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Revenge of the Courtier

On Curzio Malaparte, shit-stirrer Wikimedia Commons

Malaparte: A Biographyby Maurizio Serra, translated by Stephen Twilley. New York Review Books, 736 pages. 2025.

Once the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress had been strung up by their heels in the Piazzale Loreto for a degraded people to behold, once teenage GIs from Newark and Kalamazoo had hocked their bubblegum onto the cobblestones of Naples—once, in other words, the fascists’ twenty-year misadventure in Italia Imperialewas well and truly concluded—Curzio Malaparte left Italy for France to embark on a career as a playwright.

He arrived in the Fourth Republic with baggage. Malaparte’s stature as a leading Italian journalist and intellectual provocateur in the 1920s preceded him. While Malaparte was indebted to Mussolini for giving him a place in history, the Duce, he insisted, was also the cause of his woes. In an undated entry from his Paris diaries of 1947-48 (published by New York Review Books in 2020 as Diary of a Foreigner in Paris), Malaparte is eager to get this point across:

My friends write to me from Italy, marveling at my silence, at my reluctance to assert . . . my Resistance credentials. . . . I did not only write against, I did not only conspire. I paid with prison, before and after the war; I fought on the battlefield, in full light; I’ve exchanged gunfire with the Germans and the fascists.

The new cultural vanguard of France, many of them Resistance veterans, sniffed around these bona fides for a hint of Malaparte’s soured allegiance to fascism; these were years when operatic disavowals of complicity resounded from the dock at the Nuremberg tribunal to the remotest village squares of Europe. Reviewing Malaparte’s novel Kaputtin Combat, whose editor in chief was Albert Camus, the critic Maurice Nadeau observed that far from being a mortal enemy of the fascist regime, Malaparte was “at most its enfant terrible,” a mischievous but loyal court jester. Malaparte expected no laurels in France, he wrote in his diary, but neither would he tolerate being “slandered” as a collaborator: “Let this be said once and for all, and as clearly as possible: If you don’t believe in the authenticity of my Resistance credentials, all you have to do is make inquiries.”

Well, says Maurizio Serra, if you insist. Serra’s purpose in Malaparte: A Biographyis not to vindicate Malaparte, which he couldn’t do even if he wanted to; Malaparte himself, “with his incessant and often superfluous transformations . . . fed the worst rumors, shamelessly denying everything that the loved and hated padre padroneMussolini had done for him.” Instead, Serra proceeds forensically and with great wit, bringing the intellectual and political history of five decades to bear on Malaparte’s accretion of enthusiasms, feuds, and identities, which spanned “nationalist and cosmopolite, pacifist and bellicist, elitist and populist, blunt chronicler and baroque narrator, arch-Italian and anti-Italian, at times also a charlatan.”

Simply put, writes his biographer, Malaparte “had less to be forgiven for than many of his colleagues, who were generally more capable of reinventing themselves after the war.” The question of Malaparte’s “credentials” is dispensed with at the outset, leaving the reader with the even more troubling suggestion of authentic principle behind what looks at first glance to have been a lifetime of craven opportunism.

The subject of this book—which won the Goncourt Prize when it was published in 2011 and now appears in English translation by Stephen Twilley—is a fascist, yes, but not simply, only, or irreducibly one. Forever tripping over himself to stay one step ahead of the ash heap of history, Malaparte (who “never signed a line of anti-Semitic propaganda,” Serra is quick to establish) was an abject self-promoter and narcissist. His signal contribution to literature was as a “special correspondent to the awfulness of history.” Malaparte’s semi-fictitious accounts of the European cataclysm of the last century—Kaputt(1944) and The Skin(La pelle, 1949)—are extraordinary books, still disarming in their blend of grotesquerie, poignancy, satire, and reportorial detail.

