Chemistry Becomes a Muse the Periodic Table

By Patricia Blake

Many great writers have been obliged to moonlight, some at seemingly incongruous occupations. Christopher Marlowe was a government spy, Henry Fielding a criminal-court justice, Franz Kafka an insurance-company clerk and Herman Melville a customs inspector. Among living writers, Primo Levi has held perhaps the most improbable job. For two decades the Italian author worked as a commercial chemist, analyzing resins and rock samples for makers of varnish and other products. Can literature spring from such mundane matter? Chemistry would seem as impenetrable to the literary imagination as lead is to the X ray.

Nonetheless, as this affecting memoir demonstrates, chemistry in the right hands can be a powerful muse. For Levi, every compound has a distinctive personality. Hydrochloric acid "is one of those frank enemies that come at you shouting from a distance . . . After having taken in one breath of it you expel from your nose two short plumes of white smoke, like the horses in Eisenstein's movies." Chemistry's periodic table, which arranges the elements according to their atomic number, is Levi's metaphor for the relationships that compose a human life. The Periodic Table consists of 21 episodes, most of them autobiographical, named after elements from argon to zinc, each with its relative density, characteristic properties and unique function in the author's remarkable life story.

He begins with a loving re-creation of the small Jewish community in the northwest Italian region of Piedmont, where he was born in 1919. His ancestors resembled argon, the author explains, because it is an inactive gas: "They were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated and gratuitous discussion." Like argon, the Piedmont Jews behaved eccentrically, never combining with other elements. They spoke the rough Piedmontese dialect inlaid with Hebrew --"sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier." As deftly translated by Raymond Rosenthal, the oddities of speech are a delight. So is the "inexplicable imprecation" for which Levi's great-grandfather was famous: "May he have an accident shaped like an umbrella."

Levi's initiation into chemistry's ordered universe came in the late 1930s as chaos threatened the world. While Mussolini mimicked Hitler's menacing rhetoric, the Jewish student sought relief in science from "all the dogmas, all the unproved affirmations, and all the imperatives" of Fascism. His comrade in this search for verifiable values was Sandro, a peasant youth who later became a celebrated resistance fighter. Sandro dragged Levi on exhausting treks through mountain passes, up rock cliffs and over slopes of ice. "He felt the need," Levi says, "to prepare himself (and to prepare me) for an iron future, drawing closer month by month." In 1944 Sandro was executed by the Fascists, who left his body in the road. Levi's superb portrait of him in the chapter titled "Iron" remains his indestructible monument.

Levi also joined the anti-Fascist resistance, and in 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz. His experience in the death camp is the subject of two haunting books, published in English as If This Is a Man (1959) and The Reawakening (1965). In The Periodic Table, the author once again stirs the embers of his agonized memory. The indomitable prisoner Alberto, a memorable figure in If This Is a Man, re-emerges in the chapter "Cerium" to join Levi in a lifesaving enterprise. As a slave laborer in an Auschwitz chemical laboratory, the writer stole some rods of ironcerium, an alloy used to make flints for cigarette lighters. The flints that Levi and Alberto perilously whittled from the rods could be exchanged for bread in the camp. As Levi puts it, "The total: 120 flints, two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us."

The last chapter is a meditation on carbon, "the element of life." Levi traces the journey of a carbon atom from its original place in a limestone ledge. As 100 years pass, the atom enters the lungs of a falcon, pauses in a sun-struck leaf and lodges in the eye of a moth. Finally it enters the author's bloodstream and, ultimately, his brain. Levi closes his book with these words: The atom "is in charge of my writing . . . guides this hand of mine to impress on the paper this dot, here, this one."

Distillates of Levi's chemistry and life, the potent images in this book illustrate the insight of that great master of the extended metaphor, Herman / Melville. In Moby Dick, Ahab reflects, "Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." The Periodic Table offers fresh proof of that assertion on every page.