Curzio Malaparte's Shock Tactics

“You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three years into Mussolini’s dictatorship. Gobetti, twenty-four and hailed as the most brilliant liberal writer of his generation, hoped to prevent Malaparte, then twenty-seven, from throwing all his talent behind the Fascist cause. “Don’t you understand that you’re wasting time, that the Fascists are playing you, that in the party you’re a fifth-class man, that your writings for the past year haven’t been worth a damn?” he wrote. Gobetti died the next year, from injuries inflicted by Black Shirts. Malaparte, by then, was making his name as one of Mussolini’s highbrow henchmen. During the Second World War, he became the regime’s star foreign correspondent, mobilizing the techniques of surrealism to evoke the era’s savagery. Malaparte rode to the Eastern Front with the Wehrmacht and toured the Warsaw ghetto with Nazi commanders and their wives. A fabulist whose medium was reality, he assembled his impressions into a nightmarish triptych—“The Volga Rises in Europe,” “Kaputt,” and “The Skin”—which forms the basis of his reputation today. With their uncanny sang-froid, their suave delight in ripping off the skin of experience, they leave no reader unmarked.

Malaparte writes about spilled guts of civilization, but in the manner less of a medic rushing to the scene than of a connoisseur savoring a spectacle. His waltz through the twentieth century combined an unabashed taste for strongmen with a keen interest in history’s losers. Malaparte himself was exacting in matters great and small. A puritan who abstained from coffee, bread, and spirits and watered down his Chianti, he spent three hours on his morning routine—which included shaving his chest and the backs of his hands and greasing his jet-black hair into place. In the late thirties, he bought a plot of land on a cliff on Capri and worked with a local mason to build a bunker-like house that is still regarded as a modernist masterpiece. He preferred dogs to people and claimed to speak their language; he tenderly examined battlefield corpses and translated Emily Dickinson. He moved between high society and low, with little interest in the middle. He knew how to hire a hit man and could spot a Hohenzollern at a glance. “An unrestrained social climber, excessively vain, and a chameleon-like snob,” the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci wrote of him, judging him “capable of any villainy.” The Italian Right, too, came to distrust him, suspecting that he was a fair-weather Fascist, ready to bolt when opportunity called. And so he did, in 1943, ingratiating himself with the U.S. Army after its landing in southern Italy. Nor was that the end of his transformations. The writer who once shared a sauna with Heinrich Himmler ended his days cozying up to Mao Zedong.

In the decades since his death, in 1957, Malaparte has attracted a rogue’s gallery of admirers. Che Guevara and his wife studied a manual he wrote on coups d’etat, while the right-wing colonels who seized power in Greece in 1967 also looked to him for guidance. Milan Kundera credited Malaparte with reinventing the novel. The Polish chronicler Ryszard Kapuściński tried to do for the age of decolonization what Malaparte did for the Second World War, though without winning the same indulgence for fabrication. The great film editor Walter Murch became so taken with Malaparte that he learned Italian just to translate him, while the Czech astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová named an asteroid in his honor. Rather generous—given that Malaparte saw homosexuality as a kind of moral contagion—are the plaudits he earned from downtown New York writers like Edmund White and Gary Indiana, who marvel at the sheer transportive energy of his baroque, proto-camp prose. Their first encounters, like those of Malaparte’s other early American readers, came via pulpy Signet paperbacks in the nineteen-fifties.

A Malaparte revival currently taking place in English is of a different order. Several of his works have been reissued by New York Review Books, which has now also brought out a biography by the Italian diplomat and historian, Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley. The book celebrates Malaparte as one of the “most singular interpreters of a twentieth century whose anxieties live on into our own” and “one of the least decadent and most vitalistic authors in all of literature.” Its charge is to convince us that, whatever the “beautiful souls” may hold against him, Malaparte is a writer for the ages—especially ours.