Malaparte was born Curt Erich Suckert to an Italian mother and German father in 1898, in the Tuscan city of Prato. A veteran of the First World War, like most of the early fascists, he was exhilarated by the anti-bourgeois, pseudo-revolutionary promise of the Blackshirts to make Italy anew in the ruins of its liberal democracy. He came to prominence as the author of an irreverent novel about the war, Viva Caporetto!(1921), and for founding and editing two influential periodicals: La Conquista dello Stato, whose title suggested its editors’ avidity for “necessary extremism” and paramilitary violence, and the literary quarterly “900,” run in partnership with Massimo Bontempelli, a progenitor of magical realism who would soon be denounced in the fascist press as a xenophile (“Which in this context was not a compliment,” Serra adds helpfully).

This second journal, with its modernist, cosmopolitan orientation—contributors included James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and the Soviet Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg—posed itself against the evil little magazine Il Selvaggio, mouthpiece of the ultranationalist Strapaesemovement that exalted the earthy virtues of the peasantry. Both “900”and La Conquista dello Statofolded in the climate of full dictatorship in the second half of the twenties, while Malaparte acceded to the prevailing winds of leader-worship and philistinism. Serra’s recounting of these debates is unsettling, certainly not because anything noble was lost in La Conquista dello Stato, whose hard line of permanent insurrection was brought to heel, but because in the eclipse of “900” by Il Selvaggioand the “total state,” the pretense of critical heterodoxy under fascism was confirmed as the fantasy it had always been. When push came to shove, an independent culture was no match for the mouthwatering appeal of the boot.

Malaparte’s claim to the ultimate fascist credential—participation in Mussolini’s March on Rome in October 1922—was a lie that he would discard as soon as the war transformed it from distinction to indictment. It nevertheless gave the patina of firsthand experience to Technique du coup d’Etat(1931), a series of admiring case studies in modern statecraft from Napoleon to the Bolsheviks and Blackshirts. (Malaparte also analyzed Hitler, whom he did not admire, characterizing the führer-in-waiting as weak and feminine in contrast to Mussolini.) Unsurprisingly, Techniquebecame an international bestseller. Trotsky, for one, was incredulous. “It is difficult to believe such a book has been translated in several languages and taken seriously,” he told an audience in Copenhagen. But the Old Man “couldn’t have given [Malaparte] a greater gift,” says Serra. Controversy from all sides ensured the book a long life; among its students would be Che Guevara and the colonels of the Greek junta.

In Italy, though, where Techniquewent unpublished until after the war (hence its French title), there was such a thing as bad publicity. Malaparte had established himself as a player in the palace intrigue surrounding Mussolini. He had ambitions to become a diplomat or maybe run the car company Fiat. With his new international esteem, his friends in high places, and his newspaper editor’s nose for scandal, he was capable of drawing blood in the corridors of power. So it was that the first of Malaparte’s several arrests by the regime, in 1933, came not out of conflict with Mussolini but with an old friend, the famous aviator and high official Italo Balbo.

Antifascism had nothing to do with it—nor would it ever. The circumstances of the Balbo affair were convoluted, but suffice to say, as Ray Winstone’s character puts it in The Departed, there were some guys you could hit and some guys you couldn’t, and Malaparte learned the hard way that Balbo was not quite a guy you could hit. Though initially incarcerated in the Regina Coeli prison reserved for enemies of the regime, the actual charges were reduced significantly by Mussolini, and Malaparte served out his confinement at a series of sun-kissed, minimum-security resorts. Another of his patrons, Mussolini’s tryhard son-in-law Galeazzo Ciano, secured him publishing contracts to get him back on his feet. Malaparte was never an authentic dissident, only a shit-stirrer. Compared to actual opponents of fascism, he endured the equivalent of an ankle monitor. (Recall the chilling remark of Antonio Gramsci’s prosecutor: “For twenty years we must stop his brain from functioning.”)

In 1940, Mussolini joined Hitler’s war over the concerns of Balbo, Ciano, and Malaparte (for what little his opinion was worth). Long since expelled from the National Fascist Party—he did not resign, as he was later to claim—Malaparte took a contract with the Milanese Corriere della Serato report on the Axis conquest of Europe. The books to emerge from his experience of the war and its aftermath are Malaparte’s most indelible, and the facts of his life might be expected to prepare the reader of Kaputtand The Skinfor their narrator’s detachment and Mephistophelean flair. (A third book, Mamma marcia, from 1959, is not yet available in English.) When you first descend into Kaputt, into the dinner parties of the debauched aristocracy and the ghastly forward-operating bases of the Lebensraum, it takes a beat to realize that your correspondent is reporting from the wrong side. Through Romania, Finland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and elsewhere, Malaparte traveled in the company of some of the worst people who ever lived. To the credit of his eternal soul, he mostly saw the likes of Frau Brigitte Frank, wife of the Nazi administrator of Poland, and Ante Paveli?, of the blood-soaked Croatian Usta?e, for who they were. But he did not intervene.

