The Anti-Fascist Fabulist: Curzio Malaparte’s prose blended fact inextricably with fiction, reality with dream. (Brian Patrick Eha, Spring 2026, City Journal)
Is there a right way to witness history? Asked to name famous examples from the last century, I should think first of George Orwell shouldering a rifle alongside ill-equipped Spanish partisans, James Agee reverently cataloging the meager contents of sharecroppers’ homes, and Robert Capa clambering ashore at Normandy with his camera alongside soldiers of the Fighting First, from which ordeal only 11 blurred snapshots survived, showing those about to die already ghostlike in his lens. Percipience is a must; and above other traits, we have tended to want our witnesses to history—especially the bad side of history—to be humane. What are we to make, then, of a war correspondent, a writer of real courage, who saw more clearly and comprehensively than almost anyone else, yet who was only intermittently interested in the lives (especially the inner lives) of others? A man who cultivated a brutal dictator as his father figure; who was attracted to blood, and perhaps more fascinated than appalled by many of the horrors he bore witness to; and whose putative masterpiece contains, in its author’s own words, “nothing but soldiers, corpses, dogs, sunflowers, horses, and clouds”? A chameleon who veered from fervent Fascism in 1920s Italy to avowed anti-Fascism after the war, remaining an incorrigible fabulist all the while: Could such a figure possibly be a valuable, not to say a reliable, witness? What are we to make of the mercurial, controversial, egotistical Curzio Malaparte?