As to Corvo, he listened to my story of the missing manuscripts with close attention, and pronounced the problem a simple one. So far I had been hampered in having to rely solely on my own resources, whereas now, with unlimited support from himself, he felt confident that everything I sought would be recovered in good time. I gathered that the publication of Corvo’s unissued works, the establishment of Corvo in his proper place of repute as an author, were in future to be among his major interests, and that I could draw upon him for any reasonable sum to advance these purposes. It was a memorable and delightful lunch.
A week later we met again. This time I was his guest. The place of meeting was the Ambassador Club, which I had never before visited, but now had ample opportunity of admiring, since Mr Gregory was an hour late. He was breathlessly full of apologies, and explained that he had been detained at Buckingham Palace on urgent affairs. The lunch was certainly worth waiting for. A bevy of respectful waiters clustered round our table while costly courses appeared and disappeared. Champagne flowed, large cigars and brandy followed. While we were lunching I learned several more unexpected things. Mr Gregory counted Lord Birkenhead among his closer friends; he held an important post in the Secret Service; he was an intimate of many royal houses, and was, indeed, actively engaged in promoting the restoration of several. His cuff-links were no less resplendent than before, though not orbicular, and this time his gold cigarette case bore an inscription, not from a King, but from the Duke of York. We talked for hours. I was hardly surprised when, at four o’clock, looking round the magnificent but now empty restaurant, he whispered confidentially, ‘Of course this place belongs to me.’ I was to learn that this, like most of the things he told me, was quite true.
Our next meeting was at his office in Whitehall, whither I was summoned by telephone. I noticed with interest as I went in that the premises were those of the Whitehall Gazette, which, as I learned, Mr Gregory both edited and owned. The staircase and anteroom were unimpressive, but that only pointed a contrast with his extraordinary office, into which I was ushered after a long delay. I well remember the first sight of my queer acquaintance seated in a vast red chair behind a desk crowded with signed royal portraits, telephones, and indicators that buzzed or flashed with coloured lights. After I had been given a glass of Tio Pepe, the reason for my summons was explained. Mr Gregory felt he would like to buy the Venice letters; would I sell them, and for how much?
At that moment I needed money (since I was a schoolboy my inclinations have always exceeded my income), and I was very willing to sell. The question was, what price to name. Since money was ‘no object’ to Mr Gregory, I set their value at a hundred and fifty pounds, exactly six times what I had paid poor Millard for them. So far from demurring, my host questioned (without the slightest irony) if I was asking enough for such remarkable documents; and on being assured that I was, opened a drawer of his desk and from a thick packet handed me fifteen £10 notes. The packet was not noticeably diminished by the transfer; there must have been at least £5,000 on that table. More Tio Pepe, and then I was let out by a padded, bolted double door into the evening air. I was asked for no receipt; and it was not until a week later that I could find an opportunity of handing over the letters.
Then began a series of feasts (I can hardly call them lunches), to which I look back even now with astonishment. Mr Gregory was invariably host; he was invariably late; the food and wine were invariably first-rate and ordered with no consideration whatsoever for expense. There was often company – mostly foreign secretaries or officials, sometimes as many as a dozen guests, though usually we lunched tête-à-tête. As I came to know him better (and in the end I knew him very well) I grew to like this man of mystery. Wealth in the abstract seems to me almost non-existent: a man with a vast balance at the bank who spends very little is not rich, but poor, in my eyes. Maundy Gregory seemed to share this view. He loved visible things, and the physical results of wealth, with something between the zest of the parvenu and the joy of the artist. He had at least a dozen gold cigarette cases, and never used the same one on two consecutive days; indeed, his personal jewellery of one kind and another (all very valuable and good) would have sufficed to stock a shop. Yet for all the discursiveness of his self-revelation, I could never find out his occupation nor the source of his income. He spent at a fabulous rate. The waiter who brought his hat or his cigar received two shillings by way of tip; and the rest of his life was organized on that scale. And all his payments were made in the crispest of brand-new banknotes, or else in the shiniest of brand-new money. He really seemed, by his behaviour and extravagance, to possess a private mint.
