Munthe was besotted by Tiberius. According to Levente Erdeös, the director of the San Michele Foundation on Capri, ‘He had a kind of disease, to me, more or less obsessed by the late emperor. He could look down from his loggia and think that he, also, was the ruler of the world.’ Tiberius had owned twelve houses on the island; Munthe had to have twelve. Tiberius was a collector of statues; Munthe had to have statues too. But instead of admitting these came from ordinary antique dealers in Naples and elsewhere, he preferred to veil his ‘discoveries’ in mystery.
He liked to insinuate that the bronze copy of the Lysippan Hermes (which sits at the end of the loggia and was given to him by the city of Naples for his help with the cholera) was not, in fact, a copy but the original, which had been deliberately spirited out of the museum by one of his adoring well-wishers.
Another time he ‘felt’ that a face was watching him from the sea-bed; and when he trained his telescope on a pale speck offshore, it turned out to be the marble Medusa head now set into the wall behind his desk. Or there was the huge basalt Horus falcon—‘the largest I have ever seen,’ he wrote, ‘brought from the land of the Pharaohs by some Roman collector, maybe by Tiberius himself. Yet this object, so far as I could judge, was a standard fake from the Cairo bazaar.
By the 1920s Munthe had become a British subject. He had worked with the British Red Cross in Flanders during the First World War. And in 1943, fearing perhaps that the Germans would invade Italy, he left for Stockholm (on the same plane as Curzio Malaparte, who was travelling as a journalist to the Finno-Soviet front). He did not come back. His friend King Gustav V gave him a suite of rooms in the royal palace; and there, dreaming of the South, he died, on 11 February 1949. He had been anxious that San Michele should remain a monument to himself, and bequeathed it to the Swedish state. A memorial plaque reads: ‘To the Everlasting Memory of Dr Axel Munthe. His life – A radiant symbol of perfect humanity.’ The place is thronged with tourists, and kept as clean as a clinic.
Nowadays not many islanders remember the old doctor, who would stroll around town in the shabby clothes that marked him out as a signore. I did, however, pick up the following:
From a grande dame: ‘He was insatiable. We used to call him Il Caprone—“The Billy Goat”! And not just for that! He smelled something terrible.’
From a Neapolitan prince: ‘It was a bad crossing. How would you say that in English? A bad mixture! He populated half of Anacapri, and they all had red hair and horse faces. Sometimes you’d hear the children shouting, “Horse face!” “Horse face!”—and you knew they were shouting at one of Munthe’s bastards.’
From the omniscient young historian who works in the town hall of Anacapri: ‘Era bisessuale.’
The pro-Munthe faction, on the other hand, reveres his memory in hushed tones and piously enumerates his benefactions. In Anacapri I met one of these self-confessed ‘Munthesians’, who dashed about the garden of San Michele, pointing out this or that ‘typically Munthesian detail’ and the graves of the Queen of Sweden’s dogs. He was quite upset that I had made a few inquiries elsewhere.
‘They know nothing,’ he said crossly. ‘They are jealous of Munthe. They are jealous of the man and his achievements. You must ask me. I know everything.’
‘Was he a cold fish?’ I asked.
‘A fish?’
‘A cold person?’
‘He was hot and cold. He was all things.’
‘In what way does he interest you?’
‘He was interesting.’
‘But how?’
‘He was a pioneer of ecology. He went to Mussolini to stop the people killing birds.’
‘What else?’
‘He was the creator of beauty.’
‘Where?’
‘He created this spot.’
Curzio Malaparte was a very strange writer, and his villa, which he built in the years 1938-40 on the lonely headland of Capo Massullo, is one of the strangest habitations in the Western world.
A ‘Homeric’ ship gone aground? A modem altar to Poseidon? A house of the future – or of the prehistoric past? A surrealist house? A Fascist house? Or a ‘Tiberian’ refuge from a world gone mad? Is it the house of the dandy and professional joker, the Arcitaliano, as he was known to his friends—or of the melancholy German romantic who lay masked underneath? The ‘pure’ house of an ascetic? Or the anxious private theatre of an insatiable Casanova? What we do know is that Malaparte asked his architect, Adalberto Libera, to build him a ‘casa come me’— a ‘house like me’—which would be ‘triste, dura, severa’, as ‘sad, hard and severe’ as he hoped himself to be. He had his notepaper headed, in thick black letters, CASA COME ME—and indeed, down to the last petit bourgeois detail, the house is a biography of its owner.
