The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (11 page)

I at once got one of the girls to make a bundle of Rolfe’s washing; then, taking the bundle to his solicitor’s office, I threw it down at the feet of an astonished clerk and said: ‘Tell your master I have brought some more of his client’s dirty linen for him to attend to.’

I met Corvo in Well Street and stopped him. ‘Corvo, this must stop,’ I said; ‘If it doesn’t, I shall do you a mischief.’ The same day I had a letter from him to say he had instructed his solicitor to take out a summons for threatening language. To this I answered: ‘Tell your solicitor to wait for another twenty-four hours and then take out a summons for assault and battery. You will only have to produce yourself in evidence to have me convicted.’ In the evening I went to Bank Place. The door was opened by Mrs Hochheimer, who told me that Corvo and her husband were away. I told her what I had come for. She burst into tears and said she and her husband had had no peace since Corvo came to them, and he had ruined the
Record.
I prowled about the town all the next day looking for Corvo but I didn’t come across him. A few days later I left Holywell for good.

I never saw Corvo again.

*

It must have been about this time that, from the first floor of the Greyhound Inn, Rolfe, a gaunt and gloomy figure, pointed his accusing finger at Fr Beauclerk as the latter passed in procession to pray at the Shrine. An unpublished story, which must be contemporaneous, opens: ‘I write this in the fervent hope that I may wound one Jesuit. I desire that some of his candid friends shall read to him what I have written; and give him pain.’

Among the dozens of recriminatory letters which Fr Beauclerk sent me, many were signed and purported to be written by the
Record’s
proprietor, F. W. Hochheimer, though the handwriting remained undisguisedly Rolfe’s. Some are comic, pathetic, and childish at once; for, far from refusing to correspond (as he claims in his ‘Nowt’ story), Rolfe wrote almost daily; it was he, and not Fr Beauclerk, who was infuriated by his opponent’s silence. At the risk of overcrowding my narrative, I quote one more letter, written though not signed by Rolfe.

The Record Publishing Co.

Record Office, Holywell, N. Wales.

18 June 1898

Dear Fr Beauclerk,

I fear Mr Austin’s troubles have been quite too much for him, and I have been compelled to resume the Editorship of the
Holywell Record
as I do not consider him competent any longer to reply to letters addressed to him in such a capacity.

He has chosen to go without food since Wednesday morning, solely for the purpose, I believe, of dropping down and creating a scene and a scandal, a mode of proceeding which I strongly disfavour.

We are not without food in the house, at present, as we have several times been during the thirteen months you have boycotted us, and therefore I, finding no excuse for such conduct, dissent from it and wish to dissociate myself from any evil effects which may be caused by it.

I would ask you to make a pastoral visit to him, but could not guarantee you ordinary decent treatment.

Yours faithfully in Xt.

Frank W. Hochheimer

Under the spur of the virulence Rolfe imparted to the
Record’s
pages, its circulation waned; and midway through 1898 the whole edifice of this strange provincial feud crumbled into nothingness. When the paper died, Rolfe ostentatiously took up quarters in the workhouse, whence he continued to disseminate, to the best of his ability, the story of his ‘wrongs’, now immovably fixed in his distorted mind. It must have been almost a relief to Fr Beauclerk when his superiors, disturbed by the scandal and animosity darkening the well of the Saint, removed him to another sphere of usefulness. Rolfe had won a discreditable victory; and he paid for it later in the year when his
Wide World
fiction gave his enemies their opening. With Fr Beauclerk’s disappearance there was nothing more to keep Fr. Austin in Wales, and so, with all his possessions tied in a bundle on the end of a stick, the ‘unhappy Catholic vagabond’ set out to walk from Flint to Oxford, to find Dr Hardy at Jesus College – almost the only friend with whom, during his stormy life, he never quarrelled.

In after years Rolfe often spoke of this Holywell episode as the close of his second career. His first was the Church, and he had been driven from that; his second was painter, and he had been cheated of his due. Now he turned from cassock and brush to the pen.

CHAPTER 8: THE STRANGE HISTORIAN

NOTE

Among the privileges of the biographer is an assumption of omniscience in respect of his subject. And, when sufficient material is available, something very near full knowledge is possible. The evidence of a man’s letters, of his contemporaries, his work, and the indisputable facts of his life, do sometimes make it possible, when the material has been collated and sifted, to write with certainty. In the present study a different method has been employed. So far, I have set before the reader
(
not an analysed summary of my researches but
)
an account of the search itself; and I believe that in regard to a man so exceptional as Rolfe this exceptional method is justified. Truth takes many forms; and the dramatic alternation of light and dark in which my inquiries discovered Baron Corvo has, I am convinced, more value as verity than any one man’s account. I have tried, accordingly, to be the advocate for neither side, but rather the judge impartially bringing out all aspects of the case for the benefit of the jury. At the point in Rolfe’s life which my narrative has now reached, however, that method ceases, for the moment, to be advisable. The evidence concerning his career immediately after the Holywell episode came into my possession in fragments, over a long period of time. To present it as I obtained it would set so great a task to the reader’s attention that the resulting knowledge would almost certainly seem insufficient reward. In the chapters following I have, therefore, combined numerous testimonies and information obtained from various sources into a coherent and chronological account without detailing the course of my investigation, though
(
as will be seen
)
without, on the other hand, abandoning the framework of my Quest.

