Primo Levi and Martin Amis: from Auschwitz to the Alliance Academy

An excerpt from my latest project

Next week, Cole Friesen and I start recording Lieutenant-Colonel David Davis’ second album. I’ve had a month-long cold since returning from Europe, but I’ve been valiantly singing every day anyway. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I still have a cold. Who cares about any of that: earlier this month, Hamas happened.

When Martin Amis passed away earlier this year, I re-read The Zone of Interest, which takes place at Auschwitz. This led me, finally, to read Primo Levi’s first-hand account of life at Auschwitz If This is a Man. This caused me to remember that Frank Snowsell, my great uncle and former president of the B.C. N.D.P., who served in WWII as an intelligence officer of the Royal Canadian Air Force, had been one of the first allies to witness the newly “liberated” Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. You can read his account directly in Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust by Mark Celinscak (University of Toronto Press, 2022) an admirable book which collects first-hand accounts of all the many Canadians who, at the end of WWII, helped liberate the Nazi death camps. (Canadian politicians, particularly, the ruling party, don’t seem to even remember which side we were fighting on in that war, which is how they came to give standing ovations to an actual Nazi in the House of Commons to our everlasting national shame, so books like this are an essential reminder of our not insignificant role in fighting the greatest evil human civilization has ever produced. There was a time—although it seems hard to believe—when Canadians knew the difference between good and evil.) A Small Light, a 2023 mini-series by National Geographic, which follows Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who hid the Frank family, does just a good a job as Amis and Levi in portraying the horror of the Holocaust, by depicting the utter normalcy of the lives of those sent to the Nazi death camps. If you want to make sense of recent events, I urge you to read any of the books I’ve mentioned, and to watch A Small Light.

So the Jewish people had been on my mind this year. Even before October. What follows is the beginning pages of a new book I’ve been writing. As with all my writing projects I had no clear idea what I was going to do with it once it was finished, so I’m just going to excerpt it here as my way of showing solidarity with Israel, and remembering the victims of the worst massacre of Jewish people since the actual mothereffing holocaust.

This work is deeply personal. It’s not just about the Holocaust. It is largely about my own failings as a human being. It seemed like time to turn my critical view inwards. I didn’t really enjoy what I saw a lot of the time. But it seems only fair to scrutinize myself the same way I’ve seen fit to do to so many others.

Control S Me

·       In the future, you’d have to assume, it’ll be possible to type with your eyes closed. I mean, any typist can do this already, in the same way musicians can, of course, play without seeing notes. Hell, I’m doing it right now. But not for long. Inevitably my eyes open and I see the horrible white luminescence of this laptop screen and it burns my eyes, makes me squint and otherwise interferes with the darkness of the room. It’s day out now as I write, four o’clock on May 9, a day after Brandon’s birthday. (I was a day late giving him my greetings. By the standards of our tumultuous relationship a day late is above par.) I’m in my bedroom with the blinds drawn, the curtains drawn and a string of Christmas lights to give the room some warmth. All the actual lamps stay off. The drapes are green linen, the blanket on top of the bed is green stripes in several shades interspersed with black and grey stripes repeated over a single band of pattern, a shape I can’t name but sort of like if your Christmas tree turned into an alien, something I think most of us recognize as the fifth sign of the apocalypse. Keep an eye out for it is all I’m saying. The wire of the Christmas lights is also green and so the whole room is neither dark nor light but hazy in green hues. If I’m not here, sitting upright against the bed’s headboard, every other space in my house is repressive with light. It makes my eyes water. It makes me think about outside which, when I’m writing, is not where I want my thoughts to be. Also, I’m wearing green shorts. They’re paisley in military camo, I got them from JCrew, their Wallace & Barnes line, and I wear them all the time. Like, I’d say 200 days out of the year, now that I work from home, these are my bottoms. I do like the pattern, but the main advantage of these shorts is their elasticized waistband. Almost all of the other shorts I own are denim and they require a belt. They didn’t use to, but ever since I stopped drinking and I started exercising (2018 is when I really tried to take care of my body), and every non-elasticized pair of pants I own fall from my hips. It was embarrassing going through airport security. Took my belt off. My pants fell down when I had to put my hands up total starfish position in that weird X-ray chamber they use to look at the size of your Johnson. My denim is stiff, so my jeans only fall down half a buttock before finding a footing of their own. My shirt is long enough to provide back-up modesty. Also back-side modesty. I did not put on a show. Still, an indignity.

