Laying It on with a Trowel

In the early 1920s Axel Munthe, the renowned physician born in Sweden in 1857, was going blind. Shrinking from the glare of the sun he retired to a dark tower and taught himself to use a typewriter. Henry James had suggested he write a memoir – it might cheer him up. Munthe was surprised when The Story of San Michele (1929) became an international bestseller and rightly predicted that in a hundred years’ time nobody would have heard of it. This neglected but altogether thrilling life story was a gift from an Argentine friend of mine, her favourite book, she said. ‘When people ask “Who is Axel Munthe?” I reply with a slight air of reproach, “Well, they’ve heard of him in Buenos Aires . . .”’

You’d never guess what a gloom the poor man was in when he painfully tapped out the first sentence: ‘I sprang from the Sorrento sailing-boat on to the little beach.’ Few life stories plunge you with such immediate, energetic joy into the high tide of youth. Bronzed little boys tumble in the water; old fishermen in red Phrygian caps sit mending their nets; a barefoot ‘young Bacchante’ called Gioia guides the young medical student up the mountain to Capri. ‘My head was full of rapturous wonder, my heart full of the joy of life, the world was beautiful and I was eighteen.’ After a flagon of Don Dionisio’s matchless vino bianco he climbs yet higher to Anacapri and the ruined chapel of San Michele, built over the ruins of the Emperor Tiberius’s retirement palace. Here, looking out over the Bay of Naples, Vesuvius and the distant snowy Apennines, the young Munthe, the ‘barbarian from Ultima Thule’ dazzled by radiant beauty and the allure of a maligned Roman emperor, has his fateful vision of terrestrial paradise, a lifelong project: a house that he will build ‘open to sun and wind and the voice of the sea, like a Greek temple, and light, light, light everywhere’. We see him next in a student digs in Paris, the Hotel de l’Avenir, books everywhere; the present is all work and no pleasure but he’s beating a path to his future. To buy that plot of land and seize hold of the dream, he must become a successful doctor, work all hours in the wards of La Salpetrière, the dissecting rooms of the Ecole de Médecine or the Institut Pasteur. With superhuman dedication, eyestrain and sleepless nights he emerges triumphantly as the youngest MD ever created in France. His fellow students, even his teachers, mistake him for the rising star of medicine but they don’t know of the Faustian pact he made as he stood in the ruins of Tiberius’s villa. He is prepared to sacrifice greatness as a pioneer of his profession for a vision of human happiness on a sunlit mountaintop. Death fascinates the young medical student. The implacable adversary, that ‘sinister colleague’, sometimes so savage, yet sometimes so gentle: ‘What could he not teach me if I only could learn to read His sombre face?’ Munthe makes him so palpable a presence in the wards that you begin to picture him hooded, on the other side of a patient’s bed, like Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal. Obsessively Munthe collects clocks and watches whose chimes and ticking in the long nights of insomnia will remind him that Death must always win; all too often his only weapon is a syringe of morphia to soothe the final agonies. He makes a habit of narrowly escaping Death: in the Institut Pasteur a rabid Russian peasant locks him in a deadly stranglehold; a lunatic in the Asile St-Anne lands him a hammer blow to the head that should have killed him. ‘Ce sacré Suédois,’ say the doctors, has the skull of a bear. That’s just for starters. Superhero Axel Munthe, mysteriously impervious to microbes, tumbling masonry or artillery fire, will spend his life running to assist in disaster zones: the Naples cholera epidemic of 1884, the Messina earthquake of 1908, the Somme in 1916. Even his holidays are life-threatening. On the slopes of Mont Blanc an avalanche buries him and he looks Death in the face: ‘I fancied I could almost see him advancing in his icy shroud . . .’ Paris in the 1880s, the Belle Epoque, is full of beautiful neurotic women in search of a disease. Appendicitis has recently gone out of fashion but a new one, colitis, is very much in vogue and so is young Dr Munthe, specialist in nervous disorders. He rides in a fine carriage to visit the cream of high society in the Faubourg St-Germain. He falls in love with a lustrous-eyed countess. The odious vicomte Maurice, who shoots skylarks out of the sky for fun, challenges him to a duel in the Bois de St-Cloud. Munthe’s eyesight is extremely poor but his luck holds good. The vicomte is stretchered away and our hero, unscathed but now suddenly fainting with fright, has the trophy of two bullet holes through his hat. This Robin Hood of doctors knows another Paris. He glides amphibiously from high life to low, from duchesses to the penniless Scandinavian workers of Villette where typhoid rages, or the slum-dwelling Italians of Montparnasse whose children are dying of diphtheria. He admits that the only people he ever really likes are the ones he feels sorry for. Most pitiable of all are the syphilitic prostitutes whose only comfort on their slide to the gutter is a swig of absinthe. Munthe, their medical adviser, knows them by name. He goes to a brothel and pays for a night with Flopette so that he can dress her in a nurse’s uniform and smuggle her into the convent orphanage where her daughter lies dying. Her fellow prostitutes think he’s taking her to a bal masqué. Gifted with