The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (10 page)

He commissioned the Nowt to paint a set of banners, promising that, if he would be content to work hard, on the bare necessities of life, for a time, he would deal very generously with him later. The Nowt put his back into this business, and laboured early and late, leading the life of a pig at his patron’s direction and expense, hoping for better things bye and bye; and, after nearly a couple of years, he had produced a series of ecclesiastical paintings of a kind which everyone admitted to be something above the ordinary.

Then, the Vicar of Sewers End refused to pay for the work that had been done; actually saying that, as no legal contract existed (the Nowt always trusted to the honour of clerical patrons), he acknowledged no obligation to pay an honorarium, but was willing to give a few pounds in charity. This the Nowt emphatically scorned, and sent a statement to the Vicar’s diocesan, who summoned that cleric to explain. What kind of apologia his reverence made is not exactly known . . . but he subsequently instructed the Nowt to set down his actual claim in writing, for the Episcopal consideration. Accordingly the Nowt wrote that the Vicar had had, from him, compositions including one hundred and five figures; that he (the Vicar) had taken ten guineas from a private donor for one of those hundred and five figures: and that, on this scale, the Vicar’s valuation of the series amounted to one thousand and fifty guineas. But, he added, for his incessant and painful labours of twenty-one months, he was willing to accept an honorarium of seven hundred guineas; and from that sum he would make an offering to the Vicar’s charities of two hundred guineas. Further, to show that he was only fighting for the principle that he deserved honestly earned wages, and not the insult of proffered charitable relief, he said he would accept
any sum
as honorarium, even a single six-shillings-and-eightpence.

The Vicar replied that he would pay nothing, except as charity or friendship; whereupon the Nowt promptly skipped in next door and instructed a solicitor to issue a writ for the full value of the work in question.

After a month [the Vicar] climbed down very suddenly indeed; and, pleading poverty, offered a sum of fifty pounds as honorarium. The Nowt took it, in accordance with his promise; and paid it straightway to an institution of the diocese; for, having gained his point (honorarium
not
charity) he wished to act disinterestedly; and then, without much ado, he joined the staff of the local paper, intending to get a living by journalism till the dawn of brighter days.

But here he reckoned without the Vicar . . . [who] assiduously set himself to carry out his threats of ruin and revenge, first by counsel, and secondly by example. His counsel took the form of ‘insinuendo’ derogatory to the Nowt’s employer and his paper, and the successful corruption of his printer; and his example consisted of the severest form of boycott, with the refusal of the rites of the Church. Fired by this . . . spark the Vicar’s parishioners withdrew their advertisements; his officials openly robbed the Nowt and his employer, and conducted machinations against their business, all with the Vicar’s cognisance and tacit consent; the tradespeople refused to supply their household . . . the Vicar had the Nowt county-courted for a debt incurred by the Vicar’s authority.

And the Nowt preserved an equal mind and demeanour; and took neither notice of nor action against . . . the Vicar, or any of his gang, beyond nailing up in black and white a record of each villainy as it occurred, and driving [them] to fury by contemptuously refusing to correspond, and by a sort of heartless immutable adherence to his usual habits, careless of or indifferent to each manifestation of the malignant spite of his foes.

‘The malignant spite of his foes!’ Even without the letters that Fr Beauclerk had sent me I should have realized, I think, how completely Rolfe was his own enemy. Vincent O’Sullivan’s words recurred to me; ‘A man with only the very vaguest sense of realities.’ It was true. When the film came over the eyes of his mind, Rolfe saw himself as a permanently picturesque figure oppressed by a circle of enemies jealous of his talents or exhibiting their own meanness. It was his compensation for the maddening sense of failure, for his poverty, for his inability to dominate circumstances as he desired. Not, however, always. For those who stop on the hither side of insanity, there must be moments of self-realization, moments when an interior mentor whispers ‘I am wrong; they are right’. And, as I saw by his letters of that period, despite his constantly-expressed conviction of his utter rightness, Rolfe had spasms when he saw things as they were. But they passed; the shutters came down again; and then he was once more ‘the Nowt’ ringed round by foes. His letters tell an interior story which is very different from the surface meaning that he meant them to wear.

Loyola House

15 March 1896

Dear Fr Beauclerk,

Many thanks for your welcome letter and Postal Orders.

