Born in Turin in 1919 of middle-class parents whose ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition, Primo Levi was subjected in the thirties first to Italian racial laws that threatened his academic studies, and then to German racial edicts that threatened his life. Because of a sympathetic professor who agreed to be his dissertation advisor, he finished his studies at the University of Turin, where he was granted the Ph.D. in chemistry that eventually saved him. Early in 1943, Levi left Turin with a group of ten friends and fled to the mountains with the intention of joining Giustizia e Liberta, the Italian resistance movement. These plans were aborted when Levi was arrested in the December of that year by the Fascists, to whom he admitted being a Jew. By February of 1944, he was imprisoned in Auschwitz. There, working in a chemical laboratory but expecting death at any moment, he knew he was living what he called “the fundamental experience” of his life.

After the war’s end, he returned to Turin where he resumed his profession of chemist. In 1948, the year after his first book, Survival in Auschwitz, was published (if hardly noticed), he was made manager of a laboratory in a paint factory, the position he held until he retired in 1977. In 1975 he published The Periodic Table, in which, among other things, he acknowledged his debt to his scientific profession. Widely recognized by this time as one of Italy’s most important writers, he continued to produce poetry, memoirs, fiction, and essays.

Levi committed suicide in 1987—hurling himself over the railing of the marble staircase outside his fourth-floor apartment. It was the same apartment in which he was born in 1919, where he and his wife raised their children, and where this interview took place in July of 1985. When we met, Levi led me into his study, where we sat on a leather couch and drank coffee served by the Levi’s maid. A computer sat on the desk, and Levi mentioned how useful it was to him in composing his fiction. Like Levi himself, the room, whose windows looked out on the Corso Re Umberto, was extremely neat and well ordered.

In his person as in his writing, Primo Levi was a master of the understated. Speaking gently but animatedly and with the wry sense of humor that became increasingly evident in his later work, he ranged over topics as diverse as Tzvetan Todorov’s theory of language, Italy’s socioeconomic structure, and the need to have all scientists study ethics in the university as part of their training.

Patient, soft-spoken, diffident, Primo Levi was nevertheless capable of intense passion. Relating the fundamental concerns of life to science, particularly its concision and precision, Primo Levi was able to perfect his art. The Periodic Table, a history of his family as well as of his time, is also a history of his own evolution from a scientist to a writer, which he relates metaphorically in the story of the carbon atom. In “Carbon,” the last chapter of the book, Levi presents one of his major themes: the representation of matter as the universal thread that not only connects one life to another, not only to all life itself, but also to the very matter from which life is derived. Thus, that infinitesimal trace of matter, that particle of carbon, takes on symbolic significance of cosmological proportions.

The year before he jumped to his death Levi published The Drowned and the Saved, in which he spoke of the pain he suffered from having been a prisoner at Auschwitz, the shame that continued to torment him, the revulsion he still felt not only towards those who participated in the brutality but also towards those who could have but did not speak out against it. He believed, as he mentioned during our meeting, that all people have a responsibility to each other as well as to other living things, not only because of our moral and ethical tradition, but also because, whether ape or apple, we are all made up of the same material.

INTERVIEWER

Could you say something about your education?

PRIMO LEVI

I had a classical education. Training in writing was serious. Oddly enough, I wasn’t fond of the Italian literature program. I was fond of chemistry, so I refused the humanistic teaching of literature, but as matters go it entered me through the skin without my knowing. I engaged in a sort of polemic against my teachers because they insisted on proper construction of the phrases and so on. I was very cross with them because to me it was a waste of time when what I was looking for was a comprehension of the universal meanings—of the stars, the moon, microbes, animals, plants, chemistry and so on. All the rest—history, philosophy and so on—was simply a barrier to be crossed so I could get my diploma and enter the university.

INTERVIEWER

Your books suggest a deep as well as a very broad reading—American, Italian, German literature.

