Primo Levi by Ian Thomson

Author:Ian Thomson [Thomson, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448180738
Publisher: Random House

As Levi expected, Lello was offended by The Truce and a breach ensued that lasted many years. Of course ‘Cesare’ was conceived in the spirit of light-hearted comedy – his absurdities sprang not from dreary realism, but from Levi’s own story-telling creativity – but Lello did not see it that way. ‘He was quite severe with me,’12 Levi recalled, ‘he complained that The Truce would have been a “much more important” book if I’d got my facts right.’ In a subsequent letter to Perugia (1980) Levi wrote: ‘It’s a fact that having a writer as a friend is a risky business.’

If Perugia was upset by The Truce, the French prisoner Paul Steinberg was mortified by what Levi had done to him. Steinberg, by his own admission, had survived the camp by adopting a cynical disregard for others. Yet his transformation into the low, creeping flatterer ‘Henri’ of If This Is a Man had been a very great shock to him. Was this the same man? Steinberg was scarcely seventeen when he entered the camp, but the semi-fictionalised ‘Henri’ is twenty-eight. Perhaps Levi thought that Steinberg’s worldly cynicism would be more credible in an older man. He disparaged the Frenchman’s sexuality by comparing him to the arrow-pierced ‘San Sebastian’ as painted in 1527 by Giovanni ‘Sodoma’ Bazzi: Sebastian, of course, being a favourite saint among homosexuals.

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