “wisdom” – is inversely related to its size.

Howe’s review also includes a portrait of Levi by a photographer surnamed “Giansanti”.

“…Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims. “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed.””

________________________________________

The Utter Sadness of the Survivor
By Irving Howe

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED
By Primo Levi.
Translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
203 pp. New York:
Summit Books. $17.95.

The New York Times Book Review
January 10, 1988

Photograph by Giansanti (Sygma)

TO the vast literature on the Holocaust, this modest little book forms no more than a footnote. But it’s a precious footnote – a series of ripe meditations about the experience of Auschwitz, where the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi worked as a slave laborer during the Second World War.

Shortly before his suicide last April, Primo Levi remarked that in writing about “the tragic world” of the camps he hoped to avoid the frayed rhetoric of pathos or revenge; he chose instead to “assume the calm, sober language of the witness.” His new and final book, in Raymond Rosenthal’s lucid translation, employs exactly that language: humane, disciplined and, in its final impact, utterly sad.

Born in 1919, Primo Levi grew up in a cultivated middle-class Jewish family in Turin. As a youth he knew very little about Jewishness: it seemed “a cheerful little anomaly”‘ for someone living in a Catholic country. Young Levi trained to become a chemist, and would in fact work at that profession for most of his life. All might have gone smoothly, in pleasant bourgeois fashion, but for a sudden blow which disrupted his life and career in the late 1930’s: Mussolini, the brutal clown who ruled Italy, began to copy the anti-Semitic obscenities of his friend Hitler.

Levi’s life was torn apart, his mind opened up. He learned about the tiny nuclei of anti-Fascists in Milan and in 1934, after laboring at various nondescript jobs, he joined a group of partisans in the hills of Piedmont. Betrayed by an informer, the group was soon captured and Levi, questioned by the Fascist police, admitted to being a Jew, “partly out of fatigue but partly out of a sudden … surge of haughty pride.” In February 1944 he was handed over to the Nazis and shipped off to Auschwitz in a “railroad convoy [that] contained 650 persons; of these 525 were immediately put to death.” It was only Levi’s skill as a chemist, plus a measure of luck, that enabled him to live through the ordeal of Auschwitz.

After his liberation Levi wrote two books, now acknowledged classics, about his imprisonment in the camps: “Survival in Auschwitz” (1947) (the Italian title was “Se Questo E un Uomo” or “If This Is a Man”) and “The Reawakening” (1963) (“La Tregua” or “The Truce”). These summonings of memory reveal a touch of the scientist’s training in precise description: they are also notable for delicacy of style. “The Drowned and the Saved,” while a smaller work, represents Levi’s concluding effort to understand an experience that, as he had himself often indicated, must finally seem beyond the reach of human understanding: an evil so vast, systematic and sadistic that no available theory about the nature of evil can cope with it.

About the death camps Levi asks: “Were we witnessing the rational development of an inhuman plan or a manifestation (unique in history and still unsatisfactorily explained) of collective madness? Logic intent on evil or the absence of logic?” His answer, necessarily, is: both.

The “apotheosis of the German race,” that corrupt fantasy with which the Nazis soiled the imagination of so many of their countrymen, prepared the ground for “the Final Solution,” while the madness with which the Nazi leaders infected their followers enabled the SS to perform mass murders. Logic and anti-logic, ideology and insanity, rationality and sadism: all came together as Hitler led the scum of the earth to power. Yet it should also be remembered that the bohemian hooligans, demi-intellectuals and street thugs who formed the Nazi cadres were able to draw on a powerful tradition of German big business, and found sustenance in a popular demonology that had long encrusted European Christianity.

One of Levi’s most striking chapters, entitled “Useless Violence,” details the cruelty of the camp overlords which seemingly had no purpose other than, perhaps, the pleasure that can come to some human beings from tormenting others. With his gift for the exact detail, Levi describes this “useless violence” – from the terrors of the train transports to the humiliations of strip-pings, beatings, endless roll calls, tattoos and torture. It turns out, however, that from the Nazi point of view this “useless violence” was not quite useless. Asked by an interrogator, “Considering that you were going to kill them all … what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?” the former commandant of the Treblinka camp, Franz Stangl, answered: “To condition those who were to be the material executors of the operations.” (In plain English, that meant those who would man the gas chambers.) As Levi puts it, “Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt.” This was “the sole usefulness of useless violence.”

Nazi logic was clear. Systematically to dehumanize both guards and prisoners meant to create a realm of subjugation no longer responsive to the common norms of civilized society; and from this very process they had set in motion, the Nazis could then “conclude” that indeed Jews were not human. The Nazi enterprise drew upon, it could not be undertaken without, sadism; but at least among the leaders it was to be distinguished from commonplace sadism. It rested upon an abstract rage, the most terrible of all rages.

Bravely, without flinching, Levi confronts the consequences of this Nazi logic: that the dehumanization of the victims had to be enacted by the victims themselves, within their own ranks. In a troubling sentence he writes: “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system” such as the Nazis created in the camps “sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.”

Step by step Levi shows how the humiliating stratification within the camps depended on a series of small “privileges” – small, but often making the difference between life and death. There was the “ritual entry” by which a new prisoner was dazed into submission. There were the little “jobs” which gave a minority of prisoners a bit of extra nourishment. There were the “better” jobs occupied by “low-ranking functionaries, a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, bed smoothers (who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square), checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, interpreters, assistants’ assistants. In general, they were poor devils like ourselves who worked full time like everyone else but who for an extra half-liter of soup were willing to carry out these … functions.” Such prisoners could be “coarse and arrogant, but they were not regarded as enemies.”

Moral judgment becomes more “delicate” with regard to those who occupied seemingly more advantageous positions: the barracks chiefs; the clerks, sometimes complicit in dreadful things, sometimes manipulating SS officers to soften a blow or spare a life; and the Kapos of labor battalions, brutes with the power of life and death over fellow prisoners.

Who became a Kapo? Common criminals. Political prisoners “broken by five or ten years of sufferings.” “Jews who saw in the particle of authority being offered them the only possible escape from ‘the final solution.’“ And finally, grimly, “power was sought by the many among the oppressed who had been contaminated by their oppressors and unconsciously strove to identify with them.”

Levi hesitates to judge, dealing compassionately with the “gray cases,” those wretched prisoners who worked for and, if they could, against the Nazis. Even with regard to the Sonderkommandos (the details assigned to dispose of corpses in the gas chambers), Levi tries to maintain a balance of response that may be beyond human capacity: “I believe that no one is authorized to judge them, not those who lived through the [camp] experience and even less those who did not.” And indeed, since most of these poor creatures also ended in the gas chambers, what is the point of judging them? The 20th century has taught us there are situations so extreme that it becomes immoral to make moral judgments about those who have had to confront them.

AT the same time, Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims. “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed.”

Primo Levi’s little book offers more of value, especially a discussion of the shame and guilt felt by survivors of the camps. Let me, however, turn to Levi’s concluding essay, in which he recounts the correspondence he conducted with a number of Germans who read his early books about the camps and then troubled to write him. These were by no means the worst of the Germans; quite the contrary. Yet one grows a little sick at reading their pleas of extenuation, sometimes their whining evasions. Of course these correspondents don’t defend the Nazis, but rarely do they confront the crucial question: How was it possible that so many Germans could vote for and then yield themselves to the Nazis?

With unruffled dignity Levi answers his correspondents, pointing out, for example, that the claim of “not having known” is often impossible to believe; that anti-Semitism, far from being a Nazi invention, was deeply imbedded in German culture; and that there are clear cases of complicity – “no one forced the Topf Company (flourishing today in Wiesbaden) to build the enormous multiple crematoria…”

Whoever has come under the sway of Primo Levi’s luminous mind and lovely prose will feel pained at the realization that we shall not be hearing from him again. At a time when the Holocaust, like almost everything else in our culture, has been subjected to the vulgarity of public relations, Primo Levi wrote about this most terrible event with a purity of spirit for which we can only feel grateful. This was a man.

Both in the Same Trap

I intend to examine here the memories of extreme experiences, of injuries suffered or inflicted….

