Primo Levi's journeys to peace

Primo Levi
A TRANQUIL STAR
Unpublished stories
Translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli
164pp. Penguin. £20.
978 0 713 99955 6

 
On the jacket and the title page the stories in A Tranquil Star are described as “unpublished”. The editor, in her introduction, is more accurate, calling them “untranslated”. They are divided into two sections, “Early Stories” and “Later Stories”, though only “The Death of Marinese” (which dates from 1949) can really be described as early. Like If This Is a Man, this story concerns the recently ended war, though it is a work of fiction not autobiography. It tells how Marinese and Sante, two partisans, meet their ends; the one actively, the other passively.

Describing the composition of If This Is a Man to Philip Roth, Primo Levi insisted it was done with “no definite literary intention”, and that his model was the weekly report used in factories, whose style was precise, concise and universally comprehensible. This scientific detachment, this seeming disinterestedness, is apparent too in “The Death of Marinese”. And yet barely concealed in the short text is a sequence of images that seem to demand a more complex understanding.

When Marinese and Sante are taken away by the Germans in the back of an overcrowded truck, the former is described as slipping to the floor, where his head becomes wedged between the “bony hips” of two soldiers. Once there he begins to dream, and imagines himself “submerged in a long, narrow tunnel that had been dug into a soft, tepid substance, crimson like the light that penetrates closed eyelids”. In this reverie he feels himself moving, as if he were being pushed towards an exit. There is more. He removes a grenade – the type “shaped like a stick”, adds Levi – from the belt of the nearest soldier, and unscrews the safety cap. When it is within seconds of exploding, he rolls himself into the foetal position, “face down, his knees drawn up against his chest, the grenade wedged between his knees, his arms tight around them”. Finally, he “filled his lungs to prepare for battle and pulled the cord with all his might”. Except that it is not an umbilical cord, but the cord of the grenade, and it is death he’s about to experience, not birth. The imagery is simply too consistent to be coincidental. But what does it add to an already fine story?

In Carole Angier’s biography of Levi, The Double Bond (2002), we learn that Levi’s first child had been born in 1948. What if Levi had been thinking of the birth of Lisa as much as the death of Marinese when he composed the story? In that case the whole assumes a Janus-like quality, looking both to the past, and to the future. Another piece of evidence is the story’s concluding sentence, which is a sort of corroboration: “The truck was abandoned, and we captured it the following night”. No mention of the horrid aftermath of Marinese’s heroic deed. The truck is clean, and ready to transport its creator towards a more pacific world. In this reading, “The Death of Marinese” is a bridge between the past and the future, between war and peace, between vice and virtue, between the Lager and the world, between realism and the uncharted imagination. Fittingly, it first appeared in a journal called Il Ponte.

The next story in the collection is dated 1961, and was published in Il Mondo. Called “Bear Meat”, it is set amid the mountains, though it also contains the salty tang of the sea. It has multiple narrators, one of whom explains that ursine flesh is a metaphor for “the taste of being strong and free, which means free to make mistakes; the taste of feeling young in the mountains, of being your own master, which means master of the world”. And that taste, according to the speaker, is worth more than repose, love, success and all of life’s other rewards. As it happens, these words echo an exhortation made centuries before. By whom?

“Bear Meat” contains allusions to two writers, one named, the other not. The named writer is Dante. One of the story’s narrators cites various passages from the Divine Comedy which describe the progress of the poet and his guide across the peaks of the Underworld, from which he deduces that Dante must have done some climbing himself. The other writer is a sailor, author of a book “dear” to Levi. Here, the critic must confess his ignorance. The only sailors he can think of referred to by Levi (not counting Noah) are Ulysses, Aeneas, Robinson Crusoe and the Ancient Mariner, all of whom tasted copious amounts of bear meat in their time. Suffice it to say that the story brings together Dante and the sea, which irresistibly leads to Canto 26 of the Inferno, in which Ulysses makes the exhortation whose echo has just been heard.

It is this same passage, of course, which provides the title for the most mysterious – and enchanting – chapter of If This Is A Man. A fellow inmate of the Lager – already fluent in French and German (he’s an Alsatian) – says he would like to learn Italian. Levi offers to give him a lesson. For unknown reasons the aforementioned canto pops into his head (though not in its entirety), and he decides to use it as the basis for the first (and maybe last) class. He recalls the lines that mean so much in the camp, “Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance / Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after knowledge and excellence”. But he cannot bring to mind anything more than fragments of the lines that precede them. In the missing lines, Ulysses apologetically renounces son, father, wife and all the comforts of Ithaca, so that he may fully experience the vices and virtues of mankind. More than that, he persuades his mariners to follow him to where none has ventured before, to the unpeopled world beyond the sunset, where bear meat is the plat du jour. In other words, Dante’s Ulysses takes a very different route from that prescribed by Homer.

Needless to say, when liberated from Auschwitz, Levi imitated the more ancient mariner, and found his way back to Turin. Indeed the retelling of that journey stands in the same relation to If This Is A Man, as the Odyssey does to the Iliad. But “Bear Meat” and other stories in A Tranquil Star hint that Levi sometimes wished he had taken the example of Dante’s damned hero and followed his star to the world’s end, had been a Marinese rather than a Sante.

Instead, the seas Levi sailed were all inside his head. Like his great contemporary and friend, Italo Calvino, he described imaginary worlds and distant planets, as well as the microcosmic universe of industrial chemistry, and the comforting rhythms of work. But however far he went, and whatever he did, his anchor always remained embedded in the Lager’s unhallowed ground.

The collection’s title story (which is also its concluding one) begins as if it were a fairy story, or even an episode of Star Wars, and continues in a more scientific vein, as Levi laments the lack of a proper vocabulary to convey the immensity of space. Readers familiar with If This Is A Man will recall a similar complaint regarding the inability of language to do justice to the unique conditions in the Lager.

Just as our hunger is not that feeling of missing a meal, so our way of being cold has need of a new word . . . . If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing, wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing near.

Rather than examining the consequences of an inhuman experiment, the job of Ramon Escojido in “A Tranquil Star” is to study the heavens through a telescope. He is happy in his isolated observatory, but his wife and two children are not. What keeps the family united are regular weekend outings.

But on the weekend Levi describes, this equilibrium is disturbed by signs that the tranquil star may be anything but, may in fact have gone supernova. And so Escojido has to make a decision; will he keep his commitment to his family, or will he keep an eye on that world behind the sunset? Unlike his creator he follows the example of Dante’s Ulysses, and places curiosity over responsibility.

And what did Levi hope to find in those worlds he could imagine, but never visit? Perhaps what he wanted to witness was a virtuous enterprise commensurate with the vicious horror he had already witnessed. By electing to remain homebound, however, he added at least three volumes to the shelf of essential books, and several more – including the one under review – that ask us to consider what it means to be a man. He might not have been a Marinese, but he always was a mensch.
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Clive Sinclair's new book, Clive Sinclair's True Tales of the Wild West, will be published next spring. His novels include Meet the Wife, 2002.