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

by A. J. A. Symons

  You know that Benson has continually consoled me in my troubles, saying that I never need worry myself with thinking that I must go back to the workhouse or sleep out of doors any more. He has always assured me that when all else failed he would gladly take me in. I have impressed upon him that I yearn to be a help and not a hindrance: and I have shewn him heaps of ways in which I could be made not only self-supporting but profitable and only too willing to share my profits with him. And so now, finding myself quite without means, and quite without means even of continuing my work, I reluctantly fell back upon him. He tells me that to take me in will break his heart and cause him strong personal inconvenience; and in the roughest possible manner he offers me the situation of caretaker in his lonely house two miles from Buntingford at 8/– a week. There I am to be quite alone, to look after the place, do the gardening, and fowls, and be two miles walk and a train-journey from Mass for seven months. He emphasises the fact that I am not to consider myself his guest but his paid servant; and asks for a bond binding me to repay him my journey-money out of my first earnings.

  Now all this has taken my breath away. It is totally unexpected. I have done nothing to deserve it. And I am quite unable to explain it excepting by an hypothesis which I am frantically refusing to entertain. Roman Catholic clergymen have behaved exactly like this several times to me before; and I believe the idea was to break me, heart and soul and body. That they have not done; and I will not let it happen. Anything rather than that. But the effect of Benson’s conduct is that I am inconceivably frightened of him; and all my old distrust of the clergy is rampant and paramount. What would they do with me if I put myself completely at their mercy? I don’t know. But I fear all sorts of things, especially as this occasion is caused by one whom I regarded as a true friend and to whom I have confided all my secrets without reserve.

  Fortunately, some letters exist which give Benson’s side of this unlucky squabble:

  Catholic Rectory, Cambridge

  Dear Mr Pirie-Gordon,

  May I write to you frankly about Rolfe? I don’t know whether or not he has told you that we have had a row. The details in any case don’t matter; but I wanted to make it clear to you what my attitude is.

  My last letter to R., which reached him last Tuesday, contained an apology for having expressed things clumsily and awkwardly, and an emphatic assurance that I did not consider him a ‘knave’, as he seemed to suspect. It also contained a suggestion that he should come next month into a house which I have just bought and live there. I proposed to offer him the house for six months, the garden with its vegetables, fowls for eggs, and a few shillings each week for further things – also I said I would furnish a couple of rooms in it and advance necessary money for his moving expenses. It was an entirely friendly and genial letter. I asked him to answer this by yesterday, as I must look out for a caretaker at once, if he did not come. This he has not answered at all.

  Now I can’t go on begging him to accept this kind of thing. He is extremely angry with me, I suppose.

  If it is possible for you to convey to him how extremely foolish it is to behave like this, when there is nothing but friendliness on my side – though without telling him that you have heard from me – I shall be very grateful. Would it be possible for you to talk to him about plans and then to say ‘Have you written to Benson?’, and if he says ‘That’s no good’, then to say ‘Very well, I will’, and to do it, whatever he says?

  It seems to me that perhaps in this way he may be brought to see how foolish it is to go on like this and think himself deserted and betrayed and all the rest of it.

  Please forgive me for writing. I simply cannot wait more than three or four days more. If nothing happens by then I must engage a caretaker at once. If you can give me a hint that he is likely to wish to come, I will postpone it. . . .

  Yours sincerely

  R. H. Benson

  Benson’s account of the cause of their difference does not differ, substantially, from Rolfe’s:

  On proposing to a publisher that [Rolfe and myself] should cooperate, he answered that he didn’t want that. He wanted a book from me alone, for which he offered me a considerable sum: saying that he could not offer nearly so much for a collaborated book. I passed this on to R., thinking of course that he would not dream of insisting on his name appearing as a collaborator. What I suggested was that his name should be fervently mentioned in the preface – ‘invaluable assistance’ etc., and that our money arrangements should remain as before. In this way he would have received a lot more money which I imagined he wanted (I certainly do).