Here, as with other phenomena, we are dealing with a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and we are anxious to be clear: both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer; and it is iniquitous that the victim should suffer from it, as he does indeed suffer from it, even at a distance of decades. Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor… but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.

From “The Drowned and the Saved.”

Irving Howe has most recently co-edited “The Penguin Book of Modern Jewish Verse.”

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Retrospective by Alexander Stille – “Primo Levi – Reconciling the Man and the Writer”, The New York Times Book Review, July 5, 1987

Almost two months after Primo Levi’s death in 1987 (his obituary, by John Tagliabue, having appeared in The New York Times on April 11 of that year) author and journalist Alexander Stille’s essay, “Primo Levi: Reconciling the Man and The Writer”, appeared in the Times’ Book Review. Mr. Stille’s essay was accompanied by a portrait of Levi taken by a photographer surnamed “Giansanti” (first name unknown) of the Sygma agency, in which Primo Levi focuses his gaze directly upon the photographer. And perhaps, not-so-indirectly upon us?

With great sensitivity and perception (perception “human” as much perception historical) Mr. Stille attempts to understand and reconcile Primo Levi’s suicide within the context of his life as a whole, rather than defining Levi – as a person – only through his experiences in the Shoah. As such, Stille considers Levi’s postwar life in Turin, relationships with family members (specifically, Levi’s mother), physical health, and his perhaps lesser known work as a writer of fiction, such as the collection of short stories The Monkey’s Wrench. But, perhaps the “gravity” of Levi’s experience in the Shoah was always too deeply present, if not omnipresent; if not physically, at the very least symbolically.

And in this, Mr. Stille makes an astute observation about the power of speech versus the power of silence. Namely:

In our psychoanalytic culture
we tend to believe that those who talk are better off and happier than those who don’t.
But those who prefer silence and forgetfulness
may have a successful self-protective strategy.
Those who talk are also those who remember.
________________________________________

Primo Levi:
Reconciling the Man and the Writer
By Alexander Stille

The New York Times Book Review
July 5, 1987

Photo by Giansanti (Sygma)

WHEN a writer commits suicide it is difficult not to reinterpret his books in light of his final act. The temptation is particularly strong in the case of Primo Levi, much of whose work stemmed from his own experience at Auschwitz. The warmth and humanity of his writing had made Levi a symbol to his readers of the triumph of reason over the barbarism of genocide. For some, his violent death seemed to call that symbol into question. An article in The New Yorker went so far as to suggest that perhaps “the efficacy of all his words had somehow been canceled by his death – that his hope, or faith, was no longer usable by the rest of us.” An author’s suicide is seen as the logical conclusion of all he has written or as an ironic contradiction – rather than as the result of a purely personal torment.

Since learning of Levi’s suicide I have been trying to reconcile in my mind the writer and the man I had come to know with his violent death.

Levi bore none of the obvious emotional scars common among Holocaust survivors, none of the usual reticence in discussing his past. He was a person of remarkable serenity, openness and good humor, with a striking absence of bitterness. He was able to describe a Nazi prison guard with the same objectivity and understanding he showed in writing or speaking of his fellow prisoners. It seemed a kind of miracle that a person of such gentle temperament and finely tuned intellectual balance could have emerged from the nightmare of Auschwitz. Levi retained the shy sensitivity and inquisitiveness of the chemistry student he was before the war, and yet he had the wisdom and toughness of a survivor who has seen more of life than anyone should.

Levi was free of the vanity and self-importance of many writers perhaps because he had worked for 30 years as a chemist in a paint factory. He was unfailingly generous in response to the many demands on his time and politely answered even the most stupid questions. Slight of build, almost wiry, with a thick shock of white hair and alert eyes, he had a simplicity of manner that belied his considerable intellectual sophistication.

Unlike some survivors who remained rootless after the war, Levi had profound ties to his family and his city. After Auschwitz, he returned to live in the Turin apartment his family has occupied for three generations. He contributed regularly to the Turin newspaper La Stampa and stood by the Turinese publishing house Einaudi even after it went into receivership and most of its other prestigious authors had abandoned it.

As a writer Levi grew from being simply an eloquent witness of the Holocaust into a full-blown imaginative novelist. After his first two volumes of memoirs about his wartime experience (“Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Reawakening”), he drew on his life as a chemist to produce “The Periodic Table,” “The Monkey’s Wrench” and two collections of short stories not yet translated into English. Throughout, he remained in the stately old apartment building on Corso Umberto where he and his wife spent much of their time caring for his ailing 92-year-old mother. Their son lived just down the hall. Writing his books in the room in which he was born, working on a computer, Levi seemed both deeply rooted in the past and still intensely curious about the present. But last April 11, just outside his fourth-floor apartment, he hurled himself down the building’s central stairwell to his death.

The last months of Levi’s life were dominated by personal problems. In November his mother suffered a paralytic stroke, requiring around-the-clock care. Levi himself had been hospitalized for two prostate operations, which, although minor, tired and depressed him. A doctor had placed him on antidepressant drugs, and some have suggested that a reaction to a change in dosage may have led to his seemingly impulsive act. While these circumstances may account for the timing of his death, it is difficult not to search his Holocaust experience for the origin of his underlying despair.

Levi’s final nonfiction book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” which has not been translated into English and which I had occasion to discuss with him in Turin a year ago, sheds some light on the last period of his life. While “Survival at Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening” and “The Periodic Table” are ultimately hopeful books, “The Drowned and the Saved” is a dark meditation on the meaning of the Nazi exterminations after the passing of 40 years. In it he recalls how the Nazis tormented prisoners by telling them that even if through some miracle they managed to survive, no one would believe them when they returned home.

While this was not literally the case, it contains a larger truth. By the end of his life Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were destined to be lost as it took a place among the routine atrocities of history. Levi was troubled by the sentimental distortions of survivors and sympathetic historians and by the collective amnesia of those responsible for the exterminations. In recent years he had spoken often to students and joined the board of his former high school. He was acutely aware of how remote his experience had come to seem to the youngest generation.

“Holocaust survivors,” Levi said in one of our talks, “can be divided into two distinct categories: those who talk and those who don’t.” Levi, clearly, was in the first category. In our psychoanalytic culture we tend to believe that those who talk are better off and happier than those who don’t. But those who prefer silence and forgetfulness may have a successful self-protective strategy. Those who talk are also those who remember. Levi said he could remember literally everything that happened during his year and a half of imprisonment. Forty years later he could recall entire sentences he had heard in languages he did not even know: Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian and Greek.

Explaining why he kept returning to the subject of Auschwitz, Levi wrote in “Moments of Reprieve,” a collection of autobiographical sketches, that “a host of details continued to surface in my memory and the idea of letting them fade distressed me. A great number of human figures especially stood out against that tragic background: friends, people I’d traveled with, even adversaries – begging me one after another to help them survive and enjoy the ambiguous perennial existence of literary characters.”

In “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi writes about the tremendous difficulty of living with Holocaust memories. Suicide is, in fact, a major preoccupation of the book. He dedicates an entire chapter to the Belgian philosopher Jean Amery, who had been with Levi at Auschwitz and who killed himself in 1978. While any suicide, Levi writes, “is open to a constellation of different interpretations,” he believes that in the case of Holocaust survivors the origin is likely to reside in their war experiences. For survivors, he writes, “the period of their imprisonment (however long ago) is the center of their life, the event that, for better or worse, has marked their entire existence.” In a passage he quotes from Amery, Levi may have left us an interpretive key to his own death: “He who has been tortured remains tortured. … He who has suffered torment can no longer find his place in the world. Faith in humanity – cracked by the first slap across the face, then demolished by torture – can never be recovered.”

But while Amery was a man who tried to retaliate against violence, Levi described himself as “personally incapable of responding to a blow with a blow.” He responded to the violence of Auschwitz by internalizing it. Acutely sensitive to the suffering of others, he was particularly subject to feelings of guilt for having been unable to do more for those who suffered and died around him.

WHILE many of his readers viewed him as an example of the triumph of good over evil, Levi would probably have rejected that view as an oversimplification. When I spoke with him in Turin, he said that he was especially concerned by a tendency to view the Holocaust in black and white terms, with the Germans as the bad and the Jews the good. “The world of the Lager I witnessed was much more complex,” he said, “just as the world outside it is much more complex.” The architects of the Holocaust created a system that delegated much of the physical punishment of prisoners to other prisoners. By creating an infinite number of subtle divisions and privileges, they pitted the inmates against one another in a brutal struggle for survival.

