Working and Reporting and Sciencing

At the end of my edition of the book is included a conversation between Levi and Phillip Roth. At one point Roth asks Levi about his balancing of the scientific and writerly part of his mind and Levi responds--

I lived my camp life as rationally as I could, and I wrote If This is a Man struggling to explain to others, and to myself, the events I had been involved in, but with no definite literary intention. My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the "weekly report" commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy. And certainly not written in scientific jargon. By the way, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever been...I had to limit myself to being a technician throughout my professional life.

I was struck by the "no literary intent" and the model of a "weekly report." In an ostensible "work camp" that insists "work will set you free" there is no freedom and only a useless and senseless mockery of work; so in the book that attempts to describe the useless and senseless work done there, the writer might be undercut by the tendencies of writing with "literary intent"--tendencies toward further mockery or forced metaphor or any cohesion that would belie Levi's belief that luck was the largest factor in any person's survival there. The writer of a book like that is probably better served, as Levi was, by offering reports of the vulgar absurdities as precisely and concisely as possible. The reader (and the writer, probably) has already proved ill-equipped to deal with this subject matter on a broader level (hence such unworthy words "vulgar" and "absurd")--so perhaps the only place to start is from the technician's report.

From the interview I learned that Levi worked with more literary intent and had a fun time writing his later books, especially If Not Now, When. But I find it difficult to think of writing as the same thing they were doing in the camp and as the thing that is the most quotidian thing in the world--work. I had about as hard a time reading Roth's verbose introduction to the conversation as I did reading Levi's bare prose. Which is worse to complain about--the work of writing or the work of reading? Is it right to assume leisure on either of them that they're works of leisure and therefore not subject to complaint?

P.S. -- one other chemist-writer I know is Padgett Powell, my favorite writer. His novel A Woman Named Drown is kind of explicitly about being a chemist-writer, but all of his works have that science-led lyricism. He's more fun than Levi.