by Jamie James
One successful artistic effort to resolve these extraliterary considerations, though it has its own peculiar flaws, is Coup de Grâce, a short novel by Marguerite Yourcenar. In the summer of 1937, as Europe coasted toward another great war, she came to Capri with a new lover, an American graduate student named Grace Frick, who would become her lifelong companion and intellectual partner. The women rented La Casarella, a small house on the footpath that leads to Villa Jovis, where Yourcenar wrote most of the first draft of the novel. It was not Yourcenar’s first visit to Capri. Nine years before, she had composed an elegant, richly phrased ode there about Tiberius’s retirement. “Caprée” follows the Tacitean model of the emperor as an exhausted libertine, orchestrated in a sympathetic, somber key: “Debauchery and death mingle in the air he breathes.” Yourcenar’s Tiberius inhabits a unique solitude, for “having becoming a god himself, he no longer believes in the gods”—a spiritual dilemma that anticipates her magnificent imagining of a later emperor, in Memoirs of Hadrian.
Yourcenar and Frick’s sojourn in Capri in 1937 was a sort of honeymoon. The women had met in Paris, where Yourcenar was recovering from a disastrous love affair with a gay man, which would provide the emotional background to Coup de Grâce. They found the island mostly abandoned by its foreign residents, who had repatriated with the rising threat of war. Yourcenar wrote that Capri was once again “a small Italian village, where you feel far from everything. After the departure of the excursion boats in the evening, it returns to a slightly indolent tranquility. The isolation and the light metallic chirping of crickets are favorable both for rest and for work.” She composed her new novel by day, and in the evening the lovers strolled down the Via Tragara to view the Faraglioni by moonlight.
Coup de Grâce is a morality tale about a freelance Fascist of noble birth who fights with the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. Like The Spy, it is fiction with a repellent protagonist, but the author lays no ideological burden on the work. Yourcenar describes Erick von Lhomond as “one of those men who were too young in 1914 to have done more than brush with danger, but who were transformed into soldiers of fortune by Europe’s postwar disorders, and by their personal anxieties as well, their incapacity for satisfaction or resignation, either one.” The main story takes place at a railway café, in 1937, where von Lhomond, wounded in the Spanish Civil War while fighting with Franco’s Nationalists, tells a group of travelers about his experiences nearly twenty years before in Courland, the westernmost province of Latvia and thus a remote frontier of the Russian Revolution.
Yourcenar’s narrator makes no attempt to justify von Lhomond’s political convictions; his “hostility to the Bolsheviks was a matter of caste.” As he tells his story, von Lhomond alludes to historical events with the assured familiarity of a participant, but his real story is one of love, his love for a family, gentry in the backwoods of Courland, with whom he spent his summers as an adolescent. He idolized Conrad de Reval, a boy his own age. The sentimental evocation of swims in the lake at dawn, “noonday rests in the hay,” overnights at Lettish farms, where the peasants gave their best featherbeds in the “great room” to their highborn guests, portrays an intensely romantic friendship. Throughout the novel, Conrad remains a dreamy cipher, a Baltic counterpart to the doomed youths of A Shropshire Lad. “One could readily imagine him at thirty,” the adult Erick says, as “a humdrum country squire, pursuing farm girls, or boys; or even, in the postwar times, a poet cut to the order of T. S. Eliot or Jean Cocteau, and frequenting Berlin bars.” The irony, the unreliability of the narrator, is crucial. Nothing in Conrad’s adult behavior supports the telegraphic hints that the physical aspect of the boys’ friendship could ever progress beyond those noonday naps in the hayloft. Erick’s lopsided crush is the main source of his own incapacity for satisfaction or resignation.
Conrad’s sister, Sophie, is an invisible child in Erick’s idyllic dream of his youth, but after the armistice, when he returns to Courland to serve in the campaign to suppress the Reds, she “was no longer a lump of a girl; she had real beauty.” Always brooding, she spent the evenings “in savage poking at the drawing-room fire, sighing the while like a heroine in Ibsen utterly fed up with life.” The cause of Sophie’s frustration is that she is in love with Erick, her brother’s former playmate and now his comrade in arms. “Why is it,” Erick asks, “that women fall in love with the very men who are destined otherwise, and who accordingly must repulse them, or else deny their own nature?” In a desperate effort to get Erick’s attention, Sophie takes to heavy drinking and degrades herself in casual sex with the loyalist soldiers who are billeted at the manor house. Erick cannot return Sophie’s love, but he nonetheless has a great capacity for jealousy and torments her cruelly. When she kisses another officer at a Christmas dinner, Erick slaps her so hard that she falls and has a nosebleed.
