Kaputt (62 page)

If in
Kaputt
we often detect an absence of candor, of personal experience and understanding, it remains a remarkable book, in two senses. It is, first of all, an astonishing document, a signal act of journalistic imposture, in which a writer of singular gifts faked precisely the account of events in Eastern Europe that readers craved at the war's end (when in fact it became an international best-seller); indeed, Malaparte's is the account that one perennially craves. Stylishly skillful in its handling of descriptive detail, and clearly quite factual in its portrayal of secondary situations (embassy dinners, military bivouacs, Scandinavian summer evenings), it challenges us to question its veracity much as a con man defies us to doubt his good faith. Malaparte's voice—polished, urbane, a trifle louche—carries beautifully across the decades, summoning up a world of glittering salons peopled with chameleons, blowhards, charlatans, and ideological flimflam artists.

That is not the whole story, however. Just as Malaparte himself had many friends of great worth, among them Eugenio Montale, Benedetto Croce, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Saba, Daniel Halévy, and Harold Nicolson, so this book has, I believe— almost despite its author—intrinsic literary qualities. A poet and novelist, a lover of painting, Malaparte was highly sensitive to metaphor, and an extended trope, that of the beasts—horses, mice, dogs, birds, reindeer, and flies—governs this book. A basic intuition, that world war, the attempted suicide of mankind, can overwhelm and pervert the very order of nature, gives the story sinew and an underlying dignity. One is reminded of Goya's painting of the bewildered dog on the wall of the Quinta del Sordo, or of the truncated, twisted trees in the
Desastres de la Guerra,
betrayed into perverted use as torture instruments.
Kaputt
is heir to this vision: who can forget Malaparte's scene of the horses trapped like chess pieces in the ice of Lake Ladoga, or that of the war dogs of the Dnieper, loaded with high explosives?

Kaputt
also does something unique in the literature of war: it crosses the lines of battle. Malaparte's essentially treacherous (and also pan-European) mentality enabled him imaginatively, and at times even physically, to look at conflict simultaneously from the vantage points of opposing camps. Among other things, he found a lens that would focus on the butcher together with the victim, in itself an unusual achievement. There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of his aversion, expressed in other writings as well, to the brutalization of women in wartime, an uncommon theme in the forties. Though one wonders how war could possibly be waged without such mistreatment, he deserves credit for repeatedly yet often quite delicately confronting the issue in
Kaputt.
His treatment of the sex slaves of Soroca (probably fictional, or a blend of fact and fiction) and the slave laborers of Berlin (probably factual) is compelling.

By the time he became the
Corriere'
s correspondent, Malaparte's sleazy fraternization with Fascist and Nazi elites reflected not political conviction but faulty guesswork, since he assumed that they would win. The upshot was a perfidious scrutinization of the many contemptible people with whom, as an unprincipled arriviste, he was obliged to spend time. When eventually they lost, he was free to pour out all the venom he had stored up in his years of observation. Consequently
Kaputt
offers a matchless inside look at the moral corruption and brutal frivolity of European reactionary cliques during World War II. Though some of this writing is fictional, it feels earned and experienced in the way that good fiction does. Here Malaparte knows what he is talking about.

Italian criticism has given short shrift to Malaparte—so short, in fact, that some literary histories omit him altogether, while others dismiss him as a trashy vulgarian. In his
Letteratura e vita nazionale,
Antonio Gramsci bluntly wrote that "to achieve success he was capable of any infamy." Others had a different impression. "He was an exquisite talker," Montale recalled, "and also a listener full of tact and—a rarer quality—real courtesy— Only later did I learn how many internal fractures were concealed by his apparent normality."
Kaputt
betrays this split-mindedness, being divided into insincere and artificial passages and others of authentic inspiration. Read with discrimination, it has much to say about the collapse of European civilization in the middle of the last century.

&
MDASH
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OFSTADTER

Tenn
—Pewter.

{2}
'Workers under the "speed-up" plan.

Korsu
—A snow-buried shanty or dugout.

Lotta
—A Finnish WAC [Women's Army Corps.]

Lottalas
—The recreation halls of the
lottas.

Sillampää—A Finnish writer.

Kanna
—An isthmus.

Monstrance
—A transparent vessel in which the Host is kept and shown to the congregation.

Kanna
—An isthmus.

Pets de nonne
—Nun's fritters or apple-fritters. [literally: "Nun's farts."]

Sonderführer—A civilian technician or advisor attached to the army.

{11}
Feldwebel—A sergeant-major.

{12}
Sonderführer – A civilian technician or advisor attached to the army.

Untergrundbahn
—Subway.

Stuga
—Swedish word for cottage.