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

by A. J. A. Symons

  In the morning the girl tells her master (for such she insists he is to be) her story. She is Ermenegilda Falier, an orphan, seventeen years old in three days’ time, whose father, a gondolier, always treated her as a boy, always called her one, and made her expert with the oar before his death. Then she was taken by her uncle to live on his farm, still with cropped hair and boyish dress. Now, since the earthquake, which laid the farm in ruins and destroyed its occupants, she has no human tie; and with all the passionate fervour of her Italian nature she asks Crabbe to allow her to remain with him. ‘What should he do with her? What, in the Name of Heaven, was he to do with her?’

  Her docility, her beauty, her knowledge of boats, and above all her flat-chested boylike appearance inspire Nicholas with a notion. ‘In describing the weird gymnastics in which his mind engaged during these wave-running hours of darkness he always laid singular and particular stress upon the influence of her phenomenally perfect boyishness – not her sexlessness, nor her masculinity, but her boyishness. She looked like a boy: she could do, and did do, a boy’s work, and did it well: she had been used to pass as a boy; and she preferred it: that way lay her taste and inclination: she was competent in that capacity. There was nothing in her to inspire passion, sexual or otherwise; no one could help noticing and admiring her qualities of springlikeness, of frankness, of symmetry, of cogency; but, in other respects, she was negligeable as a boy. A youth knows and asserts his uneasy virility: a girl assiduously insinuates her feminility. Ermenegilda Falier came into neither category.’ Very well. Since she so intensely wished it, since she was able to support the part, she should be a boy and his servant, Zildo, not Zilda. He could trust himself, and he would trust her.

  The decision made, he returns with ‘Zildo’ to Venice to attend to his affairs; Crabbe becomes Rolfe. ‘It must be understood that he already had been chased from two careers, and was fairly well settled in a third. Of course a man with his face and manner and taste and talent and Call ought to have been a priest. Elsewhere it is written why he was not. The fault was hardly his.’ So he was not priest, but author; his circumstances are exactly those of Frederick William Rolfe. It follows, therefore, that he has two friends, Benson and Pirie-Gordon – Bonson and Peary-Buthlaw in the book. ‘The Reverend Bobugo Bonson was a stuttering little Chrysostom of a priest, with the Cambridge manners of a Vaughan’s Dove, the face of the Mad Hatter out of Alice in Wonderland, and the figure of an Etonian who insanely neglects to take any pains at all with the temple of the Holy Ghost, but wears paper collars and a black straw alpine hat. By sensational novel writing and by perfervid preaching he had made enough money to buy a country-place, where he had the ambition to found a private establishment (not a religious order) for the smashing of individualities, the pieces of which he intended to put together again. . . . He did not exactly aspire to actual creation: but he certainly nourished the notion that several serious mistakes had resulted from his absence during the events described in the first chapter of Genesis.’ ‘I do not pretend to be dogmatic on the point; and I merely offer the hypothetical judgement that Bobugo’s view was that the error in the Creation of Man consisted in endowing him with Sense.’ This was, for Rolfe, an almost charitable judgement. Mr Pirie-Gordon and Mr Taylor are described with equal prejudice. As in a glass darkly, Rolfe in his last book mimics the details of his life, the incidents which have brought him to Italy. All those strange episodes, which I have given in their true colours, are related and distorted from the angle of the madman who endured them. Nicholas Crabbe endures the betrayal of his false friends, the agony of hope deferred, homelessness and hunger in Venice, but cheered and supported, though he does not know it, by his growing affection for Zilda, hers for him. Plot, in the formal sense, there is none; nightmare figures loom, and disappear; yet the book has a shape. Into it Rolfe pours, with the frenzy and disappointment of his real life, the beauty and satisfaction which comforted his days in Venice; and behind the dust and tears of his rage there is always the changing beauty of the lagoon and the unchanging beauty of the Church. But further summary would do injustice to a book which is valuable for its texture rather than its form, its intensity more than its message, which is the testament of a tormented personality rather than a story. It was his last self-portrait: ‘Nicholas Crabbe, being Nicholas Crabbe, was as hard as adamant – outside. He tolerated the most fearful revilings, humiliations, losses, without turning a hair. He had none. Even his enemies (which means all the men and women with whom he ever had been intimate) freely admit (in their less excited moments) that nothing, at any time, ruffled his cruel and pitiless and altogether abominably self-possessed serenity of gait and carriage; and they account it to him for natural naughtiness. Of course they are imbecile idiots. What is to be expected of a man cased, cap-à-pie, like a crustacean, in hard armour of proof? Such an one has no means of exhibiting his feelings, excepting with his crookedly-curving, ferociously-snapping claws and (perhaps) with his bleak rigid glaring eyes. Crabbe was detested by people who habitually showed their feelings. He couldn’t show his. He never showed his real ones for that very reason. But boobies thought that he did – thought that his breakable but unbendable shell was his expression, a horrible expression because it gave no information whatever; and then, when (quite unexpectedly) the hitherto stilly-folded claws snatched and pinched and tore and tossed presumption, with a violence sudden and frightful which manifested some appalling sensibility hidden unsuspected within, the said boobies were gravely shocked or displeased and (when clerical) much pained or even deeply grieved. Pained, indeed! What of the torments of Crabbe, which no one ever considered because no one ever saw them?’ Rolfe was able to give a happier ending to his satire than destiny reserved for him, since Nicholas and Zilda realize themselves in each other, and so ‘the desire and pursuit of the whole was crowned and rewarded by love’.

