The Curious Case of Curzio Malaparte

Does a glorious prose style reflect a glorious quality in a writer’s soul? Two hundred years ago, the Romantics used to have an answer to that question, which consisted of saying that beautiful writing can flow only from someone who vibrates to the principle of beauty. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who introduced me to that idea, and because his own writing was glorious, I have always wanted to believe that something in it must be true. But Curzio Malaparte, the Italian Fascist, may stand for a different possibility. He, too, looked to the Romantics for inspiration—in his case, to Chateaubriand, the French master of masters among prose writers, whose own soul was indisputably noble. But Malaparte’s identification with Chateaubriand figures among his several unconvincing self-mythologies.