Also for the damper which was certainly needed. If I have been unduly elated, forgive me. I will try not to do it again. But I could not help feeling pleased with what I have done because I felt that I had contended successfully with many difficulties. At the same time I by no means infer that I have anything like reached my goal.

I never shall
, for the goal goes higher always. I only mean that I have gone up
one
little step. Nor do
I
claim the smallest credit for that. It is the saints who have deigned to impart some modicum of their radiance. As I correspond more closely with the graces they impart so much the more beautiful will my work become. The difficulty is for a worldly wretch like me to detach myself entirely. There was a hypnotizer once who could not hypnotize me and from whom I rose from the cataleptic trance solely on account of my strong selfishness.

Nor is it for want of diligence that I fail if continuous work is diligence. But I do not concentrate all the time and so I fail. Faces? Yes. They are only the shadow of what I have seen. And I fail to reach the reality for the reasons of hurry and human respect and worry. And really dear Father Beauclerk my worldly worries are very bad indeed and lately I have felt that I must shriek or burst. Also I have developed a violent and raging temper, blazing out at what I suppose are small annoyances, and overwhelming people with a torrent of scathing and multilingual fury. I make amends for it afterwards but it leaves me weak in mind and body. It’s the Mr Hyde surging up.

But I will take care not to show you ugly or horrid faces again. I will stick at them and pray at them till they are right.

I think if I had a clear mind I could do better. Well I
know
that. But perhaps it would be more creditable to do better for all my obstacles! I will try. There’s a Retreat at Manresa in Holy Week. I made my first and last one there in 1886.

Your faithful son in Xt,

F. A.

P.S. I see that I have failed again to put down what I really want to say. It is this chained impotence, this powerlessness to reach the point I am after that makes me chafe, and I boil inwardly the more because outwardly I insist upon keeping a demeanour most marble and which I find people call proud and cynical! ! ! (or as one of your fathers cuttingly said, ‘I’m
afraid
he’s a genius’!
Afraidl
! ! ! !) Enclosed is a Litany I have written. It’s badly put down
causa incapacitate meo
(can’t write Latin now!) but you should hear me play it. It’s a duet for a high bass and counter-tenor with chorus, and is meant to be accompanied on the strings. There’s a magnificent instrument yclept citherna or theorbo on which it would make you faint for joy. But it would be lovely played on six small harps in a procession. If you can get someone good to play it to you you may get some idea of it, and if you like it perhaps you will let me offer it to you. I would be glad. I did better things which are now illuminated on vellum at Oscott, but I was young and had not had ten years of hell then.

*

Fr Beauclerk gives the facts behind this contradictory disturbance:

The Presbytery,

Accrington

Corvo came to me soliciting work, attracted by the fact that the Shrine was prospering through my action in initiating public daily services at the Well. I made an agreement with him that I would give him the opportunity of supporting himself by finding him in lodging and board, and supplying all materials, if he would paint banners for the Shrine. He lodged quite comfortably with a good Lancashire lady, who treated him with uniform kindness.

He must have painted some ten banners for me, when one day he asked me for the sum of
£
100. On my assuring him that I could not give it, seeing that I was under orders from my religious superior, he retaliated that the Society (Jesuit) had plenty of money. He then sent me in a bill for £1000, and I put the case into the hands of a Liverpool lawyer. This man offered Rolfe £50 for himself and £10 for his counsel; and to my surprise Rolfe accepted it.

He then declared open war. A local magazine, the
Holywell Record,
had been started by a speculator, named Hochheimer, and Rolfe attached himself to the concern, his writing ability gaining him ready acceptance. He let loose in this publication all his views and grievances. He built up a wildly illusioned tale of my supposed hostility, which indeed only began and ended in my refusal to go beyond our first agreement, viz. that I would find him in everything essential.

His statements of my ‘excommunicating’ him and persecuting him and threatening to ‘hound him out of the town’ are absolutely baseless and ridiculous. In fact it was he who boasted that he worked for and secured my own dismissal from Holywell. My superior removed me in November 1898, after Rolfe had written letters against me to the Bishop of the Diocese, to my Superior General in Rome even. In
Hadrian
you may find me acting two parts. First I figure as that ‘detestable and deceitful Blackcote, who came fawning upon me, and then robbed me of months and years of labour.’ See page 15.

