MALAPARTE: A Biography, by Maurizio Serra; translated by Stephen Twilley
“Fascism” is notoriously difficult to define. It insisted on conformism while attracting bohemians and subversives, fused manic idealism with brutal cynicism and combined elements of modernism and pastoral nostalgia. The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that “fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.” In “Malaparte,” Maurizio Serra’s outstanding biography of the Italian dandy, journalist, playwright, would-be diplomat and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte, the author makes clear that Benjamin was correct. Whatever else it was, 20th-century fascism was a project more of imagination than reason; it was driven by aspiring European elites who presented themselves as populists in their pursuit of grandeur and greatness.
Malaparte showed the first glimmers of his prodigious writerly talent as a young man in the early 1920s, and although he was once an ardent champion of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, his literary reputation has hardly been confined to the fringes of the far right. The admirers of his enduring novels “Kaputt” (1944) and “The Skin” (1949) include Milan Kundera, Edmund White and Gary Indiana. The Premio Malaparte, an Italian prize bearing his name, has been proudly accepted by novelists like Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The sociologist Michael Mann once wrote, “Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia,” but Malaparte was a first-rate talent as both journalist and fiction writer. Still, he struggled to put his creative energy to constructive use: He looked down on losers, but, in his misbegotten schemes and futile projects, he found himself among their ranks.
There is a pathetic aspect to Serra’s account of Malaparte’s life, a solipsism that despaired of finding anything worthwhile in life other than movement and adventure. The anti-intellectual intellectual, the macho man who wore makeup and sported perfectly coifed hair; physically courageous as a soldier and war correspondent but in politics and his personal life a moral coward; the militant anti-communist fascinated with Lenin’s Russia and, eventually, Mao’s China; the bourgeois snob who hated the bourgeoise and idealized both proletarians and aristocrats: Malaparte embodied, almost perfectly, the contradictory impulses of the fascist generation.
Malaparte was not among fascism’s top ranks. He was not one of the chief ideologues, like his fellow writer Giuseppe Bottai. But, as his literary fame spread during the interwar period, he showed fascism’s seductive side and cultivated a fraught relationship with Mussolini that continued into the 1930s. “Malaparte” demonstrates that fascism was not only a collective enterprise and cult of the leader, but an individual one: a narcissistic worship of the self and a chance for ambitious young men from the provinces, dissatisfied with their place in liberal society, to embark upon a career.
The most important client of Malaparte’s propaganda was always himself, and, in later years, he worked to make it seem that he had been an antifascist dissident the whole time. Serra tells us not to buy it: Malaparte’s apparent political transformations were opportunistic or driven by whim. And if he abandoned the Fascist Party when he had to, he remained a fascist at heart. “From beginning to end, one finds in him a fascistic strain that he never belied under any regime,” Serra explains, “in particular a taste for force, the only real ideology of a man who disdained all ideologies.”
His contempt for losers was, perhaps, the only consistent thread in his life. This quality explains how easily he was able to abandon Mussolini when Il Duce’s downfall came, and join the Allied-aligned Kingdom of the South. And, of course, his writing saved him as often as it got him in trouble. Malaparte survived postwar fascist purges because his friend the Italian communist chief Palmiro Togliatti hoped to put the novelist’s talents to use for the party.
Curzio Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert in 1898 to a German father and Italian mother. The name “Malaparte,” like much else about him, is a piece of artifice, a play on “Bonaparte” done by affixing the prefix “Mal-” (evil or bad) that he adopted in the ’20s, partly at the suggestion of Mussolini, who wanted the writer to “Italianize” himself.
His early political life was spent in the left-wing, anticlerical, anti-monarchist Italian Republican Party. He volunteered to enlist in World War I even before Italy joined the fighting. In 1918, his unit was sent to defend against the German onslaught in the forests of Bligny. On the other side of the fierce bayonet charges was the German philosopher Ernst Jünger, who shared Malaparte’s aestheticized picture of war.
