| For
Malaparte's best work lays bare certain of the forces which will
unify Europe in the fifty years following the War; and adumbrates
the complex relations which will develop between Europe and the
United States of America whose armies have come to liberate the
Old Continent. Malaparte never makes pleasant reading: he wilfully
obscures crucial historical distinctions among the rivals in the
Second World War, larding his own involvement in history with a
belated and factitious disinterest. Yet in making his often odious
defects as personage and writer into crutches, he propels himself
with a maniacal energy into a literary realm which is of genuine
interest partly because in it the values which sustain the novel
form are so recklessly assaulted. In its insistence, its exaggeration,
its theatricality, its settling of scores, his work serves as a
vital link in a tradition of invective and diatribe that runs from
Dostoevsky’s Underground Man through Céline’s
enraged doctors and Louis-René des Forêts’ Bavard
to Thomas Bernhard’s multiple assaults upon his native Austria.(2)
Malaparte lays bare the extent to which the novel form, and the
values to which it was wedded, could itself be part of the problem,
rather than the solution, for post-War European literature.
Both as real-life author and as fictive
narrator (the two are usually synonymous), Malaparte takes the novel’s
central tenets and turns them inside out, flattening character into
caricature and motivation into self-defeating absurdity. His work
serves as a fine introduction to the capital importance of self-conscious
distortion in post-War fiction, as it parades monstrously struck
attitudes whose power resides in the very blatancy with which these
refuse depth or nuance, embracing an anti-novelistic superficiality
which, curiously, also serves to tip his prose over from reportage
into fiction. And in his two most significant works, Kaputt
which was written during World War II, and The Skin which
was written shortly after, he does so such that offences of all
sorts, to history, psychology, literary habit, plausibility, genre,
become something like the yardstick of success; a success to be
measured not by the good taste of the living so much as by the affronted
silence of the moribund and dead.(3)
Malaparte’s familiarity with
death was developed first hand, his life so perilous that underlying
his tone can be detected an amazement that he has indeed survived
to the present. Born of a German father and an Italian mother in
1898, he took a far from obvious course in 1914, while Italy was
still neutral, by volunteering to fight alongside the French, and
then by joining up again in 1917, witnessing the carnage near Amiens,
and suffering irreparable damage to his lungs in a gas attack. Back
in Italy after the Armistice, he rapidly became involved with nascent
Fascism and espoused the more violent provincialist strain of the
movement.(4) Dissatisfied
with his subsequent career as a diplomat, Malaparte also became
increasingly disillusioned with Mussolini’s brand of totalitarianism,
and was outspokenly critical of the Duce’s close associate
Italo Balbo, a critique which earned the author five years of exile
on the island of Lipari (though he only served one year of this
sentence). He travelled later as a journalist to cover the colonial
war in Abyssinia, then the invasion of France by Italy in 1940,
(5)
then the Eastern Front, collecting his experiences and fantasies
from this last destination into the volume entitled Kaputt.
Published while hostilities were still raging, Kaputt built
upon the anti-war writing of Henri Barbusse, and radicalised it
with a lambent mix of cynicism and glamour; so pungent a cocktail
that most war writing since, however apocalyptic, appears tame by
comparison. Released from prison following the downfall of Mussolini
and the invasion of Italy by the Allies, Malaparte served as a liaison
officer with the Allied Forces, as they advanced north through Italy:
an unlikely post for the former Fascist, which then became the subject
of The Skin. By a characteristically maverick realignment
and pulling of strings, Malaparte escaped post-War reprisals, and
even re-established himself as a major force in Italian political
commentary, changing camps once more to end his days as a supporter
of Stalin and Mao. And to this dangerous life his writings contributed
too, designed as they were to aggravate at all costs, outraging
not least the people of Naples, living and dead, who became the
principal subjects of The Skin, and who loathed and banned
the book.
The city has just been liberated from
the South by the Allies, and the Italian army has repudiated its
former Axis following the overthrow of Mussolini, the intervention
of the King with Marshal Badoglio, and the Allied declaration of
armistice on 8 September, 1943. Malaparte celebrates this date with
just the sort of equivocation, moral and political, which will invest
his novel along with the “liberators”. He writes that,
“the Order signed by the King’s Gracious Majesty and
by Marshal Badoglio actually contained the following words: ‘Officers
and men of the Italian Army, throw your arms and your flags like
heroes at the feet of the firstcomer’” (53). And he
indicates that he, along with his comrades, gladly obeyed this order:
"We had thrown our arms and our
flags not only at the feet of the conquerors, but also at the feet
of the conquered; not only at the feet of the British, the Americans,
the French, the Russians, the Poles, and the rest, but also at the
feet of the King, Badoglio, Mussolini and Hitler. We had thrown
them at the feet of all, victors and vanquished – even at
the feet of those with whom it had nothing whatever to do."
(52-3)
Malaparte drives the language of diplomatic
dispatch into parody, turning defeated soldiers into ludicrous marionettes
as they fling away their flags. Nor are the flags insignificant,
for he describes them not as mere national emblems but as having
history, nobility, and myth woven into their very fabric. Here are
relics of pre-Unification Italy, pennants of city states, as well
as, more fancifully, Garibaldi’s flag, “the standards
of Siena, painted by Luca Signorelli; and the Roman flags of the
Capitol, painted by Michelangelo” (52). In what will become
a typical turn, realism gives way to hyperbole, which itself gives
way to bathos, as to the more literal dejection. Nor is it flags
alone that are thrown down and downtrodden. Arch-enemies are tossed
together into a pan-European melting-pot, as if it were utterly
indifferent to whom the Italians capitulated: a levelling of rivalry
from the viewpoint of the vanquished and trampled. In The Skin
Malaparte certainly has a personal agenda: to conflate the warring
parties in such a way that his own repeated changes of side –
Fascist, dissident Fascist, Nazi fraterniser, Nazi satirist, Anti-Fascist
Resistance fighter – are seen as barely changes at all, mere
slidings within the heart of a Europe united in abjection(6).
Yet his implicit
agenda becomes itself subject to a larger (and this time literary)
reversal in which reportage yields to a self-conscious fiction that
seeks to turn abjection into a source of glory – a glory in
which devastated Naples excels.
For the ruined city, in the enthusiasm
with which it swaps allegiances, snatches victory not from but in
the jaws of defeat; an illogic in which Malaparte revels. In his
history of the period, War in Italy 1943-1945, military historian
Richard Lamb does not neglect the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi Resistance
movement, nor the civil war which accompanied liberation. Yet he
opens his volume, unambiguously, with the heading: “Italy
Changes Sides”(7). Malaparte
the historical reporter and realist does not deny it, but Malaparte
the writer attempts to undermine the heading’s truth-value
by loading with irony and exaggeration the very notions of sides
and defeat: “All of us, officers and men, vied with one another
to see which of us could throw our arms and flags in the mud most
‘heroically’” (53). The exploits of soldiers,
their suffering, their sides, their screams even, defy, in their
absurdity, notions of liberation or defeat, and so defy the sort
of truth that reportage can produce. As the combatants throw down
the flags for which they have been willing to surrender their lives,
they irreversibly enter the literary, overwhelmed, Malaparte claims,
by “Homeric laughter” (54).
Naples is the site and subject of The
Skin not least because it permits on a grand scale the triple
Malaparte move of: self-consciously literary inflation, dejection,
followed by laughter. It is the city which, as Walter Benjamin wrote
some twenty years prior to Malaparte, manifests paradox and reversal
in its very stones(8).
