Survival In Auschwitz (5+*) by Primo Levi

 

I picked up this painful memoir by Primo Levi, who was interned at Auschwitz at the age of 24,  knowing I soon would be visiting the place whose name instantly evokes evil.  His book is nothing less than an autopsy of the human condition that beggars belief:  how could people survive such torturous conditions?  He posits that they fall into two categories, the "drowned" and the "saved."  The vast majority--he calls them "musselman," a German word of unknown etymology--fall into the former and soon die, whether from starvation, illness or gassing.   The few who are "saved"--certainly not in the Christian, or spiritual sense--have something extra.

At Auschwitz, in 1944, of the old Jewish prisoners (we will not speak of the others here, as their condition was different), “kleine Nummer,” low numbers less than 150,000, only a few hundred had survived; not one was an ordinary Häftling [prisoner], vegetating in the ordinary Kommandos, and subsisting on the normal ration. There remained only the doctors, tailors, shoemakers, musicians, cooks, young attractive homosexuals, friends or compatriots of some authority in the camp; or they were particularly pitiless, vigorous and inhuman individuals, installed (following an investiture by the SS command, which showed itself in such choices to possess satanic knowledge of human beings) in the posts of Kapos, Blockältester, “ etc.; or finally, those who, without fulfilling particular functions, had always succeeded through their astuteness and energy in successfully organizing, gaining in this way, besides material advantages and reputation, the indulgence and esteem of the powerful people in the camp. Whosoever does not know how to become an “Organisator,” “Kombinator,” “Prominent” (the savage eloquence of these words!) soon becomes a “musselman.” In life, a third way exists, and is in fact the rule; it does not exist in the concentration camp.

Needless to say, it had never occurred to me that being an "attractive young homosexual" would confer a survival benefit in a concentration camp, but that's the terrible beauty of this book.  Levi bears such specific witness to the Nazi atrocities--and their impact on the prisoners, both Jewish and not--that they can never be denied.  A trained chemist, he writes from an almost clinical perspective.  Take, for example, the situation of dysentery patients, who don't want to give up the relative comfort of a "hospital" stay:  they are forced to line up on a daily basis and shit on command, which of course leads to a black market in watery stools among the prisoners.  As the cliche says, you can't make this stuff up.

That Levi wrote this book just three years after leaving Auschwitz also gives his recollections a freshness and immediacy that remains 80 years later.  It echoes and validates my own childhood impressions of the event, after my father took me to a Holocaust museum in Paris.  "If there is a God, how could God have let this happen? " I asked.  Survival in Auschwitz has done nothing to dispel my early atheism.  

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die.

*  *  *  *

Here then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside.

*  *  *  *

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command which seems to give vent to a millennial anger.

*  *  *  *

We are once again at the foot of the pile. Mischa and the Galician lift a support and put it roughly on our shoulders. Their job is the least tiring, so that they show excess zeal to keep it: they shout at companions who dawdle, they incite them, they admonish them, they drive on the work at an unbearable pace. This fills me with anger, although I already know that it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.

*  *  *  *

Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs, and which is much more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life.

We do not believe in the most obvious and facile deduction:  that man is fundamentally brutal, egoistic and stupid in his conduct once every civilized institution is taken away, and that the Häftling is consequently nothing but a man without inhibitions. We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence.

*  *  *  *

However little sense there may be in trying to specify why I, rather than thousands of others, managed to survive the test, I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid, as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.

*  *  *  *

It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening it is your turn for the supplement of soup, so that even today you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium — as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom, — well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

Some say that Levi, who suffered from depression, died from suicide at the age of 67.  Elie Weisel went so far as to observe that "Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later."  But I'd like to think that Survival In Auschwitz offers the same solace that sustained Levi for the remainder of his life:  the memory (or example) of individual goodness and the sustaining power of art.  One need only remember Levi's desperation to recall lines from Dante's Divine Comedy for another of the "saved" who has shown him a kindness as a means of impressing upon the young Alsatian student their shared humanity. 

The Hills of California (4*)

A English hotel whose name keeps changing to emphasize the sea view it doesn't have is the central metaphor for Jez Butterworth's new opus about four sisters who reunite there when their vivacious stage mother--the family's real star (Laura Donnelly)--is about to expire.  Each of the rooms in the cheesy establishment with strict rules is named after an American state; Mississippi is where all the bad things happen.

The Hills of California cuts back and forth between two time periods in the sisters' lives:  when the jukebox in their public parlor played the Andrews Sisters, and the play's present, when the same machine, broken for years, suddenly blares the "Gimme Shelter" as the oldest sister Joan (also Laura Donnelly) makes her long-awaited entrance, after spending more than a decade spent incommunicado in California.  Baby-Boomer goosebumps are guaranteed.  Ms. Donnelly's performances are so commanding that I didn't realize she was playing both roles until I read the Playbill after the show.  Butterworth also deliberately sets his play at an analog moment in entertainment history when long-distance illusions were so much easier to sustain.