After several months, during which Mr Gregory’s hospitality appeared to be as limitless as his purse, I was asked to lunch with him at even shorter notice than usual on ‘very urgent business’. He was both late and silent on arrival; I gathered that he was expecting something. It came with the coffee, when without a word he placed in my hands a bound copy of Don Renato; or An Ideal Content, that lost work of Fr. Rolfe’s so much admired by Mr Trevor Haddon.
It certainly deserved his praises. No more faithful reflection exists of its extraordinary author: and it could be the work of no other hand. The infallible touches of his fascinating, overladen style (the style of Don Tarquinio, not Hadrian, of Baron Corvo, not Fr. Rolfe) are prominent from the first page to the last. As this ‘Historical Romance’ will perhaps not be available to general readers for many years, I extract a few details from its mosaic of strange learning and language. The Dedicatory Letter (to Trevor Haddon, dignified as Apistophilis Echis) opens:
These are the words of the book which I, Frederick William, the son of James, the son of Nicholas, the son of William, the son of Robert, wrote in London and in Rome.
Because you, o painter, incessantly perturb me with inquisitions concerning the sources of my curious knowledge of matters archaick and abnormal, because you incessantly transform me with the intent regard of your Kretan brows, and molest me with entreaties that I, as man to man or (at times) as artificer to artificer, should demonstrate to you the Four Causes of my gests, especially that I should tell you how I do my deeds (and you know how many and how rare these be) – I will give you this book.
A life, as of an anachoret, as of an eremite, in severance from the world of articulately-speaking men, while rendering me inhabile in expressing thoughts, creeds, opinions, in spoken words, has made me subadept with the pen – a very detestable condition. On this account, time and human patience would be exhausted before I should be able to satisfy you by word of mouth: but, thirteen months occupied by me in writing, and seven nights or three days (when your workshop may be obscured by London fog) occupied by you in reading, will make clear to you at least one of the sources of my knowledge.
Yet, for your hypotechnical inquiry as to How the Thing is Done, I am unable to supply an apophthegm. My own consuetude, in matters of which I desire to be informed, is to place very many interrogations among experts; and, from the responses received, to respond to myself. This mode has advantages and disadvantages. On the whole it produces satisfaction; and I know no better. Indeed I doubt whether any artificer could respond to your inquiry either in spoken words or in written . . .
But, ever since you began to inquire of me, I have pondered you and your inquiry; and, because I myself from my boyhood very gravely have laboured barehanded to obtain a little knowledge, I am the more unwilling to deny to so eager and so exquisite an artificer, that counsel and assistance which have been denied to me. For men (as far as I know them) always will tell you what they think you ought to know, and always will give you what they think you ought to want: but they never will give you what you want, and they never will tell you what you want to know. Perhaps they cannot. Perchance I myself shall fail. But I will try.
Accordingly, there follow three notes concerning the Formal, Material, and Efficient Causes of the story; the first being a discussion between publishers’ managers as to the form and conditi
on of historical novels; the second an account of that English-Italian Duchess who counted for so much in Rolfe’s early life. (‘It will be evident to you’, he says, ‘that, when so very great and gracious a personage admits to her comity an obscure clerk, a plebeian student, unmannered, self-taught, physically and mentally altogether dyspathetick, and manifests so profound an interest in his labours as to give him the freedom of her archives, (charters, breves, diurnals, accompts, and the multifarious manuscripts which a House can accumulate in, let us say, a thousand years,) very intimate cognition of the bye-ways of literature and history is not unlikely to be attained, very curious knowledge is not unlikely to be acquired, very precious excerpts are not unlikely to be collected. Grant me so much.’)
