Word Escape

Allies or foes? No matter. When liberation comes it creates a moral wasteland; the local population turned supplicant before an army on the rampage for sex, booze and luxuries. Cop turns criminal; wives become whores; a once proud city bends its knee. Curzio Malaparte, The Skin. Lords now servants; ladies kicked into the gutter by barbarians. What does an aristocrat do when his country loses its honour?

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Swords out of fashion. Pistols do little damage. While tanks are rather hoi polloi. The only weapon left: words. His sentences sharp as stilettos, this nobleman writes out his revenge.

Less scenes than animated tableaux, whose odd details are elaborated with a baroque architecture of classical allusion suddenly descending into the grotesque, shattering the composure of both participant and reader - a book for the occupied or their conquerors? Less a novel than a gallery, its pages covered in word-paintings. The action, pinned under the weight of such words, is frozen within its magniloquent decoration. Giants do not move with the grace of ballerinas, they plod. Of course, we can make all kinds of fancy comments about this Italian’s poesy prose, its immobility matching the helplessness of these…. Oh, you’re stuck for a paper at the War and Literature Conference? Sure, sure, I’ll let you have it. The Revenge of the Sentence: the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Victimhood. My friend thanks me, and phones his amanuensis.

Our narrator, the writer himself, Curzio Malaparte, inhabits a world of images, his own Renaissance palace; for the outside is too horrible to contemplate directly. Life! In Naples under Allied occupation an aesthete survives by mediating his life through art; for only when turned into surreal fantasy can the artist live with the destruction of his city.1 

Complaints are coming in about looting by Allied troops. The officers in this war have shown themselves to be much abler at this kind of thing than other ranks. The charge has been made that officers of the King’s Dragoons Guards, to whom fell the honour of being the first British unit to enter Naples, have cut the paintings from the frames in the Princess’s Palace, and made off with the collection of Capodimonte china. The OSS have cleaned out Achille Lauro’s sumptuous house. Some of the bulkier items of booty are stated to have been crated up for return to England with the connivance of the Navy. (Norman Lewis, Naples ’44)

The novel begins with an explosion. An odd bomb, manufactured in the library…there is a  blast of literary references; especially to the Greek classics, Homer recalling the language of heroes and gods. Later, the references reduce, though the classical influence continues, the heroic myths of the ancients transformed into the surrealist phantasmagoria of the 20th-century; for these warriors are not Olympians, the men not giants, not even dwarfs or demons. No. Ordinary humans, mere bourgeois, acted upon by extraordinary events too extreme to be recorded in simple prose, that realism of peace.

For some reason - it may have been her purple gown or its yellow trimmings (purple and yellow are the dominant colours in the chromatic scheme of the Renaissance), or her high, narrow forehead, or the dazzling pink and white of her complexion - everything, even her lacquered nails, her hair-style and the gold clips at her bosom, combined to make of her an America contemporary of the women of Bronzino, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli. Even the grace which in the exquisite and mysterious women portrayed by those famous painters appears to have in it a deeply-ingrained streak of cruelty assumed in Mrs Flat fresh and innocent character, so that the seemed a monster of purity and virginity. And she would undoubtedly have appeared to belong to an earlier age even than the Venuses and nymphs of Botticelli except that something in her face, in the brilliance of her skin, which resembled a porcelain mask, and in her round, green eyes, wide and unwavering, recalled those coloured portraits, advertising some ‘Institut de Beauté’ or somebody’s preserves, which are a feature of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar; or rather, I would say - lest I wound Mrs Flat’s amour propre too deeply - a modern copy of an old picture, with its excessively shiny and new appearance, due to the varnish. She was, I venture to say, an ‘original’, but spurious. If I were not afraid of displeasing Mrs Flat I would add that she conformed to the Renaissance style - wherein the corrupting influence of the baroque was already evident - of the famous ‘white hall’ of the palace of the Dukes of Toledo in which we were that evening enjoying the hospitality of General Cork. She was rather like Tushkevich, that character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina who conformed to the Louis XV style of the Princess Betsy Tverskaya’s drawing-room.

