Territorial Ignorance

Malaparte shakes his head. I had asked him if he knew Norman Lewis, had read his accounts of Naples and Sicily. Why, Signor, do I need to read you English, when I have my own style, sharp as any surgeon’s knife? But we should. We might understand the problems faced by the occupiers, feel sympathy for their predicament. Few men are bad men. The weakness of these Brits not their corruption but their idealism. Within the Labyrinth. When ideals hurt, wound, kill.

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This man has a purpose. He wants his time in the army to mean something, the reason he volunteered; some romantic notion, no doubt, of the hero, sacrificing himself and others for a grand project. Of course he doesn't understand this world. The army a bureaucracy like any other, where guns and tanks exist only in memoranda and reports. Only a fool wants to kill people. And fools are rarely given the opportunity.

A bit of unpleasantness in Malevento has disturbed the F.S.O’s translation of the Norse legends. He needs someone to sort it out…. Manning’s the man! The odd workings of an inefficient bureaucracy - it is designed for war not peace - should be becoming clear to our hero: why sent to a town which already has a British officer? What has Wilton done? Neither Manning or ourselves are told. Later we guess that Wilton had made up some horror story to escape this soul squeezing place.

Malevento his chance to be a soldier! To run this small town, not like Wilton, who has gone native and civilian, but as a real British officer, who forces people to obey British rules and British codes of justice. What an opportunity! At last to live out his ideals. Empty out his small collection of narrow ideas. Narrow? Yes, you are right, the last phrase is superfluous: all ideas box in the mind. Setting tight little borders around our thinking to prevent the free movement of thought. Then our ideals; border guards shooting at sympathy, arresting tolerance, and beating up understanding, tortured in those utopian cells. Ideals. How they hate that common humanity ignorant of frontiers. Ideals? Another word for prejudices; the mind’s Bren gun killing off what we don’t like or comprehend; in this case ordinary life, with its complicated muddles; its strange relations, its peculiar histories. Norman Lewis uses a different metaphor.

On a fine May morning in 1943 catastrophe came to Malevento. The majority of the prosperous citizens who at that hour were accustomed to take their vermouth in front of the cafés were made into mincemeat or just neatly dismembered. Others, in their houses, their cries silenced by the dust of pulverised marble, instantly assumed those postures of utter submission so familiar to excavators of cities overwhelmed by acts of God. The beggars who formed such an important proportion of the citizenry and who were posted at their habitual pitches were accepted unquestioningly with Lazarus into the bosom of Abraham. At the same instant the blind children of the foundlings’ hospital found release in this act of mercy from the empty lesson of their existence. In the city’s fountains the turbid water ceased to run and was tinged for a short time as if with a delicate sunset reflection. The bronze doors of the cathedral cast in Byzantium in 1123 curled and crumpled like a discarded wrapping of tinfoil. Beneath the cathedral’s collapsing vault the Norman knights, summoned from their tombs in premature resurrection, turned to utter dust. The bells, claimed locally to be the most ancient in Christendom and attributed to St. Paulinus himself, heralded their eternity of silence with a final discord. The colossal image of Christ, until then remote and aloof from mankind on the summit of the dome, now descended, and took the city in its crucified embrace.