  Benson was less than just to himself as well as to Rolfe in thus insisting on money as the essence of their disagreement; indeed, if his excuse were taken at the foot of the letter, it would be a paltry one. He had made a bargain with Rolfe; and the fact that he could make better terms for himself by altering the bargain was no ground for altering it if his collaborator preferred to leave it unchanged. No doubt it was true that the unnamed publisher offered more money if Benson’s name stood alone upon the title-page; but there were other reasons for Fr. Benson’s desire to drop public collaboration with Fr. Rolfe. His brother Arthur had previously warned him that this new friend was a dangerous and discreditable man; and now several of his colleagues in the Church joined in adjuring him to drop the association. Their words were given weight by that cross-examination in the Thomas case to which I have referred. So Benson decided against Rolfe. But (we may suppose) he wished, charitably, not to let his collaborator feel his decision as a personal difference, and sought to throw the onus of his withdrawal on the publisher. This is surmise, but there is much to support it.

  Pirie-Gordon’s good-natured efforts to reconcile the two were fruitless:

  Dear Mr Pirie-Gordon,

  Many thanks. But I don’t in the least see what I can do now, if he insists on treating me as a suspicious enemy. If I write in a friendly manner he does not answer, and seems to think that my friendliness is a sort of frightened sop-giving. If I write my mind he thinks me brutal. The only third alternative is that I should not write unless and until he writes to me. This seems to me my only possibility. Personally I think he has treated me in an astounding manner. . . . I won’t qualify it further.

  But I am perfectly ready to be friendly: and to go on with St Thomas as soon as I have any leisure. Only the request for this must now come from him. I am keeping his chapters for the present, in the hope that he will propose this again.

  I see dimly what he thinks. But it is so amazingly unreasonable and so extremely wounding to oneself, to be treated as a fraudulent publisher, that I can hardly see how in decency I can go on making proposals. He will only see in them new and subtle plots against him. And all the while, in reality, from the business point of view it would be vastly to my advantage not to work with him at all. I have offered him the whole book, for that reason among others, if he will take it off my hands.

  I am honestly beginning to doubt, for the first time, whether he is really ‘fond of me’ at all. I don’t see at present how suspicion and friendliness can co-exist.

  As for my suffering through him – I have always been perfectly aware that Catholics dislike and distrust him. It was, largely, to rehabilitate him that I have made no secret of my liking for him (that sounds rather egotistic, but at present I am in good favour with Catholics). I don’t care one straw what they think about me. . . .

  It is an absolute delusion that anyone keeps a watch on him, or hinders him. Really, in Catholic eyes, he is practically non-existent. Certainly Catholics who do know of him suspect him – but they ignore him. It is simple egotism on his part to think that they pay him any attention.

  I am frightfully sorry for him. I would do anything I could: but the ‘Rose’ attitude of lofty isolation is intolerable and impossible. Nobody is going to ‘soar’ to him with sympathy. He is simply his own enemy. I am not: I want to be his friend. But it is because I am sorry for him; not because I think he is th
e object of a widespread plot.

  I will await developments, and, meanwhile, keep his chapters until he chooses to write to me decently again.

  Ever yours sincerely

  R. Hugh Benson

  If he did, he kept them for a long time. The wheel had almost turned; once more Rolfe’s affairs approached a crisis. There were several factors to provoke it. First, he owed a number of small sums in Oxford, sums which, though small, he was quite unable to pay. Second, as has been seen, he had quarrelled with his friend Benson. Thirdly, Mr Taylor’s complaisance had reached its limit. Finally, the Gordons had decided that at the following Christmas Gwernvale should be closed until they returned from a tour in the East. Rolfe saw that he had to make a move; and the means lay ready to his hand.

  CHAPTER 15: THE VOLUNTARY EXILE

  Among those who listened with interest, and an almost unwilling admiration, to Rolfe’s monologues and diatribes at Gwernvale was Professor R. M. Dawkins, at that time Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, now the holder of the Bywater and Sotheby chair of modern Greek at Oxford. In 1907 he returned to England to settle the affairs of a small, newly-inherited estate in Breconshire, and was duly entertained as a neighbour by the Pirie-Gordons. On one of these visits he met Rolfe; and, as he writes, ‘I was immediately struck by the personality of the man; not by his learning, which was on the surface, nor his history, which was picturesque, but by his personal intensity and singularity, which roused my curiosity and interest.’ Later, after the inevitable quarrel, Rolfe described Professor Dawkins in his most vivid vein of personal abuse, though he added parenthetically, ‘he knew more Greek archaeology than anyone else in the world, and his brains were occasionally pickable’.

