The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (18 page)

But what I wish to remark is:—Here you have another example of the truth of my perennially-shouted contention that, when I am in a position to write at ease, to produce my MS in proper form (i.e. beautifully written, on fine paper, and bound in white buckram with one of my gorgeous black-and-white designs drawn by my own hand on the cover) to send my so properly-formed MS about in proper sumptuous fashion, – I never yet have failed to dispose of it myself at once. And I argue that the only way to succeed is to keep on doing this, without intermission, until the cumulative effect of my work makes publishers ask me for books.

I told you that I’ve started four new books:
The King of the Wood
(a romance of Diana’s grove at Nemi, which I know by heart, where the priest (Rex Nemorensis or Flamen Dianae)
had
to be a runaway slave, to pick the Golden Bough (mistletoe) from the oak in the sacred grove and to slay his predecessor);
Duchess Attendolo
(the amazing courtship of Duchess Sforza and her four legal marriages within one month to the Duke her husband);
Rose’s Records,
and
Ivory, Apes and Peacocks
(successors to
Hadrian
)
.

I’m still in correspondence with Father Beauclerk (the most congenitally dishonest and stupid man God ever made) and with Father R. H. Benson (who has introduced another Catholic called Eustace Virgo, who says that he not only goes all the way with me but would rather see me Pope than even Hadrian the Seventh!). But all these people are Catholics; and I never yet met an honest one. The nearer you get to the Church, the more noisome becomes the stench. You may stifle it with incense: just as you may other stenches with Condy. But it’s always there and always some filthy porcheria or other. However if any of these devils think that they quietly can confuse and delay and evade and make of none effect, they’ll find themselves mistaken. I am very sweet and suave with them, but quite inexorable, and I give them as much information as they deserve and plenty of food for thought. It’s horrid. Isn’t it? I tell you because you’ve got horse-sense. And yet, if I were not Catholic, I shouldn’t be anything at all. I can’t explain. It’s strange; and, therefore, true. . . . Love to you all.

Your affectionate brother

Freddy

Though the four books which Rolfe mentions in this letter as ‘started’ were lost or left unfinished,
Don Tarquinio
did appear in print in the later part of 1905. On the title-page it is styled
A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance;
and the Prologue claims it to be a transcription of an original manuscript written by Don Tarquinio Santacroce,
circa
1523-27, for the edification of his son Prospero, ‘the leisurely effort of a man of unbounded energy anxious to express himself’. The Don is supposed to write in a macaronic mixture of Italian, Greek, and Latin; but the pretended translation does not keep closely to the pedantic form of its mock-original; to that extent it differs from
Don Renato
in Mr Haddon’s recollection of it.

Truth is defined in the first chapter as ‘that which every man may acquire from the apprehensive nature of perfectly cultivated senses’; history is the privilege of eye-witnesses. Hence the Don’s self-imposed task of recording his ‘fortunate day’, on which he secured release for his family from the excommunication imposed on its members as a punishment for murder.

Don Tarquinio
cannot be called an example of learning lightly borne, for Rolfe’s hardly-won knowledge protrudes from many pages in irritating footnotes; but these are flies in the amber of a highly individual style and story, which grows in attractiveness when it is re-examined. As an exercise in skill in writing – in saying, that is, only what one wants to say – it might serve as a model; as also in its unsentimental flavour of a period. And this ‘Phantasmatic’ romance has the merit of being a picture apprehended by ‘perfectly cultivated senses’. Fr. Rolfe revels in the visible. ‘Pages, in liveries resembling vermilion skins from toe to throat and wrist, bearing armorials on their tabards, displayed at the prow the double-cross, golden, and the high Estense gonfalon.’ ‘Youngsters, whose hair glittered like cocoons in candlelight, joined our progress.’ Cardinal Ippolito d’ Este purchases two acrobats yellow of skin as ‘dew-kissed pumpkins gleaming in the sunlight’. In all ways the physical is emphasized. The colour of the flesh of Indian oarsmen ‘resembled the colour of a field of ripe wheat when some delicate zephyr sways the stems in the sun, not more than half-revealing poppies: but their eyes were like pools of ink, fathomless, upon glittering mother-o’-pearl, very beautiful, and quite unintellectual.’ The heroine’s sea-blue robe is girdled by great cats’-eyes set in gold. After swimming, the hero is anointed in pure oil of olives in which violets have been macerated, and eats cocks’-combs on lettuce and quails farced with figs. The candle-reflections in the waxed oaken panels of floor and roof resembled golden stars in a brown sea. An impertinent page is said to have the ‘face of a beautiful white fiend framed in a web of buttercup-coloured hair’.

