Curzio Malaparte was the Ernst Jünger of the Italians. They were born three years apart, Jünger in 1895 and Malaparte in 1898, and the outlines of their biographies are oddly similar. The son of a bourgeois businessman becomes the soldier who fights with honor in World War I. He returns from the trenches as a wounded and decorated veteran, and an enemy of democracy. In the 1920s, he is acclaimed as a writer and develops his own theories of national socialism, but he is at odds with his country’s dictator in the 1930s.
A witness to conquest and slaughter on the Eastern Front in World War II, he survives the destruction of a Europe he loves and hates. Obsessed with health and diet, he dresses like a dandy, travels widely in the postwar years and becomes popular in France. He witnesses a second conquest, the soft triumph of Americanization, but he cannot outrun the taint of fascism. He dies a Catholic. Bruce Chatwin mounts an aesthetic defense among English speakers. As the literary statute of limitations runs out, new English translations appear, though most of his work remains untranslated.
Curzio Malaparte was not the Ernst Jünger of the Italians. Jünger worked diligently toward the heights of philosophy and metaphysics in the German manner. He retained the scientist’s seriousness before the facts and the professional soldier’s contempt for the compromises of civilian life. Malaparte cut a bella figura in the crowd as an Italian must. “Malaparte” was a pseudonym, a stage name inverting Napoleon Bonaparte’s surname for an amoralist on the “bad side.”
Where Jünger anatomized modern archetypes—the Soldier, the Worker, the Rebel, the Anarch—Malaparte acted them out. He intrigued for political place and prominence in the cultural parade. He was a performative seducer whose ardor for an heiress fizzled out after her family threatened to cut her off. He was a passionate ideologue who kept changing his ideology, from fascist to communist to anticlericalist to Christian communist to Maoist. He was an actor who, in describing how he was acted upon by the impersonal forces of his age, could claim that, though it had always been personal, it was never his fault.
A pair of Jünger biographies have been translated into English in the last decade, one from French, the other from Swedish. Maurizio Serra’s biography of Malaparte, published in French in 2011, is the first English-language life of Malaparte’s many lives. Serra, a diplomat and novelist, has interviewed Malaparte’s surviving associates and their families. He has dug past the 12-volume Italian edition of Malaparte’s correspondence into the unexplored crannies of the Malaparte archive. He has gone below and beyond, and dusted off French and Romanian police files as well as files from the Italian state archives. This superb biography is as stylish and ironic as its subject, only much less prone to deception and self-deception.
Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert in Prato, Tuscany. His father Erwin was a German textile manufacturer of varying fortune and bad temper. His mother Elvira was a beautiful scold from Lombardy. A son of Tuscany without Tuscan blood, Kurt Erich became Curt, then Curzio, then Curtino. He acquired local patriotism during his Jesuit education but not Catholic piety. He was a born contrarian, but his Tuscan chauvinism had a “strident, artificial aspect.” He sounds not unlike Evelyn Waugh, the compulsive contrarian who affected a strident, artificial impersonation of the aristocracy to which he did not belong, and who, after being divebombed by Stukas in Crete in 1941, wrote that “it was like everything German—overdone.”
In 1914, before Italy entered the war, Curzio Suckert volunteered in the Garibaldi Legion, which fought in France. When Italy joined the war, he joined the Alpine Brigade, fighting the Austrians in the Dolomite Mountains. In April 1918, the Brigade lost more than half its men when the Austrians drove the Italian Army off the mountains and onto the Friulian plain. The survivors were then transferred to France, to buttress the British, French, and Americans. One night in July 1918, Suckert’s regiment was attacked at Bois d’Éclisses by the Sturmtruppen, in which Ernst Jünger was serving. Suckert commanded a flamethrower platoon.