Any account of Malaparte must begin with his last name, a pseudonym he adopted in his late twenties. Born Kurt Suckert in 1898, in Prato—the “Manchester of Italy”—he was the son of Erwin Suckert, a German immigrant who married a Lombard and ran a textile business. Amid rising nationalism, young Malaparte wanted a name that sounded less German. “I would have called myself Bonaparte,” he once told a friend, “but the name was already taken.” “Malaparte” means “bad side” in Italian and may also echo prendere in mala parte (to take offense), a fitting nom de guerre for someone who set himself against the society around him.

At a young age, like a nobleman in earlier centuries, Malaparte was dispatched to be raised by others—in this case, a metalworker’s family on the city’s outskirts. The outsourcing had unforeseen results. Malaparte absorbed his foster family’s proud, proletarian values, and developed a lifelong fascination with street fighters—all of which set him apart from other middle-class writers. One of his fondest early memories was “getting a deep cut in the palm of my hand; the sight of my blood gave me a stunned, happy shock.”

In 1918—out of loathing, he claimed, for his domineering father—Malaparte chose the most extreme rebellion available to the son of a German, enlisting in the French Army to fight in the First World War against the German Empire. He was in France just in time to join the first major offensives, and later entered the Italian army for the Alpine campaign. “In command of the Ninety-Fourth flamethrower section, I managed to do a bit of good,” he wrote home after one Alpine battle. “The hand grenades hanging from the German soldiers’ belts, in contact with the flames, exploded.” During the conflict, Malaparte began contributing to military bulletins and newspapers. “I was born to write beautiful pages, not to die in war,” he confided to his journal. Within his first year at the front, Malaparte was exposed to mustard gas, leaving a pulmonary lesion that, nearly forty years later, contributed to his death.

Unlike contemporaries such as Ernst Jünger or Erich Maria Remarque, Malaparte did not produce a great book about the Great War. Nor, as with Hemingway, did the experience mark his style. He hadn’t yet surrendered to literature; his ambition was to become a statesman. After the war, Malaparte’s diplomatic career got off to a promising start when the Italian Army assigned him to their delegation in Paris. The Treaty of Versailles put him—if only peripherally—at the center of the world. Serra suspects that he spent most of his time there studying the languages he thought he’d need later in life: English, German, Russian. After the conference, he was transferred to Warsaw, where he claimed to be Italy’s youngest-ever diplomat. In reality, he was a glorified factotum, fencing in his free hours with Monsignor Achille Ratti, the papal diplomat who would become Pope Pius XI, and having his first love affairs. (Malaparte never married and liked to conduct liaisons with well-connected, wealthy women, though rarely for very long.) Still, Warsaw made an impression: he acquired a taste for the Polish aristocracy and a mounting respect for the Soviet Union, whose Red Army under Trotsky nearly took the city during his time there.

When Malaparte returned to Italy, in 1921, his career as a diplomat stalled. The monarchy’s days were numbered, with battles in piazzas between Socialists and Fascists. Malaparte briefly worked in the war ministry, then tried law school, before eking out a living as a journalist among Rome’s bohemians, mingling with artists like Giorgio de Chirico. “What attracted him to Fascism,” Serra writes, “was a profound social transformation in which he saw himself reflected.” Malaparte was slightly late to the Fascist movement. He did not, as is commonly believed, participate in the March on Rome, in 1922, which put Mussolini in power. But he turned out reams of propaganda, volunteered as a tribune, and briefly led Florence’s Chamber of Labor before being ousted by more militant rivals.

Malaparte soon took on the grand-sounding position of Fascist Party Inspector, which mostly meant spying on Italians in Paris. He started a magazine, La Conquista dello Stato (The Conquest of the State), where he continued to produce high-toned justifications for Mussolini’s rise. But his most valuable service was more devious. After the Fascists’ victory in the 1924 elections, a Socialist deputy named Giacomo Matteotti presented evidence of ballot-rigging and violence. Ten days later, a Fascist gang led by Amerigo Dumini—Mussolini’s “hit man”—kidnapped and killed Matteotti. The murder is often considered Italy’s version of the Night of the Long Knives, the Fascist point of no return. Mussolini, still not fully secure, needed distance from the crime. Malaparte served as fixer and helped clear the thugs of premeditated homicide. In court, he testified that Dumini had told him that he meant only to rough up Matteotti, even suggesting Matteotti himself had been involved in other political assassinations. The result was a light sentence for Dumini—Mussolini granted him amnesty a few months later—and increased clout for Malaparte, who had successfully laundered the murder of one of Il Duce’s most nettlesome public enemies.

