Frederick Rolfe
Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric.
Life
Rolfe was born in Cheapside, London, the son of piano maker and tuner James Rolfe and Ellen Elizabeth, née Pilcher. He left school at the age of fourteen and became a teacher. He taught briefly at The King's School, Grantham, where the then headmaster, Ernest Hardy, later principal of Jesus College, Oxford, became a lifelong friend.He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886 and was confirmed by Cardinal Manning. With his conversion came a strongly-felt vocation to the priesthood, which persisted throughout his life despite being constantly frustrated and never realised. In 1887 he was sponsored to train at St Mary's College, Oscott, near Birmingham and in 1889 was a student at the Pontifical Scots College in Rome, but was thrown out by both due to his inability to concentrate on priestly studies and his erratic behaviour.
At this stage he entered the circle of the Duchess Sforza Cesarini, who, he claimed, adopted him as a grandson and gave him the use of the title of "Baron Corvo". This became his best-known pseudonym; he also called himself "Frank English", "Frederick Austin" and "A. Crab Maid", among others. More often he abbreviated his own name to "Fr. Rolfe".
Rolfe spent most of his life as a freelance writer, mainly in England but eventually in Venice. He lived in the era before the welfare state, and relied on benefactors for support but he had an argumentative nature and a tendency to fall out spectacularly with most of the people who tried to help him and offer him room and board. Eventually, out of money and out of luck, he died in Venice from a stroke on 25 October 1913. He was buried in the San Michele cemetery on the Isola di San Michele in Venice.
Rolfe's life provided the basis for The Quest for Corvo by A. J. A. Symons, an "experiment in biography" regarded as a minor classic in the field. This same work reveals that Rolfe had an unlikely enthusiast in the person of Maundy Gregory.
Homosexuality
Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality and associated and corresponded with a number of other homosexual Englishmen. Early in his life he wrote a fair amount of idealistic but mawkish poetry about boy martyrs and the like. These and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them. As he himself matured, Rolfe's settled sexual preference was for late adolescents. Towards the end of his life he made his only explicit reference to his specific sexual age preference, in one of the Venice letters to Charles Masson Fox, in which he declared: "My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large." Grant Richards, in his Memories of a Misspent Youth, recalls "Frederick Baron Corvo" at Parson's Pleasure in Oxford – where scholars could bathe naked – "surveying the yellow flesh tints of youth with unbecoming satisfaction".Those of whom it is either speculated or surmised that they had sexual relations with Rolfe – Aubrey Thurstans, Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas, John 'Markoleone', Ermenegildo Vianello and the other Venetian gondoliers – were all sexually mature young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one. The idealised young men in his fiction were of a similar age.
In 1904, soon after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, the convert Robert Hugh Benson formed a chaste but passionate friendship with Rolfe. For two years this relationship involved letters "not only weekly, but at times daily, and of an intimate character, exhaustingly charged with emotion." There was a falling out in 1906. For some time previously, Benson had made plans to write jointly with Rolfe a book on St Thomas Becket, but Benson decided that he should not be associated "with a Venetian pimp and procurer of boys". Afterwards, Benson satirised Rolfe in his novel The Sentimentalists. Rolfe returned the favour a few years later, putting a caricature of Benson named "Bobugo Bonsen" in a book named Nicholas Crabbe. Their letters were subsequently destroyed, probably by Benson's brother.
Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.
Work
Principal works of fiction
Rolfe's most famous works are the stories and novels in which he himself is the thinly-disguised protagonist:- Stories Toto Told Me, a collection of six stories, later expanded to thirty-two and republished as In His Own Image, in which ‘Don Friderico’ and his teenage acolytes embark on long walking tours in the Italian countryside, even as far from Rome as the eastern coast of Italy. The youths’ leader, the sixteen-year-old Toto, recounts tales of saints behaving like pagan gods. The stories are Catholic, and the saints who figure in them are hedonistic, vengeful and entirely comfortable with nudity, diametrically opposite to any Protestant ideal of sainthood.
- Hadrian the Seventh is Rolfe's most famous novel. Rolfe portrays himself as an Englishman with a quintessentially English name, 'George Arthur Rose,' who, having originally been rejected for the priesthood, finds himself the object of a change of mind on the part of the church hierarchy, who then elect him to the papacy. Rose takes the name Hadrian VII and embarks upon a programme of ecclesiastical and geopolitical reform; the only English pope was Hadrian IV, and the last non-Italian pope had been Hadrian VI. More self-indulgently, he takes the opportunity to review his past life and to reward or punish his friends and acquaintances according to what he believes to be their just deserts. Hadrian is thus essentially an exercise in wish-fulfilment.
- Nicholas Crabbe tells the story of Rolfe's first attempts to achieve publication, with starring roles for Henry Harland, John Lane and Grant Richards. In this novel Rolfe has given himself a new fictional name, 'Nicholas Crabbe,' and its plot is a blow-by-blow chronicle of events, reproducing many of the publishers' letters and Rolfe's replies to them. Nicholas Crabbe is rich in autobiographical detail.
- The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole is set in Venice and reintroduces the reader to 'Nicholas Crabbe.' It has three interlocking plots: Crabbe’s efforts to get his books published, in the face of obstacles placed in their way by his friends and agents in England, and his consequent economic difficulties; his rescue of a sixteen-year-old girl from the Messina earthquake and employment of her as his assistant and gondolier, dressed in male garments to avoid scandal; and the transcendent beauty of Venice itself and the role it plays in the lives of its votaries. Extracts from the novel’s descriptions of Venice appear regularly in guidebooks and modern anthologies. Unlike Rolfe’s other novels, this one ends happily, with a lucrative book contract and a declaration of love. "The desire and pursuit of the whole" is the definition of love, according to Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.
Other writings
Rolfe wrote four other novels: Don Tarquinio, Don Renato, The Weird of the Wanderer, and Hubert's Arthur. Both The Weird and Hubert's Arthur were collaborations with Harry Pirie-Gordon. These works differ from the autobiographical novels in two respects: they are set in previous centuries, and the principal protagonist in each is not Rolfe's alter ego, although there is a strong degree of identification. In The Weird of the Wanderer the hero, Nicholas Crabbe, becomes a time traveller and discovers that he is Odysseus.Rolfe also wrote shorter fiction, published in contemporary periodicals and collected after his death in Three Tales of Venice, Amico di Sandro, The Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda and The Armed Hands. He also published an entertaining but unreliable work of history, Chronicles of the House of Borgia, translations of The Rubáiyát of Umar Khaiyám and The Songs of Meleager, and a little poetry, later gathered into one volume, Collected Poems.