The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (13 page)

Dear Sir:
[1]

Will you kindly note that I disapprove of, and entirely dissociate myself from Mr Edward Joseph Slaughter’s perridiculous mismanagement of my affairs; and that I have cancelled the authorisation to act for me, which I formerly gave him at his own request, he being my creditor to a small amount.

I find that my confidence once more has been abused by a stupid and dishonourable Roman Catholick; though I have no doubt but that Mr E. J. Slaughter’s aboriginal instincts and casuistick breeding will enable him to pitch some such elaborated, and delicately distinguished, yarn into his hebdomadal confessor, as will justify his treachery to me, or at least reduce it from the category of mortal, to that of venial sin; and so maintain the integrity of his idiotick self-conceit.

If these, of his, be ‘business methods’, and for more than a year I have had it rammed into my head that they are, I can only say that I thank the Goodness and the Grace which made me not a ‘business’ man.

I have no idea that you yourself will be feeling very genial: but, had it not been for your evident desire to negociate through Mr Slaughter, and that pious deceiver’s perfervid protestations that he regarded me as a promising speculation in which he was concupiscent to engage, I never should have submitted, against my own judgment, to his direction, or to have my affairs so involved and embroiled by this precious ‘commercial capability’ of which he so dogmatically has boasted. I imagine you to be extremely sick: and I well know that I am –
usque ad nauseam.
 . . .

And now, will you please note that I am managing my own affairs; and having communications addressed to me
directly
from this date. And will you consider this as an intimation of my final rupture from the Slaughter gang, and from Roman Catholics generally. I find the Faith comfortable and eximious; but its professors utterly intolerable. In seventeen years I have never met one R.C., except the Bishop of Menevia, who was not a sedulous ape, a treacherous snob, a slanderer, an oppressor, or a liar; and I am going to try to do without them.

Yours faithfully

Frederick Baron Corvo

The answer to this revelatory letter, which touched Mr Richards’s sense of humour, was an invitation to lunch, accepted in terms which it is given to few to command:

xviiij Mar. 1901

Dear Sir:

I do not want to appear ungracious, nor do I ever eat lunch, and you know that to interrupt my work even for a couple of hours is a grave inconvenience; indeed, I actually have not been outside this house since the exsequies of the Divine Victoria: but I feel that something is due to you on account of the exasperation which you have endured from the idiomata of Slaughter; and therefore, if you can meet me on friendly terms, remembering all the while that my mind is concentrated on the xvi not the xx century, and if you agree to consider our conversation as privileged and in nowise binding, I will be at Romano’s between 1 and 2 p.m. on Tuesday or Wednesday next. . . .

Faithfully yours

Frederick Baron Corvo

It is to be hoped that the lunch was enjoyable to both parties. But, enjoyable or not, it did not pacify the thoroughly suspicious Rolfe for long. Some fresh problem again required his presence in the publisher’s office: an invitation he declined in terms appropriate to the fly countering the spider:

viij April 1901

Dear Sir:

I cannot leave my work on Tuesday because it is a long way from here to Henrietta Street; and as I have no draft of your proposals there is nothing to occupy our time.

Yours faithfully

Frederick Baron Corvo

CHAPTER 9: THE CHRONICLES

Rolfe had told Vincent O’Sullivan that he ‘bathed in a row’; he might now fairly claim to be up to his neck in a series of them. He was embroiled with Grant Richards, at arms length with Slaughter, not on speaking terms with Harland, distrustful of John Lane, and amiable to Temple Scott only because the ‘dough-faced dwarf’, having left the service of Grant Richards to act as Lane’s American Manager, had accepted a private mission to push the Baron’s interests in the United States. Why was Corvo so unreasonably asperous to those who had befriended and helped him? ‘I have never been able to account for his strange conduct’, Temple Scott writes, ‘except to put it down to a nature tortured by disappointment and a megalomania that could not be satisfied with what the world had to offer it by way of value, either in money or praise. It was dangerous to praise his work, for the more you praised it the more he demanded. His intellectual vanity was colossal.’ This diagnosis is, I think, in essence true. Rolfe’s megalomania and mental conceit cannot be doubted; but they were in part his compensation against the feelings that others, far less gifted than he, were enjoying the pleasant fruits of a world in which he had no share. His own observations on the subject reveal the man: ‘To all these people who came professing friendship, he grimly said: “Actions before words. If you wish me well, employ me: or help me to get a proper price for my work, and to become your social equal; and we will begin to ponder the matter of friendship.” For he failed to understand how anyone could be friendly, who did not act wholeheartedly on his behalf.’ Rolfe never wrote anything more true than that last sentence.