But to Levi, Darwin’s laws were thrown into reverse. “The worst survived: the violent, the callous, the collaborators and the spies,” he said. Levi himself did not resort to collaboration – he survived largely through the help of an Italian worker who brought him food and through his job as a chemist in a camp factory – but he was nonetheless tormented by the memory of companions he was unable to help. In his last book he wrote: “Each of us [who survived] supplanted his neighbor and lives in his place. … It’s deeply hidden like a moth. You can’t see it from outside but it gnaws and bites.”

During his last months Levi had been talking extensively about his past with the Turinese literary critic Giovanni Tesio, who was gathering material for a biography. A few days before his death, Levi broke off their conversations because the memories of Auschwitz were becoming too painful, Mr. Tesio said recently in an interview. Other friends spoke about a nightmare Levi often had. In the dream, he told them: “I would see myself at the dinner table with my family or at work or in a green countryside. A relaxed atmosphere. And yet I felt a subtle anxiety, the sense of an imminent threat. Then as the dream proceeded, the scene dissolved. The family disappeared. There was no more work. No more countryside. I was still in the camp. And there was nothing real outside of the camp.”

Alexander Stille writes frequently on Italian subjects and is at work on a book about the experience of Italian Jews under Fascism.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Interview by Philip Roth – “A Man Saved by His Skills”, The New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1986

Here’s Philip Roth’s interview of Primo Levi, which appeared in The New York Times five months before Levi’s April, 1987 death. Though including nothing significant in the way of art (!), it does include two photographs: One a photo of Levi and Roth (perhaps in Levi’s book-lined study?), and another a portrait of Levi by Cesare Bosio. A portrait of Levi by Bosio also appeared in John Gross’ review of The Drowned and The Saved in January, 1988.

________________________________________

A Man Saved By His Skills
By Philip Roth

The New York Times Book Review
October 12, 1986

Photograph by Cesare Bosio (La Stampa)

Photograph by Giansanti (Sygma)

ON the September Friday that I arrived in Turin – to renew a conversation with with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before – I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist and, afterwards, until retirement, as factory manager. Altogether the company employs 50 people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant. The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes – all of it is encompassed in four or five acres a seven-mile drive from Turin. The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never really distressingly loud, the yard’s acrid odor – the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement – is by no means disgusting, and the skip loaded with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t particularly unsightly. It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but a very long way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi’s autobiographical narratives. On the other hand, however far from the prose, it is clearly a place close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stench, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in “The Monkey’s Wrench,” saying to Levi – who calls Faussone “my alter ego” – “I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.”

On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving on to production, I asked Levi if he could identify the particular chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: I thought it smelled a little like a hospital corridor. Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air. With a smile he told me, “I understand and can analyze it like a dog.”

He seemed to me inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest’s most astute intelligence. Levi is small and slight, though not quite so delicately built as his unassuming demeanor makes him at first appear, and still seemingly as nimble as he must have been at 10. In his body, as in his face, you see – as you don’t in most men – the face and the body of the boy that he was. His alertness is nearly palpable, keenness trembling within him like his pilot light.

It is probably not as surprising as one might think to find that writers divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don’t. Levi listens, and with his entire face, a precisely-modeled face tipped with a white chin beard that, at 67, is at once youthfully Pan-like but professorial as well, the face of irrepressible curiosity and of the esteemed dottore. I can believe Faussone when he says to Primo Levi early in “The Monkey’s Wrench,” “You’re quite a guy, making me tell these stories that, except for you, I’ve never told anybody.” It’s no wonder that people are always telling him things and that everything is recorded faithfully before it is even written down: when listening he is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall.

IN a large apartment house built a few years before he was born – and where he was born, for formerly this was the home of his parents – Levi lives with his wife, Lucia; except for his year in Auschwitz and the adventurous months immediately after his liberation, he has lived in this same apartment all his life.

The apartment is still shared, as it has been since the Levis met and married after the war, with Primo Levi’s mother. She is 91. Levi’s 95-year-old mother-in-law lives not far away, in the apartment immediately next door lives his 28-year-old son, a physicist, and a few streets off is his 38-year-old daughter, a botanist. I don’t personally know of another contemporary writer who has voluntarily remained, over so many decades, intimately entangled and in such direct, unbroken contact with his immediate family, his birthplace, his region, the world of his forebears, and, particularly, with the local working environment which, in Turin, the home of Fiat, is largely industrial. Of all the intellectually gifted artists of this century – and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than the chemist-writer – he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him. Perhaps in the case of Primo Levi, a life of communal interconnectedness, along with his masterpiece “Survival in Auschwitz,” constitutes his profoundly civilized and spirited response to those who did all they could to sever his every sustaining connection and tear him and his kind out of history.

In “The Periodic Table,” beginning with the simplest of sentences a paragraph describing one of chemistry’s most satisfying processes, Levi writes, “Distilling is beautiful.” What follows is a distillation too, a reduction to essential points of the lively, wide-ranging conversation we conducted, in English, over the course of a long weekend, mostly behind the door of the quiet study off the entrance foyer to the Levis’ apartment. Levi’s study is a large, simply furnished room. There is an old flowered sofa and a comfortable easy chair; on the desk is a shrouded word processor; perfectly shelved behind the desk are Levi’s variously colored notebooks; on shelves all around the room are books in Italian, German and English. The most evocative object is one of the smallest, an unobtrusively hung sketch of a half-destroyed wire fence at Auschwitz. Displayed more prominently on the walls are playful constructions skillfully twisted into shape by Levi himself out of insulated copper wire that is coated with the varnish developed for that purpose in his own laboratory. There is a big wire butterfly, a wire owl, a tiny wire bug, and high on the wall behind the desk are two of the largest constructions – one the wire figure of a bird-warrior armed with a knitting needle, and the other, as Levi explained when I couldn’t make out what the figure was meant to represent, “a man playing his nose.” “A Jew,” I suggested. “Yes, yes,” he said, laughing, “a Jew, of course.”

ROTH: In “The Periodic Table,” your book about “the strong and bitter flavor” of your experience as a chemist, you speak of a colleague, Giulia, who explains your “mania about work” by the fact that in your early 20’s you are shy of women and don’t have a girlfriend. But she was mistaken, I think. Your real mania about work derives from something deeper. Work would seem to be your obsessive subject, even in your book about your incarceration at Auschwitz.

Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes Freedom – are the words inscribed by the Nazis over the Auschwitz gate. But work in Auschwitz is a horrifying parody of work, useless and senseless – labor as punishment leading to agonizing death. It’s possible to view your entire literary labor as dedicated to restoring to work its humane meaning, reclaiming the word Arbeit from the derisory cynicism with which your Auschwitz employers had disfigured it. Faussone says to you, “Every job I undertake is like a first love.” He enjoys talking about his work almost as much as he enjoys working. Faussone is Man the Worker made truly free through his labors.

LEVI: I do not believe that Giulia was wrong in attributing my frenzy for work to my shyness at that time with girls. This shyness, or inhibition, was genuine, painful and heavy, much more important for me than devotion to work. Work in the Milan factory I described in “The Periodic Table” was mock-work which I did not trust. The catastrophe of the Italian armistice of Sept. 8, 1943, was already in the air, and it would have been foolish to ignore it by digging oneself into a scientifically meaningless activity.

I have never seriously tried to analyze this shyness of mine, but no doubt Mussolini’s racial laws played an important role. Other Jewish friends suffered from it, some “Aryan” schoolmates jeered at us, saying that circumcision was nothing but castration, and we, at least at an unconscious level, tended to believe it, with the help of our puritanical families. I think that at that time work was actually for me a sexual compensation rather than a real passion.

However, I am fully aware that after the camp my work, or rather my two kinds of work (chemistry and writing) did play, and are still playing, an essential role in my life. I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal, and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz’s Arbeit) gives rise to suffering and to atrophy. In my case, and in the case of my alter ego Faussone, work is identical with “problem-solving.”