Such is the imaginative power of this passage that it transcends simple metaphor. Yet we cannot overlook its portents; this earthquake both a prophecy of Manning’s collapse and a symbol of Fascism’s fall; the war squashed in there too. The town has recovered slightly by the time Manning arrives; some of the inhabitants eking out a life amongst the rubble; while the lucky ones continue their former lives in those parts of the city untouched by Earth’s anger. The mentality of the place remains unchanged. Buildings have fallen down, many people have died, but the ways of life and thought continue on as before; the population making the necessary compromises with the ruling regime, mostly corrupt. Corruption. A natural force, like too much heat or too much rain; an irritant accepted as part of the landscape. This has its upsides. It suggests a softness of character, a touch towards the humane virtues. It is also a warning to Manning: it is only the ideologues, some petty officials and the unlucky fanatic few that suffer for their successes under Fascism. They pay through poverty and ridicule; a minuscule few murdered. Life goes on; the inhabitants survive by following the old rules of behaviour and by dodging the enthusiasms of the official world, the officiousness of its occupying officers (Fascist or British). So much of this life is secret. How else protect one’s self against these officials? Though to the unwary it all looks obvious. Corruption thrust into his face - the locals invite him to join in - Manning listens to the hatreds of those denied help and is frustrated by the inefficiencies and delays. Manning is not clever enough to realise that this is but a surface view. Those who complain the most likely to take the most…. The deeper reality, the subterranean relationships between individuals - sexual or through patronage - are hidden, just like the vendettas, that can so quickly entangle the innocent outsider, if they do not take supreme care. Manning must be extremely cautious of Marshal Altamura, the top policeman in town. The Marshal has a lot to hide. He has used the chaos of the war’s end to protect himself against a dangerous enemy: he has sent Lauro to jail as a Fascist. 

We don’t know if the accusation is true. We suspect the real reason for his imprisonment is his wife’s infidelity; Lauro jealous of the Marshal he now wants to kill. Fucking is the Marshal’s favourite pastime, and his official position means that few women can resist him; those that do are raped. The times are good for the Marshal. In a period of upheaval and anarchy he uses his previous post as a policeman (and one not too close to the regime) to work for the allies, who need local figures of authority; they rely on his local knowledge and contacts to run the town. As Wilton knows, it is the Marshal who is really the boss, the Brits only pretending to rule the place.

Of course, Coccozza was the new man who was making such a stir in the area. Energetic and efficient, he was supposed to be, and pretty ruthless, too. The stirrer up of untold troubles. Arresting right and left, racket busting, unearthing scandals of all kinds: this tired looking, elderly man, who would not last long, of course. So they said. He was treading on too many toes. Already, mysteriously, his transport and been withdrawn and two of his men transferred, leaving him with only two to carry on.

This is the man Manning would like to be. He lacks Coccozza’s intelligence and willpower. Then he doesn't understand Malevento. He can't even manage this place properly, lacking the wisdom and endurance. No chance he changing the city. Manning is a fool. Educated to believe in public school pieties he hasn't noticed that they rarely extend beyond its playing fields. Does he really think that one man can transform a south Italian town, two years after a major disaster, into a Leamington Spa? I am afraid he does. Manning has no understanding of Italy, ideas or himself. Aware of the corruption, and how contagious it is - very quickly everybody wants to be his friend - he tries to keep a distance from all the inhabitants; he will not accept their gifts, refuses invitations to dinner, and lives in his office, a slum whose every night is a blitz of mosquitoes. He is making life too hard for himself. Collapse is inevitable: to live in filthy surroundings is to invite disease; while to isolate oneself from all human contact is to crave it all the more. Such isolation makes it harder to run any place. On the contrary he thinks it very simple: just give orders! Clearly Wilton’s failure was a moral one….  Again it shows our man’s limitations, his weak intellect. Morality the name we give to phenomena we don’t understand. Manning tries to requisition a car. All past failures were due, of course, to Wilton’s moral frailty; he will force Vittorio to give him the vehicle. The order is signed and hand-delivered. Detachment allows you to be hard; and being hard gets things done: the common sense of the nincompoop. Vittorio knows better. He visits HQ, and receives a countermanding order. In Malevento human relationships will always trump institutional process.

There is no escape from the Marshal, who is keen to corrupt this excessively naive officer. He takes Manning to the rich families; they drop in on a high class brothel; and afterwards he is shown a young child for sale, and when Manning rejects the offer the Marshal forces him to wait outside while he fucks her instead: the poor family had been promised payment: this is a charity, my friend. Manning hates the man. Yet the Marshal is the one person to whom he cannot remain aloof. The irony is devastating. He tries to get the policeman removed. But the Brits back at HQ are pragmatists: there is nothing wrong with Marshal Altamura. Don’t be such a fool!