“Malaparte would never again sink so low,” writes Serra of the Matteotti affair, as if it were an aberration in his subject’s career. Serra never tries to exculpate Malaparte, but there are points where he presents him as having a mind too fine for ideologies, who did not need Fascism as much as it needed him. Malaparte himself, however, does not make this kind of defense easy. It is not simply that he was a cynic, politically unreliable, saturated with racial prejudices, and monumentally selfish. It is that he wrong-foots his audiences by tempting them to reach for the word “despite.” We are often told that the triumvirate of Fascist masters of prose—Céline, Jünger, and Malaparte—are great “despite” their politics. Yet, like it or not, what made them so exceptional was inextricably intertwined with their ideological position. It is this difficulty about Malaparte that Serra prefers to sidestep.

Malaparte vaulted to international fame in 1931 with “Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution,” a slim volume purporting to be a how-to guide for seizing modern states. The aspiring putschist’s mistake, Malaparte argued, was relying on gunmen; what really mattered were squads of electricians, railway workers, and telephone operators, who could commandeer the machinery of state. Once you had the technical apparatus, the rest followed. Reviewing the coups of the interwar years, Malaparte awarded top marks to Trotsky and Mussolini. Hitler—still two years from power—was dismissed as a dithering amateur, reliant on speeches, crowds, and parliamentary niceties. “Hitler is merely a caricature of Mussolini,” Malaparte wrote, psychoanalyzing him as a closeted woman. “The feminine side of him explains Hitler’s success, his domination of the crowd and the enthusiasm he rouses in the youth of Germany.”

As a tactical manual, the book was severely deluded. Hitler, like Mussolini, prevailed precisely by first working within parliamentary structures—until they could be discarded like spent rocket boosters. What made “Coup d’État” a best-seller was its breathless, eyewitness tone, the sense that Malaparte had observed the dictators up close. The book blends minute reportage with bombastic analysis—a style he would later perfect. It was not well received by its subjects, however: Hitler banned it in Germany, Trotsky called it idiotic, and Mussolini, the main beneficiary of its praise, recoiled at being reminded of his origins as a Socialist journalist.

Malaparte’s misunderstanding of his relations with Mussolini cost him much hardship in the following years. He was sent to detention many times in the late thirties and early forties, at Mussolini’s request. The most serious offense was in 1939, when Malaparte plotted against Italo Balbo, an Italian ace pilot of the First World War who was tipped as Mussolini’s successor. Malaparte couldn’t resist trading on his notoriety, often surfacing between sentences for parties in high society. “Ladies and gentlemen, here is your convict!” he’d announce. In the postwar years, Malaparte claimed that his imprisonments by Mussolini were proof of his anti-Fascist credentials—or, at least, his irrepressible nonconformity. He liked to tell a story about the time Mussolini summoned him to his headquarters to complain about criticism of the regime and mentioned that he knew Malaparte mocked his ugly ties. Malaparte apologized, then departed with a jab: “You’re wearing an ugly tie today as well.”

In 1941, freshly out of prison, Malaparte reported for Corriere della Sera on Italy’s and Nazi Germany’s early advances. His first lasting book, “The Volga Rises in Europe,” was written as dispatches from the Eastern Front, where the Wehrmacht pressed through Ukraine in its doomed invasion of the Soviet Union. Reporting from scorched villages, Malaparte became more than a propagandist or an impressionistic observer, determined, as he wrote, “to grasp the underlying significance, the hidden meaning of this singular war.” Embedded with the German army, he realized he was witnessing “a conflict not of men alone but of machines, of techniques, of systems of industrialization.” As Malaparte saw it, both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had produced a new type of worker-peasant, more at home with tank turrets than with plows. To the frustration of his Italian editors, who wanted tales of German prowess, Malaparte grew increasingly in awe of the Red Army. The book is filled with brushstrokes that would become his hallmark: