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

by A. J. A. Symons

  Naturally I refused to inquire of the thirteen enemies, and answered that I should probably find them hateful, egotistical, wishful to chain divine things down to petty personal limitations. I denied that I was under the influence of any of the Catholic ‘connections’ which I had mentioned in my letter. I said that I wished to take Corvo as I found him, in spite of enemies. I even said, I remember, that the mystery of personal magnetism was all-wonderful, and that if it was propitious, I was the Divine Friend – I claimed the title – to the death. (I was much younger then!) I begged Rolfe to confide in my honour.

  At this Rolfe melted, and soon after came to see me in my studio at Westminster. When he arrived, I realized that he was not the kind of being my imagination had painted. In person he was somewhat short and spare; he wore glasses which accentuated a myopic expression; moreover there was a cold shyness in his manner, due, as I found out later, to the fear and mistrust which were part of his general make-up. He told me fragments of his story, mostly his experiences at the Scots College of Rome. I was amazed to hear of his penurious circumstances. It was somewhat of a shock to learn that the erstwhile patron of an interesting band of followers, living in a noble house and touring the Italian coast for pleasure, was now so straitened that he had lately been writing Chronicles of the House of Borgia ‘in conditions resembling serfdom’. From what he said I gathered that Rolfe was not in a position to stand out for respectable payment, so I suggested that he should employ an agent to look after his interests. It happened that I had seen in a literary column an announcement that Mr Stanhope Sprigge had left a publishing firm to set up on his own account as an author’s agent. I offered to see Mr Sprigge on Rolfe’s behalf. He agreed, and in the end I succeeded in interesting Mr Sprigge. When I next saw Rolfe he appeared greatly perturbed by his discovery that Sprigge was a Roman Catholic and member of a sodality at Brompton. There was evidently an uneasy suspicion in his mind that there was some backstairs reason for my suggestion and introduction. I assured him emphatically that I had no Jesuitical connections or leanings of any kind, and for the time being he was pacified. In later walks and talks he maintained that most of the offers of help and assistance he received could be traced back to a sinister intention to intern him and keep him ‘safely locked up’, and that even those Jesuits who were not bent on thwarting him in subtle unseen ways would not hesitate to ‘kick a stone in his path’.

  Indeed, he had very hard things to say of his fellow-Catholics. According to him, they did not behave in daily life as though they believed in the life to come, and he had a bitter but pleasurable anticipation of seeing them ‘fry in hell’. When things went wrong with him, his retort to Fate took the form of ‘SOMEBODY WILL HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS’. His own life ambition was to be a priest, and he could not understand the opposition that had barred his way. Priests in general he had a poor opinion of, and he spoke with scorn of the kind of conversation common to their gatherings – particularly of ‘priests’ stories’ of a certain shade of blue. His descriptions of his fellow students at the Scots College, and the Rector, Mgr Campbell (who deprived him of a dressing case with luxurious fittings on the score of worldly vanity), were devastating.

  In due course Rolfe came to my house at Elms Road, Clapham Common. During dinner, bearing in mind various references in In His Own Image (which it seems I misunderstood), I asked him whether I was right in thinking that he had been married. His answer was evasive.

  At the piano Rolfe proved himself a true and sensitive musician. He had a cult for the boy-saint William of Norwich, and had composed a lovely little hymn in his honour; I meant to get the music of it from him, but never did. He had genuine skill in transposing.

  Speaking of Elms Road is a reminder that in Hadrian the Seventh Rolfe evidently intended a lampoon of my humble self as Alfred Elms the painter – though his description of Elms’ work as a portraitist indicated a meretricious success that has evaded me. My wife instinctively disliked him, and unhesitatingly qualified him as a liar, a sponger, and sexually abnormal. He filled her with what she called ‘creepy loathing’.

  Rolfe always rolled his own cigarettes, and when in funds had his own ‘Corvo mixture’ made up at a little tobacco shop in Oxford. It had a heavy full flavour, evidently due to Latakia.

