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

by A. J. A. Symons

  And, one day, I replenished my stock of provisions at Burano; and at sunset we rowed away to find a station for the night. Imagine a twilight world of cloudless sky and smoothest sea, all made of warm, liquid, limpid heliotrope and violet and lavender, with bands of burnished copper set with emeralds, melting, on the other hand, into the fathomless blue of the eyes of the prides of peacocks, where the moon rose, rosy as mother-of-pearl. Into such glory we three advanced the black barcheta, solemnly, silently, when the last echo of Ave Maria died.

  Slowly we came out north of Burano into the open lagoon; and rowed eastward to meet the night, as far as the point marked by five pali, where the wide canal curves to the south. Slowly we went. There was something so holy – so majestically holy – in that evening silence, that I would not have it broken even by the quiet plash of oars. I was lord of time and place. No engagements cried to be kept. I could go when and where I pleased, fast or slow, far or near. And I chose the near and the slow. I did more. So unspeakably gorgeous was the peace on the lagoon just then, that it inspired me with a lust for doing nothing at all but sitting and absorbing impressions motionlessly. That way come thoughts, new, generally noble.

  The wide canal, in which we drifted, is a highway. I have never seen it unspeckled by the sandali of Buranelli fishers. Steam-boats and tank-barges of fresh water for Burano, and the ordinary barks of carriage, disturb it, not always, but often. My wish was to find a smaller canal, away – away. We were (as I said) at the southern side, at the southward curve marked by five pali. Opposite, on the other bank, begins the long line of pali which shows the deep-water way right down to the Ricevitorio of Treporti; and there, at the beginning of the line, I spied the mouth of a canal which seemed likely to suit me. We rowed across to it, and entered. It tended north-eastward for two or three hundred metres, and then bended like an elbow north-westward. It looked quite a decent canal, perhaps forty metres in width, between sweet mud-banks clothed with sea-lavender about two-foot lengths above high-water mark in places. We pushed inshore, near to the inner bank at the elbow, stuck a couple of oars into the mud fore and aft, and moored there.

  Baicolo and Caicio got out the draught board and cigarettes, and played below their breath on the puppa; while I sat still, bathing my soul in peace, till the night was dark and Selene high in the limpid sapphire-blue. Then they lighted the fanali, and put up the impermeable awning with wings and curtains to cover the whole barcheta; and made a parmentier soup to eat with our wine and polenta. And, when kapok-cushions had been arranged on the floor, and summer sleeping bags laid over them, we took our last dash overboard, said our prayers, and went to bed. Baicolo at prova with his feet towards mine amidships, and Caicio under the puppa with his feet well clear of my pillowed head. So, we slept.

  Soon after sunrise I awakened: it was a sunrise of opal and fire: the boys were deep in slumber. I took down the awning, and unmoored quietly, and mounted the puppa to row about in the dewy freshness in search of a fit place for my morning plunge. I am very particular about this. Deep water I must have – as deep as possible – I being what the Venetians call ‘appassionato per l’acqua’. Beside that, I have a vehement dyspathy against getting entangled in weeds or mud, to make my toe-nails dirtier than my finger-nails. And, being congenitally myopic, I see more clearly in deep water than in shallow, almost as clearly, in fact, as with a concave monocle on land. So I left the barcheta to drift with the current, while I took soundings with the long oar of the puppa, in several parts of the canal, near both banks as well as in the middle. Nowhere could I touch bottom; and this signified that my bathing place was more than four metres in depth. Needless to say that I gave a joyful morning yell, which dragged from sleep the luxury-loving Baicolo to make coffee, and the faithful dog Caicio to take my oar and keep the barcheta near me; and then I plunged overboard to revel in the limpid green water. Lord, how lovely is Thy smooth salt water flowing on flesh!

  But £30 does not last for ever, even when living is cheap; and the little store of sterling slowly melted. Rolfe wrote for more money to Mr Taylor, and the friendly Gordons of Gwernvale. They sent £25 and £12 10s. respectively; but they also asked his plans.