Both Kaputtand The Skin—which begins where Kaputtends, at the Allied liberation of Naples in October 1943—tell very different stories about the conduct of World War II than most Americans are used to hearing. Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest(2023) and Come and See(1985), Elim Klimov’s depiction of the Nazi occupation of Belarus, are nearer the mark. But even these frank renderings of atrocity don’t gird you for the hallucinatory weirdness of Malaparte’s imagery: not for the lake of frozen horses in Kaputt,nor the boiled mermaid served for dinner in The Skin(which is “actually” something worse). Serra believes that critics have concerned themselves overmuch with the fantastical elements of these books, “their Grand Guignol aspect,” to the neglect of their moral seriousness—a gravity that extends to the Holocaust. Revisiting the narrator’s exchange with a young captive of the Warsaw ghetto in Kaputt, Serra enlists Primo Levi and Marc Chagall in a persuasive case for Malaparte as a conscious, if not conscientious, witness to the Axis’s victims.

In these books, the rot runs much deeper than fascism; there has always been an “other, secret” Europe beneath the surface of Beethoven and the Sistine Chapel. Even the more worldly of the American occupiers, to whom Malaparte has hitched his wagon as a liaison officer in The Skin, have no idea what they’ve waded into. “You could not have chosen a more dangerous place than Naples for a landing in Europe,” he tells his new best friend, Colonel Jack Hamilton. “Your tanks run the risk of being swallowed up in the black slime of antiquity, as in a quicksand.” The ooze gurgles up in the Boschian tableau of Naples in The Skin, whose imps and humiliators include gay refugees and soldiers of color in Malaparte’s voyeuristic, often bigoted gaze.

America is good because it is young, Malaparte thinks, and in this he is as naive as the Americans themselves (the white ones, at least). But give it time. When Hamilton reappears in Mamma marcia, he’s left Europhilic innocence behind: “In fifty years, America too will be a country like Europe,” he says, “a country without freedom and without justice, in the hands of the cops, the judges, and those who command them.” It is hard to imagine an American military officer really saying this, but Malaparte’s point is clear: even in their triumph, the contagion of historical experience passes from occupied to occupier. America will get its turn.

Malaparte took the news of Ciano’s execution on the orders of the floundering Duce in January 1944 with indifference. “Revenge of the courtier,” Serra asks, “who regrets having been part of that environment, without taking it seriously?” In that milieu it had always been winner-take-all, and Malaparte “never loved losers.” It was this predilection that led him to act meaningfully against the fascists with time left on the clock. His efforts to reinvent himself as a playwright and a film director were muddled. They are massively entertaining chapters that find him sprinting toward error and whimsy, hosting variety shows and beauty pageants while squabbling with the intelligentsia of all nations. His last political obsession was China, though his incapacity for self-criticism would have made him a poor Maoist. By certain rubrics, Serra may be right that throughout his life Malaparte “breathed the air of totalitarian ideologies without becoming infected,” but rarely did he forfeit a chance to huff from the bag.

In The Skinthere is a banquet scene where the Yankees can’t get enough of Signor Malaparte, his bons mots and droll replies to their questions about Europe. He reflects on his transformation in their eyes from a “bastard Italian liaison officer” to what they call a “good fellow” and finally to the consummate charmer, a transformation that mirrors that of the conquered Italian people. History has just happened so fast. To the Americans, he writes,

I was Europe. I was the history of Europe, the civilization of Europe, the poetry, the art, all the glories and all the mysteries of Europe. 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. And I also felt that I was a really good fellow.

Malaparte was all these things. For all his idiosyncrasy, they made him something like the quintessential European of his time. Which in this context was not a compliment.