by Jamie James
There is something strange in Swedish nature, the same sort of madness that is in the nature of horses. There is also the same gentleness, the same morbid sensitiveness, the same free and abstract fancy. The equine character, the equine madness of the Swedish landscape, is revealed not only in the great, solemn, incomparably green trees of the forests but also in the silky gloss of the vistas of water, woods, islands, and clouds, in the light and deep airy vistas in which a transparent white lead, warm vermilion, cold blue, damp green, and shiny turquoise compose a clear and elusive harmony, as if the colors never rested long on the woods, meadows, and waters but flitted instantly away like butterflies.
The reader is lured into the belief that Kaputt is a factual memoir mixing the exquisite and the macabre with sophisticated artistry, until the third chapter, when Malaparte describes a bizarre natural phenomenon, again involving horses, in a deadpan narrative that purports to be scientific. A herd of horses of the Soviet artillery, trapped by a forest fire in the dead of Finnish winter, stampeded into a lake. “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 freakish phenomenon captured the horses and transformed them into a living crystal sculpture. “The lake looked like a vast sheet of marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads.” A dazzling image, an unforgettable symbol of the paralysis wrought by war, yet impossible, surely; it cannot be possible; yet like many passages in Kaputt, it hovers on the knife-edge of plausibility, giving the reader pause.
In Malaparte’s tour of Axis atrocities across the eastern front, the overlay of irony is hammered to a delicate lamina that approaches the fineness of gold leaf, gruesome substance and nightmarish invention becoming almost indistinguishable. In one infamous passage, Malaparte interviews Ante Pavelić, the Fascist dictator of the State of Croatia, a Nazi puppet regime. Taking the title Poglavnik, a Croatian word approximating Führer or Duce, Pavelić began as the heroic leader of the Ustaše, or Ustashi, the Croatian nationalist movement. However, after the Nazis installed him in Zagreb, he instituted a program of genocide against Serbs, Jews, and Romanies that rivaled those of his patrons in monstrous bloodlust. Malaparte begins audaciously, by painting a sympathetic portrait of the Poglavnik. When he had met him on a previous occasion, Pavelić appeared to him to be a good-natured man. “His stupid air seemed to me shyness, goodness, simplicity, and a peasant-like way of facing facts, people, and things as if they were physical elements—material, not moral elements—belonging to his physical, not his moral world.”
When he met Pavelić at his office in Zagreb, Malaparte was mindful of the crimes he had committed in the course of his rise to power but entertained the possibility that “while unhesitatingly countenancing extreme methods for the defense of his people’s freedom, he was horrified by bloodshed.” Pavelić gravely tells his visitor, “I shall rule my people through goodness and justice.” The political situation in Croatia has grown worse, with widespread resistance to the imposition of this good and just regime. “The pale, almost ashen face of the Poglavnik was marked with a sorrow that was deep and sincere. How grievously this excellent man must suffer, I thought.” The Italian minister, Raffaele Casertano, arrives, and the two Fascists discuss the latest dispatches from the front. Partisan rebellion is raging throughout Croatia, but Pavelić promises the Italian that his valiant ustashis will soon subdue the guerrillas.
Then Malaparte lobs a bomb into the web of ironic sympathy he has spun around his subject:
I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik’s desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters—as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked, “Would you like a nice oyster stew?”
“Are they Dalmatian oysters?” I asked the Poglavnik.
Ante Pavelić removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, “It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes.”