“It was a massacre. … At dawn, when the Sturmtruppen attacked the Bois d’Éclisses pass with tanks, our forces were reduced by half. All the battalion commanders were dead. Of every two machine guns, one was out of commission. The French, English and Americans had anti-tank guns. We Italians had none. Unable to do otherwise, we performed miracles. Eventually we had the idea of setting fire to the woods in front of the tanks, which were then forced to turn around, for fear of the gas tanks exploding. We fought amid the flames.”
The Italians were shelled, then gassed, then attacked with tanks, then shelled by the British too. Unable to evacuate their wounded, and out of food and water, Suckert’s regiment held on for two days until the Germans relented. After the war, German veterans spoke of Fronterlebnis (“front experience”) as a fraternal bond and a catalyst of radicalization. In 1922, after attending the Versailles Conference as part of the Italian mission, Suckert signed up as a Fascist syndicalist. He was on the leftmost edge of Mussolini’s movement, along with “the dissatisfied of every stripe, from former officers to anarchists.”
He missed Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 but described it firsthand anyway and wrote a handbook, Technique du coup d’État, which would be consulted by the Gaullists of the Free French, Che Guevara, and the fascist Greek colonels. He changed his surname in 1925 because he disliked how his original patronym ended on an un-Italian “t” sound. As Malaparte, he used the intellectual struggles of the fascist groups, which were really power struggles on paper, to chase a “great career” in the party and the government. He managed “honorary roles” and, in 1929, the editorship of La Stampa. “The revolution cannot grant power to those who do not wield it at the service of the collective,” Mussolini said. “Malaparte will always, and only, be at the service of himself.”
Malaparte got on the wrong side of La Stampa’s owner, the FIAT founder Giovanni Agnelli. Mussolini fired him, and the Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State sentenced him to five years confino (ostracism). He was reprieved after 20 months, some of it spent on an island off Sicily, where a photographer snapped him lifting rocks over his head (they were really pumice stone), and much of it spent in a Tuscan beach resort where he befriended Mussolini’s daughter Edda and her husband Galeazzo Ciano, who was Mussolini’s foreign minister.
Malaparte built a home on a rocky cliff in Capri, called Casa Come Me: a “house like me,” modern, spartan, solitary. But he sought out company and fame. Like Waugh, he covered the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In 1939, he became a foreign correspondent for Corriere della Sera, reporting on the Soviet invasion of Finland, where he “discovered the sauna and the pleasure of rolling naked in the snow.” This was perfect for his kind of “narcissist,” who liked to “expose himself in a context from which sex is strictly excluded.”
Malaparte was a nude sunbather who was never seen naked, a self-dramatist who sought the spotlight but avoided the microscope of emotional surveillance. He eschewed foreplay as effeminate, disliked Adolf Hitler as womanly, and loathed homosexuals. He shaved his legs, chest, and underarms. He avoided alcohol, tobacco, and drugs. In later life, he dyed his hair and revived his pallor with makeup, like Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Serra finds no evidence of homosexual activity, only limitless narcissism. Malaparte did “everything to establish the persona while concealing the man.”
“What negative judgment has struck you most?” Malaparte was asked.
“Silence.”
Cometh the hour, cometh the violence-obsessed voyeur. As a “special correspondent to the awfulness of history,” Malaparte acquired the raw material for Kaputt (1944), a fictionalized account of the degradations of death on the Eastern Front, and The Skin (1949), a fictionalized account of the degradations of life in American-occupied Naples. Malaparte fudged the dates so he could claim that he wrote Kaputt before the Allied invasion of Sicily and the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, but 20 years of assiduously protesting his “unlimited fascist devotion” suggested otherwise. As a reserve officer, he was called up by both the Kingdom of the South, the anti-Mussolini state in Allied-occupied southern Italy, and the fascist rump state, the Republic of Salo. He served neither, pleading cystitis and colic, and smartly attached himself to the American high command as a liaison officer.
