The lot of biographers is to be stymied by imperfect evidence -- missing letters, reluctant witnesses, fading memories, and the greatest silencer of all, death. How they react to such obstacles may reveal as much about themselves as their subjects. In recent years, the frustrations of biography have called forth some wonderfully unorthodox responses.
Perhaps the most unusual case is that of Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris, as the authorized biographer of Ronald Reagan, was granted unprecedented access to the then-sitting president -- but said he found Reagan's conversation incoherent and his persona impenetrable. His response, after 14 years and considerable depression, was Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999), in which an older, fictional version of the author and other heavily footnoted fictional characters relate their imaginary encounters with the elusive Reagan. Morris's pastiche of fact and fiction was a postmodernist conceit worthy of John Barth, but, for the most part, the critics were not amused.
By contrast, Robert A. Caro, the Newsday investigative reporter turned biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, has taken refuge in obsessive research. At once passionately opinionated and addicted to detail, he has spent decades courting witnesses and scouring archives in order to lay bare Johnson's darkest secrets. While his anti-Johnson tendentiousness may have marred Means of Ascent (Volume 2 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson), Caro's latest, Master of the Senate, has garnered widespread praise for its depiction of the majority leader's legislative legerdemain.
Into this arena, with its inevitable pitfalls and increasingly self-conscious solutions, has stepped Carole Angier with The Double Bond (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a massive, important, and quirky new biography of Primo Levi. Angier, the author of an award-winning biography of Jean Rhys, employs a touch of both Morris's literary imagination and Caro's journalistic intrepidity, but she exercises more restraint than the former and more discretion than the latter. The result is occasionally precious, meandering, and overwrought -- but also indispensable to anyone seriously interested in Levi.
Born in 1919 in Turin, where he lived nearly all his life in the same apartment, the great Italian-Jewish memoirist of the Holocaust killed himself in 1987 by jumping off the third-floor landing. Suicide was a fate he shared with many other famous survivors of Nazi concentration camps, including the poet Paul Celan and the memoirist Jean Améry. And yet Levi had seemed an unlikely victim. (Some few, though not Angier, still speculate that the fall might have been accidental.)
In If This Is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved, Levi cast a cool eye on life and death, heroism and villainy -- and the gray zone in between. His best works are essentially memoirs, leavened with gentle humor and irony, and composed with a novelist's gift for character, metaphor, and narrative structure. He seemed to have mastered, if anyone could have, the experience of Auschwitz, to have contained it in words, if not in memory.
So the task of any Levi biographer -- Myriam Anissimov attempted it, too, in her 1996 account, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist -- is to connect his life, his work, and his death in a way that makes sense of all three. Angier's focus is both wider than Anissimov's -- she spends far more time and space recounting the lives of Levi's friends and relatives -- and deeper. Depression alone can account for suicide, but Angier seeks the psychological roots of Levi's depression, even though a family history of suicide suggests a genetic predisposition.
She takes the title of her book from Levi's own final, unfinished work, which, like The Periodic Table, employs metaphors borrowed from his day job, as an industrial chemist. Angier notes that the Italian Il doppie legame has two possible meanings, referring to both the double bond in organic chemistry and the double bind in psychiatry. Levi's psyche -- his hidden inner life -- is her ultimate prey, and Angier proves a determined hunter.
The barriers to understanding that she faced were common ones -- above all, the refusal to cooperate by the writer's widow, Lucia, who also barred Angier from seeing Levi's personal papers. The tragedy and mystery of his death no doubt made an outsider's probing particularly unwelcome. Another obstacle was what Angier describes as Levi's typically Piedmontese reserve, which kept him from commenting in detail about his wife, his mother, and his children in his writings (even as he immortalized many of his friends and more-distant relatives).
The Double Bond alternates between traditional third-person narration, rich in detail and literary analysis, and first-person accounts of Angier's sometimes faltering quest for information. She is especially good at pinpointing the ways in which Levi embroidered the exploits of his friends and others in his memoirs. Cesare, the good-hearted con artist and fellow Auschwitz survivor in The Truce, is modeled, for instance, on Lello Perugia, a former Communist partisan, a Jew, and a fellow Auschwitz survivor whom Levi met in the camp infirmary. But Levi, Angier says, made him into a character -- "rougher, poorer and simpler than he was." The famous story of Levi's correspondence with the German chemist he encountered in the Buna laboratory of I.G. Farben at Auschwitz is also not quite as he relates it in The Periodic Table. Levi was, in reality, less harsh with the man -- who had helped him in small ways -- than the book indicates, Angier says.