Malaparte’s narrator, also named “Malaparte”,
will spend the novel walking through this city, in the company of
various American commanders, exposing in almost picaresque fashion
the city’s capacity for eluding rational accounting through
paradox and metamorphosis. The Skin opens with a staging
of the descent:
"Naples was in the throes of the
'plague'. Every afternoon at five o’clock, after half an hour
with the punching ball and a hot shower in the gymnasium of the
P.B.S. – Peninsular Base Section – Colonel Jack Hamilton
and I would walk down in the direction of San Ferdinando, elbowing
our way through the unruly mob which thronged Via Toledo from dawn
until curfew time.
We were clean, tidy and well-fed, Jack and I, as we made our way
through the midst of the dreadful Neapolitan mob – squalid,
dirty, starving, ragged, jostled and insulted in all the languages
and dialects of the world by troops of soldiers belonging to the
armies of liberation, which were drawn from all the races of the
earth." (1-2)
The entire novel will be an exploration
of this 'plague', which proves to be one to which writers rather
than doctors have access, being not of the body but of the spirit:
"This was a plague profoundly
different from, but no less horrible than, the epidemics which from
time to time devastated Europe during the Middle Ages… It
was a kind of moral plague, against which it seemed that there was
no defense." (26-7)
The purveyors of this plague are themselves
unaffected by it: the victorious armies “contained not a soldier
who had a boil, a decayed tooth, even a pimple on his face”;
notwithstanding which state of supreme health, “everything
that these magnificent soldiers touched was at once corrupted”
(29). The gesture of the conqueror-liberators which assists is precisely
that which infects. Even in the case of Colonel Jack Hamilton, an
American of considerable culture and classical learning, his benevolence
will prove lethal:
"The source of the plague was
in their compassion, in their very desire to help those unfortunate
people, to alleviate their miseries, to succor them in the tremendous
disaster that had overtaken them. The source of the disease was
in the very hand which they stretched out in brotherhood to this
conquered people." (30)
With peculiar prescience and characteristic
violence, Malaparte dramatises the latest form of sickness brought
by cultural imperialism. Watching Naples be harnessed once again
to the imperial yoke, after its being colonised by one power after
another ever since the Middle Ages, Malaparte is especially acute
on how the new benignity will exact its cost. Top on the list of
victims, most significant because most implicit, is narrative itself,
and the satisfactions offered by a plot drawing on linearity, comprehensibility,
or development; characteristics which are ceding here to a narrative
short on telos, psychology, and motivation, a narrative which
is advancing by way of fragmentation, reversal, and repetition.
Malaparte’s analytical acuity
resides upon the claim made by his narrative structure itself, that
the present situation cannot be comprehended by rationality or realism,
only by fantasy and fiction which must almost invariably be in excess
of events. I say almost, because even Malaparte can be elliptical,
when it suits his purpose. One thing he does not mention, for example,
is that there was a serious secession movement in Sicily and Southern
Italy at the end of the War, which aimed to have the region annexed
to America and declared the forty-ninth state. Here as elsewhere
it is instructive to note the contrast with Norman Lewis’s
Naples ’44. Lewis, a British Army Intelligence officer
at this time, is at pains to show that his claims for the folly
of the liberators’ policies in post-War Naples are in fact
understatement, and so has no hesitation in mentioning the secession
movement(9); where
Malaparte prefers to overlook the real political manoeuvres which
threatened the integrity of the Italian State, the better to lodge
his claim as patently excessive and writerly. Through this piece
of withholding immediate gains accrue to Malaparte’s narrator
and his part in this “plague”. Where Lewis, in his diary,
seeks distance from what he describes, Malaparte seeks distance
and at the very same time immersion. As he continues, he lets it
be seen that his crisp suit is in fact riddled with bullet holes,
that it has been plucked off the body of a British soldier killed
at Tobruk. Though his incandescent self-regard may at times obscure
this, from the outset Malaparte does make it clear, that his narrator,
because he has survived to write this tale, is necessarily, from
page one line one, himself already infected, his healthy appearance
being indeed a sign of this fact.
Nor is this the only sort of integrity
to have been lost to the “plague”, for language itself
has been invaded. In the army gym, with punch-ball and shower, Malaparte
prepares to “walk down” into the rabble(10).
The minor
assault being committed here is less visible in translation, as
it is against the Italian language, with the intrusion of the American-language
“punching ball”, “Peninsular Base Section”,
and indeed the name of Malaparte’s companion. This assault
will intensify to the point where Malaparte turns his text into
a modern-day Babel, with entire conversations being transcribed
untranslated. What is more, Malaparte’s chosen route adds
to linguistic and cultural confusion: through “San Ferdinando”,
of Spanish-Italian resonance, to the unambiguously Spanish, or Bourbon,
"Via Toledo" (since renamed “Via Roma”, on
maps if not in popular nomenclature), a history of colonial conquest
and occupation is inscribed in street names. Such a latter-day Babel
is of course no innovation, and T.S.Eliot, in the opening of The
Waste Land, presents a powerful version of it following the
Great War(11).
Yet, where Eliot leaves unresolved the question of whether an ideal
reader would in fact know the various languages which seem to be
required, Malaparte converts the collapse of linguistic unity into
an assault which only he can sustain, in and through his text. For
though he in fact possessed limited abilities in the languages he
cites – German, French, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Finnish,
English, Spanish, to name but a few – he presents himself
as the indispensable interpreter who has absorbed Europe’s
linguistic plurality into himself, thereby into his text. And he
does so in a Naples which is itself the supreme site of hybridity,
of multiculturalism avant la lettre, as he will later explain
to the American General Cork (a pseudonym for General Mark Clark),
using the city as both origin and terminus:
"When Naples was one of the most
illustrious capitals in Europe, one of the greatest cities in the
world, it contained a bit of everything. It contained a bit of London,
a bit of Paris, a bit of Madrid, a bit of Vienna – it was
a microcosm of Europe. Now that it is in its decline nothing is
left in it but Naples. What do you expect to find in London, Paris,
Vienna? You will find Naples. It is the fate of Europe to become
Naples." (188)
As the novel opens, Malaparte leaves
the Olympian heights in order to interpret the Neapolitan depths.
And if the echoes are classical, they are also Christian. He continues:
"The distinction of being the
first among all the peoples of Europe to be liberated had fallen
to the people of Naples; and in celebration of the winning of so
well-deserved a prize my poor beloved Neapolitans, after three years
of hunger, epidemics and savage air attacks, had accepted gracefully
and patriotically the longed-for and coveted honor of playing the
part of a conquered people, of singing, clapping, jumping for joy
amid the ruins of their houses, unfurling foreign flags which until
the day before had been the emblems of their foes, and throwing
flowers from their windows on the heads of the conquerors."
(2)
Malaparte will be Virgil, guide through
Inferno to Colonel Hamilton’s Dante-pilgrim (though never
forgoing his role as Dante-narrator). Yet no sooner does he adopt
the part than he betrays Virgilian neutrality in his claim that
the Neapolitans have been the first to be liberated. For, even considering
Italy alone, the Sicilians were prior, as were several important
Southern towns; while in no obvious sense was Malaparte, a Tuscan
who regularly sang his pride in his native Prato, entitled to speak
of Neapolitans as “his” people(12).
And the misleading
un-Virgilian claims do not start on page one, in fact, but on the
novel’s cover in the naming of its author, “Curzio Malaparte”.
For this is a pseudonym – Bonaparte turned nefarious –
adopted in the 1920s by Kurt Erich Suckert, who attempted thus to
reinvent himself, through a gesture worthy of his early idol Gabriele
D’Annunzio. Suckert, as Malaparte the Virgilian narrator and
tourist-guide, whose Neapolitan credentials place him bang in the
centre of Europe. “‘In Europe’,” he will
later say, “‘we are all more or less Neapolitans’”
(78): more rather than less in his own case, but not through birth-right;
through replication, rather, through his parthenogenic recreation
of himself in and as this most (re)inventive of cities(13).