Page 273
et seq.
shows me in my second personality as General of the Jesuits, the Black Pope, Father St Albans. (We Beauclerks belong to the Duke of St Albans’ family.) The interview described, wherein Hadrian tirades against Jesuits is characteristically venomous and funny, especially the final words ‘Fr St Albans looked like a flat female with chlorosis’!

On page 30 you read how he was commissioned by Cardinal Vaughan who, like myself, was struck by his apparent artistic talent, to execute a series of pictures. Vaughan found reason to discharge him, and hence Rolfe couples him with me ‘and other scoundrels’ whom he charges with defrauding him.

Lower down on the same page you can read his accusation against me. ‘A hare-brained and degenerate priest asked me to undertake another series of pictures. I worked for him for two years: and he valued my productions at fifteen hundred pounds: in fact he sold them at that rate. Well, he never paid me. Again I lost all my apparatus, all my work: and was reduced to the last extreme of penury’!

And what was the real truth? That Rolfe had been provided with a comfortable home for two years, had been able to display his powers to the many visitors and priests who frequented the Shrine, and further, as I told him, had enjoyed ample leisure to employ his talent for writing, and so earn money for himself.

And note the madness of the man! When I asked him how he calculated up the £1000 he charged me with, he replied ‘I have counted the figures on the banners I have painted, and find they number one hundred. I charge them at £10 a head.’ Now the facts are these. There were some ten banners painted, each a single figure: but he had executed a larger banner in which was portrayed a crowd of people in the background, their heads the size of a thimble! When I asked how he was justified in assessing the figures at £10 a head, he reminded me that I had told him of a visitor having given me £10 for a banner of St David!

On page 324 he vents his full resentment on my poor efforts to befriend him, when he speaks of me as ‘the very detestable scoundrel’, etc. Then follows this interesting bit of history misread. ‘What became of him? The bad priest, I mean? He ruined himself as we predicted. He persisted in his career of crime till his Bishop found him out. Then he was broken and disappeared. – Maison de Santé or something of that sort, for a time. He is in one of the Colonies now.’ Yes, I was sent to Malta for two years and acted as Chaplain for the troops. Thank God I am turned seventy-six and anything but broken; in fact I have more to attend to now than at dear old Holywell.

I had heard that Rolfe committed suicide? He used the name ‘Austin’ till he fell out with me.

What a wasted genius the man was.

Yours very sincerely

Charles S. de Vere Beauclerk, S.J.

*

Mr Holden gave me details of the vindictiveness with which, once the final breach had been made, Rolfe pursued his ends.

Corvo joined the
Holywell Record,
and through its columns attacked all whom he was pleased to call his enemies. He lashed out right and left. Now I knew what he meant when he said ‘Knowledge is Power’. Everything he had been told in confidence was blared out by the
Holywell Record,
of which Corvo was now master, and which he used for his own purposes. He caused much trouble in Holywell and in the surroundings of the town.

I heard from him again as he had promised.

Among the few things about myself which I had told him was an escapade known only to my aunt. (I had once toured the provinces for two months as an actor. I was not so much enamoured of the dramatic art as of one of the feminine exponents of it.) Through Corvo, news of this reached the ears of my mother.

My aunt had related to us an event that had taken place some ten years before. I worked this up into a humorous tale, laying the scene in Spain, but Corvo took a fancy to it and made a
Toto
story out of it. I refer to
How Some Christians Love one Another.
My aunt was the one who went to the aid of ‘the respectable woman in her hour of need’. Some of the persons concerned were living at this time, and Corvo let them know that he was in possession of their secret.

I was enraged by these treacherous attacks. Our previous quarrels had had their humorous side, and I had got a considerable amount of fun out of them. This time we were both in deadly earnest.

On the 12th June 1897 Corvo wrote to my aunt: ‘Dear Mrs Richardson. By all means continue to direct your nephew to write me threatening letters. . . . I am delighted to have your written confession that you are boycotting 3 Bank Place, the
Record,
its owner and his wife, because I lodge and am employed at the
Record
office. No doubt you think your crime will ruin the
Record
and force my employer and me to the Workhouse. . . . If that is your idea, I wish it may do you much good. But remember, each act of you Irish against me or my friends is regarded as instigated by the counsel and example of Fr Beauclerk, and each act will be met with a fresh disclosure of his villainies. We do not war with women and children, but with the knave who makes tools of you. But you are very useful to me for literature. Meanwhile you have not yet sent me my clothes. Faithfully yours, F. Austin.’