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

by A. J. A. Symons

  The attractiveness of Catholic priesthood to one so circumstanced can easily be understood. Set among those who had voluntarily embraced celibacy, his abnormality became, not a possible vice, but a sign of Vocation. Hence it came about that the young student, whose unsuitability for holy orders was recognized by his fellows almost without exception, aspired to ordination. Yet, despite the disbelief of those who were well able to judge, there is no reason to suppose that Rolfe was other than sincere in his conviction that he was fitted by nature for the robe he hoped to wear. And perhaps he was. Perhaps, if he had been given the authority of orders, he would have been able (reinforced by this external prop) to dismiss all sexual feeling, and regard the dismissal as a consequence of the privilege. His early life was passed in an atmosphere of devotion which he shared. ‘When I was a Protestant boy of fifteen I was very fervent. I went to confession, said the rosary, used the Garden of the Soul for a prayer-book. A few years later I became unfaithful to my Vocation, played the fool . . . but I never relinquished my Divine Gift. At twenty-four I became intensely earnest. At twenty-five I suddenly realized that I was on the wrong road . . . and Peter had the key. I realized it one Saturday morning at Oxford; and on Sunday I made my homage to Peter . . . A Jesuit received me into the Church at 24 hours notice.’

  Unfortunately (or perhaps, when all is counted, fortunately) there existed in his nature, also, the talent and need for artistic expression. This need (as Vincent O’Sullivan has acutely noticed) found satisfaction in those extravagances which led him into debt, as well as in his paintings and aesthetic accomplishments. Largely in consequence of his undue indulgence of it, his superiors decided that he had no Vocation, and sent him back into the world of ordinary men.

  This rejection must have been a tremendous blow to Rolfe. He knew very well his unfitness to pass unnoticed among ordinary men (since indeed he was not ordinary), and he had set his heart on the dignity and mystery of spiritual rank. What remained? Only one course, to deny the rightness of the verdict; to assert that it was the Athenians who had lost him, not he the Athenians; and this, the easiest way, he took. It was the first stage of the paranoia that darkened his life. On the fact of his un-ordinariness (which his subconsciousness could not ignore) he built up a phantasy picture of an abnormal Rolfe (abnormal since he had a priestly Vocation) thwarted unreasonably by those who should have known the truth. Here are his own words: ‘I believe that somebody carelessly lied, that someone clumsily blundered, and that all concerned were determined not to own themselves, or anyone else but me, in the wrong. A mistake – a justifiable mistake seeing that I am an abnormal creature and my superiors about as commonplace a gaggle of fatwitted geese as this hemisphere produces – was made; and, by quibbles, intimidations, every hole and corner means conceivable, it has been perpetuated.’ In this mood he came back to England; and from it, he distilled the title or pseudonym of Baron Corvo. That artifice disguised the disappointing fact that he, who had left for Rome to assume the distinguished title of Reverend, had returned plain Mr Rolfe.

  Had his career as a painter been crowned with success, time might have smoothed the smart of his rejection. But he failed, he was driven from pillar to post, from Christchurch to Aberdeen and Holywell. He could not deny to himself the reality of this further failure; but it could be explained if not only his Superiors, but all Catholics, were, somehow, either unreasonably in league and set against him, or likely at any moment to become so. Here again are his own words. ‘I myself am a Roman Catholick not even on speaking terms with any other Roman Catholicks, for I find the Faith comfortable and the Faithful intolerable. . . . I am desperately in terror of Catholicks; never (with one exception) having met one who was not a slanderer (in the double sense of Herodotus) or an oppressor of the poor (in the sense of Psalm cix, 15, A.V.) or a liar.’ This was the second stage of his paranoia.

  Circumstances forced a life of repression on him, until he attained that extraordinary command over his countenance and conversation remarked at Holywell by John Holden. Were those adventures at Rhyl true, or were they make-believe as a further disguise for his real temperament? If Rolfe did seek out those women of the street there, it was a desperate effort on his part to combat his abnormal feelings, and it failed.

