The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics)

by A. J. A. Symons

  For the next few months the only authority is Hadrian the Seventh:

  I began life again with no more than the clothes on my back, a Book of Hours, and eight shillings in my pocket. I obtained from a certain prelate, whose name I need not mention, a commission for a series of pictures to illustrate a scheme which he had conceived for the confounding of Anglicans. He saw specimens of my handicraft, was satisfied with my ability, provided me with materials for a beginning and a disused skittle-alley for a studio; and a few weeks later altered his mind and determined to put his money in the building of a cathedral.

  From Mgr Dey’s information I could place the nameless prelate as Cardinal Vaughan, the Cathedral as Westminster. The abandonment of that contract must have been a sore blow to the penniless painter; he refers to it several times in Hadrian, always with bitterness.

  I don’t know how I kept alive until I got my next commission. I only know that I endured that frightful winter of 1894-5 in light summer clothes unchanged.

  Moved by his straits his brothers tried to help him; but he refused their proposals.

  Then a hare-brained and degenerate priest asked me to undertake another series of pictures. I worked two years for him: and he valued my productions at fifteen hundred pounds: in fact he sold them at that rate. Well, he never paid me.

  By a series of chances, I was to learn the inner story of this incident.

  *

  The scene was set in Holywell, near Flint. What impulse, or indeed what conveyance, took Baron Corvo to North Wales I do not know; midway through 1895 a shabby, pious, itinerant artist, calling himself ‘Fr Austin’, sought aid and work from the Franciscan brothers of Pantasaph. He was admitted to make a retreat, and engaged to clean the great bronze crucifix. Both plans were aborted; the second when the monks learned with alarm that their property was to be cleaned by an untested secret preparation made up from a mediaeval recipe, the first when the wanderer, after three days of retirement, was found reading a Kingsley novel instead of the edifying book provided by his spiritual director. From Pantasaph ‘Fr Austin’ progressed to the neighbouring town of Holywell, where he laid his needs before the Rev Fr Sidney de Vere Beauclerk, S.J., who was in charge of the miraculous well of St Winefride. Fr Austin was destitute, hungry, and full of invective against ‘those spurious Franciscans’ who had turned him away. The charity of the Church was not invoked in vain: the stranger was engaged to paint a set of banners for the Shrine (it was his own proposal), and in return was assured of the necessities of life. Lodging was found for him in a boarding house kept by a kind Lancashire lady, and a studio set apart for him in an unused schoolroom. Oil and pigments were provided, and, after his brushes had been formally blessed, the new arrival set to work.

  Rolfe has left his own record, in a short story, of the impression that he considered he created in Holywell, which, in allusion to the fact that it had then no drainage system, he calls ‘Sewer’s End’.

  The Nowt was a Mystery. No one knew from whence he came, nor what, nor who he was. He dropped down upon Sewer’s End from ‘the back of beyond’, settled there, worked like a slave, spoke to few, and made no friends. His dress was not only shabby, but fearfully and wonderfully common and stained. He had no luggage, no change of clothes, and no effects. He was proud and reserved in manner, though he could hold a roomful attentive when he chose to speak. And the meticulous delicacy of his habits, together with his voice and accent, stamped him as a person of culture and consideration. Sewer’s End invented romances about him, said he was a ‘gentleman who had come down’; and, though he told some few the truth about himself, he was not believed. The bumpkins could not bother their beery heads simultaneously with a truth and their own patent romances; and, consequently, the Nowt practised the gentle art of answering fools according to their folly, and became a holy terror by reason of the reticent mysterious modesty of his demeanour, combined with a fashion of speech so plain, that it was undeniably ugly.

  But there was an eye-witness who saw him in a somewhat different light. A few weeks after Fr Beauclerk made his benevolent bargain, John Holden, the young nephew of the Lancashire lady who was looking after the tattered traveller, came to North Wales to recover from a serious illness, and found himself a fellow-boarder with the ‘Nowt’ of Holywell.

  Fr. Austin appeared to be about thirty-five years old. (I never learnt his real age.) He was a little below the average height, with fairly broad shoulders and decidedly bandy legs. His face reminded me of that of a monk. (Later I saw him in the garb of a Franciscan and he suited it to perfection.) He had a smooth high forehead, a rather pointed nose, and a somewhat aggressive chin; his hair was of a faded light-brown, and he was bald over the temples and the crown; he was clean-shaven, and I think that if he had let his beard grow it would have been reddish brown; his mouth was small, and his lips, particularly the upper lip, were thin; he was very short-sighted and wore a pair of extraordinarily powerful glasses. He was very shabbily dressed. I was most struck by the mouth, it looked so hard and cruel. I found him what he would have called ‘antipatico’.

  His manner was impressive. He walked and spoke with great deliberation, and seemed to be unaware of the existence of those about him. (Later I told him he reminded me of a priest returning to the sacristy after he had celebrated mass.) The immobile mouth and the extremely powerful glasses, the glint of which hid his eyes, made his face almost inscrutable. Most people went in awe of him. My aunt’s servants were terrified.