But, in both of these cases, as elsewhere, some details remain elusive. And Angier makes their elusiveness and her own doubts part of the story. What she calls her "irrational chapters" are honest and sometimes surprising. In them, she herself is the principal character, the confidante of many of Levi's surviving friends. At one point, she climbs a mountain with the ebullient, 75-year-old Alberto Salmoni, with whom she says she is "half in love." After the dangerous expedition, she feels the same exhilaration that she imagines Levi must have felt in climbs with Salmoni long ago. The present falls away, revealing the past -- or so Angier hopes.
Angier also gets close -- closer, at least, than past biographers -- to Levi's many intimate women friends. The core of her argument about Levi's "double bind" is that he struggled with both sexual desire and repression; that he both hated women and loved them; that he often feared acting on his impulses; and that he suffered as a result. After numerous crushes, he found in Lucia his first taste of sexual love, Angier tells us. Yet despite this promising start, she says, the couple was badly, even tragically, matched.
How does Angier know this? Her sources include a novel by a local historian loosely based on rumored family history, a single Levi poem, and, more convincingly, quotes from various relatives and friends. Already pathologically tied to his aging mother, according to Angier, Levi felt imprisoned in his marriage to Lucia, an attractive art-history student who, in the postwar years, taught him how to dance. "Neither of them knew yet how strong he really was, and how much he would need his freedom; nor how weak he was, and how little he would dare to seize it," Angier writes, with her characteristic fondness for paradox. Later, Angier says, Lucia -- who was shyer and more withdrawn even than her husband -- would grow jealous of his friendships and seek to bind him more tightly to home.
And yet Levi did seize his freedom, and not just through the serene brilliance of his writing. Angier suggests that he may have been, briefly, the lover of Tullia Ami, an interpreter at the chemical plant he managed and his travel companion on two trips to Russia in the 1970s. (Ami died of cancer in 1991.) Angier speaks also of his lifelong love for Gabriella Garda, a fellow chemist (and, later, chemistry teacher) whom he wrote about as Giulia Vineis in The Periodic Table. "She was his opposite, but also his twin. She was everything," gushes Angier. For Levi, Garda was the road not taken, and they fantasized about marrying after their spouses were gone. But theirs was not a sexual bond, and they were never lovers, she tells Angier.
Angier really hits tabloid pay dirt when she finds -- and leaves partially hidden -- two pseudonymous women who loved Levi in his middle and later years. The extent of the relationships remains unclear, though they were probably platonic. Angier allows the women -- she calls them Lilith (Levi's name for her as well, because of the temptation she posed) and Gisella -- to dole out scraps of information but withhold far more. Lilith, says Angier, was "an admirable opponent," beautiful, mysterious, sad. As for Gisella: "She had known him well, and tried to help him, towards the end. But that was all she could say."
But Angier, though deeply protective of her sources, pieces together clues: Levi told others that Gisella was his "last, best love"; Lilith tells the author that "he loved me to the very end." Gisella finally decides to share her copies of his unpublished work, as well as notes made from her diary that shed light on Levi's chronic bouts with depression. They make clear that he experienced considerable mental anguish near the end -- and that, amazingly, he had felt stronger and more alive even in Auschwitz.
None of those revelations is likely to bring any comfort to the already defensive, privacy-minded Lucia, the most important source on Levi who is still mute. And yet embedded in Angier's bleak assessment of their marriage -- and her kid-glove treatment of his other loves -- is a lesson about the wisdom of cooperating with biographers. Had Lucia done so, had she at least tried to relate her side of the story, would Angier have dared to be so unkind?
In any case, without Lucia, this most conscientious of biographers is still often reduced to informed guesswork. At least she is forthright about the quicksand on which she -- and we, her readers -- are trying to find a footing.
Julia M. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic based in Philadelphia.
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