The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (17 page)

While he was wandering thus round London, making contacts, but not contracts, with its hard-headed publishers, an old school friend met him and took pity on the haggard and hungry author. This friend was warned against Rolfe by Kains-Jackson, to whom he wrote in reply:

You don’t quite see our attitude with regard to Corvo. He is mortally frightened of all men, of all publicity, of all daylight upon himself and his deeds. Well, we decided to accept him without prejudice and give him another chance. We obliterate the last twenty years; the world refuses to do so. Therefore F. and I are the only two people in the world he believes in or can trust. We save him from himself by purposely ignoring anything amiss in him; and he responds to this attitude gallantly. The man I knew and loved twenty years ago was bound to do so. To us he is F. W. Rolfe; he assumes no other identity. Of course in thus disarming ourselves we risk something: one must risk something to work a miracle of healing. And we are bent on working one . . . He says he does not dare to meet you or any of the Gleeson White people. I suppose you know too much. . . . He is a jaundiced, bitter, persecuted pariah: that is evident; he has done badly by the world he lives in and his fellow-men, and he naturally fears it and them. He has spoiled his life. And we want to bring a ray of hope and comfort into it, even if he doesn’t deserve one. He hasn’t hurt us; nor will we hurt him; he has just realised this about two people out of a million . . . Do not be troubled about my renewal of friendship with Corvo; I assure you that sincere pity for his awful state is my fundamental motive. His example, his counsel, his influence, is not going to have weight with me. I cannot afford to become a crank; I don’t mind being a lever, however.

But even this good-natured friend was rebuffed after a short time, and Baron Corvo once more pursued a miserable and lonely path. The wheel of his life had made another complete circle; the new Ixion was as completely poor, friendless, prospectless and estranged from the world as when he had left Italy for England in 1890, or Holywell for London in 1898. But that desperate resolution which had already carried Rolfe alive through so much hardship was not exhausted; he took refuge from his disappointment and regrets in his own spirit, and, accepting for the moment the loneliness that was his lot, by an intense effort of will, once more made a new beginning. For the fourth time he put the past behind him to create a new career. A new life demanded a new name; and so, ‘the years of toil which went to make the pseudonym having been annulled’ (as he wrote to his brother), the barony of Corvo was abandoned, as it had been adopted: it had certainly brought him no luck. Henceforth he styled himself ‘Fr. Rolfe’. The abbreviation stood truthfully enough for Frederick; while those who misread it as ‘Father’ were only recognizing, in its bearer’s view, that tenaciously maintained divine call to which the powers of the Church had been so strangely blind.

CHAPTER 12: INTERREGNUM

By this time my Quest for Corvo had brought me a considerable understanding of his character. The answer to half the problem I had started out to solve was in my hands. I knew, now, the links of the long repressed misery to which he gave expression and relief in
Hadrian the Seventh
, which was the first-fruit of his new life. A happy man could not write such a book: there would be no need. In that intensely personal
roman à clef
Rolfe dramatized the long misadventure of his life, and made real, on the plane of imagination, his defeated dreams and hopes. Moreover, the overwrought paranoiac was able, by this projection of himself, to satisfy his spleen against all those who had in fact or in his fancy injured him, to ‘cleanse his bosom of much perilous stuff’. All the grudges which he had harboured for years, against Fr. Beauclerk, against John Holden, against Trevor Haddon, against the Scots College and its students, against the author of the Aberdeen attack, against his superiors in the Church, were, in and by this book, paid off in full. He rose refreshed, like a sinner after absolution, ready, though he did not realize it, for another revolution of the wheel of his torment. For, though he was relieved, the relief could not be lasting. In all human lives there is a recurring pattern, sometimes difficult to perceive, sometimes on the surface; and the pattern is drawn from within. By the end of these pages, Rolfe’s pattern will, I hope, be sufficiently clear, if it is not so already. This is not the place for a final diagnosis of his fascinating, distorted temperament; nor need we at this point speculate as to whether or not any lasting remedy could have been found for the inward cause of his woes. For the moment, like the cat which chews grass, he had found his own cure: time was to restore his malady, and plunge him into fresh circumstances of painful friendship and strange unhappy adventures. It must be remembered, however, that, as I have shown in my first chapter, Rolfe did far more, in
Hadrian
, than pay off old scores. He expressed
himself in
that haunted book; and his Self was something beyond the ungrateful beneficiary that so many, in daily life, found him to be, something beyond the unscrupulous, egocentric, homosexual pretender of Aberdeen, Holywell, and Rome. There is greatness, genius, the true note of a vital and unique personality expressed in its intense pages. Those who feel disposed to sentence and dismiss him should re-read the prayer of his
Prooimion
before signing judgement.

