Anatomy of Restlessness (20 page)

For two years, until his forcible dismissal, Malaparte used it as a sniping post.

He had developed a theory that the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, far from being the products of the contradictions inherent in bourgeois capitalism, were compounded from the disgust and envy of the bourgeoisie for itself. The Russian Revolution was a European phenomenon. Lenin was not some new Asiatic Chingis Khan but ‘a timid and fanatical' bourgeois functionary, a small man, part German like himself.

He carried his thesis to its conclusion in a small, brilliant book, the
Technique du Coup d'État,
which he published in Paris in 1931, after the Fascists forced him to leave
La Stampa.
The final chapter, written two years before the Nazis took power in Germany, carried the arresting title ‘Une Femme: Hitler':

None of this endeared him to the Duce, and, in Malaparte's own words, ‘Hitler asked for my head and got it.' On returning, courageously or misguidedly, from Paris in 1933, he was accused of anti-Fascist activities abroad, arrested, beaten up, put in the Regina Coeli jail, and, like some disgraced senator of imperial Rome, sentenced to five years' exile on the island of Lipari.

Here, guarded by
carabinièri,
he read Homer and Plato in the original, while the waves crashed onto the grey volcanic beach outside his house. Pictures show him in immaculate white plus fours but no socks, puckering his face like a middle-aged matador and caressing his favourite terrier:

Malaparte makes a lot of capital out of the five-year sentence: ‘Too much sea, too much sky, for so small an island and so restless a spirit.' The truth was that after about a year his friend Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, managed to have him transferred to Ischia and then to Forte del Marmi, where he lived in a villa with Febo, entertained, had the use of a ministerial Alfa-Romeo, and wrote satirical articles under the pseudonym Candido. For all Mussolini's faults, he was not vindictive, or without a sense of the absurd. Secretly he seems to have liked Malaparte – but was obliged to defer to the Germans.

Once the ‘exile' was over, Malaparte bought his own house in Forte dei Marmi, the Villa Hildebrand, which had been built for a German sculptor and frescoed by Böcklin. He then founded
Prospettive
, a cultural review with a bias toward surrealism, and published Pound, André Breton, Alberto Moravia, Mario Praz, De Chirico and Paul Éluard.

He went to Africa as a war correspondent during the Ethiopian campaign. On the whole, his dispatches were not unfavourable to Mussolini. He had also written a collection of autobiographical fantasies with such titles as ‘A Woman Like Me', ‘A Dog Like Me', ‘A Land Like Me', ‘A Saint Like Me'. And in a somewhat mysterious manner he had laid his hands on a sizeable sum of money. He bought Capo Massullo from a Capriote fisherman, saying that he wanted to keep rabbits there; instead he commissioned Libera to build the ‘house like me'.

Casa Come Me, with its stupendous views of sea and sky and rock, was intended to satisfy his ‘melancholic yearning for space' and at the same time to reproduce, on his own grandiose terms, the conditions of his exile on Lipari. It was to be the monastery-bunker of the man who had faced the dictators alone – a
casamatta,
a ‘blockhouse' or ‘madhouse', depending on which way you read that word in Italian; a house of the machine age that would nevertheless preserve the most ancient values of the Mediterranean. And unlike the ‘Apollonian' temples of classical Greece, with their forests of columns and ‘roofs set down from above', this building was to rise, like a Minoan sanctuary, from the sea itself.

The walls were the colour of bull's blood, the windows were like the windows of a liner, and there was a wedge-shaped ramp of steps which slanted, like a sacred way, up to the terrace roof Here, every morning, Malaparte would perform a ritual of gymnastics, alone, while the women who were in love with him would watch from the cliffs above.

Inside the house, on the upper floor, was the vast whitewashed atrium-saloon, its stone floors strewn with chamois skins, its long suede sofas with loose linen covers, and its wave-edged ‘Minoan' tables resting on concrete columns. There were huge, wooden, ‘fascistic' sculptures of nudes by Pericle Fazzini; and through the plate-glass fireback of the fireplace his guests could watch the sea behind the flames.

Beyond were the writer's own quarters and the ‘Room of the Favourite', each with its bathroom of veined grey marble fit for the murder of Agamemnon. Malaparte seems to have treated sex as something solemn and sacramental; in the Room of the Favourite the double bed is stationed against a plain, panelled wall and looks like the altar of a Cistercian monastery. The study too, despite its faience stove, its painting of Ethiopian women, and its floor tiles painted with the lyre of Orpheus, has a liturgical flavour. It was in this room, in September 1943, that Malaparte finished
Kaputt,
‘[my] horribly gay and gruesome book', which made his reputation outside Italy.

On Mussolini's declaration of war, Ciano advised his friend to get into uniform. So, as captain of the Fifth Alpine Regiment, Malaparte went first to watch the Italian invasion of Greece, then to report for the
Corriere della Sera
on the Russian front. He managed to charm or flatter his way into high Nazi circles. At Cracow, on the Vistula, he dined with Reichsminister Frank, the butcher of Poland, who assured him that he, Frank, was to be Poland's Orpheus, who would ‘win these people over by the arts, poetry and music'. Malaparte also wormed his way into the Warsaw ghetto and reported, somewhat evasively, what he had seen. He followed the Panzer divisions into the Ukraine and witnessed the senseless atrocities there.

His articles, syndicated through Sweden to the rest of the world, hinted from the outset that Germany was doomed. The Gestapo pressed for his removal, or worse; but Mussolini, already squirming under the shadow of Hitler, allowed him instead to go to Finland to report on the Finno-Soviet war. In the summer of 1943, on hearing of the Duce's fall, Malaparte flew from Stockholm to Italy. By the time the Americans arrived in Naples, he was sitting calmly in Casa Come Me, writing.

