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,