A story attaches to the title “Other People’s Trades,” one that Primo Levi almost certainly enjoyed concealing in plain view. The title describes the book’s ostensible subject, the work that people other than the author do. If we look carefully, though, half a dozen of these essays are about his original profession, that of chemist, and a dozen more are about writing, which was his second line of work. So he does write about other people’s trades here, but not exclusively.
It is also perplexing that the first essay in the collection is about the Turin apartment where Levi lived his entire life. If there is a trade depicted in this essay, it is not that of an absentminded chemist but that of a barnacle or limpet that, having gone briefly out into the world, in the larval stage, to swim freely, in the end affixes itself to a rock and remains there for the rest of its life. What does this have to do with other people’s trades? A strong indication comes in the author’s preface. These essays, Levi confides, “are the product of a decade and more of vagabond and dilettantish curiosity . . . ‘field invasions,’ incursions into other people’s professions,” prompted, ultimately, by the impulses of “a voyeur and a busybody”—other people’s business, in short.
The title, it turns out, comes from a venerable piece of Italian folk wisdom: stick to your knitting, or mind your own business. An old book renders it as: “Every man to his trade.” The full proverb goes: “Chi fa l’altrui mestiere, fa la zuppa nel paniere.” He who meddles in other people’s business (or tries to practice a trade other than his own) might as well make soup in a breadbasket. And by breadbasket, the proverb means one made of wicker. Hardly a suitable stockpot.
But Levi defiantly hacks off the rest of the expression, clearly showing his contempt for the tidy picket fences separating fields of knowledge.
In the Preface, Levi writes: “I have frequently set foot on bridges that join (or ought to join) scientific culture with literary culture, crossing a crevasse that has always struck me as absurd. . . . It is an unnatural, needless, toxic schism, the product of long-ago taboos and the Counter-Reformation, and in some cases it can even be traced back to a small-minded interpretation of the Biblical prohibition against partaking of a certain fruit.”
Indeed, Levi seems to argue that we should eagerly devour as much of that forbidden fruit—knowledge—as we can get our hands on. Once this is understood to be the theme of the book, the way in which Levi ordered the fifty-one essays written over nearly twenty years for the Turin daily La Stampa, takes on a new meaning, pointing to knowledge, however unseemly or arcane, as a good in and of itself.
The first essay is, as noted, about the apartment where Levi was born and lived almost his entire life. The second is about Aldous Huxley, and how singularly wooden Huxley’s depictions of those outside his social class seem. The third is how all that Levi has learned as a chemist can be used in looking at things outside the realm of chemistry: how being a chemist justifies his work as a writer. The fourth—an appreciation of Rabelais’s masterwork, Gargantua and Pantagruel—is a panegyric to the getting and enjoying of knowledge, a ceaseless and vital pursuit free of any false piety. The fifth (written just before the Moon landing in July 1969) explores the human impulse to look beyond and to inquire within. The sixth is a subtle critique of Alphonse Daudet’s book Tartarin of Tarascon, which plumbs the author’s attitude of dislike toward his own character and a deep strain of hidden racism. It is as if Levi had written a series of preambles setting forth his right to stick his nose into other people’s knowledge.
There are various leitmotivs: the importance of language, the relatively puny status of man in the universe, the pointlessness of arbitrary barriers. One essay decries the practice of writing impenetrable prose, another explores a book of “odd facts,” and delights in the surprising perspectives its author provides; yet another proudly describes Levi’s youthful intuition of a linguistic link between the Alpine dialect word baita and the Hebrew word bait—both meaning “house” or “home.”
Throughout the book, common sense is the refrain—whether tinged with humor, learned references, or personal experience. After all, when we stop listening to common sense, we ignore the most intuitive lesson of all, the one that Martin Niemöller, the anti-Hitler Lutheran minister imprisoned by the Nazis from 1937 to 1945, learned at his own expense: after they’ve come for the Socialists, the trade unionists, and the Jews, they’ll eventually come for you.
—ANTONY SHUGAAR