  At last he found the true vent for his talent, and became a writer in London. He defended his own character in whitewashing the Borgias, but still disappointment crossed his hopes. His work brought him neither rest nor money; he could only exist by incurring debt. ‘I sit in my bedroom during ten months in each year. This is mitigated by occasional plunges for pearls in the British Museum, an hour for Mass and strolls on the Heath on holidays, an hour a day for dumb-bells after the West Point system. And for two months I generally am at Oxford (strictly speaking more out of a boat than in at Sandford Lasher) reading exam, papers. But I have no communion with my fellow creatures. I loathe it and I crave it.’

  As he grew older he became intolerably conscious of the lack of emotional satisfaction in his life. His derision of love to Temple Scott, and assertion of satiety, was, I am convinced, the disdain of the fox for the grapes out of reach. He spoke of himself more truly in Hadrian as a ‘haggard shabby shy priestly-visaged individual’, mortally afraid of his fellow men, whom he despised and envied. To attract their notice he wore his heart on his sleeve in the Toto stories, but failed to find ‘the divine friend much-desired’, in Sholto Douglas or Trevor Haddon. He strove to make a substitute for affection in collaboration as a form of intimacy. So the pattern of his life was shaped.

  He sought by fresh starts to exorcise the past, not realizing that he carried the cause of his woes within. He pictured impossible situations in which ambiguous figures thawed that mail of icy reserve which ‘only one dead heart ever has been warm enough to melt’. Had there been even one dead heart? He was powerless to translate such dreams into fact; but at least he could express his disappointment if not his desires. ‘On these lines, he was becoming self-possessed, self-reliant, strong and potent.’ His forbidden love was a source of weakness, but hate could make him strong. That was the third stage.

  The friendship with Benson was of a deeper order than the rest. The lonely Rolfe had been sought out, had been praised, had been admitted as his superior, by one who had won the coveted, delusory haven of holy orders, and might be the means of bringing the never-relinquished panacea within reach of the thirsty sufferer. So at first he felt. Afterwards, as Benson recovered from his first enthusiasm, and asserted his natural dominance, Rolfe’s warmth diminished; and when he was, as he felt, ‘betrayed’, shut off from even literary association (which, to him, meant so much more than the mere writing of a book in collaboration), his liking turned to rage for which Venice was a violent, but ineffective, cathartic.

  Instead, he indulged, at last, his passion. The mask still clung, but the repression disappeared. He warmed both hands before the fire of such love as money and flattery could buy. But his delusions were still necessary to compensate his prolonged disappointment; and he retained them to the end. Yet, though he repaid succour with scorn and kindness with ingratitude, it is unjust, in reviewing his career, to withhold admiration and pity. It is very difficult to be just to Frederick William Rolfe. He had so many gifts, and industry above all; but what he had to sell found no price in the market-place. His brilliant books, expressed in prose as exquisite as the hand and as brightly coloured as the inks with which it was written, brought him trivial sums and no security. For his Toto stories thirty pounds, for his Borgia history not quite fifty, for translating Omar twenty-five; for the rest, nothing. He never, during his lifetime, received a penny in respect of Hadrian the Seventh or Don Tarquinio, for the publishers specified that there should be no royalties on the first six hundred copies, and so neither book had earned any money when Rolfe died. Small reward, it must be conceded; is it a wonder that he took such revenge as he could upon a world which ignored what he was, and what he offered, or that the books by which readers know him are b
ut an earnest of what he might have written, and less than half of what he did write? Behind his fury and lack of financial scruple, behind his inconvenient insistence on the artist’s right to live at the expense of others, behind the excesses into which his repressed nature tempted him, there remains an intense soul which maintained its faith, and expressed its aspirations in many excellent words and works.

  *

  He was capable of queer kindnesses. In 1928 I received a letter which made me rub my eyes, for though it was addressed to me the handwriting was plainly Rolfe’s. I was almost frightened as opened it.