Is it a gruesome fantasy or a real war crime? Like the implausible climatic phenomenon of a “broken heat balance” that caused a lake to freeze so quickly that horses are imprisoned in ice, the moral impossibility of collecting human eyeballs as tribute creates an insufferable trial to the imagination. Reading Kaputt requires the willing suspension of disgust as well as disbelief, forcing the reader to contemplate the ability of humankind to abandon the basic instincts of decency. The horror of horrors in Kaputt is not among the acts of cruelty it narrates but rather the capacity of those who perpetrate crimes of pure evil to believe that they are just, that they are doing good. After a wrenching visit to the ghetto in Warsaw, where the Jews were confined in conditions of almost unimaginable degradation, 1.5 million people starving in a district previously inhabited by 300,000, the sense of dread plunges deeper with Malaparte’s account of a dinner the same evening, which Ludwig Fischer, the Nazi governor of Warsaw, gives in honor of Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland. The scene evokes the grotesque gaiety of Prince Prospero’s ball in Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death.”
As she carves a roasted deer with a Nazi flag stuck in its back, Frau Frank says with a dainty shudder that she hates going to the ghetto because it is so schmutzig, so dirty. “As for the filth,” her husband comments, “it cannot be denied that they live under deplorable conditions. A German would never tolerate living like that.” Another guest, the Nazi governor of Cracow, adds, “As far as hygiene, the living Jews are more contagious than the dead.” Governor Fischer pours golden gravy over a great slab of venison and says that his main concern is for the children: “Unfortunately, there is little that can be done to reduce the children’s death rate in the ghettos,” which exceeded 50 percent. On his visit to the ghetto earlier in the day, Malaparte watched as two little girls fought each other savagely, bloodying each other’s faces over a scrap of raw potato.
Previously, when Malaparte called on the Franks at Wawel, the royal palace of Cracow, a roasted boar was brought to the dinner table, posed ferociously amid a tangle of forest brambles. After dinner, Frau Frank took Malaparte on a tour of the palace, pointing out the magnificent antique furniture and carpets, the royal collection of paintings and sculpture. Finally, she admitted him to the governor’s private study, a whitewashed room with nothing in it but a Pleyel grand piano. She told Malaparte that before Frank made a crucial decision, or when he was weary or oppressed by duty, he shut himself up there to play Schumann, Beethoven, and Brahms. Smiling with affectionate pride, Frau Frank said, “He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland.” Malaparte rarely draws conclusions; they are almost always, as in this case, so obvious that it is an insult to the reader to state them openly. Indeed, the scarcity of explicit outrage in Kaputt is one of the book’s most outrageous elements.
What prevents the book from becoming a depressing excursion through a familiar hell is the almost ecstatic beauty of the writing—not only in the sense of beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of that, but also in the mastery of tone, the complex symmetry of the book’s construction, and above all its freshness. In the years after the war, many books would document the horrors in a fullness of detail, but Malaparte wrote from personal observation in 1943, two years before the liberation of Auschwitz, Dachau, and the other Nazi death camps, when the outcome of the war was still in doubt. Readers who may feel that they have “done” the Holocaust, the all-too-vague term embracing a wide spectrum of moral depravity and terrible suffering, will confront it as if for the first time in the pages of Kaputt.
The Skin, Malaparte’s phantasmagoric memoir of his service in Naples after it was liberated by American and British troops, in October
1943, describes privation on a par with that of the Warsaw ghetto, intertwined with a pitiless analysis of the havoc unintentionally wrought by American good intentions. In this book, the element of fantasy is more pronounced than in Kaputt, punctuated by scenes of blackest humor, such as a pilgrimage to view the last remaining virgin of Naples. After queuing for an hour with Allied soldiers, Malaparte and his American friend pay a dollar each to enter a grimy hovel, lit by oil lamps, where a young girl with the eyes of an old woman sits on display, like a statue of Athena in an ancient Greek shrine. Posed amid wax figurines of the Holy Family and lithographs of scenes from Cavalleria rusticana and Tosca, the girl sits smoking a cigarette, until the impresario gives her a cue, and she lifts her red silk dress and spreads her legs, giving the customers a glimpse of her maidenhead.