  His plans! He had none. He wanted to live in the sun, and that savour of the past which surrounds and exhales from the city of St Mark; he wanted to go on talking and sightseeing, to continue his excursions, to saturate himself in the atmosphere and spirit of beauty and Italy. But the question was insistent; he could not live on beautiful impressions. So he found a ‘plan’. His old-time skill in photography should be his ‘plan’; and he suggested that he should establish himself as a shopkeeper in Venice, selling fine photographs to the tourists, living above his business, and, in his leisure, writing books which should make him rich.

  This proposal perturbed the Pirie-Gordons. They knew Rolfe’s circumstances, and something, though by no means all, of his nature: enough to appreciate the hopelessness of his plan, and also to realize that a flat denunciation of it would strengthen his impracticable determination. So, in a tactful letter, Harry suggested that his collaborator should come back to England to discuss ways and means, to consider how much capital would be needed to make a start in a small way. Reluctantly Rolfe agreed. ‘It is annoying to have to waste time and money coming to England to get money,’ he wrote, ‘but, of course, I see that there is no other way. So, as you are all so very good as to have me, expect me very soon . . . then I will finish Hubert and write that infernal Benson book, and do what else is necessary to return here in February 1909. Only, I firmly abhor from the notion that one might “begin small”. For success, one must begin as one means to continue.’ And he asked for his fare back. He got it. He also got another £15 from Dawkins. But his departure for England continued to be delayed. First his excuse was that Professor Dawkins had created so bad an impression of the English by his niggardly treatment of the boatmen of Venice that he had felt constrained to set the matter right at his own expense. Then he admitted that he had used his passage money to pay his hotel bill. Then ‘I was all ready to start last Sunday week for England, ticket taken and insurance . . . Suddenly other unexpected liabilities to the extent of £20 sterling odd came in. I could not pay. Wrote to the last man I knew, begging. On Sunday he refused. So I am another week to the bad though I live on 40 pallanche a day all told; and fresh bills have come in making it now impossible for me to get away under £32 sterling. I am sure there are no more. As I said, so far, I have maintained a singularly honoured reputation and my credit is unimpaired. To leave obscurely or in disgrace will annul the excellent foundations which I have laid here . . . I am unable to finish Hubert’s Arthur until I have consulted you on various points of heraldry (and of good taste). I fear that I shall within the next few days find myself without money or friends or future in this foreign country. I am much annoyed by this.’

  His friends in England were mystified by his manoeuvres. They knew that he had little or no money, and that without money he could not stop in Venice; yet in Venice he seemed determined to remain. Summer does not last for ever, even in Italy; Fr. Rolfe was no longer living in a boat, but in an hotel on credit, with a mounting bill. What was to be done? Pirie-Gordon was anxious for his return, anxious to complete the book in which he was collaborating; but it seemed useless to send more money to be spent in defeating the purpose for which it was intended. Benson, perhaps, desired his collaborator’s return less: tired of waiting, he had used the notes on St Thomas compiled by himself and Rolfe as the basis of a short biography about to be published over his own name.

  Rolfe seems to have banked his hopes on Mr Taylor, who, since he had granted one loan on the strength of an insurance policy, would, he supposed, grant another on the strength of more insurance. But again Rolfe had misread the situation. Mr Taylor had made that final loan as a last hope; and had taken the insurance policy as cover faute de mieux, to set against the loss in which the whole transaction seemed likely to involve him. The effect of that meeting in Linco
ln’s Inn Fields four years before had long ago worn off; and the solicitor, who had not received a penny from the ‘security’ of Hadrian or Don Tarquinio, had no longer any belief in the likelihood of his loans and costs being repaid from royalties earned by Rolfe’s books. He looked (as events proved, rightly) solely to the insurance policy for ultimate reimbursement; and, as he realized very well, he might have to pay premiums on that for many years. So, when faced by appeals for funds from Venice, he naturally wrote to say that he could make no more advances.

