The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (23 page)

But, though an even more blasting letter followed to remind the recipient that the third day of grace was drawing near, a letter which declared that ‘A stab in the back in the dark is what Spite invariably gives to Scorn’, Fr. Rolfe never explained what he wanted, nor what (short of an instant and substantial cheque) he would have regarded as ‘straight’ behaviour. His fury carried him to the length of applying to the British Consul for repatriation to England, but the third day passed without his leaving Venice. As for
Hubert’s Arthur
, Mr Pirie-Gordon took the only step which he conceived to be open to him: he washed his hands of all connection with the two books he had helped to write, and returned the manuscripts to his unhinged collaborator. One of these literary curiosities,
The Weird of the Wanderer,
was, subsequently, published; but the more important of the two,
Hubert’s Arthur
, he never saw nor heard of again. Naturally I asked for such details of it as he could remember; and his précis made me regret its disappearance more than ever:

46 Addison Avenue, W.11

Dear Symons,

Here is the précis of
Hubert’s Arthur
as it was when I last worked at it – perhaps Corvo has changed it – I expect that I have forgotten bits here and there. As being professedly ‘a chronicle’, Arthur marries early in the story, as he would have done in real life at that time, and does not have to wait for the heroine until the last chapter as would have been the case had it been a romance. Its style was meant to be an enriched variant upon that of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi and of William of Tyre, and in my own case was probably influenced by that of Maurice Hewlett.

Best Salaams

Harry Pirie-Gordon

HUBERT’S ARTHUR

(As far as I remember it)

It is an essay in ‘what might have been’ history, carefully worked out and introducing various historical characters who are all made to behave as they might reasonably have done in the circumstances imagined to fit in with the story.

Arthur, Duke of Brittany, instead of being murdered by King John, escapes with the assistance of Hubert de Burgh and takes refuge among the Crusaders in what was then left of the Holy Land. In spite of every obstacle he marries Yolande, the heiress of the kingdom of Jerusalem (who really married the elderly John de Brienne), and becomes King of Jerusalem in her right. He recovers Jerusalem by a
coup de main
from the Saracens. His best friend is his bastard cousin Fulke, King Richard’s son by Jehane de St Pol (see Maurice Hewlett’s
Richard Yea and Nay
)
.
After many adventures Arthur returns to resume his Duchy of Brittany, and joins with the King of France against John, doing homage for Normandy, Aquitaine and Poitou as nearest heir to King Richard. There is a civil war in England on John’s death – the Barons are divided into three camps: some favour Henry, son of John, some Louis, son of the King of France, some, under the influence of Hubert de Burgh, now Earl of Kent and Justiciar of England, favour Arthur. The dispute between the two English claimants is settled by a trial by combat in which Arthur and Henry (who is made a bit older than he really was at the time to make a better match of it) fight for the Crown. Arthur wins, is acclaimed King of England as well as of Jerusalem, and forthwith drives the French claimant out of the country, but is killed in so doing. That I think is how I left it, but Corvo may have altered the ending. There was a lot of very carefully prepared contemporary local colour, and a good deal of heraldry. Much attention was given to the accounts of warfare in Palestine and England.

*

Rolfe’s sufferings at this time were not imaginary. He frequented the Monday evening parties of Horatio Brown (biographer of John Addington Symonds, and a leader in the English colony) for the sake, as he said later, of the sandwiches on the sideboard: but took umbrage at some chance remark, and estranged himself by making an opportunity for publicly cutting the indignant Brown. ‘Now the summer is ending and the lagoon is rainy. But I am healthy’, he wrote tauntingly on a postcard to Pirie-Gordon. The authorities of that English hospital which he had formerly helped also fell under his displeasure, presumably through failing to comply with his frantic demands for assistance. He was reduced to offering his services, in the following style, to such few British residents as were not already at arm’s length:

Reale Societa Canottieri Bucintoro

Sir:

I beg leave to apply for a situation as second gondolier. The mismanagement of my English agent who has had charge of my literary property, and the treachery of false friends, compels me to seek
instant
and permanent means of livelihood. Unfortunately I am not in a position to give references as to either my character or my ability, though I am fairly well known in Venice. I should therefore be willing to serve you on probation for a week; and I assure you that I would serve you well. Requesting the favour of an early and (if possible) an acquiescent response,

I am Sir,

Your obedient servant

Fr. Rolfe

Sigr Williamson

It is not known that anyone was intrepid enough to avail himself of his obedient services. At the height of his desperation he was rescued by Canon Ragg.

