BOOKS
Axel's Temple
BY JOHN COLEMAN OF any twenty inaccurate anecdotes about Axel Munthe, it would be safe to say that nineteen were first narrated by him. He was incapable of leaving his life alone : what he bequeathed to a startled world was less an autobiography than an apocrypha. Yet, even without the embellishments, it would have been an odd enough tale he had to tell. At twenty-three, after a stormy disputation, he became the youngest doctor in Paris and mar- ried a Miss Ultima Hornberg, who went for walks in the rain, which allowed her to display her pretty ankles. They were divorced eight years later. Meanwhile' he was building up a fashionable practice on the Avenue de Villiers, interrupted by two trips of unfashionable heroism; to Ischia, after the earthquake of 1881, and to cholera-ravaged Naples in 1883. Such dramatic contrasts quickly became part of a pattern. All his life, he was to let his rich patients subsidise his work among the poor, at his most eccentric taking a Worth dress off the back of an enraged Lady Maud B. in order to give it to a consumptive governess. He had already fallen in love with Capri and begun the construction of his celebrated San Michele. He moved to Rome, with characteristic flair to Keats's house on the Piazza di Spagna, and poured what he earned treating neurasthenic American ladies into medicines for the slums and the rising walls of his dream house. He became the friend and consultant of royalty; without him, Queen Victoria of Sweden would have died long before; with him, had he accepted an invitation to become court physician at St. Petersburg, the Romanoffs might conceivably have ended less disastrously. San Michele was completed, but the sun hurt his fail- ing sight : he could no longer live there. In his misery, he remembered a suggestion Henry James had made years before, and so produced the book that was to make him a walking idol and increase the tourist trade of Gracie Fields's island. Over half a million people have bought The Story of San Michele in its original English translation (it has since been translated into nearly forty languages) and twice as many people have patted the rump of the red sphinx-girl that squats on the loggia of the Chapel. These, then, are some of the facts a shilling life might be expected to furnish.
No such thing exists to my knowledge, if You except that chatty, sporadically informative work, The Story of Axel Munthe, put out by his publisher, John Murray, in 1953. Now comes a memorial volume* from Sweden, half as big as a headstone and. superbly decorated, treating the complex myth—the man, the book, the house— from several angles in the clearest of type-faces; and somehow the man escapes again. The very lavishness of the production prepares one for an act of marbled piety. A good half is' devoted to a history of Capri, supported by spme sketches of islanders by C. W. Allers ('Bismarck's favourite portrait painter') and a group of magnificent, sun- * THE STORY OF AXEL MUNTHE, CAPRI AND SAN MICHELE. By various hands. (Ab Allhem, Malmo, Sweden.) drenched photographs. There is a fascinating, tongue-in-cheek account by Edwin Cerio of the shifting colonies of artists' and exiles over the years; Lenin was long remembered as 'the man who laughed.' And the 'treasures' and Latin in- scriptions of San Michele are copiously illustrated and annotated. On Munthe's life and writings there are two warily wordy articles that raise more questions than they answer. Much is made—and rightly so—of Munthe's passion for animals and birds : 'I have loved them,' he said, 'far more than I have ever loved my fellow-men'; and something of his love for beautiful things (though, as an authority has tartly pointed out, the most famous Roman ruins on Capri, those in the garden of San Michele, are also the poorest). A reasonable counter to this parenthesis is made by one of the contributors : Munthe's collection was assembled for his own pleasure, it was a private myth that he was populating, and our intrusion was neither anticipated nor desired.
But it is difficult, as one follows Dr. Andrdn's hesitant intimations as to the provenance of this shattered bust, that sphinx, not to feel present at some gigantic charade. After all, Munthe moved himself voluntarily into the public domain in 1929 and took delight, in the process, in surrounding his 'finds,' as so much else in his life, with a Gothic smoke-screen of rhetoric and visions. He had, if he is to be believed, the most literary dreams of any man in history, exact and solemnly-discussed prefigurations of what would happen next. This polite device had the further advantage of allow- ing him to pay himself nicely-turned compliments. 'A tall figure wrapped in a rich mantle' announces Munthe win build San Michele : 'Your hands are empty, but they are strong, your brain is boisterous but clear, your will is sound, you will succeed.' And there were a dozen other masks for self- congratulation on the hook. Dr. Norstrom, a Swedish colleague in Paris, tends to appear only as a sort of spout for flattery : 'I wish women would like me as much as they seem to like you, even my old cook is in love with you since you cured her of shingles. . . ."The Hall of Judgment' passage that ends the book finds him, after haranguing the archangels, taken to St. Francis's bosom. But the undisputed love of animals that this so neatly rewards has its less engaging side : a substantial contempt for humans.