In postwar Rome, Malaparte knocked around in bohemian circles, wrote an avant-garde manifesto and “began to cultivate the image of the brooding artist.” A book criticizing the army high command and the incompetence of the old guard got him drummed out of the military, or so Malaparte would claim. Whatever the case, it won him notoriety and ingratiated him with political discontents. He flirted with the far left, but opted for the far right. “His roots were and would remain nationalist,” Serra writes, “and for him Italy would always be, for better or worse, the measure of everything.”
In the 1920s, Malaparte embraced the most extreme elements in the fascist movement, the “national syndicalist” wing that envisioned a revolution led by the nationalized working class against a decadent elite. He celebrated the street violence in print, but it’s unclear how much of it he practiced himself: He was not present during the March on Rome — the event that led to Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922 — a fact that he would first obscure and then use to his advantage after the regime fell.
As Mussolini’s government attempted to ally with more conservative elements, Malaparte distanced himself from the rowdier fascist ultras in hopes of advancing a diplomatic career in the new regime. But when that failed to materialize according to his ambitions, a perverse and mischievous side asserted itself, and he began to poke fun at the fascist leadership.
His scheming eventually landed him in confino, internal exile, on the island of Lipari off the coast of Sicily. Malaparte would cite this detention to demonstrate antifascist bona fides after the war, but Serra sets the record straight: When he was released early owing to Mussolini’s clemency, he was happy to hobnob in fascist high society with the foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano and his wife, Edda, Mussolini’s daughter.
After Italy surrendered, Malaparte presented himself as a resolute anti-Nazi, which he backed up with his withering treatment of Hitler as a coward and weakling in his 1931 hit book “Technique du Coup d’État,” but his anti-Nazism was not so pronounced as to prevent the Third Reich from allowing him to cover the fighting in the east and to get access to Nazi bigwigs for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
His journalistic observations form the basis for “Kaputt,” a phantasmagoric firsthand account of the war that was one of the earliest novels to deal seriously with the European cataclysm. By that time, he had switched sides, but not without resentment: Five years later, his novel “The Skin” shows him treating the Allied occupation of his motherland with caustic irony.
Although it deals with some of the worst catastrophes of the 20th century, “Malaparte” is not infrequently funny, a product of both Serra’s wit and the absurdity of his subject’s own life. Take Serra’s description of the scene in the hospital where Malaparte spent his last days: Postwar Italy’s two great forces, the Catholic Church and the Communist Party, “lay siege to” his room, trying to get a deathbed conversion out of him. Both sides claimed they did.
Serra, the author of books on other fascist personae, including Mussolini, the Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the nationalist poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, is a former member of Italy’s foreign service. The prose, translated from the Italian by Stephen Twilley, shows finesse; it is intellectually rigorous while being dishy and playful. The savoir-faire of an experienced diplomat turns out to be an asset in reviewing Malaparte’s life. Serra carefully assesses the political twists and turns of Malaparte’s career, analyzing his courtier’s employment of flattery and ridicule with an exactitude that is scintillating.
He also warns against what he calls the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism as something comical, and is unstinting in uncovering the real facts behind a man who put himself at the service of the worst political tendencies in human history. The result is a portrait of a social-climbing chameleon who falsified his way through life. He may feel familiar to us today as we witness those who ride the whirlwind, chasing power and fame without heed to principle or even prudence. Serra makes clear that there was a consistency and coherence to Malaparte’s life, but it was a consistency of style rather than morality.
Hitler, whom Malaparte disdained as a vulgarian, failed as an artist but succeeded as a politician; Malaparte failed as a political actor but ultimately succeeded as an artist. Despite Malaparte’s own best efforts, perhaps, Serra makes clear that his subject’s greatest contribution was to bear honest witness to the greatest catastrophes in human history. Here was a liar who could not help telling the truth.
MALAPARTE: A Biography | By Maurizio Serra | Translated by Stephen Twilley | New York Review Books | 716 pp. | $39.95
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