  Indeed, Rolfe was drawn as by a magnet to this fountain of learning (who was also a landowner, and therefore, in Rolfe’s eyes, rich); while Professor Dawkins, who possessed that scientific turn of mind which often accompanies scholarship, was attracted and amused by the outré stranger, with his mixture of superstition and personal power, who talked of astrology as though it was an exact science, and ascribed his misfortunes to planetary influences. For, though Rolfe deceived others, he seemed also the dupe of his own spells; and this, and the other elements of his contradictory make-up, provided a stimulating problem to the sceptical professor. Perhaps it was the intensity of Rolfe’s self-deceptions which gave him his power, frequently displayed, of attracting the interest and sympathy of chance acquaintances. The present instance was no exception. In one of his first letters to Dawkins (for, after the latter’s return to Athens, a correspondence followed) Rolfe wrote:

  My difficulty, however, is, not to find friends as I get older, but to keep those whom the gods send me in such profusion. I find that, unless one is able to reciprocate social amœnities, one’s friends sheer off; and it is quite impossible to do one’s share in friendship – the share which one burns and yearns to do – as long as one is harassed and distracted and simply torn to pieces by the struggle of keeping on the cheerful mask disguising one’s struggles for life. So I shall watch with much interest to see how long you and I can keep it up. Don’t be afraid that I shall drop it. No. When it ends, do just tell yourself that it is the malignance of my stars which has snatched my end of the cord out of my hand. And do not be surprised: for I dance on volcanoes all the time – if you can call it dancing . . . I’m telling you all this so that if I don’t answer your letters you’ll know that it’s not the will but the ability which is lacking. When things go quite wrong with me I’ve got the habit of putting on corduroy and a blue belcher and a pseudonym and running away to hide myself until benignant stars bring me out into a more ample air.

  In later letters Rolfe dwelt on the homelessness impending over his head: Gwernvale was to be closed, and Benson – the whole story was retold – ‘has let me down with a bang’. The ‘blubber-lipped Professor of Greek’ was touched by these confidences: it must be remembered that he knew nothing of Rolfe and his affairs beyond what he was told by the Pirie-Gordons (who naturally set their guest in a good light, since they knew no harm of him beyond that he was poor and queer) and by Rolfe himself. Seeing an opportunity to help a ‘lame dog’ and secure himself amusing companionship at the same time, he suggested that Rolfe should join him in a holiday at Venice later in the year, and offered to provide the money necessary for expenses. ‘He was to repay me from money to be made by descriptive writing’, Professor Dawkins writes. ‘I was glad enough to risk a little cash for the pleasure and interest of his company, and of course I never really expected to see it back again.’

  Plans were made accordingly. Rolfe was extremely excited, and very grateful; new turrets were added to his castles in the air. There was good reason for his excitement. In an expression that used to be popular, he had an elective affinity for Italy, a fostered devotion for her sunshine, her history, and her speech. His one visit to Rome had made him a Baron in name, and tinged his nature with something more than the remembrance of Southern intensity. Now, again, he was to visit the country he had so long loved, and loved all the more by revulsion from his repeated failures in his own.

  Fr. Rolfe setting out for foreign travel was a curious sight. He had changed very much from the young man with the ‘handsome, sensitive face’ of Oscott days who had scandalized the authorities of the Scots College by his aesthetic vagaries, and captivated the elderly Duchessa by his charm. Then, he was tonsured from choice; now, in his forty-ninth year, his skull was covered with an iron-grey stubble kept closely clipped. Then, he had treasured a silver-fitted dressing case, Heaven knows how acquired; now, on this second visit, his luggage was contained in a large laundry basket, fastened by a homely bar and padlock – a mode of carrying baggage which seemed highly suspicious to the Customs officials. But still he was the same unchanging Rolfe, who contrived to give an air of queerness to ordinary actions: as in the wearing of a silver crucifix so large and heavy that to pacify his chafed flesh he wore always beneath its foot a thickness of goldbeater’s skin: or the carriage of a fountain pen at least thrice the size of those usually sold in shops. ‘During the war I feel sure that the secret services of Europe would have quarrelled as to which of them should shoot Rolfe as a spy. He looked always so extremely and self-consciously odd’, observes his travelling companion.

