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

by A. J. A. Symons

  *

  Fr Beauclerk gives the facts behind this contradictory disturbance:

  The Presbytery,

  Accrington

  Corvo came to me soliciting work, attracted by the fact that the Shrine was prospering through my action in initiating public daily services at the Well. I made an agreement with him that I would give him the opportunity of supporting himself by finding him in lodging and board, and supplying all materials, if he would paint banners for the Shrine. He lodged quite comfortably with a good Lancashire lady, who treated him with uniform kindness.

  He must have painted some ten banners for me, when one day he asked me for the sum of £100. On my assuring him that I could not give it, seeing that I was under orders from my religious superior, he retaliated that the Society (Jesuit) had plenty of money. He then sent me in a bill for £1000, and I put the case into the hands of a Liverpool lawyer. This man offered Rolfe £50 for himself and £10 for his counsel; and to my surprise Rolfe accepted it.

  He then declared open war. A local magazine, the Holywell Record, had been started by a speculator, named Hochheimer, and Rolfe attached himself to the concern, his writing ability gaining him ready acceptance. He let loose in this publication all his views and grievances. He built up a wildly illusioned tale of my supposed hostility, which indeed only began and ended in my refusal to go beyond our first agreement, viz. that I would find him in everything essential.

  His statements of my ‘excommunicating’ him and persecuting him and threatening to ‘hound him out of the town’ are absolutely baseless and ridiculous. In fact it was he who boasted that he worked for and secured my own dismissal from Holywell. My superior removed me in November 1898, after Rolfe had written letters against me to the Bishop of the Diocese, to my Superior General in Rome even. In Hadrian you may find me acting two parts. First I figure as that ‘detestable and deceitful Blackcote, who came fawning upon me, and then robbed me of months and years of labour.’ See page 15.

  Page 273 et seq. shows me in my second personality as General of the Jesuits, the Black Pope, Father St Albans. (We Beauclerks belong to the Duke of St Albans’ family.) The interview described, wherein Hadrian tirades against Jesuits is characteristically venomous and funny, especially the final words ‘Fr St Albans looked like a flat female with chlorosis’!

  On page 30 you read how he was commissioned by Cardinal Vaughan who, like myself, was struck by his apparent artistic talent, to execute a series of pictures. Vaughan found reason to discharge him, and hence Rolfe couples him with me ‘and other scoundrels’ whom he charges with defrauding him.

  Lower down on the same page you can read his accusation against me. ‘A hare-brained and degenerate priest asked me to undertake another series of pictures. I worked for him for two years: and he valued my productions at fifteen hundred pounds: in fact he sold them at that rate. Well, he never paid me. Again I lost all my apparatus, all my work: and was reduced to the last extreme of penury’!

  And what was the real truth? That Rolfe had been provided with a comfortable home for two years, had been able to display his powers to the many visitors and priests who frequented the Shrine, and further, as I told him, had enjoyed ample leisure to employ his talent for writing, and so earn money for himself.

  And note the madness of the man! When I asked him how he calculated up the £1000 he charged me with, he replied ‘I have counted the figures on the banners I have painted, and find they number one hundred. I charge them at £10 a head.’ Now the facts are these. There were some ten banners painted, each a single figure: but he had executed a larger banner in which was portrayed a crowd of people in the background, their heads the size of a thimble! When I asked how he was justified in assessing the figures at £10 a head, he reminded me that I had told him of a visitor having given me £10 for a banner of St David!

  On page 324 he vents his full resentment on my poor efforts to befriend him, when he speaks of me as ‘the very detestable scoundrel’, etc. Then follows this interesting bit of history misread. ‘What became of him? The bad priest, I mean? He ruined himself as we predicted. He persisted in his career of crime till his Bishop found him out. Then he was broken and disappeared. – Maison de Santé or something of that sort, for a time. He is in one of the Colonies now.’ Yes, I was sent to Malta for two years and acted as Chaplain for the troops. Thank God I am turned seventy-six and anything but broken; in fact I have more to attend to now than at dear old Holywell.