  Despite this formidable appearance, Fr Austin proved a pleasant companion at the dinner-table, and even invited his young new acquaintance to smoke a pipe with him in the studio. Such was the beginning of one of the queerest of Rolfe’s many queer friendships.

  Mr Holden continues:

  I went up to the studio. We passed a really pleasant evening, and I began to find him less repellent. When we parted, he asked me to come up any evening when I had nothing better to do. Not finding the company of the pious old ladies downstairs much to my taste, I got into the habit of spending every evening with him, and I often dropped in on him during the day if the weather was bad.

  His eyes were very weak, and without his glasses he was quite helpless. When he painted at night by the aid of a powerful paraffin lamp, he wore a big eyeshade. When we went to bathe in the swimming basin below the Well, he would enter the water first, and I would stand on the side of the bath, shouting to direct him and tell him when to turn.

  He was a great smoker. Every two days I bought a four-ounce tin of Capstan Navy Cut, Strong, of which he smoked more than two-thirds. He put the dottles into a stone jar, and when the jar was full he spread them out on a newspaper and dried them in the sun or over the stove.

  His hair was falling fast. He bought a tin of some ointment that was advertised to ‘touch the spot’ and smelt like furniture cream, and after washing his skull with almost boiling water, he smeared it with the preparation. After several applications he asked me to see whether there were any signs of new hair. I examined his scalp and said that red spots were appearing but that I could not say whether it was new hair pushing itself through the skin, or incipient erysipelas.

  Though he seemed to be oblivious to all about him, I have never known a man or woman who had so insatiable an appetite for gossip as he. He knew everything that took place in the town. Anything scandalous was a tit-bit. One day I happened to mention some little thing, and he badgered me so much with his questions that I became impatient and said I could not understand how an intelligent man could be interested in such trifles. ‘It’s useful to me for literature,’ he replied. ‘And besides, knowledge is power.’ I learned later what he meant.

  I well remember his snort. It was characteristic of him. It expressed surprise, impatience, contempt, and a host of other things. He could express more by that one inarticulate sound than another could express in a volume.

  What was perhaps most extraordinary about Austin was that he would never speak a word if he could write it.
We lived in the same house, a very little one, yet he would always communicate with me by note if I was not in the same room with him. He had dozens of letter-books. He seized upon every opportunity for writing a letter, and every letter, whether to a publisher or to a cobbler, was written with the same care. When closing a letter to some insignificant person about the veriest trifle, he would say ‘And that’s literature, Giovanni, that’s literature’. I have never seen him happier than when he had to answer an unpleasant letter. Before he sat down, I would hear him bubbling and chortling for quite a time. ‘Now for it’, he would say at last; ‘I’m going to flick that gentleman with my satire.’ ‘I cultivate the gentle art of making enemies,’ he would say. ‘A friend is necessary, one friend – but an enemy is more necessary. An enemy keeps one alert.’ I do believe he made enemies, or fancied he made them, for the sole pleasure of being able to ‘flick them with his satire’.

  All this was strange enough, but stranger still was the picture of himself and his past history that ‘Fr Austin’ drew for the benefit of his young friend. First he inferred and then admitted that ‘Austin’ was not his name, and that he was not the humble painter that he seemed; on the contrary, he was the Baron Corvo, partly Italian by birth, and related to several of the most noble Italian families. Nor was this all; his reasons for his retirement and disguise were numerous and mysterious. In the first place, he was hiding from very powerful and persistent enemies, who had already wrecked his life by preventing him from the priesthood for which he had been trained; what further they might do when they found him could only be guessed, though prominent among his fears was incarceration. Certain Catholic dignitaries had pursued him relentlessly; even his family and most of his friends had cast him off when he was converted to the Roman faith. Yet despite the machinations of his opponents and the indifference of his relatives he was resolved to win fame as author, painter, sculptor, or inventor; indeed, of the outcome of his unequal fight he had no doubt whatever: it was Corvo against the world, with the odds on Corvo. Though his discovery of colour photography lay fallow, already his paintings were favourably known, and he contributed regularly to important reviews, and certain manuscripts were under consideration by wealthy publishers.

  So much was definite; but there were vague hints that went further. He several times alluded to his ‘godfather’, slightly emphasizing the word. One day Holden related to him something he had read in a newspaper concerning the German Kaiser, whereupon ‘Baron Corvo’ observed: ‘So my godfather has been at it again, has he?’

  I continue Mr Holden’s narrative:

  Sometimes before telling me something about himself he would hesitate a short time and then say: ‘This is strictly between ourselves, you will understand’. At other times he would ask me to give my word that what he was about to say should never be divulged to anyone in any circumstances. I would give my word and keep it, only to learn that others had not been so honourable and discreet as I. Corvo was already a man of mystery when I arrived in Holywell.

  I told him my simple history: I, too, had been in a seminary for some years, until I discovered that I had no vocation for the priesthood. I took good care not to say more about myself than he probably already knew. I mistrusted him.

