The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) (20 page)

1. Begin with the departure of our man (Gervase?) at the age of fifteen years to be page to the Lord Chancellor. (Fortunately Thomas was very intimate with his servants; cf. Thomas of Bosham.) Almost at once Thomas becomes Archbishop, and the part ends with his consecration in 1162.

2. Begin by description of St Thomas’s life. Gervase becomes novice at Christ Church Convent; attached to Thomas; goes with him to Northampton; row; flight of Thomas; Gervase says good-bye to him at Sandwich in 1164.

3. Six years have elapsed. Last Christmas. Arrival of Thomas. Martyrdom. First miracles.

Please send comments some time
soon
, as I am beginning to warm up about it. Please also remember that my method, when once begun, is to work like lightning, and then to take a rest. I can’t plod
at all.
I shall start to read hard presently.

Agreement as to the terms of the collaboration was reached in August 1906, when Rolfe was staying with the Pirie-Gordons. For one reason and another, however, no active steps were taken immediately. Benson always had his hands more or less full, and Rolfe was occupied by his Oxford duties and his lawsuit.

When the long-protracted case was at last called, on 17 December, Benson was present at the hearing, heard his friend cross-examined, and saw him break down. Hugh Benson would have been less than human, perhaps, if his feeling as to the desirability of Fr. Rolfe as a collaborator had remained unchanged by what he heard. It did not. In any event he had outlived the first flush of his admiration for the author of
Hadrian the Seventh.

In the following year, however (1907), when Rolfe was at Gwernvale with time on his hands, the project was resumed. ‘You once said to me that Plot was your weak point’, Benson wrote. ‘I think there is truth in that. What you can do (Good Lord, how you can!) is to build up a situation when you’ve got it. You are a vignette-, a portrait-, not a landscape-painter, a maker of chords, not of progressions. . . . Therefore I am strongly inclined to collaboration . . . I think I may be able to make a plot sometime in the summer.’ The plot was devised, Benson caught fire again, and a start was made. Rolfe set down all sorts of technical phrases and facts, vignettes of the period and notes of customs, in a small notebook which went backwards and forwards between the two romancers. He sent descriptions and sketches of dresses, maps and plans of places, details of monastic life peculiar to Canterbury, as fuel for the writing fury which possessed his partner. Some time after 30 September, Benson read his beginning aloud to Fr X, who ‘laughed and shook with joy’. Rolfe, too, was writing hard at alternate chapters.

By October,
St Thomas,
though not finished, was well under way. And then, unexpectedly, Benson wrote to Rolfe suggesting an alteration to their agreement; or, as the latter phrased it, ‘showed the cloven hoof’.

He explained that during a recent visit to London, his agent, whom he did not name, had advised him that the proposed romance would have a far greater sale if Benson’s name appeared on the title-page unencumbered with that of a collaborator. Accordingly, since it was the main object of both authors to gain as much money as possible, he proposed to Rolfe that
St Thomas
should appear as ‘by Robert Hugh Benson’, and that a generous acknowledgement should be made, in a note, of ‘Mr Rolfe’s assistance’. The money arrangements were to stand unaltered; i.e., Rolfe was to receive a third. It cannot be gainsaid that the suggestion was a cool one; and Rolfe very naturally demurred. The point was argued. ‘Benson was very upset by a further refusal’, says his biographer. ‘He offered to make Mr Rolfe a present of all, absolutely, that he himself had hitherto written and discovered, with full leave to publish it as his own.’ But when he did so, ‘he foresaw that Rolfe would refuse this’, as in fact he did. Benson would make no other terms, and finally Rolfe, unwillingly, gave way.

But though Rolfe agreed to the new terms, the alteration of the agreement revived his sense of persecution in full force. He had, it can hardly be denied, some ground for grievance, since, in fact, the gaining of money had been only a part of the advantage which he looked for from the collaboration; but, as usual, he magnified his grievance into a nightmare, and saw himself again as the priest-hunted Nowt of Holywell surrounded by foes. He expressed this point of view in a letter to Mrs Gordon:

It is horrible to tell you what I think of Benson. So horrible that I am forcing myself not to come to any definite conclusion about him. I have only his actions before me; and I refuse to pronounce or even to form a final opinion about them. You know that we began the
Thomas
book in August 1906. It was entirely his own voluntary proposal. He said that if we wrote a book together, it would rehabilitate me publicly among Catholics, make publishers look more favourably on my own works, and get me a decent sum of money. He chose the subject; and offered me half profits. I was so grateful that I refused half and would only accept a third; and I promised to do my very best and to let him have his own way entirely in the book. Then the thing dilly-dallied till last Autumn, when he suddenly began to write in a violent spurt. I tottered after him as best I could. Then, Benson most peremptorily required me to sign a bond agreeing that his name should stand alone as author of the book. He said that his agent (whose name he refused to give) told him that he could make more money this way, and he promised that my share should be ‘several hundreds of pounds with £100 on day of publication’. This proposal was a radical difference to our agreement. The only ambition I have is to be independent. The original agreement was to help me to that. The new proposal kept me a sponger upon other people’s charity. Which I detest with all my heart. . . .

You know that Benson has continually consoled me in my troubles, saying that I never need worry myself with thinking that I must go back to the workhouse or sleep out of doors any more. He has always assured me that when all else failed he would gladly take me in. I have impressed upon him that I yearn to be a help and not a hindrance: and I have shewn him heaps of ways in which I could be made not only self-supporting but profitable and only too willing to share my profits with him. And so now, finding myself quite without means, and quite without means even of continuing my work, I reluctantly fell back upon him. He tells me that to take me in will break his heart and cause him strong personal inconvenience; and in the roughest possible manner he offers me the situation of caretaker in his lonely house two miles from Buntingford at 8/– a week. There I am to be quite alone, to look after the place, do the gardening, and fowls, and be two miles walk and a train-journey from Mass for seven months. He emphasises the fact that I am not to consider myself his guest but his paid servant; and asks for a bond binding me to repay him my journey-money out of my first earnings.

Now all this has taken my breath away. It is totally unexpected. I have done nothing to deserve it. And I am quite unable to explain it excepting by an hypothesis which I am frantically refusing to entertain. Roman Catholic clergymen have behaved exactly like this several times to me before; and I believe the idea was to break me, heart and soul and body. That they have not done; and I will not let it happen. Anything rather than that. But the effect of Benson’s conduct is that I am inconceivably frightened of him; and all my old distrust of the clergy is rampant and paramount. What would they do with me if I put myself completely at their mercy? I don’t know. But I fear all sorts of things, especially as this occasion is caused by one whom I regarded as a true friend and to whom I have confided all my secrets without reserve.

Fortunately, some letters exist which give Benson’s side of this unlucky squabble:

Catholic Rectory, Cambridge

Dear Mr Pirie-Gordon,

May I write to you frankly about Rolfe? I don’t know whether or not he has told you that we have had a row. The details in any case don’t matter; but I wanted to make it clear to you what my attitude is.

My last letter to R., which reached him last Tuesday, contained an apology for having expressed things clumsily and awkwardly, and an emphatic assurance that I did not consider him a ‘knave’, as he seemed to suspect. It also contained a suggestion that he should come next month into a house which I have just bought and live there. I proposed to offer him the house for six months, the garden with its vegetables, fowls for eggs, and a few shillings each week for further things – also I said I would furnish a couple of rooms in it and advance necessary money for his moving expenses. It was an entirely friendly and genial letter. I asked him to answer this by yesterday, as I must look out for a caretaker at once, if he did not come. This he has not answered at all.

Now I can’t go on begging him to accept this kind of thing. He is extremely angry with me, I suppose.

If it is possible for you to convey to him how extremely foolish it is to behave like this, when there is nothing but friendliness on my side – though without telling him that you have heard from me – I shall be very grateful. Would it be possible for you to talk to him about plans and then to say ‘Have you written to Benson?’, and if he says ‘That’s no good’, then to say ‘Very well,
I
will’,
and to do it, whatever he says?

It seems to me that perhaps in this way he may be brought to see how foolish it is to go on like this and think himself deserted and betrayed and all the rest of it.

Please forgive me for writing. I simply cannot wait more than three or four days more. If nothing happens by then I must engage a caretaker at once. If you can give me a hint that he is likely to wish to come, I will postpone it. . . .

Yours sincerely

R. H. Benson

Benson’s account of the cause of their difference does not differ, substantially, from Rolfe’s:

On proposing to a publisher that [Rolfe and myself] should cooperate, he answered that he didn’t want that. He wanted a book from me alone, for which he offered me a considerable sum: saying that he could not offer nearly so much for a collaborated book. I passed this on to R., thinking of course that he would not dream of insisting on his name appearing as a collaborator. What I suggested was that his name should be fervently mentioned in the preface – ‘invaluable assistance’ etc., and that our money arrangements should remain as before. In this way he would have received a lot more money which I imagined he wanted (I certainly do).

Benson was less than just to himself as well as to Rolfe in thus insisting on money as the essence of their disagreement; indeed, if his excuse were taken at the foot of the letter, it would be a paltry one. He had made a bargain with Rolfe; and the fact that he could make better terms for himself by altering the bargain was no ground for altering it if his collaborator preferred to leave it unchanged. No doubt it was true that the unnamed publisher offered more money if Benson’s name stood alone upon the title-page; but there were other reasons for Fr. Benson’s desire to drop public collaboration with Fr. Rolfe. His brother Arthur had previously warned him that this new friend was a dangerous and discreditable man; and now several of his colleagues in the Church joined in adjuring him to drop the association. Their words were given weight by that cross-examination in the Thomas case to which I have referred. So Benson decided against Rolfe. But (we may suppose) he wished, charitably, not to let his collaborator feel his decision as a personal difference, and sought to throw the onus of his withdrawal on the publisher. This is surmise, but there is much to support it.

Pirie-Gordon’s good-natured efforts to reconcile the two were fruitless:

Dear Mr Pirie-Gordon,

Many thanks. But I don’t in the least see what I can do now, if he insists on treating me as a suspicious enemy. If I write in a friendly manner he does not answer, and seems to think that my friendliness is a sort of frightened sop-giving. If I write my mind he thinks me brutal. The only third alternative is that I should not write unless and until he writes to me. This seems to me my only possibility. Personally I think he has treated me in an astounding manner. . . . I won’t qualify it further.

But I am perfectly ready to be friendly: and to go on with
St Thomas as soon as I have any leisure.
Only the request for this must now come from him. I am keeping his chapters for the present, in the hope that he will propose this again.

I see dimly what he thinks. But it is so amazingly unreasonable and so extremely wounding to oneself, to be treated as a fraudulent publisher, that I can hardly see how in decency I can go on making proposals. He will only see in them new and subtle plots against him. And all the while, in reality, from the business point of view it would be vastly to my advantage not to work with him at all. I have offered him the whole book, for that reason among others, if he will take it off my hands.

I am honestly beginning to doubt, for the first time, whether he is really ‘fond of me’ at all. I don’t see at present how suspicion and friendliness can co-exist.

As for my suffering through him – I have always been perfectly aware that Catholics dislike and distrust him. It was, largely, to rehabilitate him that I have made no secret of my liking for him (that sounds rather egotistic, but at present I am in good favour with Catholics). I don’t care one straw what they think about me. . . .

It is an
absolute delusion
that anyone keeps a watch on him, or hinders him. Really, in Catholic eyes, he is practically non-existent. Certainly Catholics who do know of him suspect him – but they ignore him. It is simple egotism on his part to think that they pay him any attention.

I am frightfully sorry for him. I would do anything I could: but the ‘Rose’ attitude of lofty isolation is intolerable and impossible. Nobody is going to ‘soar’ to him with sympathy. He is simply his own enemy. I am not: I want to be his friend. But it is because I am sorry for him; not because I think he is the object of a widespread plot.