Carole Angier: Levi's great strength was his fatal flaw

Primo Levi was a brilliant, hypersensitive child with a possessive and dominating mother, who would only approve of him if he was unlike his father. So he learnt to be unlike his father. He retreated into the strongest parts of himself, his intellect and will, and cut off those parts his mother condemned: his emotions and instincts, especially the most primitive ones – love and desire, anger and hate. He said so himself later: "I have no instincts, or if I do, I repress them."

It was a joke, of course; but like many jokes, it was true. Primo Levi divided himself in two, a rational, moral "higher" half, and an instinctive, emotional "lower" half, and lived only in the first one. This made him immeasurably stronger still in his rational half – it made him the genius he had potentially been from birth. He got through Auschwitz because he had learnt to suppress his emotional reactions, to endure and to live entirely in his intellect and will. And he did so afterwards, producing his great books of moral meditation, scientific observation and poetic imagination.

But there was a problem. Relying on intellect and will was a good way of getting through one year of mortal danger, but not a good way of getting through 66 years of ordinary life and ordinary relationships. Being half a mancost him all normal human ease. It made him unable to fight for himself, except through passive endurance, like his mother. It made him incapable of expressing spontaneous personal love, or hate, or anger. It made him repressed, and depressed, and in the end it killed him. Primo Levi was able to write his supremely humane books, because he had divided himself in two, and lived in his rational half only. And he died for the same reason.