Book in the spotlight: Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte
The paperback edition of Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt contains an afterword that really should have been the novel’s introduction. Its placement at the end of the text is deceptive but, from the publisher’s point of view, probably necessary – if it preceded the text, I suspect a lot less people would care to venture beyond the intro into the book’s amorphous, jerky plot. As it is, unsuspecting readers must rely on their own BS detectors to separate the wheat from the chaff. Nor is the location of the afterword the only act of deception perpetrated upon the reader. While Kaputt is a work of fiction, it is advertised as a “report” and an “insider’s dispatch,” and its narrator shares the author’s last name. They have much else in common. Like the author, Malaparte (we never learn his Christian name) is a dashing journalist covering the Eastern Front in the uniform of an Italian officer. Also like the author, Malaparte is a socialite and, when not spending time observing Axis atrocities committed on occupied territories, he hobnobs with those who help make these atrocities happen. Malaparte is a good guy though; he despises the Nazi or Nazi-adjacent elites who, in thrall to his charm and wit, invite him to their plush salons. But his contempt is not very persuasive and, a well-timed bon mot aside, certainly does not prevent him from nibbling on hors-d’oeuvres and sipping champagne in the company of those who would in time be carted off to Nuremberg. As Malaparte regales his well-heeled hosts with stories of the brutality he has witnessed, two birds are hit with one stone: Malaparte the narrator sings for his supper, while Malaparte the author narrates the events to the reader.
The novel runs the gamut of human cruelty. In no particular order, people are savagely pogromized; asphyxiated corpses fall out of trains; children are shot; dying women are raped, while others are exploited as sex slaves before they are done away with; human eyes are sent as gifts to degenerate dictators. Human life is worth nothing, particularly the life of those written off as inferiors. Not even animals are spared: there are memorable scenes of horses being trapped in the ice of a lake like figurines and of dogs being used as carriers of explosives. This is supposed to be powerful stuff, but somehow it is not. The problem is that the narrator tries too hard, and this is where we need to take a closer look at Malaparte the man. Born in Italy in 1898, he came into the world as Kurt Erich Suckert. His father was German, his mother Italian. Changing his name to Malaparte (Malaparte, Bonaparte – get it?), he put his literary gifts to use by becoming something of a fascist hack. As we learn in Dan Hofstadter’s afterword – a master class in how to keep your hands clean while dealing with a writer of questionable moral hygiene – in 1923 Malaparte wrote the following:
In the same way as we have burnt the houses and dispersed the families of those who were, out of ignorance and cowardice, hostile to the living spirit of our nation, we will burn the houses and disperse the families of those who are hostile to it out of culture and intelligentsia.
Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? Malaparte glorified war, which for him was the “primal male experience.” He was capable of racial invective, writing to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law and foreign affairs minister, that the Greeks were “mongrels” and “Levantine half-breeds.” Hofstadter puts it bluntly: “By 1944, when Malaparte was finishing Kaputt, he had conveniently forgotten his own role as warmonger.” Apropos of the Iasi Pogrom described in the novel, Hofstadter writes, Malaparte’s article covering the atrocity in an Italian newspaper contained not a trace of sympathy for the victims. In fact, a young correspondent who served as Malaparte’s driver during his travels would claim that Kaputt was initially a Nazi-friendly book, written under the assumption that the Axis Powers would win the war. When Malaparte realized he had bet on the wrong horse, the novel was rewritten (Hans Frank, the Nazi overlord of occupied Poland, was apparently cheered to the echo in the first draft; in the novel we got, he is made to look like a clown). If this is true, Kaputt is reputation laundering.
But the world is a complex place. Malaparte eventually turned against Mussolini, and his ideological insouciance cost him his party membership and, eventually, liberty, even if the five-year-long preventive detention, complete with a driver and an Alfa Romeo, was hardly the penal equivalent of a hardship tour. As the afterword makes clear, Malaparte was no more a fascist and chauvinist than he was a pacifist and anti-war crusader. Malaparte’s ideology and great project was Malaparte. He was before all else interested in himself, and this rubbed off on the “fictional” Malaparte, who is an almost pathological navel-gazer. His self-adoration leads to glaring lapses of taste. Visiting the Warsaw Ghetto, Malaparte strolls through the area like a Parisian flaneur, telling a few walking cadavers that one day they will be happy and free – in French, of all languages. The Nordic-looking SS officer who escorts him through the area is repeatedly compared to an “Angel of Jehovah.” Malaparte shows no greater tact during a visit to a Bessarabian brothel in which Jewish girls are kept as sex slaves before they are summarily executed. Far from a source of comfort to the victims he seeks out, he makes one think of those ghoulish characters who go to hospices to watch people die. Tragedy is for him only a stage to strut on; he is so busy looking in the mirror he loses sight of the difference between Holocaust history and Holocaust kitsch.
