In 1925, A. J. A. Symons came across a peculiar novel called Hadrian the Seventh and, transfixed by the tale, determined to learn everything he could about its even stranger author. He finally published his findings nine years later as The Quest for Corvo, a singular book now handsomely reissued.

Modestly subtitled An Experiment in Biography, The Quest for Corvo still stands as one of the genre’s most notable—if also quirkiest—triumphs. The experiment to which Symons alluded had several parts. First, he set out to reconstruct, largely by inquiring letters, the wretched life of a shadowy, already half-forgotten man who had died twelve years earlier, leaving few fingerprints. Second, he decided that, far from obliterating the traces of his sleuthwork, the hunt itself—along with its dead ends and frustrations—was to be woven into the narrative. Third, and perhaps trickiest of all, he resolved to garner for his subject at least a modicum of sympathy. This last may not sound particularly new or daring, except that Symons’s subject just happened to have been, to a degree surpassing even Dr. Johnson’s acquaintance Richard Savage, a figure of almost preternatural odiousness.

That contemptible creature was one Frederick William Rolfe, a.k.a. Fr. Rolfe and, more glamorously, Baron Corvo. Born in 1860, Rolfe aspired in his early years to priest- and painterhood, but was scotched in both ambitions. At literature, he proved more successful, attracting a small yet refined and cultish readership to his atavistic, extravagantly mannered fictions and histories, which include (in addition to the semi-autobiographical Hadrian the Seventh) Stories Toto Told Me and Chronicles of the House of Borgia. The talented Rolfe might have enjoyed a quaint, cozy career as writer’s writer, or as darling to ecclesiastical aesthetes, had he not possessed equal gifts for self-sabotage and the souring of friendships. No publisher who dealt with Rolfe escaped unmauled; his co-authors (among them Robert Hugh Benson, who collaborated with Rolfe on a life of St. Thomas) endured scalding baptisms of bile.

Add to Rolfe’s genius for scurrility three bushels of garden-variety paranoia. He believed in particular that Catholics, from whose sacerdotal fold he’d been excluded, conspired gleefully to keep him down. In point of fact, many were—as Symons’s research makes clear—amazingly tolerant and solicitous of Rolfe in the fine English way. But no matter: Rolfe’s mythology demanded that he play the hounded martyr. A drearily predictable pattern took hold, wherein Rolfe would cozen some naïve admirer into helping him, turn nastily on the poor Samaritan, and then split town, lobbing vituperative letters over his shoulder like hand grenades.

At last, in 1908, Rolfe was driven—or, rather, drove himself—into exile in Venice. There he liberally broadened his routine of mooching, outraging, litigation, and epistolary abuse to include wholesale predation on the city’s rent boys; like an unholy hybrid of Byron, Aschenbach, and Pasolini or William S. Burroughs, Rolfe put a late, pederastic twist on the figure of the Englishman in Venice. This did little to endear him to the local expatriates, and Rolfe’s roman à clef razzing their colony did not improve matters. When, after having degenerated, almost literally, into a water rat, the pariah finally died in 1913, a collective sigh of British relief must have risen from the canals.

In short, Frederick Rolfe amounted to what an earlier age would have called a scoundrel or a blackguard; our own would doubtless resort to more anatomically vivid epithets. Nor (pace Symons) was his life quite justified by his art. True, Rolfe’s letters are perverse masterpieces of invective, sufficiently withering to make a Parisian take pause. But much Corvine prose is nearly undigestible; an overcooked, laboriously antique confection studded with jawbreaking coinages like “turpilucricupidous,” it reads as if Robert Burton, Ronald Firbank, and the bulls of some especially bombastic pontiff had been scrambled together.

So why bother with The Quest for Corvo? To begin, because Rolfe’s a fascinating freak, an insoluble tangle of skills (others include photography and gorgeous penmanship), asperities, maladies, and odd anachronisms; as Symons put it, Rolfe “suffered from that nostalgia of the past which, of all temptations of the mind, is the most destructive to contentment.” Perhaps a greater reason, though, is that the creepiness of Rolfe is everywhere offset by his auditor’s wit and charm. In happy contrast to the anfractuous Corvine style, Symons’s ripples sparklingly along, laced with the lightest of ironies. Ditto that of Symons’s correspondents, whose transmissions account for much of the book: uniformily eloquent and delightful, these obscure missive-mates remind us of just how widespread—and how well practiced—the art of letter writing once was. It’s almost enough, these faxed-up days, to tip one into that fatal veneration of bygones from which the Purple Baron suffered and drew.