The slow-burn drama dramatizes nothing less than the gulf between a woman's dreams (and compromises) and the reality of her life lived, particularly as imagined through the eyes of the others left behind.  Throughout, I kept hearing "Children Will Listen," Stephen Sondheim's brilliant observation from Into The Woods.  

The story itself, at least the part I could hear through the accents and occasionally muffled delivery, doesn't hold many surprises but it packs two major wallops:  Donnelly's indelible sleight-of-hand from glamorous war widow into louche hippie, and the sweet harmonies her sisters sing as part of their eventual reconciliation, bitter as it may have been.

Spiralling

Inspired!  That's what I call whoever made the decision to project the pithy messages of Jenny Holzer around the spiraled atrium of the glorious Guggenheim.  

The LED lighting changes colors, too, as they round and round.

A lot of curatorial imagination--or maybe hers?--has gone into the 74-year-old artist's retrospective, aptly named "Light Line."

Her philosophical text is literally everywhere.

Holzer's work can be very sly.  Nothing more be said about J. Edgar Hoover's privacy intrusions than the FBI's investigation of Alice Neel at the height of the country's Red Scare. 

Her focus on government documents serves as an artistic indictment, like this 1972 conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger after the U.S. bombed the shit out of North Vietnam in 1972, an event resulting in protests that shut down Columbia in the spring of my freshman year.  

P:    Goddamn, that must have been a good strike!

K:    Yeah.

P:    Of course, you want to remember Johnson bombed them for years and it didn't 

        do any good.

K:    But, Mr. President, Johnson never had a strategy; he was sort of picking away

        at them.  He would go in with 50 planes, 20 planes;

P:    I bet you we will have had more planes over there in one day than Johnson 

        had in a month.

Holzer transcribes it on a background shaped like the country.

Freedom of Information requests--including those relating to the cover-up of American atrocities at Abu Ghraib--are as critical for Holzer's political art as the variety of artistic material she employs.  Is it my imagination or do some of the redactions look like weapons?

Twitter made it possible to hoist a certain U.S. president on his own petard, not that it has made any difference.   

I chose this example for aesthetics, not content

@ real Donald Trump (March 15, 2017):  Can you imagine what the outcry would be if @SnoopDogg, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama? Jail time!

More presidential detritus, where it belongs.

From an historical perspective, FOIA provides more substantive content

. . . including this understatement about January 6, 2021.

I couldn't quite parse this piece, although the gold-embossing of White House stationery surely alludes to the 45th president: They are ready for you when you are.

Several gravity-defying sculptural works in other galleries demanded to be photographed.

"Acceleration=Dream, Fibonacci Numbers in Neon and Motorcycle Phantom" by Mario Merz (1972)

"Riddle of the Sphiinx" by Mike Kelley (partial, 1991)

"Oh! Happy Days" by Maro Michalakakos (2012)

I'm a bigger fan of the grand daddy of folk art.

"The Football Players" by Henri Rousseau (1908)

Larry McMurtry: A Life (3*)

Looking back on his prolific career, Larry McMurtry described himself as a "mid-list" writer, meaning that his novels didn't generate the critical attention that many of his contemporaries--Mailer, Roth, Updike--did, even though he put them in the same category, a rung below literary masters such as Tolstoy.  Tracy Daugherty spends the better part of 400 pages trying to prove the ornery but lovable cuss from Texas wrong, unsuccessfully, in his impressionistic biography.

No doubt McMurtry had a fascinating, fulfilling life.  He wrote novels about his dusty western roots and prairie values that occasionally exposed the cowboy myth (Horseman, Pass By, The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove) that has done so much to legitimize the destructiveness of macho individualism.  He hung out with Ken Kesey in 60s San Francisco, eventually marrying the Merry Prankster's widow whose spirituality fit well with McMurtry's conservatism. Cybill Shepard, Diane Keaton, and Susan Sontag numbered among his besties.  The women he loved (but did not bed) also included Polly Platt, whose work on screen adaptations of two of his novels--The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment--elevated them to the film classic status his novels never achieved.  Collecting and selling books probably gave McMurty as much pleasure as writing them, and he accomplished the unlikely feat of temporarily transforming his rural home town north of Wichita Falls into a mecca for people who shared that interest.  Go figure--there's a novel called "Fool's Errand" in that effort!