But Malaparte’s narcissism cannot alone explain the disingenuousness that is palpably present in the novel. The truth is that Malaparte never went to the Warsaw Ghetto, he never witnessed the Iasi Pogrom, and – the afterword diplomatically says – he probably never visited any brothels with Jewish sex slaves in Bessarabia. (I’d question the very existence of such an establishment: the idea that Nazi officials would have used women they considered “racially impure” to service German officers is implausible.) Malaparte peacocks his way through suffering he never observed, and his problematic historicity casts a tall shadow over his credibility. Perhaps this explains why he overcompensates with scenes of violence. Not that a writer can’t rely on the imagination alone. William Styron did not have to witness Nazi atrocities first-hand to write Sophie’s Choice, but Malaparte is no Styron, and Kaputt has none of the haunting disquiet of Styron’s novel. It doesn’t help that he makes his characters occasionally speak in their native languages that, for the reader’s benefit (and to the reader’s annoyance), are promptly translated – while I can’t comment on Malaparte’s Romanian or Finnish, I know enough Russian to wince at some of the things the Russians get to say. One Soviet prisoner, for example, thanks Malaparte with the words, “Ochen spassibo” – meaning literally “very thank you,” this sounds as nonsensical in Russian as it does in English. “What” becomes “erto” in the mouth of a German SS officer (there is no such word in Russian; the Russian for “what” is chto). He even appears to get the etymology of the novel’s title wrong: the German word “kaputt,” the narrator says, originates from the Semitic kapparoth. According to all other sources, it comes from the French card-game term “capot.”
Malaparte is on more familiar territory when it comes to upper-class life and European elites. He liked to rub elbows with bluebloods and enjoyed the personal protection of Galeazzo Ciano himself, which explains the relative leniency shown to him by Mussolini. Malaparte apparently wanted to write like Proust (the first chapter of the novel is named after one of the Proust books), but he had little of the Proustian eye for detail; his salon dialogues are lifeless and contrived, while the social commentary is unsatisfactory. The penultimate chapter, a long-drawn-out description of some byzantine intrigue at Mussolini’s court, would only be interesting and legible to an insider. Malaparte not only wants to show he knows every European language, he also wants you to know he has seen every canvas worth seeing, and the novel is packed with incessant comparisons of landscapes and people to paintings. The flora and fauna of Capri remind Malaparte of something “painted by El Greco”; the Bessarabian lupanar makes Malaparte think of an “interior painted by Pascin”; the German advance in Ukraine is reminiscent of Dürer. Certain faces are straight from Lucas Cranach; elsewhere, they are from de Chirico. On and on it goes.
Yet, if you can overlook all the chaff, this is a serious novel and a fine work of literature. The descriptions of places are lush and atmospheric, and there are comical scenes in the best tradition of Joseph Heller and Jaroslav Hašek – I think here of the dim-witted General von Heunert, who calls for reinforcements in the shape of a Tyrolean trout expert in order to subdue a salmon in the Lappland wilderness, then spends three hours trying to reel the salmon in, and finally has an adjutant execute the fish with a pistol. And, there is no way around it, parts of the novel are written magnificently (Cesare Foligno, the translator, should be singled out as the book’s unsung hero). Consider the following:
The north wind swooped down during the night. (The north wind blows from the Murmansk Sea, like an angel of doom, crying aloud, and the land suddenly dies.) The cold became frightful. Suddenly, with the peculiar vibrating noise of breaking glass, the water froze. The heat balance was broken, and the sea, the lakes, the rivers froze. In such instances, even sea waves are gripped in mid-air and become rounded ice waves suspended in the void.