Curzio Malaparte, born in 1898, was baptised Kurt Suckert. His father, Erwin Suckert, was an irritable small-time textile manufacturer from Saxony who had settled in Prato, near Florence, and married a Florentine woman.
Early photos of Kurt show a sleek, beautiful, black-haired young man confronting the camera with the ironic and disdainful demeanour of certain portraits by Bronzino. By 1913 he was already frequenting the Red Coats café in Florence, where intellectual hotheads clamoured for action, any kind of action, in a Europe so satiated with peace that it had come to think that peace was immoral. When war broke out, he enlisted in the Legione Garibaldina and distinguished himself under fire: like Hemingway (who was a year his junior), on the Austrian front; then at Bligny, near Rheims, where nearly ten thousand Italians were killed and he himself got a gas-damaged lung.
After the war he became a journalist and a Fascist. He joined the march on Rome and signed the first Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, knew him at this time and delivered a harsh verdict on his frantic arrivismo, immeasurable vanity, and chameleon-like snobbery: ‘To have success [he] would do any kind of mischief.’ In 1925 Suckert read a nineteenth-century pamphlet titled, in part, I Malaparte e i Bonaparte and changed his name.
Malaparte fancied himself a ‘man of action’ rather in the mould of T.E. Lawrence or André Malraux. He shared their flair for self-advertisement and their mythomania; yet when it came to the crunch, the role he chose was not that of participant but that of literary voyeur. He was astute enough to see, from the start, the cruel absurdities of Mussolini’s movement; and with his corrosive sense of humour he could never resist the temptation to mock men in power. The first hint of trouble came when he mocked Mussolini’s taste in ties. The Duce called him to his office in the Palazzo Chigi to apologise. Then, crossing the cold marble floor after the interview, Malaparte turned and said:
‘Permit me to say one last word in my defence.’
‘Go ahead,’ said Mussolini, raising his eyes.’
‘Even today you’re wearing a horrible tie.’
Malaparte loved princesses and peasants; he hated homosexuals and his own humdrum background. He was a sharp dresser. (With one of his old friends, the Principe di Sirignano, I had a discussion as to whether he used to anoint his hair with brilliantine or Vaseline or la gomina argentina.) He could mesmerise any room with his stories; and the highly placed Fascists who were his protectors were secretly delighted to hear the Duce jeered at. In 1929 Senator Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat and no friend of the regime, appointed him editor-in-chief of Agnelli’s newspaper, La Stampa.
For two years, until his forcible dismissal, Malaparte used it as a sniping post.
He had developed a theory that the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, far from being the products of the contradictions inherent in bourgeois capitalism, were compounded from the disgust and envy of the bourgeoisie for itself. The Russian Revolution was a European phenomenon. Lenin was not some new Asiatic Chingis Khan but ‘a timid and fanatical’ bourgeois functionary, a small man, part German like himself.
He carried his thesis to its conclusion in a small, brilliant book, the Technique
du Coup d’État, which he published in Paris in 1931, after the Fascists forced him to leave La Stampa. The final chapter, written two years before the Nazis took power in Germany, carried the arresting title ‘Une Femme: Hitler’:That fat and boastful Austrian ... with hard mistrustful eyes, fixed ambitions and cynical plans, could well have, like all Austrians, a certain taste for the heroes of Ancient Rome ...
His hero, Julius Caesar in Lederhosen ...
Hitler is a caricature of Mussolini ...
The spirit of Hitler is profoundly feminine; his intelligence, his ambitions, even his willpower have nothing virile about them ...
Dictatorship ... is the most complete form of envy in all its aspects, political, moral, intellectual ...
Hitler, the dictator; the woman whom Germany deserves ...
