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

by A. J. A. Symons

  Corvo’s self-control when he was in a rage was my despair. He turned white and his tongue became more venomous, but he never raised his voice and he was even more deliberate in his speech. I once broke a maulstick over his head. Not a muscle of his face moved and not a word did he utter. I wished the maulstick had been a scaffold pole.

  One Sunday afternoon after a little skirmish we both sat reading. The door and windows were closed, and the stove was burning full blast. I opened the door and he shut it. I opened a window and he shut it. I shut the door of the stove to diminish the draught and he opened it. (Neither of us had spoken.) I felt that I was losing, and I was fast losing my self-control. What could I do next? My eye fell upon a jar of water in which the brushes were soaked. I picked it up, and, lifting up the lid of the stove, poured the contents over the red-hot cinders. There was an explosion and I was half-blinded by the steam and ashes. When I recovered my sight, I looked at Corvo. He hadn’t budged. He only interrupted his reading from time to time to blow the ashes off his book. I had lost again. To keep up appearances I read on for another half-hour, but I went home with murder in my heart.

  I know he took pleasure in provoking me.

  We had been speaking of the resemblance we saw in some of our acquaintances to certain animals, quadruped and biped. ‘What am I?’ he asked. ‘A porcupine,’ I answered promptly; ‘you are so beastly prickly! And I?’ ‘A badly broken-in young colt.’ I think we were both right.

  One reconciliation was brought about in a most extraordinary manner. He had written me half a dozen letters in his most virulent style. The last had goaded me to fury. ‘Now it’s your turn, Corvo, and you’re going to have it,’ I said to myself. I didn’t spare him. I called him a consummate humbug and many other things. When I had finished I thought ‘This is an end to you and I’m jolly glad.’ I gave my letter to the girl when she went to do Corvo’s room. In a quarter of an hour a boy came with an answer. It ran: ‘Gorgeous! Drop whatever you are doing and come round at once. I’ve a bottle of nectar awaiting you. Corvo.’ I was mystified. I had said things calculated to bring him round with a tomahawk, and here he was asking me to pass a convivial evening. I went round. He was prancing about the room, my letter in his hand. His welcome was most cordial. He filled my pipe and poured out a glass of Chartreuse for me. (Fr Beauclerk occasionally made him a present of a bottle of liqueur.) He read my letter aloud, chortling over my most malignant passages. Was he making game of me I wondered? Ought I to crack him over the head with the bottle? When he came to the end of the letter, he said ‘It’s splendid, Giovannino. I couldn’t have done much better myself.’ The man really was delighted. We had a jolly evening.

  In his attitude to women he was peculiar. Here are a few of his sayings regarding them:

  ‘Women are a necessity at times, but as a rule they are superfluous.’

  ‘A friend is necessary; influential acquaintances are useful; but never encumber yourself with a woman.’

  ‘The worst of a woman is that she expects you to make love to her, or to pretend to make love to her, first.’

  ‘What you can see to admire in the female form I don’t know. All those curves and protuberances that seem to fascinate you only go to show what nature intended her for – all that she’s fit for – breeding.’

  ‘There’s no more loathsome sight in nature than a pregnant woman.’

  But despite these hard sayings, and others from early Christian writers which he sometimes repeated at table, he was so far interested in women that at intervals he would pay a visit to Rhyl or Manchester to seek what your namesake Arthur Symons calls ‘the chance romances of the street’. On his return he would tell me of these experiences at some length. They did not seem to give him a great deal of satisfaction; on one occasion he asked me if I thought he was impotent. In such matters he was an enigma, and I could not understand him. He would go to mass every Sunday and to confession and communion every month, but quite as regularly he would make his pleasure trip.

  When Corvo had to begin another banner, he would go to Rhyl for ‘inspiration’. After a Turkish bath and luncheon, he would have himself wheeled in a bath chair up and down the front for two or three hours and then go in search of a ‘chance romance’. I more than once suggested, rather maliciously, that he would have done better to make a retreat.