Few onslaughts on London and literary fame can ever have seemed more hopeless than that of the baffled, exposed, threadbare Baron, with his dismal record of unsuccessful painting, priesthood and photography, his kinks of quarrelsomeness and sexual feeling. Penniless, friendless, out of favour with the authorities of his Church, smarting from exposure by newspaper, he had not even youth, which can outweigh many odds, to balance the scale. He was nearly forty, the age at which most men who are to make a mark in the world have struck the first impressions. But Rolfe had made no mark: the world had stamped him, not he the world: no rolling stone ever gathered less moss. Nevertheless there were three things on his side. First was the habit of hardship, which enabled him to accept poverty in the spirit which has dignified so many artists’ garrets. It is easier to tolerate the accustomed, than deprivation. And if the outcast had no cash, he was at least immune from the quotidian responsibilities that chain the lives of the free. Second, his excellent, still unimpaired constitution and sense of the physical, which, when he was not hungry, brought him a ready, thrilling appreciation of the world around him. And thirdly, he possessed a genuine talent, so far hidden behind the bushels of his other aspirations, but now to be revealed. Still, when all this has been allowed, it must be admitted that he wore thin armour against fate.

His only literary acquaintance in London (if the term may be used of one he had never met) was John Lane. Lane, too, was in his way a remarkable man, a self-taught railway clearing-clerk who had graduated by way of bookselling into the ranks of established publishers. He set new standards for his trade, and sponsored many good books. By a flair, perhaps less for literature than for men, by luck, by hospitality, and by natural business sense, he had reached prosperity and the opportunity of power. Among his many enterprises,
The Yellow Book,
a quarterly miscellany of literature and art which represented (and misrepresented) the noisy, gifted younger generation of that time, is perhaps now best remembered. The eighteen-nineties was a decade in which many new ideas and mental attitudes were born, many old ones died, many new talents first flowered. It was marked by an unusual expectancy of fresh things, and readiness to consider unknown men. Perhaps for that last reason Henry Harland, the literary editor of
The Yellow Book,
accepted and published six short stories which ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ sent from Wales.

But the stories deserved acceptance, and the applause they provoked, on their own merits. Though they were Rolfe’s first serious effort at writing, his ability suddenly appears in them full-fledged. There is a vivid and arresting novelty of style, poise and theme in these
Stories Toto Told Me
which charmed sceptics equally with the devout. Baldly described, they are retellings of folk-lore legends of the Catholic saints as presented by one Toto, a handsome, ingenuous, vivacious Italian peasant-lad. His quaint attributions of human characteristics and motives to the saints in their heavenly functions remind the reader irresistibly, though without irreverence, of the Gods of Olympus. Toto’s audience is his English patron, the Baron; and his manner of speech is represented by an effervescent mixture of archaisms and broken English. No summary can do justice to these modern fables, which Rolfe, as he told his brother, ‘rewrote nine times in honour of the Nine Quires of Angels’. They did not pass unobserved in the pages of the
Yellow Book
: such was their reception that Lane was encouraged to reprint them in a booklet uniform with Max Beerbohm’s
The Happy Hypocrite,
which had also aroused a wide admiration on its first appearance in the famous quarterly. He did more: he invited the unknown author to submit a second series of
Toto
stories; and it was with the fate of this further batch that Rolfe first concerned himself in London.

In the February of 1899, then, on a Monday morning, Baron Corvo presented himself for the first time to the astonished eyes of his publisher. John Lane (whom Rolfe describes as a ‘tubby little pot-bellied bantam, scrupulously attired and looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer’) was confronted by a gaunt figure shrouded in a tattered mackintosh which might hide anything or nothing, who spoke with ‘an arctic highness which strangely contrasted with his frightfully shabby garb’, an un-Baronial and yet impressive scarecrow. Rolfe’s account of this meeting survives: ‘The publisher had a curiosity to see the writer whose first book he had published. . . . The writer, on the other hand, took no more interest in the publisher than one takes in the chopper which one seizes at random for hewing-out steps to fortune: he had no fear at the back of his mind; and he had something quite definite to say.’ The ‘something’ concerned that second series of
Toto
stories, commissioned the year before, and delivered nine months previous to this visit. Nothing had been heard of them since, and their author now requested that ‘terms for publication should be settled out of hand’. Behind this ‘definite’ request a good deal remained unspoken, as Lane was shrewd enough to see.

Lane was impulsive as well as shrewd. He could be hard; but he could also be humane. It is no injustice to his memory to say that he often kept his authors waiting unduly for their due; yet he frequently backed books which he knew would involve him in loss, or supported men whose work could never pay. On meeting the haggard yet haughty Baron, who was frank that he had no friends or funds in the world, he was moved to pity, praised his work, gave him the names of other publishers for whom he might read manuscripts, pressed a sovereign in his hand, advised him to call on Henry Harland, and promised to arrange matters in respect of the book next day. Baron Corvo left the Albany office almost in elation.