The Skin proffers a trajectory
into the hybrid heart of Europe in which the innocent American will
learn the dark secrets of the Old Continent. Colonel Hamilton is
less the Henry James princess than most, in that “he alone
realized how much mystery there is in the story and the lives of
the people of Naples” (33). Yet, in the event, despite the
affronts to his sensibility, the colonel remains naïve, and
it is not least this failure of the educational purpose which makes
the novel run so contrarily to the grain of Dantesque revelation
and novelistic discovery. The Colonel never follows Dante out of
Inferno to “see again the stars”, and is in fact dead
by the novel’s conclusion. The novel is given an episodic,
anti-epiphanic structure by the fact that the account it offers
is of the frequently perverse and invariably unsuccessful –
therefore necessarily repetitive – attempts to avert a failed
communication, to circumvent a botched cross-cultural initiation.
The stone on which the most neo-colonial
toes get stubbed is placed on the path by sex; sex where, in the
absence of more developed linguistic communication, cross-cultural
exchange might have appeared most plausible. Malaparte takes Colonel
Hamilton, with Jimmy his subaltern, to see the Naples flesh-pots.
Together, they discover ¿The Virgin of Naplesî: a girl who, extraordinarily
in this city where the obvious plague is that of venereal disease,
and where virtually all girls, and many boys, have been prostituted
by their parents, still has her hymen intact, which she displays
for a paltry dollar. Jimmy claims to have understood the alarming
message; only to reveal that he hasn’t understood a thing
when next he is encountered, on his way to the wig shop. What are
manufactured here are not conventional wigs, but blonde pubic tufts
that prostitutes will wear because, it is reported, “‘Negroes
like blondes’” (73). A visit is paid to the steps where
dwarf whores solicit soldiers. Colonel Hamilton is invited to witness
“the Asiatic cult of Uranianism” (100) in which a group
of homosexual men forgather to watch one of their number give birth
to a gnarled wooden infant.
The reaction of the Colonel to this
age-old ritual serves as a reminder, if reminder were needed, of
a further narrative structure which, as much as Dante’s and
as much as any novelistic expectation of epiphany, is underpinning
The Skin: tourism, and tourism’s origins in that educational
form of travel undertaken by travellers on the Grand Tour, during
whose time Naples became a cultural capital and the third city of
Europe(14). The
Colonel’s reaction perfectly mirrors that of one of the most
famous of such travellers, offered not to a Neapolitan grotesque
this time but to a Sicilian one. When Goethe visited the palace
of the Prince of Pallagonia, he found sculptures so odd and obscene,
such “deformed and revolting shapes”, that they confronted
this most eloquent of writers with the limits of his own capacity
for transcription:
"When a person is expected to
describe some absurdity, he is always at a loss, because however
great his love for the truth, merely by describing it, he makes
it something, whereas, in fact, it is nothing that wants to be taken
for something… I called them groups, but the word is inappropriate,
for they are not the productions of calculation or even of caprice;
they are merely accidental jumbles."(15).
Goethe was constrained by decorum to
keep his protests verbal, but Colonel Hamilton, when he confronts
the “absurdity” of Uranianism, lashes out with his feet,
prompting Malaparte, ever-ready with ironic commentary, to exclaim,
“‘You’re a conqueror, Jack’” (148).
It may be more than coincidence that Malaparte’s Colonel shares
his patronym with that lynch-pin of the Neapolitan leg of the Grand
Tour, Sir William Hamilton(16).
In the late
eighteenth century the British Special Envoy was host to many of
the writers and artists who celebrated Naples, and he is mentioned
more than once in The Skin; while the city into which Malaparte
descends with the colonel, given its steep decline from around 1830,
is substantially that inhabited by his historical namesake.
No consideration of Naples or its relation
to the Grand Tour can ignore the city’s proximity to Pompeii
and the volcano that caused its destruction and preservation(17).
I shall turn
to these shortly, but not before first noting that even for such
dignified tourists as Sir William and Goethe, Naples presented opportunities
of discovery in the sexual domain. The affair and subsequent marriage
are notorious, of the hitherto very sober Sir William to Emma Hart,
as is his subsequent part in the ménage-à-trois
with Lord Nelson. Goethe is notably coy on matters sexual in Italian
Journey, despite biographers’ conclusions that this was
a period of initiation for him(18).
Yet he does
admit to being enchanted by a Princess whose lack of inhibition
is such that, like Pallagonia’s statues, it too defies transcription,
in that “no censorship could possibly pass her discourses
if they were written down”. He is especially titillated by
an episode in which, following an earthquake, the princess found
herself virtually pinned under an abbot:
“‘Fie!” she cried,
leaning her head against the sinking wall. 'Is this proper for such
a venerable old man? Why, you’re behaving as if you wished
to fall on top of me. This is against all morality and decorum.'
In the meantime the house had resettled itself, but she could not
stop laughing at the ridiculous and lustful figure which she said
the good old man had made of himself."
It is not merely the encounter of Thanatos
with Eros that provokes Goethe, rather it is the princess’s
willingness to forgo all privacy and pudore for the theatricality
of the joke: “she showed no concern for the calamities and
loss of life and property which had affected her family and thousands
of others, as if this joke had made her forget everything else”(19).
What is it that, one hundred and fifty
years later, so horrifies Malaparte’s American companions
as they encounter the dwarf and child prostitutes, the blonde pubic
wigs, and the homosexual mothers? Beyond the obvious subversion
of procreative sexuality, it is the fact that sex has become theatrical;
and in becoming theatrical has evacuated the merest trace of privacy,
become bankrupt of the interiority so dear to the liberators’
Puritan traditions. It is almost as if Goethe’s titillation
had been radicalised through a reading of that other serious Northerner,
Walter Benjamin, whose account of his disturbed reaction to the
city claims that everything here, from family life to food to commerce,
even to sleep, has been theatricalised(20).
For Benjamin,
Naples becomes the anti-bourgeois capital par excellence,
the city where the family barely functions, where life is spectacle
and improvisation, even in architecture. For Benjamin, Naples is
“porous”, defying the urban definition of, precisely,
definedness: permeable, labile, turned inside-out. Benjamin finishes
his essay with a panicked admission that eroticism is also omnipresent
here; then ends in a somewhat embarrassed joke in which he suffers
the indignity of being the butt, yet re-establishes the distance
of a foreigner.
With Malaparte, the pubic hair may
be dyed blonde, but the tone of sex is darkened: laughter hardens
to rictus, while theatre turns into guignol(21).
Porosity
becomes menacing indeed, as categories flip into their opposite,
protectors becoming salesmen, and, in a classic reversal, masters
becoming slaves. After wandering into "Via Toledo" with
the Colonel, Malaparte points to the Negro soldiers who, even as
they are purchasing prostitutes’ services, are themselves
being bought and sold, in defiance of their present military, cultural,
and economic dominance:
"As he wanders from bar to bar,
from inn to inn, from brothel to brothel, as he smiles, drinks and
eats, as he caresses the arm of a girl, the Negro is oblivious of
the fact that he has become a medium of exchange… There was
not a family in the city, however poor, which did not possess its
Negro slave."(22). (18)
The wealthier or better-connected the
soldier, the greater his value on the slave market: “Drivers
were the most expensive of all. A black driver cost up to two thousand
dollars” (19). The Malaparte of sex, laughter, and death re-emerges
here, as reminder of the hollowness of victory: the scugnizzo
leads his master-slave to the flesh-market, starting at home with
his own sister; the deathly element derives from the echo in new
imperialism of the genocidal affront of African slavery; while the
laughter is Neapolitan, in revenge against the liberator-invaders.
Removed from privacy and divorced from
sentiment, sex effects reversals which conceal yet further reversals,
and these in turn remove this writing not just from conventional
propriety but from desire itself as the prime mover of plot(23).
Central here
are the “inverts”, to whom two long chapters are devoted
(“The Rose of Flesh” and “The Son of Adam”).
