The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (26 page)

CHAPTER 19: THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE

Mr Justin very kindly allowed me to borrow the whole of his Rolfe papers. It chanced that I was called upon to deliver, at short notice, an after-dinner address to a dining club of which I was a newly-elected member. With my head full of Fr. Rolfe and the details of his life, and my study littered with his handwriting, ‘Frederick Baron Corvo’ was an obvious choice. Accordingly I wrote an essay of something less than five thousand words upon his work and adventures, which was duly read to a company which included Shane Leslie and other admirers of arcane literature. I mention this circumstance not for its own importance, but because it led to an estrangement, reluctant on my part, with Mr Herbert Rolfe.

During my investigations Mr Rolfe had remained detached, if not aloof. He had lent me a number of letters at our first meeting, as I have narrated, but in his acknowledgement of their return he observes: ‘You will, I am sure, understand that, interested though I am in this matter, I can only give it fragments of time now.’ In subsequent letters he commended my industry, though, I could see, with a doubt as to where it would lead me. That doubt became certainty when I sent him the draft of my address. I had said that Fr. Rolfe lived in the recollections of his contemporaries at the Scots College as an astounding romancer; that in his last year he ‘fell from grace’, and ‘left certain letters that Aretino might have written at Casanova’s dictation’; and that his financial conduct showed, at times, a ‘lack of honesty’. These observations, in Mr Rolfe’s view, were ‘gratuitous, unnecessary, and incongruous’. It seemed to me that I might with justice have used harder phrases, and that my literary integrity would be compromised if I said less than I believed to be the truth; and in a letter which was, perhaps, tactless, I said so. Mr Rolfe did not agree, and finally declared:

I have no desire to be obstructive so far as a publication of the bare events of the sad life of my brother may be concerned, and, of course, I have no title to object to literary criticism. What I have endeavoured to impress upon you is that, for reasons stated, I do decidedly object to any ‘publication’ whatever of matter which either implicitly or explicitly imputes to my brother dishonesty or immorality. And I will add this, that, contrary to what your letters to me seem to imply, his relatives never had, and have not now, any indication, much less proof, that he was ever guilty of either. I, and they, believe him to have been the son and brother that we knew him to be and no other. He is in the hands of the Creator of all men, and in His mercy. There we would have him left. I trust you will now understand that your pamphlet, if it remained unmodified, would cause us pain and distress, and that you will, in consequence, revise what you have written. I enclose a list of the passages to which I have previously called attention. . . . Although I send you this list I am afraid that I must say that, on the whole, we would much prefer that the whole pamphlet had been confined to the bare record before mentioned – painful though that must be – and to literary criticism. This is to guard myself from any general expression of approval.

This statement of Mr Rolfe’s attitude made me feel more than ever that a principle was involved on which I could accept no compromise. I became aware, also, that he was even opposed to any later publication of
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
;
whereas it was and is my view that posterity owes its unlucky author the tribute of reading his last book. I said so, and our correspondence ended. I was left to make what further discoveries I could from Mr Justin’s papers alone.

I had imagined, when I met Mr Justin and learned the details of Rolfe’s death, that my Quest was over. It was not. Though the laden suitcase which I carried back with me to London was full of fascinating things, letters and letter-books by which I came to know Fr. Rolfe as well as I shall ever know him, with such curiosities as his pocket-book containing carefully preserved letters from Conte Cesare Borgia, and his visiting card engraved from a florid Italian script, there were maddening omissions. After Mr Taylor had signed the Deed of Release giving Rolfe command again over his own work, he reassigned his property to Mr Justin, who, as I found by an examination of his documents, was the legal proprietor of all those unpublished works of which I had heard so much:
Don Renato, Hubert’s Arthur, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Songs of Meleager, The One and the Many.
But, though Mr Justin owned these books (which it must be admitted he had dearly purchased), and had the right to publish them, he possessed only one unpublished manuscript –
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole.
In respect of the other books, I was no nearer satisfying my eagerness to lay hands on them than I had been when I learned, step by step, that they had existed. I concluded that at the time of Rolfe’s death they must have been scattered about the world, waiting for the verdict of publishers to whom they had been submitted, or not reclaimed, as in the case of that manuscript which had lain forgotten in Messrs Chatto’s safe for more than ten years. Did they even survive? Unreclaimed manuscripts are not kept for ever; perhaps those strange books on which poor Rolfe lavished so many pains, for which he made such extravagant claims, were lost for ever, destroyed by careless hands which did not value their uncommercial quality.

