The edition of Curzio Malaparte’s Diary of a Foreigner in Paris brought out by the redoubtable New York Review Books this past May is a curious beast from an editorial standpoint, translation and editorial responsibilities both taken on by Stephen Twilley, who has found himself working from two broadly variant editions in different languages—Italian and French, the two languages in which the original manuscripts were originally composed without much in the way of rhyme or reason—without access to the original manuscripts or support from the Malaparte estate. The title of the book is misleading in any language, because the so-called ‘diaries’ are typical of their author’s modus operandi, featuring he, Curzio Malaparte himself, as the somewhat outlandish protagonist, but clearly not in a context where “facts” are considered sacrosanct. Before and during the Second World War, Malaparte had published numerous works of fiction which secured his international renown and which featured himself as the star, all of them famous for prodigious invention and the difficult-to-credit conduct of the author’s literary avatar. The Paris “diaries,” spanning the years 1947 and 1948, demand to be read as a continuation of the earlier practice, and we cannot assess them adequately without being attentive to their clearly being posterity-minded and calculated. In 1947, arriving in what was once his favourite city, Malaparte is immediately more than a little displeased with the manner in which he is received. He detects in François Mauriac’s reception “a hint of animosity, of repulsion, of dislike.” Others will consistently present as similarly cool or even outright hostile, the exceedingly chic Albert Camus among them. When a woman in the street is kind to him, even vaguely affectionate, he finds it amusing, as it indicates that she is simply too unworldly to have divined from his accent that he is Italian. Writing about a discussion, shortly after his arrival in Paris, with Italian Ambassador Quaroni, Malaparte, already sensing a general and pervasive atmosphere of passive-aggressive rebuke, vents some of his frustration to the diplomat: “it’s even quite amusing to see how much the French consider me a collaborator. At times I have the desire to respond forcefully, to ask what certain people’s Resistance really consisted of.” It is all pretty funny. Can Malaparte actually be credulous in wondering why he is considered a collaborator? Though he would fall in and out of favour, the man was at times a major Italian fascist of record. His tendency is to point to his own Resistance bonafides by enumerating to interlocutors the frequency with which he managed to get arrested as well as the time he spent both in prison and under isolated house arrest. Readers of Malaparte’s Kaputt (’44) are aware of the frequency with which the author likes to present himself insulting powerful people in the most recklessly bold manner imaginable. Hardly emblematic of some sort of commitment to direct action or political Resistance, it appear to testify far more to caprice and a curious spirit of corrosive perversity. Still, in communicating his grievance to Quaroni, Malaparte does at least in part have a point. Any given one of the eminent and cultured gentlemen who have scorned him: of what indeed did these men’s actual so-called Resistances materially consist? During the years covered in Diary of a Foreigner in Paris, the filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville is in the process of hustling-up the modest funds he requires to adapt independently to the screen Jean Marcel Bruller's 1941 novel Le silence de la mer. Both Melville and Bruller fought in the Resistance, and the original novel had originally been published cloak and dagger, distributed through clandestine channels. The film would be released in 1949 and (along with revolutionizing production models and film form) is widely considered the first crucial film of the French Resistance. What exactly does the film show and/or tell us? Shot in Bruller’s actual residence, Le silence de la mer features principally a cast of three. A relatively cosmopolitan German officer with a somewhat ghoulish aspect, played by stock company Nazi Howard Vernon, becomes billeted by decree in the home of an uncle and niece played by Jean-Marie Robain and Nicole Stéphane respectively. Though the gregarious and pitifully romantic (which is to say deluded) German officer regales the two occupants of his temporary domicile with repeated monologues over an extended period of time, his hosts, without having consulted one another on the matter, abstain from speaking to him. In a perfunctory sense, the uncle and niece “resist” by being rude and uncooperative, which is in this context suddenly amusing, considering that Malaparte, who would like us to believe him to be more a resister than a collaborator, has little more to point to in his defense other than his own habit of being fantastically rude to highly-placed personages. The reason the Melville film works so well is because of the extraordinary potency of the representational mode, and because of the expressive potency of the form of silence captured in the representation. There is also something to be said for merely waiting the Nazis out. Like Napoleon, Hitler and his minions would ultimately fall on the sword of their own crazed extraterritorial ambition, effectively doing themselves in. Something nearly equivalent, if in micro, happens to Howard Vernon’s officer in Melville’s film. The silence of his hosts insists itself, ultimately serving as an unspoken interrogation that he himself internalizes and then forcefully mobilizes, the upshot being that, having seen the errors of his ways and the rank insidiousness of his countrymen, he ends up requesting mobilization to the front (an unambiguously suicidal act). Telling the niece of his grim decision, and preparing to take his leave, she half-whispers the only word she will ever speak to him, a tender and powerfully underscored “Adieu.” This only serves to intensify the expressive potency of the cinematographic mode that sets the stage for this crucial moment. Let us consider how this powerful cinematographic instance parallels a passage from Malaparte in praise of the actress Véra Korène, performing Racine at the Théâtre-Français: “the only one, surrounded by the poor, embarrassed, insecure, and fearful Paris public of 1947, to bear the message of French tenderness, which is the only still valid message of France’s greatness.” The silence of the sea is the silence that swallows up the Nazis, it is the interrogatory silence directed toward the German interloper, but it is also crucially the silence of the solidarity that precipitates and maintains this iteration of Resistance, the uncle and niece never having had to coordinate their actions by way of speech. If this is Resistance that actually resits in a material and efficacious fashion, it can only be said to do so with any certainly whatever if we confine matters to the representational mode. Indeed, the film was fiercely attacked in many quarters, inciting debates about the legitimacy of what it would appear to argue. Given over to the public, speech again enters the picture, fractious sectarianism dominates, much of it incredibly rude, and division once again reigns. How do you show that you have meaningfully resisted? Usually you have to die or be marked by institutionalized torture (as with the tattoos of concentration camp survivors). It is not for nothing that Jean Marcel Brulle dedicated the original novel Le silence de la mer to Saint-Pol-Roux, “the assassinated poet,” who died in 1941. An Alsatian Jew born with the surname Grumbach, Jean-Pierre Melville—who appropriated his Resistance nom de guerre from the great 19th century American novelist, and was famous for wearing Stetson hats, driving big American cars, and lionizing Hollywood directors like John Huston and William Wyler—lost his brother, who died either as a casualty of operational exigencies or (probably more likely) because he happened to be transporting money to Charles de Gaulle. Though it will not be staged for a few years, in 1949, Samuel Beckett, an expatriated Irishman, who did long-distance errands for the Resistance, has completed his play Waiting for Godot, a masterpiece in part inspired by the tedious and demoralizing work he had done for a noble cause. That work, like dying itself, tends to be quotidian and none too pretty. It is often totally anonymous by design. Martyrs and epochal heroes only happen at the level of representations and the public business of myth (endlessly contested and subject of arguments). A curiosity: there is a nearly throwaway voiceover line of the uncle’s in the film version of Le silence de la mer, the elderly man recalling the “rage” he felt at being “absurd” in the carrying out of his little-r resistance, as though momentarily recessed into the world of Beckett. I’m not convinced that we can do any better than the 17th century poet George Herbert who tells us that “Living well is the best revenge,” the caveat to this axiomatic being that you need to have already cultivated the sapience required to meaningfully rise to its challenge.
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