But what betrayed the presence beneath Mrs Flat’s Renaissance facade of a modern woman, in tune with the times - a typical American woman - were her voice, her gestures, and the pride that was reflected in her every word, in her eyes and in her smile. Her voice was thin and incisive, her gestures were at once imperious and sophisticated. She had an intolerant pride, a pride quickened by that distinctive Park Avenue brand of snobbery which holds that the only beings worthy of respect are princess and princesses, dukes and duchesses - in a world the ‘nobility’ - and a false rather than a genuine ‘nobility’ at that. Mrs Flat was there at our table, seated beside General Cork. Yet how remote she was from us! In spirit she was floating through the sublime realms in which the princesses, duchesses and marchionesses of old Europe scintillate like golden stars. She sat erect, her head slightly tilted back, her eyes fixed on an invisible cloud, drifting across an invisible blue sky. And as I followed the direction of Mrs Flat’s gaze I suddenly became aware that her eyes were riveted on a canvas that hung form the wall opposite her. It was a portrait of the young Princess of Teano, maternal grandmother of the Duke of Toledo, who in 1860 or thereabouts had illumined with her grace and beauty the last sad days of the court of the Bourbons in Naples. And I could not suppress a smile when I observed that the Princess of Teano was also sitting erect, her head slightly tilted back and her eyes turned heavenwards, in an attitude identical with Mrs Flat’s. 

It is a baroque learned from André Breton and his crowd; here applied to its ideal subject: the hyperrealities of war. Order collapses and life becomes erratic and unstable; it drifts about like a dream. A liberated city is a gothic tragedy; not only the destruction and death, but the degradation of the human soul, an appalling spectacle.2 Living becomes squalid. Men of sensibility are overwhelmed by the ugliness, the wretchedness of its victims, whose humanity is lost to the basest instincts - to survive is all. The Neapolitans now worse than beasts, as they plot and plan their own ignominy, selling their honour, freely giving away their jewelled pride. Only within the madness of his own imagery can the sensitive man, the artist, remain sane; an architectonic surrealism to keep out the horrible indifference, the sordidness, of the liberator’s barbarian ways. His sentences his flack jacket! He will be a prince in prose. Also a warrior. For Malaparte is on the attack; the denouement of this extravagant feast - you shall taste its delights later - his revenge for the looting of the Princess’s Palace. Off these very plates - trophies of plunder (while we suspect that the actual dinner took place in a hall denuded of its gallery of pictorial treasures) - Malaparte will have his retribution. Dressing the honoured guest in the best Renaissance style he’ll choke her on the dessert. (Behind every Michelangelo a Borgia.) The gaudy extravagances of literature to defeat these prosaic Americans; exquisite bon mots taking out their jeeps and tanks. In the grandiloquent phrase Malaparte retains his superiority, he writes as a noble man, kills in the best chivalric style. His guest chokes on a mermaid.

Mrs Flat. (What a name! Could there be better revenge?) To copy the style of the past is to invent an uncanny simulacrum, exaggerating the fakery: never are we more contemporary than when imitating the ancients. Mrs Flat a parody of a Renaissance princess; the high style highlighting the thinness of her modernity. The Skin a treatise on this problem. The devastation is worthy of the Greeks. The ships, the tanks, the missiles, the guns are a tribute to Dedalus. Yet these Americans are pure Wall Street. Death now banal. The grandiose actions of a martial past have become an absurd gymnastics, the obscene slaughter, of today. The Skin an Iliad without gods or heroes. It is what happens when simple citizens are forced, by modern warfare, with its Homeric technology, to act the Greek: they stumble about like automatons or rampage around as animals. Man isn't big enough for these machines, whose size and monstrous ferocity voids the spirit, and quite literally: in one horrific scene a man is reduced to mere skin when an armoured vehicle rolls him flat across the street. Man an insect on the flypaper that is modern war. The source of Malaparte’s sadness, reverberating throughout this novel. To protect himself he spins his fabulous prose, these appalling events caught in the spiderweb of his art; his victims - these conquerors - smothered in his exquisitely woven sentences. Yet…we feel the artificiality; the style working too hard to compensate for this loss of the humane virtues. A rococo church full of decoration but empty of worshippers. Then epic scenes need epic characters to populate them. The scenery too large, too majestic, for such puny personalities. Like Mrs Flat, this novel feels oddly out of time; the prose too studied, it lacks sprezzatura; a throwback to when politicians spoke like Demosthenes and argued like Cicero. We want speed, and spontaneity. We yearn for the primitive; we want to feel the action not to have it fastidiously transcribed. Admiring the beautifully engraved armour, we long to see the living flesh behind it.