In
Kaputt
Malaparte chose to present an aesthete's view of German-occupied Europe, describing it as some vast and sinister fresco of the dance of death. The result, to say the least, is disturbing. His angle of vision is always oblique, always equivocal; the tone is surrealist—or, like the Nazis themselves, kitsch. There are moments when the imagery of Dali seems, at last, to have found a real-life subject, such as a scene in which Malaparte shared a sauna with Himmler, or this visit to the
Poglavnik
(military governor) of Croatia, after a push by the partisans:

Now, to my mind, the combination of ‘forty pounds' and ‘Fortnum and Mason' is both nauseating and bogus; and however weird
Kaputt
may seem on first reading, it surely works neither as novel nor as memoir. The same goes for
Kaputt
'
s
sequel,
The Skin
, a book written in a similarly self-inflationary vein, and one which tells of his career as a liaison officer between the Italian army and its new-found American allies. The set pieces, this time around, are sadistic ‘southern baroque'.

The Skin
was an international best-seller – except among the Neapolitans and Capriotes, who, feeling themselves to have been calumniated by a collaborator, made Malaparte's life on the island extremely uncomfortable. He joined the Communist Party, became disillusioned, and decided to emigrate to France.

There he fared no better. He loathed the intellectual climate of Paris during the reign of Camus and Sartre. He wrote a play about Proust, and another about Karl Marx in London; both were booed off the stage. He returned to Italy to make a successful film. People remember him at literary gatherings in Rome, in a wellcut brown tweed jacket, with a silent, boyish girl on his arm. He started to get fat and planned to ride a bicycle from New York to Los Angeles. Finally, in 1956, he went to the Soviet Union and China, where he wrote sober reportage, suggesting that he could have become a new kind of writer, not necessarily at the centre of things.

On Sunday, the eleventh of November, he fell ill with fever in Peking. The doctor who attended him said, ‘You have caught a gentle little Chinese microbe which has given you ... a gentle little Chinese fever. Nothing serious.' It was an incurable cancer of the lung. On his deathbed he converted to Catholicism and received the final absolution.

‘How he prayed!' said the Principe di Sirignano. ‘He prayed to Christ ... to the Madonna of Pompeii ... to Lenin ... But he died in agony!'

He left Casa Come Me – perhaps out of malice towards the Capriotes – for the use of artists from the People's Republic of China. His family contested the will, got the house back, and has recently set up a Malaparte foundation, whose function was not exactly clear to me. On the day of my visit the house was full of art students from Munich.

I also met a local man who said that Malaparte had been a big boss of the Communist Party.

‘Can't you see it?' he said, looking down the cliff at the rectangular roof and its curving concrete windbreak. ‘He built the house in the shape of a hammer and sickle.'

 

This morning we have assembled to bow before the graven image. But an Old Testament prophet, were he present, would have thundered, ‘Fingers Off! Thou shalt not lust after things.' The patriarchs of Ancient Israel lived in black tents. Their wealth was in herds; they moved up and down their tribal lands on seasonal migrations; and they were famous for their resistance to art objects. They would have stormed into art galleries as they stormed into the shrines of Baal, and slashed every image in sight. And this, not because they couldn't pack them in their saddlebags, but on moral grounds. For they believed that pictures separated man from God. The adoration of images was a sin of settlement; the worship of the Golden Calf had satisfied the emotional weaklings who sighed for the fleshpots of Egypt. And prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah recalled the time when their people were a race of hardy individualists, who did not need to comfort themselves with images. For this reason they denounced the Temple which God's Children had turned into a sculpture gallery, and recommended a policy of vandalism and a return to the tents.

And do we not all long to throw down our altars and rid ourselves of our possessions? Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, ‘If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality.' For what, on the face of it, enhances life less than a work of art? One tires of it. One cannot eat it. It makes an uncomfortable bedfellow. One guards it, and feels obliged to enjoy it long after it has ceased to amuse. We sacrifice our freedom of action to become its privileged guardian, and we end its imprisoned slave. All civilisations are by their very nature ‘thing-oriented' and the main problem of their stability has been to devise new equations between the urge to amass things and the urge to be rid of them.

But things have a way of insinuating themselves into all human lives. Some people attract more things than others, but no people, however mobile, is
thingless.
A chimpanzee uses sticks and stones as tools, but he does not keep possessions. Man does. And the things to which he becomes most attached do not serve any useful function. Instead they are symbols or emotional anchors. The question I should like to ask (without necessarily being able to answer it) is, ‘Why are man's real treasures useless?' For if we understood this, we might also understand the convoluted rituals of the art market.

People who know and really love things – people, we say, who have taste—commonly rant against the philistine who buys a work of art with as much emotion as he would eat an egg. They accuse him of collecting in order to buy an intellectual respectability without having to suffer for it, or of making people admire him through the refracted mirror of his things. But Freud and the psychoanalysts have had far nastier innuendoes to make about the compulsive art collector. The true collector, they imply, is a voyeur in life, protected by a stuffing of possessions from those he would like to love, possessed of the tenderest emotions for things and glacial emotions for people. He is the classic cold fish. He taps the vitality of former ages to compensate for the impotence of the present. And he protects his things with defensive fury from the human wolves who threaten them. (We shall recall Karl Marx's insight that the destruction of brick and mortar causes more dismay to the bourgeois than the widespread spilling of human blood.) In other words, the collector evolves a moral system from which he squeezes out people. We can call it the morality of things.