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

by A. J. A. Symons

  I always date my letters. Life is too short to date mere notes. Don Tarquinio is the book which I shewed you at Xmas. It purports to be written by Tarquinio Santacroce, a handsome daredevil young Roman Patrician, a bandit because the House of Santacroce was put under the Great Ban by Xystus IIII 12 years before. It describes every single thing which he did, on what he calls his Fortunate Day in March 1495, when he was living secretly in Rome under the protection of Cardinal Prince Ippolito d’ Este (aet. 17 and a connoisseur of wrestlers, runners, acrobats, and other specimens of human physique). During these 24 hours, he made friends with Lucrezia Borgia and her brother Giaffredo; ran 26 miles, disguised, with a cypher message printed on his back, for Caesar (called) Borgia (by which means the latter was enabled to escape from King Charles VIII of France, who held him as hostage); married Hersilia Manfredi; and won so much favour from Pope Alexander VI (Borgia) that His Holiness magnificently removed the Great Ban from Santacroce: with other incidents too numerous to mention. You read something of the plot in a sketch which I made for a play some months ago. I wrote this book in two ways. First, as the work of Don Tarquinio himself, saying in a preface that it was all nonsense to allege that the Fifteenth and the Twentieth Century had no Common Denominator and therefore couldn’t speak to each other: because they have a C.D. in the shape of Human Nature. This version was very quaint in style: so quaint indeed, and besides so full of unique and hitherto unknown historical detail, that your perspicacious critic is not unlikely to discover an extremely fine mare’s nest and proclaim that my so-called romance is nothing more nor less than a very valuable genuine historical document. But, secondly, I did the book as though I had Don Tarquinio’s holograph before me; and, because ‘the Fifteenth Century cannot possibly speak to the Twentieth’, I have posed as an entirely modern rather slangy story-teller and have told the tale in my own words with just as many quotations from the ‘original holograph’ as suffice to give a verisimilitude. In this version, of course, I’ve had the opportunity of popping comments and reflections from the Twentieth Century point of view, which to my mind help the story and add piquancy. Both versions, however, are distinctly funny as well as instructive; and I make haste to assure you that they’re only instructive in so far as that they deal with a kind of people, circumstances, mode of life and thought, never really described before. And I’ve done my describing in broad masterly touches with just enough detail to make the thing shine: so that, if my readers want to learn, they can learn, but if not they’ll be amused and interested anyhow. And now comes the funny part of the business. It was the MS of the antique version which I sent first to Chatto, keeping the modern one up my sleeve in case the first didn’t please. But it did, on sight! They promptly offered to issue it on similar terms to the Hadrian, but the royalty to become due after sale of 500 instead of 600. I said thanks sharp; and said that perhaps they would like to choose which of the two versions seemed most likely, in their judgment, to succeed. And I plumped the second (and better, say I) MS upon them. They silkily thanked me for my courtesy; and that’s how things stand at this moment. I am rather curious to know which they will choose.

  But what I wish to remark is:—Here you have another example of the truth of my perennially-shouted contention that, when I am in a position to write at ease, to produce my MS in proper form (i.e. beautifully written, on fine paper, and bound in white buckram with one of my gorgeous black-and-white designs drawn by my own hand on the cover) to send my so properly-formed MS about in proper sumptuous fashion, – I never yet have failed to dispose of it myself at once. And I argue that the only way to succeed is to keep on doing this, without intermission, until the cumulative effect of my work makes publishers ask me for books.

  I told you that I’ve started four new books: The King of the Wood (a romance of Diana’s grove at Nemi, which I know by heart, where the priest (Rex Nemorensis or Flamen Dianae) had to be a runaway slave, to pick the Golden Bough (mistletoe) from the oak in the sacred grove and to slay his predecessor); Duchess Attendolo (the amazing courtship of Duchess Sforza and her four legal marriages within one month to the Duke her husband); Rose’s Records, and Ivory, Apes and Peacocks (successors to Hadrian).

  I’m still in correspondence with Father Beauclerk (the most congenitally dishonest and stupid man God ever made) and with Father R. H. Benson (who has introduced another Catholic called Eustace Virgo, who says that he not only goes all the way with me but would rather see me Pope than even Hadrian the Seventh!). But all these people are Catholics; and I never yet met an honest one. The nearer you get to the Church, the more noisome becomes the stench. You may stifle it with incense: just as you may other stenches with Condy. But it’s always there and always some filthy porcheria or other. However if any of these devils think that they quietly can confuse and delay and evade and make of none effect, they’ll find themselves mistaken. I am very sweet and suave with them, but quite inexorable, and I give them as much information as they deserve and plenty of food for thought. It’s horrid. Isn’t it? I tell you because you’ve got horse-sense. And yet, if I were not Catholic, I shouldn’t be anything at all. I can’t explain. It’s strange; and, therefore, true. . . . Love to you all.

  Your affectionate brother

  Freddy

  Though the four books which Rolfe mentions in this letter as ‘started’ were lost or left unfinished, Don Tarquinio did appear in print in the later part of 1905. On the title-page it is styled A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance; and the Prologue claims it to be a transcription of an original manuscript written by Don Tarquinio Santacroce, circa 1523-27, for the edification of his son Prospero, ‘the leisurely effort of a man of unbounded energy anxious to express himself’. The Don is supposed to write in a macaronic mixture of Italian, Greek, and Latin; but the pretended translation does not keep closely to the pedantic form of its mock-original; to that extent it differs from Don Renato in Mr Haddon’s recollection of it.

  Truth is defined in the first chapter as ‘that which every man may acquire from the apprehensive nature of perfectly cultivated senses’; history is the privilege of eye-witnesses. Hence the Don’s self-imposed task of recording his ‘fortunate day’, on which he secured release for his family from the excommunication imposed on its members as a punishment for murder.

  Don Tarquinio cannot be called an example of learning lightly borne, for Rolfe’s hardly-won knowledge protrudes from many pages in irritating footnotes; but these are flies in the amber of a highly individual style and story, which grows in attractiveness when it is re-examined. As an exercise in skill in writing – in saying, that is, only what one wants to say – it might serve as a model; as also in its unsentimental flavour of a period. And this ‘Phantasmatic’ romance has the merit of being a picture apprehended by ‘perfectly cultivated senses’. Fr. Rolfe revels in the visible. ‘Pages, in liveries resembling vermilion skins from toe to throat and wrist, bearing armorials on their tabards, displayed at the prow the double-cross, golden, and the high Estense gonfalon.’ ‘Youngsters, whose hair glittered like cocoons in candlelight, joined our progress.’ Cardinal Ippolito d’ Este purchases two acrobats yellow of skin as ‘dew-kissed pumpkins gleaming in the sunlight’. In all ways the physical is emphasized. The colour of the flesh of Indian oarsmen ‘resembled the colour of a field of ripe wheat when some delicate zephyr sways the stems in the sun, not more than half-revealing poppies: but their eyes were like pools of ink, fathomless, upon glittering mother-o’-pearl, very beautiful, and quite unintellectual.’ The heroine’s sea-blue robe is girdled by great cats’-eyes set in gold. After swimming, the hero is anointed in pure oil of olives in which violets have been macerated, and eats cocks’-combs on lettuce and quails farced with figs. The candle-reflections in the waxed oaken panels of floor and roof resembled golden stars in a brown sea. An impertinent page is said to have the ‘face of a beautiful white fiend framed in a web of buttercup-coloured hair’.

  What Herbert Rolfe’s opinion was of this highly coloured rom
ance of the flesh, which his brother dedicated to him, is not recorded; but the critics were reasonably appreciative of its many merits. ‘An extravagant wealth of quaint conceit and irony.’ ‘A brilliant tour de force [which] might have come out of Boccaccio.’ ‘A novel of exceptional interest and dramatic power.’ ‘Altogether remarkable mastery over words.’ ‘The vivid verbal brilliance of the book is wonderful.’ These cuttings were carefully sent by the exultant author to Mr Churton Taylor. That anonymous writer in The Times mentioned in my second chapter gives higher and more reasoned praise. ‘[Rolfe’s] desire to own a sumptuous vocabulary not degraded by vulgar use was characteristic. He loved magnificence purged from meretriciousness; and that ideal he realized in the neglected little masterpiece Don Tarquinio, in which the triple flame of the Renascence, bodily, intellectual and spiritual, burns with a cruel and yet magnanimous incandescence. Who can forget the culminating vision of the great Borgia Pope opening the cornucopia of his clemency with the gesture of Jove in a tiara, and withdrawing to his afternoon nap “like the lifegiving sun, who sinketh glorious, golden to his rest in the sea”?’

