Anatomy of Restlessness (19 page)

Yet outside, the gold mosaic still clung to the fluted columns, and, over the peristyle, I could still read, in black marble letters, AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM—‘Sacred to Love and Sorrow'. And the white marble stair, balustraded with vine leaves and purple grapes, still led to Nino's nusery-like bedroom – although Jacques's had tumbled down.

 

He was said to be the ‘most fascinating man in Europe', but it is hard, in retrospect, to like Axel Munthe or his pretentious museum-sanctuary, the Villa San Michele.

Born in 1857 in the Swedish province of Småland, Munthe came from a family of bishops and burgomasters which had moved to Scandinavia from Flanders. He studied medicine at Uppsala University and, at the age of eighteen, travelled to Italy to recover from a haemorrhaging lung. Happening to spend a day in the town of Anacapri, he saw an abandoned chapel and beside it a garden whose owner, Mastro Vincenzo, had unearthed the mosaic floors of a Roman villa and a lot of ancient marble fragments – the
roba di Timberio,
or ‘things of Tiberius', as they were called by local peasants. Munthe recognised the site as one of Tiberius' twelve and conceived, there and then if one believes him, a mission to own it.

‘Why should I not buy Mastro Vincenzo's house,' he wrote in
The Story of San Michele,
‘and join the chapel and the house with garlands of vines and avenues of cypresses and columns supporting white loggias, peopled with marble statues of gods and bronzes of emperors.'

Munthe did not go back to Sweden but continued his studies in Montpellier and then in Paris. At twenty-two he was the youngest doctor of medicine in France. He had charm, intelligence and a most plausible bedside manner, and he was soon the partner in a fashionable practice. He believed in making the rich pay for the poor. He took a special interest in nervous diseases and their possible cure by hypnosis.

He was the close friend of Prince Eugen Bernardotte, the Swedish king's youngest son, who was then leading the life of artistic bohemia in Paris. He knew Strindberg. He knew Maupassant (and even cruised on his yacht): in fact, much of
The Story of San Michele
—with its high life, low life, and whiffs of the supernatural – reminds one of Maupassant's late style. In 1884 Munthe interrupted a journey through Lapland to work in the poor districts of Naples during a cholera epidemic. In 1889 he left Paris, bought the land at San Michele, and, to pay for the villa, set up another practice, in Keats' house, off the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

There he prospered. Dr Weir Mitchell sent him ailing millionairesses from the United States. From Vienna, Professor Krafft-Ebing sent him neuropaths ‘of both sexes and of no sex'. His fees were colossal, his celebrated ‘cures' perhaps due less to conventional medicine than to changes of climate and scenery. He collected royalty as he collected antiquities. His principal patient was Queen Victoria of Sweden, whom he cajoled into living far longer than she apparently intended. The Czarina craved his attentions, for herself and the haemophiliac Czarevitch (to the extent of almost kidnapping Munthe aboard the imperial yacht), and when he refused her, she fell into the arms of Rasputin.

There were times when the villa on Capri must have seemed like a sanatorium for ailing queens and empresses; the Empress Elisabeth of Austria was dying to buy it. Later, when the supply of royalty began to dry up, their successors continued to call.

‘As for San Michele itself,' Munthe wrote, ironically and in English, to Hermann Goering in August 1937, ‘I should be glad to lend it to you if ever you can get away from your tremendous cares. The place is small. It was built by me on the principle that the soul needs more room than the body, and it may not be comfortable enough for you.'

He was his own architect: the style he chose was Saracen-Romanesque. The house was white and light – a ‘sanctuary to the sun' – and done up in the ‘Renaissance' manner most popular around the turn of the century. (Roberto Pane, the architectural historian of Capri, has described it as
‛un falso presuntuoso quanto insultante'.
) There was indeed a loggia peopled with statues – genuine and fake – of gods and emperors, and fragments of ancient marble, some salvaged from the imperial villa, were stuck into the walls like nuts in nougat.

He laid out gardens with pergolas, terraces and cypress walks. And as to the Chapel of San Michele itself, which used to stand like a lonely, cliff-top hermitage, he had it transformed into a kind of pasha's pavilion from which he could gaze up to the Castle of Barbarossa, down over the cliffs to Marina Grande, or across the bay to Tiberius' Villa Jovis—and that execrated blot on the landscape, Fersen's Villa Lysis.

At San Michele the view is everything: in Pasadena or Beverly Hills Munthe's creation wouldn't get more than a passing glance. Yet it is still one of the best-loved houses in the world, and after fifty-five years
The Story of San Michele
is still a best-seller and has been translated into some fifty languages (its Korean translator had turned up shortly before my visit).

Munthe was a natural storyteller who, before hypnotising others, had taken great pains to hypnotise himself He spun tales of buried treasure; of madness; of mixed-up coffins; of wordly clerics, cold countesses and good-hearted whores; of the nun he nearly seduced during the cholera epidemic. What, however, made the book irresistible, particularly to its English readers, was Munthe's passionate identification with birds and animals. He rescued a baboon from its half-crazed American owner. He almost killed in a duel a sadistic French viscount who had kicked Munthe's dog so severely the animal had to be shot. He declared war on the butcher of Anacapri, who would net migrant birds and blind them with red-hot needles to make them sing. And finally, he succeeded in persuading Mussolini to turn the whole of Capri into a bird sanctuary.

From a literary point of view, the book's best stories deal with his years in Paris and Rome and are told with a clinical, worldweary detachment; they are reminiscent of (besides Maupassant) another doctor turned writer, W. Somerset Maugham. Like Maugham, too, his reminiscences always seem to wind up on a self-congratulatory (or, later, self-pitying) note; and the book in general bears out Oscar Wilde's warning of the pitfalls of the first-person narrative, particularly when the narrator is a compulsive mythomaniac.

Munthe was besotted by Tiberius. According to Levente Erdeös, the director of the San Michele Foundation on Capri, ‘He had a kind of disease, to me, more or less obsessed by the late emperor. He could look down from his loggia and think that he, also, was the ruler of the world.' Tiberius had owned twelve houses on the island; Munthe had to have twelve. Tiberius was a collector of statues; Munthe had to have statues too. But instead of admitting these came from ordinary antique dealers in Naples and elsewhere, he preferred to veil his ‘discoveries' in mystery.

He liked to insinuate that the bronze copy of the Lysippan Hermes (which sits at the end of the loggia and was given to him by the city of Naples for his help with the cholera) was not, in fact, a copy but the original, which had been deliberately spirited out of the museum by one of his adoring well-wishers.

Another time he ‘felt' that a face was watching him from the sea-bed; and when he trained his telescope on a pale speck offshore, it turned out to be the marble Medusa head now set into the wall behind his desk. Or there was the huge basalt Horus falcon—‘the largest I have ever seen,' he wrote, ‘brought from the land of the Pharaohs by some Roman collector, maybe by Tiberius himself. Yet this object, so far as I could judge, was a standard fake from the Cairo bazaar.

By the 1920s Munthe had become a British subject. He had worked with the British Red Cross in Flanders during the First World War. And in 1943, fearing perhaps that the Germans would invade Italy, he left for Stockholm (on the same plane as Curzio Malaparte, who was travelling as a journalist to the Finno-Soviet front). He did not come back. His friend King Gustav V gave him a suite of rooms in the royal palace; and there, dreaming of the South, he died, on 11 February 1949. He had been anxious that San Michele should remain a monument to himself, and bequeathed it to the Swedish state. A memorial plaque reads: ‘To the Everlasting Memory of Dr Axel Munthe. His life – A radiant symbol of perfect humanity.' The place is thronged with tourists, and kept as clean as a clinic.

Nowadays not many islanders remember the old doctor, who would stroll around town in the shabby clothes that marked him out as a
signore.
I did, however, pick up the following:

From
a grande dame
: ‘He was insatiable. We used to call him
Il Caprone
—“The Billy Goat”! And not just for that! He smelled something terrible.'

From a Neapolitan prince: ‘It was a bad crossing. How would you say that in English? A bad mixture! He populated half of Anacapri, and they all had red hair and horse faces. Sometimes you'd hear the children shouting, “Horse face!” “Horse face!”—and you knew they were shouting at one of Munthe's bastards.'

From the omniscient young historian who works in the town hall of Anacapri:
‘Era bisessuale.'