None of this endeared him to the Duce, and, in Malaparte’s own words, ‘Hitler asked for my head and got it.’ On returning, courageously or misguidedly, from Paris in 1933, he was accused of anti-Fascist activities abroad, arrested, beaten up, put in the Regina Coeli jail, and, like some disgraced senator of imperial Rome, sentenced to five years’ exile on the island of Lipari.
Here, guarded by carabinièri, he read Homer and Plato in the original, while the waves crashed onto the grey volcanic beach outside his house. Pictures show him in immaculate white plus fours but no socks, puckering his face like a middle-aged matador and caressing his favourite terrier:I had no one but the dogs to talk to. At night I went out onto the terrace of my sad house by the sea. I leaned over the balustrade and called out Eolo, the brother of my own dog Febo. I called Vulcano, and Apollo, and Stromboli ... All the dogs had ancient names ... the dogs of my fishermen friends. I stayed for hours on my terrace, howling at the dogs who howled back at me ...
Malaparte makes a lot of capital out of the five-year sentence: ‘Too much sea, too much sky, for so small an island and so restless a spirit.’ The truth was that after about a year his friend Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, managed to have him transferred to Ischia and then to Forte del Marmi, where he lived in a villa with Febo, entertained, had the use of a ministerial Alfa-Romeo, and wrote satirical articles under the pseudonym Candido. For all Mussolini’s faults, he was not vindictive, or without a sense of the absurd. Secretly he seems to have liked Malaparte – but was obliged to defer to the Germans.
Once the ‘exile’ was over, Malaparte bought his own house in Forte dei Marmi, the Villa Hildebrand, which had been built for a German sculptor and frescoed by Böcklin. He then founded Prospettive, a cultural review with a bias toward surrealism, and published Pound, André Breton, Alberto Moravia, Mario Praz, De Chirico and Paul Éluard.
He went to Africa as a war correspondent during the Ethiopian campaign. On the whole, his dispatches were not unfavourable to Mussolini. He had also written a collection of autobiographical fantasies with such titles as ‘A Woman Like Me’, ‘A Dog Like Me’, ‘A Land Like Me’, ‘A Saint Like Me’. And in a somewhat mysterious manner he had laid his hands on a sizeable sum of money. He bought Capo Massullo from a Capriote fisherman, saying that he wanted to keep rabbits there; instead he commissioned Libera to build the ‘house like me’.
Casa Come Me, with its stupendous views of sea and sky and rock, was intended to satisfy his ‘melancholic yearning for space’ and at the same time to reproduce, on his own grandiose terms, the conditions of his exile on Lipari. It was to be the monastery-bunker of the man who had faced the dictators alone – a casamatta, a ‘blockhouse’ or ‘madhouse’, depending on which way you read that word in Italian; a house of the machine age that would nevertheless preserve the most ancient values of the Mediterranean. And unlike the ‘Apollonian’ temples of classical Greece, with their forests of columns and ‘roofs set down from above’, this building was to rise, like a Minoan sanctuary, from the sea itself.
The walls were the colour of bull’s blood, the windows were like the windows of a liner, and there was a wedge-shaped ramp of steps which slanted, like a sacred way, up to the terrace roof Here, every morning, Malaparte would perform a ritual of gymnastics, alone, while the women who were in love with him would watch from the cliffs above.
Inside the house, on the upper floor, was the vast whitewashed atrium-saloon, its stone floors strewn with chamois skins, its long suede sofas with loose linen covers, and its wave-edged ‘Minoan’ tables resting on concrete columns. There were huge, wooden, ‘fascistic’ sculptures of nudes by Pericle Fazzini; and through the plate-glass fireback of the fireplace his guests could watch the sea behind the flames.
Beyond were the writer’s own quarters and the ‘Room of the Favourite’, each with its bathroom of veined grey marble fit for the murder of Agamemnon. Malaparte seems to have treated sex as something solemn and sacramental; in the Room of the Favourite the double bed is stationed against a plain, panelled wall and looks like the altar of a Cistercian monastery. The study too, despite its faience stove, its painting of Ethiopian women, and its floor tiles painted with the lyre of Orpheus, has a liturgical flavour. It was in this room, in September 1943, that Malaparte finished Kaputt, ‘[my] horribly gay and gruesome book’, which made his reputation outside Italy.