  CHAPTER 13: THE HAPPY INTERVAL

  The reader will perhaps remember that at the outset of my Quest a Mr Pirie-Gordon had written offering to call for the purpose of talking about Baron Corvo. By a series of mischances, a long period passed before a date suitable to both of us could be arranged. But at last we met.

  Was it, perhaps, his spidery, small writing that led me to expect a trim, precise, small man? My caller proved, on the contrary, a burly six-footer, with the shoulders of an athlete and the complexion of a countryman. I put his age at forty-five. He seemed preoccupied by an interior joke, which I found to derive from entertainment provoked by my unexpected lack of years (I was in the middle twenties at the time of these events) and from the resuscitation of Rolfe. I could hardly believe my ears when, in reply to my first question, ‘Did you know Corvo personally?’, my visitor replied ‘I did indeed: I am Caliban, the last of his collaborators.’ The consequence may be imagined: we talked for hours. Mr Pirie-Gordon was the missing link between Rolfe’s middle and his later years. He told me without bitterness of the strange way in which Baron Corvo had repaid the hospitality and help which the Pirie-Gordon family had been glad to give. He gave me an outline of Rolfe’s intimacy with Robert Hugh Benson and its results. He explained how Fr. Rolfe had become a resident in Venice and never returned. And he left with me a bundle of Rolfe’s letters, surpassing in interest any I had yet seen save the first volume belonging to Millard. With a spontaneity that I saw was characteristic, Mr Pirie-Gordon declared that these letters should, in the fullness of time, be bequeathed to me.

  In subsequent interviews, and by the study of the correspondence left for my inspection, I was able to piece the story together, to watch another rotation of that wheel to which Rolfe was bound.

  The first meeting between Rolfe and Pirie-Gordon took place at Oxford late one night in the summer of 1906. Fr. Rolfe had secured a congenial occupation, and was staying at Jesus College, helping his former Grantham headmaster, Dr Hardy, to whom he was acting as secretary. (Shortly before Dr Hardy’s death he told Shane Leslie: ‘I liked and appreciated Rolfe’s very attractive personality. In spite of his little foibles I always found him a good and loyal friend, and he was distinctly persona grata in my family. I sometimes worked him pretty hard. In the two years when I was Greats examiner he read papers to me for six or seven hours a day for more than two months on end.’ On the subject of Rolfe’s Latin scholarship it is worth noting that at this time, with Dr Hardy’s help, he wrote a long Ciceronian indictment of contemporary Catholics which was forwarded to Pope Leo XIII.)

  Pirie-Gordon was a member of Magdalen, keeping a postgraduate year devoted to historical study. Enthusiastic for literature, the young man had read with admiration Chronicles of the House of Borgia; and when he learned that its author, now called Fr. Rolfe, was working in Jesus, paid a surprise visit to his rooms. For all Rolfe’s desire to avoid notice, he was very willing to make amusing acquaintances; he did not rebuff this chance-sent admirer; soon a close friendship sprang up between the two. There was much to draw them together. Pirie-Gordon was, for a young man, wealthy; he was interested in Rolfe’s favourite fifteenth century; had just returned from a long visit to Florence, Rome, South Italy, North Africa, and Spain. More than that, he had to a high degree the young man’s love of fine clothes: his vast wardrobe much impressed the impecunious author, who had known what it was to wear the same garments winter and summer alike. Above all, Pirie-Gordon had a great plan, very fascinating to the tired literary wanderer, for the furthering of which he eagerly invited Rolfe’s co-operation.