At least I had recovered that Venetian satire to which Rolfe owed his expulsion from the Palazzo Mocenigo; and since he nearly died from the subsequent sufferings, it may be said that he almost gave his life for this book. It is indeed, as Mr Swinnerton described it, a ‘beautiful and absorbing story’; and knowing, as I did, the circumstances behind its sentences, I was spellbound by its white-hot pages, as I had been by
Hadrian.
The hero, Nicholas Crabbe, is of course Rolfe himself; or, rather, Rolfe as he saw himself. ‘Nicholas Crabbe, being bored (to the extent of a desire to do something violent) by the alternate screams and snarls of a carroty Professor of Greek who had let him down . . . departed from Venice at the end of November. He went alone in his topo of six tons burden; and sailed southward along the Italian coast, with no idea in his head excepting that of thoroughly enjoying his own society, while scrupulously avoiding every kind of conversation with other human beings.’ How vividly the real Rolfe speaks in that opening. Crabbe, in his sturdy, deep-bosomed, flat-bottomed, blunt-nosed boat comes alive in the pages following as clearly as George Arthur Rose in
Hadrian.
Cruising at leisure, flying the ensign of England in the liberty of wide horizons, the lone adventurer sees, from the sea, the lights of Messina and Reggio extinguished in the great earthquake of 1908. A tidal wave tosses his boat like a toy, but it survives the storm. Shocked and shaken, he seeks a peaceful haven to think over, ‘perhaps for hours, perhaps for weeks, perhaps for life’. But, in the cove wherein he anchors, he finds not peace but ruin: houses thrown down, death and horror. In the wreckage only one soul lives: a young girl of exquisite, boylike beauty. Her he rescues.

But, having found her, Crabbe is baffled to know the next move. He knows nothing of women, has always treated them as goddesses in niches. Having seen that this slip of a girl has no real injuries, he sets her ashore. An hour or so later, terrified of the stricken land, friendless, having nowhere to go, she swims back to the boat, and implores, with the devotion of sixteen to its saviour, to be taken in. And when the equally lonely Nicholas refuses her offers of service and says grimly that he will put her ashore again in the morning, she suicidally slips back into the sea, to be rescued a second time.

In the morning the girl tells her master (for such she insists he is to be) her story. She is Ermenegilda Falier, an orphan, seventeen years old in three days’ time, whose father, a gondolier, always treated her as a boy, always called her one, and made her expert with the oar before his death. Then she was taken by her uncle to live on his farm, still with cropped hair and boyish dress. Now, since the earthquake, which laid the farm in ruins and destroyed its occupants, she has no human tie; and with all the passionate fervour of her Italian nature she asks Crabbe to allow her to remain with him. ‘What should he do with her? What, in the Name of Heaven, was he to do with her?’

Her docility, her beauty, her knowledge of boats, and above all her flat-chested boylike appearance inspire Nicholas with a notion. ‘In describing the weird gymnastics in which his mind engaged during these wave-running hours of darkness he always laid singular and particular stress upon the influence of her phenomenally perfect boyishness – not her sexlessness, nor her masculinity, but her boyishness. She looked like a boy: she could do, and did do, a boy’s work, and did it well: she had been used to pass as a boy; and she preferred it: that way lay her taste and inclination: she was competent in that capacity. There was nothing in her to inspire passion, sexual or otherwise; no one could help noticing and admiring her qualities of springlikeness, of frankness, of symmetry, of cogency; but, in other respects, she was negligeable as a boy. A youth knows and asserts his uneasy virility: a girl assiduously insinuates her feminility. Ermenegilda Falier came into neither category.’ Very well. Since she so intensely wished it, since she was able to support the part, she should be a boy and his servant, Zildo, not Zilda. He could trust himself, and he would trust her.

