Old photographs are cruel: they stir up sediments, cause pointless regrets. Yet I keep them, for reasons that I do not understand well—maybe sheer narcissism, maybe a vague expectation that they may interest someone or could bear witness to an epoch. I looked again at the pictures taken at the Campiello Prize ceremony in 1963 with mixed feelings, sad and happy, but with the definite impression that they portray what in my former profession is called a color change.
I had written and published my first book, If This Is a Man, in 1947, and nothing further for fourteen years. I did not feel the urge to write, and it seemed to me that nobody needed my writings. I was a chemist in a factory; my daily work was hard but almost never boring. It was concrete and gave me security. It also brought me worries, but it was my job, the trade that I had chosen and for which I had studied, I had grown up inside it, I had been educated in it, it had shaped my way of living and of looking at the world—maybe even my language. It gave me my bread, and the notion of leaving it and devoting myself to writing was far from my mind. I thought about it occasionally, on the bad days that occur in any job, but not seriously, just as we dream of islands. It was not a plan but a daydream; the Turinese do not leave certainty for uncertainty, the old ways for the new ones. After all, work is the human condition, and to work, by definition, means to get up early in the morning, to negotiate the city traffic.
The desire to write returned toward the end of 1961, unexpectedly, the way a love is born; maybe it was because the Italian economic miracle that had blossomed a little earlier had relaxed factory life somewhat. I realized that I still had a lot to say: in just one year of work (yes, this, too, was work, but light, festive, autonomous, my own) I wrote The Truce, the story of my return from prison. Unlike its older brother, this second book immediately appeared to be lively, born under a benign star, so much so that it took If This Is a Man by the hand and put it back into circulation. Nevertheless, I continued to refuse the designation of writer. I was a chemist, an expert in insulating varnishes who happened to have written two books by working overtime evenings and Sundays. I had no more doubts; with The Truce I had exhausted my reservoir of memories—I had completed the tale of my basic experience, the experience of Auschwitz and of the return from Auschwitz.
My publisher’s proposal to compete for a literary prize fell like a meteorite on my settled and orderly existence. The competition in question was the first year of the Campiello, a literary prize that was serious and important but newly launched; and it was like sloughing my skin. I felt acknowledged and flattered. At the same time I felt, within my new skin, the tickle of self-irony—you, in Venice, among career men of letters and descendants of the Doges, maybe in evening dress, still with the smell of paint on you! I remember that the crucial announcement that I was on the short list and had a good chance to win reached me at the test desk.
I was wrong to be so afraid, but I was right to guess that the Campiello was a decisive step. It was a second graduation at an age when many lower their sails; it was the entrance into a new world, full of provocations and risks—and I had not yet lost, at the age of forty-four, my taste for risk. I did not relinquish right away the security of factory work, but I accepted the label of writer and drew up for myself a different future. At a yet unspecified time I would abandon my job as a shaper of matter and undertake a new one. It was like preparing to be born a second time.
Il Gazzettino, July 25, 1982 (written on the occasion of the
twentieth presentation of the Campiello Prize, which in 1982
was awarded to If Not Now, When?)