DIARY OF A FOREIGNER IN PARIS

CURZIO MALAPARTE

Translated by Stephen Twilley

250pp. NYRB Classics. Paperback, $17.95.

CURZIO MALAPARTE, Italian fascist, Maoist, fabulist, dandy, diplomat, dog worshipper, aesthete, journalist, novelist, filmmaker, was a very odd cove. Edmund White, in his introduction to Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, Malaparte's uncompleted journals written in the late 1940s, calls him a "famous womanizer". There were indeed a number of women in his life, most of them quite grand. But Malaparte's sexuality was peculiar; he wouldn't sleep with anyone after the act was concluded, usually very swiftly. He spent hours every morning grooming himself, shaving off all his bodily hair, even from the back of his hands, and slept with a slab of raw beef held to his cheeks to stave off wrinkles.

He appears to have been a narcissist, whose main interest was in himself. His obsessive grooming, infatuation with aristocrats, and his dandyism, might suggest a rather precious nature, an exquisite who was drawn to decadence. In fact, Malaparte, in all his works, including the diaries, expresses a horror of decadence, as well as of women and homosexuals. In a passage from The Skin, his rich and fantastical account of the Allied liberation/occupation of Naples in 1944, he deplores the presence of "inverts who had flocked to [the city] by way of the German lines". He writes: "In their shrill, mincing voices one discerned that jealous hunger which is aroused by the stale smell of withered roses ... Proudly they defy the meekness and submissiveness of their frail feminine natures. They have the cruelty of women ..."

Perhaps he was protesting a little too much. But even in his prejudices, Malaparte was complicated. He loved strength, manliness, robust health and the conquering spirit of great dictators; hence his infatuation with Mussolini, which lasted well into the war. But here he is, in his Paris diaries, recalling a conversation he had with an American officer in Naples in 1944: "There is something morbidly feminine, something morbidly virtuous in [Mussolini], which some people have taken for homosexuality". He recalls a scene of the Duce dropping rose petals onto an adoring crowd in Rome, a spectacle Malaparte found disturbing: "That gesture a la Oscar Wilde, Byronian in a sense, that decadent gesture, made me ill at ease". Earlier in the war, Malaparte had annoyed Italy's German allies by writing that Hitler had a "feminine nature". As I said, a rum cove.

One way of understanding Malaparte's attitude is to consider his experiences as a soldier in the First World War and the horrors of fighting in the Dolomites against the Austrians, as well as against German shock troops in northern France. By all accounts, he was a brave soldier, who had been in the thick of bloody action. Like many writers of his generation, most notably Ernst Junger, the author of Storm and Steel, Malaparte bore the traumas of the carnage of 1916 and 1917 for the rest of his life. He shared with...