Sophie’s alienation becomes complete when she deserts her family and her hopeless love to join the Reds. She loves, or conceives a spiteful passion for, a radical bookstore clerk and absconds at dawn to join him in his cause. The Bolsheviks ultimately triumph, of course, but as Erick leads the loyalists in retreat, Conrad is wounded and dies a horrible death in his friend’s arms. In his final action in the conflict in Latvia, Erick captures a group of Bolshevik soldiers hiding in the hayloft of a barn, which includes Sophie. He tries to spare her execution, but she scorns this sentimental gesture. In the final scene, when Sophie’s turn comes, she stops the executioner, the former majordomo of her ancestral home, and tells him that she wants Erick to carry out the sentence. Erick shoots her in the face. He concludes the book by saying that at first he thought that she intended her request to be the final proof of her love, but later he understood that “she only wished to take revenge, leaving me prey to remorse. She was right in that: I do feel remorse at times. One is always trapped, somehow, in dealings with women.”
Coup de Grâce, the book, is itself an act of revenge, that of the author against the man she loved. Like Sophie, Yourcenar was besotted with love for a man who could not love women, André Fraigneau, her editor at Éditions Grasset. She had already written one book about his brutal rejections, the long prose poem Fires, published in 1936. Yourcenar wrote in a preface to Coup de Grâce that the novel was based on a true story, claiming that the characters of Erick, Sophie, and Conrad “remain much as they were described to me by one of the best friends of the principal person concerned.” We have no reason to doubt her veracity, but the book is plainly autobiographical, and the key is not difficult to decipher: Yourcenar herself is Sophie, and vain, cruel Erick von Lhomond is André Fraigneau. Conrad is a shadowy character because he is a generalized representation of Yourcenar’s male rivals for Fraigneau’s love.
After her stay in Capri with Grace Frick, Yourcenar completed and revised Coup de Grâce in Sorrento. It is a fascinating little novel, quite as grim to read as it sounds in synopsis. The author had suffered at the hands of a misogynist and took no interest in sparing the reader pain. The book presents a problem for some contemporary readers in its disregard of moral certainties about Fascism. Yourcenar copes with the hazards posed by a protagonist who holds despicable views simply by evading them. In Coup de Grâce, the harshness of her portrait of Erick von Lhomond is entirely confined to his private conduct. Like most loyalists of any ancien régime, von Lhomond makes no intellectual rationale for his partisanship; he was born with it. When he describes the extreme cruelty of “the highly specialized Letts who served the Reds as hangmen,” who “perfected the art of torture in a manner worthy of the most celebrated Mongol traditions,” he sounds admiring. In Marguerite Yourcenar’s reading of history, inhumanity possesses no ideology.
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THE ARTISTS AND WRITERS resident in Capri during the First World War were all exiles of one sort or another, the Russians in the strictest sense, and the others for reasons of their own, in some cases simply to avoid the inconvenient nastiness of the war, which left Capri unbruised. In “The Gentleman from Sa
n Francisco,” written in the midst of war, Bunin’s characterization of the Russians in Capri as “untidy and absent-minded owing to their bookish thoughts” was a wicked insider’s joke for readers who had some knowledge about the background of Gorky’s exile and the identity of his visitors. If they were absent-minded about their appearance, it was only because their thoughts were concentrated on great events and causes, and their bookishness, far from being an escape from the world, was their arsenal in these intellectual battles. Yet in the years preceding the next world war, Capri ceased to be a backwater and got swept up in the mainstream of ideological conflicts that would once more bathe Europe in blood.