Beyond the obvious “inversion”, the homosexual group
which Malaparte frequents is one which upturns the very reality
of the War, its hierarchies and ideals: no sooner has the war front
shifted north, than “the international community of inverts,
tragically disrupted by the war, was reconstituting itself in that
first strip of Europe to be liberated by the handsome Allied soldiers”
(82-3). Irony bites in “tragically”, yet Malaparte does
admire this group: not only because it reinforces his claims for
his own pan-European hodgepodge, but also because, ostensibly founded
upon sex, it in fact comes close to transcending sexual motivation
altogether:
"Inverts, as is well known, constitute
a sort of international brotherhood, a secret society governed by
the laws of a friendship that is both deep and tender, and not at
the mercy of the foibles and the proverbial fickleness of sexual
feeling. The love of inverts is, thank God, superior to the sexual
feeling of men and women." (131)
What Malaparte portrays here is something
akin to the Freemasonry for which Naples was also a home (and which
was also suppressed by Mussolini)(24):
an “unnatural”
fraternity which, even when it has done sterling war service (which
Malaparte acknowledges), owes allegiance to plots of neither nation
nor libido, rather to something more farcical and moribund –
more farcical because more moribund: “They testified, with
a dignity beyond compare, to all that was choicest and most exquisite
in the world whose passing was symbolical of the tragic decline
of European civilization” (83). Beyond the foppery and pantomime,
Uranianism’s rite of passage is decadent in the strong sense,
when a handsome youth undergoes ritual confinement, labour, parturition:
the very excess of the ancient fertility rite being undercut by
the deathly sterility of the gnarled wooden offspring, as it is
by the failure of the Colonel to learn from it.
Colonel Hamilton lashes out, while
Malaparte watches and ironises. Despite the ostentatious parade
the real-life author made of his liaisons with glamorous women,
the narrator Malaparte is notably chaste in The Skin, indeed
throughout the Malaparte oeuvre; nothing of the Dantesque empathy
with Paolo and Francesca, rather the lofty disdain of a Virgil,
as if no personal weakness of the flesh were imaginable(25).
Skin and flesh: the claim Malaparte wishes to make for the emblematic
status of the former (to which I shall return) leaving him ostentatiously
immune to the lure of the latter. In Malaparte-the-narrator there
are to be found no obvious symptoms of sexual desire, of paternal
instinct, still less of any dynastic or genealogical drive; though,
as we are seeing, this may be less despite the centrality of these
forces to the novel genre and tradition than precisely because of
their centrality(26). Yet
this is the case – and the caveat is crucial – only
in that the flesh which might have tempted him turns out to be practically
indistinguishable from the surface of his own body. At General Cork’s
banquet, Malaparte is asked why Italians did not rebel against Mussolini
prior to 1939; to which he responds, characteristically and not
without some justice, “so as not to displease Roosevelt and
Churchill, who were great friends of Mussolini before the war”
(203)(27). In
the shocked reactions he receives, Malaparte reaps his reward, which
is to become more than merely representative, the very incarnation
– in the literal sense – of a time and a place which
are otherness itself for his American interlocutors: “I was
Europe. I was the history of Europe, the civilization of Europe,
the poetry, the art, all the glories and all the miseries of Europe”
(203). Malaparte is Europe, Europe is Naples, Malaparte is Naples
is Malaparte.
In The Skin, nationalism is
always presented as an ideological après-coup designed
to erase historical compromises through a bowdlerising of reality.
Malaparte’s own anti- or supra-nationalism would, if lodged
merely as a claim, be definable in exactly the same way, in that
Malaparte himself had every reason to wish to edit his past. But,
as in the almost mystical moment at the banquet, Malaparte’s
transcendence of national frontiers and ideological definitions
is only marginally a claim, being embedded rather in his novel’s
structure, as well as in the tone of eroticism with which the novel
is suffused. If Malaparte can assume a distance from the theatrical
sex of the city, then it is precisely because he already is that
city: when he walks into it, accompanied by the Colonel, he is walking
into himself. Within the homosocial and homosexual implications
of this move lies a further eroticism(28).
It is understating
the case to claim, as is often done, that Malaparte is self-regarding,
for he follows Narcissus through, and plunges into the pool, drowning
in his own image; or, to shift metaphors, he is not just Dante and
Virgil, but the bolgias of Inferno too, and their inhabitants.
The narrator’s every irony, his every snobbish aside, is fed
by this radical auto-erotism, which frees him from extraneous temptation.
This it is which confers upon him a fluidity denied to the Neapolitans,
who for the most part will appear as epigones of his hyperinflationary
self. This it is which frees him of national limitations, absolves
him of plot as well, of the need or obligation to grow or develop,
in that he is already plethoric. Malaparte’s narrator, being
entirely turned in upon himself, is also entirely turned out from
himself; always on the move because never moving at all; brazenly
disinterested because only ever visiting his own person, in a perilous
piece of homeostatic bravura. After identifying himself at the banquet
as Europe, Malaparte’s Borgesian reversals (hero and traitor)
become not a source of anguish but an index of the achieved ecstasy
of (re)incarnation: “And simultaneously I felt that I had
been oppressed, destroyed, shot, invaded and liberated. I felt a
coward and a hero, a ‘bastard’ and ‘charming’,
a friend and an enemy, victorious and vanquished” (203).
Underpinning Walter Benjamin’s
essay on Naples is a startled perception that this city has somehow
avoided the nineteenth century, resisted the embourgeoisement
of which Benjamin was himself the consummate analyst. Surprisingly,
given his analysis of how the city refuses other nineteenth-century
institutions, Benjamin does not draw the obvious literary conclusion:
that this is a city which also resists the great nineteenth-century
genre, the novel, which has depended so thoroughly on what he calls,
speaking of architecture, “the Nordic sense” of interiority
and the private self. It is indeed the case that Naples, celebrated
for art, poetry, philosophy, theatre, song, is poor in distinguished
novelists; as it is the case that Malaparte’s contribution
to the impoverished genre was reviled by the Neapolitans who were
its subjects(29). Malaparte
attempts a Neapolitan novel which does not conceal or avoid the
city’s theatricality but magnifies it into ruthless exhibitionism:
no rounded characters here, only cut-outs; no intrigue, only exposition;
no introspection, only harangue; no multiplication of distinct voices,
only a single, strident tone, even when dialogue is transcribed(30).
There is
nothing novel in this novel that will not be revealed as some sort
of repetition, no depth that does not have its innards removed.
At its worst and most nostalgic, in moments which seriously undermine
much of what is achieved elsewhere, The Skin romantically
laments the loss of the values and dimensions which have traditionally
sustained the novel genre, and attributes this loss to the withdrawal
of the Christian God. Yet at its best, just as it tramples on the
notion of nation, it tramples on the novel’s conventions of
plot, characterisation, interiority, complexity, plurality, impersonality,
epiphany, or reacts to their loss not with a sigh but a guffaw.
If The Skin jolts forwards by
means of incorporation and the forging of avatars, then two instances
or objects particularly expose and challenge this a-logical logic:
Malaparte’s house and Malaparte’s food; the former of
which he enters, the second of which enters him. The two are served
up together at General Cork’s banquet, organised in honour
of a staunchly puritanical arch-American, Mrs Flat (whose name already
indicates how hard she will find it, eponymously two-dimensional
as she is, to ingest the fare, never mind the larger Neapolitan
lesson). Mrs Flat is intrigued to hear of Malaparte’s house
on Capri, whither Malaparte would withdraw with top Allied officers
when exhausted from the assault on Cassino. Malaparte has already
recounted how this multinational group would imbibe fine wines,
themselves of farflung provenance, and how the Homeric group would
turn almost Lawrencian, as “we used to sprawl in front of
the chimney piece on the chamois skins that cover the stone-paved
floor” (201). Yet lest this seem like a retreat within the
novel from the Neapolitan person of Malaparte, it should be stressed
here that his house is, more even than Naples, an autobiographical
construction: casa come me, as he called it, a “house
like me”, his ritratto di pietra (“self-portrait
in stone”)(31).
