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In Search of the Biographer

To open Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot or Richard Holmes’s Footsteps is to embark on a journey of discovery in more ways than one. They not only deal with the lives of writers but are also detective stories, investigative records, travelogues. Such works of biographical exploration have always fascinated me but, excellent though both these books are, I am especially fond of their remarkable predecessor, a book that also set me on the path to becoming a biographer.

The pioneering work in question, The Quest for Corvo (1934), was written by an author who published little else of note. It broke all the rules but established a literary sub-genre of its own by revealing the working of the biographer’s mind as he struggles to uncover and make sense of the scattered fragments of a life. This experimental work demonstrates how the image of any figure portrayed in a biography is not so much a photograph as a portrait in mosaic, reflecting within it something of the portraitist’s own personality and predispositions. As Julian Symons, the crime writer and brother of its author wrote, it blew the gaff on the genre ‘by refusing for a moment to make the customary pretence of detachment’.

Its subject was the delusional Catholic novelist and homosexual Frederick William Rolfe, who was little read at the time and is largely forgotten today. The book of the quest for him, on the other hand, is widely known and well-regarded. But who exactly was the author of this landmark work? Alphonse James Albert Symons (who signed himself ‘A. J. A. Symons’ but preferred to be known simply as ‘A. J.’ after his favourite fictional detective, A. J. Raffles) was a self-educated young man who, in the years following the Great War, set out to advance himself in the world of literature. A bibliophile, he founded and ran the First

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To open Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot or Richard Holmes’s Footsteps is to embark on a journey of discovery in more ways than one. They not only deal with the lives of writers but are also detective stories, investigative records, travelogues. Such works of biographical exploration have always fascinated me but, excellent though both these books are, I am especially fond of their remarkable predecessor, a book that also set me on the path to becoming a biographer.

The pioneering work in question, The Quest for Corvo (1934), was written by an author who published little else of note. It broke all the rules but established a literary sub-genre of its own by revealing the working of the biographer’s mind as he struggles to uncover and make sense of the scattered fragments of a life. This experimental work demonstrates how the image of any figure portrayed in a biography is not so much a photograph as a portrait in mosaic, reflecting within it something of the portraitist’s own personality and predispositions. As Julian Symons, the crime writer and brother of its author wrote, it blew the gaff on the genre ‘by refusing for a moment to make the customary pretence of detachment’. Its subject was the delusional Catholic novelist and homosexual Frederick William Rolfe, who was little read at the time and is largely forgotten today. The book of the quest for him, on the other hand, is widely known and well-regarded. But who exactly was the author of this landmark work? Alphonse James Albert Symons (who signed himself ‘A. J. A. Symons’ but preferred to be known simply as ‘A. J.’ after his favourite fictional detective, A. J. Raffles) was a self-educated young man who, in the years following the Great War, set out to advance himself in the world of literature. A bibliophile, he founded and ran the First Edition Club (devoted to the appreciation of manuscripts and rare editions) and also organized the selection of the fifty best (finely produced) books of the year. The Club boasted among its members the publishers John Murray and John Lane, the bookseller William Foyle, the press magnate Cecil Harmsworth, the author Wyndham Lewis, and the widow of the author of Dracula, Bram Stoker. Fin-de-siècle authors and their works were Symons’s particular interest. In the 1920s he compiled a bibliography of Yeats’s first editions, published an anthology of Nineties verse and founded the Book Collector’s Quarterly. Then in 1933, aided by the bookselling brothers William and Gilbert Foyle and a French gastronome, André Simon, he set up the Wine & Food Society, attracting a number of London publishers and writers to its annual dinners. Symons was also a dedicated collector of Victoriana, including a notable collection of music boxes now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. He wrote two conventional biographies – of Emin Pasha and H. M. Stanley. Neither was widely reviewed or is now much read, but in 1934 his minor masterpiece, The Quest for Corvo, appeared, and his literary reputation was assured. At his death in August 1941, a few days after his forty-first birthday, he was working on a biography of Oscar Wilde. So what set Symons off on his famous quest? It began one day in a Kensington garden, where he and the eccentric book collector Christopher Millard were discussing ‘books that miss their just reward of praise and influence’. One suggested by Millard was Hadrian the Seventh (1904) by Frederick Rolfe, would-be Catholic priest, painter, photographer and novelist. Symons borrowed a copy and then read and reread it in a single sitting. Hadrian the Seventh concerns George Arthur Rose, failed candidate for the priesthood, who is unexpectedly plucked from poverty and first granted Holy Orders in recognition of hurts suffered at the hands of the Church, then called to Rome, made a Cardinal and finally elected Pope. Thus is created Hadrian VII, the second ever English Pontiff. It seems a strange novel for Symons to have admired, for it is wildly overwritten in places, as where Rolfe describes Hadrian’s attitude towards his Vatican critics:

His quaintly correct and archaic diction exasperated men who had not means of expressing their thoughts except in the fluid elusive clipped verbosity of the day. Objections were made to his hendecasyllabical allocutions, by mediocrities who could not away with a man who discoursed in ithyphallics.

However, Symons was excited enough to want to know something about its author. Millard gave him what little he knew and pointed him towards others who had known Rolfe more intimately. Gradually Symons began to uncover the strange story of an eccentric whose novel he came to regard as the thinly disguised autobiography of a delinquent genius. Millard had given him not just a brief outline of the life as he knew it but also some initial leads for him to follow – a batch of letters, an informative article by Shane Leslie and a few newspaper cuttings, including a letter in the TLS. As each new fragment of the life is revealed, Symons finds himself wanting to know more and is so gripped he decides to embark on a biography of Rolfe. As he put it: ‘My appetite had been whetted by Hadrian, these hints of pleasures to come were a fresh incitement to my unsatisfied zest.’ He writes off to people who had known his subject as their names come to light, and, as each fresh clue arrives with their replies, he follows it into the maze of this strangely convoluted life. Slowly from these leads a story of failure emerges – expulsion from two seminaries, a life of beggarly poverty and finally death in Venice. One early discovery in particular excites Symons’s curiosity. Rolfe had been considered to have shown early intellectual promise by a schoolmaster, later Vice-Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and his biographer wants to know how this impressive young man evolved into the impoverished misfit described by Millard. Symons allows us to eavesdrop on his thoughts and designs, follow his moves and read lengthy extracts of the material as it comes to hand, the life slowly unveiled in the random order of its discovery, an order he replicates in most of his book. But in whatever order it is told, the story of Frederick William Rolfe – fanatical Catholic, medievalist, mystic, deceiver, rancorous man of letters – is a tragedy of overblown self-belief, a rake’s progress from promising scholar to social outcast. Along the way Symons finds himself surprised at the many personae Rolfe had adopted. At different times he was Father Austen White, painter; George Arthur Rose, tonsured priest; Francis Engel, journalist; and the grandiose Baron Corvo, a title conferred on him by an Italian Duchess, or so he liked to claim. As the story unfolds, two very contrasting personalities emerge – Rolfe the duplicitous, self-deluded narcissist and Symons the conscientious, single-minded sleuth. However, there were things they had in common, which probably accounts for Symons’s attraction to his bizarre subject. Both were autodidacts with eccentric predilections and gay sensibilities. The book also shows Symons possessed of that quality essential for any biographer – unquenchable curiosity. Here the objects of that curiosity, Rolfe and his novel, are enough to set him off and then sustain him on his ‘experimental’ odyssey. Symons’s leisurely method and style in The Quest were probably dictated by his material. He was trying to uncover a hidden story; traces were few and witnesses elusive. Tracking down each narrative fragment and relating it to the mosaic as a whole, adding piece by piece to the image of so mercurial and protean a figure, demanded much patience; and querying new findings, probing myths and assessing witness accounts called for meticulous attention to detail. Luckily for us, Symons was a scrupulous bibliographer and a diligent and dedicated antiquarian, forever on the watch for that elusive item needed to complete his collection. In his Quest he also displays an unusual degree of honesty. As each piece of evidence emerges he places it before us, sometimes in full, sharing with us the thrill of the biographical chase and enabling us, if we wish, gradually to construct our own version of the life. The final portrait emerges slowly through the confusion of sometimes conflicting reminiscences of those whom Rolfe encountered, exploited and abused, seemingly without the slightest compunction. There was his Oxford mentor’s unusually glowing testimonial, recalling him as a ‘valued friend’, a ‘cultivated man’ and