  But, though it was satisfactory to have found the Venetian autobiography, I still longed to discover those mediaeval romances in which Fr. Rolfe embodied that historical knowledge on which he so much prided himself; and my desire was all the keener from reading, in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, his description of Hubert’s Arthur.

  He read over what he had already done. It seemed to be almost as far above the ordinary as he wished it to be – history-as-it-wasn’t-but-as-it-might-very-well-have-been. For example, there is no direct evidence of the mysterious murder of Arthur fitz-Geoffrey, Duke of Armorica, by or at the instance of his wicked uncle John. Young Arthur was rightful King of England, not only by primogeniture but also by will of King Richard Lionheart. Consequently it was very necessary to John (who usurped his crown) that he should disappear. And he did disappear at Rouen. And John is credited with his murder. But – suppose that he did not really disappear, that he was not murdered, that he actually escaped from his wicked uncle, the history of England (as we have it from the monkish chroniclers) might be quite another story. This was Crabbe’s idea. Young Arthur was not murdered at all. By help of Hubert de Burgh, he escaped the tormentors sent to put out his eye-lights, he escaped from John when that assassin tried to drown him in the Seine, he escaped (half-crucified) from the Giwen of Bristol to whom John-Judas had sold him for thirty-thousand marks of silver. Innocent the Third, that astute steel pontiff with the eye of a squinting lambkin, though frightfully excited about the boy, didn’t see his political way at the moment to depose the rich oldster John (who was in possession of the crown of the English) in favour of the poor youngster Arthur (who so far hadn’t a deed to his name). Arthur, accordingly, in an access of Angevin anger, went and did deeds in the Holy Land, as the shortest cut into Innocent’s valuable affections, returning (as King-Consort of Hierusalem) just in time to find the Pope bored to death with John’s abominations, and only too happy (now) to do the straight thing. Armed with bulls and whatnot, and supported by Earl Hubert de Burgh, admiral and warden and regent of England, Arthur conquered England, drove John into life-sanctuary at his Cistercian Abbey of Beauli
eu, fought young Henry Lackland (commonly called Henry the Third) for the crown in ordeal of battle at Oxford; and reigned with enormous glory till the year of Our Lord 1255. And the history of it all was written, on King Arthur’s death, by old Hubert de Burgh, Constable of the Tower, who had been and done everything in England for a matter of sixty years or so, and (in extreme old age) fancied that he naturally knew more about facts than a certain little monk, Mr Matthew (formerly of Paris), who only listened to gossip and spied through the keyhole of his monastery, and wrote the stuff thus gleaned as what he had the insolence to call The Chronicle of England. This, Hubert de Burgh’s astoundingly circumstantial [narrative], bristling with personal knowledge of men famous and infamous, with statesmanlike policy, heraldry, archaeology, love, wit, sorrow, humour, courage, suffering, every high and noble human interest and activity, all illumined by the insight and pathos and power of his own personality, was embodied in a manuscript written in a very individual sort of Latin which Nicholas Crabbe pretended to have discovered in the Tower of London and to be translating in collaboration with his friend [Pirie-Gordon].

  A remarkable book, apparently. But where was it to be found? After it had been refused by Messrs Chatto the manuscript was sent, by Rolfe’s direction, to a friend in America; but letters sent to him were returned ‘Gone Away’. For a year I tried every hole or corner which my imagination and knowledge could suggest as the hiding place of Rolfe’s lost books, but without avail. At last I abandoned the pursuit. Somewhere, I was confident, they existed: I would wait until a swirl of the waters of time brought them to the shore.

  *

  There is one other of Rolfe’s books to which I have not referred in detail: that one in which Messrs Rider and Son manifested so timely an interest at the moment when the author first met Mr Justin, which appeared in print as the only tangible form of that ‘financial partnership’ in 1912, seven years after its predecessor, Don Tarquinio. This collaborated work bears on the title-page the inscription The Weird of the Wanderer, being the Papyrus records of some incidents in one of the previous lives of Mr Nicholas Crabbe. Here produced by Prospero and Caliban (Rolfe’s gibe against his friend, mentioned in Chapter XIII, prompted the name). Despite the duality of the psuedonym, the dust cover states that the book ‘is the work of a classical scholar, and an author of genius and originality, who conceals his identity under the nom-de-plume of Prospero and Caliban’; and the publisher’s catalogue bound in at the end gives Rolfe’s name alone as the author. There is certainly no trace of ‘genius’ in this undistinguished work, which narrates in the first person the adventures of Nicholas Crabbe, of Crabs Herborough, Kent, after he has acquainted himself with the magic incantations of ancient Egypt, and seeks, by their means, to commune with the dead. His command of spells fails him at a crucial point, and he is carried back through time to an earlier incarnation of himself as Odysseus. The passage describing the translation has, more than any other in the book, a touch of Rolfe’s excellence: ‘I saw the histories of mortal men of many different races being enacted before my eyes . . . kings and queens and emperors and republicans and patricians and plebeians swept in reverse order across my view. . . . Time rushed backwards in tremendous panoramas. Great men died before they won their fame. Kings were deposed before they were crowned. Nero and the Borgias and Cromwell and Asquith and the Jesuits enjoyed eternal infamy and then began to earn it. My motherland . . . melted into barbaric Britain; Byzantion melted into Rome; Venice into Henetian Altino; Hellas into innumerable migrations. Blows fell; and then were struck.’ But though there are some interesting turns of phrase, the book, as a whole, is a failure, marked by continual pedantry of expression, and by insufferably jocose footnotes. I might have concluded, from the deterioration evident in this book, that Rolfe’s later years were marked by a decline in his literary powers, had not The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, and those startling Venice letters, emphatically proved otherwise.

  CHAPTER 20: THE END OF THE QUEST

  In 1927 my friend Millard died. The Quest for Corvo had been almost at a standstill for months; with Millard’s passing it altogether stopped. Sometimes after dinner I turned a contemplative eye to the files and papers that I had purchased from the Rev. Stephen Justin; sometimes I looked again at those painful Venice letters; I re-read Hadrian; more frequently I speculated whether I should ever find the lost manuscripts of the unlucky, gifted man who had occupied my mind for so long. But nothing happened; I made no progress; without having lost interest I had lost incentive to pursue a search which for the moment I could see no way to advance. Such hope as remained to me rested on the unusual beauty of Rolfe’s written manuscripts, which, judging by those I had seen, were not likely to be thrown away by anyone with eyes in his head.

  And then, one fine Spring morning, a message came to my room to ask if I would see a Mr Gregory, who had called with an introduction from Shane Leslie to ask questions about Baron Corvo. Mr Gregory (or, as he was formally announced, Mr Maundy Gregory) proved to be a plump, rubicund, middle-sized man in the fifties, with an expensive flower in his buttonhole, an air of constant good-living, an affable smile, a glittering watchchain, good clothes and (as I noticed when he sat down) very beautiful boots. His business was briefly stated. He had read the works of Baron Corvo with fanatical admiration, my own article (published by Mr Desmond MacCarthy after my disagreement with Herbert Rolfe) with zest; and meeting Mr Leslie by chance, had been advised by him to seek me out as the source of further knowledge. His visit was sufficiently explained; yet a certain watchfulness in his manner, an expression of worldliness far beyond mere literary curiosity, seemed to hint at something more. I felt instinctively that this resplendent personage would take a part in my Quest; I did not guess how completely, for a time, it was to be identified with him.

  I produced the Corvo manuscripts, which were the motive of Mr Gregory’s call; and his admiration was undissembled and knew (apparently) no bounds. He gazed at the letters and books I produced for his inspection with that open envy which is the pleasantest form of flattery to a collector. The multicoloured letters to Grant Richards moved him to reverence, the Venice correspondence to awe. My reserve vanished before such pertinacious and tactful amiability, like mist before the sun; I began to like Mr Gregory.

  Then, with a curious and rather attractive diffidence, my visitor asked if I would consider selling, him one of my less important treasures. He could not hope, he conceded, that I would part with any of the major manuscripts; but perhaps I could spare a fragment or a duplicate? Money was no object, he added, almost regretfully, as he turned over again the leaves of The Weird of the Wanderer in Corvo’s beautiful handwriting. Actually I had no particular wish to sell anything that morning; but something in his hint that he was immensely wealthy, a peculiar challenge in his eyes as he made it, prompted me to pass him, more in jest than in earnest, a small poem of Rolfe’s composition into his hand, and say ‘You can have that for £20.’ Without hesitation Mr Maundy Gregory’s hand went to his pocket; a thick gold-edged wallet appeared and was opened; four five-pound notes were taken from an impressive wad; and ‘I am most grateful to you,’ he murmured.

  I was as much astonished as I was delighted. At the rate I had charged Mr Gregory for this single poem, my shelf of Corvo manuscripts was worth more than a thousand pounds, a pleasant reflection for a poor man. But I knew perfectly well that they were worth no such sum, and that I had grossly overcharged for the poem. I said so. To no effect: Mr Gregory smiled mysteriously again and repeated that money was no object to him, and that he was very grateful for the chance to acquire a unique specimen of the work of his favourite writer.

  We parted after more than an hour’s talking, with mutual asseverations of goodwill, and an undertaking on his part to lunch with me a few days later. As I escorted him to the door a waiting taxicab drew forward from beyond, and without a word my visitor stepped in. ‘Goodness,’ I exclaimed, ‘has that cab been waiting for you all this time?’ ‘Oh yes,’ r
eplied Mr Gregory, ‘You see, I own it.’ And with a bland salutation, but no direction to the chauffeur, he drove away.

  I telephoned to ask Shane Leslie what he knew of his impressive friend; but without learning much. Shane had met Maundy Gregory at a dinner-party, and, the conversation turning on Corvo, had given him my name. I waited with interest for our next meeting.

  Punctually to the moment (for the only time in our acquaintance) Mr Gregory arrived to keep his luncheon appointment. Champagne seemed the appropriate drink for so expensive an individual, and I was not surprised when he admitted a preference for it over other wines. I tried tactfully to learn something of my visitor. Did he own a fleet of taxicabs? No, he explained, only one, which even now waited without. He used it instead of a private car for the reason that a car waiting outside a door was easily recognized, whereas a taxicab passed unnoticed. But why did he need to pass unnoticed? I persisted. He gave no direct answer, but I gathered that there were important reasons why Mr Maundy Gregory’s movements should not be proclaimed.

  In a dozen ways during lunch I became aware that I was talking to a very rich and influential man. It was not the gold cigarette case he produced (a gift from the King of Greece), nor his superb sleeve links (platinum balls covered with diamonds), nor the beautiful black pearl in his tie which produced this impression of vast wealth, so much as the implication behind everything he said that whatever he wished to do or to possess was, so far as money was concerned, a settled thing. He displayed no reluctance to talk about himself. For example, he told me that he lunched every day at the Ambassador Club, never alone, and that every day at a quarter to one two bottles of champagne were put on ice for him. I learned that he possessed two yachts, a house in London, another on the river, and a flat in Brighton. Without in the least boasting he let me know that his library contained many rare books, his cellar much fine wine. Of all these things he spoke quite calmly, and with a friendly, flattering assumption that thenceforth I should share in them.