Next morning, alas, his day-dream was swiftly shattered. Lane’s impulses had reversed themselves overnight, and he now offered only £20 as the purchase price for the new
Toto
stories on which Rolfe had built his hopes. The unlucky Baron could, and should, have refused. But it had taken nearly a year to extract even this offer; if he opened negotiations with someone else an equal period might pass before he benefited at all by his labours. And the prospect of an immediate cheque was irresistible. So, hiding his disappointment behind a blank mask, Rolfe assented, and left the publisher’s office richer by £10. The balance he was to receive when the book came out. It was a bad bargain; and he never forgave the man who made it.

Where and how did Corvo live, then? (One is almost tempted to add, why?) There is no clue to the quarter of London in which he hid his poverty and rage; but at least he did not despair. The autobiographical romance in which he consoled himself by setting down an acid recital of his wrongs narrates that ‘on the way back’ he bought a lamp and an oilcan, a ream each of standard linen bank- and green blotting-paper, a large bottle of Draper’s Dichroic ink, a Japanese letter copybook, and a fountain pen which held a quarter of a pint of ink. With these slight weapons he renewed his fight against his penury and the indifference of the world.

He had hopes of Harland. The editor of the
Yellow Book
and his friends were fascinated by the equivocal Baron, an impressively shabby figure at the Saturday tea-parties in the Cromwell Road. The slight, eagle-nosed, reticent, unsmiling worn wanderer, in corduroy trousers and jacket, with his appalling cap and withered cloak, his Vandyke beard grown during the walk from Wales, his strange rings and stranger words, was indisputably a man of parts. It was apparent when he talked. On those occasions he kept his eyes cast down, raising them abruptly to disconcert interrupters. His topics were very various and yet akin. In a lucky moment you might have heard a surprising panegyric of the Borgias or a vivid description of modern Rome, a profession of Catholic faith or a bitter denunciation of contemporary Catholics. He was manifestly a mine of liturgical knowledge. On occasion he would relate his past life for hours, and tell of his privations, his paintings, and his oppressors. He explained that he was a tonsured clerk as well as a Papal Baron. By his own account he was a singularly friendless individual, who for a variety of reasons had been treated with shameless treachery by those in whom he had trusted. Once started on this topic he was difficult to stop, and a modern observer would have found the label of ‘persecution mania’ ready to his hand. Nevertheless there was evident, abundant ability in the man; and, partly on account of it, partly because of the mystery of his circumstances, Baron Corvo was treated with respect by Harland and his circle.

But though this audience and their attentions doubtless gratified his vanity, the hungry author was still without the means to live. He besought editors with unsolicited articles, he entreated publishers for work as a ‘reader’ (or, as he put it, ‘asked for a chance of showing his skill as a judge of commonplace literature’). Few listened; fewer still employed him; he lived on oranges and oatmeal. ‘The Baron’ was almost destitute and desperate when he met Mr Grant Richards, a young newcomer among publishers, on the look-out for talent.

Here, in a way, he was in luck. Grant Richards had read and admired the
Toto
stories, and was eager to consider further work by the same hand. The first meeting between the publishing novice and the pseudo-Baron is unrecorded; but out of it, after an interval, a book was born. ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ was engaged to produce a history of the rise and fall of the Borgia family which should be at once a gallimaufry of living pictures and a studious chronicle. How Rolfe had managed, in the course of his worried and wandering life, to acquire sufficient knowledge of Italy and Italian history to equip him for the task is an interesting problem. Was this the legacy of those unrecorded Roman months? At all events he was able to satisfy Mr Richards of his competence to write the book; for he had studied under the best of all masters – his own desires, his own curiosity, and with such masters one learns quickly.

For payment he was to receive a sovereign a week (for not more than seven months), ten pounds on publication, and twenty-five pounds on the issue of a second edition. In return he sold, irrevocably, all rights. Not very generous terms; but they were his own suggestion, and the best he was to get during the whole of his life. At least the arrangement promised a roof overhead for half a year. Accustomed as Rolfe was to hardship, he believed that he could live within the means proposed, which he hoped to supplement by extra work. So the contract was signed, and the weird scholar departed to his task.

How he progressed can be shown in his own words:

Hogarth Club, Bond St, W

Dear Mr Richards,

I have got through the first week on 18s. 10d., which I think is a bit of a triumph! It was achieved by the simple expedient of cutting dinner: and it has left me furious for work. Now I find the evenings intolerable after the B.M. closes; and think you might let me have something to read by way of change. Mss for choice,
for which I shall not expect you to pay unless you like.
It’s
reading
I want
hic et nunc.

V ty,

Corvo

For weeks the quaint, shabby Baron haunted the British Museum, reading and making notes all day. But, as he wrote subsequently, ‘a man cannot work eighteen hours a day during seven days a week on insufficient food and with total absence of recreation without feeling the strain’. The bargain as to payment was made in November 1899. Three months later (it will be seen) the strain began to tell: