The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (Valancourt eClassics) Read Free Page B

Benson after he had thrice read Hadrian. Benson’s admiration moved him to write a glowing letter to the author, which brought the two together in hectic friendship and enmity. Some such step occurred to me; but first I went to see Millard.
    Millard was pleased by my pleasure, and began to talk in his discursive fashion. Had I realized that the book was really an autobiography, that Rose was Rolfe himself, that half the incidents were based on his experiences, and most of the characters drawn from living men? Actually I had not; but, with that duplicity which we practise even to our oldest friends, I disguised my blindness. We talked round and round. I gathered that Rolfe was dead, that he was a spoiled priest, and that, rather mysteriously, he had written other books under the title or pseudonym of Baron Corvo. The news that Rolfe was Baron Corvo struck a chord of remembrance: vaguely I recalled having read a short story by that author which had seemed to me so excellent that I had intended, but forgotten, to seek out more of his work. Then from one of his tin boxes (Millard was a great man for files and cases, and could put his hand at a moment on any scrap or book, despite the seeming disorder of his shelves and floor) my friend produced a morocco-bound quarto. ‘Since you are becoming interested in Rolfe you had better read these too’, was his comment. The few sentences that caught my eye as I turned the pages were arresting; and I would have begun my reading then and there; but in his gently autocratic way Millard insisted upon my paying attention to his remarks, and not to the book, which I could read at leisure. I left the bungalow half-stifled with curiosity.
    How well I remember that midnight when, alone in my tiny study, I sat down to read Millard’s mysterious book. It contained, I found, typescripts of twenty-three long letters and two telegrams, forming a series addressed from Venice in the years 1909-10 to an unnamed correspondent; and as I read my hair began to rise. Here, described with the frank felicity of Hadrian the Seventh , was an unwitting account, step by step, of the destruction of a soul. The idealism of George Arthur Rose, the generous sentiments and hopes for man and the world which distinguish Hadrian, were not to be found in these pages. On the contrary, they gave an account, in language that omitted nothing, of the criminal delights that waited for the ignoble sensualist to whom they were addressed, in the Italian city from which his correspondent wrote. Only lack of money, it appeared, prevented the writer from enjoying an existence compared with which Nero’s was innocent, praiseworthy, and unexciting: indeed, it seemed that even without money he had successfully descended to depths from which he could hardly hope to rise. Throughout all the letters one purpose was visible: they were an entreaty to their recipient to bring his wealth to a market where it would buy full value. Rolfe could answer for the wares he offered: he had tested them, and he would willingly be guide to this earthly paradise. An undercurrent of appeals for immediate aid, for money, money, money, ran through the series, mixed with odd fragments of beautiful description, and sudden, bitter attacks on individuals with whom Fr. Rolfe had been concerned in one way or another. It would have seemed impossible that this could be the private correspondence of the author of Hadrian the Seventh had not the signature of his style rung in every sentence. What shocked me about these letters was not the confession they made of perverse sexual indulgence: that phenomenon surprises no historian. But that a man of education, ideas, something near genius, should have enjoyed without remorse the destruction of the innocence of youth; that he should have been willing for a price to traffic in his knowledge of the dark byways of that Italian city; that he could have pursued the paths of lust with such frenzied tenacity: these things