*

The imbroglio with Grant Richards grew more entangled. After lengthy vicissitudes of correspondence, he offered to do what was needed to his book for a further £50, plus ‘the typescribe’s fee which I saved you last October-November in copying the m.s.’, at the same time reminding the publisher (in an axiom which he would have done well to have borne in mind himself) that ‘this is commerce in which I am engaged, not euchre’. But that proposal was of no avail, and he was soon as tart as ever:

xxiiij Apr. 1901

Dear Sir:

I cannot regard your letter as being in any way a straight reply to mine; and you leave me no option but to take professional advice.

Yours faithfully

Frederick Baron Corvo

Even ‘professional advice’ could not help, and the book appeared without further correction from its author, with all its imperfections on its head. Doubtless its publication (in October 1901) must have secretly rejoiced Rolfe’s heart (he wrote by postcard, ‘The writer of
Chronicles of the House of Borgia
notes that the usual Author’s copies are withheld from him, after publication’); at least it gave him new ground for his hobby of correspondence:

69 Broadhurst Gardens, Hampstead

xiij Oct. MCMI

Dear Sirs:

I am surprised to see, in the
Athenaum,
that you are advertising your Borgia Book by name.

I beg leave to remind you that, more than a year ago, I withdrew my name from your Borgia Book, on account of your demand for the reformation of the style in accordance with your two extraordinary ‘Reader’s Reports’ of Sept. 1900.

Since that date, I several times have informed you that your book is a tissue of historical inaccuracies, owing to your refusal to provide me with opportunities for original research, and owing to your refusal to avail yourself of the new material obtained by me from Conte Cesare Borgia after the expiration of my agreement with you.

I now have to intimate to you that I formally prohibit you from using my name in connection with your
Chronicles of the House of Borgia
; not only on the grounds before-mentioned: but, also, on the additional grounds, that I decline to accept responsibility for your mutilation of, and excision from, my MS; and, that there is no stipulation in our contract obliging me to lend my name to a work which I consider subturpiculous, and which, frequently during the last twelve months, I categorically have disapproved.

This is without prejudice; and I reserve all rights in this letter.

Yours faithfully

Frederick Baron Corvo

Indeed, the ground of his grievances continued to widen:

69 Broadhurst Gardens, Hampstead

xvij Dec. 1901

Sirs:

I do not know by what law, either of business or of common courtesy, you justify your disregard of my request, dated xviiij Oct. 1901, that you should refuse all letters sent to your care for me – a rule which I asked you to construe as absolute, to which no exception can be made under any circumstances.

The thing which I ask of you is a very small thing and not, I believe, an unheard-of thing: and your repeated disregard of my wishes impels me to remind you that, in view of your mutilation of my work, and the libellous liberties which you have taken with my name, you should avoid converting my present attitude of forbearance into one of reprisal.

Your obedient servant

Frederick William Rolfe

Nevertheless one other letter was sent on to him, doubtless by clerical inadvertence; and in consequence the correspondence was closed by a final letter, too libellous for transcription, which, after mentioning that Mr Richards had few friends and many enemies, concluded:

but I doubt whether you ever have made a more ruthless and persequent enemy than

Your obedient servant

Frederick William Rolfe
[1]

