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

by A. J. A. Symons

  Lane was impulsive as well as shrewd. He could be hard; but he could also be humane. It is no injustice to his memory to say that he often kept his authors waiting unduly for their due; yet he frequently backed books which he knew would involve him in loss, or supported men whose work could never pay. On meeting the haggard yet haughty Baron, who was frank that he had no friends or funds in the world, he was moved to pity, praised his work, gave him the names of other publishers for whom he might read manuscripts, pressed a sovereign in his hand, advised him to call on Henry Harland, and promised to arrange matters in respect of the book next day. Baron Corvo left the Albany office almost in elation.

  Next morning, alas, his day-dream was swiftly shattered. Lane’s impulses had reversed themselves overnight, and he now offered only £20 as the purchase price for the new Toto stories on which Rolfe had built his hopes. The unlucky Baron could, and should, have refused. But it had taken nearly a year to extract even this offer; if he opened negotiations with someone else an equal period might pass before he benefited at all by his labours. And the prospect of an immediate cheque was irresistible. So, hiding his disappointment behind a blank mask, Rolfe assented, and left the publisher’s office richer by £10. The balance he was to receive when the book came out. It was a bad bargain; and he never forgave the man who made it.

  Where and how did Corvo live, then? (One is almost tempted to add, why?) There is no clue to the quarter of London in which he hid his poverty and rage; but at least he did not despair. The autobiographical romance in which he consoled himself by setting down an acid recital of his wrongs narrates that ‘on the way back’ he bought a lamp and an oilcan, a ream each of standard linen bank- and green blotting-paper, a large bottle of Draper’s Dichroic ink, a Japanese letter copybook, and a fountain pen which held a quarter of a pint of ink. With these slight weapons he renewed his fight against his penury and the indifference of the world.

  He had hopes of Harland. The editor of the Yellow Book and his friends were fascinated by the equivocal Baron, an impressively shabby figure at the Saturday tea-parties in the Cromwell Road. The slight, eagle-nosed, reticent, unsmiling worn wanderer, in corduroy trousers and jacket, with his appalling cap and withered cloak, his Vandyke beard grown during the walk from Wales, his strange rings and stranger words, was indisputably a man of parts. It was apparent when he talked. On those occasions he kept his eyes cast down, raising them abruptly to disconcert interrupters. His topics were very various and yet akin. In a lucky moment you might have heard a surprising panegyric of the Borgias or a vivid description of modern Rome, a profession of Catholic faith or a bitter denunciation of contemporary Catholics. He was manifestly a mine of liturgical knowledge. On occasion he would relate his past life for hours, and tell of his privations, his paintings, and his oppressors. He explained that he was a tonsured clerk as well as a Papal Baron. By his own account he was a singularly friendless individual, who for a variety of reasons had been treated with shameless treachery by those in whom he had trusted. Once started on this topic he was difficult to stop, and a modern observer would have found the label of ‘persecution mania’ ready to his hand. Nevertheless there was evident, abundant ability in the man; and, partly on account of it, partly because of the mystery of his circumstances, Baron Corvo was treated with respect by Harland and his circle.

  But though this audience and their attentions doubtless gratified his vanity, the hungry author was still without the means to live. He besought editors with unsolicited articles, he entreated publishers for work as a ‘reader’ (or, as he put it, ‘asked for a chance of showing his skill as a judge of commonplace literature’). Few listened; fewer still employed him; he lived on oranges and oatmeal. ‘The Baron’ was almost destitute and desperate when he met Mr Grant Richards, a young newcomer among publishers, on the look-out for talent.

  Here, in a way, he was in luck. Grant Richards had read and admired the Toto stories, and was eager to consider further work by the same hand. The first meeting between the publishing novice and the pseudo-Baron is unrecorded; but out of it, after an interval, a book was born. ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ was engaged to produce a history of the rise and fall of the Borgia family which should be at once a gallimaufry of living pictures and a studious chronicle. How Rolfe had managed, in the course of his worried and wandering life, to acquire sufficient knowledge of Italy and Italian history to equip him for the task is an interesting problem. Was this the legacy of those unrecorded Roman months? At all events he was able to satisfy Mr Richards of his competence to write the book; for he had studied under the best of all masters – his own desires, his own curiosity, and with such masters one learns quickly.

  For payment he was to receive a sovereign a week (for not more than seven months), ten pounds on publication, and twenty-five pounds on the issue of a second edition. In return he sold, irrevocably, all rights. Not very generous terms; but they were his own suggestion, and the best he was to get during the whole of his life. At least the arrangement promised a roof overhead for half a year. Accustomed as Rolfe was to hardship, he believed that he could live within the means proposed, which he hoped to supplement by extra work. So the contract was signed, and the weird scholar departed to his task.

  How he progressed can be shown in his own words:

  Hogarth Club, Bond St, W

  Dear Mr Richards,

  I have got through the first week on 18s. 10d., which I think is a bit of a triumph! It was achieved by the simple expedient of cutting dinner: and it has left me furious for work. Now I find the evenings intolerable after the B.M. closes; and think you might let me have something to read by way of change. Mss for choice, for which I shall not expect you to pay unless you like. It’s reading I want hic et nunc.