  His linguistic capacity, where I could test it, was far from marked. He asserted a knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian, but I soon found out that he had little or no Greek or German; and I soon came to suspect that his other claims were no better founded. At all events he gave me no encouragement whatsoever when (languages being a hobby of mine) I took up Italian. Though I frequently tried to draw him by asking the gender of a noun or tense of some irregular verb, he would never answer me. ‘I know Italian,’ he said; ‘you should learn languages I don’t know, and so increase our common fund of knowledge.’ In the same way he declined to converse in French with a visitor who was more accustomed to that tongue than to English, and sat at our table. But he may have been able to read more Italian and French than he could speak; vocally at least he was no linguist. He knew enough Latin to read the Missal and the Breviary fairly well.

  On one occasion I brutally told him that he had a wonderful knack of making people believe he knew thoroughly a subject of which he had only the most superficial knowledge. He took that for a compliment and said: ‘That is the art of arts’.

  Corvo professed to have a horror of reptiles. He told me that he had once fallen into a trance after stumbling over a lizard, and had very nearly been buried alive. (This he worked up into a story and published in the Wide World Magazine under the title How I was Buried Alive. Corvo claimed that the first paragraph was autobiographical, and he alludes to his Imperial godfather in it.) I thought this was another of his ‘tall’ stories, but later I was persuaded there was some truth in it. One Sunday afternoon we had taken a walk down to the river, and when we got back we found the house empty, it being church time. I climbed over the yard door and got through the kitchen window, then I opened the house door for Corvo and went upstairs. Suddenly I heard a blood-curdling shriek, and on rushing downstairs I found him in the kitchen, his face as white as chalk, his mouth twitching. He was staring fixedly at something I did not at first see. I followed his gaze, and under the table I saw a little toad. I spoke to him, shouted to him, but he did not answer. I got a chair and pushed him into it, and he sat there for more than an hour quite motionless except for the working of his mouth. When he had recovered enough to stand and walk, I accompanied him to the studio and laid him on his bed. He fell at once into a deep sleep, and when I went round early the next morning to see how he was, I found him still asleep. I didn’t wake him, and he slept on till eleven without stirring once. When I questioned him later, he told me he remembered nothing after first seeing the toad.

  Mr Holden’s vivid account, though written from such close quarters, is that of a man who was young, perhaps younger than his years, at the time of the incidents which he describes with such fidelity; and, naturally, he was more concerned with his own problems than with those of the strange man whom chance had thrown into his company. Nevertheless he had brought Rolfe to life for me more completely, perhaps because he knew him more closely, than any other of my correspondents. And he had answered the most urgent of my questions. Rolfe is revealed for the first time as a writer in fact and intention; for his conscious habit of letter-writing must have been the whetstone of his literary power, just as his tall stories were the restless signs of stirred imagination – though there were obviously other reasons for them also.

  For nearly two years this fantastic friendship continued to develop; and during that time ‘Fr Austin’, despite his vagaries of conversation, patiently continued to paint his banners, which are still the pride of the church in which they hang. Did he begin to tire of his six-winged serafini, his four archangels, ‘St Peter in scarlet’, ‘St Gregory in purple’, and (favourite su
bject) Chaucer’s ‘Swete Seynt Hew’? It would seem so; for now the Holywell adventure takes a darker turn.

  Early in 1897 (Mr Holden continues) I noticed that the relations between Corvo and Fr Beauclerk were less cordial. My aunt told me that Fr Beauclerk always spoke of Corvo as ‘My Old Man of the Seas’, and was most anxious to get rid of him.

  Fr Beauclerk dropped in upon us one day and after wishing me good morning asked me to take a walk for half-an-hour. When I returned I could see that something was amiss. As soon as Corvo and I were alone he said: ‘You and I will soon be off now.’ ‘On tramp?’ I asked. ‘No, in a first-class railway carriage,’ he answered. There was a long silence. Corvo was thinking hard. At last he looked at me in a very strange manner and said slowly: ‘You have often been here when Fr Beauclerk has called, and you have heard him say that I was to have £— (I have forgotten the amount) for each banner I painted?’ I replied: ‘I have very often been here when Fr Beauclerk has dropped in, but never once have I heard him speak of paying a penny for one of your banners. I have always understood that he was finding you work until you got on your feet again. And this is the first time,’ I continued, ‘that you have ever told me you expected to be paid.’ ‘So you have gone over to the enemy, have you?’ he asked. This time I spoke calmly. ‘Look here, Corvo,’ I said, ‘you know that ever since I first met you I have never asked you one question about yourself or your affairs. I tell you plainly that I don’t know anything of any arrangement you may have come to with Fr Beauclerk. If you have a quarrel with him, I am neutral.’ He gave me a look I remember well. ‘There are a few things that belong to you here,’ he said; ‘I will thank you to take them and yourself away. You shall hear from me again.’ That was my final break with Corvo.

