The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Memoir of Edwardian Venice

by Frederick Rolfe

The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole stands as a uniquely scurrilous sensual testament to Frederick Rolfe's fervent affection for the physical beauty of the city of Venice and it's a inhabitants. This is the Death in Venice, Thomas Mann would not have dared to write and is one of the classic books on Venice at a time when it served as an home for undesirables from all over Europe as well as erotic vacation destinations for some in the way Asia is today. Published posthumously in 1934, the original edition was heavily edited version and only first published in its entirety in 1993. Since new photographs of Rolfe and his world have come to light and this is the first annotated edition which clearly identifies who is who in the book.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Novels, Gay Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

About the author

English writer, novelist, artist, fantasist and eccentric. Rolfe is also known as Baron Corvo. His best known work is the novel Hadrian the Seventh.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm falling so far behind in writing reviews, I feel like I have little to say about so many of them, but then I think that I just have so little to say about myself and most of my reviews are more about me me me than the book and I think maybe I should try writing about the books instead of using these book reviews as a public diary, or something.

Until about a month ago when I picked up the biography on Rolfe, The Search for Corvo, at Housing Works I'd never known heard anything about the author before. Still for some reason I had wanted the biography, I think it was the pretty cover and that it was a NYRB's book. Then, I think it was Bill Thompson made a comment about Rolfe and the biography and I got fascinated by the author. He was a Victorian era guy (I accidently typed gay, which he was that too I'm sure) who wanted to be a priest but the church wouldn't accept him, he also thought of himself as being nobility (which he wasn't) so he christened himself Baron Corvo. Since the church wouldn't allow him to be a priest he published his books with the name Fr. Rolfe, which makes it seem as if he might be a priest, but instead of father, the Fr. stands for Fredrick. I'm kind of a sucker for people who play with their own identities like this for real and so I thought I should go read a book of his before giving the biography a try.

The easiest way to describe the basic premise of the book is to think of Death in Venice (as I mentioned in the comments this book was published a year before Thomas Mann's classic, I have no idea if these two knew each other, I highly doubt it. Rolfe seems to really really hate Germans). It's about an older writer who lives in Venice and becomes enamored with a boy. Although in this case it's actually a girl whose father raised her to do boy things, like be a gondolier and who prefers to keep her hair cut like a boys and wear boy clothes and even at seventeen has a boyish body still. She's generally referred to as he in the book, so in a round about way it's gay but gay in delusional sort of way. As for the charges of homoeroticism in the book, I don't really see it, except that the main character, Crabbe, seems to salivate over the idea that her physique is closer to Michelangelo's David than that of a Barbie doll. Really the whole relationship between Crabbe and Zilda (that's the girl) is very Platonic, which makes perfect sense since the books title is from Plato's Symposium and taken from the part (mis-attributed to Socrates, bad author, bad bad! Socrates didn't tell this part of the Symposium or if he did this wasn't his highest form of love, but I'm fairly certain another person told this tale) where man was originally made up of what would be two people attached at the back, and our desire for another is a desire for the completion of ourselves as a whole (which would be achieved by making the ol' beast with two backs).

Crabbe saves Zilda after an earthquake leaves the rest of her family dead. He takes her on as a servant and spends almost all his money on setting her up with an apartment so that the secret of her gender will never be known. He also sets her up with the apartment so that he can remove temptation from himself since he's in the last months of a twenty year vow of chastity he took to prove to the uncaring Catholic Church that he really has the vocation to be a priest. Because he set her up with an apartment and allowance he leads himself to ruin. He's supposed to have money coming in from books and stories he's written but the publishers, his lawyers and the guy looking after his affairs in England are all causing him grief in getting any money out of them.