At Auschwitz I quite often observed a curious phenomenon. The need for lavoro ben fatto – “work properly done” – is so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores “properly.” The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months hated Germans, their food, their language, their war; but when they set him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out of obedience but out of professional dignity.

ROTH: “Survival in Auschwitz” concludes with a chapter entitled “The Story of Ten Days,” in which you describe, in diary form, how you endured from January 18 to January 27, 1945, among a small remnant of sick and dying patients in the camp’s makeshift infirmary after the Nazis had fled westward with some 20,000 “healthy” prisoners. What’s recounted there reads to me like the story of Robinson Crusoe in hell, with you, Primo Levi, as Crusoe, wrenching what you needed to live from the chaotic residue of a ruthlessly evil island. What struck me there, as throughout the book, was how much thinking contributed to your survival, the thinking of a practical, humane, scientific mind. Yours doesn’t seem to me a survival that was determined by either brute biological strength or incredible luck, but was rooted, rather, in your professional character: the man of precision, the controller of experiments who seeks the principle of order, confronted with the evil inversion of everything he valued. Granted you were a numbered part in an infernal machine, but a numbered part with a systematic mind that has always to understand. At Auschwitz you tell yourself, “I think too much” to resist, “I am too civilized.” But to me the civilized man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor. The scientist and the survivor are one.

LEVI: Exactly – you hit the bull’s-eye. In those memorable 10 days, I truly did feel like Robinson Crusoe, but with one important difference. Crusoe set to work for his individual survival, whereas I and mv two French companions were consciously and happily willing to work at last for a just and human goal, to save the lives of our sick comrades.

As for survival, this is a question that I put to myself many times and that many have put to me. I insist there was no general rule, except entering the camp in good health and knowing German. Barring this, luck dominated. I have seen the survival of shrewd people and silly people, the brave and the cowardly, “thinkers” and madmen. In my case, luck played an essential role on at least two occasions: in leading me to meet the Italian bricklayer, and in getting sick only once, but at the right moment.

And yet what you say, that for me thinking and observing were survival factors, is true, although in my opinion sheer luck prevailed. I remember having lived my Auschwitz year in a condition of exceptional spiritedness. I don’t know if this depended on my professional background, or an unsuspected stamina, or on a sound instinct. I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded by a curiosity that somebody afterwards did, in fact, deem nothing less than cynical, the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous, but new, monstrously new.

ROTH: “Survival in Auschwitz” was originally published in English as “If This Is a Man,” a faithful rendering of your Italian title, “Se Questo E un Uomo” (and the title that your first American publishers should have had the good sense to preserve). The description and analysis of your atrocious memories of the Germans’ “gigantic biological and social experiment” is governed, very precisely, by a quantitative concern for the ways in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties. “If This Is a Man” reads like the memoirs of a theoretician of moral biochemistry who has himself been forcibly enlisted as the specimen organism to undergo laboratory experimentation of the most sinister kind. The creature caught in the laboratory of the mad scientist is himself the very epitome of the rational scientist.

In “The Monkey’s Wrench” – which might accurately have been titled “This Is a Man” – you tell Faussone, your blue-collar Scheherazade, that “being a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling … a writer’s blood in my veins,’ you consequently have “two souls in my body, and that’s too many.” I’d say there’s one soul, capacious and seamless; I’d say that not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable but the writer and the scientist as well. ‘

LEVI: Rather than a question, this is a diagnosis that I accept with thanks. I lived my camp life as rationally as I could, and I wrote “If This Is a Man” struggling to explain to others, and to myself, the events I had been involved in, but with no definite literary intention. My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the “weekly report” commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy. And certainly not written in scientific jargon. By the way, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever been. I did want to become one, but war and the camp prevented me. I had to limit myself to being a technician.

I agree with you on there being only “one soul … and seamless,” and once more I feel grateful to you. My statement that “two souls … is too many” is half a joke, but half hints at serious things. I worked in a factory for almost 30 years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more soul-destroying tasks. This whole trade is brutally incompatible with writing. Consequently I felt hugely relieved when I reached retirement age and could resign, and so renounce my soul number one.

ROTH: Your sequel to “If This Is a Man” (“The Reawakening”: also unfortunately retitled by one of your early American publishers) was called in Italian “La Tregua,” the truce. It’s about your journey from Auschwitz back to Italy. There is a real legendary dimension to that tortuous journey, especially to the story of your long gestation period in the Soviet Union, waiting to be repatriated. What’s surprising about “La Tregua,” which might understandably have been marked by a mood of mourning and inconsolable despair, is its exuberance. Your reconciliation with life takes place in a world that sometimes seemed to you like the primeval Chaos. Yet you are so tremendously engaged by everyone, so highly entertained as well as instructed, that I wondered if, despite the hunger and the cold and the fears, even despite the memories, you’ve ever really had a better time than during those months that you ;all “a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.”

You appear to be someone whose most vital needs require, above all, rootedness – in his profession, his ancestry, his region, his language – and yet when you bund yourself as alone and uprooted as a man can be, mu considered that condition a gift.

LEVI: A friend of mine, an excellent doctor, told me many years ago, “Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and of your travel home are in Technicolor.” He was right. Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure. Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.

You are in the business, so you know how these things happen. “The Truce” was written 14 years after “If This Is a Man”: it is a more “self-conscious” book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. Beforehand, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely different cultural levels (to friends mainly and to high school boys and girls), and I had retouched it en route so as to arouse their most favorable reactions. When “If This Is a Man” began to achieve some success, and I began to see a future for my writing, I set out to put these adventures on paper. I aimed at having fun in writing and at amusing my prospective readers. Consequently, I gave emphasis to strange, exotic, cheerful episodes – mainly to the Russians seen close up – and I relegated to the first and last pages the mood, as you put it, “of mourning and inconsolable despair.”

As for “rootedness,” it is true that I have deep roots, and that I had the luck of not losing them. My family was almost completely spared by the Nazi slaughter, and today I continue to live in the very flat where I was born. The desk here where I write occupies, according to family legend, exactly the spot where I first saw light. When I found myself “as uprooted as a man could be” certainly I suffered, but this was far more than compensated afterwards by the fascination of adventure, by human encounters, by the sweetness of “convalescence” from the plague of Auschwitz. In its historical reality, my Russian “truce” turned to a “gift” only many years later, when I purified it by rethinking it and by writing about it.

ROTH: “If Not Now, When?” is like nothing else of yours that I’ve read in English. Though pointedly drawn from actual historical events, the book is cast as a straightforward, picaresque adventure tale about a small band of Jewish partisans of Russian and Polish extraction harassing the Germans behind their eastern front lines. Your other books are perhaps less “imaginary” as to subject matter but strike me as more imaginative in technique. The motive behind “If Not Now, When?” seems more narrowly tendentious – and consequently less liberating to the writer – than the impulses that generate the autobiographical works.

I wonder if you agree with this – if in writing about the bravery of the Jews who fought back, you felt yourself doing something you ought to do, responsible to moral and political claims that don’t necessarily intervene elsewhere, even when the subject is your own markedly Jewish fate.

LEVI: “If Not Now, When?” followed an unforeseen path. The motivations that drove me to write it are manifold. Here they are, in order of importance:

I had made a sort of bet with myself: after so much plain or disguised autobiography, are you, or are you not, a full-fledged writer, capable of constructing a novel, shaping characters, describing landscapes you have never seen? Try it!

I intended to amuse myself by writing a “Western’ plot set in a landscape uncommon in Italy. I intended to amuse my readers by telling them a substantially optimistic story, a story of hope, even occasionally cheerful, although projected onto a background of massacre.

I wished to assault a commonplace still prevailing in Italy: a Jew is a mild person, a scholar (religious or profane), unwarlike, humiliated, who tolerated centuries of persecution without ever fighting back. I seemed to me a duty to pay homage to those Jews who in desperate conditions, had found the courage and the skills to resist.

I cherished the ambition to be the first (perhaps only) Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world. I intended to “exploit” my popularity in my country in order to impose upon my readers a book centered on the Ashkenazi civilization, history, language, and frame of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth [the Austrian novelist who died in 1939}, Bellow, Singer, Mala-mud, Potok and of course yourself.

