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Dandy of the lowest depths

Curzio Malaparte and his gallery of horrors

Curzio Malaparte

THE SKIN

Translated by David Moore

344pp. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Paperback, $16.95.

Giordano Bruno Guerri

IL MALA PARTE ILLUSTRATO

50pp. Milan: Mondadori.

The writer Curzio Malaparte' s real name was Kurt Erich Suckert; his father was a déclassé German technician who had settled in Prato. His mother, a well-born, and beautiful woman, was Piedmontese, but Malaparte remained uneasy about his heredity.

He once confessed that he shared "all the romanticism and the madness of the Germans", and that his mistakes derived from a continual effort

"to be (not to appear) an Italian like all the others". One should not read this, perhaps, as wholly sincere. Owning up to a streak of German romanticism was a way of defending himself against the charges of conforming to an Italian stereotype of the cynical adventurer, ready to sell his services to the highest bidder. Nevertheless, his aggressive exaltation of the characteristics of the "arch-Italian" and his populist cult of Tuscan provinciality can be seen as driven by a desire to live down, or repudiate, his German ancestry.

Malaparte made no secret about his desire to be on good terms with the powerful. Handsome, bold and stylish, he was irresistible to women, and many men, too, fell under the spell of his charm. He was a sophisticated, amusing conversationalist and a born storyteller. He practiced the most subtle kind of flattery, that which maintains an appearance of independence. He was not much troubled by considerations of consistency or personal loyalty; lavishly subsidized by Mussolini's son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, he yet, after the latter's fall, left a contemptuous verdict on Ciano's qualities as a man and as a politician.

One of the more embarrassing moments in Malaparte's career came in 1948, after he had published a lurid anti-Communist political fantasy, when the then head of the Partito Communista, Palmiro Togliatti, revealed that in 1944 Malaparte had tried to become a party member and had claimed to have been a Communist since his birth. Togliatti, however, was always willing to overlook the past when there was a prestigious intellectual convert to be gained, and after visiting Malaparte on his deathbed, he accepted his request for a party card. Characteristically, at the same time, Malaparte sought and obtained Pius XII's blessing, although he was disappointed that the Pope did not deliver it in person. His last major journalistic enterprise had been his visit to China in 1956, when he did not fail to praise Mao for "his lack of factiousness and fanaticism", and "his profound sense of equilibrium and of humanity". Malaparte's commitment to Fascism was probably more sincere and more compatible with his true inclinations than his later allegiances. His early career was in many ways typical of the generation which brought Fascism to power. In 1914, at the age of sixteen, while Italy was still neutral, he ran away from home to join the Garibaldian Volunteer legion fighting in France. He did not reach the front, but the following year, after Italy had joined the war, he volunteered again, together with the other members of the young Republican branch of which he was secretary. During the German offensive of 1918, he returned to France with an Italian contingent, where he took part in the desperate battle of Bligny, and was decorated for his bravery in leading a section of flame-throwers. Although he only joined the Fascist movement two months before the March on Rome, in 1924 he became the most eloquent spokesman for the extremists who wished to force Mussolini to abandon his residual compromise with the Liberal state. Malaparte's journal, La Conquista dello Stato, called for a second revolution to establish "integral fascism" through the participation of the ex-combatant masses in government. His ideology was a strange but representative blend of revolutionary syndicalism, populism and traditionalism. He praised Mussolini as the leader of the revolt of the Italian spirit against the sceptical and critical ethos of the Nordic reformation. But at the same time he claimed that the revolutionary syndicalists, converted to nationalism, were the true heirs of the heroic minorities of the Risorgirnento. Malaparte's revolutionary traditionalism mirrored the confused and contradictory nature of Fascist extremism, an unstable compound of different ideological elements. But the very intelligence and polemical verve which distinguished his writing were qualities which, once Fascism had consolidated its power, made him suspect. Malaparte was an opportunist, but he was not a conformist. In his nature, the courtier existed alongside the rebel. Resentment of his dependence on the powerful, 'which he had voluntarily assumed, led him to betray himself through repeated indiscretions. If he is to be believed, in his first interview with Mussolini, the Duce gave him a paternal warning that his irrepressible love of malicious gossip would damage his career. He had criticized, in public, the Duce's taste in ties.  But this was the sort of liberty which Malaparte would not forgo, and time and again his tongue got him into trouble. He made a very favourable impression on the founder of Fiat, Giovanni Agnelli, who had him appointed in 1929 as Editor of La Stampa, the important Turin newspaper which he controlled. Malaparte was an excellent editor, who sought out distinguished contributors and preserved a certain independence from the party line. But, less than a year later, Agnelli sacked him because he had denounced the managing director of the paper as an anti-Fascist. Some years afterwards, Malaparte took his revenge by having a very public affair with Agnelli's daughter. In 1931, a biography of the flamboyant Air Minister, Italo Balbo, formerly the most prestigious leader of Fascism's paramilitary action squads, appeared under Malaparte's name. Although the real author of the book was Elio Vittorini, Malaparte presumably approved its message; Balbo appeared as the incarnation of the romantic and populist version of Fascism which he had tried to propagate through his writings. Yet a year later Malaparte was arrested and confined to the isle of Lipari for having written a letter in which he denounced Balbo as a man "who has in him the stuff of a provincial tyrant", and whose ambitions might prove disastrous for Fascism.

