A Clean, Well-Lighted Soul

THOSE CURSED TUSCANS by Curzio Malaparte. 236 pages. Ohio University. $4.95.

Novelist-Journalist Curzio Malaparte made it his life's ambition to be hated by his readers. He succeeded admirably. By the time of his death in 1957, he was anathema to the right and left and almost everybody in between.

His contempt for most of humanity was complete. He regarded hatred as the one majestic emotion of this miserable species, for he who hates is at least passionately concerned, not docilely conformist. He poured all his venom into a novel, Kaputt, an account of Nazi atrocities on the Eastern front, and into a later novel, The Skin, describing barbarous conditions under the U.S. occupation of Italy. With a passion akin to Swift's, Malaparte sought to indict the cruelties of mankind. Readers were shocked, as he intended; they were also shocked by the fact that Malaparte seemed to be enjoying the telling of these poisonous tales too much.

No Time to Sing. Tall, rugged, dashing, Malaparte was one of a vanishing breed: the intellectual buccaneer in the manner of D'Annunzio, who bounced from one Great Cause to the next. After fighting in World War I, he became an ardent advocate of Fascism. In and out of favor with the regime, he joined the Allies in 1943, later tried to join the Communist Party but was brusquely turned down. He visited Red China in 1956 and came home bubbling with enthusiasm.

Those Cursed Tuscans is a white-hot, sometimes overwrought exposition of Malaparte's philosophy and an apologia, really, for his way of life. As far as he is concerned, it was a mistake to unite Italy, for unification brought spare, lean and hungry Tuscans into contact with a lot of softhearted, overemotional Italians. "The Tuscans aren't tenors. They speak: they don't sing. They don't wash out their throats with beautiful Italian phrases." The whole history of Tuscany, thinks Malaparte, can be expressed in a common Tuscan curse: "To hell with all of you, go shove it."

The Tuscans enjoy a chummy relationship with God; they do not prostrate themselves: "They have a way of kneeling which is more a way of standing up with their legs bent-exactly the opposite of all other Italians, who, even when standing upright, seem to be on their knees. In religious processions, Tuscans carry Christ along as if they were on their way to lynch him. They believe that even Christ, the Madonna and the Saints must sooner or later give an account of themselves-which is, one must admit, a fine way of turning the Judgment Day upside down."

Nothing Sacred. The attraction evil had for Malaparte gave him peculiar insight into the behavior of men who were far worse in deed than he ever was in thought. In Kaputt, he wrote: "The Nazi has no fear of the strong man, of the armed man who faces him with courage. The Nazi fears the defenseless, the weak and the sick."

The personal truculence Malaparte advocates is far from the mass hysteria of Fascism. "Learn from the Tuscans," he writes, "how to spit in the face of the mighty, in the face of kings, emperors, bishops, inquisitors, judges, masters. Learn from the Tuscans that there is nothing sacred in this world except the human itself, and that one human's soul is worth precisely that of another's: and that it is only necessary to know how to keep the soul clean, in a cool dry place, that it gather neither dust nor humidity. Woe unto him who tries to dirty that soul, or humiliate it, or butter it up, or bless it, mortgage it, rent it, buy it."

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