The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (28 page)

But, ever since you began to inquire of me, I have pondered you and your inquiry; and, because I myself from my boyhood very gravely have laboured barehanded to obtain a little knowledge, I am the more unwilling to deny to so eager and so exquisite an artificer, that counsel and assistance which have been denied to me. For men (as far as I know them) always will tell you what they think you ought to know, and always will give you what they think you ought to want: but they never will give you what you want, and they never will tell you what you want to know. Perhaps they cannot. Perchance I myself shall fail. But I will try.

Accordingly, there follow three notes concerning the Formal, Material, and Efficient Causes of the story; the first being a discussion between publishers’ managers as to the form and condition of historical novels; the second an account of that English-Italian Duchess who counted for so much in Rolfe’s early life. (‘It will be evident to you’, he says, ‘that, when so very great and gracious a personage admits to her comity an obscure clerk, a plebeian student, unmannered, self-taught, physically and mentally altogether dyspathetick, and manifests so profound an interest in his labours as to give him the freedom of her archives, (charters, breves, diurnals, accompts, and the multifarious manuscripts which a House can accumulate in, let us say, a thousand years,) very intimate cognition of the bye-ways of literature and history is not unlikely to be attained, very curious knowledge is not unlikely to be acquired, very precious excerpts are not unlikely to be collected. Grant me so much.’)

So much having been granted, Rolfe describes, as the Formal Cause, his discovery of a quarto volume bound in stout white vellum surrounded by an embossed silver band containing six hundred pages of thin opaque paper. This is Dom Gheraldo’s Diurnal, the diary of a Roman priest attached to the house of Santacroce, written between 1528 and 1530 in that macaronic mixture of Greek, Latin and Italian which I had already met in
Don Tarquinio.
The priest goes further than the prince, however, in that his entries are written in imitation of various classic and Italian styles. The translation of this imaginary volume forms the body of Rolfe’s book.

No writer ever set himself a more difficult task. He, or rather Dom Gheraldo in his entries, tells a story: he reveals by slow and feline touches the character of the priest from within; and at the same time he attempts to give an English equivalent for the verbal mix-up of the pretended original. And in all this he succeeds, though in retaining Dom Gheraldo’s macaronics he almost makes his book unreadable. Fortunately, he provides a glossary, so that it is possible to understand, without a headache, the exact meaning that he meant to extract from such constructions or compounds or rarities as argute, deaurate, in-vestite, lucktifick, excandescence, galbanate, lecertose, insulsity, hestern, macilent, effrenate, dicaculous, pavonine, and torose. Even so,
Don Renato
is not a book to read at a sitting, but rather one to be dipped into at odd hours when the mind can be stimulated by puzzles in verbal ingenuity, by such passages as

On the insensible stone Don Lelio lay, almost inconscious, his form wound in a ligature, marmoreal in white stillness. His terete members but an hour ago so apt and flexuous, were distorted by incessant twitchings and cold as snow. Already his lips were livid;  they disclosed the purity of teeth clenched and continually strident. In the pallid throat, palpitated a vein with diminishing rhythm. Coerulean stains appeared below the flickering lashes of the half-closed eyes. Like rose-petals in a breeze, even the nostrils quivered. Bloomed the abhominable unmistakeable pallor on the brow, where the soft caesarial hair was humid with the dew of the breath of Death.

And the passage I have quoted is simple and lucid compared to most passages in this fantasy, wherein bright figures ‘recline in the barge under the frondosity of sycamores’ after an al fresco dinner ‘in the umbriferous ilicet on the shore of the lake’. But when the effort has been made, and the pedantic vocabulary mastered, there is a reward. By touch after touch Fr. Rolfe (or Baron Corvo as he was when he wrote this book) builds up his central character, the comfort-loving, word-loving, superstitious yet learned priest, and shows the round of daily life in a great Renaissance family, the turn of mind of the sixteenth century. Perhaps this study in ivory and amber owes something to
The Ring and the Book;
certainly Browning would have delighted in Dom Gheraldo, with his mediaeval medicines (‘This day, to the odious Don Tullio Tripette, I gave a vial of the humour of spurge – Euphorbia polygonifolia – done with salt, wherewith to dismiss his warts’); who keeps a benevolent paternal eye on the morals of the pages, with whom he bathes naked by moonlight; who notes with satisfaction the good dishes of the day (‘At supper, a proper dish of young cucumbers grown out of season, boiled, eviscerate, replenished with a farce of beef and herbs, and fried in new oil. Very grateful’); to whom water is not hot or cold, but gelid or calid; who frequently admonishes himself in his diary – ‘Gheraldo, Gheraldo, Gheraldo, take care of thy stile’. Perhaps there is no greater public now than when it was written for this humorous and human mixture of learning and
na
ï
veté;
but posterity certainly owes Fr. Rolfe the tribute of a popular edition of
Don Renato; or An Ideal Content.