There are brilliant scenes - they decorate every chapter - but because self-consciously constructed, so clearly the servants of style, they feel static: less acted out as written out.3 These characters, sumptuously dressed in our author’s phrases, his literary haute couture, that crafted consciousness, lack vitality; for all their energy goes into carrying the clothes they wear. This novel a magnificent palace of words, where the humans scuttle around like cleaners. Spectacular but somehow lifeless. Perhaps it us. We too small for this novel. The concentrated effort in reading it leaves little left for a reader’s reflex response. With so many leanly tailored models on the catwalk, advertising the latest in Lucrezia Wear, we long for the chance encounter on the street with a Botticelli beauty in M&S skirt and blouse. Malaparte produces extraordinary effects; but, as with the Siren banquet, the ornate prose dissipates rather than concentrates what it captures. The mind working overtime to make sense of these Byzantine sentences, the feelings slump on the couch after a long day’s shift. The display amazes us, yet feels not quite real. The scenes too finely wrought, so full of artifice, that the characters, squeezed tight inside this cornucopia of literary conceit, have little space to move. Malaparte observes. We feel the coolness of the spectator not the warmth of the actor (it is telling that he must continually remind us of his sorrow). Such distance, a virtuoso’s coldness of touch, leads to contrivance. These amazing images a screen between us and the realities they represent. The screen is beautiful, it compels our attention; it is far more interesting than the mangled corpses, the woman sodomised on the street….

But is there a reality? you ask. Isn’t Malaparte hiding behind these words? We a witness to the author’s own madness. How cope when war invades the mind of an aesthete? How live with the destruction of all we hold dear? What happens when soldiers are running around inside our heads; the bourgeois visiting our gallery of images, vandalising them with their banalities? My friend laughs. 

Of course! We create our own crazy world. All this is true. And yet it is not quite enough. Literature is not just fantasy. We need a touch of the real. So much truth is lost amongst these grotesqueries. The mad fascinate, but they also repel, for living too much in their minds they lack a common humanity; that touch of sympathy, some simple understanding.

My friend says we have different tastes.

Yes, you’ve made me think, friend. Scintillating and empty. An odd couple. Did Malaparte intend their marriage? The style conveys the bizarrerie of mechanised war, its size and sophistication highlighting man’s absurdity. We are but clowns. Or mere materiel - modern warfare emphasises our uselessness. Definition of the modern world: a surgeon cutting out the soul. A terrifying thought, no? And alienating to read…. My friend nods his head. I shake mine. Can a novel be wholly successful recording just that emptiness and portraying its artificiality? Wouldn't it be better to give us a tank manual so that we can drive the thing? My friend interjects…. Yes, I know, such a reaction the author might think the right one. And yet and yet…we are not so lobotomised. It suggests a weakness; this author too aloof, too far up his own mad tower, to see what of the human is left in us. Friend mentions the specific conditions; the war, this liberation nightmare. True. Maybe it takes another kind of reader, someone with the experience of these desperate Neapolitans, to read him properly. I am unsure and hesitate….

We’re on firmer ground with Malaparte himself. No escape for him from these terrible events but through such stylised prose. This novel a bunker, though its walls lined with the richest wallpaper, the lighting diamond chandeliers. Inside our author writes like Aeschylus. While outside the statues of Jupiter and Minerva lie pulverised on the ground. Outside. No longer fighting like Gods for Olympus, but to scramble around in the dirt as vermin.4 He closes the gun hatch. Only inside this word palace Malaparte to retain his dignity, that most important of the virtues.

