Malala v malignity, Malaparte the dualist

Of course there are always going to be troll-toads lurking to aim their spit at the dove of progress*, but it came as a shock on the day that Malala Yousafzai had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Indian anti-child slavery campaigner Kailash Satyarthi to find an attack from an official quarter. I won't dignify the Editor of the Pakistan Observer with a name, but it was astonishing to find a supposedly educated man, interviewed on the BBC World Service's Newshour, describing the whole incident of Malala's shooting as a western set-up, asserting that she wasn't even shot and that her father is a sinister manipulator. And Malala herself? 'Just a normal, useless girl'. Well, that says it all. And why give such a creature airtime? Because his views are shared by - or should one say stoked in - thousands around Pakistan.

It's the same old story worldwide: one laughs at the absurdity of such goons, but when they are in positions of power, it's a different matter. Putin, after all, has idiots in place around Russia, as we know from Stephen Fry's interview with the ludicrous St Petersburg homophobe. When ideologies you could knock down with a feather of logical argument become enshrined, lives are at risk. And yes, we have it lurking close to home in the deceptive personage of Nigel Farage.

Frankly I share the view of my old ma who, until our brush with a local Ukip councillor doubling as the taxi driver who ferried us to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for her birthday treat, might have voted for Farage. She keeps telling me how every time Nige appears on the telly she has the urge to 'smash his awful smug face in' (this is figurative, you understand, not a threat of real physical violence). And yet people will still vote for him, even after every week some new fool in the grassroots of his party says something absurd, and even now that he's come out, as it were, with the proposal of banning HIV positive foreigners from entering our sceptred isle (this, it seems, might even have been a jealous hit at the not very prepossessing-looking but presumably slightly brighter Tory MP Douglas Carswell who defected to Ukip and won their first seat in Clacton-on-Sea; Carswell's father was a pioneer in HIV research, and he condemned Farage's cheap trick unreservedly. One can only hope he's a plant to implode Ukip policies).

No coincidence, then, that Clacton Council removed from a town wall the above Aesopian or La Fontaine fable by the great Banksy (as it comes from banksy.org, I assume the reproduction is freely available), one of his best commentaries yet. It's said that people didn't get the real point, but I imagine they got it all too well.

Enough ranting. But it did sadden me, too, to read of the humble Satyarthi's injuries in 34 years of attempting, sometimes successfully, to rescue enslaved children: a broken shoulder, a broken leg and a broken back. Plus the losses of two of his colleagues - 'one was shot dead and one was beaten to death. Most of my junior colleagues have been beaten up many times. So it is not an easy game'.

Two inspiring comments from Satyarthi to wrap up this part of the argument: 'This is a moral examination that one has to pass...to stand up against social evils' and 'India has hundreds of problems and millions of solutions'. The spirit of Gandhi is alive and healthy. By the way, if you haven't done so already, please sign the #upforschool petition.

The connection with a masterpiece of a novel by Italo-German writer Curzio Malaparte, born Kurt Eric Suckert in Prato, may be tenuous. But I get a queasy sense of good and evil, beauty and horror, mixed up in The Skin (La pelle), published in 1949 as an extraordinary literary transfiguration of his experiences as a liaison officer in Naples following the Allied liberation in 1943. I've just read it in a New York Review Books edition which reinstates passages omitted from previous English-language editions (in Italy La pelle was banned by the church for some time). My cover has Luciano Fontana's Concetto Spaziale of 1966, but I like the one above, where the transcendent coincides with the all too mortal just as it does in the book.

At first it seems as if Malaparte is being perverse, almost playing with the paradox of a liberation which is worse for the Neapolitans than the war itself. What does he really think of the rosy, fresh-faced Americans? How disingenuous is he being and what is he making up? Clarification soon comes in the second chapter:

I do not like to see how low man can stoop in order to live. I preferred the war to the 'plague' which, after the liberation, had defiled, corrupted and humiliated us all - men, women and children. Before the liberation we had fought and suffered in order not to die. Now we were fighting and suffering in order to live...It is a humiliating, horrible thing, a shameful necessity, a fight for life. Only for life. Only to save one's skin. It is no longer a fight against oppression, a fight for freedom, for human dignity, for honour. It is a fight for a crust of bread, for a little fuel, for a rag with which to cover the nakedness of one's own children, for a handful of straw on which to lie.