  Rolfe was unchanged, too, in his propensity to incur debts, and his attitude to other people’s money. Officially he had not come as Professor Dawkins’s guest, but as one who had borrowed money which he would presently repay. Since it was his intention and hope to repay whatever he might spend, he saw no reason for stinting himself; and his host (in fact if not in name) soon found that Rolfe’s idea of enjoyment included numerous forms of ‘elaborate idleness’ which were expensive, as well as more than ordinarily good food and wine. Protests he met with ‘a sort of worrying bullying’. Despite the subtlety on which Rolfe prided himself, he frequently went astray over simple matters. It was so now. Professor Dawkins, far from being pleased by the pleasant ways of spending money which Rolfe was constantly discovering, was disconcerted to find that he was expected to live almost en prince for two. So, inventing an excuse that was reasonably true, he announced his intention of examining Greek manuscripts at Rome (an alternative to Venetian idleness which did not attract Rolfe) and departed, with expressions of goodwill that he hardly felt, leaving Rolfe enough money to enable him to stay in Venice for a time and then return home. The friends never met again; indeed, not one of his English friends ever again saw Fr. Rolfe in the flesh, though they saw and shivered at his beautiful script.

  Alone in Venice, Rolfe set himself to weave new dreams. The sun shone bright in the city of canals; and the battered, homeless wanderer had always loved water and sunshine. Moreover, he had money in the bank. Not much; but to one who had lived so long on debts and credit, even thirty pounds (he can have had little more) seemed a sum. We can guess almost exactly how he spent his time. Certainly he swam a great deal, and hired a sandalo, whic
h he learned to row in the Venetian mode – a difficult task. He talked in his faulty and academic Italian to everyone in reach, from fisher-boys to hotel secretary, though perhaps most of all to the fisher-boys. And he gratified the lust of the eye. All through his life Rolfe had shown himself strongly susceptible to outward appearances. Now, in the old Italian city, he indulged in an orgy of sightseeing where there was so much to see.

  Fr. Rolfe left an account of his first impressions of Venetian life which deserves quotation:

  I came to Venice in August for a six week’s holiday; and lived and worked and slept in my barcheta almost always. It seemed that, by staying on, I could most virtuously and most righteously cheat autumn and winter. Such was the effect of this kind of Venetian life on me, that I felt no more than twenty-five years old, in everything excepting valueless experience and valuable disillusion. The bounding joy of vigorous health, the physical capacity for cheerful (nay, gay) endurance, the careless, untroubled mental activity, the perfectly gorgeous appetite, the prompt, delicate dreamless nights of sleep, which betoken healthy youth – all this (with indescribable happiness) I had triumphantly snatched from solitude with the sun and the sea. I went swimming half a dozen times a day, beginning at white dawn, and ending after sunsets which set the whole lagoon ablaze with amethyst and topaz. Between friends, I will confess that I am not guiltless of often getting up in the night and popping silently overboard to swim for an hour in the clear of a great gold moon – plenilunio – or among the waving reflections of the stars. (O my goodness me, how heavenly a spot that is!) When I wanted change of scene and anchorage, I rowed with my two gondoglieri; and there is nothing known to physiculturalists (for giving you ‘poise’ and the organs and figure of a slim young Diadymenos) like rowing standing in the Mode Venetian. It is jolly hard work; but no other exercise bucks you up as does springing forward from your toe-tips and stretching forward to the full in pushing the oar, or produces such exquisite lassitude at night when your work is done. And I wrote quite easily for a good seven hours each day. Could anything be more felicitous?