Frederick Rolfe

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Fr. Rolfe

Frederick William Rolfe, better known as Baron Corvo, and also calling himself 'Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe', (Cheapside, London, July 22, 1860 - Venice, October 25 1913), was an English writer, novelist, artist and eccentric.

Life and work

The son of a piano manufacturer, Rolfe left school at the age of fourteen and became a teacher. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1886 and was confirmed by Cardinal Manning. Rolfe took on the ambition to become a priest. In 1887 he enrolled in a college near Birmingham and in 1889 was a student at the Scots College in Rome, but was thrown out by both due to his inability to concentrate on priestly studies. At this stage he entered the circle of the Duchess of 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," "A. Crab Maid," and several other pseudonyms. More often he abbreviated his own name to "Fr. Rolfe" (an ambiguous usage, suggesting he was the priest he had hoped to become).

As "Baron Corvo" he was an occasional contributor to the Yellow Book published by John Lane, notably with Stories Toto Told Me, humorous retellings of Italian peasant legends about the saints, later collected in book form with that title and with a larger sequel, In His Own Image. These made his early reputation such as it was, and this was enlarged by his Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), a serious if idiosyncratic historical study in refulgently Baroque prose. His extensive and obsessive erudition about the Renaissance period, of which the Chronicles is the most solid result, bore fruit in his two loosely-linked and intensely imagined historical novels of the Borgia period, Don Tarquinio (described by the author as 'a Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance'), and Don Renato.

Rolfe spent most of the rest of his life as a freelance writer, mainly in England but eventually in Venice. He also executed a number of paintings and designs, including cover designs for some of his books, and some church paintings in Christchurch, Dorset and Holywell, near Chester. Throughout Rolfe's life, his argumentative nature made him many enemies and lost him numerous friends. Rolfe was a homosexual, and many passages of his books can be read as more or less veiled descriptions of homosexuality; this is explicit in his posthumous work 'The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole' (published 1934) in which he also took revenge on his many actual and imagined enemies. Eventually, out of money and out of luck, he died in Venice from a stroke.

Tito Biondi Photograph by Rolfe; Rome, ca. 1890

Rolfe's design for 'Don Tarquinio'

Rolfe's fiction steers well clear of any 'mainstream'. His works still find interested readers today, perhaps largely on account of his prose style and the unusual personality it reveals; erudite, ornate, and somewhat precieux, they belong on the same shelf with Symbolist prose poetry. His most autobiographical novel is Nicholas Crabbe and his best-known by far (and least-distracting in its eccentricities) is Hadrian the Seventh (1904), a fantasy autobiography in which an obscure literary Englishman, George Arthur Rose, bearing many similarities to Rolfe (including his heavy smoking) is elected Pope and moves forward with an ambitious programme to set the world to rights. The book was very successfully adapted as a stage show in London in the 1960s, in which the part of Hadrian/Rolfe was played by Alec McCowen.

Rolfe engaged in a number of ill-starred collaborations, notably with R. H. Benson (brother of E. F. Benson and A. C. Benson) on a book about St. Thomas à Becket (Rolfe's contribution to this is minimal), and with Harry Pirie-Gordon, which gave rise to two books almost entirely Rolfe's work, namely Hubert's Arthur, a historical fantasy about Arthur I, Duke of Brittany, and The Weird of the Wanderer, envisaged as a sequel to The World's Desire by Andrew Lang.

Bibliography

Rolfe's principal works include:

Stories Toto Told Me (1898)
Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901)
Tarcissus the Boy Martyr of Rome (1901)
Nicholas Crabbe (1903-4, posthumously published 1958)
Hadrian the Seventh (1904)
Don Tarquinio (1905)
Don Renato (1907-8, printed 1909 but not published, posthumously published 1963)
Hubert's Arthur (1909-11, posthumously published 1935)
The Weird of the Wanderer (1912)
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1909, published 1934)
In His Own Image (posthumously published 1926)

Frederick Rolfe

Life and work

Bibliography

Further reading