  London Hospital,

  Whitechapel, E.1

  Dear Sir,

  Probably it will surprise, possibly it will interest you to see that the calligraphy of Frederick William Rolfe still lives. When I was a little boy of 6 or 7, Rolfe was an occasional visitor to the house. I remember him as a man of charming manners to a child, who knew all about magic and charms, who wore strange rings and told fascinating histories.

  He wrote me a few letters, on the occasions of my birthdays, which were so unlike any others I ever received both in substance and in script that they were preserved in an old cupboard. When I was about 16 I came across them. At that time my own handwriting was almost illegible, ill-formed, very small and ugly. I was so struck by the beauty of Rolfe’s that I at once set myself to copy the script. In two months I was fairly proficient in the style, and in a year it had become my normal writing, but as you can detect the fine edge of its beauty has been lost in passing through my hand.

  Yours faithfully

  John Bland

  It is not only the evil that men do that lives after them! Rolfe deserves a kinder epitaph than the belated amende of the Aberdeen Free Press. Who could improve on his own: ‘Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.’? Or, as he once wrote to a friend who accused him of selfishness: ‘Selfish? Yes, selfish. The selfishness of a square peg in a round hole.’

  CHAPTER 19: THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE

  Mr Justin very kindly allowed me to borrow the whole of his Rolfe papers. It chanced that I was called upon to deliver, at short notice, an after-dinner address to a dining club of which I was a newly-elected member. With my head full of Fr. Rolfe and the details of his life, and my study littered with his handwriting, ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ was an obvious choice. Accordingly I wrote an essay of something less than five thousand words upon his work and adventures, which was duly read to a company which included Shane Leslie and other admirers of arcane literature. I mention this circumstance not for its own importance, but because it led to an estrangement, reluctant on my part, with Mr Herbert Rolfe.

  During my investigations Mr Rolfe had remained detached, if not aloof. He had lent me a number of letters at our first meeting, as I have narrated, but in his acknowledgement of their return he observes: ‘You will, I am sure, understand that, interested though I am in this matter, I can only give it fragments of time now.’ In subsequent letters he commended my industry, though, I could see, with a doubt as to where it would lead me. That doubt became certainty when I sent him the draft of my address. I had said that Fr. Rolfe lived in the recollections of his contemporaries at the Scots College as an astounding romancer; that in his last year he ‘fell from grace’, and ‘left certain letters that Aretino might have written at Casanova’s dictation’; and that his financial conduct showed, at times, a ‘lack of honesty’. These observations, in Mr Rolfe’s view, were ‘gratuitous, unnecessary, and incongruous’. It seemed to me that I might with justice have used harder phrases, and that my literary integrity would be compromised if I said less than I believed to be the truth; and in a letter which was, perhaps, tactless, I said so. Mr Rolfe did not agree, and finally declared:

  I have no desire to be obstructive so far as a publication of the bare events of the sad life of my brother may be concerned, and, of course, I have no title to object to literary criticism. What I have endeavoured to impress upon you is that, for reasons stated, I do decidedly object to any ‘publication’ whatever of matter which either implicitly or explicitly imputes to my brother dishonesty or immorality. And I will add this, that, contrary to what your letters to me seem to imply, his relatives never had, and have not now, any indication, much less proof, that he was ever guilty of either. I, and they, believe him to have been the son and brother that we knew him to be and no other. He is in the hands of the Creator of all men, and in His mercy. There we would have him left. I trust you will now understand that your pamphlet, if it remained unmodified, would cause us pain and distress, and that you will, in consequence, revise what you have written. I enclose a list of the passages to which I have previously called attention. . . . Although I send you this list I am afraid that I must say that, on the whole, we would much prefer that the whole pamphlet had been confined to the bare record before mentioned – painful though that must be – and to literary criticism. This is to guard myself from any general expression of approval.