Built between 1937 and 1942, against
every building regulation and upon one of the most spectacular rocky
outcrops in the entire Mediterranean, Malaparte’s house was
given its initial design by the renowned architect, Adalberto Libera.
But Libera never claimed the house among his works, and scholarship
has confirmed that Malaparte himself took over the design and made
the house his own, doing so with none of the Christian regret which
clogs his literary work, but in the resolutely un-nostalgic International
Style of Modernism(32). Just
how unnostalgic the house is becomes clear when it is contrasted
(which scholarship has rarely done) with the equally famous Capri
house belonging to Axel Munthe (whom the author invokes in The
Skin only to disparage him), the origins of which are recounted
in the pre-War bestseller, The Story of San Michele. Where
Munthe’s house on the opposite corner of Capri is a product
of patient gathering and enfolding, an assemblage designed to promote
inwardness, a tender act of homage to the past, a novelistic house
indeed, Malaparte’s house is an affront, more gesture than
dwelling, projected above the sea in an extraordinary act of pretension,
an architectural exaggeration. That it did not hold water, literally,
is perhaps appropriate for this autobiographical construction, where
Malaparte’s literary selves will fail to hold water more figuratively.
Mrs Flat is alarmed to learn that in
1942, shortly before the battle of El Alamein, General Rommel was
a visitor to Malaparte’s house. Malaparte recounts how he
served Rommel wine, then joined him to inspect the spectacular scenery.
Leaving, Rommel asks if Malaparte designed the house himself, to
which the author responds that he “‘bought the house
as it stood’” (204). This lie is mere preface to the
larger inflation, which itself is prelude to a joke. Malaparte continues,
to the banquet guests:
“And with a sweeping gesture,
indicating the sheer cliff of Mastromania, the three gigantic rocks
of the Faraglioni, the peninsula of Sorrento, the islands of the
Sirens, the far-away blue coastline of Amalfi, and the golden sands
of Paestum, shimmering in the distance, I said to him: ‘I
designed the scenery’” (204-5).
Perplexed and in retreat, Rommel exclaims,
“‘Ah, so!’”, Teutonic literalism stumbling
over the blasphemous metamorphosis with which Malaparte sets out
to épater not just les bourgeois, but les
généraux as well (of whichever dominant army).
The fact that no history book would have Rommel anywhere near Capri
during this period confirms this as another self-aggrandising refusal
of historicity(33). Indeed,
Malaparte does not hold water: it may be unsurprising that, having
built it, the author hardly ever inhabited his house, which may
none the less yet prove to be his most enduring construction.
Mrs Flat barely has time to recover
from one provocation before a more sinister one is served, in the
form of the banquet’s pièce de résistance:
“It was the first time I had ever seen a little girl who had
been cooked, a little girl who had been boiled” (218)(34).
For lack of fish and as relief from spam rations, General Cork’s
major-domo has raided the famous Naples aquarium for what has become
“Siren mayonnaise with a border of coral”. The guests
are appalled, except for the delighted Malaparte:
"Ah! It was worth losing the war
just to see those American officers and that proud American woman
sitting pale and horror-stricken round the table of an American
general, on which, in a silver tray, reposed the body of a Siren,
a sea goddess!" (223)
The Sirens’ island off Capri
has shrunk into the alimentary nugget which Malaparte prepares to
ingest in a characteristic blend of sacrament and cannibalism(35).
Only, before he can tuck in, the siren is whisked away by the uncomprehending
General Cork, who orders that it be buried. Death rises up for the
American other as anthropomorphic, tragic, literary, above all as
meaningful, where for Malaparte it is mythic, indifferent, above
all a joke in poor taste. Not only, then, do Eros and the “inverts”
foreground decadence and death, but eating does too: death, which
the new rulers are determined to personalise and which Malaparte
is equally determined to keep impersonal, and, if possible, incomprehensible,
even at the cost of forgoing one of the greatest of satisfactions
that novels can offer. Death is in fact – or rather death
is through fiction – what may constitute the major area of
resistance to the colonists, and it is also what constitutes the
final area of resistance to the inherited novel form which I wish
to consider here.
The rapport of food to jokes and fictitiousness,
and the relation of these three to death, are underscored by what
is practically the only passage in which an irony directed at the
narrator’s self threatens to make this self thicken and develop,
psychologically and novelistically, with the imminence of a lesson
absorbed. Shortly before Malaparte sits down to lunch with various
officers in the hills round Cassino, a mine explodes under a goumier,
whose severed hand cannot be found. Nothing daunted, Malaparte eats
his couscous. His fellow officers take the chance to heap scepticism
upon the accounts of banquets in Kaputt, already published
and famous by this time: “Judging from Kaputt,”
says one officer, “one would say that Malaparte eats nothing
but nightingales’ hearts, served on plates of old Meissen
and Nynphenburg porcelain at the tables of Royal Highnesses, Duchesses
and Ambassadors” (283). A second general kindly overlooks
the accurately diagnosed Malaparte snobbery, to conclude: “Malaparte
has a very vivid imagination”. As refutation, the author gives
a hypertrophic account of the origins of the humble fare currently
before them, tracing the foodstuffs through their habitats back
to their regal and sacrosanct origins. The encomiums to ham, trout,
and kid lead through St. Thomas Aquinas, Schiller, the Danube, Mycenae,
Delphi, to Marakesh, as if the entire Mediterranean basin had been
required to yield the humble meal just eaten. But if step one is
mythopoeic inflation – death as ritual sacrifice – then
step two, which threatens to individualise death, is a demonstration
that even inflation is understatement where death is concerned,
dictated here by scrupulous table manners. Malaparte reports that
the flavour of the couscous has been only somewhat spoiled by “the
hand of the unfortunate goumier, which the exploding mine
had neatly severed and hurled into the great copper pot in which
our kouskous was cooking” (287). To his comrades’ appalled
disbelief Malaparte replies by assembling the knuckles and finger-bones
on his plate: “One should never make fun of a guest when he
is devouring a man’s hand… You will forgive me if, in
spite of my good breeding, I wasn’t equal to swallowing the
nails” (287-8).
Rather as Malaparte’s Naples
takes Walter Benjamin’s formulations on the city and radicalises
them, so here the author tries to find a space for his own type
of death – or his own type of novel – beyond Benjamin’s
linkage of the genre to meaningful dying. Benjamin argues, famously,
that “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller
can tell”, that, “the novel is significant, therefore,
not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps
didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of
the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never
draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the
hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about”(36).
What will turn out to be most rebarbative in Malaparte – and
rebarbative to the new colonists first of all, who are seeking to
read meaning into him and his culture – is his refusal to
render death in the personal terms which they, and novels, most
readily recognise.
Returning now to the meal of the goumier’s
hand, we know already that Europe is Malaparte is Europe, and therefore
that all eating is, for the narrator, a murderous act bordering
on auto-ingurgitation. Yet no example makes it clearer that it is
a willingness to acknowledge the dead, and at the very same time
to extinguish their tragic potential – even at the cost of
cannibalism – that is the sanction of Malaparte’s brand
of novelistic ambition. This time it is Colonel Hamilton who draws
the conclusion: "That’ll teach you," laughed Jack,
"to question the truth of what Malaparte relates in his books!"