Malaparte cranks up the superb rhetoric and concludes:

The plague had been able to achieve more in a few days than tyranny had done in twenty years of universal humiliation, or war in three years of hunger, grief and atrocious suffering. Those people who bartered themselves, their honour, their bodies and the flesh of their own children in the streets - could they possibly be the same people who a few days before, in those same streets, had given such conspicuous and horrible proof of their courage and fire in face of German opposition?

Malaparte's philosophical games on the edge of politics are perhaps embodied in his biography: an early supporter of Mussolini who soon turned against the dictator in powerful prose, was exiled to the island of Lipari - an era which coincides with a tragic narrative in The Skin about his dog Febo, pictured there with him below

and woven in with the main gist about a dying soldier - and ended up after the war a committed communist. But he is, first and foremost, a deadly serious artist, and his chameleonic tone is what puts The Skin as a work of literature above the mere, if excellent, sometimes selective reportage of Norman Lewis in Naples '44. There is, besides, a metaphysical dimension, a use of Homeric similes and a conscious, often parodistic parallel between the post-war situation and Greek or Roman mythology which, like music, Malaparte knows and describes so well.

There are too many vivid embodiments of his savage irony to cite here, but I'll just touch on the linking of two dazzlingly described gatherings.. The first, in my favourite chapter 'General Cork's Banquet', makes absurd contrasts between the fine, Capodimonte-laden table beneath a fresco by Luca Giordano in the Duke of Toledo's palace and the food served up, including fried Spam and boiled corn which sends Malaparte off on one of his grotesquely enjoyable riffs. 'The ancient and glorious house of Toledo had never witnessed so tragic a humiliation, ' he summarises. He makes fun of the guest of honour, Mrs Flat - a seeming 'monster of purity and virginity' in command of the WACs, and the piece de resistance is the fish course.'The famous Siren from the Aquarium' has been sacrificed, like other prize specimens, 'to General Cork's mental cruelty'. Unfortunately it resembles a dead girl; Malaparte tortures both us and Mrs Flat with the possibility of cannibalism. I can't see it myself in images of the eel-like siren fish, but this superstitious concoction brings us closer to the semi-fantasy:

If that's priceless and relentlessly horrible, almost more so is the way Malaparte takes his revenge on his fellow diners at a camp outside Rome, discussing what's fact and what fiction in his previous novel, Kaputt (about his time on the eastern front, partly resurrected in The Skin. Thankfully Kaputt is also in the NYRB series, and I've ordered it up from Daunt Books). A General Guillaume opines that 'in Kaputt [Malaparte] is pulling his readers' legs'. Malaparte, previously silent, goes into a long and eloquent disquisition about how in his couscous he had discovered the hand of a Moroccan soldier which had just been blown off by a landmine. And ate it. We almost begin to believe him. Then in an aside to his best mate Jack he asks him if he saw 'how skillfully I arranged those little ram's bones on my plate? They looked just like the bones of a hand'.

But it's not all so gruesomely joky. I came to respect and marvel at Malaparte's role as a truth-telling jester of paradox, of the gulf between seeming and being. In the last chapter he transcends his own descent into hell by telling a less brilliant American than Jack: 'it isn't true that Christ saved the world once and for all'.

'Christ died to teach us that every one of us can become Christ, that every man can save the world by his own sacrifice. Christ too would have died in vain if it were not possible for every man to become Christ and to save the world.'

'A man is only a man,' said Jimmy.

'Oh, Jimmy, won't you understand that it isn't necessary for a man to be the Son of God, to rise again from the dead on the third day, and to sit on the right hand of the Father, in order to be Christ? It is those thousands and thousands of dead men who have saved the world, Jimmy.'

Kurt Vonnegut, my recent obsession, who loved the simple message of the Sermon on the Mount, would like that, I think, even if Malaparte has stopped playing the Vonneguttian holy fool. So, I hope, would Malala.

*French proverb which I like, 'La bave du crapaud n'atteint pas la blanche colombe'. The nearest English equivalent, 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me', isn't quite so poetic.

Emperors and popes: mostly bad, some mixed

What a sorry but enticing saga is the history of Rome – rather oddly told, it has to be admitted, in Robert Hughes’s popular and understandably art-skewed book bearing the city's name as title. Odd and skewed since, once the glory days and the era of the Grand Tour are over, Hughes seems to be stumped for specifically Roman material and goes tramping all over Italy, and sometimes the rest of Europe. He’s also no Simon Winder – see one of my endless paeans to Germania – in that the personal flavour of the Prologue gets lost in the chronological, if still selective, account that follows.