I met him by chance and learned that he was reduced to sleeping in the open in that rather fine ‘martial cloak’ in which he fancied himself as looking like the Duke of Wellington. He was very proud and reserved, and correspondingly difficult to help. On some specious excuse I induced him to sup with me at a restaurant.

A visit of Mgr Robert Hugh Benson to Venice gave me a chance of talking over Rolfe’s problem, and Benson and I spent an evening together in a gondola, but nothing substantial came of it. Benson was afraid to touch the case.

During our last weeks in Venice, before leaving for England, we were staying in Palazzo Barbaro, and our own flat was vacant save for the luggage waiting to be transported. We then beguiled Rolfe to think he was doing us a service if he would use the flat (instead of open air) as a dormitory. Our luggage was ready labelled, and thus he became acquainted with our future address in England.

Far from being grateful, he seemed to resent all benefits. I fancy my crowning offence was introducing him to a representative of Rothschild’s in Paris, a man whom all my friends admired, and who, it was thought, could unravel his financial problems if they could be unravelled at all. They met and had their talk; and for some reason Rolfe’s bitterness seemed to increase from that moment.

For some time after our return to England he maintained a one-sided correspondence, mainly by the medium of insulting postcards, which he sometimes varied by unstamped letters. We refused to take the letters in, and after some months we heard no more of him.

*

Canon Ragg had, however, done Rolfe one more good turn than he knew. In March, just before the patience of Sgr Barbieri ended, he introduced Fr. Rolfe to a friend, Dr van Someren, settled with his young American wife in Venice. The acquaintance was not, at the time, pursued; but one evening in June, after the Raggs had returned to England, Rolfe called to see the Doctor and told him frankly that he was starving.

A knowledge of the circumstances of Rolfe’s life is in itself almost sufficient to rescind any cynicism concerning human nature and its tendency to benevolence. Continually throughout his career he was aided by those on whom he had no call beyond that of obvious misery and suffering, and the impression of brilliant ability in distress. It was so now. The charitable Dr van Someren listened with horror to Rolfe’s story of his wanderings and homelessness, and instantly decided that it was his duty to relieve both; accordingly, he insisted that, a few days later, when a room had been prepared for him, the outcast author should come to live in his house. Actually, such an arrangement was more than normally inconvenient, since Mrs van Someren was in child-bed at that time, with attendant nurses who strained the accommodation available to the limit. Rolfe was given the large first floor landing of the marble staircase which had been partitioned in by a previous tenant; and here, though his room had no fireplace, and could only be heated by
scaldino,
Rolfe was made more comfortable than, perhaps, he had ever expected to be again.

Reassured by a roof over his head, indeed, the outcast became charming: Dr and Mrs van Someren found his company a continual source of pleasure. Time had added new strings to his conversational bow. ‘Have you ever seen serpents sliding out of the eye-holes of skulls?’ was one of his openings, derived from his explorations among the islands, one of which he had found to be littered with the whitening bones of Austrians heaped there at the end of the war of liberation. He talked of the violet evenings and rapid dawns which he had observed from his boat, and had many stories of the quaint behaviour of his young gondoliers, one of whom he frequently described as ‘a tiger with a simper’. There was a story, too, of a dark night when his miserable meditations had been interrupted by arrest as a spy. But these conversational flights were, in the main, confined to mealtimes. Otherwise he remained for hours on end quietly in his room, working busily on a new book, the subject of which he preferred not to disclose till it was finished. Though still fastidious in little things, he gave no trouble; and when, after the birth of Dr van Someren’s daughter, it was thought wise for the mother to be taken for a holiday change of scene, Rolfe was left behind with the servants.