The book’s principal themes unite in the symbol of the Siren of the Naples Aquarium. After they liberated the city, the Allies prohibited fishing in the gulf, so there was not a sardine to be had. When General Cork, Malaparte’s apparently fictional commander of the American forces, “a true American gentleman,” entertains official guests, he orders fish to be caught in the only available source, the Naples Aquarium, the most important singular collection of marine life in Europe after that of Munich. Eisenhower was served the giant octopus presented to the aquarium by the emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, and rare dragonfishes, a gift from the emperor Hirohito, were served to a party of American senators. By the night that Malaparte dined with General Cork and a group of American dignitaries (including a general in the Women’s Army Corps named Mrs. Flat), the aquarium’s collection was almost depleted. They were served its last prize, the famous Siren, “a very rare example of that species of ‘sirenoids,’ which, because of their almost human form, gave rise to the ancient legend about the Sirens.” The dinner reaches its outrageous climax when the anthropomorphic fish is served: “The majordomo, assisted by the footmen, deposited the tray in the middle of the table, in front of General Cork and Mrs. Flat, and withdrew a few steps. We all looked at the fish, and we turned pale. A feeble cry of horror escaped from the lips of Mrs. Flat, and General Cork blanched. In the middle of the tray was a little girl, or something that resembled a little girl.” The boiled Siren lay on a bed of greens, encircled by a wreath of pink coral stems.
With a perfectly pitched Swiftian mock naïveté, Malaparte bathes the rot of war in cheap sweet perfume. In the wreckage of Naples, the most heavily bombed city in Italy during the war, he writes, he often saw a body prepared for burial amid wreaths of flowers, and it was often the corpse of a child. But before General Cork’s dinner, he had never seen the body of a little girl encircled by coral:
How many poor Neapolitan mothers would have coveted such a wonderful wreath of coral for their own dead babies! Coral stems are like the branches of a flowering peach tree. They are a joy to behold; they lend a gay, spring-like air to the dead bodies of little children. I looked at that poor boiled child, and I trembled inwardly with pity and pride. A wonderful country, Italy! I thought. What other people in the world can permit itself the luxury of offering Siren mayonnaise with a border of coral to a foreign army that has destroyed and invaded its country?
Several scenes in The Skin are set in Capri. After Malaparte invited General Cork for a visit at his new house there, the general considered it “his own personal rest camp.” He would have regarded Capri as a perfect paradise, except that it “lay prostrate beneath the heel of female tyrants—an elect band of ‘extraordinary women,’ as Compton Mackenzie calls them. All of them Countesses, Marchionesses, Duchesses, Princesses, and the like, and mostly no longer young, though still ugly, they constituted the feminine aristocracy of Capri. And as everyone knows, the moral, intellectual, and social tyranny of old and ugly women is the worst tyranny of all.” If the reader can get past the rank misogyny, which may be ironic but not ironic enough, The Skin offers some moments of high-camp hilarity. Malaparte imagines the soirees of these female tyrants, dressed in tweed jackets and purple velvet capes, their wrinkled brows swathed “in lofty turbans of white or red silk, richly decked with gold clasps, precious stones, and pearls,” who remained faithful to D’Annunzio and Debussy, for them the Schiaparellis of poetry and music.
At a fete to welcome the American liberators, General Cork is called upon to open the ball with the first lady of the island, but no one had told him who it was. “While the Quisisana orchestra played ‘Stardust,’ General Cork gazed one by one at the mature Venuses,” until he saw a dark, saucy-looking girl, mingling with the maids at the door of the buttery. She was Antonietta, who ran the hotel’s coat check. The general swept past the titled ogresses and opened the ball in the arms of Antonietta. Malaparte concludes, “It was a colossal scandal, and the Faraglioni are still quivering from its impact.”