Specifically, Fascism arrived. As early as 1922, before Mussolini’s March on Rome and accession to power, there were Fascist demonstrations in the Piazzetta. Il Duce made a triumphant visit to the island in 1925, which persuaded him to make the island a showplace of Fascist values. In 1926, he installed as mayor a Neapolitan nobleman, Marchese Marino Dusmet de Smours, who was married to an heiress from California, a zealous Christian Scientist. Mussolini gave Dusmet all the money he asked for to upgrade the island’s infrastructure. The Fascist mayor paved the main roads for the first time, took measures to prevent dangerous rockfalls on Via Krupp, and extended the pier at the Marina Grande so that ships could dock there in stormy weather. These improvements made Dusmet a popular leader, but when he used the bells of Santo Stefano to summon party members to meetings at city hall, the parocco locked the campanile and reserved the use of the carillon for church services. Another of the Fascists’ goals in Capri was to clean up the morals of the foreign residents, in particular to round up and expel pederasts, a campaign enthusiastically supported by the American marchesa. (As usual, the lesbian community was never a target of the moralists.)
In the 1930s, Capri became a favorite holiday destination for the Fascist elite. Nazis, too: Field Marshal Hermann Göring conceived a strong fancy for the island, and as a souvenir brought his favorite tenor, Giuseppe Savarese, home with him to sing for Hitler in Berlin. In 1937, an exhibition in Rome that set out to prove one of Mussolini’s favorite themes, the parallels between Fascism and imperial Rome, highlighted Capri’s role in this connection. The exhibit gave rise to a series of patriotic, pseudo-scholarly events on the island, such as a jamboree to celebrate the two thousandth anniversary of the birth of Augustus. The most prominent Fascist to take up permanent residence in Capri was the gadfly journalist and author Curzio Malaparte, though labeling him a Fascist is problematic, for his career was an exemplary proof of the rapid, effortless mutability of Fascist ideology; later, he renounced it and espoused Maoist Communism.
Born Kurt Erich Suckert, in 1898, he was the son of a German dyer in Prato and his Milanese wife. He received a classical education at the Liceo Cicognini, D’Annunzio’s alma mater, which was broadened by an immersion in Futurism at cafés in Florence, including the Giubbe Rosse, the movement’s informal headquarters. Young Suckert dabbled in every extreme of the political spectrum. Still in his teens, he served in the First World War as a commander in the Battle of the Marne, supporting the Allies against the final German offensive on the western front. He served with distinction and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the war, Suckert worked as a journalist, stalking famous artists and intellectuals in pursuit of interviews and useful connections. He launched his own movement, a retread of Nietzsche he called Oceanism. Oceanism proclaimed as its motto, “Usefulness is not necessary in life.” It did not attract a following—what was the use of joining?—and earned him a reputation as an opportunistic intellectual snob. That did not present a problem for the Fascists, who recognized his talent and recruited him as a rhetorician for the movement, which was always searching for a respectable rationale. In 1925, Suckert signed the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals, adding his name to those of D’Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello.
Pirandello later remarked, “Fascism is like an empty tube, you can put whatever you want in it,” a truism proved by Kurt Suckert’s career. He tacked to every ideological breeze that blew through the movement and quickly rose to a position of power as a writer and editor of nationalist publications. When Mussolini ordained in 1926 that “a Fascist writer must have an Italian name,” Suckert dutifully adopted the nom de guerre Curzio Malaparte, a diabolical inversion of Bonaparte, taking the “evil side” in opposition to Napoleon’s “good side.” At the age of thirty, Malaparte was appointed to the position of top editor at the Naples daily Il Mattino; three months later, he ascended even higher, taking charge of La Stampa, the newspaper of Fiat, in Turin. At the same time, he was a prolific author of books, notably Technique du coup d’état, a sympathetic study of the Machiavellian tactics of revolutionists including Napoleon, Trotsky, and Mussolini. Malaparte was sedulous in his flattery of Il Duce, but he made more enemies than friends in his rise through the ranks of the party. After the police intercepted letters he had written that ridiculed Mussolini’s heir apparent, the air marshal Italo Balbo, Malaparte was arrested on charges of anti-Fascist activities and defamation, and sentenced to five years’ exile in Lipari, a tiny rock off the coast of Sicily.
