I
66
PARTISAN REVIEW
and catastrophe of Europe as a whole during the last decade and a half.
It's also the first document I've seen from "the other side" in
th~
WarJ
a record of Malaparte's experiences as a war correspondent with the
Italian Fascist armies in Russia, as a jester at the court of the German
governor Frank in Poland, as a hanger-on in the circles of international
diplomacy and nobility in Finland and Sweden. Over-written, verbose,
theatrical and operatic, the book nevertheless abounds in brilliant pas–
sages: amazing pictures of "the German fear" as they begin to sense
the possibility of their defeat in Russia. The book has been a tremendous
best-seller in Italy-a fact which made me somewhat late in corning
to it since I thought it would be just another ·salacious broadside (they
now flooo the Italian press!) on the whoring and amorous life of the
Regime. Interestingly enough, and not at all untypically, Malaparte,
who hobnobbed with Ciano and the Germans, has now become a mem–
ber of the Communist Party!
These cultural shackles may be broken if the center of Italian life
shifts again outside of Rome. Fascism did no greater disservice to the
country's culture than by draining writers and artists into Rome, which
became the bureaucratic center of the nation. The atmosphere of Rome
is a dj!adly concentration of some of the worst features of Italian life
and society (of which Fascism, in its cultural aspects, was an outgrowth
as well as promoter): the closed and oppressive family life, woman–
dominating and woman-dominated, which might be summed up as the
ferocious cult of the madonna as mistress; the conniving
furb eria
of the
bourgeoisie, the petty snobbery of the lower aristocracy, and in the back–
ground, like the ancient malarial mist of Latium, the baleful lingering
sickness of the
aristocrazia nera.
An atmosphere which strangles young
men's talents, which invites perpetually the easy retreat to the womb.
In another country Alberto Moravia might have been a first-rate writer:
he can now use an elaborate Kafkaesque technique on the subject of
the social amenities, on who goes
in
first to dinner. . . . The case of
De Chirico, however, is the best graph of the Italian artist's fate in this
period. The painter whom Jean Cocteau could speak of in 1913 as the
twin giant, with Picasso, of modern painting, retires from the hard strug–
gle of Paris to the quiet backwaters of Rome and his private circle of
adulation. Behind this defection lies the working of the intense Italian
family and the domineering mother who manages her son into middle–
age: the old man, still the young son, returns to sleep in the warm and
dripping womb of his admirers, is irritated at the mention of Paris or
Picasso, explains incessantly that the latter represents
la barbaria della
pittura,
the barbaric decline of painting. Cocteau no doubt exaggerated,
since De Chirico never really entered into the central stream of modern
painting; though he was a creator of surrealism, it was in that aspect
in which surrealism itself remains outside modern painting. Nevertheless,