Alone in this unexpected apartment of the vast Palazzo Mocenigo-Corner, whose walls of rusticated stone three feet thick recalled its condottiere-builder and the days of the Borgia, Rolfe picked up again the threads of his life; that is to say, his quarrels, and his incessant search for a financial partner. So far as he could, he made his ‘enemies’ suffer. Benson was denounced to his bishop, Mr Taylor to the Law Society, Pirie-Gordon to the Publishers’ Association. But simple denunciations did not satisfy his rage for long, and heavier weapons were called into action. All those friendly neighbours he had met at Gwernvale, for instance, were astonished by letters of which this is a specimen.

Private and Personal

Palazzo Mocenigo-Corner

Venice

Dear Mr Somerset,

I can’t claim to know you well enough to justify me in asking your friendly intervention: but I should be more than grateful if you could see your way to cough efficaciously at your churchwarden, E. Pirie-Gordon, and his son, regarding their questionable conduct towards me. E. P. G. is fully cognisant of his son’s behaviour; and apparently consents to it. C. H. Pirie-Gordon arbitrarily embroiled me with my agents in England a year ago, so that they stopped communications and with-held my publishers’ accounts of the last three years. Consequently I became stranded here. I have had no change of clothes since August 1908. I live and sleep in the open landing of a stair in this barrack of a palace. I have walked the city many nights, wet and fine, before I found this refuge – have been six consecutive days without food, half-starved for weeks together on two rolls (at three centesimi each) a day, and endured all extremes of penury short of prison and the Asili dei Senza Tetto. All my pawn-tickets of the Monte di Pieta have expired, save one. Now and then I contrive to get a job as a private gondogliere: at present I chop and saw and carry logs, work a cream-separator, light fires, and fill boilers. My mother in England works for a living at 75: my sister has become blind; and we have not met for three years. Meanwhile, the Pirie-Gordons sulk in silence, having flatly refused to send me the things which I left at Gwernvale in August 1908 unless I pay carriage. My goods detained at Gwernvale are clothes, tools of trade, heaps of unfinished work – all I have in the world – which I might have turned into money long ago. And, considering what I have done for the Pirie-Gordons in the past – I need only mention C. H. P.-G’s
Innocent the Great,
dictated from a short rejected essay, revised, edited, typed and seen through the press by me – I am utterly at a loss to understand what good reason they dare allege for (first) ruining me so that I cannot pay carriage of my goods, and (then) refusing me the use of my own life-work, manuscripts and materials, whereby I might have refunded cost of their carriage and retrieved my position long ago. I don’t want to interfere between your friendly relations with the Pirie-Gordons: but, if an official word of reproof could goad them (even moderately) into a sense of decency, I should be vastly served.

Faithfully yours

Fr. Rolfe

Even this did not suffice, and he announced his intention of producing a pornographic work in Italian, French, and English, to be published at Paris for 50 francs, with the initials R. H. B. on the title-page, the Pirie-Gordon arms on the cover, and a notice within that the book was produced by the authority of that Order of Sanctissima Sophia which he had helped to found in happier days at Gwernvale. The van Somerens returned from their holiday, and found their unobtrusive guest still busy at his work; they little guessed what queer web Fr. Rolfe was quietly weaving.

It was at this period that he began that correspondence with a friend in England (now dead, who shall be nameless) which so much amazed me when Millard first introduced me to Rolfe’s work. Now, when I re-read those frightening letters in the light of my later knowledge, it still seemed to me that he never sank lower than in writing them. His ingratitude to those who helped him, his objurgations against his friends, even his vindictive attempts to secure such revenge as lay in his power against those who, in his fancy, had injured him, can be explained and almost excused. He had some ground for a grudge against a world in which he found himself so misplaced, which offered such slight rewards for his gifts, and the books in which they were manifested. There was some ground for his grudge against Benson. But, if these dark letters are to be believed, he had embarked in Venice on a course of life which not even well-founded wrongs, even by his own standard, could justify. It was not only that he stood self-revealed as a patron of that homosexual underworld which exists in every city. He had become a habitual corrupter of youth, a seducer of innocence, and he asked his wealthy accomplice for money, first that he might use it as a temptation, to buy bait for the boys whom he misled, and secondly so that he might efficiently act as pander when his friend revisited Venice. Neither scruple nor remorse was expressed or implied in these long accounts of his sexual exploits and enjoyments, which were so definite in their descriptions that he was forced, in sending them by post, so to fold them that only blank paper showed through the thin foreign envelopes.