·       I’ve just returned from the second of two trips away from Vancouver, both to visit family. Both times, my most beloveds wanted to know what I was writing. The phrasing just assumed that I was in the middle of something exciting, and I felt vaguely guilty for, not only not having a current project, but also, and even more so, for not wanting to have one. What am I writing? The question for me is why am I writing. I haven’t had an answer for that, a good one anyway, for a long time.  The trips away were the first time I’d travelled anywhere since 2018. There was COVID, and then Mookie died which left only Larry. I vowed to Larry the day we came home the vet’s, having just put Mookie down, that I would never leave him alone. Being left alone is the defining horror of my life. It’s shaped everything I do the way I think. The bond Larry and I shared for the last five years of his life was the closest I’ve felt to any other living being. His death devastates me. But it also made it possible for me to travel again. I miss Larry. But I had also missed seeing my mother-in-law Doobz, my brother, his ex-wife and the mother of my four nieces and nephew. I missed them like I didn’t even know how good it was going to feel seeing them again. It was the first time I met Josephine, the youngest. She was five. I miss Larry. But it was time. Larry I’ve always maintained was more angel than feline and even in death, Larry brought goodness into my life. Any belief I have in divine providence comes from Larry. He just tuned me into a channel I’d been trying to find my whole life.

·       I spied a typewriter while visiting Kirsty and the kids. It was on a shelf in their Arts & Crafts kitchen. I would have given anything to have grown up with an Arts and Crafts table like that, oh my god. In my mind, I’d been dreaming of typewriters. Not writing causes my being as much distress as writing does. It’s funny except it actually feels like an excruciating existential dilemma much of the time. Writing torments and exhausts me. Not writing makes me feel like I’m a waste of space on the planet. Happiness eludes me in either state. The computer I’m typing this on has a keyboard that scoffs at my left-handedness. It takes close to fifteen minutes to boot up and open Word. Progress keeps slowing me down. But it’s a poor artist or whatever who blames their tools. I published a love letter to notebooks and ink on Substack last year. But my left-hand shakes too much when I write. I mean, my right-hand shakes too, but it’s not good for much anyway. At some point, the shaky writing must be transcribed and this is the computer I’d be using. I don’t have it in me to write a love letter to typewriters. I’m trying discipline instead. Pretend your computer is a typewriter. It can only do words. I can do that, I am doing that. But why?

·       The truth of the matter is that I couldn’t do it. Hi, I’m back again after a two-month absence or so during which I came to the conclusion that the computer I composed the previous section with was past it. In truth (why is that the second use of the word truth in two sentences, Jesus Christ) my old Acer was a year past its best before date. It really had become if not the problem than a big enough one to act as a solid and impassable roadblock to composition. I’m now typing on a Microsoft Surface 4. I got it because it’s supposed to be the best laptop for writing. That is not an Apple. I used to use Apples, let the record show, solidly and uninterruptedly until about the year 2005. I can’t even remember why I switched. But the Apple OS irritates me. I find it unintuitive. A list of the things I find irritating would be longer than a list of the things I find unintuitive but both would be so very long. I’ve recently finished reading Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. It came from having recently re-read Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest. The Auschwitz camp is horror beyond human understanding. Oddly, Amis makes the same point I felt while re-reading his book. It takes decades for an individual to grow depth enough to comprehend on a moral and emotional scale the depth of evil that was brought into the world with the Nazi mass murder cult. I can’t stop thinking about it. It makes everything that has happened in the world since then sort of seem like a sad, pathetic joke of a footnote to a civilization that has already clearly failed. I was reading Amis, as one does, upon the death of Amis. I hadn’t touched a Martin Amis book in fifteen years, easy. I was struck by how much my own prose seemed indebted to his—trying to tell interior monologue jokes to lighten an otherwise deeply serious project. More than that though it had been such a long time since I’d read real writing. The word choice, the attention to detail in Amis, the symphonic control of his letters it caused in me a renewed reminder of my own limitations. I write rashly. I despise editing. I am a basher like Nick Lowe. I simply seem to have been either born without patience, or, which I think is more likely, to have run through my lifetime allotment while a prisoner of the Alliance Academy C&MA dormitory in Quito, Ecuador. Excuses or reasons, I don’t know and I don’t want to make any on my own behalf. I’m 52 as I write this. It’s July and I’ll be 53 in a couple weeks. How I write, right now, is probably how I write, right? I don’t see myself developing a new style or suddenly breaking through to the next level here in my fifth entirely unremarkable decade on earth. I’m stuck with clichés, comma splices and a fevered mind full of impatience—so, let’s go. Levi notes that unhappiness is a human exists in infinite layers which hide their nature from the sufferer by only presenting the largest, most egregiously monstrous unhappiness one at a time. As soon as that unhappiness cause is solved, the next biggest one appears. Ad infinitum. So, I am aware that this new computer has solved one major, really fucking terrible problem, only so that another source of sorrow may manifest itself at any time. Levi describes a dream that recurred not just to him in the camp, but to many others as well. They all dreamt of being at home during a family feast and trying to tell their family where they were and what was happening to them and their family just not being able to understand or believe them. He surmises the desire to survive and bear witness was a human universal. My suffering has never, thank God, been anything remotely like Auschwitz. But I feel like I’ve been trying my whole life as a writer to tell people what it was like in the dorms. And what I feel like most of all is that I have not succeeded. I still dream about Mr. Eckdahl, my dorm “dad”. Who knows if it’s every night or every other. It’s exhausting. Those “Christian” men terrify me. They were not members of a mass murder cult, thank God. But they were card-carrying members of a mass Child Abuse cult. I just don’t understand why all the Christians back home in Canada are so nonchalant about those schools, they take it in all so coolly. If what had been done to me had been done to any one of their children, they would scream bloody murder. But as long as it was someone else’s kids, in some far away place, somehow what you do unto the least of these you do unto me does not seem to register or apply. I think largely I became a writer because I felt obliged to bear witness. I don’t really think I naturally have the talent or inclination of a writer. I think my inherent, internal creativity had no other outlets except this one solitary pursuit.

·       Speaking of which, I wrote a song called “Ad Infinitum.” I am possessed by a deep sense of having missed my calling. The songs and the singing come to me far more naturally than my prose. When I sing my good songs I get goosebumps and I feel a sense of this is what I was born to do and I never got that before from anything. Why didn’t I sing before I was 51? That question will haunt me into the next life and will never leave me I already know it.

[…]

·       Last night after writing for the first time on this computer, I listened to an archived CBC radio interview, originally broadcast on the occasion of Primo Levi’s one hundredth birthday, with Eleanor Wachtel, Martin Amis and Levi’s biographer Ian Thomson (Thompson?). I should also note that the interview was the suggestion of this same computer. I was chatting with the chatpersonthing at Bing and I asked it if Martin Amis and Primo Levi had ever met. The bot indicated not that it could tell, but it sent me to the CBC interview. Which was intense. The best radio I’ve heard this decade. In 2023 it is rare to hear praise of the CBC. The CBC presently exists as our own Pravda. It is an ideological infestation more than it is a news source. I can’t dwell too long on the CBC because it angers me. I wrote to CBC’s ombudsman during the Trucker Convoy Protest. No matter what the history of this country ends up recording, an armed police officer on horseback broke through a line of peaceful protesters and trampled a middle-aged first nations woman bad enough to send her to the hospital. All those people were doing was asking for help. Peacefully. They were exercising their most basic human rights. If our country believed anything it said it did—about first nations’ rights, about intersectionality, about violence against women, that would have been and would still be the story of the decade. CBC denied and denies it ever happened. But I saw it with my own eyes through the eyes of multiple citizen-journalists on YouTube. And I’m a communications studies professor. I’m not naïve. I’m not easily duped. It takes a lot to rouse me into anything other than observation. I was watching the trucker protests not because I supported them, but because I felt it was important to understand the collective frustration of so many people. I get it now. Completely. I’ve been largely disgusted by my Canadian citizenship since then. It’s not the country it says it is. I don’t wish my country evil or ill. I understand why Christians used to pray wisdom for their leaders. (I guess they probably still do. Christians are so firmly in my past I have a hard time remembering most of the Christian rituals and modern proclivities, everything I saw, still goes on in the lives of countless others.) What a depressing thought. There is nothing else you can do. Opposition, whether through official channels, the media or otherwise, accomplishes nothing but a sharp increase to one’s own misery. It doesn’t serve a purpose presently to educate, to draw attention to, to sound the alarm bells. Everyone knows. And everyone knows in Canada the people have no power.