What Herbert Rolfe’s opinion was of this highly coloured romance of the flesh, which his brother dedicated to him, is not recorded; but the critics were reasonably appreciative of its many merits. ‘An extravagant wealth of quaint conceit and irony.’ ‘A brilliant
tour de force
[which] might have come out of Boccaccio.’ ‘A novel of exceptional interest and dramatic power.’ ‘Altogether remarkable mastery over words.’ ‘The vivid verbal brilliance of the book is wonderful.’ These cuttings were carefully sent by the exultant author to Mr Churton Taylor. That anonymous writer in
The Times
mentioned in my second chapter gives higher and more reasoned praise. ‘[Rolfe’s] desire to own a sumptuous vocabulary not degraded by vulgar use was characteristic. He loved magnificence purged from meretriciousness; and that ideal he realized in the neglected little masterpiece
Don Tarquinio,
in which the triple flame of the Renascence, bodily, intellectual and spiritual, burns with a cruel and yet magnanimous incandescence. Who can forget the culminating vision of the great Borgia Pope opening the cornucopia of his clemency with the gesture of Jove in a tiara, and withdrawing to his afternoon nap “like the lifegiving sun, who sinketh glorious, golden to his rest in the sea”?’

CHAPTER 13: THE HAPPY INTERVAL

The reader will perhaps remember that at the outset of my Quest a Mr Pirie-Gordon had written offering to call for the purpose of talking about Baron Corvo. By a series of mischances, a long period passed before a date suitable to both of us could be arranged. But at last we met.

Was it, perhaps, his spidery, small writing that led me to expect a trim, precise, small man? My caller proved, on the contrary, a burly six-footer, with the shoulders of an athlete and the complexion of a countryman. I put his age at forty-five. He seemed preoccupied by an interior joke, which I found to derive from entertainment provoked by my unexpected lack of years (I was in the middle twenties at the time of these events) and from the resuscitation of Rolfe. I could hardly believe my ears when, in reply to my first question, ‘Did you know Corvo personally?’, my visitor replied ‘I did indeed: I am Caliban, the last of his collaborators.’ The consequence may be imagined: we talked for hours. Mr Pirie-Gordon was the missing link between Rolfe’s middle and his later years. He told me without bitterness of the strange way in which Baron Corvo had repaid the hospitality and help which the Pirie-Gordon family had been glad to give. He gave me an outline of Rolfe’s intimacy with Robert Hugh Benson and its results. He explained how Fr. Rolfe had become a resident in Venice and never returned. And he left with me a bundle of Rolfe’s letters, surpassing in interest any I had yet seen save the first volume belonging to Millard. With a spontaneity that I saw was characteristic, Mr Pirie-Gordon declared that these letters should, in the fullness of time, be bequeathed to me.

In subsequent interviews, and by the study of the correspondence left for my inspection, I was able to piece the story together, to watch another rotation of that wheel to which Rolfe was bound.

