Corvo

by Donald Weeks

First U.S. edition. Biography of Frederick William Rolfe. xxvii, 450 pages. cloth, dust jacket.. thick 8vo..

450 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved Hadrian VII, and it made me intrigued to find out more about the life of Frederick Rolfe, "Baron Corvo". There is indeed much about his life which is fascinating, and amusing - but also sad. He was one of those strange people who always bites the hand that feeds. He was clearly both mad and bad, but also talented and mainly a danger only to himself.

This book was strangely unsatisfying. The author was clearly a Corvo obsessive and sometimes one cannot see the wood for the trees. For example, we get passages from Hadrian VII set out alongside passages from Rolfe's letters to demonstrate that the fictional Pontiff of Hadrian VII was clearly modelled on Rolfe himself. This is obvious to any reader of Hadrian VII and I am not sure we gain much from having several pages of minutely detailed text set out in synoptic fashion like this. On the other hand, there are numerous references to Rolfe's Toto stories but I searched in vain for any kind of summary of them, or any detail about the Italian boy who is supposed to have been the inspiration for them. There are just lots of casual asides, because the author seems to assume the reader knows all about them anyway.

On the subject of Rolfe's sexuality, it does seem peculiar that he took vows to live a celibate llife whilst apparently at the same time enjoying sexual relations with teenage Venetian gondoliers. The author wriggles with this one and tries to acquit Rolfe of hypocrisy by suggesting that the letters describing his sexual exploits were basically made up. I am not so sure. A Catholic priest once joked to me that "celibacy isn't as bad as no sex at all", but technically celibacy is the unmarried state - it is chastity which is restraint from sexual activity. As Rolfe never had any attraction to women, it would have been easy for him to make a public commitment to remaining unmarried. In his mind, I suspect that this is what he meant by "celibacy", and when adventuring with Italian youths he would probably have consoled himself with the thought that he was still technically "celibate" (and not committing adultery). Or maybe he just kept his sexuality in a different mental box from his Catholicism; I too have been guilty of this kind of compartmentalism. Living where and when he did, he never came to the attention of the police. I doubt he would have been so lucky now (his photographs alone would have landed him in trouble today)

[Bobbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone drawn to Frederick (Baron Corvo) Rolfe must needs find Donald Week's book an essential and definitive read alongside other biographies of Rolfe. The book is wonderfully detailed and anecdotal of so much about Rolfe, of the good and the bad, of wretched pathos and dogged stubbornness, of Rolfe's eccentricities, of him being a pathetic stubborn lonesome survivalist against ongoing trials and tribulations in his life that saw him embroiled determinedly in his artistic and writing aesthetics, a virtual tramp a vagabond both in England and then in Venice. Clearly, a complex difficult character, seemingly, though always with a poetic turn of phrase often sprinkled with Latin phrases, his bile toward others can be forgiven because of its prosaic theatrical deliveries in letters and novel writing. Rolfe comes through in Week's book as an extraordinary if troubled soul that I for one have come more to admire because of the unique Rolfe revealed in Donald Week's thoroughly incisive, detailed and obsessive research that in Week's book has laid bare a unique person in all his complexities that was Frederick Rolfe. I have been reading Mr Week's book alongside Rolfe's 'Desire and Pursuit of the Whole' that I read decades ago being a first expurgated censored version, but this time taking up a modern unexpurgated printing that Rolfe originally expected to be published. I have never ever read two books together at the same time or any book for years, yet somehow I got myself of late into reading Rolfe again and the read of the two has come easily and has flowed. Thank you Mr Donald Weeks ~ What would we do without obsessives ~ aye? 🙂