He is a fool. Oblivious to the obvious - the Marshal will hear about it and plot his revenge - Manning tries to get the Marshal sacked. If Manning were subtle he’d immerse himself in this society, where he’d find the means to undermine his man from the inside; using the local population to do this work for him. A strategy too complicated for his crude sensibility, which cannot inhabit more than one level of reality at a time. Manning, being intellectually weak, is mentally rigid; unable to set up strong but flexible boundaries inside his own mind, those walls and fences visible only to himself, and whose number and geography shift all the time, so allowing him to improvise; no jazz musician this, but a classical pianist who must read every note of the score. Instead he puts up physical obstacles, obvious to everyone. Fool! It makes him easy to read, so simple to manipulate, especially for a master like the Marshal. Such a strict approach to government works only if there is massive force behind it…. Do I have to spell it out? In a place like Malevento there is no straight choice between purity and sin; always we have to choose between different shades of corruption - the light or the dark - this choice to depend upon the fineness of one’s own conscience. Manning lacks such a strong and refined taste. Like all weak-minded characters it is everything or nothing; right or wrong; yes or no; enemy or friend. That stupid morality again. He tries to live like a saint. Hopeless hopeless case! He visits the old marchesina; her ruined castle, like her ancient body, riddled with a seductive charm. Manning hasn't had a woman for ages….

The Marshal discovers our man’s weakness: drink. Soon this Brit is a wretched alcoholic. Distance has exacerbated his own faults, his soft and corrupt will. Manning may believe in ideals, but like so many educated fools before him they remain distinct from his actual character; he can live up to them only if they are embedded in the physical environment; it is the surroundings (not the ideas) that conditions him to act up to an ideal. Characters like Manning have to be hemmed in by good people and good behaviour; then he will be alright, as he follows the crowd. Take away such a buttress his church falls. Remove the habits, the rules, the strict but kindly people, and Manning’s ideals are no more than faint hopes and impossible dreams. He cannot be left on his own…. It is why a good education can breed disappointment, depressing and destroying the weak and unwary, for educated to believe in ideas they are too soft and silly to embody and act them out. Manning is unfortunate. In Malevento he is forced to confront his own weakness; he must watch his own tragedy, that inability to live up to his moral ideal. The climax is not nice: he must look at the Marshal laughing into his face. Most of us avoid such a degrading spectacle; the decline slow and gradual we blame others - the family, the state, capitalism, the sign of the times - for any failure; while - thank the heavens! - by late middle-age we have the perfect excuse of time: too old to do anything worthwhile. Always we are saved by others, by the system, by life itself. Manning is a fool. He tries to rush through change in the prime of his young age. Then, by isolating himself so completely, he has no one, no one at all, to blame for his collapse. 

In refusing to make friends in town his only proper acquaintance is the Marshal, whose official role he cannot escape. An irony of course. Also, one of the paradoxes of experience that the well-educated overlook, for it doesn't fit with the normal standards of behaviour or good reason: ideals tend to diminish purity not increase it. Forced into daily contact with a rapist, extortionist, black-marketeer and murderer, Manning’s integrity is eroded; corruption attacks him like those mosquito bites. He tries to recover himself by asserting his original purpose. He goes full out to find and arrest Luigi Mancuso; the reason for his posting to Malevento. Our man has lost his head. He has become a fanatic. And he forgets (or no longer cares, the more likely explanation) that Mancuso’s crimes are fictions; they were Wilton’s joke, and a serious piece of advice to his simple-minded replacement. But Manning has to have a purpose. He must show that he is really in charge. He must arrest someone! Only this to absolve his own conscience. Yet…a fictional crook? But of course! A perfect instrument to purify bad thoughts. Like any good abstraction such a fiction, its core a void, can be filled up by any illusion, and with that mindless action that mistakes itself for utility. Made ineffective by his own ideals those ideals are now corrupting our hero….Poor Manning. A sap. Manning’s enthusiasm gets a ready response from the Marshal; always quick to see how to use another’s stupidity to his own advantage. Of course he’ll help Manning find his man. Of course he finds Mancuso. Did we doubt it? Typically, Manning questions none of this. Just a simple, straightforward manhunt…. Blind to what is going on he inevitably goes too far. He breaks the rules of sanctuary by following his suspect into the monastery’s sacred cave; where Mancuso panics and falls to his death. A terrible taboo has been broken.