Yet Hughes can be entertainingly wrathful on the grandeur and follies of emperors and popes. He questions, as any good historian must, the story of Rome as told entirely from a Christian perspective. Horrible things happened to the early Christians, to be sure; but equally horrible and worse tortures lay in store for the so-called Pagans (a term I had to reassess, since of course it embraces so much of the humanities) under the so-called Christian emperors.

I do like the sound of the emperor Julian – some ‘Apostate’; it simply transpires that the fledgling Christianity didn’t speak to him; but he never went round stoking any fires under the believers.


Besides, one forgets that Julian’s predecessor Constantine wasn’t exactly a ‘Christian emperor’ in the all-embracing way we think of it. Tolerant of the Roman majority and no zealot after his ‘vision’ at the Ponte Milvio, he was nevertheless another of those family monsters – putting his own son by an early marriage to death on the accusation of a later wife, boiling her alive in the hot-room of the palace when it turned out she’d lied. No wonder mamma Helena sublimated her sorrow by going off round the middle east buying up bits of cross and less easily transportable objects.


Much worse for history, though, was the later, forged ‘Donation of Constantine’ which gave free rein to papal infallibility. And it’s no surprise, of course, that most of the later popes wallowed in luxury and persecuted the faithless with a zeal that puts even Caligula and Nero to shame. But here the paradoxes accumulate, especially since many who would seem to us the worst have given us Rome as we so wonderingly know it. Most likeable to a libertarian is Leo X, Giovanni de’Medici, who kept a pet elephant, led a shameless gay sex life and honoured scholars and poets.


But his feckless spending led to that sale of indulgences, posts and art treasures which gave his polar opposite, Martin Luther, fuel to his rightful indignation. Nevertheless I know which I’d rather invite to an ideal dinner party.

Even the anti-religious Hughes has mixed feelings about the ‘manic-impressive’ Sixtus V. Stalin could hardly have done a better job on purging the criminality which beset Rome when Sixtus, born Felice Peretti, came to power in 1585.


He drove many of the spectacular lines we see through Rome today, often at the expense of the classical, with which he held no truck – other than to show its inferiority to Christianity; the tale of the dragging of the Egyptian obelisk from the back of St Peter’s to stand at the centre of the square in front takes on Neronian dimensions. He also stuck a statue of St Peter, cast from melted-down classical bronzes, on top of the magnificent Trajan’s column. As Hughes reports, ‘in dedicating the statue of Peter, His Holiness explained that such a monument as Trajan’s could become worthy to bear the effigy of Christ’s Vicar on Earth only if it were rededicated in the cause of the Catholic Church – an astonishing piece of casuistry’.


Another tale chills the blood but simultaneously warms one’s spirit to know that ordinary Romans did sometimes fight back: here's what followed an accusation carried out in the traditional dialogue between the messages posted on the old statue called the Pasquino (a BC Greek sculpture of Menelaus) near the Piazza Navona and those on the river-god Marforio outside the Travertine Prison (now at the entrance to the Capitoline Museums on the Campidoglio). Let Hughes tell the tale:

…one day during the reign of Sixtus V Pasquino was seen wearing a horribly filthy shirt. Why, Marforio wanted to know, did he wear such a stinking rag? Because Donna Camilla was the pope’s sister, who in her humbler days had been a washerwoman but had just been ennobled by His Holiness.

There was a limit to what great figures would endure from Pasquino, and this crossed the line. It got to the ears of Sixtus, who let it be known that if the anonymous satirist owned up to writing it, his life would be spared and he would receive a present of one thousand pistoles, cash. But if anyone else found him out and denounced him, he would be hanged. Naturally the nameless graffitist – for who was going to turn down such a reward? – confessed. Sixtus V gave him the money and spared his life, but unsportingly added that ‘We have reserved for Ourselves the power of cutting off your hands and boring your tongue through, to prevent your being so witty in future’. But nothing would shut Pasquino up; he had a hundred tongues and two hundred hands. The very next Sunday he was seen draped in a freshly laundered, still-wet shirt, to dry it in the sun. Marforio wondered why he couldn’t wait until Monday. ‘There’s no time to lose,’ said Pasquino, thinking of His Holiness’s taxation habits. ‘If I stay until tomorrow perhaps I’ll have to pay for the sunshine’.