There is much about this incident that is still obscure, and it is possible that it originated in a misplaced attempt by Malaparte to curry favour with Mussolini by playing on his suspicions of Balbo. Even if it were so, the miscalculation seems so gross as to demand a psychological explanation. Before the war, Malaparte's one really successful book was his manual on the technique of the coup d'etat, published in Paris in 1932. His brilliant but superficial analysis is authentically Fascist in its isolation and idealization of the techniques of violence. However, the book certainly contributed to his reputation for unorthodoxy and unreliability. He displayed admiration for Trotsky and contempt for Hitler. If he showed a remarkable and prescient intuition in his judgment of Hitler's character, as a "feminine" type, sexually morbid, who used brutality to hide his inner weaknesses, he was far from understanding the determination and subtlety of Hitler's political strategy. He treated Hitler as the Duce's incompetent pupil, and the portrait of the "feminine" Hitler implied a flattering contrast with Mussolini's well-known virility. But if it was Malaparte's intent to please Mussolini, it once again backfired. At a time when Italy was drawing closer to Germany, it was hardly prudent to disparage Hitler so radically. Malaparte's repulsion for Hitler and for National Socialism helped to inspire his most famous and successful book, Kaputt, based on his experiences as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front. Certainly, there is even here a big question mark over Malaparte' s good faith. The original draft of the book was probably more anti-English than anti-German, and it was only as the war turned in the Allies' favour that Malaparte gave free rein to what, I think, was a genuine antipathy. The critical reader may find much of Malaparte's writing in Kaputt exasperating and repugnant. He inherits from baroque imagery appears contrived rather than appropriate, and the constant striving after extreme effects ends by becoming tedious. It leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, and not only because of its subject matter. By way of contrast, one might read Norman Lewis's Naples '44, which allows the facts, or the stories, to speak for themselves. Il Malaparte illustrato by Giordano Bruno Guerri, issued to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Malaparte's birth, could have as its subtitle, "Portrait of a Fascist dandy". Malaparte had style, and he knew it. For a more detailed account of his career, Guerri's longer biography, L'Arcitaliano, should be consulted. Guerri does not hide his subject's defects, but a note of apologia creeps in here and there. He tries to make out a case for Malaparte as a "precursor" of the present objective assessment of Fascism and anti-Fascism. I don't myself think that Curzio Malaparte was a precursor of anything of value; but he deserves to be remembered as a skilled guide to the lowest depths of Europe's inferno.

Adrian Lyttelton is Professor of History at the fohns Hopkins University Center, Bologna. He is working on a social history of Italy, 1860-1915.

TLS OCTOBER 9 1998