*

The fruit of Baron Corvo’s harassed labours was presented to the world late in October 1901. Though a financial failure at that time,
Chronicles of the House of Borgia
attracted wide notice, and has since influenced other writers and become a rare book. In form it is a substantial and handsome octavo of nearly four hundred pages; in content it abounds in passages of epigrammatic excellence and insolence, and in Rolfe’s individual eccentricities of spelling, language and treatment. He tells a fascinating if diffuse story of the rise and fall of the great sinister, perverse family which, sprung from a King, gave Christendom two Popes, and a Saint and General of the Jesuits. The Preface defines the author’s attitude, without admitting that it is that of counsel for the defence. He explains that ‘The writer does not write with the object of whitewashing the House of Borgia: his present opinion being that all men are too vile for words to tell. Further, he does not write in the Roman Catholic interest; nor in the Jesuit interest; nor in the interest of any creed, or corporation, or even human being; but solely as one who has scratched together some sherds of knowledge, which he perforce must sell, to live.’ But, although he professed not to wish to whitewash the Borgia, Rolfe was unwilling that they should be condemned. ‘No man, save One, since Adam, has been wholly good. Not one has been wholly bad’, he wrote (again in the Preface). ‘The truth about the Borgia, no doubt, lies between the two extremes. They are accused of loose morals, and of having been addicted to improper practices and amusements. Well; what then? Does anybody want to judge them? Popes and Kings, and lovers, and men of intellect, and men of war, cannot be judged by the narrow code, the stunted standard, of the journalist and the lodging-house keeper, or the plumber and the haberdasher. . . . Why should good hours of sunlight be wasted on the judgment seat, by those who, presently, will have to take their turn in the dock? Why not leave the affairs of Borgia to the Recording Angel?’ This attitude, in its widest sense, might be taken to preclude even his own book; which, however, he justified by adding, ‘All about the Borgia quite truly will be known some day; and in the interim, more profitable entertainment may be gained by frankly and openly studying that swift vivid violent age when . . . “there was no check to the growth of personality, no grinding of men down to match the average”.’

There is no doubt that Fr. Rolfe wrote himself into his Borgia book as he did into
Hadrian.
He worked from a boarding house in Hampstead, but he dreamed himself in Rome, the Rome of the Middle Ages. He turned from the twentieth century in which he was born, and in which he had failed, from its ‘jaded physique and sophisticated brain’, to what he called ‘the physically strong and intellectually simple fifteenth, when the world – the dust which makes man’s flesh – was five centuries younger and fresher; when colour was vivid; light, a blaze; virtue and vice, extreme; passion, primitive and ardent; life, violent; youth, intense, supreme; and sententious pettifogging respectable mediocrity, senile and debile, of no importance whatever’. Reading this book (with its denunciation of ‘that curse to real civilisation, the printed book’, denounced because it ended the amenities of manuscript), with its joy in the ‘raw reality and glittering light’ of Italy, its cult of magnificence in manners and habiliments, its strenuous love of action and insistence on hardihood of nerve, it is easy to see that Rolfe had accepted himself as a contemporary of Cellini, and suffered from that nostalgia of the past which, of all temptations of the mind, is the most destructive of contentment. So constituted, his attitude to the Borgia can be imagined. He admired them. To him the infamous Alexander with his simony, bastards and murders, was ‘A very strong man, guilty of hiding none of his human weaknesses’, who made ‘malefactors feel the flail which, like Osiris, he wielded equally with the crook’; Cesare Borgia was a governor whose power, justice and ever-present indefatigable energy seemed superhuman. ‘He was hated: hated by the great Baronial houses which he had ruined, whose heirs he had slain; but he was not even disliked by the people whom he ruled. It was not extraordinary; for the mob always adores the strong bowelless man, the rigid fearless despot, the conquering autocrat who brings peace with security.’ As for Lucrezia, she was a ‘pearl among women’, a second Lucrece, who ‘won fresh fame by her goodness to young girls, whom she provided with dowries, to tempt them to keep continency by marrying well’.

This patchwork book is not history as it should be written; but it is history that can be read. Corvo’s sentences sing: ‘sumptuous brocades, fairest linen of flax, furs from the East and delicate enduring leather, adorned these men and women who had not learned to change their garments as often as they changed their minds; and who went to bed at night simply as nature made them.’ Sometimes he employs the emphasis of brevity: ‘This year died the twelve-toed, chin-tufted excommunicated little Christian King Charles VIII of France, and was succeeded by his cousin Louis XII, a thin man with a fat neck and lip, and an Ethiopic nose, and exquisite attire.’ Sometimes he reaches his effects by expressive images, as when relating how the news spread of the disbanding of Cesare’s army: ‘Colonna and Orsini heard, in their ugly exile, in their battered fortress. Like the chained wolves on the Capitol who know when rust makes thin their fetters, they lifted up their horrid heads and waited till the ultimate link should part.’

