Page 0, Primo Levi and a c**k up!

Give me a break! I haven't finished Hammett yet. It's amazing how you cannot imagine Sam Spade as anybody but Humphrey Bogart, isn't it? And Joel Cairo IS Peter Lorre. And Gutman IS Sydney Greenstreet. Iconic performances in what must have seemed at the time, a throwaway film.

Bit like Casablanca, I guess.

And I can't believe I've mis-spelt Sartre all the way through this blog! I mean it's like spelling Martin as Highdigger! I've corrected what I've found but there are no doubt others I've missed. Sorry Jean-Paul. Really, I mean that, I'm not just saying it. Sorry!

Strange, in a way, titling the last blog "Call me Ishmael". A hero, Alan Coren, English humourist, much indebted to S J Perelman, and author of the Idi Amin diaries, once did a piece on the misplaced comma. He used Melville's opening line, only in the piece it was "Call me, Ishmael". What followed was a short spoof of Moby Dick in Melville's style which revolved around Ahab's answerphone :). It used to be here but I cannot find it and memory is so unreliable...........

I left a comment on the previous blog which was the opening paragraph to 'If this is a man' by Primo Levi. Levi was an Auschwitz survivor, an Italian Jew, but a chemist not a writer, at least not initially. And yet in 'If..' he lays out in the most exquisite prose, a perpetual dilemma. Where does hope come from? How do you stay alive, want to stay alive, when: "To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze, from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement."

Does his faith help? It's never seemed that way to me. A belief that something so wrong could never be right? However twisted society becomes? I don't think so. So why, when he believes himself destroyed does he not only continue living but spends the remainder of his life writing life affirming texts? There is, must be, something in the human spirit which provides for all occasions, all adversity. I just wish I knew what it was. Perhaps it's what the English call 'bloody mindedness'. That perverse notion that when the brown, squishy stuff hits the round, twirly thing, you don't duck, you don't move out of the way, you just stand your ground. And then when it's all over, you smile sweetly at the fan and walk away, confident in the knowledge that you could beat the crap out of it now but you don't really need or want to, do you? You're better than that, aren't you? You survived, didn't you?

There is a somewhat sad postscript to all of this. Levi died after falling down the stairs of his apartment. What no-one knows is whether it was deliberate or an accident.

So many of the Auschwitz survivors felt guilty that they had survived!