The pro-Munthe faction, on the other hand, reveres his memory in hushed tones and piously enumerates his benefactions. In Anacapri I met one of these self-confessed ‘Munthesians', who dashed about the garden of San Michele, pointing out this or that ‘typically Munthesian detail' and the graves of the Queen of Sweden's dogs. He was quite upset that I had made a few inquiries elsewhere.

‘They know nothing,' he said crossly. ‘They are jealous of Munthe. They are jealous of the man and his achievements. You must ask me. I know everything.'

‘Was he a cold fish?' I asked.

‘A fish?'

‘A cold person?'

‘He was hot and cold. He was all things.'

‘In what way does he interest you?'

‘He was interesting.'

‘But how?'

‘He was a pioneer of ecology. He went to Mussolini to stop the people killing birds.'

‘What else?'

‘He was the creator of beauty.'

‘Where?'

‘He created this spot.'

Curzio Malaparte was a very strange writer, and his villa, which he built in the years 1938-40 on the lonely headland of Capo Massullo, is one of the strangest habitations in the Western world.

A ‘Homeric' ship gone aground? A modem altar to Poseidon? A house of the future – or of the prehistoric past? A surrealist house? A Fascist house? Or a ‘Tiberian' refuge from a world gone mad? Is it the house of the dandy and professional joker, the
Arcitaliano
, as he was known to his friends—or of the melancholy German romantic who lay masked underneath? The ‘pure' house of an ascetic? Or the anxious private theatre of an insatiable Casanova? What we do know is that Malaparte asked his architect, Adalberto Libera, to build him a ‘
casa come me'—
a ‘house like me'—which would be ‘
triste, dura, severa',
as ‘sad, hard and severe' as he hoped himself to be. He had his notepaper headed, in thick black letters, CASA COME ME—and indeed, down to the last petit bourgeois detail, the house is a biography of its owner.

Curzio Malaparte, born in 1898, was baptised Kurt Suckert. His father, Erwin Suckert, was an irritable small-time textile manufacturer from Saxony who had settled in Prato, near Florence, and married a Florentine woman.

Early photos of Kurt show a sleek, beautiful, black-haired young man confronting the camera with the ironic and disdainful demeanour of certain portraits by Bronzino. By 1913 he was already frequenting the Red Coats café in Florence, where intellectual hotheads clamoured for action, any kind of action, in a Europe so satiated with peace that it had come to think that peace was immoral. When war broke out, he enlisted in the Legione Garibaldina and distinguished himself under fire: like Hemingway (who was a year his junior), on the Austrian front; then at Bligny, near Rheims, where nearly ten thousand Italians were killed and he himself got a gas-damaged lung.

After the war he became a journalist and a Fascist. He joined the march on Rome and signed the first Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals. Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, knew him at this time and delivered a harsh verdict on his frantic
arrivismo,
immeasurable vanity, and chameleon-like snobbery: ‘To have success [he] would do any kind of mischief.' In 1925 Suckert read a nineteenth-century pamphlet titled, in part,
I Malaparte e i Bonaparte
and changed his name.

Malaparte fancied himself a ‘man of action' rather in the mould of T.E. Lawrence or André Malraux. He shared their flair for self-advertisement and their mythomania; yet when it came to the crunch, the role he chose was not that of participant but that of literary voyeur. He was astute enough to see, from the start, the cruel absurdities of Mussolini's movement; and with his corrosive sense of humour he could never resist the temptation to mock men in power. The first hint of trouble came when he mocked Mussolini's taste in ties. The Duce called him to his office in the Palazzo Chigi to apologise. Then, crossing the cold marble floor after the interview, Malaparte turned and said:

‘Permit me to say one last word in my defence.'

‘Go ahead,' said Mussolini, raising his eyes.'

‘Even today you're wearing a horrible tie.'

Malaparte loved princesses and peasants; he hated homosexuals and his own humdrum background. He was a sharp dresser. (With one of his old friends, the Principe di Sirignano, I had a discussion as to whether he used to anoint his hair with brilliantine or Vaseline or
la gomina argentina.)
He could mesmerise any room with his stories; and the highly placed Fascists who were his protectors were secretly delighted to hear the Duce jeered at. In 1929 Senator Giovanni Agnelli, the chairman of Fiat and no friend of the regime, appointed him editor-in-chief of Agnelli's newspaper,
La Stampa.