The first meeting between Rolfe and Pirie-Gordon took place at Oxford late one night in the summer of 1906. Fr. Rolfe had secured a congenial occupation, and was staying at Jesus College, helping his former Grantham headmaster, Dr Hardy, to whom he was acting as secretary. (Shortly before Dr Hardy’s death he told Shane Leslie: ‘I liked and appreciated Rolfe’s very attractive personality. In spite of his little foibles I always found him a good and loyal friend, and he was distinctly
persona grata
in my family. I sometimes worked him pretty hard. In the two years when I was Greats examiner he read papers to me for six or seven hours a day for more than two months on end.’ On the subject of Rolfe’s Latin scholarship it is worth noting that at this time, with Dr Hardy’s help, he wrote a long Ciceronian indictment of contemporary Catholics which was forwarded to Pope Leo XIII.)

Pirie-Gordon was a member of Magdalen, keeping a postgraduate year devoted to historical study. Enthusiastic for literature, the young man had read with admiration
Chronicles of the House of Borgia;
and when he learned that its author, now called Fr. Rolfe, was working in Jesus, paid a surprise visit to his rooms. For all Rolfe’s desire to avoid notice, he was very willing to make amusing acquaintances; he did not rebuff this chance-sent admirer; soon a close friendship sprang up between the two. There was much to draw them together. Pirie-Gordon was, for a young man, wealthy; he was interested in Rolfe’s favourite fifteenth century; had just returned from a long visit to Florence, Rome, South Italy, North Africa, and Spain. More than that, he had to a high degree the young man’s love of fine clothes: his vast wardrobe much impressed the impecunious author, who had known what it was to wear the same garments winter and summer alike. Above all, Pirie-Gordon had a great plan, very fascinating to the tired literary wanderer, for the furthering of which he eagerly invited Rolfe’s co-operation.

This ambitious project was the founding of a secular semi-monastic order which, by joint studies, should, in a spirit of disinterestedness, add to the learning of the world. Nothing could have tallied more nearly with Rolfe’s desires, and he entered with enthusiasm into the details of this substitute for priesthood. The fires of his artistic ambition flickered anew, and he set to work to design banners, emblems and devices for the Order. Before the newly-established friendship was a month old, Pirie-Gordon, with that spontaneity which I had noticed as surviving in him, impetuously urged Rolfe to spend a holiday in his father’s house in Wales. Rolfe very naturally hesitated at returning to that country of misfortune, and urged that he had no clothes for country-house visits; but his young friend would brook no denial, and prevailed upon his mother to second the invitation in a flattering letter. After a week of indecision Rolfe assented; and so he who (as he sometimes boasted) had been the inmate of a Welsh workhouse, left Oxford to be entertained by the magisterial owner of Gwernvale.

Unexpectedly, he made a good impression on the Pirie-Gordons. It was not simply that he was the son’s friend, or that in the flush of his pleasure at being comfortably housed he offered tactful phrases: he was liked for his own sake, and made more welcome than such a chance-comer could have expected. In this congenial atmosphere Rolfe expanded, and confided his hopes and troubles to his host. He told, more or less, the picturesque story of his life: his clerical ambitions, the unfair treatment which had barred him from the priesthood, the persecution of his Catholic enemies, the deceitful behaviour of Col. Thomas. He told of his still undecided lawsuit, and the meagre salary from Dr Hardy on which he lived. The Pirie-Gordons, who admired his books, were touched by his confidences, and sympathized with his woes. Within a week he was ‘Hadrian’ to the entire family.

Perhaps Rolfe was never happier than during that summer month of his first stay in Gwernvale. Despite the pretended difficulty about clothes, his luggage included a mole-coloured velvet dinner jacket, so that he was able to appear as a spruce if mysterious figure at the dinner parties given by the Pirie-Gordons and their neighbours. At these he was a great success. He had a flow of conversation on unusual subjects which astonished all his listeners. One of his topics centred round a strange ring on his right hand, in which a small spur was mounted on a bezel. This, he explained, was for the purpose of protecting himself from kidnapping attempts, and he wore it in consequence of an assault on his person made years before by the Jesuits. When they essayed, as he fully expected, a further abduction, he would sweep with his armed hand at the brow of his assailant. A line would thus be scored in the flesh which would draw blood; and his blinded enemy (blinded by the dripping blood) would be at the mercy of the intended victim. This ring, and his others, some of which he wore strung round his neck, were made of silver; and at night they were carefully placed in powdered sulphur to preserve the right shade of tarnished darkness. He asserted, also, that he understood in part the language of the cats; and events so far bore out his claim that when, in the moonlight, he muttered his incantations on the lawn, strange cats as well as those of the household abandoned their prowls to rub purringly against his legs.

