The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (9 page)

I told my aunt of what had taken place, and we had a hearty laugh.

The next day I transferred a number of my books and papers to the studio.

Corvo was engaged on some banners. I did the borders and the lettering on them.

At the end of our first day’s work Corvo said to me in a casual tone: ‘Now you will wash the brushes and make up the fire.’ ‘Is that included in the articles?’ I inquired. ‘Of course,’ answered he; ‘everything has to be shared.’ ‘Good,’ said I. ‘While I am washing the brushes you will see to the fire.’ I thought it prudent to make a good start.

Our other department, literature, was not neglected. We pinned to the studio walls sheets of foolscap, and jotted down on them ideas as they occurred to us. If we were dissatisfied with a word or a phrase, we ringed it in red, and then from time to time scribbled against it another which we thought more fitting. Saturday night was revision night, and we went over the week’s work. If we disagreed as to a word or an expression, Corvo was umpire. To anything nearly read we gave the final touch. The better things were signed ‘Corvo’: those more or less predestined to rejection were signed ‘Blount’.

It was also very amusing to compose sestinas, triolets, etc. This we did only for our own pleasure.

We also produced a number of Limericks. These were not for publication either. In the writing of Limericks I excelled Corvo. He even acknowledged that.

I asked Corvo why he did nothing more for the
Pall Mall Gazette.
He said that Sir Douglas Straight (I think that was the editor’s name) and he had quarrelled, and that Sir Douglas was no gentleman.

This collaboration, which Mr Holden laughed at with his aunt, was regarded in a very different way by Corvo. It was a feature in Rolfe’s friendships which recurred time after time during his troubled life; though I was unaware of its significance when I first read Mr Holden’s account.

After our day’s work we would often read together till midnight. We read Marlowe, a selection of verses made by Gleeson White, the plays of W. S. Gilbert, some extracts from Chaucer, the Bible (particularly the Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs), the
Memoirs
of Benvenuto Cellini,
The Cloister and the Hearth
, and Pepys’s
Diary.
In the end we knew the Book of Proverbs, the
Mikado
and
Patience
almost by heart. We both revelled in Cellini’s
Memoirs.
Corvo soaked himself in them.

I believe his favourite character in fiction was Denys of Burgundy.

All the books named above belonged to me.

These evenings we spent in reading and discussing books were some of the pleasantest in my life.

All our evenings, however, were not so peaceful and pleasant. Before long we began to quarrel. Corvo was not an easy man to get on with. His sarcastic tongue and, above all, his impassive ways used to drive me mad. I was young and hot-headed, accustomed to speak and act first and do my thinking after. I was pert, too, and cheeked him awfully. We often quarrelled over trifles. I think we quarrelled at times just to keep our hand in.

After our first squabble I did not go to the studio for nearly a week. Corvo met me as we were coming out of church and said in a very indifferent tone: ‘Pax?’ ‘Pax, if you wish it,’ said I. ‘Very well, then. You have only to ask my pardon.’ ‘Then it’s war, bloody war,’ I cried. My aunt reconciled us, but I didn’t beg his pardon.

When we had a row, it was as a rule Corvo who made the first advances towards a reconciliation. Sometimes it was I. Life in Holywell is dull, especially in winter, but one was never dull with Corvo.

I will copy one letter he sent me after we had had a quarrel:

‘June 17th, 1896. I have your letter of the 8th. Let us begin again on the original compact. Come back here as soon as you like, and let us have a clear understanding with your aunt that you must have the days fairly free in which to write. Make up your mind to take me for better or worse. It’s the worse now, and if you are steadfast the better will come. I shan’t do anything alone. I am not in the mood to. But I have a Kampf’s Safety Razor now which you can share and which will give you no end of joy. Corvo.’

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 subject) 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.