Curzio Malaparte's Kaputt

In writing, one must lie, regardless of whether it is fiction or essay. Not for the reason we commonly think: to make the writing more appeaing. The fundamental purpose for writing is to express ideas, more than facts, for, in the words of David Byrne, "Facts are lazy and facts are late, facts all come with points of view, facts don't do what you want them to..." When people state "facts", they are almost always disconnected from the complex web of information that makes that "fact" true. A writer's gift is to render that web so convincingly that no one minds what conclusions they make; we are smart enough to dismantle the web, that the ideas exist is enough.

Which makes "Kaputt" a troubling read. It is an account of World War II composed entirely of anecdotes, from a man on the "losing side", the Italian Fascist Party. It's difficult to verify the accuracy of his account, worse, the author stylistically is a liar, fond of embellishing facts for his own mental image.

The adage goes, The best lies have some truth in them, so let us turn to the writer of "Kaputt", Kurt Eric Suckert, otherwise known by his nom de plume, Curzio Malaparte. He would make for an interesting biography, which I have not read. Going by Wikipedia, Malaparte earned decorations for valor in World War I and contributed much to Mussolini's National Fascist Party, supporting his prime ministership and contributing articles. He seemed to be drawn to war, writing "Technique du Coup d'Etat" and had gotten cushy with a number of Italian royals, though later in life he ostensibly condemns both. The afterword from my NYRB edition mentions he was "given to dueling" and once wrote "I love war... I love it as every well-bred man loves it, every healthy, strong man, and every man who is not satisfied with humanity and its misdeeds." He fell out of favor with Mussolini and was put in jail for it, though Mussolini's son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, whom Malaparte often disparages in "Kaputt", intervened for him. In this odd political state Malaparte continued work as a war correspondent for the Second World War, but for his unflattering reportage he was sent back to prison during the last days of Italy's involvement. Apparently he also acted as a diplomat, given his extensive name-dropping in the novel.

One becomes disillusioned with Malaparte when one gleams the lie. I was shocked to find, in the afterword, that a lot of "The Rats" is ficitionalized; Malaparte could not have witnessed the pogram of Jassy nor have seen a Polish ghetto. One does suspect that the journalistic instinct, to editorialize, to direct, to express, comes into play here, and Malaparte, himself a man of suspicious renown, is denouncing the war for his own pleasure.

We go through the novel, then, as scientists, unable to believe the veracity of even one sentence. If we truly do that, then we find something extremely beautiful in it, even told by a liar.

Let's start with whom Malaparte thinks he is. He is an impartial thinker, a lover of art, a humanist, an unwilling bystander, a thrilling speaker, an Italian at heart. This we know from the astounding "Horses", an account of several aspects of war through the narrative frame of a sojourn in Sweden, a neutral country.

If Malaparte fancied himself a kind of Proust, he has some credibility on that claim. We cannot believe Malaparte and Prince Eugene's conversation and Malaparte's generous account of a Sweden untainted and uncorrupted by war, of the plaintive neighing of the sea and of the radiant health of the Swedes. Yet his account of German cruelty to Russians, the Swedish fear of Hitler so as to stage races, his account of Axel Munthe and his dog, the Princess of Piedmont watching Monteverdi's "Orpheus" and the beauty of Russian birds at the gallows, these cannot be true, but they are true. They're unspeakably real, even if they did not happen, even if he pretended they were real.

Malaparte transgresses the boundary between true and false in the sub-chapter "Ice Horses". It's a jaw-dropping chapter, though I must spoil it. In it, he interacts with Finnish rangers as they release frozen horses from a lake before the spring decays their bodies. Russian horses fled the fire of a previous day's battle and, with nowhere to go between the lake during the infamous Finnish winters and the firing Finnish squads, chose the lake, and somehow froze there in the violent Finnish winds, where they appear as a mass of marble statues.

That story cannot be true, but those emotions - the fear, the terror, the ruthlessness, in the context of the scale of the war - must be true. That's the extremely odd thing about fiction: it can convince if the audience is convinced of its sincerity. I cannot accept that the ice horses are true, because I do not think Malaparte's self-restraint from embellishment is sincere. I do believe the war, to many, was precisely that: a perversion of nature, of man's placement on the world as a moral entity.

So I take "Kaputt" as true, because in a sense it has no target. The writer has no gain from saying that he himself has been humiliated, has been turned into a whore by the war, he has no gain in depicting atrocities that implicate no one, he has no gain in feeling pity for others but especially for himself. (He does gain from condemning Ciano.) In that context, as sensational as the stories in "Kaputt" are, I don't see anything particularly mercenary in its construction. In fact, people are likely to call it vulgar, mixing in stories of German soldiers un-eyeing cats with children picking toy planes out of bushes.

But that vulgarity is Malaparte's aim, after all, for human life is vulgar. The book's last sub-chapter, "Blood", describes a dense crowd of homeless, ugly people in Naples. Malaparte is squeamish of their squalor and ugliness, but they, the flies, have won. The flies and the salmon have defeated a Europe that has destroyed itself, its connection to nature, its connection to humanity. For someone who loved war, Malaparte surely hated losing, and yet when one reads "Kaputt" one does not feel he hated the war the Italians lost, but he hated the war that has numbed people to death and to the individual's sense of beauty and liberty.

Himmler appears in the novel as a contradiction: an intimidating German commander surrounded by an armed guard, once he is out of his uniform he appears as pink as a lobster, fat, and playfully whacked at by his companions in a sauna. His soldiers ironically ask, "What war?" But Malaparte does not condemn Himmler for this, it seems; why can't Himmler steam in saunas? Is Himmler not a human? Even if Hans Frank is shooting at children, and mocking world-class boxers, is he not a human, who loves Chopin in an ironic twist?

In "Blood" - the aftermath of the war, the residue after the irreparable wound has been opened - Malaparte is happy that people take joy in blood, are weeping for blood, because he has seen a Europe that cares not one bit for the spilling of blood, though he slightly mocks them for it as it is the blood of a saint, and not the blood of an actual living human. "High hope filled everyone's heart, as if no single drop of blood would ever drop again on the thirsting earth."

The novel has become one of my favorites. In its writing style and in its premise, it is a novel about life, even, and especially, when it is confronted not just by death, but the automation of death, the psychological infatuation with death. Even the mass murderers of the novel are human beings, after all, such as Ante Pavelic, described as a thoroughly Christian man, but what elevates the novel is that some of the bystanders, the various German princesses for example, seem just as bad as the murderers, though they have not done a thing, precisely because they have not done a thing. Europe has destroyed Europe. Europe is complicit in Europe's destruction. Because of Proust, because of Chopin, because of Marxism and Christianity and golf and Siegfried, Europe destroyed itself. The book is total in terms of its condemnation, whose purity, and beauty, I admire. For that reason, though a great liar, I can believe Malaparte's view genuinely changed during the war, because nothing, not even belief, survived that great collapse. Perhaps he pulled one over on me after all.