  Even then Rolfe refused to return to the friends who would have supported him.

  Well [he wrote to Harry Pirie-Gordon] I have told Taylor in effect that if he stops now, he loses all he has done so far. If he doesn’t mind, that’s his affair. Anyhow I’m tired out of trying to make bricks without straw. And I am not trying any more. A friend in need is a friend indeed. . . .

  I have the habit of taking the air this way. There’s a small English Ospedale on Giudecca – English staff, patients chiefly sailors. I go over every afternoon in a sandalo and row convalescents about in the sun. They think no end of me. So does the matron, Miss Chaffey. Now Lady Layard (Queen of England in Venice), who adores the hospital, does so too. I choke ’em all off. What’s the good of making new friends when you may be denounced at the questura for debt any day? I don’t know what my expenses at the hotel are. I always burn the bills as I can’t pay them.

  What was to be done? It is a proof of the sincerity of young Pirie-Gordon’s friendship that even now he did not abandon patience with his errant collaborator. ‘I cannot help thinking that we ought to do something for Rolfe’, he wrote to Mr Taylor, and suggested that, through the solicitor, he, Benson and Dawkins should remit a small sum – 45 lire, then nearly £2, weekly – to Rolfe’s landlord, – sufficient to keep Rolfe in modest style in Venice for three more months, by which time, he hoped, his friend would return to his senses, and home.

  But the suggestion proved a useless one. Rolfe’s landlord refused to consider such an arrangement until the matter of what was already owing – approximately £40 – was dealt with, and warned Mr Taylor that Rolfe’s expenditure (which was ‘not excessive for a gentleman of even moderate means’) was double the proposed allowance. Letters of explanation went backwards and forwards, but no acceptable compromise was found, and in the end the sums subscribed for Rolfe’s benefit were returned to the three subscribers, Benson, Pirie-Gordon, and Dawkins.

  The wheel had turned again. Rolfe was in the process of making new friends, but his old ones were not allowed to forget him. The familiar artillery of insulting letters was called into action. If the folly of the man is obvious, it is also tragic. Once more, torn by the distortion of his biassed vision, he saw himself playing the hero’s part in the drama of The One and the Many. His batteries were turned first on Benson, who received almost daily pages of abuse, in which he was called many names skilfully calculated for their wounding truth or half-truth. Prominent among them was the charge of being a ‘sadimaniac’. Another of Rolfe’s grievances was that when these erstwhile friends had agreed each to return the other’s letters, Benson’s letters to Rolfe had been sent back to him; but (taking heed from the violence of Rolfe’s tone that worse might follow) Benson had retained Rolfe’s letters to himself, ‘as a protection’. Hence it came about that, years later, Fr. Martindale had the advantage, denied to me, of reading both sides of the correspondence, which passed through the scale from fervent to frantic, from affection to hate.

  The next object of attack was Mr Taylor. His main offence, naturally, lay in cutting off supplies; but almost level with it in Rolfe’s view was his action in writing to the Venetian landlord with the proposal for a weekly payment. ‘You have had an absolutely free hand in managing my affairs’, the client wrote, mild at first; ‘if they are unproductive, that can only be due to your mismanagement. Badly as I managed them myself before you took them over, I did contrive to make something of them. But you seem to have done nothing . . . I have yet to learn that you have even taken any steps whatever to quicken my publishers’ energies in regard to my books. . . . Your failure to keep to your agreement . . . ought to have opened my eyes to your indifference to my interests . . . I feel that my present position is entirely due to your negligence . . . Under these circumstances, I am desirous either of completely revising the nature of our connection, or of breaking it off and transferring my obligations and my assets to more capable administration. I shall therefore be glad to hear what you suggest.’ Nothing was, nothing could be, suggested, and so Rolfe refused to pass the proofs of his two books in the press (Don Renato and Meleager) and registered a protest against them with the Publishers’ Association.

