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

by A. J. A. Symons

  Now the fun begins. Unexpected though the transformation is, Rose instantly adjusts himself, and shows his will to rule. He is not in the least abashed by the extraordinary dignity conferred upon him, and carries himself with enigmatical equanimity all through the long ceremony of consecration. At the conferring of the episcopal ring he annoys the Cardinals by demanding an amethyst instead of the proffered emerald. When asked what pontifical name he would choose:

  ‘Hadrian the Seventh’: the response came unhesitatingly, undemonstratively.

  ‘Your Holiness would perhaps prefer to be called Leo, or Pius, or Gregory, as is the modern manner?’ the Cardinal-Dean inquired with imperious suavity.

  ‘The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth; the present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our Own impulse, We command.’

  Then there was no more to be said.

  Hadrian’s next act is to require the opening of a blocked window looking out over the city, one of those blocked up in 1870 in the dispute between the Papal and temporal powers, and not opened since. And, despite the protests of the Cardinals, opened it is, and from it a tiny-seeming figure in silver and gold, radiant in the sun, gives the Apostolic Benediction to the City and the World.

  It is not necessary to follow the story in detail through all its convolutions to the end. During his two decades of wandering misery, George Arthur Rose, driven in upon himself, has had plenty of time in which to clarify his theories and wishes; now he has the chance to give them effect, and he does. He breaks the self-imposed Papal obligation of remaining within the Vatican walls by walking in procession to his coronation. He astonishes the world by an Epistle to all Christians, and by a Bull in which, on the text that ‘My Kingdom is not of this World’, he makes formal and unconditional renunciation of all claim to temporal sovereignty. He denounces Socialism and the principle of equality in an Epistle to the English; and in further demonstration of the unwordliness which should be the mark of God’s minister, sells the Vatican treasures for a vast sum, which he gives to the poor. Not the least interesting part of this section of the book is the interview which he gives to the Italian ambassador for the discussion of the world’s political future. Some of Fr. Rolfe’s guesses were very far from the fact, but looking back at them, as I did, after twenty years, the real shrewdness of his observation was very clear.

  Such a story is obviously a difficult one to bring to a conclusion; and Fr. Rolfe, with less plausibility than in other parts of his fantasy, relies upon the machinations of a disappointed woman and a corrupt Socialist agitator. The conspiracy between them, with blackmail based on a knowledge of Hadrian’s early life as its main object, is frustrated; and the baffled Comrade, in a fit of rage, shoots the Pope as he is returning to the Vatican. ‘How bright the sunlight was, on the warm grey stones, on the ripe Roman skins, on vermilion and lavender and blue and ermine and green and gold, on the indecent grotesque blackness of two blotches, on Apostolic whiteness and the rose of blood.’ The final words are worthy of their author: ‘Pray for the repose of his soul. He was so tired.’

  *

  The style in which Hadrian the Seventh is written is hardly less remarkable than the story it tells. Fr. Rolfe shares his hero’s liking for compound words; and his pages are studded with such inventions or adaptations as ‘tolutiloquence’, ‘contortuplicate’, ‘incoronation’, ‘noncurant’, ‘occession’, and ‘digladiator’. In constructing his sentences he sets his adverbs as far before both parts of the verb as he can; and though he often lapses into learning and Latin, the most homely expressions are not disdained in his elaborate paragraphs. But these peculiarities do not rob him of a real eloquence; as, for instance, when describing Hadrian’s private visit to St Peter’s:

  They passed through innumerable passages and descended stairs, emerging in a chapel where lights burned about a tabernacle of gilded bronze and lapis lazuli. Here He paused while His escort unlocked the gates of the screen. Once through that, He sent-back the guard to his station; but He Himself went on into the vast obscurity of the basilica. He walked very slowly: it was as though His eyes were wrapped in clear black velvet, so intense and so immense was the darkness. Then, very far away to the right, He saw as it were a coronal of dim stars glimmering – on the floor they seemed to be. He was in the mighty nave; and the stars were the ever-burning lamps surrounding the Confession. He slowly approached them. As He passed within them, He took one from its golden branch, and descended the marble steps. Here, He spread the cloak on the floor; placed the lamp beside it; and fell to prayer. Outside, in the City and the World, men played, or worked, or sinned, or slept. Inside, at the very tomb of the Apostle, the Apostle prayed.

  And Fr. Rolfe also has the secret of a staccato brilliance, of phrases that tell as much as the paragraphs of others; of such expressions as ‘that cold white candent voice which was more caustic than silver nitrate and more thrilling than a scream’; ‘miscellaneous multitudes paved the spaces with tumultuous eyes’; ‘they mean well; but their whole aim and object seems to be to serve God by conciliating Mammon.’

  Perhaps above all the astonishments of Hadrian the Seventh I ought to put its revelation of a temperament. Hadrian, as he is presented by his creator, is a superman in whom we are compelled to believe. The felinity of his retort, his ready command over words, the breadth of his vision, the noble unworldliness of his beliefs and bearing, his mixture of pride and humility, of gentle charity and ruthless reproof for error, his sensitiveness to form and hatred of ugliness, his steadfast and touching confidence in God and in himself; all these things unite to create a character as difficult to match as the story of his exploits.

  *

  Those who are susceptible to literary influence will have no difficulty in imagining the effect of Hadrian the Seventh upon my imagination and my interest. Other occupations seemed colourless by contrast with the necessity of learning more about Fr. Rolfe. Was he alive or dead? What else had he written? How was it that I had never heard of a man who had it in his power to write such a book as Hadrian the Seventh? Many years before (though I was, of course, unaware of the circumstance) a similar enthusiasm overcame Robert Hugh Benson after he had thrice read Hadrian. Benson’s admiration moved him to write a glowing letter to the author, which brought the two together in hectic friendship and enmity. Some such step occurred to me; but first I went to see Millard.

  Millard was pleased by my pleasure, and began to talk in his discursive fashion. Had I realized that the book was really an autobiography, that Rose was Rolfe himself, that half the incidents were based on his experiences, and most of the characters drawn from living men? Actually I had not; but, with that duplicity which we practise even to our oldest friends, I disguised my blindness. We talked round and round. I gathered that Rolfe was dead, that he was a spoiled priest, and that, rather mysteriously, he had written other books under the title or pseudonym of Baron Corvo. The news that Rolfe was Baron Corvo struck a chord of remembrance: vaguely I recalled having read a short story by that author which had seemed to me so excellent that I had intended, but forgotten, to seek out more of his work. Then from one of his tin boxes (Millard was a great man for files and cases, and could put his hand at a moment on any scrap or book, despite the seeming disorder of his shelves and floor) my friend produced a morocco-bound quarto. ‘Since you are becoming interested in Rolfe you had better read these too’, was his comment. The few sentences that caught my eye as I turned the pages were arresting; and I would have begun my reading then and there; but in his gently autocratic way Millard insisted upon my paying attention to his remarks, and not to the book, which I could read at leisure. I left the bungalow half-stifled with curiosity.

  How well I remember that midnight when, alone in my tiny study, I sat down to read Millard’s mysterious book. It contained, I found, typescripts of twenty-three long letters and two telegrams, forming a series addressed from Venice in the years 1909-10 to an unnamed correspondent; and as I r
ead my hair began to rise. Here, described with the frank felicity of Hadrian the Seventh, was an unwitting account, step by step, of the destruction of a soul. The idealism of George Arthur Rose, the generous sentiments and hopes for man and the world which distinguish Hadrian, were not to be found in these pages. On the contrary, they gave an account, in language that omitted nothing, of the criminal delights that waited for the ignoble sensualist to whom they were addressed, in the Italian city from which his correspondent wrote. Only lack of money, it appeared, prevented the writer from enjoying an existence compared with which Nero’s was innocent, praiseworthy, and unexciting: indeed, it seemed that even without money he had successfully descended to depths from which he could hardly hope to rise. Throughout all the letters one purpose was visible: they were an entreaty to their recipient to bring his wealth to a market where it would buy full value. Rolfe could answer for the wares he offered: he had tested them, and he would willingly be guide to this earthly paradise. An undercurrent of appeals for immediate aid, for money, money, money, ran through the series, mixed with odd fragments of beautiful description, and sudden, bitter attacks on individuals with whom Fr. Rolfe had been concerned in one way or another. It would have seemed impossible that this could be the private correspondence of the author of Hadrian the Seventh had not the signature of his style rung in every sentence. What shocked me about these letters was not the confession they made of perverse sexual indulgence: that phenomenon surprises no historian. But that a man of education, ideas, something near genius, should have enjoyed without remorse the destruction of the innocence of youth; that he should have been willing for a price to traffic in his knowledge of the dark byways of that Italian city; that he could have pursued the paths of lust with such frenzied tenacity: these things shocked me into anger and pity. Pity; for behind the ugliness of their boasts and offers, these letters told a harrowing story of a man sliding desperately downhill, unable to pay for clothes, light or food; living like a rat in the bottom of an empty boat, slinking along side streets in misery at frustrated talents and missed chances, with no money in his pocket or meat in his belly, who had come at last to convince himself that every man’s hand was against him. With the letters were two telegrams, one of them from the English consul to say ‘Fr. Rolfe in hospital dangerously ill asks you wire ten pounds urgent necessities’. The errant Catholic was given the last Sacrament but recovered from that illness brought on by exposure and lack of food. The last of all the letters in point of date was perhaps the saddest. As despair deepened in the heart of the lost Englishman in Venice, his demands decreased; and in the end he subdued all his persuasiveness to plead for five pounds. ‘For God’s sake send me five pounds’, concluded the concluding letter. Five pounds. . . . A slip in Millard’s hand ended the story: ‘Rolfe died two years later, 1913, aetat 53.’

  It took me two hours to read those extraordinary letters; and when I had, I was unable to sleep. I could not banish from my mind the thought of that gifted and intellectual man dragged down by his kink of temperament to perish in shame, want and exile. Horrible though the letters were, they possessed all the graces of the book that had so charmed me: the spirit and the content differed, not the style. As I lay restlessly turning from side to side, I realized suddenly that my curiosity was still unslaked. What was the course and cause of this tragic decline? In Hadrian and the letters I had (what I took to be) the opening and the close of a career. What story lay in between? The desire to know swelled in me so urgently that I almost rose from bed to telephone to Millard that I was coming back; only the certainty of being roundly and rightly cursed in his heavy voice deterred me. But I went next morning.

  CHAPTER 2: THE CLUES

  Millard was very willing to tell what he knew about Fr. Rolfe, whose life and books had formed one of his main amusements for many years. But he warned me that his information was not extensive, and that it had already been used by Mr Shane Leslie for a biographical account in the London Mercury. First he produced the originals of the Venice letters, which I had read in typescript. They were hardly less surprising in their physical form than in their content: written on paper of the oddest shapes and sizes, in the most beautiful handwriting I had ever seen, in red, blue, green, purple, and black inks, presumably chosen as occasion chanced. So far as appearance went, they were not unworthy of the author of Hadrian; but I could not resist a shudder at the sight of those cries from the depths. Next Millard handed me a proof of Mr Leslie’s account of Rolfe; and, finally, a batch of letters and press-cuttings which it had evoked. My friend assured me that when I had mastered these documents I should know as much as he did, and probably as much as anyone living, of the man who had so signally roused my curiosity. He was wrong in that belief: there was much more to be learned; but I shall always be grateful to him for giving me the first clues.

  I lost no time in examining the dossier. Earliest in point of date came a cutting from the Star newspaper of 29 October 1913 which read:

  A curiously interesting and almost mysterious character has passed away in the person of Mr Frederick Rolfe, who was found dead in his bed at Venice a few mornings since. Mr Rolfe was the author, under his own name, of various novels, in which an extraordinary amount of very ill-assimilated learning was displayed, and the life of the Italian priesthood, rural as well as at the Curia, was portrayed with an insight and appearance of exact knowledge which impressed the critics.

  Under the name of Baron Corvo, an Italian title which he claimed to have acquired through the gift of some estates by a former Duchess of Cesarini-Sforza, he wrote verses and controversial articles on Catholic ritual and Italian politics. He used to state that he had been at one time in priest’s orders, but this, we believe, was denied by the authorities of his Church.

  A devout Catholic in doctrine, he was at issue with the hierarchy over Italian matters, being a strong opponent of the temporal power. He compiled an elaborate genealogical table to show that the King of Italy was the legitimate King of England, and fantastic as the idea may appear, the scholarship and research involved were frankly acknowledged by antiquarian and heraldic criticism.

  Mr Rolfe resided for some years as Baron Corvo at Christchurch, Hampshire, where he was noted for outbursts of elaborate expenditure, alternating with an extreme asceticism. Latterly, at Venice, he had led a life of the latter character exclusively. He will, perhaps, chiefly be remembered for his Stories Toto Told Me, a volume of contes which is remarkably illustrative of Italian peasant life.

  Next I turned to Mr Leslie’s article, which I read with close attention. Again I was astonished; and an underlying note of sarcasm which I had half felt in the Star report was explained. ‘Curiously interesting’ and ‘almost mysterious’ were understatements when applied to Rolfe. His career was at least as extraordinary as his book; his adventures matched those of Gil Blas. I began to see why his name was not remembered: apparently he had passed through life in a state of opposition and exasperation, giving and taking offence without cause or scruple, until even his friends feared and avoided him. Despite Mr Leslie’s epigrammatic sparkle and amusing verve, the tale of Rolfe’s tribulations, self-caused though they largely were, made very melancholy reading. Here was indeed a tragic comedy, more sombre and fantastic than I had expected or hoped. From the beginning, it seemed, this unfortunate man’s temperament and circumstances had warred with his talent. Frustration and poverty had been the condition of his early years as of his last; tutorships, odd jobs, and charity were the actual lot of the dreamer who (in his dreams) had ruled the world. It was not in Venice only that he had starved. Such hardships and disappointments would have turned most men crazy; small wonder that in the end friendship with Rolfe became ‘a minor experiment in demonology’. I concurred, as I read, in Mr Leslie’s verdict: ‘A self-tortured and defeated soul, who might have done much, had he been born in the proper era or surroundings’. But though I concurred in his verdict, there were a dozen tantalizing gaps in his narrative which left my curiosity
rampant. What was Rolfe’s lineage or upbringing? How had he come to be so strangely stranded in Venice? Could nothing more have been done to help a man whose talent must have been obvious? Obstinate, indeed, as well as obvious; for in the course of a life which can have had few equals for uncertainty and discomfort, Fr. Rolfe had somehow contrived to produce at least four books beside Hadrian: books which sounded, in Mr Leslie’s descriptions, hardly less interesting than the one I already knew. There was, for example, Don Tarquinio, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of a young nobleman in the company of the Borgia, A.D. 1495: a tale composed, so I gathered, in language even more elaborate and mannered than that of Hadrian, and with a plot very little less striking. Evidently Rolfe was a profound mediaevalist, for he had also written Chronicles of the House of Borgia, an historical work packed with obscure learning and tart epigrams. More attractive still sounded that volume of Stories Toto Told Me mentioned in the Star obituary, described as ‘the most amazing, fantastical, whimsical, bizarre, erratic and hare-brained of books’, written in an ‘orchidaceous’ vocabulary full of fancy coinages and individualistic spelling. Rolfe had even translated Omar Khayyam (from Nicolas’ French text, not from the Persian) into so-called ‘diaphotick’ verse designed to emphasize the humour and sarcasm of the original.