Or he gives dramatic pictures of such incidents as the punishment of Ramiro d’ Orca: ‘On the twenty-second of December, when the setting sun cast blood-red lights across the snow, without warning Duke Cesare galloped into Cesena with an armed escort of lancers. The cowed Cesenisi, turning out of doors to do him reverence, caught bare glimpses of flashing mail and the bull-bannerols of Borgia passing over the drawbridge of the citadel. Presently, from that citadel came Messer Cipriano di Numai, the Duke’s secretary, to the house of Messer Domenico d’ Ugolini, the treasurer, seeking the Governor of the city. Messer Ramiro d’ Orca was arrested, and conducted to the presence of his chief. Surmise that night was rife as to the import of these acts. New vengeance? New taxes? New horror? None could say.’

There are touches of Rolfe’s ironic humour in his summary of the scientific learning of that time. ‘Messer Giambattista della Porta appears to have used his science and magical art to invent “Some Sports against Women”; which will show what the Borgian Era regarded as permissible practical jokes. He says that, if you wish to discover paint on a face, you must chew saffron before breathing on her, and incontinently she yellows: or you may burn brimstone near her, which will blacken mercury sublimate and cerusa (white lead): or you may chew cummin or garlic and breathe on her, and her cerusa or quicksilver will decay. But if that you yearn to dye a woman green you must decoct a chameleon in her bath.’

A final quotation will show Rolfe’s sympathy for the classic learning of the Renaissance:

During many years, since the first signs of Muslim activity, fugitives from Byzantium descended upon Italian shores. The glory of Greece had gone to Imperial Rome. The grandeur of Imperial Rome had returned to Byzantium. And now the glory and grandeur of Byzantium was going to Christian Rome. When danger menaced, when the day of stress began to dawn, scholars and cunning artificers, experts skilful in all knowledge, fled westward to the open arms of Italy with their treasures of work. Italy welcomed all who could enlarge, illuminate her transcendent genius: learning and culture and skill found with her not exile but a home, and a market for wares. Scholarship became the fashion. ‘Literary taste was the regulative principle.’ It was the Age of Acquisition. ‘Tuscan is hardly known to all Italians, but Latin is spread far and wide throughout all the world’, says Filelfo. But to know Greek was the real test of a gentleman of that day; and Greek scholars were Italy’s most honoured guests. Not content with the codices and classics of antiquity that these brought with them, Italian princes and patricians sent embassies to falling Byzantium, to search for manuscripts, inscriptions, or carven gems, and bronze, and marble. Greek intaglii and camei graced the finger-rings, the ouches, collars, caps, of Venetian senators, of the lords of Florence, of the sovereigns of the Regno, of the barons and cardinals and popes of Rome.

Baron Corvo seems after all to have had his way, very largely, in the matter of punctuation and spelling. At least, ‘Sistine’ is ‘Xystine’ throughout; all the characters are referred to by their ceremonial titles (Caesar Borgia, for instance, is not so called, but ‘Duke Cesare de Valentinois’); and all the Popes are accorded capitalized pronouns. Another whim which may be noticed is his avoidance, in the chapter entitled ‘The Legend of the Borgia Venom’, of the word ‘poison’, which only defiles his pages in a quotation. He revived an old form, and for ‘poison’ wrote ‘venom’, for ‘poisoned’ ‘envenomed’, for ‘poisonous’ ‘veneficous’, and ‘venenation’ for ‘poisoning’. This chapter on the Borgian poisons, in which Rolfe refused to believe, is the most interesting in the book, and as ingenious as the lock of a Milner safe. By a pharmaceutical examination of the ingredients and recipes asserted to have been used, Corvo came to the conclusion that the stories of assassination by spiked ring, and the rest of the romantic Borgian murders in similar modes, were merely fabulous; in short, that ‘These Borgia could no more poison artistically, than they could send telegrams’.