Munthe's book is full of hurled-off opinions; this one, about criminals, betrays a Swiftian reversal of values : 'All first offenders should be condemned to a much shorter term of imprison- ment on a very low diet combined with repeated and severe corporal punishments.' Only the poor and the maimed, in body or spirit, are lovable—'I have always had a sneaking liking for hunch- backs.' Why, in God's name? Because they make good jesters? Because of their interesting shape? The large-minded speculations are always grind- ing to a halt on such sinister avowals. And it is a refusal to think anything through that is symbol- ised in the vapbrous apostrophes with which he
confronts and conquers any recalcitrant subject : one learns to dread the sentences beginning '0 . . .' It would be tempting to discuss the whole work as a series of vanishing tricks. Munthe de- livers an after-dinner story, gives a rapid sketch of an eccentric; these are things he can do very well; then suddenly disappears behind the hysteri- cal abstractions of a Poe; he flashes a hand of Kings and Queens, then plays the joker; he tells you, for all the motions of frankness, almost nothing you want to know; his reticences are more disturbing than his confessions. His second wife and his children are not mentioned at all, the physical details of building the fabulous house barely. In all fairness, it should be said that the enormous success of his book surprised him and he was often to say he wished it had been better done.
But millions haxe found it good as it is. Where, then, does the appeal of The Story of San Michele lie? Perhaps a little at first in its date of publica- tion : the harsh times were propitious for a work that had nothing 'to say about politics but talked with large comfort of Life and Death, that offered the image of a man pulling a castle from the air and harnessing it firmly to the ground. For its continuing popularity one must invoke other satisfactions, of which not the least is the morbid curiosity that any medical man's journal is bound to titillate; and to an ounce of good clinical sense Munthe allows a pound of bloody horrors. He mixed forthrightly with royalty. He writes with great affection of Capri; and our northern nostalgia for the Mediterranean is confirmed and extended. Although-an 'agnostic,' he is not afraid to talk easily of gods with a plain man's religiosity. Ile underlines in several chapters that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy and is kind enough not to touch on what our philosophy might be. He is a happy master of the moral cliché; his Countess weeps when he takes her on a tour of the Paris hovels; it is Fusco, the poor street-sweeper, who is the hero when diphtheria strikes; Flopette, the whore, has a maternal heart of gold. Most of his stories exemplify life's little ironies in the Maupas- sant manner. He has a knack for the unexplained, romantic aside: '1 have myself put a cobra into a state of catalepsy in the temple at Karnak; '1 myself have roasted a cat over a spirit lamp.' Roast cat or not, he anthropomorphises animals shame- lessly: 'the dog is a saint' must have set up chains of echoes through the length and breadth of the land. And then he writes easily and undemand- ingly, for the most part in short running clauses, separated by commas; there is nothing in the language, which leans heavily on nineteenth-cen- tury courtliness and archaism, to arrest the skim- ming eye. It is extraordinary, when you come down to it, how many best-seller elements are con- tained in this one testament.
And the larger myth formed. There was the house he had prepared, with its strange, almost ritual artefacts : people pat that sphinx to make their wishes come true. There was the Book, with its easy confusion of fact and fiction, visitations and realities. There was the benevolent, withdrawn man himself, who fled all his life from cameras, so remote that he was able to quote an American reviewer's theory that 'Axel Munthe does not exist.' But exist he did. He did brave, remarkable things, he founded a bird sanctuary on Capri, he willed his home as a place of rest for Swedish artists. But what he wrote, by a Gresham's Law of the spirit, depreciates his finer acts. From his book he emerges as a warring and wilful egocen- tric, balancing somewhere along a rope whose ends are sustained by Frank Harris and Dr. Schweitzer; a man, genuinely loved by thousands of poor people, whom it is very hard to like.
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