So much having been granted, Rolfe describes, as the Formal Cause, his discovery of a quarto volume bound in stout white vellum surrounded by an embossed silver band containing six hundred pages of thin opaque paper. This is Dom Gheraldo’s Diurnal, the diary of a Roman priest attached to the house of Santacroce, written between 1528 and 1530 in that macaronic mixture of Greek, Latin and Italian which I had already met in Don Tarquinio. The priest goes further than the prince, however, in that his entries are written in imitation of various classic and Italian styles. The translation of this imaginary volume forms the body of Rolfe’s book.
No writer ever set himself a more difficult task. He, or rather Dom Gheraldo in his entries, tells a story: he reveals by slow and feline touches the character of the priest from within; and at the same time he attempts to give an English equivalent for the verbal mix-up of the pretended original. And in all this he succeeds, though in retaining Dom Gheraldo’s macaronics he almost makes his book unreadable. Fortunately, he provides a glossary, so that it is possible to understand, without a headache, the exact meaning that he meant to extract from such constructions or compounds or rarities as argute, deaurate, in-vestite, lucktifick, excandescence, galbanate, lecertose, insulsity, hestern, macilent, effrenate, dicaculous, pavonine, and torose. Even so, Don Renato is not a book to read at a sitting, but rather one to be dipped into at odd hours when the mind can be stimulated by puzzles in verbal ingenuity, by such passages as
On the insensible stone Don Lelio lay, almost inconscious, his form wound in a ligature, marmoreal in white stillness. His terete members but an hour ago so apt and flexuous, were distorted by incessant twitchings and cold as snow. Already his lips were livid; they disclosed the purity of teeth clenched and continually strident. In the pallid throat, palpitated a vein with diminishing rhythm. Coerulean stains appeared below the flickering lashes of the half-closed eyes. Like rose-petals in a breeze, even the nostrils quivered. Bloomed the abhominable unmistakeable pallor on the brow, where the soft caesarial hair was humid with the dew of the breath of Death.
And the passage I have quoted is simple and lucid compared to most passages in this fantasy, wherein bright figures ‘recline in the barge under the frondosity of sycamores’ after an al fresco dinner ‘in the umbriferous ilicet on the shore of the lake’. But when the effort has been made, and the pedantic vocabulary mastered, there is a reward. By touch after touch Fr. Rolfe (or Baron Corvo as he was when he wrote this book) builds up his central character, the comfort-loving, word-loving, superstitious yet learned priest, and shows the round of daily life in a great Renaissance family, the turn of mind of the sixteenth century. Perhaps this study in ivory and amber owes something to The Ring and the Book; certainly Browning would have delighted in Dom Gheraldo, with his mediaeval medicines (‘This day, to the odious Don Tullio Tripette, I gave a vial of the humour of spurge – Euphorbia polygonifolia – done with salt, wherewith to dismiss his warts’); who keeps a benevolent paternal eye on the morals of the pages, with whom he bathes naked by moonlight; who notes with satisfaction the good dishes of the day (‘At supper, a proper dish of young cucumbers grown out of season, boiled, eviscerate, replenished with a farce of beef and herbs, and fried in new oil. Very grateful’); to whom water is not hot or cold, but gelid or calid; who frequently admonishes himself in his diary – ‘Gheraldo, Gheraldo, Gheraldo, take care of thy stile’. Perhaps there is no greater public now than when it was written for this humorous and human mixture of learning and naïveté; but posterity certainly owes Fr. Rolfe the tribute of a popular edition of Don Renato; or An Ideal Content.