  He liked the romantic richness of the Italian tongue. I was amused at his praising the Italian version of Ben Hur. He spoke very little of literature in general. He enveloped himself in his own atmosphere, though he would occasionally quote with glee and admiration some happy phrase or purple patch.

  He lent me the manuscript of a draft version of his charming story of Don Tarquinio, a day in the life of a Roman nobleman.

  Later on he sent me the manuscript of another book, the diary (it pretended to be) of an Italian priest, Dom Gheraldo, in the service of one of the great Renaissance nobles. He had often spoken of it, and quoted from it. Indeed, he announced his intention of dedicating this interesting and extraordinary work to me. The facts about that flower of Rolfe’s patient genius must be narrated by others, but it seemed to me such a marvellous mosaic of apparently authentic detail that it could only have been secreted from intense and persistent observation, and that under very favourable circumstances. Wherever did he get it all? In my letters I cautiously sounded him as to his creative methods.

  The rationale of creative art is one of the most fascinating human problems, and Rolfe’s bizarre and elaborate artistry aroused my curiosity. Where did he get his material? He undoubtedly loved, with an almost passionate understanding, that period of life in Italy which formed the setting of Dom Gheraldo and I could not help wondering how much was invention, how much divination, how much a systematic ‘culture’ of such fragments and unconsidered trifles as his reading and research enabled him to pick up. That much he shrewdly kept to himself, but in answer to a letter in which I formulated as nearly as I deemed justifiable the idea of mediumship, I practically got an admission that the divination had to wait on favourable conjunctions.

  It is possible that the inception of the Dom Gheraldo book was an incident that Rolfe related to me as occurring in Rome when he was in the town palace of the Duchess Sforza-Cesarini, who was employing workmen to take up the pavement of the ground-floor in connection with the installation of a new calorifer. In the course of the work a deep oubliette was discovered. The household was in a great state of excitement when the workmen who had descended reported the discovery of a skeleton, which was intensified on his remains being brought to light, when the skull was seen to be pierced. ‘That proved him to have been a priest’, said Rolfe, and explained to me that this form of assassination was reserved for the priesthood. The hero in the unpublished book I have mentioned perished by that means.

  More than twenty-five years later I read Mr Shane Leslie’s essay in which he describes a visit paid by Rolfe to W. T. Stead, ‘who, before testing Rolfe’s literary talents, handed a penny held by the Baron to his medium Julia, who from another room furnished the oracular reply, “He is a blackguard! He has a hole in his head.” Mr Stead thereupon chased and seized Rolfe until he could feel his cranium, when behold there was a perceptible hole to be found in the skull! He was accordingly dismissed as a blackguard, and for once Rolfe was baffled by powers more sinister than his own.’

  Julia’s verdict, ‘He has a hole in his head’, amazes me. Surely there was more than coincidence in this? Was Rolfe a modem projection of Dom Gheraldo, or had he built up a dream-entity of such psychic stability that it coincided with himself – or what?

  What a pity, by the way, that Dom Gheraldo (I am not quite sure if that was the name – it was also called An Ideal Content, I fancy) is lost. Perhaps you will be able to trace that queer freak of Rolfe’s fancy, which is unlike any other of his books in the number and variety of its fanciful words. I never knew whether the proposed dedication took any definite form, for the simple reason that Rolfe chose to break with me, and this must be the conclusion of my random recollections.

&n
bsp; MALEDICTORY

  I wish I could have spelt it with a V! It came about thus. I never heard much of Rolfe’s dealings with Stanhope Sprigge, but I understood he had a manuscript to ‘place’ which got mislaid. In the course of time Rolfe asked me to send him a statement of the various small sums of money I had advanced him, or expended on his behalf. After I had done this, I received a postcard from him written in green ink which concluded thus: ‘When the manuscript which was purloined by your accomplice Sprigge has been returned to me, it will be time enough for me to consider the settling of your bill.’ !!!

  SIC TRANSIVIT

  CHAPTER 11: THE QUEER COLLABORATOR

  All through my Quest for Corvo chance helped astonishingly; it came to my aid now. Grant Richards, into the well of whose memory I plunged frequent buckets, recollected as an unimportant detail the name of Sholto Douglas as that of a friend of Rolfe’s. The name Sholto is, I knew, a very usual one in the Douglas family; I had met three. One of them I had encountered once only: at a dinner given to the two of us by my friend Vincent Marrot, a dinner made memorable by Madeira of the year 1803. The Sholto Douglas then encountered was, I felt unreasonably certain, the one known to Mr Grant Richards. Confident in my assumption, I wrote to him, and was delighted to find that I was right.

  27 Brunswick Place,

  Hove, Sussex

  Dear Mr Symons,

  Of course I remember well the happy evening when I had the pleasure of meeting you. I have often hoped that we might meet again. But I am out of Town for the present. I have a curious job. I am in charge of a lad of seventeen. He learned to read and write at the age of seven. He was then given a ten-year holiday. Now I am called in. The depths of his ignorance are abysmal. At first I thought that I could not endure. But I have come to be interested immensely. . . . I hope to travel far with him.

  But I forget to answer your questions.

  I know very little of Corvo. I read his In His Own Image long ago – 1902 perhaps. Then I wrote to him through his publisher to ask if he could put me in the way of the legend of Fioravanti and Guerino. He replied in Italian that he could not do so. I responded in French. He then tried Latin. Of course I could counter with a long answer in Greek. After that linguistic display we continued in English. I did not meet him for some time. We agreed to collaborate. Actually looking back I cannot but say that he took a series of Reviews of Unwritten Books which I had concocted and failed to sell. He damaged them in my estimation, but I admit he sold them – to the Monthly Review – when I had failed to sell them at all. And he took no money for them: I got it all. We then set to work on a satiric history of certain naughty emperors, in which I wrote everything and he made changes which annoyed me. He even took a translation I had made of Meleager of Gadara. Neither of these were ever published. But over that last we came to a final squabble. He made alterations to which I could not agree. I demanded the return of my MS and he refused because of the work he had put into it. Eventually I got it back together with most of my letters to him in exchange for all his letters to me. Well, we were both at fault. I did not make due allowance for his wayward and fantastic genius. I see now that I failed in sense of charity. He was not as other men and I was wrong in treating him as an ordinary man and judging him by ordinary standards.

  I had only once the privilege of seeing him in his poor little lodging in Hampstead. It was not a pretty setting for such a man as he – a commonplace little room with a few shelves and photographs about, mostly his own handiwork. I think he had exaggerated ideas about his own power of drawing: he told me that he drew the not very attractive things which decorate the outsides of Don Tarquinio and Hadrian the Seventh.

  He was not a first-rate classical scholar. His Latinity was not quite faultless: and his Greek was, shall we say, on a par with Shakespeare’s. Even in Italian I remember his making one elementary slip to me. But he knew his Italian history well: even there he had a perverse way of rejecting other people’s conclusions – sometimes, it would seem, differing from others simply for the sake of differing, as in his estimate of the characters of Alexander VI and Julius II.

  I feel that these desultory remarks are going to be of no use to you. It is indeed the case that I know very little of the man. Indeed, I believe that he did not want me to know much. He learnt much more of me than he ever told me of himself. I think he never quite got over the fact that I was not Catholic in his opinion.

  I ought to be in Blackheath for the first fortnight in January. It would give me much pleasure to see you then – if fate is kind. Perhaps you will dine with me. . . .

  Sincerely yours

  Sholto Douglas

  I could not help reflecting, after reading this valuable letter, on the insistent eccentricity with which Rolfe marked his way. Who but he would have lightly entered upon a collaboration (by correspondence) with a stranger! – a collaboration, moreover, which had as its object translation from a language which he hardly knew? What sort of version of the immortal Meleager had been produced by this strange conjunction! I wondered, and wrote to ask for the loan of the manuscript. But alas; after a vain search Sholto Douglas was forced to conclude that it was lost or destroyed. To console me, however, for a disappointment perhaps too bluntly expressed, he placed in my hands those letters to Rolfe returned after their disagreement. Knowing the story of the correspondence, it was a queer experience to read it through, and mark the ripening of a romantic friendship between two kindred spirits who had yet to meet. These letters must have meant much to the lonely Rolfe: Sholto Douglas’s brief summary does less than justice to their interest. Where, I wondered, was the rest of the correspondence? Lost with the manuscripts, I feared; and indeed it is one of the regrets of my quest that though in the end I found most of what I sought, those letters to Sholto Douglas still elude me.