The decision made, he returns with ‘Zildo’ to Venice to attend to his affairs; Crabbe becomes Rolfe. ‘It must be understood that he already had been chased from two careers, and was fairly well settled in a third. Of course a man with his face and manner and taste and talent and Call ought to have been a priest. Elsewhere it is written why he was not. The fault was hardly his.’ So he was not priest, but author; his circumstances are exactly those of Frederick William Rolfe. It follows, therefore, that he has two friends, Benson and Pirie-Gordon – Bonson and Peary-Buthlaw in the book. ‘The Reverend Bobugo Bonson was a stuttering little Chrysostom of a priest, with the Cambridge manners of a Vaughan’s Dove, the face of the Mad Hatter out of
Alice in Wonderland
, and the figure of an Etonian who insanely neglects to take any pains at all with the temple of the Holy Ghost, but wears paper collars and a black straw alpine hat. By sensational novel writing and by perfervid preaching he had made enough money to buy a country-place, where he had the ambition to found a private establishment (not a religious order) for the smashing of individualities, the pieces of which he intended to put together again. . . . He did not exactly aspire to actual creation: but he certainly nourished the notion that several serious mistakes had resulted from his absence during the events described in the first chapter of Genesis.’ ‘I do not pretend to be dogmatic on the point; and I merely offer the hypothetical judgement that Bobugo’s view was that the error in the Creation of Man consisted in endowing him with Sense.’ This was, for Rolfe, an almost charitable judgement. Mr Pirie-Gordon and Mr Taylor are described with equal prejudice. As in a glass darkly, Rolfe in his last book mimics the details of his life, the incidents which have brought him to Italy. All those strange episodes, which I have given in their true colours, are related and distorted from the angle of the madman who endured them. Nicholas Crabbe endures the betrayal of his false friends, the agony of hope deferred, homelessness and hunger in Venice, but cheered and supported, though he does not know it, by his growing affection for Zilda, hers for him. Plot, in the formal sense, there is none; nightmare figures loom, and disappear; yet the book has a shape. Into it Rolfe pours, with the frenzy and disappointment of his real life, the beauty and satisfaction which comforted his days in Venice; and behind the dust and tears of his rage there is always the changing beauty of the lagoon and the unchanging beauty of the Church. But further summary would do injustice to a book which is valuable for its texture rather than its form, its intensity more than its message, which is the testament of a tormented personality rather than a story. It was his last self-portrait: ‘Nicholas Crabbe, being Nicholas Crabbe, was as hard as adamant – outside. He tolerated the most fearful revilings, humiliations, losses, without turning a hair. He had none. Even his enemies (which means all the men and women with whom he ever had been intimate) freely admit (in their less excited moments) that nothing, at any time, ruffled his cruel and pitiless and altogether abominably self-possessed serenity of gait and carriage; and they account it to him for natural naughtiness. Of course they are imbecile idiots. What is to be expected of a man cased, cap-à-pie, like a crustacean, in hard armour of proof? Such an one has no means of exhibiting his feelings, excepting with his crookedly-curving, ferociously-snapping claws and (perhaps) with his bleak rigid glaring eyes. Crabbe was detested by people who habitually showed their feelings. He couldn’t show his. He never showed his real ones for that very reason. But boobies thought that he did – thought that his breakable but unbendable shell was his expression, a horrible expression because it gave no information whatever; and then, when (quite unexpectedly) the hitherto stilly-folded claws snatched and pinched and tore and tossed presumption, with a violence sudden and frightful which manifested some appalling sensibility hidden unsuspected within, the said boobies were gravely shocked or displeased and (when clerical) much pained or even deeply grieved. Pained, indeed! What of the torments of Crabbe, which no one ever considered because no one ever saw them?’ Rolfe was able to give a happier ending to his satire than destiny reserved for him, since Nicholas and Zilda realize themselves in each other, and so ‘the desire and pursuit of the whole was crowned and rewarded by love’.