The Wandering Fascist
On the New Translation of Maurizio Serra’s ‘Malaparte: A Biography’
There’s a passage in Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris which, for all of its contradictions, helps explain the lingering fascination with Malaparte’s work. While there’s something inherently fraught in giving Malaparte the first word, it’s also useful to establish him as an edifice of sorts. Whether that edifice will be torn down or defaced in the words to come remains to be seen.
The year is 1948. Malaparte, born Kurt Erich Suckert, is living in Paris. He is addressing criticism he’s received since arriving in France after the end of World War II; it turns out some people he once considered friends and colleagues think ill of him for his ties to Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism:
They don’t want to understand that I am toward the antifascists what I was toward the fascists; that the reasons I despised the Nazis are the same reasons I despise the Russian Communists; that I have the highest contempt for politicians, of whatever party; that I’m interested only in ideas, in literature, in art. That I am a free man, a man above everything that stirs this poor mass of men.
As Ernest Hemingway, who turns up more than once in Maurizio Serra’s expansive biography of Malaparte, memorably wrote: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” The idea of Malaparte as a kind of inverse George Orwell — a writer who eluded easy political labeling but hewed to a particular set of ideals — is tempting; it is also, as Serra’s book points out, wholly false. Malaparte: A Biography is a book at war with its subject, and it’s all the more compelling for it.
Put differently, had Curzio Malaparte been the protagonist of a novel, he’d likely be the sort of antihero who draws in obsessive fans over time. His life — as writer, soldier, reporter, editor, tastemaker, outcast, fabulist, and court intellectual — could be the stuff of gripping fiction. Unfortunately for us, Malaparte’s life was all too real, and the burden of reckoning with his legacy rests firmly on his readers. Malaparte is the story of one man looking out for himself across history, leaving ruin as he went.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about Malaparte — or found a troubling resonance between his work and the present political moment. In 2017, I wrote an essay for Literary Hub, “How Far Can Fascist Satire Go?”, that revisited his books The Skin and Kaputt, along with his persona, during the first Trump administration. Malaparte’s adoption of a provocative pseudonym, an allusion to Napoleon Bonaparte, seemed of a piece with, say, Curtis Yarvin’s use of the nom-de-plume Mencius Moldbug.
In introducing her English translation of Malaparte’s The Kremlin Ball, Jenny McPhee describes the experience of reading Malaparte as being “profoundly destabilized by his sentences while at the same time thrilled and intrigued as one is thrust into a quasi-hallucinatory state of uncomfortable surprise, awe, and disbelief.” Details in Malaparte’s accounts of post-World War II Italy in The Skin and his coverage of Italian troops fighting on the Eastern Front in Kaputt seem far too outrageous to be believed. In Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, Malaparte encounters the likes of Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles and always manages to come off as the smartest, cleverest person in the room. There’s also the matter of his ideological influence. Serra points out that enthusiastic readers of Malaparte’s 1931 Coup d'État: The Technique of Revolution included Che Guevara and the right-wing Greek junta that took power in 1967.
Reading Malaparte, one does see him admit to being a fascist at one point in his life, but in his telling, this was a youthful mistake — something he flirted with before running afoul of Mussolini, being punished for it, and learning from his errors. One of the great strengths of Serra’s book is the numerous ways in which he punctures Malaparte’s self-created mythology. It doesn’t hurt that Serra’s other books include a biography of Benito Mussolini, which has yet to be translated into English; as the saying goes, Serra “has the receipts” for the inner workings and palace intrigue of Il Duce’s regime.
What is perhaps the most damning thread in Malaparte occurs relatively early in the biography and reckons with Malaparte’s complicity in the aftermath of socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti’s 1924 murder by agents of Mussolini, including Amerigo Dumini. Serra notes that Malaparte testified in both the investigation and the first murder trial. He provided testimony to the effect that Mussolini’s agents had sought to intimidate rather than kill Matteotti. As Serra explains, Malaparte’s obscuring of justice didn’t stop there: “But there was worse: Curzio became the key witness in a scheme, in which Mussolini himself participated, to prove Matteotti’s responsibility for the assassination of Bonservizi, an event that would have explained, and in a certain measure justified, Dumini’s act.” Serra goes on to argue that this represented a moral low point for Malaparte, who “would never again sink so low, not even in the name of a purported political ideal.” This doesn’t mean that Malaparte had turned an ideological corner, however. Of the author in 1940, Serra writes he “may no longer have been a Fascist in his heart, but his conversion to pacifism was still to come.”
Late in the biography, Serra writes of Battibecco, a regular column Malaparte wrote late in his career: “[H]e struggled to propose solutions, and fundamentally he was uninterested in doing so, because if there were solutions, what role would he play?” Serra offers a portrait of a kind of ideological restlessness with no end point. In his 2016 book Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer explores the beliefs and convictions that saw several 20th-century thinkers migrate from the political left to the right. Though it’s tempting to view Malaparte through a similar, albeit reversed, lens, it’s more challenging to find the underlying beliefs that informed his political evolution. At the end of his life, Malaparte took arguably his most unexpected turn, gravitating towards Maoism and possibly undergoing a deathbed conversion to Catholicism. If that’s a somewhat discordant combination, well, it’s hardly the first you’ll find here.
Serra quotes one government official who described Malaparte as someone who “suffers from xenophilia.” That’s generally an admirable quality; it’s also a dangerous quality to have when living in a fascist state. One of the arguments Serra makes is that Malaparte’s true allegiances were more aesthetic than political, citing his work with anti-fascist translator Ettore Settanni to publish excerpts from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in Prospettive, a magazine Malaparte edited.
The paradoxes hardly end there. One of the repeated delights of Serra’s book are the concise moments in which he finds synecdoches for Malaparte’s life in the most unexpected places. Consider, for example, that “In Finland, Malaparte discovered the sauna and the pleasure of rolling naked in the snow; there was nothing better, for a narcissist like him, than to expose himself in a context from which sex is strictly excluded.”
Joyce isn’t the only literary figure to make an appearance here. Serra makes a compelling case that Malaparte’s account of meeting Mikhail Bulgakov in The Kremlin Ball is almost certainly false. Later in the book, Serra describes Malaparte’s late-career relationship with a much younger Chilean woman, Rebequita Yáñez. Yáñez was the niece of the transgressive novelist José Donoso. If Donoso’s path ever formally crossed with Malaparte’s, though, the historical record remains silent, and it’s left to the reader to imagine what these two charismatic, contradictory writers would have had to say to one another.
Serra has set an especially daunting task here: to tell the story of Malaparte’s complex, ever-expanding life while exposing Malaparte’s self-created mythology — and then, atop all of that, to make a compelling argument for why his work still deserves attention. Reading this book, I found myself recoiling from some of Malaparte’s beliefs and actions even as I hoped to one day read his as-yet-untranslated Mamma marcia, something of a companion piece to Kaputt and The Skin. It isn’t the only way to approach Malaparte’s work, but the combination of rancidity and seductiveness found in the bibliography suggests proceeding with caution. Malaparte’s own work offers a singular perspective on the middle of the 20th century. The grand achievement of Serra’s biography is in cracking the code of Malaparte’s life — neither hero nor antihero, but certainly a cautionary tale.
Tobias Carroll is the author of five books, including Political Sign (2020) and In the Sight (2024). He writes a monthly column about books in translation for Words Without Borders and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.
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