Most of the book is Rolfe, I mean Crabbe, trying to get money out of people who he feels owe it to him. He's forever writing letters demanding his money and refusing all kinds of attempts to help him out. He's constantly being a priggish dick to just about everyone, he burns bridges and makes demands on people that make perfect sense to him and his sense of honor and dignity. The letters he writes in response to almost any attempt to help him are quite funny, one might even say droll. His melodramatic manner in dealing with just about everyone was sort of reminiscent of a person like Morrissey, and I was surprised to find no entry for Rolfe in the Mozipedia, I can't believe that Morrissey hasn't read and loved him.

My three star rating is a little deceiving. Parts of this book are great. Thinking back on the book I like it a lot more than three stars would show, but there are sections of the book that just kind of drag. I loved all of his attacks on the Catholic Church and the priests that he seems to view as all being degenerates who don't have nearly the vocation that he would have had if they had accepted him. Another reviewer complained about all the stuff about the Church, but I'm certain that reviewer is wrong. Rolfe's handling of the church is a highlight of the book, and is handled in the great vitriolic manner of say Waugh. My big problem with the book was the endless mapquest like descriptions of how to get around Venice. I never got the feeling for Venice as a place through all of the overly detailed descriptions of moving through the canals, I imagine if I knew the city maybe I'd appreciate it but to me it felt as empty as if I tried to capture the feeling of Woodside by telling you that I walked up 62nd St and turned left at the Korean discount shop on Roosevelt and then crossed Roosevelt and went up 61st St and turned left on Woodside Ave and then made a quick right onto 60th st at Sean Ogs and then walked down 60th St till I got to Karen's apartment. Those are great directions and you could follow them to get to Karen's but they don't do anything to evoke a feeling for Woodside (unless you extrapolate that it's a diverse neighborhood with Koreans selling discount things and a place with a very Irish name in it).

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading more from Rolfe and the biography. I think I will try to read his 'masterpiece' Hadrian the Sixth(opps, I meant)Seventh before delving into The Search for Corvo.

[Chris · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a completely disappointing book! It starts out quite well enough with the rescue by Nicholas Crabbe of the alluring boy-girl Zildo in the wreckage of an earthquake, and points the way evidently toward exploring their romantic homoerotic relationship. However, in the following 275 pages Rolfe completely discards this alluring beginning and wastes the reader's time with endless chapters of boring details of the Roman Catholic religion and priesthood. I couldn't have cared less. Nevertheless, I persisted in the vain hope that Rolfe would pull the story together. Not so. My time was wasted and sadly, I believe, so was the author's, probably the victim of self-censorship in a time of rampant crippling homophobia. Although maybe that was the point of the book after all.

[carelessdestiny · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to believe that he wrote this when he was destitute with hardly anything to eat. It's an amazingly baroque piece of writing, with great descriptions of Venice, catholic ritual, and maliciously drawn characters. It's not easy to read; he seems to make up a lot of his vocabulary and the complications of his financial dealings are labyrinthine. Also the plot is weirdly eccentric. Fascinating.

[Wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a privilege to witness an ego as big as Rolfe's, excuse me, Baron Corvo's in action.

[Tiffany · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the most obnoxious authors/narrators (it's very close to autobiographical) I have ever read. If you want to read about someone's descent into paranoia in a beautiful setting (Venice) then this is the book for you.

[Felicity · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another serendipitous discovery in my local secondhand bookshop -- on reflection, perhaps not so serendipitous because I find the fictitious Baron Corvo a more interesting character in A J A Symons's study that in his own fiction. Despite the wonderful title of this novel and the promising beginning, my expectations soon foundered as my attention wandered. Where Hadrian VII was tolerable, the self-absorption of Rolfe's aka Corvo's Nicholas Crabbe, the misogyny, prejudice and prolixity, become increasingly tedious. I kept setting the book aside in favour of something less exasperating, which is probably why I lost the plot, if indeed there was one to lose.

[Rawley · Rating 5 out of 5]

My five star rating for this ‘ana’ is somewhat equivocal, given that one of the pleasures I derived with particular piquancy was, I can asseverate with certitude, unintended by Frederick Rolfe, its remarkable author.
Perhaps a reader who was to read this book without any awareness of its author would believe that it was a work of subtle mischievous mockery, its characterisation of its protagonist a work of consummate irony, in which the bathetic and purblind egomania of a truculent eccentric is maliciously essayed for our diabolic diversion (to compare Rolfe to Nabokov with a more unalloyed complimentariness, his usage of language, with its febrile polylingualism and tactual sensual pleasure in words, does, in my judgement, presage some of Nabokov’s style, albeit naively.)
Alas for Rolfe, anyone reading this book will likely be cognisant of his outsized personality, and the circumstances of the composition; thus, they will be savvy to the fact that Rolfe, though a great wit—“No doubt she acted according to her lights. The pity is that they were farthing dips.”—tended rather more to bravura, braggadocious sincerity than fastidious, incising irony, and his portrait of Crabbe as being an arrogant, imbalanced, and over-exacting paranoiac is an entirely inadvertent one, with us, the affable reader, being expected to peruse Crabbe’s capaciously self-inflicted travails with unmitigated sympathy and admiration for him.
The prior sentence is, I hope, read in the spirit of tolerant amusement rather than repudiative censoriousness; eloquence is wasted upon the expenditure of pudibund, finger-wagging moralising, and doubly so with someone as extravagantly fun as Rolfe. Nor would I have it misapprehended that my rating is motivated by sarcasm; I do not regard the novel as belonging to the so-bad-it’s-good genre, my esteem is genuine. The novel, for one with my peccant taste in style—that is to say, I am not for the straitened, homely style of a Twain, feeling instead an avaricious gluttonousness for the purple. Strachey in his fealty to the writings of Sir Thomas Browne is my man—is superlatively literary, with plethoric sentences which I found myself excitedly underlining. Oh yes, Rolfe could write. The naif quality to it does not, in my view, mar its merits, rather it superadds to them, rendering the book all the more nonpareil in its maledictory, dictionaried aura.

There is a review on this website which discontentedly bemoans the surfeit of Roman Catholicism present in the book. I do not intend to chide the author of this review for their contention, but it is one I dissent from. The Catholic religion does indeed, from the author of Hadrian the Seventh, figure in the novel, but as a tertiary, rather than a preponderating, motif. The theme in the book which is most majorly prevalent, I would say, is Crabbe’s feelings of aggrievement towards his erstwhile pals in Britain, conjoined with envenomed expectorations of malice towards the British community in Venice—the Baggists—with his impecuniosity likewise featuring with greater prominence than his Catholicism. It seems to me that only a rabietic iconomachist could be seriously discomfited by the religious aspect of Rolfe's novel, and really Rolfe was a pretty odd sort of religionist anyway, his Catholicism interlarded with sensuous paganism, brazen homosexuality (he’s a Jonathan looking for his David), and Olympian vanity; his vexatious fulminations against Priests is hardly conventionally pietistic either.
My viewpoint is that if The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole had been timelily published it could have done rather well, but, being so autobiographical a novel, and so scanty in the pseudonyms it provided for Rolfe’s imagined wrongdoers—Londonderry Bagge for Lonsdale Ragg being particularly diaphanous in its intended object of criminatory satire—it was, alack, unpublishable, Rolfe being disinclined to compromise (“That generally sufficed to suffocate: when it didn’t, when weak fools suggested the pact (between comfort and cowardice) which, under the delusion of expediency, is called compromise (and is far worse than death.)") It is not unsullied by the odd solecism of style or taste, exampling attitudes which one would now consider unseemly or improper, but Rolfe/Crabbe is too singular a fellow for me to feel offended by. It will, I think, appeal most puissantly to logophiles, as it teems with rare words (several of which I’ve appropriated for this review), neologisms, and brilliantly brittle apophthegms; those with a yen for the Yellow Nineties should also feel partial towards it.

[Scott Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting in the context of gay literature.