human beings, Munthe is also an animal-whisperer, chatting in Swedish with the polar bear in the Zoological Gardens or sitting hand-in-hand with Jacques the consumptive gorilla, nursing him tenderly to the end. Everywhere he picks up dogs and monkeys. He loves birds (Mount Barbarossa, next to San Michele, is still, thanks to him, a bird sanctuary). He pulls a splinter from a lion’s paw. He can put a cobra into a state of catalepsy. Mortally wounded soldiers and violent lunatics are anaesthetized at the touch of his hand. Where does it come from, this strange mesmeric power? He cannot explain it. Perhaps it gives his personality a sinister forcefulness. Sometimes you wonder whether he’s St Francis or Rasputin. In fact, the Russian Imperial family had wanted Munthe for their family physician in preference to Rasputin but he served the Swedish royals instead. Oddly he makes no mention of this – or of his life in England, his two marriages, his two sons or his affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell. His tendency in life, it seems, was always to drift back into solitude. In the preface to the third, 1936 edition of The Story of San Michele he wrote: ‘It will be lonely to be dead, but it cannot be much more lonely than to be alive.’ San Michele was his passion and he achieved his dream by moving his practice from Paris to Rome, digging and building with his bare hands, sweating under a hot sun with old Mastr’Antonio. Henry James came to visit in 1899 during a festival. Munthe recalls him ‘looking down from his bedroom window, shaking with laughter in his pyjamas’ as the band parped out the Serenata d’Addio after a night of carousing. James called San Michele ‘a creation of the most fantastic beauty, poetry and inutility that I have ever seen’. To friends he remarked on Munthe’s ‘unnatural simplicity’. Simplicity to Henry James, of course, could never have seemed natural, but the phrase is hauntingly apt: Munthe’s sensible old friend Dr Norstrom always used to tell him that he had ‘two different brains working alternatively in my head, the well-developed brain of a fool and the undeveloped brain of a sort of genius’. Munthe was a grown-up child, grasping at whatever was left of enchantment in the world. And to live from 1857 to 1949 was to see enchantment fade with terrible speed. Trekking across Lapland in the 1880s he’d met, so he said, a goblin who told him that his nurse had squeezed three drops of raven’s blood into his milk. No wonder he was an enfant terrible, a ‘sacré Suédois’ with ‘le diable au corps’, born, besides, on All Hallows Eve. His trajectory through life is that of Clever Hans in the fairytale who doesn’t know what fear is but sets forth to find out. He inhabits a world of giants, hunchbacked dwarves, trolls and talking animals. His description of the sewer rats in Naples is gothic horror – as is the hilarious chapter on the efforts to be rid of his witchy housekeeper, Mamsell Agata, whose ‘long hook nose’ overhung ‘a narrow slit which seldom opened to show a row of long pointed teeth like those of a ferret’. She spends her Sundays in the Swedish church ‘praying to the God of wrath’ and the chaplain fears she may bite off his finger at Holy Communion. Munthe’s friend the colonel, who’d charged the Prussians at Gravelotte, undertakes to dismiss her but after exposure to her killer smile is mysteriously taken ill . . . ‘I do not ask for better than not to be believed,’ Munthe wrote in his second preface to the book, and indeed his detractors will think him a monstrous fibber. But since life is so often improbable, his assertion that ‘Life itself is the greatest writer of sensational stories’ is not so unreasonable. For him medicine was a sacred calling not a trade, but he was also a sailor, diver, mountain climber, builder, collector and archaeological plunderer – an individual to whom ‘sensational’ things must happen. Pity and a boundless self-confidence propelled him into bizarre quixotic escapades that no one else would attempt. Even his efforts at self-deprecation had a way of turning into humblebrags. Maupassant was a friend and patient, and Munthe undoubtedly picked up tricks from that master of storytelling – the slow build of circumstance that leads to the twist, delivered with impeccable timing for maximum shock or pathos. But he throws into the mix his own distinct flavour of macabre drollery. This atheist with his sharp scientific mind was also a dreamer with a wild sense of humour, in love with Olympian gods and Catholic saints; a man of culture happiest in the company of animals and peasants; a polyglot who preferred the music of birds and the sea to the babble of humans. He leaves you childishly wanting to believe every word of his tall tales or thirsting to know the nugget of truth that lies behind them. His answer to enquiries, I imagine, would be to point to the fruit of his last big adventure, a granite sphinx, still in pride of place in the loggia overlooking the Bay of Naples. Her whereabouts under Nero’s villa at Anzio were revealed to him in a dream – how else? On the way his sailing boat nearly sank in a storm; while digging her up, he was kidnapped by brigands, bitten by vipers and stung by scorpions; he came home racked with malaria. Sometimes my granddaughter begs me to recount the ‘scariest things that ever happened to me’. My resolution on a second reading of this marvellously invigorating memoir is that next time she asks, I’m going to lay it on with a trowel.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Noonie Minogue 2025