The days were hardly less delightful. They were spent, for the most part, in driving about the countryside, or in bathing in the river Usk, or in sunbathing in a walled orchard while revising the Rule of that projected Order, which finally took shape thus:

In the belief that it is desirable to revive the virtues of that period of the World’s history commonly called the Middle Ages, and to practise them, in the hope that We may thereby the better pursue wisdom; and being convinced that the practice of the Catholic Faith is compatible with the pursuit of Wisdom as comprised in the human Letters and Arts; and

Being persuaded that some Individuals can aspire to Wisdom the better when associated with other Individuals having similar desires and abilities;

Therefore, We the Founders, having in Our Minds the Mediaeval Ideal of a Monastic Military Order devoted to God-service, – independent inasmuch as it tolerates no interference, – but law abiding, inasmuch as it submits to the supremacy of the Monarch in whose Dominions it is located, Do Now and Hereby Institute and Found

THE ORDER OF SANCTISSIMA SOPHIA

constituted, organised and devoted in the manner of the Middle Ages to God-service in the pursuit of Wisdom by way of the Human Letters and Arts.

And to this end We intend Ourselves to provide an Establishment or Establishments where the Rule of this Our Order shall displace the existing Laws of the Land, acquiring an Island, or other Territory, over which this Our Order may exercise such supremacy as shall be necessary for the achievement of its Object.

And until such time when this may be accomplished, We intend Ourselves to maintain a convenient centre wherein the Rule of this Our Order may be prosecuted so far as is consistent with Our Religious obligations and Our loyalty to the Reigning Monarch; and We place this Our Order under the protection of the Ever Blessed and Most Glorious Trinity, of Saint Mary the Virgin, of Saint Peter the Apostle, and of Saint George the Patron of Chivalry.

Over and beyond these general objects, an elaborate scheme of government for the Order was worked out in detail. Beautiful notepaper, with headings designed by Rolfe, was printed, and orders given for a special dress, designed by Pirie-Gordon. Pending the acquisition of the desired island, Gwernvale was settled on as temporary headquarters.

But other, and more practical, plans were made by the two friends. Young Pirie-Gordon had made and laid by various abortive beginnings of books; and these, in an expansive moment, he showed to Rolfe. They included a vague romance, conceived at Harrow, of a modern man who was to relive his past, in which he was to identify himself with Odysseus; and an unsuccessful Arnold Prize essay on the life and times of Innocent the Great. Both of these beginnings were pronounced by Rolfe to have elements of excellence; and he half-hinted, half-proposed collaboration. The Pirie-Gordons were delighted at the thought that their son’s vague projects might be given a useful form; Harry himself, like all beginners in letters, burned for print. Work was begun on both these books, and also on a third, more remarkable than either, a reconstruction of history ‘as it ought to have been, and easily might have been, but in fact was not’. The name of this romance, I learned with the prospective joy of a discoverer, was
Hubert’s Arthur
! Rolfe, I learned further, was left to do the major part of it, while Pirie-Gordon made himself mainly responsible for the reincarnation story (called
The Weird of the Wanderer
) and, almost entirely, for the study of Innocent, which he had written originally in Rome and Amalfi for the Arnold Prize.

Months passed by. Rolfe returned to Oxford, still as temporary secretary to Dr Hardy; Pirie-Gordon toured abroad; the collaboration was continued by post; the lawsuit was postponed once more.