  *

  Before transcribing Fr Beauclerk’s account of these occurrences, I quote again from the story in which ‘Fr Austin’ set out the affair as he saw it, or tried to see it. The main villain of the story is, of course, the Priest, Fr Beauclerk, who is thus described:

  His religion consisted of eternal principles modified to suit temporal requirements. But he had a good heart, and he meant well. Ladies said he was the most graceful man they had ever seen, and so he was till this story’s middle, after which he jerked like an electrified marionette. . . . [He] craved notoriety . . . [and] was unhappy unless he was thumping a tub or punching a pillow before the public. . . . So he organized pious prances, or crawls, according to his mood, which were neither Salvationist nor Ecclesiastical, nor fish, nor fowl, nor good red herring; but whose fashion was so deliberately frantic, and of so purposeful a violence, that his end was gained and immediate conspicuousness assured.

  He commissioned the Nowt to paint a set of banners, promising that, if he would be content to work hard, on the bare necessities of life, for a time, he would deal very generously with him later. The Nowt put his back into this business, and laboured early and late, leading the life of a pig at his patron’s direction and expense, hoping for better things bye and bye; and, after nearly a couple of years, he had produced a series of ecclesiastical paintings of a kind which everyone admitted to be something above the ordinary.

  Then, the Vicar of Sewers End refused to pay for the work that had been done; actually saying that, as no legal contract existed (the Nowt always trusted to the honour of clerical patrons), he acknowledged no obligation to pay an honorarium, but was willing to give a few pounds in charity. This the Nowt emphatically scorned, and sent a statement to the Vicar’s diocesan, who summoned that cleric to explain. What kind of apologia his reverence made is not exactly known . . . but he subsequently instructed the Nowt to set down his actual claim in writing, for the Episcopal consideration. Accordingly the Nowt wrote that the Vicar had had, from him, compositions including one hundred and five figures; that he (the Vicar) had taken ten guineas from a private donor for one of those hundred and five figures: and that, on this scale, the Vicar’s valuation of the series amounted to one thousand and fifty guineas. But, he added, for his incessant and painful labours of twenty-one months, he was willing to accept an honorarium of seven hundred guineas; and from that sum he would make an offering to the Vicar’s charities of two hundred guineas. Further, to show that he was only fighting for the principle that he deserved honestly earned wages, and not the insult of proffered charitable relief, he said he would accept any sum as honorarium, even a single six-shillings-and-eightpence.

  The Vicar replied that he would pay nothing, except as charity or friendship; whereupon the Nowt promptly skipped in next door and instructed a solicitor to issue a writ for the full value of the work in question.

  After a month [the Vicar] climbed down very suddenly indeed; and, pleading poverty, offered a sum of fifty pounds as honorarium. The Nowt took it, in accordance with his promise; and paid it straightway to an institution of the diocese; for, having gained his point (honorarium not charity) he wished to act disinterestedly; and then, without much ado, he joined the staff of the local paper, intending to get a living by journalism till the dawn of brighter days.

  But here he reckoned without the Vicar . . . [who] assiduously set himself to carry out his threats of ruin and revenge, first by counsel, and secondly by example. His counsel took the form of ‘insinuendo’ derogatory to the Nowt’s employer and his paper, and the successful corruption of his printer; and his example consisted of the severest form of boycott, with the refusal of the rites of the Church. Fired by this . . . spark the Vicar’s parishioners withdrew their advertisements; his officials openly robbed the Nowt and his employer, and conducted machinations against their business, all with the Vicar’s cognisance and tacit consent; the tradespeople refused to supply their household . . . the Vicar had the Nowt county-courted for a debt incurred by the Vicar’s authority.