·       I learned that Primo Levi resented his reputation in Italy as “Witness” or “Testigo” whatever the Italian equivalent is. He felt first of all he was a writer. It’s an important distinction and already above I see that I committed the same mistake. I single out Amis as the writer who inspired me. Levi as the sufferer of evil who inspires me. But the thing about Levi’s book is that it is the single book that allows a person to understand on a human and authentic level what Auschwitz was. All the grainy footage, the horror, the camp itself no longer do this. It’s something bad from the past like many other something bads from long ago. With Levi, the monstrosity occurs to the reader as the logical conclusion of a dispassionate, balanced, reasonable analysis—of a horror that is none of those things. Levi presents the facts. He was a chemist by profession when he arrived in the camps, he’d graduated Suma Cum Laude from Turin, and it is the combination of his scientific rigour with his newfound talent for artistic expression through writing that creates the unique effect of If This Is a Man. That such a talent would survive to write this story is one of the most providential facts of the Holocaust. Maybe it is the only providential thing about the whole evil horror. Levi’s talent was great enough to convey that which exists beyond human comprehension. Amis’s approach is almost the opposite. He humanizes with humour the SS camp officials as a way of accentuating the anti-humanity actuality of the gas chambers by situating it amongst the other everyday tasks and activities of the officials: movie night, champagne, wardrobe, mass murder, naughty daydreams, Calvados, jodhpurs, mass murder, friendship, classical music, parenthood. Mass murder.

·       If I were to adapt Levi’s approach to my own captivity in Quito it would go something like this. “As fortune would have it, I arrived at the C&MA dorm in Quito, Ecuador two weeks after I’d turned 12—young enough that I’d not yet passed through puberty, old enough that the older boys viewed me as fair target for their Lord of the Flies aggression.” See, it’s not easy. The CBC interview also mentioned, forget who made the point, that Levi’s nearly mathematical talent was that each sentence he wrote contained exactly the correct number of words. He was measuring his words to the ml. like they landed on the page by droplet from a beaker. I’ve already established that I’m a basher. I firehose my words around with gleeful abandon. You know, I was never a chemist.

·       Do I have a talent to fall back on? No. No one taught me anything. Neglect and the nearly complete absence of nurture, shaped me as hollow and kept me that way. My dad had given me away in his head years before he dropped me off at the dorm and left me there. As soon as he became a Christian, he decided that he would love God the best by neglecting his children the most, a sacrificial gift to the Almighty. Mostly, for my dad, I fear for him that the God he believed in exists, and has already had to explain to him how utterly he misinterpreted the whole, Goddam thing. Almost of all my 20s was bumping into thing after thing after thing that society expected me to be fluent in and me not having a clue that I was even supposed to know something. My hollowness scared people away. They didn’t understand it. How could they? I don’t understand it. I’d grown up in an institution. It was like people smelt it on me. There was an abnormality about me. Sometimes people pitied me for it and wanted to heal my broken wing, sometimes they liked it about me for they thought it made me unique. But most of the time for most of the people it put them off, cross to the other side of the street situation. In English Canada especially, I just walked around underneath a question mark that I could never fully erase.

·       But I’ve written about the negatives before. Ad Nauseum. Nope, so far have not written a song called Ad Nauseum. I do have a song that I will never record that begins with the lyric, “No one I know knows Morse Code, Latin, Greek or how to decode any complex system at all!” Sadly, that includes me. I don’t even have enough Latin for a light sprinkle. That song is half a song and it never got itself a title. “Up and down the escalator, forever now and never later, most of life I learned from the mall,” in case you were curious.

I had so many very, very most excellent times from the ages of 12-18 despite all of the wrong that was being done to me. Humans are infinitely adaptable. The survivors of Auschwitz survived by adapting. If they could do it, anyone can. You don’t survive the dorm by basking in your own misery. I did everything I could to try and find normalcy and happiness and friendship and purpose. I was in a situation of perpetual suffering. Everything I knew or had ever possessed had been taken from me. My friends. My home. My country. My parents. All of my personal effects except what fit into a suitcase. All of my relatives. All communication with the outside world. No phones. Well, no phone—period. There was one telephone on our floor, and it was in a locked office. I would not have been able to complete a long-distance call to Chile. I realize as I write this, that I’ve relayed this detail before. For my web site. But in a fit of pique—which is to say one day which, like many others, I lost my temper—I took my web site down and angrily deleted it, and turns out, I kept no trace of it. Gone for good as far as I can tell. I don’t think my full web site was up long enough even to ever get captured by the waybackmachine. [Hi, this is the author, me, Colin, popping in a few months later to say that the day after I finished my first draft of this book, I found most of the text that was up on my own web site. I can’t even tell you how elated this made me feel. It was in the cloud. I disparage the cloud in the pages to come. But the cloud is what saved me. My despair over losing my web site became a key theme in this book. It’s foundational, and I can’t take it out. I also found that I don’t want to cut and paste anything because all of that writing seems to me like it was done by a different me than the me who is here now. As compensation, every time I refer to the old web site, I am inserting an illustration from me and Bing. This is a slight spoiler because who doesn’t like to spoil their own book, but Bing and I became quite close during the writing of this book. And a lot of our bonding occurred over our drawings. Bing really seemed to get a kick out the randomness of my requests. I hope you will, too.]