(p.288). Scepticism rebuffed, Malaparte appears more absorptive
than ever; until, on leaving the lunch, he lets on to the Colonel
that he has in fact been lying, playing a practical joke with rams’
bones. The character Malaparte cedes to the trickster-narrator Malaparte,
who is no longer confirming, but inventing himself now, irresponsibly,
sadistically, humorously perhaps; veracity is reduced – to
the novel’s gain qua novel – into verisimilitude;
verisimilitude is theatricalised; while death is flattened, almost
literally disjointed, into farce.
General Cork’s banquet concludes
with Malaparte’s being denied his Siren, which is buried in
a move that underlines the New World’s burying of the Old,
a rejection of that special Counter-Reformation to which Malaparte
was devoted (and which he had once seen Fascism as promoting)(37).
Yet this
minor defeat is instantly followed by another dinner, held this
time in the palace of the Prince of Candia, who is himself an idealised
Malaparte (being born of parents of mixed nationalities, an opponent
of Mussolini, and – unlike Malaparte – a nobleman).
The prince’s very palace bespeaks resistance, as it “conforms
to that imitation Spanish baroque” of the Counter-Reformation,
as does the portrait of his father, which depicts him not in his
prime but in the activity – or passivity, rather – of
dying. High-flown conversation is barely quelled by the German air-raid
which ensues, until a bomb explodes alongside, and the populace
breaks in, carrying a dead girl. The prince gives the lead on how
death should be encountered: “The traditional attitude of
the Neapolitan nobility to death is different from that of the common
people. They greet it not with tears but with smiles, almost gallantly,
as one greets a beloved woman or a young bride” (238).
The transformation the dead girl will
undergo has precedents not least in the portrait of the Prince’s
father that Malaparte has been admiring. For Naples has been, over
centuries, the ideal site of the picturesque. “One has only
to walk the streets,” Goethe writes, “and keep one’s
eyes open to see the most inimitable pictures”(38).
From the
time of Caravaggio, if not for longer, artists have been putting
frames round Neapolitan experience, turning living into tableaux
vivants(39). The
dead girl here is dressed, oiled, adorned until she is Clorinda:
“As it lay there on the table the corpse invested the scene
with an air of brightness and calm; it transformed the hall and
the people in it into a peaceful tableau”(40)
(251-2).
Malaparte is an expert creator of such tableaux, but his are almost
invariably mourants rather than vivants. In Kaputt,
death’s ability to create a cruel, surreal version of the
picturesque is unforgettably illustrated through a scene in which
scores of horses are driven by fire and panic into a Finnish lake
which then freezes, leaving the deep-frozen horses’ heads
as anguished statues above the ice(41).
In The
Skin the inhabitants of Hamburg, firebombed and covered in phosphorous,
which ignites on contact with air, jump into the canals in a fruitless
attempt to save themselves. Death transfixes the human, or exaggerates
it, into something beyond even tableau – into a quasi-sculptural
stasis which defies interpretation.
The literary correlative of this Dantesque
infernal stasis leads beyond mythic inflation, beyond bathos and
laughter, into silence, a degree-zero knell, not of individual humans
or animals but of the human and the animal, the animate per se;
and it sounds the more powerfully – the more silently –
in that Malaparte is such an inveterately noisy writer. As harbinger
of stasis and silence, Malaparte sees a “black wind”,
which transforms itself into a “black voice” (169).
He recalls their first appearance, in the Ukraine in 1941: a hallucinatory
scene in which he rides through an avenue of trees on each of which
is a crucified Jew; men who, still just alive, refuse his succour
and Christian pity. Malaparte’s remonstrance of innocence
is mocked, as “a horrible laugh ran from tree to tree, from
cross to cross” (155). To the vividness of the tableau
mourant corresponds an inability to interpret its significance,
even as vengeful Christian reprisal. Malaparte, listening, is plunged
into deathly fever, frozen into synaesthetic blankness: “The
silence was horrible. The light was dead, the smell of the grass,
the colour of the leaves, of the stones, of the clouds that drifted
through the grey sky – everything was dead, everything was
plunged in a vast, empty, frozen silence” (160).
The episode which follows is perhaps
the most affecting in the novel, and its intensity is only magnified
if one knows that Malaparte harboured greater love of dogs than
he did of people. In 1940 Malaparte had published Cane come me
(“A Dog Like Me”), a hymn – if a typically autobiographical
one – to his faithful hound, Febo(42).
In The
Skin he explains how Febo, like Odysseus’s Argos, would
wait for him when he was imprisoned, how he “was, as it were,
the mirror of my soul… the dearest of brothers to me, a true
brother, one who betrays not, nor humiliates” (161-2). Febo,
who is himself of mythic pedigree, who has held his own against
the wife of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, walked in Byron’s
footsteps, this Febo one day goes missing, just as the “black
wind” appears. Frantic, Malaparte seeks him everywhere, until
he finds him in a vivisection unit, “his stomach exposed and
a probe buried in his liver” (167). Administering death, Malaparte
asks only why the agonised dogs are quite silent. The doctor, lethal
syringe in hand, replies: “‘Before we operate on them…
we cut their vocal cords’” (168). There is no more damaging
noise in the novel than this canine mutism, in which death determinedly
resists providing the novelistic warmth of which Benjamin writes.
It is so silencing that it almost – if not quite – justifies
the volume of Malaparte’s own barking. Though whether it justifies
it more or less if one knows that the real-life Febo survived the
war intact, and accompanied its master into doggish old-age, is
an open question.
Compared to Febo’s, the young
girl’s death under bombardment is lyrical, as by becoming
Clorinda she is removed from the uncomprehending gaze of the invading
armies, be they German or American. The silence that falls upon
the crowd is not appalled but awed. Yet the community of mourners
barely has time to form before a new laughter is heard, when “a
tremendous blood-red glare filled the sky” (256). Every ceremony
is dwarfed by Naples’ resident deity, “this inhuman
scourge” – Vesuvius (262): “It was a pitiless,
implacable voice. It was in truth the voice of a tumultuous malignant
nature – the voice of chaos itself” (272). If Naples
is, for Malaparte, “my city”, then herein lies the final
reason for the adoption: its nearness to an abnegating force that
renders the entire cityscape a tableau mourant, this force
against which Naples’ patron saint, San Gennaro, whose blood
is said to liquefy twice a year in token of his protection, is ludicrously
meagre, sticking-plaster to a forthcoming amputation.
Malaparte is in a long line of writers
to have found Naples’ fascination in its proximity to Vesuvius,
the volcano which challenges any writer’s ability to translate
its reality into words. The city became a major site on the Grand
Tour as a direct consequence of Winckelmann’s excavations
at Pompeii, and Sir William Hamilton divided his time between excavations
and vulcanology. Pliny the Younger, in the most famous account of
the destruction of Pompeii, took refuge in modesty, claiming to
Tacitus that his writing on the disastrous eruption of A.D. 79 was
“unworthy of history”(43).
Goethe called Vesuvius “this peak of hell”, a “shapeless
heap” which “declares war on any sense of beauty”,
and after his third ascent, wrote: “The Terrible beside the
Beautiful, the Beautiful beside the Terrible, cancel one another
out and produce a feeling of indifference. The Neapolitan would
certainly be a different creature if he did not feel himself wedged
between God and the Devil”(44).
Of course,
Malaparte opts for neither modesty nor indifference, and his description
of the eruption is predictably indulgent and excessive. Yet he does
not conclude with drama but, counter-instinctually, with anticlimax.
In the final chapter of the novel he climbs the now dormant Vesuvius
with his American companion. He watches the Neapolitans invert Goethe’s
taxonomy and pray to the volcano as to their god, in the hope of
rekindling its flames. Rather like Franz Kafka’s sirens which
are never so powerful as when silent, somewhat like Samuel Beckett’s
Godot who is so determining in his absence, Malaparte’s death-delivering
Vesuvius is never so ominous as when it declines to utter(45).