*

I knew, as I have said, the answer to half that problem which had perplexed me when I first read
Hadrian
and Millard’s letters – how Rolfe’s masterpiece came to be written, and what manner of man its author was; but the rest still waited for solution – what had happened to the lost manuscripts, what train of chances took Rolfe to his death in Venice. The Quest continued.

Rolfe’s relatives are not scarified with his acquaintances in
Hadrian.
Instead, he sought and reached a reconciliation. There seemed no impediment to his
vita nuova,
which opened auspiciously when his book found a publisher within a month of its completion. ‘This is Fr. Rolfe’s first work’, he wrote to his brother; and this time he did not sell his book outright. The contract provided a royalty basis whereby the author was to receive a shilling for every copy sold after the first six hundred; and ‘I have every reason to believe that Chatto and Windus are a different class of publisher to Lane and Richards’, he grimly wrote, little suspecting that his new bargain was to work out even more badly than those he had previously made. But this time at least he did not permit himself the extravagant hopes which he had attached to his earlier books. ‘At present I am undergoing the depression which always follows publication’, he wrote to Herbert Rolfe. ‘A piece of Me has been taken from me. I have the limpness of a brand-new mother. After the usual interval, Nature will enable me to replace what I have exuded. But, for a week, you may think of me as a piece of thread.’ ‘I look upon the whole thing as a toss-up’, he adds. ‘I did not go out of my way to read reviews of my other books: and knowing what I know now (from practical experience) of reviewing and of the intelligence as well as of the
bona fides
of reviewers, I am not going to seek them or worry about them or let myself be influenced by them now. I know that I have done my best; and, if that is not good enough, I’ll try again.’

The one contemporary critic who gave Rolfe’s masterpiece its due was Henry Murray. ‘This is a book for which I think it safe to predict a fairly large measure of success’, he wrote, with, alas, unjustified hopefulness. ‘Fr. Rolfe’s book . . . is dazzlingly clever in parts, and almost consistently admirable throughout.’ He gave long quotations to display the qualities of his discovery, and praised the style and the plot with courage and discernment. But despite his praises, and those of a few others,
Hadrian
is still waiting for its proper applause, and place in literature. Fr. Martindale, of that Society of Jesus which Rolfe so often feared, observes of it that ‘Over much of it plays the light of a quite uncanny beauty; its crackle of epigram is continual; an under-current of white-hot personal passion is at all times discernible.’ My own impression has been given in the first chapter. Another who has been dazzled by its glow is D. H. Lawrence, who wrote: ‘The book remains a clear and definite book of our epoch, not to be swept aside. If it is the book of a demon, as [Rolfe’s] contemporaries said, it is the book of a man demon, not of a mere poseur. And if some of it is caviare, at least it came out of the belly of a live fish.’

*

Rolfe believed devoutly in his Guardian Angel; but that overworked spirit proved inefficient to protect his protégé from new mischances. In the autumn of 1903, while finishing
Hadrian,
‘Fr. Rolfe’ came into touch, by means of an advertisement, with a man whom he subsequently described as ‘an obese magenta colonel of militia with a black-stubbed moustache and a Welsh-tongued proposition’, Colonel Owen Thomas, subsequently Brigadier-General Sir Owen Thomas, M.P. Col. Thomas, who had served with distinction in the Boer War, was an expert adviser of the Rhodes Trustees. In that capacity he had collected, at substantial expense, a mass of evidence concerning pastoral and agricultural prospects in Rhodesia, which he was desirous of making into a report to be submitted, first to the Trustees of the Rhodes Estate, and subsequently, in book form, to the public. Unfortunately the Colonel had no gift for writing; so he sought the help of some trained hand to present his facts in acceptable shape. Rolfe seemed just the man needed; and terms were made. Not, however, precise terms. Doubtless the matter was left open until events showed how much Rolfe would be required to do. What his share of the labour actually was cannot now be discovered, but with his aid the Report was delivered, and in due course the book was published. The latter certainly bears in many places the stigmata of Rolfe’s eccentric style; according to his claim he had expanded the Colonel’s notes from a twenty-page pamphlet to a five-hundred-page volume. At all events, for his work, whatever it was (it certainly seems to have occupied most of eight months), he was in the end offered by Col. Thomas a sum which, coupled with previous payments, made the not very grand total of £50. However much or little Rolfe had expected from
Hadrian,
his hopes in respect of the connection with Col. Thomas were very, if vaguely, high, and this time his anger was not to be satisfied with the writing of sarcastic letters. The ‘new life’ demanded something more to appease his disappointment; and on the advice and introduction of the literary agent, Pinker, the affair was placed in the hands of a substantial firm of lawyers.

