Is there a nobler hero in literature than the salmon Curzio Malaparte eulogizes in Kaputt, his semi-fictionalized account of his time as an Italian diplomat during World War II? The last salmon left in the Juutuanjoki, a Finnish river the Nazis have decimated by fishing with grenades, becomes the obsession of Gen. von Heulert, who even sends for “reinforcements” in the form of a Tyrolese “trout specialist.” The general eventually hooks the fish but can’t manage to reel it in; after three hours’ struggle beneath the contemptuous gaze of the Finns, who have pronounced the assault on the salmon a mortal error, he shouts to a foot soldier, “Enough!” and commands him to shoot the creature in the head. The victory is hollow, the Germans are disgraced, and the insolent pointlessness of their war effort is pathetically evident to all.
The story requires two things not common among principled narrators: a coziness with undisputed villains and a liberty with matters of fact. After Benito Mussolini’s arrest and the Allied invasion of Italy in 1943, Malaparte worked frantically, if not effectively, to paint himself a steadfast opponent of fascism. In reality, he’d joined the fascists early and profited handsomely from his association with them. His imprisonment by Mussolini’s regime was a consequence not of his determination to speak his conscience in the press (as he later claimed) but of libels against Italo Balbo, a famed aviator and the governor-general of Libya, whom Malaparte accused in private letters of conducting anti-fascist activities in secret.
A number of qualifications are nevertheless in order. What drew Malaparte to fascism in the 1920s — corporatism, the promise of national renewal, the need for a counterweight to Bolshevism — also appealed to many unimpeachable Italians of his day, including the writers Luigi Pirandello and Elio Vittorini. The movement’s racism and cultural dogmatism were alien to Malaparte, who used his position as a writer and editor to bring attention to such taboo subjects as surrealism and Sigmund Freud. It is not that he was brave, though in a certain sense he was, but that he thought so highly of his own cleverness that he felt himself exempted from toeing the party line. How else to explain his double-edged remarks on Mussolini and his outright insults to Adolf Hitler in his 1931 book Coup d’Etat, or his praise of Ethiopia in articles meant to exalt the Italian conquest of it?
Malaparte began Diary of a Foreigner in Paris in September 1947. France was a second homeland for him: He spoke the language fluently, had fought there in World War I, and had many French friends and contacts he hoped would redeem him from the notoriety he had fallen into at home. Months before, he had been absolved of crimes under the fascist regime thanks to his own behind-the-scenes maneuvering, which had cost him allies of all stripes. Clearly meant for publication, Diary shows him reinventing himself as a dissenter, chastising the self-righteousness of resistance figures such as Albert Camus, and struggling to find a place in a country he alternately admires and disdains.
Despite its many evident fictions, Diary has an earnest feel, with introspective passages of a kind rare in Malaparte’s work. The war over, he asks why the sense of victory is so hollow for the French but also for himself. The answer lies in part with that “new race” that is slowly taking shape in Europe, a “European race” destined to bury the histories of people like him. He retains his old and widely attested admiration for workers and the poor but disdains the morality of the “petty bourgeois,” the forerunners of the global technocracy so reviled by today’s far left and far right. He decries as “illegitimate” the power of politicians who, “like all men, don’t believe in anything, but [are] paid to make the people believe that they believe in something.” And yet his attitude is less outraged than stoic: He loves the old Europe not because it was better but because it is the setting for his memories and the longings of his youth.
Malaparte had a genius for anecdotes, and Diary contains several exquisite ones. When hearing of the plight of a widower who wished his wife could help him address the pile of letters he must send out to announce her death, he writes:
Elsewhere, he gets a dig in at Count Agustin de Foxa, a Spanish diplomat who took responsibility in a newspaper interview for all the clever sections of Kaputt: “No offense to Foxa, but I tell his stories better than he does.” Having read de Foxa, I am inclined to agree, and the tale that follows, the saga of a Russo-Spanish communist captured in the field, repatriated to Francisco Franco’s Spain in a public relations coup, then discreetly done away with because he can’t stop boasting in public about the superiority of Moscow’s cafes and theaters, is one of Malaparte’s funniest.
Interesting, too, is his engagement with French literature and philosophy. He is withering on existentialism, calling it a fad rather than a system, “a new, artificial bohemianism, which proposes to replace principles with slovenliness, ideas with a sweater.” Andre Malraux, whom he disparages in his correspondence as “a kind of centaur, with nothing human but the head,” seems to exasperate him more than ever, and Malaparte accuses the great humanist of hitting him up once for cab fare without bothering to say thanks. He criticizes French society’s rationalist bent but finds a kindred spirit in Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, the aristocratic chronicler of the French Revolution, and there is something almost elegiac in his wish to, like the old nobleman, “grasp in this transformation of old Europe into the new that which is eternal in our race, in our civilization.”
I like to imagine Malaparte painted by Francisco Goya, who knew better than any other how to portray that crystalline core of dignity that is an essential characteristic of the buffoon. Few writers have been more calculating than he, more willing to prevaricate and switch sides. But Malaparte was too proud to be a good sellout, too convinced of his own craftiness, and he spent much of his life trying to redress his endless slips of the pen. His one principle was himself, and he stayed true to it to the end. And in his self-love, this incorrigible fabulist, who claimed to have insulted Mussolini’s neckties to his face and to have introduced the sport of water skiing into Italy, offered a haunting snapshot of his era. Now sumptuous, now horrifying, and often both at the same time, Malaparte’s vision showed how deep the rift between sincerity and truth can be.
Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator, critic, and the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation.
