I finally read earlier this year a book I had wanted to read over sixty years ago. This was The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe, an extract from which had figured in one of the readers that had been prescribed when I was in the Lower School at S. Thomas’. There were four of these for the four years of the Lower School, from a series of five books, and I think the third was omitted. The first was called Happy Hours and the next was Golden Tales though I cannot remember the names of the last two, which had extracts I much enjoyed.
Amongst these was a story from Jeremy and Hamlet by Hugh Walpole, which prompted me to read Jeremy. I hugely enjoyed that but sadly never found the sequel from which the extract that moved me was taken. Then there was a story called The Blot on the Blind but whom it was by I cannot remember at all. And from the very first book I remember a story about why the poplar had branches heading up, because he had stolen the silver spoons of the Gods.
The story I remembered best, after the one about Jeremy, was an extract from The Story of San Michele about the mischievous antics of a monkey. That created the impression that the book was about the menagerie Munthe had set up on the island of Capri, and impression strengthened when a few years later I read The Exile of Capri by Roger de Peyrefitte, who noted that Munthe had created the impression that Capri was a haven for animals whereas Peyrefitte was of the view that it was a haven for homosexuals.
I did come across the book later but I never read it through, perhaps because the book is more an inspired autobiography by Munthe and, though framed by his love for the home he set up on Capri, is much more about his work as a fashionable physician in Paris and Rome, with set pieces about his work during disasters in the south of Italy, cholera in Naples, an earthquake in Messina.
When I first had the book in my hands I did not appreciate Munthe’s range and his tongue in cheek approach to near everything, combined with a passionate romanticism about animals. But this time round I found it absolutely riveting. And I was not too disappointed to find that there was no set piece about Billy the monkey, but that what I had read in childhood was made up of extracts about him from various points in the book, mainly from its latter pages when Munthe was settled in Capri.
The book has wonderful descriptions of Munthe’s exploits on the mainland, which I will look at next week, but here let me end with his empathy for animals, and his wonderful evocations of the love he felt for those he had adopted and their love for him. And this love goes beyond the tame ones, including his Minerva owl, to encompass the birds in his garden as when ‘There is also much fluttering of wings and a soft murmur of bird-voices in the thicket of rosemary by the chapel. I pretend to know nothing about it, but I am pretty sure some flirtation is going on there.