  I had heard that Rolfe committed suicide? He used the name ‘Austin’ till he fell out with me.

  What a wasted genius the man was.

  Yours very sincerely

  Charles S. de Vere Beauclerk, S.J.

  *

  Mr Holden gave me details of the vindictiveness with which, once the final breach had been made, Rolfe pursued his ends.

  Corvo joined the Holywell Record, and through its columns attacked all whom he was pleased to call his enemies. He lashed out right and left. Now I knew what he meant when he said ‘Knowledge is Power’. Everything he had been told in confidence was blared out by the Holywell Record, of which Corvo was now master, and which he used for his own purposes. He caused much trouble in Holywell and in the surroundings of the town.

  I heard from him again as he had promised.

  Among the few things about myself which I had told him was an escapade known only to my aunt. (I had once toured the provinces for two months as an actor. I was not so much enamoured of the dramatic art as of one of the feminine exponents of it.) Through Corvo, news of this reached the ears of my mother.

  My aunt had related to us an event that had taken place some ten years before. I worked this up into a humorous tale, laying the scene in Spain, but Corvo took a fancy to it and made a Toto story out of it. I refer to How Some Christians Love one Another. My aunt was the one who went to the aid of ‘the respectable woman in her hour of need’. Some of the persons concerned were living at this time, and Corvo let them know that he was in possession of their secret.

  I was enraged by these treacherous attacks. Our previous quarrels had had their humorous side, and I had got a considerable amount of fun out of them. This time we were both in deadly earnest.

  On the 12th June 1897 Corvo wrote to my aunt: ‘Dear Mrs Richardson. By all means continue to direct your nephew to write me threatening letters. . . . I am delighted to have your written confession that you are boycotting 3 Bank Place, the Record, its owner and his wife, because I lodge and am employed at the Record office. No doubt you think your crime will ruin the Record and force my employer and me to the Workhouse. . . . If that is your idea, I wish it may do you much good. But remember, each act of you Irish against me or my friends is regarded as instigated by the counsel and example of Fr Beauclerk, and each act will be met with a fresh disclosure of his villainies. We do not war with women and children, but with the knave who makes tools of you. But you are very useful to me for literature. Meanwhile you have not yet sent me my clothes. Faithfully yours, F. Austin.’

  I at once got one of the girls to make a bundle of Rolfe’s washing; then, taking the bundle to his solicitor’s office, I threw it down at the feet of an astonished clerk and said: ‘Tell your master I have brought some more of his client’s dirty linen for him to attend to.’

  I met Corvo in Well Street and stopped him. ‘Corvo, this must stop,’ I said; ‘If it doesn’t, I shall do you a mischief.’ The same day I had a letter from him to say he had instructed his solicitor to take out a summons for threatening language. To this I answered: ‘Tell your solicitor to wait for another twenty-four hours and then take out a summons for assault and battery. You will only have to produce yourself in evidence to have me convicted.’ In the evening I went to Bank Place. The door was opened by Mrs Hochheimer, who told me that Corvo and her husband were away. I told her what I had come for. She burst into tears and said she and her husband had had no peace since Corvo came to them, and he had ruined the Record. I prowled about the town all the next
day looking for Corvo but I didn’t come across him. A few days later I left Holywell for good.

  I never saw Corvo again.

  *

  It must have been about this time that, from the first floor of the Greyhound Inn, Rolfe, a gaunt and gloomy figure, pointed his accusing finger at Fr Beauclerk as the latter passed in procession to pray at the Shrine. An unpublished story, which must be contemporaneous, opens: ‘I write this in the fervent hope that I may wound one Jesuit. I desire that some of his candid friends shall read to him what I have written; and give him pain.’

  Among the dozens of recriminatory letters which Fr Beauclerk sent me, many were signed and purported to be written by the Record’s proprietor, F. W. Hochheimer, though the handwriting remained undisguisedly Rolfe’s. Some are comic, pathetic, and childish at once; for, far from refusing to correspond (as he claims in his ‘Nowt’ story), Rolfe wrote almost daily; it was he, and not Fr Beauclerk, who was infuriated by his opponent’s silence. At the risk of overcrowding my narrative, I quote one more letter, written though not signed by Rolfe.

