Axel Munthe. The road to San Michele
A mixture of facts and conscious fiction – Axel Munthe
I read The story of San Michele as a boy in the 1930s and was bowled over. Its author, Axel Munthe, was a swashbuckling, Swedish doctor who treated rich European patients, had all sorts of hair-raising adventures, and wrote about his dream house on the isle of Capri. Sixty years on I contributed a profile of Munthe to a medical journal. Few of my colleagues had heard of him, let alone the one-time bestseller, and there was no copy of the book in the city library; the author remained something of a mystery. All is now revealed by the distinguished Swedish professor of literature, Bengt Jangfeldt, in Axel Munthe. The road to San Michele, translated by Harry Watson. What must have been a daunting task ordering a mass of correspondence, diaries, personal testimonies, and interviews with relatives has produced a story as gripping as the original, though both authors share a fondness for fantasy.
A recluse who moved in the grand monde
The bare bones of Jangfeldt's blow-by-blow account (a chronological table would have been helpful) may be summarised thus. Axel Munthe was born in Sweden in 1857. He qualified as a doctor in Paris and rapidly made a name for himself as a ‘neuropsychiatrist’. After six years, he was ‘forced into exile’ in Capri – an island he had fallen in love with as a young man – by ill health, a failed marriage and, according to him, a quarrel with Charcot over hypnosis. Around 1889 he returned to Rome where he practised from Keats's former house near the Spanish Steps, and soon had an extensive clientele among wealthy expatriates, as well as the city's poor who he treated for nothing. In 1892 he began to look after the Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden and was appointed her personal physician when she became Queen in 1903.
In 1895 he bought the ruins of what was said to be the villa of the Roman Emperor Tiberius at Anacapri and spent five years restoring it to what became San Michele. He left Rome in 1902 to live there in solitude, but still travelled extensively with the Queen and saw patients in Sweden and increasingly in London. In 1907 he married a young Englishwoman, Hilda Pennington-Mellor, an only child of wealthy parents, with whom he had two sons, but they soon agreed to live apart. By this time his eyesight was failing and he moved to Torre Materita, an old castle on the other side of the island to avoid the bright light. There he began laboriously to write The story of San Michele; it was published by his friend John Murray in 1929 and became an instant bestseller. He was forced to leave Capri in 1945, due to the second world war, and went to live with the King of Sweden in Stockholm. He died there in 1949 at the age of 91, having failed to return to his beloved Capri.
Bacillus niger
This brief portrait does scant justice to a complex character, full of contradictions and prone to odd behaviour. All his life Munthe complained of hypochondria, melancholy, insomnia, fear of death, and he wrote a piece about being infected with bacillus niger (remember Churchill – black dog and Hemingway – black ass?). Surely he suffered from clinical depression? At other times he ‘rushed to help’ the victims of a cholera epidemic in Naples and an earthquake in Messina; climbed in the Alps in dangerous conditions that cost him three toes from frostbite; and dashed to France in 1914, at the age of 57 and partially blind, to help the Red Cross. He himself called one of these episodes ‘demonic’; it would not be too fanciful to label it manic depressive psychosis or bipolar disorder. Jangfeldt surmises syphilis and attempted suicide as possible causes on no evidence.
Munthe had an extraordinary attraction to women: many of his patients were clearly in love with him; they included the Crown Princess Victoria, Lady Ottoline Morrell and the future Mrs Bernard Shaw. This prompts Jangfeldt to imply without any justification a sexual relationship, and the blurb states (no doubt to sell the book) that ‘he [Munthe] became the lover of the Crown Princess Victoria’. He ignores the possibility that Munthe might have adhered to the moral tradition of the Hippocratic oath that doctors should not indulge in sexual relations with their patients. What might have been an academic study of an extraordinary human being is spoilt here and elsewhere by speculation and innuendo.
- © 2009 Royal College of Physicians
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