*

Naturally I was staggered to find Mr Gregory successful where I had failed; and besought him to reveal how he had recovered Rolfe’s pedantic masterpiece. It had been found, I gathered, by one of his many ‘agents’, who, at considerable cost, had traced the original printer, and from the depths of a rat-haunted cellar salved five copies, the only survivors of the whole edition. Few modern books can have a stranger history than
Don Renato.
It was written at least as early as 1902, perhaps earlier, in the flush of Rolfe’s Borgian enthusiasm; indeed, if the dedicatory reference to Rome is to be believed, earlier still. For years he kept the manuscript by him, adding to its rich sentences and obscure learning, showing it, quoting from it, offering it at intervals to the blind tribe of Barabbas. It was one of those undeveloped ‘assets’ with which, in 1904, he tempted Mr Taylor into fighting Col. Thomas. Not until 1907 did he find a publisher sufficiently intrepid to wish to bring it before the public. The first proofs reached the author in Venice in 1908, at the beginning of his feud with his English friends. When the break came, this was the first of Rolfe’s books that he denounced to the Publishers’ Association; and though, since he had signed an agreement, his ban had little legal weight, nevertheless on account of it publication was delayed. Months passed; the printer failed; the sheets (if more than a few proof copies were printed off, which is uncertain) were destroyed; even the proofs disappeared with the manuscript, and all traces of it sank beneath the waters of time till the ‘agent’-diver brought this highly artificial pearl to the surface once more. With great generosity Mr Gregory presented to me one of the five precious copies; and, whenever I am depressed, I dip into its elaborate pages and, like Gheraldo, ‘think more of my stile’.

There can be no repetition of a surprise; but unexpected repetition is itself a new surprise, and I confess that I was startled again when, a week later, the terete and sensile Gregory (as Rolfe would probably have called him) produced the manuscript of that translation of Meleager’s songs which Baron Corvo had made with Sholto Douglas over twenty years earlier. This time, indeed, he did more. It was part of Rolfe’s plan for the book that its pages should be sprinkled with small Greek heads and figures from his own designs, printed in vermilion on buff paper. Pulls of these charming little ‘shrieks’ were pasted in their appropriate places in the manuscripts; and lo! as I took my place at the table, there, nestling by my wine-glass, were the actual blocks made from Rolfe’s drawings. I almost regarded Maundy Gregory as a magician after this further demonstration of his powers as a discoverer, and said so; but he waved my praise away, and made his usual answer that with money one can do anything.

As for the manuscript itself, it suffers from the defect of all translations from verse, that it is a translation. Rolfe was no FitzGerald, to re-create in English a new work of art based upon an old original, but his version is expressed in a rhythmic prose which is dignified and rounded; and from a careful comparison with Mr Aldington’s later text, it seems that he did not often misconstrue the sense; for that, the credit was perhaps his collaborator’s. I quote two examples:

By Timo’s flood of Lover-loving curls; by Demo’s Balsam-breathing, Sleep-beguiling skin; by Ilia’s pretty pranks; by Slumber’s Foe, the Lamp, that Drinketh of my Revels many Songs; O Love, but scanty Breath is left upon my Lips; yet speak the Word, and I will pour out even this.

A dulcet Strain, by Pan of Arcady, thou singest to thine Harp, Zenophila; a far too dulcet Strain thou strikest. Whither shall I flee from thee? Loves compass me on every Side; and grant me not one moment to regain my Breath. Thy Beauty filleth me with Desire, thy Musick too, thy Grace, thy——what shall I say? All, all of thee! I burn with Fire!