  The Record Publishing Co.

  Record Office, Holywell, N. Wales.

  18 June 1898

  Dear Fr Beauclerk,

  I fear Mr Austin’s troubles have been quite too much for him, and I have been compelled to resume the Editorship of the Holywell Record as I do not consider him competent any longer to reply to letters addressed to him in such a capacity.

  He has chosen to go without food since Wednesday morning, solely for the purpose, I believe, of dropping down and creating a scene and a scandal, a mode of proceeding which I strongly disfavour.

  We are not without food in the house, at present, as we have several times been during the thirteen months you have boycotted us, and therefore I, finding no excuse for such conduct, dissent from it and wish to dissociate myself from any evil effects which may be caused by it.

  I would ask you to make a pastoral visit to him, but could not guarantee you ordinary decent treatment.

  Yours faithfully in Xt.

  Frank W. Hochheimer

  Under the spur of the virulence Rolfe imparted to the Record’s pages, its circulation waned; and midway through 1898 the whole edifice of this strange provincial feud crumbled into nothingness. When the paper died, Rolfe ostentatiously took up quarters in the workhouse, whence he continued to disseminate, to the best of his ability, the story of his ‘wrongs’, now immovably fixed in his distorted mind. It must have been almost a relief to Fr Beauclerk when his superiors, disturbed by the scandal and animosity darkening the well of the Saint, removed him to another sphere of usefulness. Rolfe had won a discreditable victory; and he paid for it later in the year when his Wide World fiction gave his enemies their opening. With Fr Beauclerk’s disappearance there was nothing more to keep Fr. Austin in Wales, and so, with all his possessions tied in a bundle on the end of a stick, the ‘unhappy Catholic vagabond’ set out to walk from Flint to Oxford, to find Dr Hardy at Jesus College – almost the only friend with whom, during his stormy life, he never quarrelled.

  In after years Rolfe often spoke of this Holywell episode as the close of his second career. His first was the Church, and he had been driven from that; his second was painter, and he had been cheated of his due. Now he turned from cassock and brush to the pen.

  CHAPTER 8: THE STRANGE HISTORIAN

  NOTE

  Among the privileges of the biographer is an assumption of omniscience in respect of his subject. And, when sufficient material is available, something very near full knowledge is possible. The evidence of a man’s letters, of his contemporaries, his work, and the indisputable facts of his life, do sometimes make it possible, when the material has been collated and sifted, to write with certainty. In the present study a different method has been employed. So far, I have set before the reader (not an analysed summary of my researches but) an account of the search itself; and I believe that in regard to a man so exceptional as Rolfe this exceptional method is justified. Truth takes many forms; and the dramatic alternation of light and dark in which my inquiries discovered Baron Corvo has, I am convinced, more value as verity than any one man’s account. I have tried, accordingly, to be the advocate for neither side, but rather the judge impartially bringing out all aspects of the case for the benefit of the jury. At the point in Rolfe’s life which my narrative has now reached, however, that method ceases, for the moment, to be advisable. The evidence concerning his career immediately after the Holywell episode came into my possession in fragments, over a long period of time. To present it as I obtained it would set so great a task to the reader’s attention that the resulting knowledge would almost certainly seem insufficient reward. In the chapters following I have, therefore, combined numerous testimonies and information obtained from various sources into a coherent and chronological account without detailing the course of my investigation, though (as will be seen) without, on the other hand, abandoning the framework of my Quest.