  V ty,

  Corvo

  For weeks the quaint, shabby Baron haunted the British Museum, reading and making notes all day. But, as he wrote subsequently, ‘a man cannot work eighteen hours a day during seven days a week on insufficient food and with total absence of recreation without feeling the strain’. The bargain as to payment was made in November 1899. Three months later (it will be seen) the strain began to tell:

  Jesus College, Oxon.

  xxvij Feb. 1900

  Dear Sir:

  The Borgia book is progressing. I should very much like to have photographs of the various portraits etc., which I selected some weeks ago; for, with these before me to assist the human air, I shall be able to work without let or hindrance, as long as my health endures the strain.

  I may say that I find living on a pound a week, while working as intensely as I do, to be a very difficult task. May I suggest the desirability of increasing that amount to thirty shillings – a sum which would save me many petty worries? Of course I do not for a moment propose any interference with the agreement which I have made with you; but that the extra ten shillings should come out of the sum which you are to pay me on publication.

  I should be much obliged if you would give this proposal early consideration; for the work on the book is far greater than I, or any one, anticipated; and, very naturally, I wish to put into it a great deal more than that of which I am deemed capable.

  I am staying a few days in college with Mr E. G. Hardy, who is V. P. of Jesus, and an old friend of mine; and to whose care a letter may be addressed to me till Thursday.

  Yours faithfully

  Baron Corvo

  This pathetic, modest request went unanswered. Perhaps the young publisher with a business to establish would or could not go beyond his contract. Shortage of money was not, however, Corvo’s only trouble. His artistic conscience was alarmed by reductions proposed in the number of illustrations planned for his book; he fought for portraits and medallions like a wildcat for its young, in long and earnest letters in which he bewailed the poverty which prevented him from supplementing them from his own pocket. On a pound a week he could not afford to pay for process blocks.

  For the moment, actually, he had found a home.
Among the few figures from his past life with whom he remained on speaking terms was a young Catholic solicitor, Edward Slaughter, to whom he had acted as tutor thirteen years before. One afternoon about this time the two met unexpectedly in Bond Street, and the Baron was invited to dine next day with his former pupil in his Hampstead lodging. The meeting was repeated, and then repeated again. The landlady had a tiny room to spare; why should not the Baron use it till the publication of his book brought him fame and funds to take a proper apartment? The suggestion was welcomed, and the move was made. Certainly Rolfe worked hard. When not investigating by day in the British Museum, the indefatigable chronicler spent his nights in constructing a vast pedigree of the Borgia family from its origin in Aragon to the present day. It was made on some forty squares of squared paper each two feet long, engrossed in inks of many colours and blazoned with the Borgia bull. When finished and assembled, this labour of love measured nine feet by five, and nearly covered the floor of its compiler’s room. Slaughter, returning from his day’s work, marvelled to find that his ex-tutor had written a whole new chapter, or added a fresh line of descent to the giant family tree. But still that extra ten shillings eluded the strange historian:

  69 Broadhurst Gardens, South Hampstead

  xvi May 1900

  Dear Mr Grant Richards:

  In reply to yours of today:—

  I suggested that you should pay me £1–10–0 per week instead of £1, upon which last I could die but not live; and that the extra 10/– could come from the £10, which you were to pay me on completion of my task; if that is what you mean. If not, I have a copy of my letter somewhere. Also, I beg you to be reassured that La Borgiada will be in your hands at the time stipulated in our agreement. I suppose ‘July’ will bear without straining the interpretation ‘July 31st’. I am taking that for granted: because, as you will readily imagine, with all the delays I have endured, as long as possible a time will not be a day too much. . . .

  Yours faithfully

  Corvo

  Luckily, he did not have to live entirely on a pound a week. In addition to the timely aid of Slaughter, who made a small but regular contribution to his friend’s revenue, Rolfe benefited by the good nature of Grant Richards’s manager, Temple Scott, described with the Baron’s usual asperity as a ‘broad-nosed dough-faced dwarf with thin woolly hair scattered over his big head’. ‘I visited him every Saturday’, writes Temple Scott, who shared his employer’s admiration for the unconventional and harassed writer, ‘and found him as a rule happy and engrossed in his monster genealogical tree of the Borgia family. I used to bring him twelve packages of different tobacco, named by him, which he would blend for his cigarettes. He liked, he said, to have twelve emotions of taste in smoking. He would come nearly every evening to my apartments in Welbeck Mansions for meals and the opportunity to read to my wife and myself what he had written. I found him a most pleasant companion with a store of archaic lore that was at times weird in the form in which he imparted it. He was childishly superstitious and childishly romantic. You may translate this as you wish, but the children in my home listened to him with wide-eyed faith.’