This is unforgettable. So are Malaparte’s scenes of wartime terror, when taken in isolation. At one point, Malaparte and an Italian consular official by the name of Sartori try to track down a Jewish lawyer in the wake of the Iasi Pogrom. The man is on a train bound for a concentration camp, and Malaparte’s party finally manages to catch up with the train at some godforsaken station. Some two thousand people have been packed into ten sealed cattle cars, and when Malaparte prevails upon the stationmaster to open the doors, a grisly scene unfolds:
The dead were fleeing from the train. They dropped in masses – with dull thuds, like concrete statues. Buried under the corpses, crushed by their huge, cold weight, Sartori struggled and wriggled trying to free himself from under that dead burden, from under that frozen mountain; finally he disappeared beneath the pile of corpses, as if it were an avalanche of stones . . . Some, attempting to crush him, hurled themselves with all their weight upon Sartori, others dropped on him coldly, rigidly, sluggishly; others butted their heads into his chest, or hit him with their knees and their elbows. Sartori grasped their hair, clutched at their clothing, caught hold of their arms, tried to push them back by gripping their throats or hitting their faces with clenched fists.
The diplomat is eventually rescued from this macabre onslaught. He is pale but calm, and he only says that his cheek has been bitten. But this is not the end. Once all the corpses have been offloaded and the body of the lawyer identified, Malaparte and his company watch in horror as a crowd of peasants and gypsies swarms the bodies like vultures to purloin their clothes:
The dead seemed to defend themselves with all their strength against the violence of those who were stripping them; men and women dripping with perspiration, screaming and cursing, were doggedly trying to raise stubborn arms, bend stiff elbows and knees, in order to draw off the jackets, trousers and underclothing. The women were most stubborn in their relentless defense. I never would have thought that it would be so difficult to take a slip off a dead girl.
This is literature of the first order, and the factuality of the events described is perhaps secondary. While parts of the novel are disingenuous, the novel cannot be dismissed in its entirety. Malaparte may have been a chameleon, but things were likely more complicated, as they usually are. Eugenio Montale, who knew Malaparte, said his placid facade belied a tormented psyche. After the war, Malaparte embraced communism; on his deathbed, he is said to have converted to Catholicism. This evolution is prefigured in Kaputt. The novel is more than just an anti-war work. It is also a – perhaps unconscious – condemnation of the upper classes, who flit through ornate drawing rooms as they dispatch lesser mortals to the killing fields of Europe. Above all, it is a condemnation of the godlessness of a civilization that has been consumed by its own depravity. There is a delicious scene in Kaputt where the crème de la crème of Helsinki’s diplomatic circles gather at the Spanish legation to carouse in evening attire and bejeweled dresses. As Malaparte watches them gossip, he sees something else: “A golden crucifix hung over the sideboard, and Christ’s feet touched the necks of champagne bottles sunk in buckets of ice.” The tragedy of Europe’s 20th-century history is that Christ’s feet were allowed to touch the necks of champagne bottles; the heavenly was dragged down to the level of the profane, and no one could see the heavens any longer.
A more gripping metaphor appears in the novel’s coda. As Malaparte wanders amid the apocalyptic ruins of Naples, crowds race towards the Duomo. Anguished and agitated, the people drop on their knees in front of the cathedral, crying out, “O sangue!” (“blood” in Italian). Rumor has spread that a bomb has hit the Duomo, destroying a casket containing the liquified blood of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples. The rumor drives the city to despair. The millions of people killed over the previous four years seemed to have left people unmoved; it took the destruction of a saint’s liquified blood to bring into stark relief the fall of man, his descent into barbarity, and the blood that he has spilled all over Europe. But the rumor is fake news. A priest steps out of the Duomo and tells the grieving crowd that the precious blood is undamaged. The crowd is delirious: “The kneeling people wept invoking the blood, and everybody was smiling; tears of joy ran down the faces hollowed by hunger; high hope filled everyone’s heart, as if no single drop of blood would ever drip again on the thirsting earth.” The preservation of the saint’s relics has reminded the inhabitants of Naples of God, the heavenly, and the possibility of redemption. It has reminded them that Christ’s feet should not touch the necks of champagne bottles. Did Malaparte write this consciously when he put the final touches on the novel in 1944 and, if so, did he sincerely believe it? Who knows. Hofstadter concludes that Kaputt “has much to say about the collapse of European civilization in the middle of the last century.” Malaparte was as much a contributor to that collapse as he was its witness and victim.
The Writings of Scriptor Adorans 