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.
And then, when things began to look bad for the Axis, Malaparte defected to the winning side and announced that anti-Fascism had been his principle all along, which he tried to prove by inflating Mussolini’s moments of pique against him. Stalinist fanaticism became his new ideal, first in the Soviet version and then in Mao’s—though he also managed to convince some people that liberal democracy was his fondest hope.
His prestige today—it is remarkable how many American writers of our own moment have come to regard Malaparte as a nice man with talent and a naughty streak, like Philip Roth, except naughtier, hence more exciting—rests on two or three books from the immediate period after Fascism’s defeat, chiefly Kaputt, said to be his masterpiece. He recounts in that book his experiences reporting for the Italian press on the Axis conquest of Eastern Europe, and in the course of doing so he paints an enormous landscape of the European catastrophe, filled with stunning images of monstrous people and innocent animals, dominated by a creepily dishonest image of himself, a man of virtue.
Serra, the biographer, invokes Stendhal from time to time, which is fitting because Serra himself appears to be a Stendhal of sorts, cerebral, acute, cynical, and admiring of whoever possesses the culturally most superior brain. He is alert to mendacities: his version of events should serve as a corrective to what other writers, in their prefaces to translations of Malaparte, have sometimes naïvely said. And yet, in his Stendhalian mode, Serra figures that Malaparte’s mendacities were authentic to himself, and therefore were admirable, in some fashion. And the mendacities ought not to prevent us from seeing that, in the end, the man was morally serious. His insights were pure. He got at “the sense,” meaning the essence, of Europe’s disaster, and he did it superbly: “Malaparte was perhaps without equal.”
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.
Serra admires the much-discussed chapter in Kaputt where, in between barbarian dinner parties among the Nazi overlords of Warsaw, Malaparte goes strolling with a helmeted SS Black Guard through the cadaver-filled streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, offering what he pictures as sympathy and encouragement to the doomed and the dying. Serra lingers with particular enthusiasm over a passage where a kindly Malaparte and his SS guard come across a little girl who has been fighting with another girl over a potato.
Malaparte offers money to the little girl. She demurs. He offers her, instead, a fine cigar that has been given to him by the German lieutenant governor of Radom, in central Poland. She wanders off with the cigar, sniffing it as if he had offered her a flower. And the structure of that scene, the horror mixed with what Malaparte presents as compassion, the contrast of delicacy and crime, the shocking and the incongruous, the artfully chosen details culminating in what Serra applauds as the “marvelous” cigar—those several things leave the biographer impressed, moved, and reverential.
It is remarkable how many American writers of our own moment have come to regard Malaparte as a nice man with talent and a naughty streak, like Philip Roth, except naughtier, hence more exciting.
My own reaction, though, is to wonder about Maurizio Serra. The passage is nauseating. It attracts my attention because my own family were Jews of Radom. The Nazi who gave Malaparte the cigar was, I presume, responsible for their murder. But I do not need a personal connection to recoil. I see in those pages an answer to my perplexity about prose and the soul. It is not that Emerson was wrong in supposing that glorious prose implies a glorious soul. The error lies in supposing that Curzio Malaparte wrote glorious prose.
I think, instead, that Malaparte was a singularly ugly writer, whose glorious aspect was an outer shell of bold and deceptive technique, which renders the inner ugliness uglier. If in some respect Malaparte got at the essence of Europe’s catastrophe, it was because his own character—haughty, refined, and morally inert, like a dead horse in the street—was the essence of the essence, and he revealed it clearly enough.
Am I too harsh? My favorite among Malaparte’s books is his Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, from after the war. It is a journal of further dinner parties, this time among the Parisians, mixed with philosophical bloviations and boasting about his resemblance to Chateaubriand. What I like is how faithfully he reports that, at various get-togethers, the other guests treated him with the kind of polished Parisian contempt that was Stendhal’s finest theme. The clear-thinking Albert Camus—an admirable person, at last—found a politely indirect way to express to Malaparte a wish to see him shot. This could well have been his fate, too, if only he had been French.
But he survived. He acquired glamour, if not in everyone’s eyes. He designed his own house on Capri, where Jean-Luc Godard went on to film Brigitte Bardot sunbathing nude. And his glamour has endured, such that, just the other day, I came across the well-regarded Columbia University professor Adam Tooze musing respectfully about Malaparte in a journal called Public Seminar. To wit, double-negatively, “Reading the books sixty years later, one cannot help wondering whether we don’t need a Malaparte for our own age of polycrisis”—which I take to be a sign of how deep are the waters in which we are currently drowning.
Paul Berman is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 and Terror and Liberalism