He passed the time there reading Homer in Greek, but the obscurity was intolerable to his vanity. “Too much sea, too much sky for such a small island and so restless a spirit,” he said. He pleaded a medical excuse, and through the influence of his friend Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s minister of foreign affairs, Malaparte got his exile relocated, first to Ischia, Capri’s neighboring island to the north, and then to Forte dei Marmi, a seaside resort in Tuscany. He prospered in his disgrace: in Forte dei Marmi, he occupied (and later bought) Villa Hildebrand, a modern palace with frescoes by Arnold Böcklin, which had previously been D’Annunzio’s residence. In 1937, Malaparte launched Prospettive, a journal in the luxurious style of Henry Luce’s Fortune magazine, which was subsidized by the Culture Ministry. It was a successful venture by any measure. Its contributors included André Breton, Federico García Lorca, and James Joyce, who gave Malaparte his Italian translation, in collaboration with Ettore Settanni, of the Anna Livia Plurabelle episode of Finnegans Wake. Prospettive outlived Fascism and continued publication until 1952.
After a visit to Capri in 1937, Malaparte decided to build a house there. He commissioned Adalberto Libera, an Italian architect who had designed public buildings for the Fascists, to create the initial designs for a monumental, radically modernist house. Malaparte took charge and improvised many major alterations during the construction. By the time it was completed, in 1943, it was very much what Malaparte called it, “una casa come me,” a house like me, an allusion to a collection of autobiographical fantasies he had published with titles such as “Woman Like Me,” “Dog Like Me,” and “Saint Like Me.” Casa Malaparte, as it is usually known, is one of the most famous private houses of the twentieth century, as familiar an icon of Capri as the Faraglioni, the majestic stone stacks off the island’s southeast coast, which it overlooks from a steep, isolated crag on the island’s southeastern coast.
Malaparte’s reputation as a writer rests upon two remarkable books he wrote during and soon after the Second World War: Kaputt, published in 1944, which is based upon his experiences on the eastern front, in Poland, Rumania, the Balkans, Finland, and the Baltic states, when he was a correspondent for Corriere della Sera, Milan’s prestigious daily newspaper; and The Skin (La Pelle, 1949), which narrates episodes in his service as a liaison officer attached to the American high command in Naples immediately after liberation. The books are not widely read outside Italy. Because Malaparte was both a Fascist and later a Communist sympathizer, everyone in the postwar era has had grounds to despise him, and the books’ savage irony and misanthropic black humor, with many passages of dyspeptic misogyny, make them a hard sell for the leisure reader as much as for university curriculums.
The history of the manuscript of Kaputt is a tale of adventure straight from a spy novel by Graham Greene or Eric Ambler, which Orson Welles might have fi
lmed, casting himself as the slippery, amoral protagonist. In a preface, Malaparte writes that he began the book in the Ukraine in 1941, at a farm adjoining the former House of the Soviets, which was by then occupied by the SS. His host was a Communist pig farmer, whose daughters sat under an apple tree in the garden reading Herodotus in Greek. Before the Gestapo came to arrest him because of his dispatches in Corriere della Sera, Malaparte had sewn the manuscript of Kaputt inside the lining of his uniform. He resumed work on the book in Poland until he was reassigned to Finland, again transporting the manuscript in his coat. He finished it, except for the last chapter, while he was there.
Before his return to Italy, in 1942, Malaparte divided the manuscript into three parts and gave them to Spanish and Rumanian diplomats posted in Helsinki. When the pages arrived safely in Italy, he hid them in the perimeter wall of the newly completed Casa Malaparte. In 1943, he went back to Finland to resume his reports for the newspaper, until the day he heard the news of Mussolini’s fall, when he returned to Rome. On this journey, he concealed his manuscript in shoes with hollow soles. Two days after his arrival, he was arrested yet again, still wearing the shoes that had the pages of his book, and confined in the notorious Regina Coeli prison. After his release, he wrote, “I wanted to go home, I wanted to go to Capri, to my lonely house high above the sea.” In his refuge at Casa Malaparte, he wrote the final pages of Kaputt while he waited for the arrival of the Allies.
I have said that his books are based upon his observations as a war correspondent and a military officer, a deliberately vague description, for determining the precise relationship between text and history is one of the principal challenges these books pose. In Kaputt, the atrocities of the Nazi occupation are described in vivid, horrible detail, at times almost rhapsodical in tone, which creates a perceptual dissonance that cannot easily be resolved, because the historical realities also defy belief. The book begins on an elegiac note, in a long, melancholy Swedish twilight at the palace of Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke (whom Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen would have met on his visit to Stockholm in 1902). Malaparte torments the prince, a noted painter, with grisly war stories expounded in exquisitely shaded prose haunted by Proust. In an aside, Malaparte writes,
