Stories Toto Told Me (Valancourt Classics)

STORIES TOTO TOLD ME

Stories Toto Told Me

by

FREDERICK ROLFE

(BARON CORVO)

Edited with an introduction by

Edmund Miller

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Stories Toto Told Me
by Baron Corvo

First published in
1898
by John Lane

First Valancourt Books edition
2008

First Kindle edition 2012

This edition ©
2008
by Valancourt Books

Introduction ©
2008
by Edmund Miller

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rolfe, Frederick,
1860-1913
.

Stories Toto told me / by Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo) ; edited with an introduction and notes by Edmund Miller.  –1st Valancourt Books ed.

       p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p.   ).

 
ISBN 1-934555-58-4
(alk. paper)

  I. Title.

 
PR5236.R27S76 2008

  823’.8–
dc
22

                                                            2008030324

Published by Valancourt Books

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

INTRODUCTION

Frederick William Rolfe
, who sometimes expanded his name to Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe and often wrote as Baron Corvo, was born on
22
July
1860
in London. Although he had obviously developed a strong interest in learning in his youth, he left school early in his teens. Having converted to Roman Catholicism, he eked out a living as an artist, a photographer, even a school teacher.

  In
1880
he published the poetry chapbook
Tarcissus
and began writing to add to his income. Six stories by Corvo narrated primarily in the voice of an Italian servant boy were published in the literary magazine
The Yellow Book
. The magazine became a flashpoint of fin de siècle decadence, and publication in this organ brought with it a good deal of visibility, leading in
1898
to publication of the stories as the book
Stories Toto Told Me
reprinted here. These stories were revised and twenty-four were added to make
In His Own Image
, which appeared in
1901
. In
Stories Toto Told Me
, the primary narrator of the stories, simultaneously naïve and precocious, is an idealized companion for the bachelor Englishman who employs him. The boy is charming and loquacious with an anecdote for all occasions.

  But writing never provided a regular income, and Rolfe’s (or Corvo’s) real desire was ordination. When his vocation was questioned—apparently because of his perceived homosexual sensibility—he took a twenty-year vow of chastity. His obsession with Roman Catholicism is clear in a group of works begun at this time. These works show the distinctive characteristics of a Corvine prose style with self-consciously arcane vocabulary and a focus on Renaissance historical subjects. The works also show an insistence on the good works of the notorious Borgia family. The
1901
book
Chronicles of the House of Borgia
presents sympathetic portraits of Pope Alexander VI, of Lucretia, and of Cesare (whose Borgia paternity Corvo perversely doubts). There is evidence of extensive historical research in this work although the rehabilitation of the Borgias has not won many converts. A related novel is the
1905
Don Tarquinio: A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance
, a careful reconstruction of one day in the life of a condottiere (or soldier of fortune). A similar novel written in prose even more baroque is
Don Renato: An Ideal Content
(printed in
1909
but not released for sale until
1963
).

  Corvo also tried collaboration during this period.
Hubert’s Arthur
with C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon was completed although not published until
1935
. It is an imagined life of Arthur, Duke of Brittany, had he escaped death at the hands of King John. Arthur becomes a crusader, marries the heiress of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and returns to fight for the English crown in trial by combat with John’s son, his historical successor King Henry III. Another collaboration with Pirie-Gordon is
The Weird of the Wanderer
(
1912
), a tale of reincarnation.

  At the end of the term of self-abnegation represented by the vow of chastity, Corvo proved to his own satisfaction his worthiness of ordination, but his failure to be ordained in fact had two consequences. One was personal. He accepted his sexual feelings. The second was that he developed a new writing style, the first published fruit of which was the autobiographical masterpiece
Hadrian the Seventh
(
1904
). This is the inaugural use of the authorial name Fr. Rolfe, perhaps as an act self-ordination. The prose is less baroque than in his historical works of this period and consequently more accessible. It is also satirical. He tells his own story with the same romantic turn as used in the tale of Arthur, Duke of Brittany. In the novel
Hadrian the Seventh
, George Rose, an expelled seminarian whose poverty and other tribulations rebuke the Catholic Church for failure to recognize a genuine vocation, is elected Pope as a compromise choice in a deadlocked Papal election. As Pope, Hadrian VII ends the diplomatic stalemate with Italy over the occupation of the Papal States and resolves the other European antagonisms that were to lead to World War I only a decade after the book was published. Hadrian VII dies suddenly at the hand of an anarchist, a martyr to the success of his political insight and diplomacy.

  Corvo (as we may continue to call him) returned to Italy and settled in Venice in
1908
, never to leave. Friends he came to distrust tried to do what they could to pay his passage home and settle his debts, but he turned on everyone who came to his aid. The prose of the works completed in the Venice years is like the prose of
Hadrian
but progressively more satirical as Corvo became progressively more paranoiac.
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice
(published
1934
) and
Nicholas Crabbe; or, The One and the Many
(published
1958
) feature caricatures of everyone who had ever crossed his path, including the expatriates who gave him shelter after he was reduced to sleeping in a gondola. The satirical portraits may have interfered with the publishability of these late works, but a greater problem was the sexual content. Some early commentators were troubled by the celebration of the attractions of adolescent boys in the Toto stories. But the celebration of decadent androgyny in turn-of-the-century Venice was more troubling in the works of this late period although they are less explicit than the
Venice Letters
to Charles Masson Fox (published
1974
) composed at the same time. Much more openly than the stories of a decade earlier, these last two novels combine sensuality with Corvo’s control of the stylistic flourishes in his Renaissance novels, and, as a result, these last novels have an interest for contemporary readers now that time has both dimmed awareness of the targets of satire and forestalled shock about content.