Of course,
being who he is, Malaparte has to spoil his own best insight with
some cod-Christian pontificating about the Second Coming. Yet even
this cannot quite undercut his assertion to his companion, that
“here in Europe… only the dead count – dead volcanoes
too now." (344).
Throughout the novel it has been the
dead’s ability to “count”, to thicken into significance,
against which Malaparte has been militating. “Everyone knows,”
he writes, “what a race of egoists the dead are. They are
the only people in the world, no one else counts. They are jealous,
and full of envy, and they forgive the living everything save the
fact that they are alive” (66-7). His remedy against the attempt
of the dead to rise up and claim meaning for themselves? His remedy
has been, of course, to flatten them out of (non-)existence: “The
police ought to bury them with handcuffs on their wrists and, having
nailed up the coffins securely, lower them into very deep, specially
dug holes, and then tread down the earth above the grave, to prevent
these bastards from coming out and biting people” (66-7).
Crisis conditions and war were the
mainstays of Malaparte’s work, and nothing he wrote after
1947 matches the achievement, however flawed, of Kaputt and
The Skin. His attempt post-War to be adopted by the French
intelligentsia tripped up over his Fascist past; his belated flirtation
with Communism, his excursions to Soviet Russia and Maoist China
– he even bequeathed his Capri house to the Chinese State
– all bespeak the desperation of a fading talent courting
admiration at whatever cost. Malaparte never looks more opportunistic
than when trying to appear multi-faceted, almost as if he had failed
to learn his own lesson – a lesson with whose first and final
emblem I wish now to conclude.
After breaking through at Cassino,
the Allied Forces under Colonel Granger are finally entering Rome,
on the route which Malaparte claims to have suggested, down the
via Appia Antica. The triumphal march is mythologised in typical
Malaparte fashion, as the footsteps are retraced of victors from
Marius to Tiberius; while death has its poetico-artistic place,
and its bathos, as GIs stop to have their photos taken in front
of Celopatra’s tomb (“Colonel Granger shouted: ‘A
famous signorina, wasn’t she?’” (292)).
But death is more literally deflating too, when, at this precise
place and moment where Antiquity and Christianity converge, an Italian
shouting “Long Live America” falls beneath the caterpillar
tracks of an advancing Sherman tank and is crushed.
The episode is neither tragic nor merely
comic; absurd rather and grotesque, causing Malaparte to recall
another such flattening, from 1941 in the Ukraine. There, a man
who had been squashed by a tank into a carpet of human skin was
impaled, picked up, and carried through the streets as a standard.
Back in the present, Malaparte visits the house of the second flattened
man, whom he finds “no thicker than a stout piece of felt”
(306). It is precisely this piece of human felt that Malaparte wishes
to see flying from the tower of Rome’s Capitol, in its unabashed
two-dimensionality. For the eponymous skin is not just “the
true flag of us all, victors and vanquished” (306), but, in
its final denial of all that is inner, it is the true flag of Malaparte’s
eviscerated novel as well.
FOOTNOTES
1.
Curzio Malaparte, "The Skin"
(translated by David Moore, Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1997)
Go Back
2. See Fyodor Dostoevsky,
"Notes From Underground" (translated by Richard Pevear
and Larissa Volokhonsky, New York: Vintage Classics, 1994); Louis-Ferdinand
Céline, "Journey to the End of the Night" (translated
by Ralph Manheim, London: Calder Publications, 1989), and "Death
on Credit" (translated by Ralph Manheim, London: Calder Publications,
1990); Louis-René des Forêts, "Le Bavard"
(Paris: Gallimard, 1978); and Thomas Bernhard, for example "Extinction"
(translated by David McLintock, London: Penguin Books, 1996).
Go Back
3.
Curzio Malaparte, "Kaputt" (translated
by Cesare Foligno, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
Go Back
4.
On Malaparte’s political career up to the Second
World War, see Giuseppe Pardini, "Curzio Malaparte: Biografia
Politica" (Milan: Luni Editrice, 1998). On Malaparte’s
life more broadly see Giordano Bruno Guerri, "L’Arcitaliano:
Vita di Curzio Malaparte" (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2000),
and "Il Malaparte Illustrato di Giordano Bruno Guerri"
(Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1998).Go
Back
5.
The reports from the Franco-Italian front became the work
entitled "Il sole è cieco", ("The Sun is Blind")
(Florence: Vallecchi, 1947).Go
Back
6.
Malaparte also undertook a more literal, though covert,
change of sides in his texts, when he revised them post-War to make
them more palatable to those now in authority. See Guerri, "L’Arcitaliano",
passim, and Giancarlo Vigorelli, “Malaparte: testimonianza
e proposta di revisione”, in Luigi Martellini, ed., "Curzio
Malaparte: Opere Scelte" (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, Cellection
I Meridiani,1977) pp.XI-XXXIX.Go
Back
7.
Richard Lamb, "War in Italy 1943-1945" (London:
Penguin Books, 1993), chapter one.Go
Back
8.
Walter Benjamin with Asja Lacis, “Naples”,
written 1924, in "One Way Street and Other Writings",
(translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso,
1979), pp.167-176.Go
Back
9.
See Norman Lewis, "Naples ’44" (London:
Eland, 1983), pp.59-60, and, for a fuller account of this movement,
"Norman Lewis, The Honoured Society" (London: Eland, 1984),
chapters 8-9. Go
Back
10.
The Italian for this is “scendevamo”. Curzio Malaparte,
"La Pelle", in "Opere Scelte", p.967.Go
Back
11.
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” opens with Latin, Greek,
Italian, and German, as well as English. In Collected Poems 1909-1962
(London: Faber & Faber, 1963), pp.61-3.Go
Back
12.
Malaparte praises the Tuscans and his own Tuscan roots in many of
his works, not least in "Maledetti Toscani" (in "Opere
Scelte" pp.1331-1487).Go
Back
13.
Much of William Hope’s "Curzio Malaparte: The Narrative
Contact Strained" (Market Harborough: Troubadour Publishing,
2000) is devoted to discussion of the relation between Malaparte
and his various narrative personae. For the present context, see
especially pp.61-2.Go
Back
14.
On Naples’ increasing importance in the Grand Tour, see Melissa
Calaresu, “Looking for Virgil’s Tomb: The End of the
Grand Tour and the Cosmopolitan Ideal in Europe”, in
Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds., "Voyages and Visions:
Towards a Cultural History of Travel" (London: Reaktion Books,
1999), pp.138-312.Go
Back
15.
Goethe, "Italian Journey" (translated by W.H.Auden and
Elizabeth Mayer, London: Penguin, 1970), pp.237-9. Go
Back
16.
In her novelistic account of Naples in the late eighteenth century,
"The Volcano Lover" (London: Vintage, 1993), Susan Sontag
provides a vivid portrait of Sir William Hamilton, and portrays
his, rather than Goethe’s, horrified reaction to the statues
of the Prince of Palagonia:
"They said: the world is mad. Ordinary life is ridiculous,
if you take some distance from it. Anything can turn into anything
else, anything can be dangerous, anything can collapse, give way.
An ordinary object can be made from . . . anything. Any shape can
be deformed. Any common purpose served by objects balked."
(248) Go
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17.
On the role of Sir William Hamilton and Pompeii in Enlightenment
Naples see Alain Schnapp, “Antiquarian Studies in Naples at
the end of the Eighteenth Century. From Comparative Archaeology
to Comparative Religion”, in Girolamo Imbruglia, ed., "Naples
in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth and Death of a Nation State"
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.154-166. See also
Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, eds., "Vases and Volcanoes: Sir
William Hamilton and His Collection" (London: British Museum
Press, 1996).
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18.
See Nicholas Boyle, "Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume I"
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), e.g. pp.428, 506-8.Go
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19.
Goethe, "Italian Journey", p.313.Go
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20.