a refined and honourable gentleman, whose moral character is without reproach, and of whose genuineness and bona fides in all relations of life I have no doubt whatever . . . even if I had had no other opportunities, during the many years I have known him, of forming a judgment on his abilities, his social charm.

For others, however, memories of the dissolute, deceptive Rolfe were still raw. Their testimonies portray a confirmed scrounger, often wheedling his way into someone’s home (usually a rich Catholic) as a non-paying guest or, as a tenant, shamelessly disdaining to pay rent. After being chased out of Christchurch as a fraud in 1892, he resurfaced in Aberdeen where he was masquerading as ‘Baron Corvo’, the experimental photographer. A report in the Aberdeen Free Press tells how his landlord finally lost patience with his evasive tenant. He gave him an ultimatum which the ‘Baron’ ignored, so he decided to act.

One evening about 6 o’clock the landlord besought the aid of a fellow-workman. They entered the Baron’s bedroom, and [he] was given ten minutes to dress and clear out. He refused to move, and when the ten minutes was up he seized hold of the iron bedstead and clung for dear life. He was dragged forth, wearing only his pyjamas, out to the staircase, where he caught hold of the banisters, and another struggle ensued. Thence he was carried down the long staircase and was shot on to the pavement, as he stood, to the wonderment of the passers-by. His clothing was thrown after him, which he ultimately donned – and that was the last of Baron Corvo in that particular locality.

And a London painter tells Symons that while he himself found Rolfe intriguing, his wife ‘instinctively disliked him, and unhesitatingly qualified him as a liar, a sponger, and sexually abnormal [who] filled her with what she called “creepy loathing”’. Symons’s method of keeping his reader close to his raw material seems to preclude the seamless narrative. However, he does manage it at the end in describing Rolfe’s last days of poverty and degradation in Venice, though even here he feels obliged to explain himself and disclose his list of informants. ‘I traced them all and received, from each, fragments of the puzzle which . . . I have put together to the best of my ability.’ Finally he feels able to offer his own gloss on his subject’s character, and in so doing reveals where his sympathies lie:

Rolfe, as the reader has seen, was an almost self-educated man who had painfully gathered a mass of intimate and much-prized learning, who had rubbed hard against the corners of the world, endured many privations, and constantly fulfilled the role of outcast. A streak of the sinister was mixed in his composition with many good qualities; he was nevertheless a man of strong original mind, with very various and developed talents.

Rolfe was haunted by a sense of failure – failure as a priest, as an artist, but above all as a novelist. His literary output was greater than most (ten novels) and his works were often serious and original, but they rarely sold well. In recent times, Hadrian the Seventh, certainly Rolfe’s best novel, has acquired a new circle of admirers, in no small part thanks to Symons’s book and a successful stage version in 1968. Despite his distasteful reputation, Rolfe also comes across as a compelling, larger-than-life character. Symons, by contrast, emerges as the quiet, reserved seeker after truth, a committed biographer and meticulous portraitist, composing the mosaic of a life piece by piece. It’s a tragedy that he didn’t live long enough to undertake other quests and achieve the further literary honours of which he was undoubtedly capable.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Gordon Bowker 2015


About the contributor

Gordon Bowker has written four biographies – of Malcolm Lowry, Lawrence Durrell, George Orwell and James Joyce. They enabled him to become the Sherlock Holmes he liked to pretend he was as a schoolboy.

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