I began reading McMurtry shortly after graduating from college.  My desperation to escape Texas meant that his early books never interested me but All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers resonated because I easily could imagine myself as Danny Deck, a young writer who embarks on a road trip from Houston to seek fame and fortune in California, leaving three women behind.  My degree in English had required reading a lot of books I didn't really understand, so McMurtry's novel delighted me as much as it did a paranoid schizophrenic woman I worked with at the New York Public Library.  Janice insisted that nobody ever had written more believable female characters, an assessment with which I agreed in part because, like McMurtry, I also always had enjoyed the company of women more than men.  Just ask The Real Girls.

And then McMurtry published Terms of Endearment, perhaps the most moving and true novel ever about a mother/daughter relationship.  Nearly 50 years later I recognize that the book meant as much to me as it did because it reversed my own situation.  My mother--no Aurora Greenway, but definitely a force to be reckoned with--died around the same time and McMurtry's novel gave me permission to grieve our conflicted relationship vicariously.  And the movie was even better, perfectly cast.  It was the first film I saw after returning from Australia, just around the time it won Best Picture.  Tears gushed like an oil well in West Texas.

I stuck with McMurtry for a couple more novels, which he published so regularly that it brought to mind Truman Capote's dismissal of Jack Kerouac:  "that's not writing, it's typing."  Writing came easily to McMurtry.  He wrote ten pages every day in much the same way that a fitness enthusiast exercises but as I became more secure in my gay identity, his characters didn't hold the same appeal.  Bad reviews led me to ignore McMurtry until the Pulitzer-prize winning Lonesome Dove, a novel I felt I had to read because of its critical reception.  No doubt about it, he can spin a good yarn when he puts his mind to it, although the subtext eluded me completely:  I didn't really think of it as an indictment of cowboy culture.

For Tracy Daugherty, that lifelong theme pretty much elevates McMurtry to first rank among American authors.  It's not a bad argument--has the Lone Star State ever produced another writer so acclaimed and widely read?-- but his most convincing evidence comes at the end of the book, after McMurtry has met his longtime writing partner, Diana Ossana.  She insists that he read a short story--a genre which didn't interest him in the least--by Annie Proulx called "Brokeback Mountain."  Suddenly everything clicked:  this extraordinary examination of what some called "homos on the range" provided him with the material he needed to explode toxic masculinity once and for all, with absolutely no doubt about his intentions.  For the first time in his career, he really stuck his neck out and crafted with Ossana a perfect screenplay about Ennis & Jack with as much nuance and sensitivity as he had written about Aurora & Emma three decades earlier.  Once again, tears gushed from these eyes and those of anyone with a heart.   He and Ossana took home the 2006 Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

McMurtry likely wrote his ten pages the next day, but for my money, less is sometimes more.  He probably knew it, too.  "Mid-list" is how you reach people, sometimes even changing their lives.

Prep School Art

Randy suggested I check out the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover.  "Those prep schools have a lot of money, you know."  Tom and I visited before he dropped me off in Boston for my return train to New York after celebrating Audrey's 70th birthday.   

Like many adolescents, expatriate American artist Peter Saul was a big fan of Mad magazine stocked by Shakespeare of Company in Paris.  It, Rocky & Bullwinkle and Woody Allen probably were the earliest influences on my sense of humor.

"Man in Electric Chair" (1964)

Although an exhibit called "Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962" had wet my appetite (perhaps because I was confusing it with an MGM musical),  it featured mostly abstract art, not my favorite thing.  I I did enjoy a sculpture by Shinkichi Tajiri.

"White Line" by Sam Francis (1958) &
"Lament for Lady (for Billie Holiday) by Shinkichi Tajiri (1953)

"Uranus" by Paul Jenkins (1956)

Apparently the Addison has enough clout in the art world to borrow items from other institutions for its exhibitions.  This work by Leon Golub belongs to MoMA.

"Torso, III"  (1960)

Several years ago, I learned about the centrality of the barbershop in Black male politics at the Greenwood Rising Museum in Tulsa, where visitors can sit in one thanks to virtual reality.

"Barbershop" by Haywood "Bill" Rivers (1950)

Emil Cadoo used multiple exposures in his photography.

Untitled  (ca 1960)

Boris Lurie spent time in Buchenwald before emigrating to the United States in 1946.  Much of his work, often controversial, refracted his Holocaust experience through a contemporary pop culture lens including a collage that juxtaposed concentration camp bodies with a pin-up girl.

"Rocks Is Legs Is Breasts" (1951-52)

Herbert Gentry resided at New York City's Chelsea Hotel for 30 years after returning from Europe.