  This statement of Mr Rolfe’s attitude made me feel more than ever that a principle was involved on which I could accept no compromise. I became aware, also, that he was even opposed to any later publication of The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole; whereas it was and is my view that posterity owes its unlucky author the tribute of reading his last book. I said so, and our correspondence ended. I was left to make what further discoveries I could from Mr Justin’s papers alone.

  I had imagined, when I met Mr Justin and learned the details of Rolfe’s death, that my Quest was over. It was not. Though the laden suitcase which I carried back with me to London was full of fascinating things, letters and letter-books by which I came to know Fr. Rolfe as well as I shall ever know him, with such curiosities as his pocket-book containing carefully preserved letters from Conte Cesare Borgia, and his visiting card engraved from a florid Italian script, there were maddening omissions. After Mr Taylor had signed the Deed of Release giving Rolfe command again over his own work, he reassigned his property to Mr Justin, who, as I found by an examination of his documents, was the legal proprietor of all those unpublished works of which I had heard so much: Don Renato, Hubert’s Arthur, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Songs of Meleager, The One and the Many. But, though Mr Justin owned these books (which it must be admitted he had dearly purchased), and had the right to publish them, he possessed only one unpublished manuscript – The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. In respect of the other books, I was no nearer satisfying my eagerness to lay hands on them than I had been when I learned, step by step, that they had existed. I concluded that at the time of Rolfe’s death they must have been scattered about the world, waiting for the verdict of publishers to whom they had been submitted, or not reclaimed, as in the case of that manuscript which had lain forgotten in Messrs Chatto’s safe for more than ten years. Did they even survive? Unreclaimed manuscripts are not kept for ever; perhaps those strange books on which poor Rolfe lavished so many pains, for which he made such extravagant claims, were lost for ever, destroyed by careless hands which did not value their uncommercial quality.

  At least I had recovered that Venetian satire to which Rolfe owed his expulsion from the Palazzo Mocenigo; and since he nearly died from the subsequent sufferings, it may be said that he almost gave his life for this book. It is indeed, as Mr Swinnerton described it, a ‘beautiful and absorbing story’; and knowing, as I did, the circumstances behind its sentences, I was spellbound by its white-hot pages, as I had been by Hadrian. The hero, Nicholas Crabbe, is of course Rolfe himself; or, rather, Rolfe as he saw himself. ‘Nicholas Crabbe, being bored (to the extent of a desire to do something violent) by the alternate screams and snarls of a carroty Professor of Greek who had let him down . . . departed from Venice at the end of November. He went alone in his topo of six tons burden; and sailed southward along the Italian coast, with no idea in his head excepting that of thoroughly enjoying his own society, while scrupulously avoiding every kind of conversation with other human beings.’ How
vividly the real Rolfe speaks in that opening. Crabbe, in his sturdy, deep-bosomed, flat-bottomed, blunt-nosed boat comes alive in the pages following as clearly as George Arthur Rose in Hadrian. Cruising at leisure, flying the ensign of England in the liberty of wide horizons, the lone adventurer sees, from the sea, the lights of Messina and Reggio extinguished in the great earthquake of 1908. A tidal wave tosses his boat like a toy, but it survives the storm. Shocked and shaken, he seeks a peaceful haven to think over, ‘perhaps for hours, perhaps for weeks, perhaps for life’. But, in the cove wherein he anchors, he finds not peace but ruin: houses thrown down, death and horror. In the wreckage only one soul lives: a young girl of exquisite, boylike beauty. Her he rescues.

  But, having found her, Crabbe is baffled to know the next move. He knows nothing of women, has always treated them as goddesses in niches. Having seen that this slip of a girl has no real injuries, he sets her ashore. An hour or so later, terrified of the stricken land, friendless, having nowhere to go, she swims back to the boat, and implores, with the devotion of sixteen to its saviour, to be taken in. And when the equally lonely Nicholas refuses her offers of service and says grimly that he will put her ashore again in the morning, she suicidally slips back into the sea, to be rescued a second time.