Personally, I am satisfied with this book mainly because I had good fun planning and writing it. For the first and only time in my life as a writer, I had the impression (almost a hallucination) that my characters were alive, around me, behind my back, suggesting spontaneously their feats and their dialogues. The year I spent writing was a happy one, and so, whatever the result, for me this was a liberating book.

ROTH: Let’s talk finally about the paint factory. In our time many writers have worked as teachers, some as journalists, and most writers over 50 have been employed, for a while at least, as somebody or other’s soldier. There is an impressive list of writers who have simultaneously practiced medicine and written books, and of others who have been clergymen. T.S. Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organizations. To my knowledge only two writers of importance have ever been managers of a paint factory, you in Turin, Italy, and Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio. Anderson had to flee the paint factory (and his family) to become a writer; you seem to have become the writer you are by staying and pursuing your career there. I wonder if you think of yourself as actually more fortunate – even better equipped to write – than those of us who are without a paint factory and all that’s implied by that kind of connection.

LEVI: As I have already said, I entered the paint industry by chance, but I never had very much to do with the general run of paints, varnishes, and lacquers. Our company, immediately after it began, specialized in the production of wire enamels, insulating coatings for copper electrical conductors. At the peak of my career, I numbered among the 30 or 40 specialists in the world in this branch. The animals hanging here on the wall are made out of scrap enameled wire.

Honestly, I knew nothing of Sherwood Anderson till you spoke of him. No, it would never have occurred to me to quit family and factory for full-time writing, as he did. I’d have feared the jump into the dark, and I would have lost any right to a retirement allowance.

However, to your list of writer/paint manufacturers I must add a third name, Italo Svevo, a converted Jew of Trieste, the author of “The Confessions of Zeno,” who lived from 1861 to 1928.” For a long time Svevo was the commercial manager of a paint company in Trieste that belonged to his father-in-law, and that dissolved a few years ago. Until 1918 Trieste belonged to Austria, and this company was famous because it supplied the Austrian Navy with an excellent antifouling paint, preventing shellfish incrustation, for the keels of warships. After 1918 Trieste became Italian, and the paint was delivered to the Italian and British Navies. To be able to deal with the Admiralty, Svevo took lessons in English from James Joyce, at the time a teacher in Trieste. They became friends and Joyce assisted Svevo in finding a publisher for his works.

The trade name of the antifouling paint was Moravia. That it is the same as the nom de plume of the noted Italian novelist is not fortuitous: both the Triestine businessman and the Roman writer derived it from the family name of a mutual relative on the mother’s side. Forgive me for this hardly pertinent gossip. No, no, as I’ve hinted already, I have no regrets. I don’t believe I wasted my time in the factory. My factory militanza – my compulsory and honorable service there – kept me in touch with the world of real things.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Obituary by John Tagliabue, The New York Times, April 11, 1987

Primo Levi’s obituary by John Tagliabue of Bates College, as it appeared in The New York Times on April 11, 1987.

A minor error: The title “The Damned and the Saved,” is incorrect, and should of course be The Drowned and the Saved.

A minor point: Previously, I’d been unaware of Primo Levi’s use of the pseudonym “Damiano Malaballa”, probably because – until learning more – I always associated Primo Levi with non-fiction.

________________________________________

Primo Levi, Author of Works On Holocaust, Is Found Dead
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Special to The New York Times

The New York Times
April 11, 1987

ROME, April 11 – Primo Levi, whose autobiographical writings drew on his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor and his training as a chemist, died today in Turin. He was 67 years old.

The authorities said they were treating the-death as a suicide. Mr. Levi was found by members of his family and neighbors at the foot of a stairwell in the home where he was born, in the Crocetta neighborhood, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.

Renzo Levi, the writer’s son, said by telephone from Turin that his father had had serious bouts of depression in recent months.

“The elder Mr. Levi had undergone minor surgery recently, and friends suggested he was deeply troubled about the condition of his 92-year-old mother, who was partially paralyzed by a stroke last year.

Already well known in Europe, Mr. Levi became prominent among American readers with the appearance in 1984 of the third volume of his autobiographical reflections, “The Periodic Table,” in which he used the chemical elements as a bridge to weave an unusual account of his experiences in the Nazi death camps.

Pseudonym Sometimes Used

His other books include “Survival in Auschwitz,” the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy; “The Reawakening,” the second volume; “Moments of Reprieve,” a series of sketches of the author’s acquaintances from the camps, and, most recently, “The Damned and the Saved.” He also wrote works of fiction, some of it under the pseudonym Damiano Malaballa.

Primo Levi was born in Turin on July 31, 1919, a descendant of Jews who had settled in the Piedmont, in northern Italy, after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, even after the Mussolini regime barred Jews from institutes of higher learning in 1938, and received a degree in 1941.

In 1943, he quit his job at a Milan pharmaceutical laboratory to join Italian Partisans fighting the Fascist fprces of Germany and Italy. “I was not a very good Partisan,” Mr. Levi told Herbert Mitgang in The New York Times in 1985. “When my unit was betrayed by an informer, I was interrogated by Italian Fascists and handed over to the Germans. I was put on a train with hundreds of other Jews and sent to Monowitz-Auschwitz, the factory part of the camp that used slave labor.”

Number Tattooed on Arm

It was his experiences there, as No. 174517 – the number was tattooed on his left arm, a few inches above the wrist – that were to shape his life and work.

His 1947 account, “Survival in Auschwitz” – also published under the title “If This Is a Man” – described daily life in the death camps in rich detail, creating a monument to the triumph of lucid intelligence over Nazi barbarism.

He attributed his survival in the camp to luck, to the Germans’ need for chemists – he was given a job in a synthetic-rubber factory – and to an acquaintanceship with a fellow inmate, an Italian bricklayer who was not Jewish, who brought him bread and soup.

In “The Reawakening,” published in 1963, the author described his long and bizarre journey home to Turin after being liberated from the camp by Soviet soldiers.

He also drew on his Partisan days in a novel, “If Not Now, When?” The novel, published in Italy in 1982, chronicled the exploits in the closing months of the war of a band of Eastern European Jewish Partisans who dream of finding freedom in Palestine.

A Turn to Fiction

In recent years, Mr. Levi turned increasingly to works of fiction, including novels and short stories, and was a regular contributor of poetry to the Turin newspaper La Stampa.

He was the winner of several literary prizes, including the Strega Prize, a prestigious Italian award, in 1979. In 1985 he and Saul Bellow shared the Kenneth B. Smilen fiction award, sponsored by the Jewish Museum in New York.

While devoted to his writing, Mr. Levi continued his career as a chemist, working for a Turin paint factory, SIVA, for almost 30 years. From 1961 to 1974, he was the plant’s general manager.

In an interview with The New York Times in December 1984, Mr. Levi described himself as “a chemist by conviction,” but added. “After Auschwitz, I had an absolute need to write.”

“Not only as a moral duty,” he said, “but as a psychological need.”

That need was reflected in a Yiddish proverb he used as an epigraph for “The Periodic Table”: “Troubles overcome are good to tell.”

Mr. Levi wrote in an Italian enriched by snatches of the disappearing jargon of the Piedmontese Jews, which combined Hebrew roots with local endings and inflections.

Mr. Levi, who came from a middle-class family of assimilated Jews, once wrote that “a Jew is someone who at Christmas does not have a tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but does, who has learned a little bit of Hebrew at 13 and then forgotten it.”

But he remained close to the Italian Jewish community and two years ago he contributed an introduction to the catalogue of a newly opened Jewish museum in Turin.

The novelist Phillip Roth, whose account of a conversation with the Italian appeared last October in The New York Times Book Review, said of Mr. Levi today:

“With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a 20th-century titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible.”

Mr. Levi is survived by his wife, Lucia; a daughter, Lisa, and a son, Renzo.

Ray Bradbury Interview by Charles Platt, in “Dream Makers” [November, 1980]

My prior post, regarding Ray Bradbury’s The Fireman (later Fahrenheit 451), presented musings about his novel viewed in the context of the events of the year 2020, and, in terms of the effect of “information technology” in the contemporary world, which seem to have been anticipated in his novel. This serves as an introduction to images of the magazine and book cover art associated with Fahrenheit 451’s first appearance:in Galaxy Magazine (under the title The Fireman), and next, as Ballantine Books’ publication of the novel under that much-more-familiarly-known title. In turn, the post includes excerpts from some of the novel’s passages that are the most powerful, descriptive, and relevant to the world we now live in.