  This ambitious project was the founding of a secular semi-monastic order which, by joint studies, should, in a spirit of disinterestedness, add to the learning of the world. Nothing could have tallied more nearly with Rolfe’s desires, and he entered with enthusiasm into the details of this substitute for priesthood. The fires of his artistic ambition flickered anew, and he set to work to design banners, emblems and devices for the Order. Before the newly-established friendship was a month old, Pirie-Gordon, with that spontaneity which I had noticed as surviving in him, impetuously urged Rolfe to spend a holiday in his father’s house in Wales. Rolfe very naturally hesitated at returning to that country of misfortune, and urged that he had no clothes for country-house visits; but his young friend would brook no denial, and prevailed upon his mother to second the invitation in a flattering letter. After a week of indecision Rolfe assented; and so he who (as he sometimes boasted) had been the inmate of a Welsh workhouse, left Oxford to be entertained by the magisterial owner of Gwernvale.

  Unexpectedly, he made a good impression on the Pirie-Gordons. It was not simply that he was the son’s friend, or that in the flush of his pleasure at being comfortably housed he offered tactful phrases: he was liked for his own sake, and made more welcome than such a chance-comer could have expected. In this congenial atmosphere Rolfe expanded, and confided his hopes and troubles to his host. He told, more or less, the picturesque story of his life: his clerical ambitions, the unfair treatment which had barred him from the priesthood, the persecution of his Catholic enemies, the deceitful behaviour of Col. Thomas. He told of his still undecided lawsuit, and the meagre salary from Dr Hardy on which he lived. The Pirie-Gordons, who admired his books, were touched by his confidences, and sympathized with his woes. Within a week he was ‘Hadrian’ to the entire family.

  Perhaps Rolfe was never happier than during that summer month of his first stay in Gwernvale. Despite the pretended difficulty about clothes, his luggage included a mole-coloured velvet dinner jacket, so that he was able to appear as a spruce if mysterious figure at the dinner parties given by the Pirie-Gordons and their neighbours. At these he was a great success. He had a flow of conversation on unusual subjects which astonished all his listeners. One of his topics centred round a strange ring on his right hand, in which a small spur was mounted on a bezel. This, he explained, was for the purpose of protecting himself from kidnapping attempts, and he wore it in consequence of an assault on his person made years before by the Jesuits. When they essayed, as he fully expected, a further abduction, he would sweep with his armed hand at the brow of his assailant. A line would thus be scored in the flesh which would draw blood; and his blinded enemy (blinded by the dripping blood) would be at the mercy of the intended victim. This ring, and his others, some of which he wore strung round his neck, were made of silver; and at night they were carefully placed in powdered sulphur to preserve the right shade of tarnished darkness. He asserted, also, that he understood in part the language of the cats; and events so far bore out his claim that when, in the moonlight, he muttered his incantations on the lawn, strange cats as well as those of the household abandoned their prowls to rub purringly against his legs.

  The days were hardly less delightful. They were spent, for the most part, in driving about the countryside, or in bathing in
the river Usk, or in sunbathing in a walled orchard while revising the Rule of that projected Order, which finally took shape thus:

  In the belief that it is desirable to revive the virtues of that period of the World’s history commonly called the Middle Ages, and to practise them, in the hope that We may thereby the better pursue wisdom; and being convinced that the practice of the Catholic Faith is compatible with the pursuit of Wisdom as comprised in the human Letters and Arts; and

  Being persuaded that some Individuals can aspire to Wisdom the better when associated with other Individuals having similar desires and abilities;

  Therefore, We the Founders, having in Our Minds the Mediaeval Ideal of a Monastic Military Order devoted to God-service, – independent inasmuch as it tolerates no interference, – but law abiding, inasmuch as it submits to the supremacy of the Monarch in whose Dominions it is located, Do Now and Hereby Institute and Found

  THE ORDER OF SANCTISSIMA SOPHIA

  constituted, organised and devoted in the manner of the Middle Ages to God-service in the pursuit of Wisdom by way of the Human Letters and Arts.

  And to this end We intend Ourselves to provide an Establishment or Establishments where the Rule of this Our Order shall displace the existing Laws of the Land, acquiring an Island, or other Territory, over which this Our Order may exercise such supremacy as shall be necessary for the achievement of its Object.

  And until such time when this may be accomplished, We intend Ourselves to maintain a convenient centre wherein the Rule of this Our Order may be prosecuted so far as is consistent with Our Religious obligations and Our loyalty to the Reigning Monarch; and We place this Our Order under the protection of the Ever Blessed and Most Glorious Trinity, of Saint Mary the Virgin, of Saint Peter the Apostle, and of Saint George the Patron of Chivalry.