LEVI

Yes, my father was fond of reading. And so, although he was not very rich, he was generous in giving me books. It was different then. Today, it’s easier to find foreign books everywhere—translated or not. You just go to a bookshop, and everything is there. At that time, it was not easy because the Fascists were very keen about distinguishing: this book, yes, this book, no. They allowed, for instance, translated English or American books if they were critical of English or American society. The books of D. H. Lawrence about life in the coal mines were not only published in Italy but distributed widely because they were so critical of the condition of miners in England. The implication was that Italian miners’ lives were not like this. Lawrence mistook fascism for a romantic adventure, one reason more for translating him. Yes. The Fascist censors were intelligent, in their way. Admitting something and excluding something else. Like Hemingway, for instance. Hemingway had been a quasi-pseudo-communist in Spain. His books in translation came into Italy only after the war. My father let me read Freud, for instance, at twelve.

INTERVIEWER

Really!

LEVI

Illegally. Freud was not admitted. But my father managed to have a translation of The Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I didn’t understand it.

INTERVIEWER

What about other American writers? Mark Twain? Walt Whitman?

LEVI

Mark Twain was politically neutral. Who else? John Dos Passos—translated. Sholem Asch—translated. Well, Italy was not completely cut off from abroad. Melville was translated by Pavese. Moby-Dick was a discovery; it had no political implications. I read it at twenty. I was not a boy anymore, but I was fascinated by him. Cesare Pavese was one of the great translators though hardly orthodox. He distorted it, fit it into the Italian language. He wasn’t a seaman—Pavese—he hated the sea. So, he had to prepare himself. I knew him. I met him twice before he committed suicide. In 1950, at full literary success, he killed himself in a room in the Hotel Bologna—for mysterious reasons, but then every suicide is mysterious. He had sex difficulties, apparently, without really being impotent. A sort of sexual timidity. Moreover, he was a very complicated man. He was never satisfied with his work as a writer. Political difficulties too—because he was a follower of communism during the war, but hadn’t the courage to go in to the resistance. And so after the war, he had a sort of guilt complex for not having fought the Germans. These are some reasons for his suicide. But I don’t think I have exhausted them.

INTERVIEWER

In The Periodic Table, you talk of the difference between the spirit and matter, suggesting that only through matter can we understand the universe and its components.

LEVI

The Fascist philosophy insisted a lot upon spirit. The slogan was: it is the spirit that masters matter. For instance, the Italian Army was badly equipped but if its spirits dominated matter, so we could win a war even without the equipment. The idea was that if you had the spirit, you’d be able to win. It was foolish, but it dominated the mood of the school. In the language taught us in philosophy hours, the word spirit had a very ambiguous meaning. Most of my comrades accepted it. I was cross with this insisting upon spirit. What is spirit? Spirit isn’t soul. I was not a believer; I am not a believer. Spirit is something you can’t touch. At that time it seemed to me an official lie insisting upon something you can’t experience with your eyes, your ears, with your fingers.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a danger in the spirit . . . that it can control reason.

LEVI

Mind you, spirit is instinct not reason. In fact, reason was discouraged because it was the tool of criticism. In their language, spirit was something very indefinite. A good citizen has to be tuned . . . You know Orwell? Do you remember the afterword of 1984 about Newspeak? It was copied from totalitarianism. The fact was many things in Fascist Italy didn’t work at all. But teaching did. They were careful about having anti-Fascist teachers discarded, thrown away, or punishing them, and having enthusiastic teachers instead of them. So Fascist ideas painlessly penetrated, one of them this preeminence of spirit and not matter—the very reason I chose to be a chemist, to have something under my fingers that could be verified as true or false.

INTERVIEWER

The spirit can never be proven except by those who believe.

LEVI

Yes. The same problems discussed by Plato are still discussed. There is no end to the discussion about what it means to be, to exist, if the soul is immortal or not. To the contrary, with the natural sciences any idea can be proved or disproved. Thus it was a relief for me to shift from indefinite discussions to something concrete, to what can be tested in the laboratory, in the test tube. You see it, you feel it.