The Modern European’s First Steps
Much is required for even a great talent to be noticed: genius and ability, friends and luck, originality and not least money – as well as a world that makes room for a great talent. The world is not always ready.
Never before, however, has talent encountered a society so ready to make exceptions as during the period before the last turn of the century.
Steinfeldt writes:
When artists suddenly could reach the highest class, when people with simple backgrounds could become bankers and aristocrats, when doctors, explorers, scientists, authors and engineers became great heroes for both small boys and well-to-do gentlemen in their drawing rooms, then it was a great period for talent.
No other epoch in world history held so many brilliant careers than the period between the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the First World War, the first phase of the modern world. Axel Munthe’s life follows the same pattern: He is one of the great Fin de siècle talents – even if it is difficult to say where his greatest gift lies.
The old world, royalty and aristocracy remain. The nobles still cling to power, but their grip is fragile and uncertain! The bourgeois already have the money – but isn’t there something better than money, namely the freedom to be yourself, and it isn’t it the aristocrats who have that freedom without ever having acquired it? We are living in a “period of transition”, Charles Baudelaire explains, “where democracy is not all-powerful yet, where the aristocracy totters and sinks. In this turbulence it is possible that some of the socially degraded, rejected, lazy people, who are still full of their original energy, decide to consider a new type of aristocracy”, without family and heirs, of course.
Certainly this is about the dandy, and Axel Munthe’s trousers were certainly unpressed far too often to belong to that kind of style aristocracy. Still there is a common element: the blurring division between the middle class and the nobility provided an opportunity for sudden rising stars, for improbable talents, incredible careers across class divisions and across half the world.
The Dilettantes
The years before the First World War were those of the great dilettantes, the first experts, the attention-seekers, and Axel Munthe was all three.
During this period of transition celebrity had begun to replace birth as society’s greatest mark of distinction, and the new prosperity allowed a surprisingly large group of more or less unemployed people to live a life of leisure and travel. Axel Munthe must have had an extraordinary ability to cater to this new elite’s spiritual desires: for the nervous women, those who felt the world’s increasing restlessness in their own bodies, he became a nerve-specialist, for those who imagined they suffered from the noise and dirt of large cities he became a nature lover, for those who had to stay at home he was an adventurer and journalist.
And above all he discovered Italy as an earthly paradise: He was among the first who regarded the delightful land in the south, not primarily as the home of antique culture, but as the simple, real, landscape of the sensual life. And who moved to the European periphery, and didn’t return.
His period was characterised by the dream of the “great person”: men who rejected the petty interests of social life to encounter life’s great questions alone. We will probably never know hwo skillful Axel Munthe was as a doctor. As a writer, without doubt he belonged to the more conventional and sometimes the more sensational.
Bu he sat higher on his mountain above the Gulf of Naples than did Victor Hugo on “the cliff of the damned” on Guernsey, he built the temple to himself that Arnold Böcklin only painted, he came closer to the terminally ill than did Napoleon when he visited the plague victims in Jaffa, he owned a larger and older tower on Capri than did W. B. Yeats in Ireland, and not just one.
Axel Munthe was the man who truly lived his grandiose visions, who created his own fantastic kingdom, at considerable risk to himself, and if he succeeded, at least in the eyes of the world, he also had to pay a high price. The partial blindness that affected him before the turn of the century is also an expression of an increasing isolation: Memories began to be more enchanting than reality itself, and the man on the cliff was to a growing degree a lonely elderly man without a real family and without reliable friends, but with a somewhat absurd job for the international aristocracy – a private person in the oddest sense of the world.
The international best-seller The Story of San Michele from 1929 must have felt like the delivery of a child. Axel Munthe had to experience his own spiritual desires shared by millions of readers, that only he had gone ahead in creating a dream that countless people since have felt as their own:
Steinfeldt writes:
Imagine being able to live like this, said his readers to themselves, in a little palace above the Mediterranean, with a garden that produces wine, tomatoes and lemons, and the faithful animals that sit at your feet. The dream of the true holiday begins in this way – still today it remains, despite the obvious contradiction, the dream of mass tourism.
Until the 60’s, and perhaps even longer, Axel Munthe was the most read Swede of the Twentieth Century. Who else could it have been? August Strindberg? Selma Lagerlöf? Gunnar Myrdal? Ingmar Bergman? Anita Ekberg? He had been famous long before the book.
But the unheard of success gave Axel Munthe an almost Olympian reputation. The book was translated into more than forty languages and sold far more than the official 25 million copies – it was a success on the order of Boris Pasternak’s "Doctor Zhivago" or Margaret Mitchell’s "Gone With the Wind"; Munthe was even suggested for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
And even if Axel Munthe had long ago left Villa San Michele, to escape the sun in a darker place, the daring house was still there.
Oscar Wilde had visited, Rainer Maria Rilke and Norman Douglas, then came Greta Garbo, the American ambassador to Italy and Hermann Göring. There was no longer a periphery for Axel Munthe, the middle of the world had moved with him. And the book became a monument to its author, greater and more durable than the house ever could have been – or shall we say: The book became a monument to a monument to a gifted enthusiast.
Thomas Steinfeldt
Author