  Weeks sped by and became months; August arrived; and at last the Borgia book was finished. Even with the help of his two friends Baron Corvo saw that he would be unable to make ends meet without the much discussed pound, and so he sought more work. He implored Grant Richards for a new commission, in letters which are a mixture of dignity and tragedy. The publisher temporized; he felt that he had experimented sufficiently with this unusual author. Corvo wrote again: ‘The week or two of which you spoke expired more than a month ago; and it becomes an urgent necessity that I should complete my plans for the winter.’ Who can say what would have happened had a fresh commission been vouchsafed? Though at that moment Rolfe would have welcomed any labour, for almost any pittance, ultimately, probably, he would have rebelled in some dramatic unreasonable form (as at Holywell) against the rigid poverty of his life. But his patience was tested in a quite different way; the historian of the Borgias was not fated to write a second book for Mr Grant Richards.

  *

  The completed manuscript of Rolfe’s ‘gallimaufry’ was submitted to an expert ‘reader’; and, unexpectedly, the report contained criticisms and suggestions for alteration to the text. Passages were rebuked as showing ‘acrostics and effeminacies of intellect and strange clumsiness of thought and style’. The reader’s remarks and requests were communicated to Corvo, who exploded like a bomb. ‘Dear Mr Grant Richards’ became at once ‘Dear Sir’, and Rolfe’s letters took on an instantaneous tone of sullen dignity:

  xxvj Sept. 1900

  Dear Sir:

  I have your letter dated 25th, the Second Report, and the Borgia MSS.

  I have taken the trouble to think out a method, and a style of writing. I believe that you know this. I believe that it was because you liked my previous work that you gave me this commission. It appears to me, therefore, perfectly amazing that you should now agree with your Reader’s opinion, i.e. that the style is ‘loose’, ‘clumsy’, the spelling ‘incorrect’; – the method, in short, unsatisfactory. As though all these things were not relative, and only relative.

  In reference to the Reports (while sternly denying that ‘Il Cardinale del Gonalla’ [your reader persists in the small g] is a sentence [v. Report II, 3] seeing that it lacks a predicate), I must be allowed to regret the impatience, perhaps animus, which appears, particularly in Report II; and to say that I incontinently and utterly abjure ‘the incurable mania for self-justification’ (a phrase which I should not have expected to find in a Reader’s Report) now that I am aware of the futility of the same. And concerning these Reports, and your decision, I have no more to say. The work shall be recopied, revised, and gelded, in accordance with your instructions. I estimate that it will take two months from the date of commencement. That date depends on a, my recovery of strength, which circumstances make uncertain, b, my obtaining a commission which will enable me to pay debts incurred for living while waiting for your delayed decision, and which will provide me with means of living on.

  You are perfectly aware that I have nothing except my literary earnings.

  Of course, I need hardly say that on no account will I allow myself publickly to be connected with this New Borgia book, written in a style which is not mine. I can only accept responsibility for works of which my own judgment approves – things quaint or curious, and distinguishable from the works of the million. So, kindly invent a man of straw, John Brown, or James Black, or St George Gerry and put him, in those lists of which you wrote in July, as the author of the House of Borgia.

  ‘An Ideal Content’ – term in Logick – shall be omitted.

  Understand that you shall have exactly what you want, as soon as I am in a position to do it; and without any reference to my natural rights or sentiments, or future commissions: and that I will communicate with you directly I have regained health (if I ever do) and have concluded arrangements which will enable me to give my spare time to your work.

  Faithfully yours

  Frederick Baron Corvo

  After taking up this position, the outraged author dug his toes in, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be persuaded even to discuss the matter. He had said that he would revise the book; he had said that he disapproved of the revisions; he had withdrawn his name from a book which did not fulfil his wishes; what could there be to discuss?

  xviiij Oct. 1900

  Dear Sir,

  In compliance with your request, I will come on Monday; although, as my health is declining and not improving, this week would have suited me quite as well: but, in view of the mysterious reticence which you observe regarding the object of this interview – a reticence which prevents me, in my dejected condition of health, from being prepared to give adequate attention to matters over which I have had no opportunity of pondering, – I think it as well to try to define more clearly than before, the position which I ha
ve taken up in reference to the Chronicles of the House of Borgia.

  I am sure that I very gladly should have welcomed an intelligent criticism of, and an intelligent correction of minor pen-slips and clerical errors which may have crept into, a work that cost me such infinite and ceaseless pains; but you do not seem to be aware of the sad injustice which you have done both to the book and to its writer, in subjecting it, not to your own promised consideration, but to the judgment of one so manifestly incompetent as your Reader. I mean that I resent the opinion of a person who could not read the Varchi passage without ultimate blunders; who denounces as ‘strange clumsiness’ a sentence which I did not write; who displays a defective knowledge of spelling; who calls a name devoid of predicate a ‘sentence’; who has not a word to say on the Greek and Latin extracts (where my rusty classical knowledge may have led me into error); who alleges, in mitigation of his intemperate remarks, that his report is the report of a printer’s devil – but I will not fill the page.