  I had known Austin-Corvo about a month when he said he had a proposal to make to me. I asked him what it was. After reflecting for a few minutes he answered, ‘You are the man I have been waiting for. We are flint and steel to each other. I need you and you need me. My proposal is that you and I go into partnership.’ I was much too astonished to speak. I looked at him steadily for a minute or two. He was evidently in earnest. ‘The man’s quite mad,’ I said to myself; then, aloud: ‘What’s the object of the partnership?’ ‘We work together and share all we earn.’ ‘Very well,’ I said; ‘let’s draw up the articles of association.’ (I knew that I should have to spend some time in Holywell, the winter was approaching, and the society of the prim, pious old ladies would not be congenial to me, a scatterbrained youngster of twenty-two. This partnership offered me a pastime, and there ought to be some fun to be got out of it.) ‘Of course you will have to choose a nom-de-guerre,’ Corvo went on. ‘How would John Blount do?’ I asked. (I had made a few attempts at writing short stories for the popular magazines in this name, but modesty forbade my telling him that.) ‘I like it,’ he said. He produced a letter from Henry Harland, the editor of the Yellow Book, to say that he had accepted the first Toto story. ‘That’s our beginning,’ said he. ‘We shall have much to do.’

  I told my aunt of what had taken place, and we had a hearty laugh.

  The next day I transferred a number of my books and papers to the studio.

  Corvo was engaged on some banners. I did the borders and the lettering on them.

  At the end of our first day’s work Corvo said to me in a casual tone: ‘Now you will wash the brushes and make up the fire.’ ‘Is that included in the articles?’ I inquired. ‘Of course,’ answered he; ‘everything has to be shared.’ ‘Good,’ said I. ‘While I am washing the brushes you will see to the fire.’ I thought it prudent to make a good start.

  Our other department, literature, was not neglected. We pinned to the studio walls sheets of foolscap, and jotted down on them ideas as they occurred to us. If we were dissatisfied with a word or a phrase, we ringed it in red, and then from time to time scribbled against it another which we thought more fitting. Saturday night was revision night, and we went over the week’s work. If we disagreed as to a word or an expression, Corvo was umpire. To anything nearly read we gave the final touch. The better things were signed ‘Corvo’: those more or less predestined to rejection were signed ‘Blount’.

  It was also very amusing to compose sestinas, triolets, etc. This we did only for our own pleasure.

  We also produced a number of Limericks. These were not for publication either. In the writing of Limericks I excelled Corvo. He even acknowledged that.

  I asked Corvo why he did nothing more for the Pall Mall Gazette. He said that Sir Douglas Straight (I think that was the editor’s name) and he had quarrelled, and that Sir Douglas was no gentleman.

  This collaboration, which Mr Holden laughed at with his aunt, was regarded in a very different way by Corvo. It was a feature in Rolfe’s friendships which recurred time after time during his troubled life; though I was unaware of its significance when I first read Mr Holden’s account.

  After our day’s work we would often read together till midnight. We read Marlowe, a selection of verses made by Gleeson White, the plays of W. S. Gilbert, some extracts from Chaucer, the Bible (particularly the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs), the Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, The Cloister and the Hearth, and Pepys’s Diary. In the end we knew the Book of Proverbs, the Mikado and Patience almost by heart. We both revelled in Cellini’s Memoirs. Corvo soaked himself in them.

  I believe his favourite character in fiction was Denys of Burgundy.

  All the books named above belonged to me.

  These evenings we spent in reading and discussing books were some of the pleasantest in my life.

  All our evenings, however, were not so peaceful and pleasant. Before long we began to quarrel. Corvo was not an easy man to get on with. His sarcastic tongue and, above all, his impassive ways used to drive me mad. I was young and hot-headed, accustomed to speak and act first and do my thinking after. I was pert, too, and cheeked him awfully. We often quarrelled over trifles. I think we quarrelled at times just to keep our hand in.

  After our first squabble I did not go to the studio for nearly a week. Corvo met me as we were coming out of church and said in a very indifferent tone: ‘Pax?’ ‘Pax, if you wish it,’ said I. ‘Very well, then. You have only to ask my pardon.’ ‘Then it’s war, bloody war,’ I cried. My aunt reconciled us, but I didn’t beg his pardon.

  When we had a row, it was as a rule Corvo who made the first advances towards a reconciliation. Sometimes it was I. Life in Holywell is dull, especially in wint
er, but one was never dull with Corvo.

  I will copy one letter he sent me after we had had a quarrel:

  ‘June 17th, 1896. I have your letter of the 8th. Let us begin again on the original compact. Come back here as soon as you like, and let us have a clear understanding with your aunt that you must have the days fairly free in which to write. Make up your mind to take me for better or worse. It’s the worse now, and if you are steadfast the better will come. I shan’t do anything alone. I am not in the mood to. But I have a Kampf’s Safety Razor now which you can share and which will give you no end of joy. Corvo.’