Like Jünger, Malaparte was a “cool and disenchanted observer” of a barbarism he had helped to bring about who then strode out of the rubble as an unreliable witness. Serra identifies Malaparte’s persona in Kaputt and The Skin as “a man of the world plunged into the heart of the horror.” In Naples ’44, the British intelligence officer and future travel writer Norman Lewis describes what he saw. In The Skin, Malaparte describes what everyone saw, or what he thinks they should see. He is, Serra writes, a “voyeur in a Proustian sense,” an eavesdropper assembling a mosaic of fragmentary images, and adding his own to make it cohere.
In Kaputt, the narrator sees a naked Heinrich Himmler being flayed with birch twigs in a sauna. The Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic shows him an Adriatic oyster basket, containing “forty pounds of human eyes,” taken from the bodies of his Serbian enemies. In The Skin, the American general hosts a feast of fried Spam, boiled corn, and canned milk, followed by “Siren mayonnaise,” the boiled corpse of a young girl, decorated with coral from the city aquarium.
These are the images in Malaparte’s mind’s eye. To see and hear them, as Malaparte saw the Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto and heard Jewish musicians playing German music, an echo of the civilization that the Germans were destroying, made the spectator into a witness, an accessory to the crime. Malaparte, who reserved his compassion for animals and himself, could only feel compassion for others when he saw people as predators and prey.
This insight was the failing of his civilization, and especially of its decadence, the replacement of Christian morals by Darwinian logic and aesthetic sensuality. For all his talk of strength and heroism, he was, in the title of Alberto Moravia’s analysis of fascist psychology, The Conformist. He was driven, Serra writes, not by a will to power, but a “will to strength,” the urge to fortify himself against his inner weaknesses. After the war, he turned communist. The neofascists would not forgive him, and it was good for his career.
Serra notes that, as Italy’s cool postwar modernism was a direct continuation of its fascist-era modernism, so the bad faith of the Malaparte persona anticipates the “idle dreamer characters” of postwar Italian cinema, such as Marcello, the antihero of La Dolce Vita, who “seeks in vain to touch, to grasp the life being made and unmade before their eyes.” Short of friends and funds, running an Oldsmobile Rocket 88 convertible, expensive tastes, and two elderly parents, Malaparte’s efforts to “put off the moment of truth,” the recognition of his inner void, became desperate.
Ernst Jünger kept his compromises for his diary. He never gave a straight-faced encomium to Mao Zedong or succumbed to the “buffoonery” of putting on an American-style satirical revue in the provinces called Sexophone, or thought of solving his financial troubles by turning his Tuscan beach house into “a nightspot, with the then-obligatory Cuban or Brazilian band, restaurant, and dance floor paved in marble from the yacht of the former king Farouk of Egypt.”
Malaparte’s war wounds turned cancerous and slowly consumed him. Malaparte the writer would have recognized the potential of the motif. He did, in a way, by turning his death into a “sado-voyeuristic spectacle.” Hair and makeup in place, he endured a protracted and painful death in a Roman hospital bed, attended by weeping girlfriends, literary loiterers, and newspaper photographers. The leaders of the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party sought his endorsement, alongside a pair of competing priests. One of them secured his last-gasp penitence. The man probably did not have a soul to save.
Six years later, in 1963, Jean-Luc Godard filmed Contempt at Casa Come Me. The design of the house, like the railway station at Venice, is a modernist icon in which fascist ideals take physical form: “the cult of order, a rejection of history, metaphysical nakedness, and indifference to others.” In the movie, Jack Palance plays a Hollywood producer. The director Fritz Lang, playing a director, makes a “schlocky version of the Odyssey on the peeling rooftop terrace” of Malaparte’s house, and recites Dante and Hölderlin. Imagination and reality, beauty and ugliness, the eternal Europe and the lost. There is no parapet on the roof: “a misstep would be fatal.”
Malaparte: A Biography
by Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley
New York Review Books, 736 pp., $39.95 (paperback)
Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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