This post is quite different in nature: It’s the text of an interview with Ray Bradbury that appeared in Charles Platt’s Dream Makers – The Uncommon People Who Write Science Fiction, published in November of 1980 by Berkley Books. The author’s conversation with his Ray Bradbury occurred in Los Angeles in May of 1979.

Platt’s book is excellent, for the reader gains an appreciation through exchanges with 29 authors of not only their relationship with the world of writing, but simply about their personal histories (sometimes their families, too) and lives, as “people”. Albeit, the profile of Cyril Kornbluth is by definition and nature not an interview as such, Kornbluth having died in 1958! Thus, Kornbluth’s brief biographical profile is based on Charles Platt’s taped interview with Kornbluth’s widow Mary, which occurred in November of 1973.

(Alas, I so wish that something had been included about Cordwainer Smith or Catherine L. Moore!)

Profiled in the book are:

Brian W. Aldiss
Isaac Asimov
J.G. Ballard
Gregory Benford
Alfred Bester
Ray D. Bradbury
John Brunner
Edward Bryant
Algis Budrys
Samuel R. Delaney
Philip K. Dick
Thomas M. Disch
Harlan Ellison
Philip Jose Farmer
Frank Herbert
C.M. (Cyril M.) Kornbluth
Damon Knight
Barry N. Malzberg
Michael Moorcock
Frederik Pohl
Robert Scheckley
Robert Silverberg
Norman Spinrad
Hank Stine
E.C. Tubb
A.E. (Alfred Elton) van Vogt (…see more at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, at the University of Kansas…)
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Ian Watson
Kate Wilhelm

So, here’s Charles Platt’s interview with Ray Bradbury. If I emerged from reading Fahrenheit 451 with an appreciation of Bradbury’s literary skill, I emerged from reading Platt’s interview with a solid appreciation of Bradbury as “a person”. A person, most impressive, at that.

________________________________________

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury’s stories speak with a unique voice. They can never be confused with the work of any other writer. And Bradbury himself is just as unmistakable: a charismatic individualist with a forceful, effusive manner and a kind of wide-screen, epic dedication to the powers of Creativity, Life, and Art.

He has no patience with commercial writing which is produced soullessly for the mass market:

“It’s all crap, it’s all crap, and I’m not being virtuous about it; I react in terms of my emotional, needful self, in that if you turn away from what you are, you’ll get sick some day. If you go for the market, some day you’ll wake up and regret it. I know a lot of screenwriters; they’re always doing things for other people, for money, because it’s a job. Instead of saying, ‘Hey, I really shouldn’t be doing this,’ they take it, because it’s immediate, and because it’s a credit. But no one remembers that credit. If you went anywhere in Los Angeles among established writers and said, ‘Who wrote the screenplay for Gone With the Wind?” they couldn’t tell you. Or the screenplay for North by Northwest. Or the screenplay for Psycho – even I couldn’t tell you that, and I’ve seen the film eight times. These people are at the beck and call of the market; they grow old, and lonely, and envious, and they are not loved, because no one remembers. But in novels and short stories, essays and poetry, you’ve got a chance of not having, necessarily, such a huge audience, but having a constant group of lovers, people who show up in your life on occasion and look at you with such a pure light in their faces and their eyes that there’s no denying that love, it’s there, you can’t fake it. When you’re in the street and you see someone you haven’t seen in years – that look! They see you and, that light, it comes out, saying, My God, there you are, Jesus God it’s been five years, let me buy you a drink… And you go into a bar, and – and that beautiful thing, which friendship gives you, that’s what we want, hah? That’s what we want. And all the rest is crap. It is. That’s what we want from life – “ He pounds his fist on the glass top of his large, circular coffee table. “ – We want friends. In a lifetime most people only have one or two decent friends, constant friends. I have five, maybe even six. And a decent marriage, and children, plus the work that you want to do, plus the fans that accumulate around that work – Lord, it’s a complete life, isn’t it – but the screenwriters never have it, and it’s terribly sad. Or the Harold Robbinses of the world – I mean, probably a nice gent. But no one cares, no one cares that he wrote those books, because they’re commercial books, and there’s no moment of truth that speaks to the heart. The grandeur and exhilaration of certain days is missing – those gorgeous days when you walk out and it’s enough just to be alive, the sunlight goes right in your nostrils and out your ears, hah? That’s the stuff. All the rest – the figuring out of the designs, for how to do a bestseller – what a bore that is. Lord, I’d kill myself, I really would, I couldn’t live that way. And I’m not being moralistic. I’m speaking from the secret wellsprings of the nervous system. I can’t do those things, not because it’s morally wrong and unvirtuous, but because the gut system can’t take it, finally, being untrue to the gift of life. If you turn away from natural gifts that God has given you, or the universe has given you, however you want to describe it in your own terms, you’re going to grow old too soon. You’re going to get sour, get cynical, because you yourself are a sublime cynic for having done what you’ve done. You’re going to die before you die. That’s no way to live.”

He speaks in a rich, powerful voice-indeed, a hot-gospel voice – as he delivers this inspirational sermon. He may be adopting a slightly more incisive style than usual, for the purposes of this interview, and he may be using a little overstatement to emphasize his outlook; but there can be no doubt of his sincerity. Those passages of ecstatic prose in his fiction, paying homage to the vibrant images of childhood, the glorious fury of flaming rockets, the exquisite mystery of Mars, the all-around wonder-fullness of the universe in general – he truly seems to experience life in these terms, uninhibitedly, unreservedly.

Intellectual control and cold, hard reason have a place, too; but they must give way to emotion, during the creative process:

“It takes a day to write a short story. At the end of the day, you say, that seems to work, what parts don’t? Well, there’s a scene here that’s not real, now, what’s missing? Okay, the intellect can help you here. Then, the next day, you go back to it, and you explode again, based on what you learned the night before from your intellect. But it’s got to be a total explosion, over in a few hours, in order to be honest.

“Intellectualizing is a great danger. It can get in the way of doing anything. Our intellect is there to protect us from destroying ourselves – from falling off cliffs, or from bad relationships – love affairs where we need the brains not to be involved. That’s what the intellect is for. But it should not be the center of things. If you try to make your intellect the center of your life you’re going to spoil all the fun, hah? You’re going to get out of bed with people before you ever get into bed with them. So if that happens – the whole world would die, we’d never have any children!” He laughs. “You’d never start any relationships, you’d be afraid of all friendships, and become paranoid. The intellect can make you paranoid about everything, including creativity, if you’re not careful. So why not delay thinking till the act is over? It doesn’t hurt anything.”

I feel that Bradbury’s outlook, and his stories, are unashamedly romantic. But when I use this label, he doesn’t seem at all comfortable with it.

“I’m not quite sure I know what it means. If certain things make you laugh or cry, how can you help that? You’re only describing a process. I went down to Cape Canaveral for the first time three years ago. I walked into it, and yes, I thought, this is my home town! Here is where I came from, and it’s all been built in the last twenty years behind my back. I walk into the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is 400 feet high, and I go up in the elevator and look down – and the tears burst from my eyes. They absolutely burst from my eyes! I’m just full of the same awe that I have when I visit Chartres or go into the Notre Dame or St. Peter’s. The size of this cathedral where the rockets take off to go to the moon is so amazing, I don’t know how to describe it. On the way out, in tears, I turn to my driver and I say, ‘How the hell do I write that down? It was like walking around in Shakespeare’s head.’ And as soon as I said it I knew that was the metaphor. That night on the train I got out my typewriter and I wrote a seven-page poem, which is in my last book of poetry, about my experience at Canaveral walking around inside Shakespeare’s head.

