Does a glorious prose style reflect a glorious quality in a writer’s soul? Two hundred years ago, the Romantics used to have an answer to that question, which consisted of saying that beautiful writing can flow only from someone who vibrates to the principle of beauty. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who introduced me to that idea, and because his own writing was glorious, I have always wanted to believe that something in it must be true. But Curzio Malaparte, the Italian Fascist, may stand for a different possibility. He, too, looked to the Romantics for inspiration—in his case, to Chateaubriand, the French master of masters among prose writers, whose own soul was indisputably noble. But Malaparte’s identification with Chateaubriand figures among his several unconvincing self-mythologies.
Maurizio Serra, the sophisticated, or perhaps too sophisticated, author of an enormous, newly translated biography of Malaparte, instructs us that Malaparte’s attraction to thuggery, together with his revulsion at bourgeois peaceableness, brought him, in a spirit of the literary avant-garde, to Benito Mussolini and the Fascist Party in Italy. Life among the Fascists had its ups and downs. The tyrant variously smiled on the young Malaparte, or chose to be annoyed, or reverted to his original affection—boosting Malaparte’s career in Italian journalism, then sending him to jail and to exile on pleasant islands off the Italian coast, and then boosting his career once again, and not just in Italy. In Nazi Germany, his contributions ran in the armed forces’ magazine.