  Meanwhile Pirie-Gordon was not overlooked. He received a short note (enclosing a letter from the long suffering Venetian landlord threatening application to the Police failing payment of his bill) intimating that only a remittance by telegram could save the voluntary exile from prison. The bluff failed; no money was sent, by telegram or otherwise: so a later letter conveyed the information:

  I am now simply engaged in dying as slowly and as publicly and as annoyingly to all of you professing and non-practising friends of mine as possible. Since Saturday (this is Thursday) I have contrived to cadge two lunches Tuesday and Wednesday and afternoon tea every day. Also I have scratched up a few walnuts and oranges. I have not slept in bed since Friday. Next Sunday I shall have exhausted these amenities. Then I shall steal the sandalo from the Bucintoro Club as usual, and go a little way on the lagoon, flying the two English flags, and taking an elaborate diary of my passion, with my passport, and select correspondence with all of you dastards, and play about till the end. You have made a show of me, and you shall have full value in return.

  The principal drawback to this attitude was that, to give it effect, Rolfe had actually to die; and, as he knew very well, he was not of the stuff from which suicides are made. Despite his dismal expressions, and the utter penury to which he was by now reduced, he still clung to life and credit. No doubt he went ‘a little way out’ in the Club sandalo; but if so he returned. What he did in fact was to copy the letter in his letter book. It was important, in the wordy warfare which he was opening by this long-range bombardment, not to repeat himself.

  CHAPTER 16: THE VENETIAN OUTCAST

  What, meantime, had been happening in Venice? The letter to Pirie-Gordon proclaiming suicide is dated April 1909; Rolfe had got through his first Venetian winter by a skilful manipulation of credit and excuses. It was a remarkable feat; but his credit had several buttresses. In the first place, Rolfe had paid handsomely while he could, and was positive that he would not be long without funds. In the second, landlords of hotels in seasonal places welcome regular residents; and since ‘Mr Rolfe’ had expressed his intention of remaining permanently, Signor Barbieri, proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue et de Russie, had no wish to lose this customer, unless there was good cause. Further, Rolfe received many letters from England, mostly written on thick or official paper, the more hopeful-seeming of which he showed to the landlord, who saw that this ‘English’ had friends who were concerned on his behalf. But what proved the most convincing demonstration to the Italian hotel-keeper of the truth of his queer guest’s claim to have property in England, which would presently be profitable, was Mr Taylor’s official letter (enclosing cheque in advance) offering, on behalf of Benson, Dawkins, and Pirie-Gordon to make a regular payment in respect of Rolfe for three months. Rolfe’s anger when he heard of the proposal was genuine and impressive; but the return of the money, on which he insisted, was more impressive still, and convinced Sgr Barbieri that if he waited he would be paid. So, through the winter, he continued to allow credit for food and housing to the eccentric Englishman.

  In the course of that winter, On 28 December 1908, occurred the famous Messina earthquake which left thousands homeless. As a member of the Royal Bucintoro Rowing Club, Rolfe played an energetic part in the relief measures organized by the ci
tizens of Venice. The Club boats (one of them under Rolfe’s care) went from house to shop begging for food, clothes, and building material for the sufferers. He spent a busy and happy fortnight carrying mixed cargoes, casks of semolina, flasks of wine, blankets and old clothes to the Barracks of San Zaccaria, which was converted into a temporary warehouse.

  His election to the Bucintoro Club owed itself to an amusing incident arising from his passion for swimming, and rowing in the ‘mode Venetian’. One day, turning a corner of the Grand Canal too sharply, he fell overboard while smoking a pipe. Swimming strongly under water, he came up unexpectedly far from his boat, looking extremely solemn, with his pipe still in his mouth. On climbing back into the sandalo, he calmly knocked the wet tobacco out of his pipe; refilled from his rubber pouch, which had kept its contents dry; borrowed a light; and with the single word Avanti went his way. Such impassivity charmed the Venetian onlookers; word went round of this incident, which, coupled with his aquatic fervour, gained him membership of the Bucintoro, a useful privilege, since he could use the Club boats and clubhouse.