In "Midnight in Sicily" (London: The Harvill Press, 1998),
his book on Sicily and the Italian South, Peter Robb recalls his
first visit to Naples in similar terms:
"Naples was a theatre, and Neapolitans further offered a newcomer
the vast consolation of a people who’d seen it all. They’d
learned to live not as the makers of history but as choral onlookers.
History in Naples as in Sicily meant two and a half millennia of
foreign occupation." (150)
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21.
Some way into the Neapolitan episode of Roberto Rossellini’s
film "Paisà" (1946), which portrays the liberation
of Italy, the Negro soldier who is its protagonist is led by a Neapolitan
"scugnizzo" into a theatre where he finds not humans acting
but two-dimensional puppets, just the sort of theatre into which,
more broadly, Malaparte leads his own companions. The soldier becomes
so involved in what is a racial battle on stage (Christians versus
Saracens) that he jumps up and takes part, paralleling the confusion
and reversal which Malaparte illustrates in his own account of the
Negro soldiers.Go
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22.
In Rossellini’s "Paisá", the helping
hand of the "scugnizzo" is also the hand that thieves;
though Rossellini, being infinitely more compassionate in his vision
than Malaparte, has the Negro soldier recognise and forgive the
fact that he is being exploited.Go
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23.
On sexual desire as motor of “narrative desire”
see Peter Brooks, "Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention
in Narrative" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), chapter 2.Go
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24.
On the centrality of Naples to the Freemasonry movement,
see Carlo Francovich: "Storia della massoneria in Italia"
(Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1989), especially ch.10.Go
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25.
On Malaparte the lady’s-man see Guerri, "Il
Malaparte Illustrato", pp.50-58.Go
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26.
See Peter Brooks, "Reading for the Plot":
"Upon reflection, one can see that paternity is a dominant
issue within the great tradition of the nineteenth-century novel
(extending well into the twentieth century), a principal embodiment
of its concern with authority, legitimacy, the conflict of generations,
and the transmission of wisdom” (p.63)
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27.
On relations between Mussolini and the US and Britain during
the late 1920s and 1930s see Piers Brendon: "The Dark Valley:
A Panorama of the 1930s" (London: Pimlico, 2001), chapters
6, 13, 22. Not entirely untypical of the positive response Mussolini
found in the English-language world is that of the former ambassador
to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, who wrote the foreword to "My
Autobiography" by Mussolini (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1928). Here, Child states of Il Duce:
"Time has shown that he was neither violent nor absurd. Time
has shown that he is both wise and humane.
It takes the world a long time to see what has been dropped into
the pan of its old scales!… He is a mystic to himself."
(XVII-XIX) Go
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28.
As if sensing the difficulty of portraying the sort of
homosexual frisson which Malaparte’s novel exudes,
which goes beyond shared showers and Uranianism, Liliana Cavani,
in her 1981 film version of "The Skin", greatly increases
the importance of women in the narrative.
Discussing Malaparte’s personae in relation to an erotic scene
in "Sangue", William Hope offers a suggestion which holds
true for most of Malaparte’s work: “The underlying factor
in this tale is the way in which readers are manipulated by an equivocal
narration which highlights the more prurient elements of the scene
while the young Malapartian protagonist, who personally participates
in the text, is left unsullied by them” ("Curzio Malaparte:
The Narrative Contract Strained", p.75). Further fruitful ways
of exploring the relation between Malaparte’s prurience and
sexual indifference are thrown up by the discussion of the “split
between aesthetics and the senses” in Fascism’s founding
ideology, as proposed by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi in "Fascist
Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy"
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997),
p.12, and chapter 1.
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29.
It is presumably indicative of an ongoing resistance to
Malaparte’s view of Naples that he is not so much as mentioned
in the most recent English-language history of the city, John Santore’s
"Modern Naples: A Documentary History 1799-1999" (New
York: Italica Press, 2001); where, by contrast, Norman Lewis’s
"Naples ’44" is quoted extensively.Go
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30.
While this can be hypnotic in the fiction, it becomes close
to being disastrous in Malaparte’s drama, as it does in his
one film, "Cristo Proibito" (1951). For a more generous
assessment of Malaparte’s film, see William Hope, "The
Alienation of the Viewer in Malaparte’s Il Cristo Proibito"
(Salford: ESRI, 1999, Working papers in Literary & Cultural
Studies, no.35).Go
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31.
See Marino Talamona, "Casa Malaparte" (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), p.20. Michael McDonough writes
of the house: “It has been called the twentieth century’s
most beautiful house” (rear cover).
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32.
Marina Talamona’s volume, "Casa Malaparte", gives
a full account of the relations between Malaparte and Libera. More
recently, Gianni Pattena has also studied the relation, in "Casa
Malaparte Capri" (Florence: Le Lettere, 1999). This and many
other issues relating to the house have been documented in "Malaparte:
A House Like Me", edited by Michael McDonough (New York: Clarkson
Potter, 1999). The house is perhaps best known as a setting for
Jean-Luc Goddard’s film "Le Mépris". The
plot of Goddard’s film, itself based on a novel by Alberto
Moravia, is not without interest in the present context, presenting
as it does a form of pillaging of Europe by America and Hollywood.Go
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33.
See Michael McDonough, ed., "Casa Malaparte",
p.31.Go
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34.
That not all elements of this repast are apocryphal can
be deduced from the fact that Norman Lewis also mentions this meal
of a cooked baby manatee, in "Naples ’44", p.61.Go
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35.
Colman Andrews discusses Malaparte and food in an essay
entitled “Eating Malaparte”. In McDonough, ed., "Malaparte:
A House Like Me", pp.150-155.Go
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36.
Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections of
the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, in Illuminations (translated
by Harry Zohn, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books,
1969), pp.94, 101.Go
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37.
On Malaparte’s linking of Fascism to the Counter-Reformation,
see his "Muss.: Ritratto di un dittatore" (manuscript
unpublished in Malaparte’s lifetime, collected in "Muss.:
Il Grande Imbecile", Milan: Luni Editrice, 1999), where, for
example, he writes that: “Fascism, in its essence, is nothing
but the complex of defects of Catholic civilisation, the final aspect
of the Counter-Reformation” (my translation, p.38). Go
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38.
Goethe, "Italian Journey", p.212. On the lure
of the picturesque in Southern Italy, see John Dickie, “Stereotypes
of the Italian South 1860-1900” in Robert Lumley and Jonathan
Morris, eds, "The New History of the Italian South" (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp.114-147.Go
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39.
Caravaggio visited and stayed in Naples twice, in 1606
and 1609. Most famous of the paintings he executed there are the
"Seven Works of Mercy", now housed in Naples’ Pio
Monte della Misericordia, and the "Flagellation of Christ"
now in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte. On Caravaggio’s
use of the Neapolitan poor see Catherine Puglisi, "Caravaggio"
(London: Phaidon Press, 2000), pp.259-277, and Helen Langdon, "Caravaggio:
A Life" (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000), pp.319-339.Go
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40.
The original does not employ the French “tableau”,
which is self-consciously aestheticising, but “paesaggio”,
with its more mythico-buccolic associations.Go
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41.
Malaparte, "Kaputt", chapter 3, “Ice Horses”.Go
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42.
In "Donna come me", in Malaparte, "Opere
Scelte", pp. 373-7.Go
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43. Cited in Robert Etienne, "Pompeii,
The Day a City Died" (translated by Caroline Palmer, London:
Thames and Hudson, 1994), p.145.Go
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44. Goethe, "Italian Journey",
pp.192, 215.Go
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45.
See Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens”,
in "Collected Stories" (Edited by Gabriel Josipovici,
London: David Campbell Publishers, Everyman’s Library, 1993),
pp.398-9; and Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot", in
"The Complete Dramatic Works" (London: Faber and Faber,
1990), pp.7-88.Go
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