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Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
The character and life history of Frederick William Rolfe, author of the
novel Hadrian the Seventh, were at least as bizarre and extraordinary as
those of his literary creations. He
was remembered variously by his acquaintances as genius, fraud, eccentric,
megalomaniac, paedophile, artist and madman; but the dark, bespectacled
pipe-smoker was seldom ignored, and almost never forgotten.
Fittingly, the keenest insight into this phenomenon came from the man
himself, who summarized his own personality as “the selfishness of a square
peg in a round hole.” In the tradition of Lord Byron and the “tortured artist”
Rolfe felt himself to be a man apart and misunderstood—a stranger in this
breathing world; but for him, the role of the misfit was far more than simply a
literary pose.
Born in 1860 to Anglican parents in
Cheapside, London, Rolfe left home at
the age of fifteen to become a schoolmaster.
Over the following ten years, he worked at a variety of establishments;
and his talent for teaching was widely praised, if sparsely rewarded.
However, it seems to have been during this period that two of his
strongest feeling of “difference” came to light—firstly his abhorrence of
women and predilection, certainly for other men, and probably for young boys;
and secondly, his growing bias toward Catholicism.
The former he was forced to conceal, in a society which—at least on the
surface—remained staunchly heterosexual; and evidence of it remains only
tenuously, in his poetry and art, and more graphically, in a few letters penned
in later life. The latter resulted
in his confirmation into the Catholic Church in January 1885.
Here began Rolfe’s lifelong ambition to become a priest; and in October
1887 he was finally accepted to train for ordination at St. Mary’s College,
Oscott, near Birmingham. However, both this and his 1889 enrollment at the Scots
College, Rome, ended in dismissal after a fairly short time, on the grounds of
strange behavior. His superiors
could discern little Christian humility in the strange student who painted a
picture of William of Norwich, in which the hundred and forty-nine bearers of
the sacred body, and even the saint himself, were marked self-portraits by
sharing the Rolfian nose! Fellow
students feared his vitroilic tongue and his “unmistakable sense of
superiority”; and were amazed by his habits of stamping everything possible
with the raven, his own adopted crest, and of telling wildly imaginative
anecdotes concerning the importance of his family—even to the extent of
claiming common ancestry with great historical figures such as William the
conqueror.
Doubtless aware of this disapproval, yet typically unwilling to
compromise his behavior in any way, Rolfe kept to his room as much as possible
prior to his dismissal and practiced his many hobbies.
A great lover of beauty—“Ugly things really hurt him” commented a
friend of the time—he proved a talented artist and photographer.
Indeed, a few years later he went some way towards inventing submarine
photography and natural color photographs.
However, in a scenario that was to recur time and time again throughout
his life, Rolfe lacked the finances necessary to continue his research, and was
forced to abandon it. Never greatly
rewarded for any of his achievements, poverty was a constant thorn in his side,
often forcing this proud aesthete to suffer the indignity of living in small,
dirty rooms and hovels for which he could not pay the rent, and from which he
was frequently evicted.
Rolf was setting a precedent, then, when he was eventually thrown out
bodily from the Scots College in Rome (still lying on his mattress, having
flatly refused to leave on his own volition).
He now found himself with his cherished dream of ordination shattered for
a second time—this time for good. The
destruction of his one goal and ideal must have had a profound effect upon him,
as it was at this point that his own life began to evolve into a series of
fictional creations. Canon Carmont
recalled that, at the Scots College, “he was universally regarded as about the
biggest liar we had ever met”’ and the different identities and backgrounds
that he invented for himself in the years that followed, would suggest that his
perception of the boundary between fact and fantasy was becoming increasingly
blurred.
On returning to England in 1890, thrown back into the world of ordinary
men, Rolfe first consoled himself with the title “Baron Corvo”; and this is
the name by which he has become known to posterity.
Living on credit, the bounty of others, and what little painting and
photography work he could find, Rolfe moved about the country, living in
poverty, escaping debt, seeking commissions and charity, and creating ever more
complex backgrounds for himself. Sometimes
it was a Bishop who had made him a Baron, sometimes it was his friend the
Duchess Sforza-Cezarini. Sometimes
he had studied at Oxford University, sometimes he was a hunted man with powerful
enemies, whose Godfather was the German Kaiser.
There were four of me at least . . .
‘I was a tonsured clerk, intending to
persist in my Divine Vocation, but forced for a time to engage in
secular pursuits to earn my living and to pay my debts.
I had a shuddering repugnance from associating my name, the
name by which I should some day be known in the priesthood, with
these secular pursuits. For that reason I adopted pseudonyms.
‘In fact, I split up my personality.
As Rose (Rolfe) I was a tonsured clerk:
as Baron Corvo I wrote and painted and photographed:
as Austin White I designed decorations:
as Francis Engle I did journalism.
There were four of me at least.
‘And of course my pseudonymity has been
misunderstood by the stupid, as well as misrepresented by the
invidious. Most
people have only half developed their single personalities.
That a man should split his into four and more, and should
develop each separately and perfectly, was so abnormal that many
normals failed to understand it.’
--Probably
at Jesus College, Oxford, 1907
Sometimes he was “Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary
Rolfe,” some of whose many names had been conferred upon him by a Bishop and a
Cardinal. At other times, he tried
to adopt the religious orders he so fervently desired by contracting
‘Frederick’ to ‘Fr.’ In the hope that, when written as ‘Fr. Austin’
or “Fr. Rolfe’ the letters might be thought to stand for ‘Father.’
Given the scale and complexity of his many deceptions, the events of late
1898 appear somewhat inevitable. Shortly
after the publication of his first book Stories
Toto Told Me, an article appeared in the Aberdeen Daily
Free Press, exposing “Baron Corvo” to ridicule, cruelly caricaturing and
exposing all aspects of his appearance and character.
Rolfe, a proud and paranoid man at the best of times, already exhausted
from years of poverty and hunger—and, doubtless, from living with the extremes
of his own temperament—was broken by this; and in January 1899 he put himself
into the Holywell Workhouse in North Wales.
Discharging himself a month later, he departed to start a new life in
London, having been persuaded by acquaintances to pursue a literary, rather than
an artistic, career.
Over the next eight years, Rolfe produced a number of works, including In
His Own Image (1901), Chronicles of
the House of Borgia (1901), Don
Tarquinio (1903) and Hadrian the
Seventh (1904) which is generally considered to be his masterpiece. Never a man afraid to experiment, or shy of displaying his
abilities, his work delights in the possibilities of language, containing
linguistic inventions and adaptations worthy of Joyce in words such as
“tolutiloquence” and “contortuplicate.”
It also provided him with a legitimate outlet for fantasies about his
life; thus, most of his peripheral characters are based upon people he knew,
while his hero is invariably an adapted version of himself.
In Hadrian the Seventh in
particular, he portrayed his past life as he wished it to go down in history,
and his future life as he longed and dreamed for it to be.
The living Rolfe’s failures are transformed into Hadrian’s triumphs;
his powerlessness into Hadrian’s magnanimity.
However, it remained only fiction, and although Hadrian
the Seventh brought Rolfe some critical acclaim, he received little
remuneration from his publishers, leaving him still in dire poverty, and further
fuelling his already chronic persecution complex.
Rolfe finally left the country in disgust in 1908, and went to Venice.
He was never to return. He
continued to write sporadically—two novels, The
Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole: a Romance of Modern Venice and Nicholas
Crabbe were published long after his death in 1913—but his primary means
of support for some time was the stream of begging letters he sent to friends in
England. These long-suffering
individuals sent him money for a time, but eventually stopped; at which point
Rolfe’s letters became abusive, poisonous and accusatory.
Such letters were a long-standing hobby of Rolfe’s—John Holden, a
friend of his time in Wales, recalled “I have never seen him happier than when
he had to answer an unpleasant letter. Before
he sat down, I would hear him bubbling and chortling for quite a time . . .”
while Rolfe himself gleefully admitted to “. . . the most violently amazing
ability of nipping and pinching other people’s rawest and most secret sores”
when he felt he had been wronged. Admittedly,
he felt that most of the time, his blurred sense of truth allowing him to view
himself as the injured party in any quarrel—often in blatant disregard of the
facts. Nonetheless, his frustration
and sense of injustice became more understandable when the circumstances of his
life are borne in mind.
Rolfe’s was the tragedy of talent opposed by circumstance, of the
individual alienated by his society; and the product was a man both bitter and
untrusting, and certainly flawed, but ultimately undiminished within the bounds
of his own personality. The
defiantly lonely words from Meredith’s Harry
Richmond which he adopted as his motto form a fitting epitaph:
‘Neve Me Impedias, Neve Longius
Persequaris’ is emblazoned on the title pages of a number of his novels,
and the sails of his boat in Venice—“Stand not in my way, nor follow me too
far”. Pretty good advice, all
things considered.
--Joanna Mcmelkan
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