But after the liberation men had had to fight in order to live. It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one’s own skin. It is no longer a fight against oppression, a fight for freedom, for human dignity, for honour. It is a fight against hunger. It is a fight for a crust of bread, for a little fuel, for a rag with which to cover the nakedness of one’s own children, for a handful of straw on which to lie. When men are fighting in order to live, everything, even an empty jar, a cigar stub, a piece of orange-peel, a crust of dry bread rescued form the rubbish heap, a meatless bone - everything has for them an enormous, decisive value. To live, men will perform the meanest actions; to live, they will stoop to every sort of infamy, every sort of crime. For a crust of bread we are ready, all of us, to sell our own wives, our own daughters, to defile our own mothers, to sell our brothers and friends, to prostate ourselves to other men. We are ready to go down on our knees, to grovel, to lick the boots of any who can assuage our hunger, to bend our backs beneath the whip, smilingly to wipe our cheeks when men have spat on us; and all this with a humble, gentle smile, with eyes full of a ravenous, animal hope, a stupendous hope.

The liberation of Naples a moral atom bomb, destroying all values. Amongst this wreckage of the humane virtues the Neapolitans are left to pimp and prostitute.5 To live without honour, become a slave of the body, is to be worse than beasts, for we have lost all civilisation. Merely skin. Those horrible images of flattened corpses both metaphor and metonymy for such lost souls. A paradox? No, given Malaparte’s impeccable reasoning. Italy’s real defeat was after liberation; the moment these Italians lose all control and self-respect. Some honour perhaps in the north, with its civil war; though can virtue really be found in Italians executing Italians? In the south we have licentiousness, perversion, prostitution; while an army of homosexuals has invaded the city….

Malaparte fights back.

‘You won’t ask us to believe, ‘ said Pierre Lyautey, ‘that all that Malaparte relates in Kaputt actually happened to him. Is it really possible that everything happens to him? Nothing ever happens to me!’

‘Are you quite sure of that?’ said Jack, half-closing his eyes.

‘Please forgive me,’ I said at last, turning to General Guillaume, ‘if I am forced to reveal to you that a few moments ago, at this very table, I had the most extraordinary experience of my life. You were not aware of it, because I am a well-mannered guest. But inasmuch as you question the truth of what I narrate in my books, allow me to tell you what happened to me a few moments ago - here, in your presence.’

‘I am curious to know that happened to you that was so extraordinary,’ answered General Guillaume, laughing.

‘Do you remember the delicious ham with which we began our meal? It was a ham from the Fondi mountains. You have fought over those mountains - they rise behind Gaeta, between Cassino and the Castelli Romani - and you will therefore know that in the Fondi mountains they breed the finest pigs in the whole of Latium and the whole of Ciociaria. These are the pigs that are referred to in such affectionate terms by St Thomas Aquinas, who came, in fact, from the Fondi mountains. These pigs are sacred, and they root within the precincts of the churches in the little villages situated on the high ridges of Ciociaria. Their flesh has the perfume of incense, and their lard is as soft as virgin wax.’

‘C était en effet un sacré jambon,’ said General Guillaume.