Anyway, it’s Sixtus we have to thank for some of Rome’s avenues and the fountains I much admired on my dawn walk back to Termini the other Monday. But as far as the human cost is concerned, compared to all this, the caprices of Pio Nono in the 19th century and Mussolini (and Berlusconi) in the 20th seem like childsplay.

15/12 - a neat addition from Banksy and his disfigured cardinal in Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. Read about it here, or just enjoy/abhor the seasonal sentiment I've extrapolated: 'The statue? I guess you could call it a Christmas present. At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.'

High time for clemency

I'm rather arbitrarily comparing big and small here, and in the case of the small, Israel may have been the starting point but is no longer the issue (snapped that White Rabbit in Jerusalem's Mane Yehuda district two years ago, by the way - is it a Banksy?)

Obama's UN veto on Palestine strikes me as the biggest disappointment yet, on a par with his inability to intervene in the greatest horror last night, the execution of a man who remained innocent until proven guilty (what's the saw? Better twenty guilty men go free than that an innocent man should hang).

Anyway, one shouldn't be surprised about the USA's intractable association with Israel: in came a telling statistic from Peter Phillips that the Israel Philharmonic indeed gets little funding from its own government but - surprise, surprise - has most of the shortfall met by America. And don't get me wrong: I do believe that in some respects Israel remains a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. But in the areas where it so flagrantly isn't, there must be room for self-examination and not just the kneejerk assertion that anyone who says there's a serious problem must be anti-semitic. We well know, though, that no rational argument is possible here, it's been too deep wired over thousands of years.

As it happens, the Israel Philharmonic doesn't really figure any more in the case of 'the LPO four', the orchestral musicians who put their signatures to a petition in the Independent seeking the boycott of the IPO's visit to the Proms. The grey area which remains is whether it was they or the organisers of the petition who appended 'London Philharmonic Orchestra' to their names and professions. If it was the players - and this should have been properly established by due process - than an emphatic public caution from an organisation which should not have been linked with the cause was totally justified.

What remains indefensible is the decision to bar the players from all activity with the orchestra, first for nine months, now for six. Big deal. As I wrote in an email to LPO chief executive Timothy Walker yesterday - you can send one, too, to timothy.walker@lpo.org.uk - 'a suspension, even if only for six months, is extreme, and reflects badly on nobody but the orchestral management'.

No reply as yet. Last night I was harangued by a person closely associated with the orchestra for trying to raise the issue as objectively as I could in the LPO's opening concert of the season, as if it had no place even in interval chit-chat. Anyway, I attended - some of my colleagues returned boycott for boycott - with the intention of giving the great Jurowski's latest piece of daredevil programming its due, but also of raising the peripheral issue, in my Arts Desk review, and have done just that. VJ, incidentally, did what he thought he could to plead for the players but doesn't feel beyond making his point that more is within his remit as principal conductor.

I was, of course, relieved that there were no protests in the hall, but deeply disappointed that no-one had the decency to support the players by issuing leaflets in the foyers. The gist should have been, 'enjoy the concert, but be aware of the issues' - the line taken by protesters at the BP-sponsored Trafalgar Square live screening of the Royal Opera Cendrillon. This eco-ballet, Swan Lake as parable of swans in oil, photo courtesy (I trust) of the Indymedia UK website, did not 'disrupt the event' as the site claims; it took place half an hour before curtain up.


I didn't catch the quarter-hour happening, as I arrived just before official 'curtain up'. I did, however, get a very witty and articulate leaflet. But on Wednesday there was nothing before or after the concert. That's sad.

23/9 Update: 117 signatories in a letter to the Telegraph, including Mike Leigh and Miriam Margolyes, have expressed their outrage. I don't think they've approached it from quite the right angle, but they've made their feelings known. And Timothy Walker - who still hasn't responded to my email - tells the Telegraph: 'This all became an issue when we started to receive emails and letters from supporters, a lot of whom are Jewish and felt that the players were taking an anti-Jewish position. Some said they weren't going to come to the concerts or give us any money.' Hmm - that says rather more than it should, doesn't it? And I believe two of the players in question are Jewish, so what does that make them - self-hating?