On Mussolini’s declaration of war, Ciano advised his friend to get into uniform. So, as captain of the Fifth Alpine Regiment, Malaparte went first to watch the Italian invasion of Greece, then to report for the Corriere della Sera on the Russian front. He managed to charm or flatter his way into high Nazi circles. At Cracow, on the Vistula, he dined with Reichsminister Frank, the butcher of Poland, who assured him that he, Frank, was to be Poland’s Orpheus, who would ‘win these people over by the arts, poetry and music’. Malaparte also wormed his way into the Warsaw ghetto and reported, somewhat evasively, what he had seen. He followed the Panzer divisions into the Ukraine and witnessed the senseless atrocities there.
His articles, syndicated through Sweden to the rest of the world, hinted from the outset that Germany was doomed. The Gestapo pressed for his removal, or worse; but Mussolini, already squirming under the shadow of Hitler, allowed him instead to go to Finland to report on the Finno-Soviet war. In the summer of 1943, on hearing of the Duce’s fall, Malaparte flew from Stockholm to Italy. By the time the Americans arrived in Naples, he was sitting calmly in Casa Come Me, writing.
In Kaputt Malaparte chose to present an aesthete’s view of German-occupied Europe, describing it as some vast and sinister fresco of the dance of death. The result, to say the least, is disturbing. His angle of vision is always oblique, always equivocal; the tone is surrealist—or, like the Nazis themselves, kitsch. There are moments when the imagery of Dali seems, at last, to have found a real-life subject, such as a scene in which Malaparte shared a sauna with Himmler, or this visit to the Poglavnik (military governor) of Croatia, after a push by the partisans:‘The Croatian people,’ said Ante Pavelič, ‘wish to be ruled with goodness and justice. And I am here to provide them.’
While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik’s desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters – as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano, an Italian diplomat, looked at me and winked, ‘Would you like a nice oyster stew?’
‘Are they Dalmatian oysters?’ I asked the Poglavnik.
Ante Pavelič removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, ‘It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes.’
Now, to my mind, the combination of ‘forty pounds’ and ‘Fortnum and Mason’ is both nauseating and bogus; and however weird Kaputt may seem on first reading, it surely works neither as novel nor as memoir. The same goes for Kaputt’s sequel, The Skin, a book written in a similarly self-inflationary vein, and one which tells of his career as a liaison officer between the Italian army and its new-found American allies. The set pieces, this time around, are sa
distic ‘southern baroque’.
The Skin was an international best-seller – except among the Neapolitans and Capriotes, who, feeling themselves to have been calumniated by a collaborator, made Malaparte’s life on the island extremely uncomfortable. He joined the Communist Party, became disillusioned, and decided to emigrate to France.
There he fared no better. He loathed the intellectual climate of Paris during the reign of Camus and Sartre. He wrote a play about Proust, and another about Karl Marx in London; both were booed off the stage. He returned to Italy to make a successful film. People remember him at literary gatherings in Rome, in a wellcut brown tweed jacket, with a silent, boyish girl on his arm. He started to get fat and planned to ride a bicycle from New York to Los Angeles. Finally, in 1956, he went to the Soviet Union and China, where he wrote sober reportage, suggesting that he could have become a new kind of writer, not necessarily at the centre of things.
On Sunday, the eleventh of November, he fell ill with fever in Peking. The doctor who attended him said, ‘You have caught a gentle little Chinese microbe which has given you ... a gentle little Chinese fever. Nothing serious.’ It was an incurable cancer of the lung. On his deathbed he converted to Catholicism and received the final absolution.
‘How he prayed!’ said the Principe di Sirignano. ‘He prayed to Christ ... to the Madonna of Pompeii ... to Lenin ... But he died in agony!’
He left Casa Come Me – perhaps out of malice towards the Capriotes – for the use of artists from the People’s Republic of China. His family contested the will, got the house back, and has recently set up a Malaparte foundation, whose function was not exactly clear to me. On the day of my visit the house was full of art students from Munich.
Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings, 1969-1989 Page 15