*
Naturally I was staggered to find Mr Gregory successful where I had failed; and besought him to reveal how he had recovered Rolfe’s pedantic masterpiece. It had been found, I gathered, by one of his many ‘agents’, who, at considerable cost, had traced the original printer, and from the depths of a rat-haunted cellar salved five copies, the only survivors of the whole edition. Few modern books can have a stranger history than Don Renato. It was written at least as early as 1902, perhaps earlier, in the flush of Rolfe’s Borgian enthusiasm; indeed, if the dedicatory reference to Rome is to be believed, earlier still. For years he kept the manuscript by him, adding to its rich sentences and obscure learning, showing it, quoting from it, offering it at intervals to the blind tribe of Barabbas. It was one of those undeveloped ‘assets’ with which, in 1904, he tempted Mr Taylor into fighting Col. Thomas. Not until 1907 did he find a publisher sufficiently intrepid to wish to bring it before the public. The first proofs reached the author in Venice in 1908, at the beginning of his feud with his English friends. When the break came, this was the first of Rolfe’s books that he denounced to the Publishers’ Association; and though, since he had signed an agreement, his ban had little legal weight, nevertheless on account of it publication was delayed. Months passed; the printer failed; the sheets (if more than a few proof copies were printed off, which is uncertain) were destroyed; even the proofs disappeared with the manuscript, and all traces of it sank beneath the waters of time till the ‘agent’-diver brought this highly artificial pearl to the surface once more. With great generosity Mr Gregory presented to me one of the five precious copies; and, whenever I am depressed, I dip into its elaborate pages and, like Gheraldo, ‘think more of my stile’.
There can be no repetition of a surprise; but unexpected repetition is itself a new surprise, and I confess that I was startled again when, a week later, the terete and sensile Gregory (as Rolfe would probably have called him) produced the manuscript of that translation of Meleager’s songs which Baron Corvo had made with Sholto Douglas over twenty years earlier. This time, indeed, he did more. It was part of Rolfe’s plan for the book that its pages should be sprinkled with small Greek heads and figures from his own designs, printed in vermilion on buff paper. Pulls of these charming little ‘shrieks’ were pasted in their appropriate places in the manuscripts; and lo! as I took my place at the table, there, nestling by my wine-glass, were the actual blocks made from Rolfe’s drawings. I almost regarded Maundy Gregory as a magician after this further demonstration of his powers as a discoverer, and said so; but he waved my praise away, and made his usual answer that with money one can do anything.
As for the manuscript itself, it suffers from the defect of all translations from verse, that it is a translation. Rolfe was no FitzGerald, to re-create in English a new work of art based upon an old original, but his version is expressed in a rhythmic prose which is dignified and rounded; and from a careful comparison with Mr Aldington’s later text, it seems that he did not often misconstrue the sense; for that, the credit was perhaps his collaborator’s. I quote two examples:
By Timo’s flood of Lover-loving curls; by Demo’s Balsam-breathing, Sleep-beguiling skin; by Ilia’s pretty pranks; by Slumber’s Foe, the Lamp, that Drinketh of my Revels many Songs; O Love, but scanty Breath is left upon my Lips; yet speak the Word, and I will pour out even this.
A dulcet Strain, by Pan of Arcady, thou singest to thine Harp, Zenophila; a far too dulcet Strain thou strikest. Whither shall I flee from thee? Loves compass me on every Side; and grant me not one moment to regain my Breath. Thy Beauty filleth me with Desire, thy Musick too, thy Grace, thy——what shall I say? All, all
of thee! I burn with Fire!
When Rolfe and Sholto Douglas made this translation, Meleager’s verses had not been extracted from the Greek Anthology and separately published with an English text; but during the twenty-five years that have passed since then, other hands have performed the task. There is, perhaps, no longer any need for a new version; nevertheless I hope that some day this carefully constructed monument to Rolfe’s passionate love for Greek literature may stand on the shelf with his other works.
*
The day when Mr Gregory revealed to me his second discovery was, I think, the high-water mark of his enthusiasm for Baron Corvo. Gradually his energetic lavishness diminished, and we met for Arabian Nights’ luncheons less and less frequently, though when we did his links and cigarette-cases and tie-pins coruscated with all their old-time splendour, his conversation was as full as ever of interest and revelation. Since he left England to live abroad eight months ago, my inquiries have remained unanswered, and I have looked in vain for any letter in his sturdy square handwriting. His memory remains like that of an incandescent meteor in the sky of high finance, an acquaintance as fantastic and unlikely as the wildest passage in the books of the weird Baron whom we both admired.
The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) Page 28