“Now, if that’s romantic, I was born with romantic genes. I cry more, I suppose – I’m easy to tears, I’m easy to laughter, I try to go with that and not suppress it. So if that’s romantic, well, then, I guess I’m a romantic, but I really don’t know what that term means. I’ve heard it applied to people like Byron, and in many ways he was terribly foolish, especially to give his life away, the way he did, at the end. I hate that, when I see someone needlessly lost to the world. We should have had him for another five years – or how about twenty? I felt he was foolishly romantic, but I don’t know his life that completely. I’m a mixture; I don’t think George Bernard Shaw was all that much of a romanticist, and yet I’m a huge fan of Shaw’s. He’s influenced me deeply, along with people like Shakespeare, or Melville. I’m mad for Shaw; I carry him with me everywhere. I reread his prefaces all the time.”

Quite apart from what I still feel is a romantic outlook, Bradbury is distinctive as a writer who shows a recurring sense of nostalgia in his work. Many stories look back to bygone times when everything was simpler, and technology had not yet disrupted the basics of small-town life. I ask him if he knows the source of this affection for simplicity.

“I grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, which had a population of around 32,000, and in a town like that you walk everywhere when you’re a child. We didn’t have a car till I was twelve years old. So I didn’t drive in automobiles much until I came west when I was fourteen, to live in Los Angeles. We didn’t have a telephone in our family until I was about fifteen, in high school. A lot of things, we didn’t have; we were a very poor family. So you start with basics, and you respect them. You respect walking, you respect a small town, you respect the library, where you went for your education – which I started doing when I was nine or ten. I’ve always been a great swimmer and a great walker, and a bicyclist. I’ve discovered every time I’m depressed or worried by anything, swimming or walking or bicycling will generally cure it. You get the blood clean and the mind clean, and then you’re ready to go back to work again.”

He goes on to talk about his early ambitions: “My interests were diverse. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I wanted to have my own comic strip. And I wanted to make films, and be on the stage, and be an architect – I was madly in love with the architecture of the future that I saw in photographs of various world’s fairs which preceded my birth. And then, reading Edgar Rice Burroughs when I was ten or eleven, I wanted to write Martian stories. So when I began to write, when I was twelve, that was the first thing I did. I wrote a sequel to an Edgar Rice Burroughs book.

“When I was seventeen years old, in Los Angeles, I used to go to science-fantasy meetings, downtown. We’d go to Clifton’s Cafeteria; Forrest Ackerman and his friends would organize the group there every Thursday night, and you could go there and meet Henry Kuttner, and C.L. Moore, and Jack Williamson, and Edmond Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett – my God, how beautiful, I was seventeen years old, I wanted heroes, and they treated me beautifully. They accepted me. I still know practically everyone in the field, at least from the old days. I love them all. Robert Heinlein was my teacher, when I was nineteen… but you can’t stay with that sort of thing, a family has to grow. Just as you let your children out into the world – I have four daughters – you don’t say, ‘Here is the boundary, you can’t go out there.’ So at the age of nineteen I began to grow. By the time I was twenty I was moving into little theater groups and I was beginning to experiment with other fictional forms. I still kept up my contacts with the science-fiction groups, but I mustn’t stay in just that.

“When I was around twenty-four, I was trying to sell stories to Colliers and Harper’s and The Atlantic, and I wanted to be in The Best American Short Stories. But it wasn’t happening. I had a friend who knew a psychiatrist. I said, ‘Can I borrow your psychiatrist for an afternoon?’ One hour cost twenty dollars! That was my salary for the whole week, to go to this guy for an hour. So I went to him and he said, ‘Mr. Bradbury, what’s your problem?’ And I said, ‘Well, hell, nothing’s happening.’ So he said, ‘What do you want to happen?’ And I said, ‘Well, gee, I want to be the greatest writer that ever lived.’ And he said, “That’s going to take a little time, then, isn’t it?’ He said, ‘Do you ever read the encyclopedia? Go down to the library and read the lives of Balzac and Du Maupassant and Dickens and Tolstoy, and see how long it took them to become what they became.’ So I went and read and discovered that they had to wait, too. And a year later I began to sell to the American Mercury, and Collier’s, and I appeared in The Best American Short Stories when I was twenty-six. I still wasn’t making any money, but I was getting the recognition that I wanted, the love that I wanted from people I looked up to. The intellectual elite in America was beginning to say, “Hey, you’re okay, you’re all right, and you’re going to make it.’ And then my girlfriend Maggie told me the same thing. And then it didn’t matter whether the people around me sneered at me. I was willing to wait.”

In fact, Bradbury must have received wider critical recognition, during the late 1950s and into the 1960s, than any other science-fiction author. His work used very little technical jargon, which made it easy for “outsiders” to digest, and he acquired a reputation as a stylist, if only because so few science-fiction authors at that time showed any awareness of style at all.

Within the science-fiction field, however, Bradbury has never received as much acclaim, measured (for example) by Hugo or Nebula awards. Doe this irk him?

“That’s a very dangerous thing to talk about.” He pauses. Up till this moment, he has talked readily, with absolute confidence. Now, he seems ill-at-ease. “I left the family, you see. And that’s a danger… to them. Because, they haven’t got out of the house. It’s like when your older brother leaves home suddenly – how dare he leave me, hah? My hero, that I depended on to protect me. There’s some of that feeling. I don’t know how to describe it. But once you’re out and you look back and they’ve got their noses pressed against the glass, you want to say, ‘Hey, come on, it’s not that hard, come on out.’ But each of us has a different capacity for foolhardiness at a certain time. It takes a certain amount of – it’s not bravery – it’s experimentation. Because I’m really, basically, a coward. I’m afraid of heights, I don’t fly, I don’t drive. So you see I can’t really claim to be a brave person. But the part of me that’s a writer wanted to experiment out in the bigger world, and I couldn’t help myself, I just had to go out there.

“I knew that I had to write a certain way, and take my chances. I sold newspapers on a street comer, for three or four years, from the time I was nineteen till I was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. I made ten dollars a week at it, which was nothing, and meant that I couldn’t take girls out and give them a halfway decent evening. I could give them a ten-cent malted milk and a cheap movie, and then walk them home. We couldn’t take the bus, there was no money left. But, again, this was no virtuous selection on my part. It was pure instinct. I knew exactly how to keep myself well.

“I began to write for Weird Tales in my early twenties, sold my short stories there, got twenty or thirty dollars apiece for them. You know everything that’s in The Martian Chronicles, except two stories, sold for forty, fifty dollars apiece, originally.

“I met Maggie when I was twenty-five. She worked in a bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, and her views were so much like mine – she was interested in books, in language, in literature – and she wasn’t interested in having a rich boyfriend; which was great, because I wasn’t! We got married two years later and in thirty-two years of marriage we have had only one problem with money. One incident, with a play. The rest of the time we have never discussed it. We knew we didn’t have any money in the bank, so why discuss something you don’t have, hah? We lived in Venice, California, our little apartment, thirty dollars a month, for a couple of years, and our first children came along, which terrified us because we had no money, and then God began to provide. As soon as the first child arrived my income went up from fifty dollars a week to ninety dollars a week. By the time I was thirty-three I was making $110 a week. And then John Huston came along, and gave me Moby Dick [the film for which Bradbury wrote the screenplay] and my income went up precipitously in one year – and then went back down the next year, because I chose not to do any more screenplays for three years after that, it was a conscious choice and an intuitive one, to write more books and establish a reputation. Because, as I said earlier, no one remembers who wrote Moby Dick for the screen.

“Los Angeles has been great for me, because it was a collision of Hollywood – motion pictures – and the birthing of certain technologies. I’ve been madly in love with film since I was three years old. I’m not a pure science-fiction writer, I’m a film maniac at heart, and it infests all of my work. Many of my short stories can be shot right off the page. When I first met Sam Peckinpah, eight or nine years ago, and we started a friendship, and he wanted to do Something Wicked This Way Comes, I said, ‘How are you going to do it?’ And he said, ‘I’m going to rip the pages out of your book and stuff them in the camera.’ He was absolutely correct. Since I’m a bastard son of Erich von Stroheim out of Lon Chaney – a child of the cinema – hah! – it’s only natural that almost all of my work is photogenic.”

Is he happy with the way his stories have been made into movies?