The master of Casa Malaparte became accustomed to uninvited visitors, who turned up on his doorstep in the hope of having a look at the house. In The Skin, he tells the guests at the Siren mayonnaise dinner about the time Field Marshal Erwin Rommel came to visit him, in the spring of 1942, shortly before the Battle of El Alamein. The story is certainly pure invention. Malaparte gives Rommel the full tour, and “when we returned to the vast hall with its great windows, which look out on to the most beautiful scenery in the world, I offered him a glass of Vesuvian wine from the vineyards of Pompeii.” Rommel toasts his host and asks him if he designed the house himself. Malaparte lies and says that he bought the place just as it was. “And with a sweeping gesture, indicating the sheer cliff of Matermania, the three gigantic rocks of the Faraglioni, the peninsula of Sorrento, the islands of the Sirens, the faraway blue coastline of Amalfi, and the golden sands of Paestum, shimmering in the distance, I said to him: ‘I designed the scenery.’”
The final twist in Malaparte’s restless ideological metastasis was an embrace of Maoism, in the years preceding his death in 1957, of lung cancer. He attributed his illness to his exposure to mustard gas in the First World War, though in almost every photograph of him that survives he has a cigarette planted in his mouth. In a quixotic gesture intended to strengthen relations between East and West, he left Casa Malaparte to the Chinese people in his will. His family, unimpressed by this beau geste, challenged the will and eventually won control of the house, in the early 1970s. They have been good caretakers and have restored the house to its pristine condition. They might even have enhanced its power as a legend by their decision to make visits there virtually impossible.
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THE MANAGER OF Casa Malaparte, a member of the Suckert family, advises that the house “cannot be understood without seeing it in person,” a stale truism all the more pointless because the only way to follow her advice, it seems, is to pay a fortune to rent it by the day to film a perfume commercial there. The house is one of the most popular tourist sights in Capri, in the same sense that the Turin Shroud attracts millions of visitors: even Nicolino Morgano, the owner of the Quisisana Hotel, was unable to secure me an invitation to visit Casa Malaparte at a week’s notice when I was in Capri. The only options available to tourists intent on getting a look at Casa Malaparte are an overland trek, which gets you a peek through the trees at a distance of about a hundred yards, or an expensive boat trip, which brings you closer in terms of a GPS reading, but the house’s site atop a hundred-foot cliff permits only a view of the top edge of the seaside facade and gives no sense of the layout.
The site Malaparte chose was Punta di Massullo, a narrow, rocky promontory that sticks like a finger into the sea, pointing to the Sorrento peninsula and flanking the Faraglioni. He bought the land from a fisherman for ten thousand lire, saying he wanted to breed rabbits there. It was yet a greater coup that he got permission to build a house in a district of the island where private residences were prohibited, which he contrived through the influence of his old friend Galeazzo Ciano, who had previously arranged his release from his gilded cage of exile in Forte dei Marmi. Adalberto Libera executed the preliminary design for the
house, followed by a revision submitted for approval to the island’s planning commission, but after construction began, Libera disappeared from the scene. Recently published correspondence supports the thesis that the final design was Malaparte’s own, in collaboration with the builder.
Libera had designed a modernist building in harmony with traditional Capriote architecture, but Malaparte conceived the house as a unique work that defied categorization among the jungle of isms that proliferated in European architecture in the mid-twentieth century. Casa Malaparte has lived up to its creator’s ambition, steadily gaining prestige since his death: it is an enigmatic icon, if the two qualities can coexist in a single work. Bruce Chatwin described the impact of Malaparte’s masterpiece with a series of metaphorical questions: “A Homeric ship gone aground? A modern altar to Poseidon? A house of the future—or the prehistoric past? A surrealist house? A Fascist house? Or a Tiberian refuge from a world gone mad?” Casa Malaparte is a brute monolith, a masonry box painted Pompeii red, sparingly fenestrated, which occupies its geological plinth with a ponderous majesty that justifies Chatwin’s comparison to an ancient warship. The building’s most striking feature is the trapezoidal stairway that slopes gently from the ground to the roof platform, which is a long, unrailed rectangle inflected only by a freestanding whitewashed wall, a windbreak in the shape of a comma or ear.