  Few onslaughts on London and literary fame can ever have seemed more hopeless than that of the baffled, exposed, threadbare Baron, with his dismal record of unsuccessful painting, priesthood and photography, his kinks of quarrelsomeness and sexual feeling. Penniless, friendless, out of favour with the authorities of his Church, smarting from exposure by newspaper, he had not even youth, which can outweigh many odds, to balance the scale. He was nearly forty, the age at which most men who are to make a mark in the world have struck the first impressions. But Rolfe had made no mark: the world had stamped him, not he the world: no rolling stone ever gathered less moss. Nevertheless there were three things on his side. First was the habit of hardship, which enabled him to accept poverty in the spirit which has dignified so many artists’ garrets. It is easier to tolerate the accustomed, than deprivation. And if the outcast had no cash, he was at least immune from the quotidian responsibilities that chain the lives of the free. Second, his excellent, still unimpaired constitution and sense of the physical, which, when he was not hungry, brought him a ready, thrilling appreciation of the world around him. And thirdly, he possessed a genuine talent, so far hidden behind the bushels of his other aspirations, but now to be revealed. Still, when all this has been allowed, it must be admitted that he wore thin armour against fate.

  His only literary acquaintance in London (if the term may be used of one he had never met) was John Lane. Lane, too, was in his way a remarkable man, a self-taught railway clearing-clerk who had graduated by way of bookselling into the ranks of established publishers. He set new standards for his trade, and sponsored many good books. By a flair, perhaps less for literature than for men, by luck, by hospitality, and by natural business sense, he had reached prosperity and the opportunity of power. Among his many enterprises, The Yellow Book, a quarterly miscellany of literature and art which represented (and misrepresented) the noisy, gifted younger generation of that time, is perhaps now best remembered. The eighteen-nineties was a decade in which many new ideas and mental attitudes were born, many old ones died, many new talents first flowered. It was marked by an unusual expectancy of fresh things, and readiness to consider unknown men. Perhaps for that last reason Henry Harland, the literary editor of The Yellow Book, accepted and published six short stories which ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ sent from Wales.

  But the stories deserved acceptance, and the applause they provoked, on their own merits. Though they were Rolfe’s first serious effort at writing, his ability suddenly appears in them full-fledged. There is a vivid and arresting novelty of style, poise and theme in these Stories Toto Told Me which charmed sceptics equally with the devout. Baldly described, they are retellings of folk-lore legends of the Catholic saints as presented by one Toto, a handsome, ingenuous, vivacious Italian peasant-lad. His quaint attributions of human characteristics and motives to the saints in their heavenly functions remind the reader irresistibly, though without irreverence, of the Gods of Olympus. Toto’s audience is his English patron, the Baron; and his manner of speech is repr
esented by an effervescent mixture of archaisms and broken English. No summary can do justice to these modern fables, which Rolfe, as he told his brother, ‘rewrote nine times in honour of the Nine Quires of Angels’. They did not pass unobserved in the pages of the Yellow Book: such was their reception that Lane was encouraged to reprint them in a booklet uniform with Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, which had also aroused a wide admiration on its first appearance in the famous quarterly. He did more: he invited the unknown author to submit a second series of Toto stories; and it was with the fate of this further batch that Rolfe first concerned himself in London.

  In the February of 1899, then, on a Monday morning, Baron Corvo presented himself for the first time to the astonished eyes of his publisher. John Lane (whom Rolfe describes as a ‘tubby little pot-bellied bantam, scrupulously attired and looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer’) was confronted by a gaunt figure shrouded in a tattered mackintosh which might hide anything or nothing, who spoke with ‘an arctic highness which strangely contrasted with his frightfully shabby garb’, an un-Baronial and yet impressive scarecrow. Rolfe’s account of this meeting survives: ‘The publisher had a curiosity to see the writer whose first book he had published. . . . The writer, on the other hand, took no more interest in the publisher than one takes in the chopper which one seizes at random for hewing-out steps to fortune: he had no fear at the back of his mind; and he had something quite definite to say.’ The ‘something’ concerned that second series of Toto stories, commissioned the year before, and delivered nine months previous to this visit. Nothing had been heard of them since, and their author now requested that ‘terms for publication should be settled out of hand’. Behind this ‘definite’ request a good deal remained unspoken, as Lane was shrewd enough to see.