“I was happy with Fahrenheit 451: I think it’s a beautiful film, with a gorgeous ending. A great ending by Truffaut. The Illustrated Man I detested; a horrible film. I now have the rights back, and we’ll do it over again, some time, in the next few years. Moby Dick – I’m immensely moved by it. I’m very happy with it. I see things I could do now, twenty-five years later, that I understand better, about Shakespeare and the Bible – who, after all, instructed Melville at his activities. Without the Bible and Shakespeare, Moby Dick would never have been born. Nevertheless, with all the flaws, and with the problem of Gregory Peck not being quite right as Ahab – I wanted someone like Olivier; it would have been fantastic to see Olivier – all that to one side, I’m still very pleased.”

In the past few years Bradbury has turned increasingly toward writing poetry as opposed to short stories. Not all of this poetry has been well-received. I ask him if he suffers from that most irritating criticism – people telling him that his early work was better.

“Oh, yes, and they’re – they’re wrong, of course. Steinbeck had to put up with that. I remember hearing him say this. And it’s nonsense. I’m doing work in my poems, now, that I could never have done thirty years ago. And I’m very proud. Some of the poems that have popped out of my head in the last two years are incredible. I don’t know where in hell they come from, but – good God, they’re good! I have written at least three poems that are going to be around seventy years, a hundred years from now. Just three poems, you say? But the reputation of most of the great poets are based on only one or two poems. I mean, when you think of Yeats, you think of Sailing to Byzantium, and then I defy you, unless you’re a Yeats fiend, to name six other poems.

“To be able to write one poem in a lifetime, that you feel is so good it’s going to be around for a while… and I’ve done that, damn it, I’ve done it – at least three poems – and a lot of short stories. I did a short story a year ago called Gotcha, that is, damn it, boy, that’s good. It’s terrifying! I read it and I say, oh, yes, that’s good. Another thing, called The Burning Man, which I did two years ago … and then some of my new plays, the new Fahrenheit 451, a totally original new play based on what my characters are giving me, at the typewriter. I’m not in control of them. They’re living their lives all over again, twenty-nine years later, and they’re saying good stuff. So long as I can keep the channels open between my subconscious and my outer self, it’s going to stay good.

“I don’t know how I do anything that I do, in poetry. Again, it’s instinctive, from years and years and years of reading Shakespeare, and Pope – I’m a great admirer of Pope – and Dylan Thomas, I don’t know what in hell he’s saying, a lot of times, but God it sounds good, Jesus, it rings, doesn’t it, hah? It’s as clear as crystal. And then you look closely and you say, it’s crystal – but I don’t know how it’s cut. But you don’t care. Again, it’s unconscious, for me. People come up and say. Oh, you did an Alexandrian couplet here. And I say, Oh, did I? I was so dumb, I thought an Alexandrian couplet had to do with Alexander Pope!

“But from reading poetry every day of your life, you pick up rhythms, you pick up beats, you pick up inner rhymes. And then, some day in your forty-fifth year, your subconscious brings you a surprise. You finally do something decent. But it took me thirty, thirty-five years of writing, before I wrote one poem that I liked.”

There is no denying this man’s energy and his enthusiasm. It’s so directly expressed, and so guileless, it makes him a likeable and charming man regardless of whether you identify with his outlook or share his opinions. He projects a mixture of innocence and sincerity; he looks at you directly as he speaks, as if trying to win you over and catalyze you into sharing his enthusiasm. He is a tanned, handsome figure, with white hair and. often, white or light-colored clothing; the first time I ever saw him, at a science-fiction convention, he seemed almost regal, standing in his white suit, surrounded by a mass of scruffy adolescent fans in dowdy T-shirts and jeans. Yet he seemed to empathize with them; despite his healthy ego he is not condescending toward his younger admirers, perhaps because he still feels (and looks) so young at heart himself. In a way he is forever living the fantasies he writes, about the nostalgic moments of childhood. He has a child’s sense of wonder and naive, idealistic spirit, as he goes around marveling at the world. He has not become jaded or disillusioned either about science fiction or about its most central subject matter, travel into space.

“We have had this remarkable thing occurring during the last ten years, when the children of the world began to educate the teachers, and said, ‘Here is science fiction, read it’; and they read it and they said, ‘Hey, it’s not bad,’ and began to teach it. Only in the last seven or eight years has science fiction gotten respectable.

“Orwell’s 1984 came out thirty years ago this summer. Not a mention of space travel in it, as an alternative to Big Brother, a way to get away from him. That proves how myopic the intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s were about the future. They didn’t want to see something as exciting and as soul-opening and as revelatory as space travel. Because we can escape, we can escape, and escape is very important, very tonic, for the human spirit. We escaped Europe 400 years ago and it was all to the good, and then from what we learned, by escaping, we could come back and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to refresh you, we got our revolution, now maybe we can all revolt together against certain things.’ My point is that intellectual snobbishness permeated everything, including all the novels, except in science fiction. It’s only in the last ten years we can look back and say, ‘Oh, my God, we really were beat up all the time by these people, and it’s a miracle we survived.’“

But, I suggest, a lot of the mythic quality of space travel has been lost, now that NASA has made it an everyday reality.

“I believe that any great activity finally bores a lot of people,” he replies, “and it’s up to us ‘romantics’ – hmm?” (he makes it clear, he still dislikes the term) “to continue the endeavor. Because my enthusiasm remains constant. From the time I saw my first space covers on Science and Invention, or Wonder Stories, when I was eight or nine years old – that stuff is still in me. Carl Sagan, a friend of mine, he’s a ‘romantic,’ he loves Edgar Rice Burroughs – I know, he’s told me. And Bruce Murray, who’s another friend of mine, who’s become president of Jet Propulsion Laboratories – first time I’ve ever known someone who became president of anything! – and he’s a human being, that’s the first thing, and he happens, second, to be the president of a large company that’s sending our rockets out to Jupiter and Mars. I don’t think it’s been demystified. I think a lot of people were not mystified to begin with, and that’s a shame.”

Is Bradbury happy with the growth of science fiction? Does he like modem commercial exploitation of the genre – as in movies like Star Wars?

“Star Wars – idiotic but beautiful, a gorgeously dumb movie. Like being in love with a really stupid woman.” He gives a shout of laughter, delighted by the metaphor. “But you can’t keep your hands off her, that’s what Star Wars is. And then Close Encounters comes along, and it’s got a brain, so you get to go to bed with a beautiful film. And then something like Alien comes along, and it’s a horror film in outer space, and it has a gorgeous look to it, a gorgeous look. So wherever we can get help we take it, but the dream remains the same: survival in space and moving on out, and caring about the whole history of the human race, with all our stupidities, all the dumb things that we are, the idiotic creatures, fragile, broken creatures. I try to accept that; I say, okay, we are also the ghosts of Shakespeare, Plato, Euripedes and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Da Vinci, and a lot of amazing people who cared enough to try and help us. Those are the things that give me hope in the midst of stupidity. So what we are going to try and do is move on out to the moon, get on out to Mars, move on out to Alpha Centauri, and we’ll do it in the next 500 years, which is a very short period of time; maybe even sooner, in 200 years. And then, survive forever, that is the great thing. Oh, God, I would love to come back every 100 years and watch us.

“So there it is, there’s the essence of optimism – that I believe we’ll make it, and we’ll be proud, and we’ll still be stupid and make all the dumb mistakes, and part of the time we’ll hate ourselves; but then the rest of the time we’ll celebrate.”

(Los Angeles, May 1979)

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Ray Bradbury is probably best known for The Martian Chronicles (1950), his enduring collection of stories which use off-the-shelf science-fiction hardware (rocket ships, the planet Mars colonized by man), but explore these ideas in a spirit of fantasy as opposed to predictive reality. Bradbury’s vision of the ‘lost race’ of Martians was powerful enough to eclipse all others and become a tradition, followed in many subsequent science-fiction novels by other writers.

The Illustrated Man (1951) presents fantasy and horror stories linked by the slightly artificial device of embodying key scenes in tattoos on the body of a man who has supposedly journeyed through the various events. Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is a novel depicting a repressive future where all books must be burned, and firemen start the fires rather than put them out. The October Country (1955) is a collection of fantasy and macabre stories. Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) is a novel depicting a peaceful, innocent small town, visited by a sinister carnival which brings pure evil.

Bradbury’s recent poetry, much of it dealing with science-fiction themes, appears in a couple of recent collections.