It was my good fortune to make the personal acquaintance of the solicitor who acted for ‘Fr. Rolfe’ in the ensuing complications. Mr Churton Taylor remembered the case well: he had good cause. The most sedate men may be inflamed by certain provocations; the most cautious sometimes tempted into speculation. The latter fate befell Mr Taylor when he met Rolfe, who must have been in his most persuasive mood on the fateful afternoon when he called to set out his claim, for the careful lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn Fields was carried off his feet by the shabby stranger, the queerest man he had ever met. During nearly two hours he listened to the story of Rolfe’s wrongs and hopes, his false friends and the wonderful books he could write if once he had peace and his deserts.
Hadrian,
and the more impressive reviews of it, were produced as evidence, together with the great Borgia roll, which, in appearance at least, was very valuable. What Rolfe needed, he explained, was a business agent who would receive his royalties and administer his affairs, giving him in return a small allowance to keep him free from worry while working. It may seem incredible, but after a few further meetings Rolfe secured a promise that not only would Mr Taylor fight the case against Col. Thomas unprovided with funds, but also that he would make his client the necessary allowance to live on until the action was decided. Eloquence for once met its reward; or perhaps the Guardian Angel was in a better mood that day.

But even Mr Taylor’s interest in the aggrieved man of letters could not blind him to the uncertain issue of his suit, and at  Rolfe’s suggestion he accepted, as security for costs and the money he was to advance, an assignment of
Hadrian,
and certain other unpublished or unfinished works, including that priest’s diary shown to Mr Haddon, and the translation of Meleager (of which last, however, Rolfe only claimed to be a third proprietor).

The writ was issued on August 6, 1904, and ‘the plaintiff claims from the defendant as the balance of remuneration due to him for literary work and labour’ the sum of £999 9s. 6d., made up for the most part by ‘say 1050 hours at 10s. 6d. an hour’ in writing and revising
Agricultural and Pastoral Prospects in South Africa,
Col. Thomas’s book. Here again, as in the dispute with Fr. Beauclerk at Holywell, and in the correspondence with Grant Richards, I could not help noticing how Rolfe destroyed whatever grounds for sympathy he may have had by the extravagance of his claim. Not content, indeed, with asking nearly a thousand pounds for his literary labours, he also stated that ‘Previous to October 1903 the plaintiff had, after spending a considerable amount of time and trouble thereon, prepared a skeleton history of the Borgia family in the form of an annotated genealogical tree . . . and in consideration that the plaintiff would neglect his own work and continue to do the work and labour [for which claim had already been made] the defendant . . . verbally promised and undertook that he would procure a purchaser . . . at a price which should yield the plaintiff not less than £2000 net’!!! – which sum the optimistic Rolfe also sued for in addition to his fee for writing the book!

However, whether Rolfe won or lost his case, he seemed to be a certain gainer, since even if the verdict went against him he could hardly be worse off than he was before the starting of the action; and meanwhile, pending the hearing, he was to be supported with funds on the security of books which, so far, had proved neither a gold-mine nor even a copper-mine to their indigent author. Rolfe had been lucky in his solicitor, but his luck went even further. Delay after delay prolonged the period of his action. Month followed month, and still the case was not listed for hearing. And when it was, Col. Thomas, a busy man and traveller, was forced to ask for an adjournment. It really seemed as though that care-free interval for which Rolfe had so long sighed, during which he would be able to write masterpieces untroubled by money worries, had unexpectedly been vouchsafed.

The opening of the year 1905 found him still enjoying the novel experience of a regular income; for his case still hung fire, and his allowance continued. In the peaceful interregnum so strangely secured, he was neither idle nor unhappy; he began to write a new book, and to make fresh friends. The new book, embodying a theme originally suggested by Temple Scott, was vividly described in a long letter to Herbert Rolfe:

St Alphege, Broadstairs,

Isle of Thanet

xv Mar. 1905

Dear H:

I am not quite well. Tuning out of order; tongue like a polecat’s pelt. Worry always affects me this way. Consequently I’m taking a morning easy; and here’s a letter for you. I shall be better after lunch.

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.