‘After the ham from the Fondi mountains came miniature trout from the Liri. A beautiful river, the Liri. On its green banks many of your goumiers have fallen before the fire of the German machine-guns - fallen face downwards in the grass. Do you remember the Liri trout - slim and silvery, with delicate fins that diffuse a faint green radiance and have a darker, mellower silveriness? The miniature trout from the Liri are like those found in the Black Forest; they are like the Blauforellen of the Neckar - the poets’ river, the river of Hölderlin - and of the Titisee; they resemble the Blauforellen found in the Danube at Donaueschingen, where the Danube as its source. That regal river rises in the park of the castle of the Prices of Fürstenburg, in a white marble basin that looks like a cradle and is adorned with neo-classical statues. That marble cradle, pleasance of the black swans celebrated by Schiller, is frequented by stags and fallow-deer, which go there at sunset to drink. But the Liri trout are perhaps brighter and more transparent than the Blauforellen of the Black Forest; and the silvery green of their light scales, which in colour resemble the old silver candelabra that hang in the churches of Ciociaria, does not yield the palm to the silvery blue of the Blauforellen of the Neckar and the Danube, which diffuse the same mysterious blue radiance as the dazzling white porcelain for which Nymphenburg is famous. The soil that is washed by the Liri is ancient and noble; it is some of the noblest and most ancient soil in Italy; and just now I was moved when I saw the Liri trout curled up in the form of a crown with their tails in they pink mouths, even as the ancients used to represent the serpent, symbol of eternity, in the form of a wreath, with its tail in its mouth, on the columns at Mycenae, Paestum, Selinus, the Delphi. And do you remember the flavour of Liri trout - delicate and elusive as the voice that noble river?’

‘Elles étaient délicieuses!’ said General Guillaume.

‘And finally an immense copper tray appeared on the table. It contained the kouskous, with its barbarous, delicate flavour. But the ram from which this kouskous is made is not a moroccan ram from Mount Atlas or from the scorched pastures of Fez, Teroudan or Marrakesh. The Itri mountains above Fondi - where Fra Diavolo rules - are its habitat. On the Itri mountains, in Ciociaria, there grows a herb similar to horse-mint, but richer, with a flavour that reminds one of sage. The people who live among those mountains call it by the ancient Greek name of kallimeria. From it pregnant women make a potion that facilities childbirth. It is a pungent herb, and the rams of Itri devour it greedily. It is indeed, to this herb, kallimeria, that the rams of Itri owe their rich fat, so suggestive of pregnant women; because of it they have the feminine indolence, the fullness of voice and the weary, languid eyes of pregnant women and hermaphrodites. You should look attentively at your plate when you eat kouskous. The ivory whiteness of the bran in which the ram is cooked is in fact as delightful to the eye as the flour is to the palate, don’t you think?’

‘Ce kouskous, en effet, est excellent!’ said General Guillaume.

‘Ah, if only I had closed my eyes when I ate that kouskous! For a moment earlier I had suddenly become aware that the warm, strong flavour of the mutton had an unpleasant sweetness about it, and that I was chewing a piece of meat that was colder and softer than the rest. I looked at my plate, and was horrified to see a finger appear in the middle of the bran - first one finger, then two, then five, and finally a hand with white nails - a man’s hand.’

‘Taisez-vous!’ exclaimed General Guillaume in a strangled voice.

‘It was a man’s hand. It was undoubtedly the hand of the unfortunate goumier, which the exploding mine had neatly severed and hurled into the great copper pot in which our kouskous was cooking . What could I do? I was educated at the Collegio Cicognini, which is the best college in Italy, and from boyhood I have been taught that one should never, for any reason, interrupt the general gaiety, whether at a dance, a party, or a dinner. I forced myself not to turn pale or cry out, and calmly began eating the hand. The flesh was a little tough. It had not time to cook.’

He’ll choke these bastards on his words. Sentences more dangerous than swords.

Review: The Skin

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1.  A brilliant prose poem that argues the same case: The Garden of Time, by J.G Ballard, in The Garden of Time.

2.  For a comic account of these same terrible events, Eric Linklater, Private Angelo.

3.  This becomes very obvious when we read Norman Lewis’ diary, which covers much of the same time and territory.

4.  Norman Lewis, in both in Naples ’44 and Within the Labyrinth, shows the impossibility of remaining uncorrupted during this time.

5.  What most shocks about the prostitution is its banality. Lewis describes a Canadian soldier knocking on at a stranger’s house in the expectation that he will be granted sex for army rations. Prostitution is the norm; one expects a woman to drop her knickers for gifts. It is this banality of the horrific that Malaparte’s prose fails to convey; the extraordinary reduced to the ordinary is what lost to his intricate exaggerations. Or to put it another way: for the Neapolitan war's surrealism had become their naturalism.