When Rolfe and Sholto Douglas made this translation, Meleager’s verses had not been extracted from the Greek Anthology and separately published with an English text; but during the twenty-five years that have passed since then, other hands have performed the task. There is, perhaps, no longer any need for a new version; nevertheless I hope that some day this carefully constructed monument to Rolfe’s passionate love for Greek literature may stand on the shelf with his other works.

*

The day when Mr Gregory revealed to me his second discovery was, I think, the high-water mark of his enthusiasm for Baron Corvo. Gradually his energetic lavishness diminished, and we met for Arabian Nights’ luncheons less and less frequently, though when we did his links and cigarette-cases and tie-pins coruscated with all their old-time splendour, his conversation was as full as ever of interest and revelation. Since he left England to live abroad eight months ago, my inquiries have remained unanswered, and I have looked in vain for any letter in his sturdy square handwriting. His memory remains like that of an incandescent meteor in the sky of high finance, an acquaintance as fantastic and unlikely as the wildest passage in the books of the weird Baron whom we both admired.

Stimulated by his success, I renewed my own researches; and it was my hand and not his that retrieved the two remaining testaments of Fr. Rolfe’s ill-rewarded but persistent toil. Multiplied inquiries in America traced at last that friend (Mr Morgan Akin Jones) to whom the manuscript of
Hubert’s Arthur
was sent by the direction of its author shortly before his death.

A great deal might be said concerning this long and fascinating product of the unlucky friendship of Prospero and Caliban which, when it attains its birthright of paper and ink, will add lustre to Baron Corvo’s posthumous renown. On the first page is written ‘Leniency is respectfully requested for the manual work of this MS. It was done by day and by night in a small fishing boat on the Venetian lagoon with the natural interruptions of storms, bad weather, and occasional overwhelming weariness.’ Yet it is written in unfaltering and faultless script on the finest hand-made paper, crudely but stoutly bound (probably by the author’s hand) in thick vellum. That note, with its pathetic implication, and pointed contrast with the unusual magnificence of the manuscript (in these days of typewriters and poor paper), was one of Fr. Rolfe’s last signals of invitation to the reluctant publishers before whom he cast his pearls.

Hubert’s Arthur,
at least, is in its way a pearl; and again I wondered why none of those to whom it was submitted took their chance. Perhaps it was too long, or too strange, or too full of heraldry or incident, or too arch, or too well written; for it is all these things. It is Rolfe’s one exercise in English history, into the stream of which it will one day itself pass. Since I have already printed the summaries of both the authors of
Hubert’s Arthur,
there is no need to say more here concerning that queer masterpiece. John Buchan, who read it for one publisher, wrote to Rolfe: ‘the more I look at it the more I admire it, and the more convinced I am that no publisher in Britain could make a success of it’; Maurice Hewlett, who read it for another, implored him to make a more usual use of his great gifts. Their commendation came too late, when less than a year of life was left to him, and only a holocaust of his ‘enemies’ would have appeased his chronic wrath against the world and against himself.

Last of all his works to come to light was
The One and the Many,
which stands midway between
Hadrian the Seventh
and
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
in the autobiographical trilogy wherein Rolfe recorded his adult life. If time does bring him the fame that his temperament merited and his temper prevented, this exercise in autobiography may join the other two in print, though it is inferior to either as a work of art. John Lane, Grant Richards, and Henry Harland make a trio of villains drawn with Rolfe’s usual brushful of acid; and the minor enemies who make up the ‘many’ are also recognizable. There are many brilliant passages of his saturnine irony, many beautiful paragraphs, many pages of self-revelation and utter self-deception. But the background lacks the interest of his other canvases, and the scale of his personalities is slight. Nevertheless it was a deep satisfaction to discover it in the depths of a literary agent’s cupboard of unretrieved MSS. It was a deeper satisfaction still to know that every one of the works which had been left and lost in obscurity when Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe died suddenly and alone at Venice had been collected together by sympathetic hands, and that, alone of living men, I had read every line of every one. Nothing was left to be discovered; the Quest was ended. Hail, strange tormented spirit, in whatever hell or heaven has been allotted for your everlasting rest!