Shunned by the whole town, his drinking gets worse, and he becomes ill with malaria. Could the Marshal have planned it so well? No planning was necessary; it is enough to know a person and the landscape even better. The Devil is a first rate psychologist.

Utterly alone and ill Manning requires help. But only the Marshal can provide it. He places the officer with a local family, who conscientiously brings him back to health. Sick and dependent Manning relaxes, and becomes friendly with his carers, Matteo and his sister Lina. No ideal can withstand the emotional needs at such a desperate time. When he gets better these feelings continue, creating a conscience and a sense of obligation. He must repay this family, who do not want cash; that would be breaking their code of ethics. It is favours they will ask for…. A friend helps a friend; this is natural; it is good. Such simple feelings an aid to the ordinary human satisfactions, such as having enough to eat and acquiring a few possessions; these possible only on the black market. The requests flow easily. Please please help us to live; oh a crime? No no sir, it is natural, it is this life…. Yes yes, you are a kind man: Manning gives Matteo a day pass allowing him to trade illicit goods outside the region. A normal human being will adapt themselves to the immediate environment; even if the place has an alien set of moral values; it is merely a question of time and attrition. Manning knows this now, as he feels the pressure of human contact, and finds he cannot resist it. Lina comes into his bedroom, she bends down, he sees dark hairs in her cleavage, feels the heat of her sexual need - soon they are making love.

This is how he should have begun! It is too late now. For although the town’s citizens all come back to him - he has helped one of their own: he has freed Matteo from prison - he has alienated the Marshal, who will not be denied his revenge (or risk his own safety). We guess that he arranged for Matteo to be caught (it is why he won’t contact the arresting officers) knowing that to save her brother Lina will seduce Manning. After such sexual antics our hero must go all the way…. Matteo rings him up, tells him of his predicament, and asks to be released. No human could refuse this request. Worse is to follow. Lauro hears about the affair - the source is surely the Marshal - and escapes; he is seeking out his new rival. 

Manning gripped the tommy-gun, and at that moment the moon came out, fully revealing a great sloping field strewn in confusion with white stones. The graves had been tightly packed, and the catastrophe which had overwhelmed Malevento, not having differentiated between living and dead, had produced a chaos of stone-lined craters and stone-studded mounds. The wealthy of Malevento had favoured marble representations of their dead, and of these there were many broken fragments of arms, legs, torsos and heads jumbled together with crosses, scrolls, funerary urns and angels with sad, severe faces, crusader swords and half-folded wings. The night had drawn up from the place the sour smell of elders. As they went forward snail shells crunched beneath their feet.

In a cemetery on the edge of town Manning shoots Lina’s husband. 

Lauro is handcuffed. Manning has shot an unarmed man. Of course! His escape was a fiction. The Marshal has found a way of removing two problems at one crime scene. Manning has been corrupted by his idealism, ravaged in this town. He has done an evil deed. A bad man, a criminal.

Manning remembered that he had admired Coccozza from his reputation. Now ironically he found himself on the other side of the fence…

Coccozza nodded slowly and with deliberation. The unwavering scrutiny continued, and Manning checked the birth of a smile which he knew would have been a very nervous one.

‘Yes,’ Coccozza said. ‘There’s plenty to do . We are always busy. The country’s full of dirty scoundrels.’ He snapped out the last word with something like passion. Manning looked up, surprised. The vague geniality had faded out. Coccozza’s eyes were even narrower…

He should have listened to Wilton and treated this posting as a game, while finding some innocuous hobby - like collecting ancient inscriptions - to pass the time.1 Manning was too obtuse to listen; believing in his own righteousness and moral purpose he ignores this expert’s wise advice. He will change this small, opaque, deeply complicated world, where friendship and favours and patronage are the rules of business and the sinews of life. Malevento will be different; it will be run like an institution (like the army) on abstract lines of justice and reason. It is a fantasy. An idea only. Manning is too weak. He is not clever enough. He tries too hard. His failure is therefore certain. With Lauro’s death it is complete. Our man is a disgrace. Not only forced to accept an alien way of life, in resisting its natural, compelling force, he has broken a universal moral code. To kill an unarmed man. He is a fool. Oh yes, he knows it. His conscience will not be assuaged; never to forget that triumphant Marshal.

I am painting a too sombre picture of this novel. A gloomy tragedy? No. It is a farce. Some of the scenes are hilarious…

‘For God’s sake don’t take any notice of this old fellow. He is so engrossed in his bodily needs he never pays any attention to the things of the spirit. He will be telling us they have malaria at Cardito next. It’s the village next to us. It’s famous for its wonderful churches.’

‘No,’ said the first, ‘not malaria: only bandits. And for just that reason. The place is so healthy that the only way they can keep the population down is by killing one another. They have a cemetery where they say no one has ever been buried who died a natural death. They’re proud of it. When Musso talked about abolishing malaria he was out of his mind. How could we afford to abolish malaria? It’s a prime necessity, That’s unless you prefer bandits. Just as silly as all this talk about abolishing war.’

‘I’m with you there,’ said the other. ‘But do you realize that half our troubles have arisen because there’s not been a real war for centuries? Now look at the last war. Do you call that a war? They just don’t understand the meaning of the word war now.’

‘You’re right. It was  a complete waste of time. Might as well not have had one.’

Manning is not a serious person. He is not grown up. An adolescent playacting the hero. A youth who has mistook fairy tales for real life. How often do we see this, especially amongst the educated class? Learning a few ideas they lack the intelligence to see these ideas’ limits; they do not comprehend that an idea in the abstract - in the classroom, in a book - belongs to a different order of existence from an idea on the street, embedded in a city, alive in someone’s nervous system. In a book an idea is fixed for all eternity. In life the idea changes every moment you try to use it. Only the wise and the mature to understand this. Of course, there are those able to force their ideas onto a society; who either don’t see or care about the human cost. But you need to be more than just a child to change things. You have to have a strong will, a hard intelligence and a complete lack of sympathy for ordinary mortality. To be alienated from your society is a prerequisite.2 Progress. Always it needs a strong dose of inhumanity. Manning is too weak, he is too human, for such a heroic role. Contrast our hero with the “elderly” Coccozza, with his “passion” about the “scoundrels”. Coccozza has physical resources denied to Manning; but this is not the reason for his reputation; it is his sensibility, both aloof and intelligently engaged with his surroundings, that makes him such a reforming force. He knows the limits within which he can work; at the same time he will not let a scoundrel get away scot-free; giving in to Manning’s request to free Matteo he nevertheless forces him to sign a document which restricts the prisoner’s release time. He has humiliated his opponent, and made him feel unfree.3 It is what Manning should have done to the Marshal. But Manning cannot play such complicated games. They require too much psychological insight and social experience. He remains a child who parodies the play of adults, whom inevitably treat him with contempt. Marshal Altamura laughs in his face.

Review: Within the Labyrinth

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1.  Compare with the occupying force in John Bayley’s In Another Country.

2.  In the 1960s alienation was seen as the result of progress. Like so much of the New Left they got the concept the wrong way round.

3.  For a brilliant example: the way the police humiliate the author when they catch him speeding: Tim Parks, Italian Ways. To make him sweat for ten minutes far more effective than arresting him.