But there is an end to all things, even to the law’s delays. After more than two years, the action against Col. Thomas was heard in the King’s Bench Court on 17 December 1906, and following a brief hearing, in which Rolfe was cross-examined severely concerning his past life, and broke down, a verdict was given for the defendant on all points with costs.

I feel exactly as though I had been beaten with beetroots and mangold wurzels all over, especially on my face, neck and hands

the unsuccessful litigant wrote to his friends,

quite sore and bruized by the court full of eyes which banged on me all Wednesday. It appears to me that I was a great fool. Not such a fool as my advisers: but a fool. Several things were omitted which ought to have been put in:—there were some of Thomas’s ‘rough drafts’ which, when compared with my MS and the printed book, would have shewed
How
MUCH of the work was his and how much mine – that ‘Schedule’ ought to have been shewn, to prove what the original £25 Report was to have been and how the Book grew out of it. . . .

And so on. That unsuccessful lawsuit was Rolfe’s Moscow, though he did not know it.

*

Fr. Rolfe returned to Oxford, not yet dispirited. And, since man must rest his hopes on something, he began to have hopes of
Hubert’s Arthur.

(It) is an awful piece of work (he wrote). But it will be unlike any book ever written. And it will pay. I go on very slowly and keep on rewriting. I’m just beginning to know the people in it: but I alter so radically as the thing grows that I shan’t let it be seen till it’s done. And I am not going to do any one single thing beside till it is done. Mark me well.

Some of his postcards are very funny:

Have you any objection to Lady Maud de Braose being shut up in a dungeon, and fed with the tails of haddocks, two a day, till she, saltish, perishes of pure displeasure? They can sing her requiem on the eleventh day.

Of Oxford itself (which by this time he must have come to know better than any other city) he wrote to another correspondent:

This Examination (the Honour School of Literae Humaniores) is an experience. We are doing Ancient History, Logick, Roman History, Translation. The papers are perfectly appalling. The vilest, vulgarest scripts, the silliest spelling, infinitives split to the midriff. I asked Hardy what was to be done with these crimes against fair English, and he answered sedately, ‘Pass them over with silent contempt.’

I find that silent system admirable altogether.

This is why.

Whatever is of good, a man must get not from a teacher, but from his own toil.

The man who wants to write Good English will, ultimately, write good English, and his work will have the supreme merit of being rare.

So this mighty Alma Mater of Oxford does well not to teach the preservation of unsplit infinitives. She teaches you how to teach yourself, and that is all, and all is everything, and there is nothing more.

But what a lovely place it is. I call it the City of Eternal Youth. All that is not life is gray and ancient, gracious colleges, gardens and the sunny river. And everywhere is musick, antiphony and song. Do you know the quality of voice which I call virgin-bass? The resonant reticent bass of the boy of twenty wearing his maidenhead for one day more? I heard that last Tuesday and recorded a new emotion. Its exceeding rarity, its evanishing bloom is as precious as carved chrusoprase. I could live here very well and do good work in the divine peace.

The friendship continued. In the following Easter, Rolfe visited Gwernvale again. His appointment with Hardy had ended, and as he had nowhere to go, he was invited to remain as a more or less permanent guest. The ‘family’ was abroad, travelling; and when Harry returned to Oxford, Rolfe was left alone, with the servants, as deputy master of the house.
Innocent the Great
was finished. Was Rolfe slightly vexed when Messrs Longmans, Green and Co. accepted his young protégé’s book without demur? He consoled himself, rather unkindly, by christening Pirie-Gordon ‘Caliban’, in reference to that passage in
The Tempest
when Prospero says:

. . . I pitied thee,

Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour

One thing or other: when thou didst not (savage)

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I informed thy purposes

With words.

His envy might almost be pardoned, for publishers were once more showing an unaccountable (so he reasonably thought it) indifference to his work. Even Mr Grant Richards (to whom he had once promised ‘ruthless and persequent enmity’) was approached, yet missed his chance: