Author, author: Why everyone hates Malaparte

This winter, I've been living in Paris. And I've been reading. But rather than doing the obvious thing - reading French literature - I've ended up reading other literature that doesn't seem to exist in English any more but is available in French translation, such as the great Italian writer Curzio Malaparte.

In his youth, Malaparte was a fascist. Then he fell out with Mussolini and was sent into internal exile. After the intercession of Mussolini's son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, he was freed in 1938 - but was repeatedly rearrested. As a war correspondent for the Corriere della Sera, he covered the axis powers on the eastern front, and then the liberation of Italy. After the war he moved to Paris, where his politics became communist. Before he died in 1957, he was rather tempted by Maoism.

Everyone, therefore, has a reason to hate Malaparte: you can hate him on the left, or on the right. And the following story perhaps demonstrates the deeper reason why.

Malaparte was standing, he recounts, in the foyer of the Pohjanhovi hotel in Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland, the northernmost province of Finland. This was during the second world war. And there on the threshold of the elevator cage was a man in a Nazi uniform who looked, Malaparte says, like Stravinsky. The reader can deduce that this man was minuscule, with a huge nose and thick glasses. This man chatted to some German officers, then stepped into the lift, closed the grille, and was about to press the button when Malaparte ran up, pushed through the group of officers and opened the grille. The man in the Nazi uniform, who looked like Stravinsky, motioned as if to push him out. Annoyed, Malaparte pushed him back, and pressed the button. Through the door of the elevator, as they slowly ascended, Malaparte observed the German officers running up the stairs at high speed. At the third floor, they both got out.

Five minutes later, snug between the sheets, Malaparte received a knock at his door. Himmler, he was told, was inviting him to have a drink. But where, thought Malaparte, had he ever met Himmler? Himmler, of course, was the man in the lift. And Malaparte had not recognised him.

I like this story because it seems such a neat allegory of Malaparte's cool - the changes in his politics show how much of an opportunist he was. His shifts demonstrate his indifference to political parties, his fundamentally aesthetic disinterest.

Usually people think that, to be original, you have to be a revolutionary. You have to think in a way that people don't normally think. But Malaparte offers a wilder example. First, you don't think like other people. Then you have to not think like yourself. You have to become a counter-revolutionary. This is what the life of Malaparte represents: an antimodern modern; a reactionary liberal.

I'm not the first person to have noticed this pirouette. In The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, Matthew Arnold praised Edmund Burke for being someone who "brings thought to bear on politics, he saturates politics with thought". He then went further. Burke had deplored the French revolution. He was a counter-revolutionary. And yet, in 1791, in his Thoughts on French Affairs, he suddenly developed a theory that perhaps, if everyone agrees with something, it is no longer cool to disagree with it. It is no longer a mark of independence. Instead, it just shows that one has become "perverse and obstinate". It is a sad admission of defeat from Burke: a moment of counter-counter-revolution. And Arnold quotes it and then comments, with admiration: "That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed, in any literature."

This need to keep turning round, when faced with revolutions - which are about-turns themselves - reminds me of something in Vladimir Nabokov's last published novel, Look at the Harlequins!. The narrator Vadim Vadimovich N- (a warped version of Nabokov) learns from his great-aunt, before the Russian revolution, the dictum "Look at the harlequins! . . . Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!" But this homage to the imagination has a catch. Vadim, the exiled writer, now suffers from an affliction. If he imagines himself walking down a street, he can imagine turning round, but he cannot imagine the reversal of his surroundings. He cannot turn round. Which is to say, he will not carry out a revolution.

I've always admired that tacit aesthetic rebuke to the obsession with revolution: Nabokov's counter-revolution, consisting in the refusal of revolutions. And now I can add to this list my personal Parisian revolution, my inadvertent homage to the spirit of Malaparte.

A journalist friend had invited me to go with her to a dinner party. She knew only the hostess, she said. It'd be a very small thing. So we turned up, my friend bearing champagne and me in a suit accessorised (due to the vagaries of my packing) with a pair of battered trainers. But so what? I thought. Who would see my trainers under a table?

It turned out that this was a soirée for about 100 people. The hostess introduced us to the three people who were standing with her as we arrived. In my sudden fear, I caught no one's name. Then my friend left the room, to smoke a cigarette. Suddenly the circle dispersed, leaving me stranded with a kind-looking, white-haired man. In my nervous, impolite French, I talked to him. He seemed sweet; he seemed interested. Buoyed by his interest, and a glass of wine, I chatted airily about myself. His interest seemed to wane. I asked him what he did: Vous faîtes quoi dans la vie? He seemed ever so slightly surprised, as if it were an appropriate question. I didn't quite catch his answer. Of course, I thought. I had made a mistake. He looked down at my ragged trainers. Dolefully, I looked down too. I had shown how British I was, so ready to define a person by their profession. We soon parted, and I was left there, looking out at some moonlit tree beside the moonlit Seine. I felt alone. Then, at my arm, there was the hostess - so pleased for me, she said, that I had had the chance to talk to Monsieur Jospin.

I felt even more alone. Worse, I felt ashamed. But then my rising distress ended with delight.

It's cooler, perhaps, not to recognise Himmler during the second world war. It shows more chutzpah, more chic. But I am still proud that in a Parisian apartment I didn't recognise Lionel Jospin, the former prime minister of France. And I turned round, and walked away.