The Novelist Who Tried to Make It Look Cool to Be Fascist

New York Times

9 hours ago

MALAPARTE: A Biography, by Maurizio Serra; translated by Stephen Twilley
'Fascism' is notoriously difficult to define. It insisted on conformism while attracting bohemians and subversives, fused manic idealism with brutal cynicism and combined elements of modernism and pastoral nostalgia. The critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote that 'fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.' In 'Malaparte,' Maurizio Serra's outstanding biography of the Italian dandy, journalist, playwright, would-be diplomat and filmmaker Curzio Malaparte, the author makes clear that Benjamin was correct. Whatever else it was, 20th-century fascism was a project more of imagination than reason; it was driven by aspiring European elites who presented themselves as populists in their pursuit of grandeur and greatness.
Malaparte showed the first glimmers of his prodigious writerly talent as a young man in the early 1920s, and although he was once an ardent champion of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, his literary reputation has hardly been confined to the fringes of the far right. The admirers of his enduring novels 'Kaputt' (1944) and 'The Skin' (1949) include Milan Kundera, Edmund White and Gary Indiana. The Premio Malaparte, an Italian prize bearing his name, has been proudly accepted by novelists like Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
The sociologist Michael Mann once wrote, 'Fascism was a movement of the lesser intelligentsia,' but Malaparte was a first-rate talent as both journalist and fiction writer. Still, he struggled to put his creative energy to constructive use: He looked down on losers, but, in his misbegotten schemes and futile projects, he found himself among their ranks.
There is a pathetic aspect to Serra's account of Malaparte's life, a solipsism that despaired of finding anything worthwhile in life other than movement and adventure. The anti-intellectual intellectual, the macho man who wore makeup and sported perfectly coifed hair; physically courageous as a soldier and war correspondent but in politics and his personal life a moral coward; the militant anti-communist fascinated with Lenin's Russia and, eventually, Mao's China; the bourgeois snob who hated the bourgeoise and idealized both proletarians and aristocrats: Malaparte embodied, almost perfectly, the contradictory impulses of the fascist generation.
Malaparte was not among fascism's top ranks. He was not one of the chief ideologues, like his fellow writer Giuseppe Bottai. But, as his literary fame spread during the interwar period, he showed fascism's seductive side and cultivated a fraught relationship with Mussolini that continued into the 1930s. 'Malaparte' demonstrates that fascism was not only a collective enterprise and cult of the leader, but an individual one: a narcissistic worship of the self and a chance for ambitious young men from the provinces, dissatisfied with their place in liberal society, to embark upon a career.
The most important client of Malaparte's propaganda was always himself, and, in later years, he worked to make it seem that he had been an antifascist dissident the whole time. Serra tells us not to buy it: Malaparte's apparent political transformations were opportunistic or driven by whim. And if he abandoned the Fascist Party when he had to, he remained a fascist at heart. 'From beginning to end, one finds in him a fascistic strain that he never belied under any regime,' Serra explains, 'in particular a taste for force, the only real ideology of a man who disdained all ideologies.'
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