  The modest first demand for information, just such an inquiry as any diffident reader might send to an author whose book he liked, told very little; nor did the French and Greek expostulations; but I was interested to see, from a slightly later letter, that, as at Oscott and Holywell, Rolfe claimed Oxford as part of his background, and regretted that he had been sent down. ‘My dear Sir’ soon became ‘Dear Man’. ‘You ask me many questions,’ Douglas wrote, ‘the most comprehensive is “Who are you?” I am a man no doubt somewhat older than you [in fact he was 28, Rolfe 40]. I say that because you aged so quickly between the first stories Toto told you and the coming of In His Own Image. I am a private tutor, doing sufficient work to reduce my poverty to the tolerable minimum. I compel the elements of accuracy into the dull unwitting brains of successive pupils’; ‘My first tutorship was an easy one and a great success; my second was difficult and a failure: from it I learned many things and I have acted consistently upon them ever since. I remember that I am a male governess. I suppress myself and speak when I am spoken to. I am studiously polite. I echo the religious opinions of my employer. I eat what I am expected to eat. I smoke only when and where I am expected to smoke. I adore little girls. I have no eccentricities. I am violently interested in mechanical toys and county cricket – I am particularly good at county cricket. Therefore I am a successful tutor.’

  As a counter-confidence Baron Corvo sent the friend he did not know a copy of the Aberdeen attack. The reply was reassuring. ‘The cutting from the paper is interesting as a study in calumny, but I should like to be able to read it in a looking glass.’ Encouraged, Rolfe suggested a meeting. Douglas was doubtful. ‘Shall we get on? I am certainly at my best in my letters. And you?’ They did meet. ‘Dear Man, I had formed a strangely incorrect notion of you. I had absolutely failed to expect that very human kindliness which twinkles so charmingly behind your spectacles.’ So far, good.

  Though Sholto Douglas did not realize it, that letter written in fluent Greek had deeply impressed Rolfe. Fresh from his Borgian studies, imbued with the spirit of the Renaissance when it was the test of a gentleman to understand Greek, Baron Corvo had plunged into the study of the classics with
all the ardour of the amateur. He not only desired to know, but also to conceal the newness (and thinness) of his knowledge. So he rejoiced in this contact with the greater learning of Sholto Douglas, though without betraying the limitations of his own. The task was not unduly difficult; he was by now sufficiently well acquainted with Latin authors to give an air of erudition to his comments on the books he was reading or admired. Nor was Greek beyond him. Personal adaptations from the Greek (lexicon) star the pages of Toto. If this was sciolism, it was sciolism in the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, who delighted in reviewing and correcting translations from the German, though his knowledge of that language was less than Rolfe’s of Greek. Both possessed that true feeling for literature beside which mere learning is an unlit lamp.

  When Rolfe learned that Sholto Douglas treasured in a drawer a number of unfinished manuscripts, and an unpublished translation of Meleager, he was delighted, and asked at once to see them. But it was one thing, in this quaint correspondence, to ask; quite another to receive. Douglas possessed a mind of tantalizing nimbleness, and a sense of fun and humour that was perhaps more tantalizing still to his sombre senior. In reply to a discourse on Ausonius, for example, Douglas returned, not the reasoned comment that Rolfe invited, but a denunciation of Southsea and its ways: ‘It is all flat and made of plaster with esplanades and promenades and cheap coloured females and pavilions and Lipton’s tea. Think of slob at low tide and boggle it up with an estuary, dry it and scratch bricks out of it and build anathematic villas, stick an esplanade and shrubs all round, decorate with barrel organs and piers and make electric trams squirt all over it – then fall on your knees and sympathise with me.’ Rolfe was not in the least amused, and asked again for Meleager and the manuscripts.