"Chez Honey" (1949)

Another exhibit paired paintings by Kay WalkingStick, a contemporary Cherokee artist, with works from the Hudson River School on loan from the New York Historical Society.  I much preferred the latter.  If I were an art critic, that opinion probably would get me cancelled.

"Four Portraits of North American Indians" by Albert Bierstadt (1859)

Walt Whitman was a big fan of Jesse Talbot.

"Indian on a Cliff"  (ca 1840s)

I wondered if recent retrospectives of Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper in New York City museums influenced the Addison's choice of works to display from its permanent collection.

"The West Wind" by Winslow Homer (1891)

"Manhattan Bridge Loop" by Edward Hopper (1928)

Charles Prendergast did not ring a bell but his work reminds me of Florine Stettheimer's. His brother Maurice painted, too.

"Hill Town" by Charles Prendergast (1928)

I recently discovered "America Today" an incredible room of murals by Thomas Hart Benton at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The painting below reminded me of the time I spent driving on the Great Cattle Highway near Amarillo during my Seattle road trip.

"Cattle Loading, West Texas" (1928-29)

For The Birds!

There I was at my usual spot on Central Park West after a morning bike loop of Central Park, reading Open Throat, when a pigeon jumped on my knee and wouldn't budge until I stood.

I definitely prefer the skittishness--and beauty--of the blue jays at my after-walk reading spot in the Ramble.

Jane Fonda Fan Club played an impromptu concert at the band shell.

Their groovy noodling wasn't bad.

"Benoit" a series of bronze sculptures by Bruno Catalano along Park Avenue in the Murray Hill neighborhood.  I caught them during multiple visits to the dermatologist.

"Blue de Chine" 

"Benoit"

"L'Etoffe des Heros"

"Voyage a New York"

There were plenty of exhibits to catch up on at the Met after returning from Florida, including "Sleeping Beauties."

"Ammonite" by Bea Szenfeld (2014)

Matthew Barney, working in terra cotta, smeared the walls of the Gladstone Gallery as part of his latest work.

With "Seasons" at MoMA, Alex Katz, still going strong at 97,  provided the backdrop for my favorite selfie of the summer.   Relatively speaking, I'm a spring chicken.

Somebody at the Flag Art Foundation came up with up with the clever idea of celebrating the 60th anniversary of "The Swimmer," a short story John Cheever published in The New Yorker, later adapted into a film, with a themed exhibit.

"Pool" by Cynthia Talmadge (2022)

I'm always amazed by how few adults I see swimming in the ocean.

"Coming Home After Swim" by Katharine Bradford (2024)

The Brooklyn Museum exhibited more than one hundred views of 19th-century Tokyo, when it was known as Edo.

"Maple Trees at Mama, Tekona Shrine and Linked Bridge" (1857)

Osmegeos taught visitors to the Lehmann Maupin Gallery how twins dream.

A traveling show at MoMA's PS1 showed some overdue respect to Pacita Abad who never saw a major exhibition of her work in America during her lifetime.

"Subali" (1983/1990)

Underwear embroidered by a mental health patient was among the items exhibited by the American Folklore Museum in a traveling show that explored "institutional psychiatry."

A retrospective of Des Evlin's designs for the theater and concert tours at the Cooper Hewitt persuaded me that her work is often as interesting as the headliner's.  I first became acquainted with her work at Miami Superblue.

The Cooper Hewitt also displayed some interesting political posters from Peru by Jesús Ruiz Durand. 

"Make the Most of Your Land" (1968-73)

There's always something to catch your eye walking the streets of Manhattan.  The elegance of the Chrysler Building camouflages its serious real estate woes with commercial tenants complaining of rats and murky water.

Despite this beautifully painted and upholstered chair's ability to stand en pointe, somebody was discarding it on the Upper West Side.  I was tempted to claim it, but there's no room left at 47 Pianos after 46 years of garbage picking.

Although I worked at the New York Public Library for five years, I never noticed the lions beneath the upper windows on the 40th Street side of the Beaux Arts masterpiece.

Even Manhattan's graffiti works out!

This magnetic Tin Man flyposting adorned the IRT subway station at 23rd Street.

More bikes for the collection.

Long Island City

Murray Hill

Anthony and John served a delicious Turkish meal the night before 

. . .  Thom and I had almost the same meal at Magda's and Joe's place in Quechee, Vermont, but no hot air balloons floated past in Baldwin.

We also visited the Billings Farm and Museum

. . .  which displayed the incredible array of entries in a quilting bee contest.

Just across the street, the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park offered a lesson in land conservation.

After returning from Poland, I took Amtrak tot Randy's in New London

. . . before continuing on to North Andover to celebrate Audrey's 70th birthday.  Despite the rain, I took my first dip in her and Tom's heated pool, about twice the size of ours at the Folly.