  And the Nowt preserved an equal mind and demeanour; and took neither notice of nor action against . . . the Vicar, or any of his gang, beyond nailing up in black and white a record of each villainy as it occurred, and driving [them] to fury by contemptuously refusing to correspond, and by a sort of heartless immutable adherence to his usual habits, careless of or indifferent to each manifestation of the malignant spite of his foes.

  ‘The malignant spite of his foes!’ Even without the letters that Fr Beauclerk had sent me I should have realized, I think, how completely Rolfe was his own enemy. Vincent O’Sullivan’s words recurred to me; ‘A man with only the very vaguest sense of realities.’ It was true. When the film came over the eyes of his mind, Rolfe saw himself as a permanently picturesque figure oppressed by a circle of enemies jealous of his talents or exhibiting their own meanness. It was his compensation for the maddening sense of failure, for his poverty, for his inability to dominate circumstances as he desired. Not, however, always. For those who stop on the hither side of insanity, there must be moments of self-realization, moments when an interior mentor whispers ‘I am wrong; they are right’. And, as I saw by his letters of that period, despite his constantly-expressed conviction of his utter rightness, Rolfe had spasms when he saw things as they were. But they passed; the shutters came down again; and then he was once more ‘the Nowt’ ringed round by foes. His letters tell an interior story which is very different from the surface meaning that he meant them to wear.

  Loyola House

  15 March 1896

  Dear Fr Beauclerk,

  Many thanks for your welcome letter and Postal Orders.

  Also for the damper which was certainly needed. If I have been unduly elated, forgive me. I will try not to do it again. But I could not help feeling pleased with what I have done because I felt that I had contended successfully with many difficulties. At the same time I by no means infer that I have anything like reached my goal.

  I never shall, for the goal goes higher always. I only mean that I have gone up one little step. Nor do I claim the smallest credit for that. It is the saints who have deigned to impart some modicum of their radiance. As I correspond more closely with the graces they impart so
much the more beautiful will my work become. The difficulty is for a worldly wretch like me to detach myself entirely. There was a hypnotizer once who could not hypnotize me and from whom I rose from the cataleptic trance solely on account of my strong selfishness.

  Nor is it for want of diligence that I fail if continuous work is diligence. But I do not concentrate all the time and so I fail. Faces? Yes. They are only the shadow of what I have seen. And I fail to reach the reality for the reasons of hurry and human respect and worry. And really dear Father Beauclerk my worldly worries are very bad indeed and lately I have felt that I must shriek or burst. Also I have developed a violent and raging temper, blazing out at what I suppose are small annoyances, and overwhelming people with a torrent of scathing and multilingual fury. I make amends for it afterwards but it leaves me weak in mind and body. It’s the Mr Hyde surging up.

  But I will take care not to show you ugly or horrid faces again. I will stick at them and pray at them till they are right.

  I think if I had a clear mind I could do better. Well I know that. But perhaps it would be more creditable to do better for all my obstacles! I will try. There’s a Retreat at Manresa in Holy Week. I made my first and last one there in 1886.

  Your faithful son in Xt,

  F. A.

  P.S. I see that I have failed again to put down what I really want to say. It is this chained impotence, this powerlessness to reach the point I am after that makes me chafe, and I boil inwardly the more because outwardly I insist upon keeping a demeanour most marble and which I find people call proud and cynical! ! ! (or as one of your fathers cuttingly said, ‘I’m afraid he’s a genius’! Afraidl ! ! ! !) Enclosed is a Litany I have written. It’s badly put down causa incapacitate meo (can’t write Latin now!) but you should hear me play it. It’s a duet for a high bass and counter-tenor with chorus, and is meant to be accompanied on the strings. There’s a magnificent instrument yclept citherna or theorbo on which it would make you faint for joy. But it would be lovely played on six small harps in a procession. If you can get someone good to play it to you you may get some idea of it, and if you like it perhaps you will let me offer it to you. I would be glad. I did better things which are now illuminated on vellum at Oscott, but I was young and had not had ten years of hell then.