Malaparte: A Biography

Terrified horses frozen in Lake Ladoga all winter, until the thaw begins . . . Starved Russian dogs strapped with explosives that detonate when the animals run under German tanks . . . A basket of what appear at first to be oysters but are something more gruesome . . . Lavish dinner parties thrown by the Nazi Governor-General of Poland, who styles himself a great artist in the German tradition . . . A freight car stopped in Romania, disgorging its awful, rotting cargo . . .

Such are some of the sights Italian writer and erstwhile fascist supporter Curzio Malaparte reported from the Eastern Front of the Second World War. That he reported such events is true; that the events occurred as he described them is unlikely, being a writer for whom “reality had no objective, verifiable value.”

Throughout his eventful but relatively short life, Malaparte had a cavalier relationship with fact but a fabulist’s ability to “re-create the essence of what he did not see but perceived.” Maybe a Nazi officer in Finland never did bring a team of marksmen and dynamiters on a fishing expedition to hunt down and execute a huge stubborn salmon (as Malaparte describes in one chapter of Kaputt, the book collecting his impressions of the Eastern Front), but the scene somehow gets at the madness of the era in a way straight, scrupulous reporting could not.

With the new English translation of Maurizio Serra’s Malaparte: A Biography, readers now have a chance to learn the truth (to the extent it can be discerned) about the life of Kurt Erich Suckert, better known by his nom de plume (or perhaps nom de guerre, Curzio Malaparte. 

The man who would become Malaparte was born in Tuscany in 1898 to a German father and Italian mother. From this background of disparate cultures and places Malaparte seems to have derived his sense of self as something multiple, shifting, and amenable to reinvention. As a young man, he fought on the side of the French, against the Germans, as part of an Italian regiment in the First World War. In the interwar period, he wrote for and edited many literary periodicals, establishing himself as a provocateur, a seeker of controversy, an egoist, a tireless mythologizer and aggrandizer of himself, someone perennially ready to say or do “something to upset everyone.” Malaparte, Serra writes, “could neither live nor write without attacking.”

It was in this period that he began experimenting with variations on his given name, and their accompanying personae, eventually settling on Curzio Malaparte. Curzio came about as a bastardized, pseudo-Italianized version of his given name Kurt Erich. As a parody of Bonaparte, he chose Malaparte (meaning, roughly, bad or wrong side), indicating the scale of his ego and his continuing attraction to the sinister and subversive. All his life he worked to present a character—for he was playing a character—defined by the scandal and evil his chosen name implied.

In Italy’s fascist years, Malaparte offered his inconstant support to the regime. He was often favored with prestigious assignments and generous stipends (all of which he denied in the postwar years). As one with more interest in the aesthetics of fascism than adhering to party doctrine, he also ran afoul of Mussolini and was imprisoned (which Malaparte exaggerated and played up in the postwar years).

Despite his fraught relations with the fascist government, Malaparte nonetheless managed to obtain clearance to cover the Axis war effort in eastern Europe. Of this period in Malaparte’s life, Serra writes that “the Second World War, with its procession of atrocities, was the ideal theme for his pen and the background he needed to reveal himself in his full maturity as a writer.”

Indeed, the war (as he chronicled it in Kaputt) and its aftermath in Italy (described in similarly surreal, poetic terms in The Skin) served more as a setting for the (largely fictitious) exploits of his adopted persona than as the principal subject. In reading these works, “one passes continually from reality to allegory and vice versa, without anything being either entirely true or entirely false.” War suited him more than peace as a man, like his contemporary Ernst Jünger, fascinated with violent conflict as a medium for the actualization of the individual, concerned only minimally with the nuances of politics. The works of these years were and continue to be considered his best.

In the postwar period, Malaparte struggled politically, artistically, and financially. With the fall of fascism in Italy and the consequent investigations to root out those who supported the regime, Malaparte found himself reversing the positions he had defended for nearly 20 years and attempting to present himself (quite dishonestly) as a victim of the fascist regime. As a writer, he had developed “a visionary style [that] could not be adapted to a properly narrative frame,” and, with the war and all its madness beyond belief over, he never again quite found a subject and style that he could both execute well and profit from.

Although no longer a professed fascist, Malaparte’s attraction to extreme ideologies continued. In a development that makes little sense politically but much in terms of the writer’s attraction to aestheticized displays of power, in the mid 1950s, Malaparte became interested in Maoist China. In late 1956, he traveled to the country with support from the regime. The writings and dispatches form this period reveal a writer who, having lost the “keen and dispassionate sense of reality” that animated his earlier work, seems to have uncritically accepted the official communist line on everything, a mistake he had never made as a younger man. Malaparte fell deathly ill while in China and was the object of much diplomatic scurrying to repatriate him before his eventual death might cause political complications between Italy and China. Malaparte died in Italy in 1957, not long after turning 59.

Serra’s biography, originally published in French in 2011, is rich in detail about Malaparte’s life and times, the fruit of many years of diligent archival research as well as interviews with people who knew Malaparte. At about 630 pages of text and 70 more of notes on sources, the biography is certainly scrupulous, though for readers lacking extensive knowledge of 19th and 20th century Italian history, politics, and literature, that profusion of detail can make for a dizzying effort to follow the thread.

For readers whose chief interest is in Malaparte’s literary artistry rather than the facts of his life, the biography will likely feel tedious in comparison to anything in Kaputt, The Skin, or even the unfinished The Kremlin Ball. There is also the problem of uncovering the facts about a man who devoted much of his energy to blurring distinctions between truth and falsehood for artistic reasons as well as personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Serra himself notes this complication, remarking that even for those who claim to be “well acquainted with [Malaparte’s] existence, his typical day will remain a mystery.”

And so, at the end of Malaparte: A Biography, though its subject, a man over whom “history had only a superficial hold,” may appear only somewhat more clearly, there will be renewed interest in reading his work and appreciating anew how his bending and molding of the truth set the precedent for many later writers. As Malaparte himself said of his disregard for objective truth: “It’s much more beautiful the way I wrote it.”