  Fr. Rolfe, Baron Corvo died
23
October
1913
in Venice. Corvo has a considerable cult following, perhaps traceable to the
1934
A. J. A. Symons biography
The Quest for Corvo
. Corvo’s curious subject matter and checkered publication history have also given his works a special value to collectors. A major stylist of fin-de-siècle decadence, Corvo fueled his writing career with personal vendetta but also found for himself the perfect subject matter with which to create the distinctive characteristics of all three incarnations of Corvine prose.

 
Stories Toto Told Me
includes six early stories essentially narrated in the words of the servant boy Toto. Stories I, II, and III are narrated directly by Toto to his Master. Stories IV, V, and VI have a filtering frame narration by the Master, V and VI perhaps to justify the technical theological knowledge that these stories include. The narrative transitions of Story VI, “About One Way in Which Christians Love One Another,” include a number of naturalistic representations of oral composition. At one point Toto backtracks to supply missing detail, saying, “Now I ought to have told you this,” and afterwards returns to the main narrative, saying, “Now I must go to another part of the story.” The frame narration serves a different purpose in Story IV, “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro,” than in Stories V and VI. The tale of Beatrice is a slight but engaging anecdote of the discovery by the Master of the androgynous character of Toto’s beloved. It has no necessary relationship to the story that Toto then narrates and seems to exist for its own sake as a celebration of this romantic ideal of androgyny.

  The character and charm of Toto are consistent. But Toto’s English is perhaps implausibly good if not impossible. And in some places his knowledge of theology seems improbably complete in light of his moral naïveté in other places. For example, his recreation of Heaven relies on a childlike vision of the afterlife as a place of fun and games. In “About the Lilies of San Luigi,” which is set in Heaven, Toto depicts two patron saints of adolescence laughing at a third for preferring the lilies of this world to those of the next, and God allows the two to play a trick on the third to show him that his earthly venerators do not do proper honor to his memory. This is all good, clean fun in terms of this world, but the events are set in the next world without any acknowledgment of the fundamental principle of Christianity that the Beatific Vision of the saints in Heaven makes good, clean fun irrelevant. On the other hand, in “About the Heresy of Fra Serafino” Toto’s narrative turns on tracing the source of a citation in a sermon by a Franciscan preacher back through Pope Gregory the Great to St. Paul’s Epistles.

  The narrative structure of the stories is also a mixture of the conventional format of literate culture and the less predictable connections of folktale and myth. For example, like a fable out of Aesop, “About the Heresy of Fra Serafino” ends with structured foiling of the Jesuit antagonist who is shown up as thinking he knows more about theology than the Holy Ghost, but the story lacks the literary coda needed to explain that all the characters have misunderstood the text “No one shall be crowned unless he has contended lawfully” by taking it to mean that physical martyrdom is necessary to salvation.

  “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro” indicates in its very title the mixing of genres. Having in the voice of the Master exclaimed over the attractions of adolescence perhaps just so much as he thought readers could accept, Corvo has the Master snatch at a passing observation of Toto’s to turn the conversation to something else: “Here I saw a chance of changing the subject, and remarked that it would be nice to know what sort of a mamma the Madonna had given to San Pietro.” What follows is Toto’s elaborate fable of someone (the mother of St. Peter) so anxious to prevent other people from an undeserved welcome into Heaven that she loses her own chance. Beatrice disappears from the story and from the consciousness of the Master, whose closing remark after Toto’s story is only “I chuckled at Toto’s moral reflections.” On the whole, however,
Stories Toto Told Me
is particularly good at balancing the requirement of narrative closure against the pose of innocence.

  One indication of judicious control of style in these stories is the way Italian vocabulary is used. Although there is quite a bit of Italian, it never appears as central terminology necessary to understanding the meaning of a passage. Typically it occurs in direct address, exclamations, and colorful characterizations, the negative implications of which can be surmised from the context. On the other hand, a reader who knows Italian will see that one character has a name that, while plausible, actually means “Dumbbell the Parrot.” And cultural references are also manipulated to have maximum effect for those with minimum knowledge. The Italian form of the saints’ names and of various monuments in Rome disguises for English readers without the language one level of reality, but the names nevertheless provide additional atmosphere the way the exclamations do. The people and places are, however, real, and for those who do possess this knowledge, it can ground in historical reality stories with a playful and escapist surface. Some facts of this sort are that the saints in “About the Lilies of San Luigi” are patrons of adolescence, that the artworks mentioned in “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro” celebrate young men erotically, that the opera singer Lina Cavalieri was renowned for the tightness of her corsets, and that Mehemet Ali helped rebuild the Basilica of St. Paul-without-the-Walls after one of its collapses.

  The prose style is the most distinctive virtue of these stories. While Corvo’s historical works are famous—and justly admired—for their baroque extravagances and while his late works are interesting for their psychology and satire, the beauties of the early stories reprinted here are more subtle. Corvo is at his most transparent as a stylist in these stories.

Edmund Miller

Long Island University

April
7, 2008

ABOUT THE EDITOR

Edmund Miller, Chairman of the English Department at the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University, has published a number of encyclopedia articles on Baron Corvo and a short story about him. His scholarly work includes
Drudgerie Divine: The Rhetoric of God and Man in George Herbert
and other books and articles on a wide range of authors and topics. Miller’s most recent creative writing is
The Go-Go Boy Sonnets: Men of the New York Club Scene
.