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Frederick Rolfe’s self-portrait, 1903, Suzi Feay on Hadrian the Seventh, Slightly Foxed 77

Trouble at the Vatican

‘How very Corvine of you,’ I purred to the witty author who had just made a remark as savage as it was exquisitely expressed. His eyes widened in surprise, then took on a gleam of approval. In an instant we recognized each other as fans of that most recondite of authors and enigmatic of literary personalities: Fr. Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo.

As a gay writer, Rolfe has gained a small but devoted readership denied to him in life. The sly ambiguity of that ‘Fr.’ – it stands for Frederick but could be read as ‘Father’ – is typical of this slippery individual, who liked to pose as a man of the cloth. After being rejected for the priesthood, a perceived injustice Rolfe raged at for the rest of his life, he took up his mysterious title of Baron, conferred, he claimed, by an elderly member of a noble clan whom he had befriended in Italy. Another of his incarnations was ‘F. Austin’, and for a time he wrote a furious series of letters under the name of Frank W. Hochheimer.

Of all the works he wrote in his short life, Hadrian the Seventh (1904) is the best known. It was acclaimed by D. H. Lawrence (‘first-rate’) and later by Graham Greene, who was no doubt attracted by its intense atmosphere of heavy-breathing Catholicism. Hadrian is currently available as a Penguin Classic, albeit with a few typos that would have dismayed its fastidious author. On first glance it’s a novel about an impoverished middle-aged Englishman, George Arthur Rose, who unexpectedly – even miraculously – becomes Pope, only to fall prey to calumniators from his past. Yet such are the weird billows and currents of emotion that pulse beneath the prose, such are the eccentricities of its central character and the specifics of his grudges and obsessions, it’s impossible not to suspect that this is more than pure fiction.

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‘How very Corvine of you,’ I purred to the witty author who had just made a remark as savage as it was exquisitely expressed. His eyes widened in surprise, then took on a gleam of approval. In an instant we recognized each other as fans of that most recondite of authors and enigmatic of literary personalities: Fr. Rolfe, also known as Baron Corvo.

As a gay writer, Rolfe has gained a small but devoted readership denied to him in life. The sly ambiguity of that ‘Fr.’ – it stands for Frederick but could be read as ‘Father’ – is typical of this slippery individual, who liked to pose as a man of the cloth. After being rejected for the priesthood, a perceived injustice Rolfe raged at for the rest of his life, he took up his mysterious title of Baron, conferred, he claimed, by an elderly member of a noble clan whom he had befriended in Italy. Another of his incarnations was ‘F. Austin’, and for a time he wrote a furious series of letters under the name of Frank W. Hochheimer. Of all the works he wrote in his short life, Hadrian the Seventh (1904) is the best known. It was acclaimed by D. H. Lawrence (‘first-rate’) and later by Graham Greene, who was no doubt attracted by its intense atmosphere of heavy-breathing Catholicism. Hadrian is currently available as a Penguin Classic, albeit with a few typos that would have dismayed its fastidious author. On first glance it’s a novel about an impoverished middle-aged Englishman, George Arthur Rose, who unexpectedly – even miraculously – becomes Pope, only to fall prey to calumniators from his past. Yet such are the weird billows and currents of emotion that pulse beneath the prose, such are the eccentricities of its central character and the specifics of his grudges and obsessions, it’s impossible not to suspect that this is more than pure fiction. On reading the novel in 1925, twelve years after the death of its unhappy author, the young bibliophile A. J. A. Symons was inspired to embark on The Quest for Corvo (see SF no. 46), as his subsequent ‘experiment in biography’ was titled. It was a timely investigation, as many of the men Rolfe had crossed swords with were still around. Symons had a lot of untangling to do to get at the truth behind the alternative identities and myths Rolfe spun around himself. Born in London’s Cheapside in 1860 as Frederick William Rolfe, he converted to Catholicism in his mid-twenties, and the faith was to prove his succour and his bane (mostly his bane) for the rest of his life. It’s not surprising that his superiors deemed him unsuitable for the priesthood, considering his prickly nature and tendency to paranoia. Having some artistic talent, Rolfe decided to make his way as an artist, journalist and novelist, but he never forgave those who had thwarted him. Today, there is no doubt he would be an Internet troll of the most persistent and vituperative kind. Bursts of kindness and a magnetic personality drew admirers, but Rolfe proved incapable of retaining friendships, alienating anyone who tried to help him by subjecting them to torrents of outrageous demands, abuse and accusations. How his victims must have shuddered on receiving an envelope addressed in Rolfe’s exquisite hand, knowing that what lay within would be another vicious diatribe. Thinly disguised former collaborators, priests and would-be patrons turn up in the pages of Hadrian the Seventh, savagely upbraided for their perfidy towards the blameless protagonist. Canon Carmont, a fellow trainee priest during Rolfe’s ill-fated stint at the Scots College in Rome, sardonically observed to Symons that his former friend ‘was good enough to make me a Cardinal’ in its pages. Eccentric, pedantic and weirdly coloured by revenge though it is, Hadrian is a ripping read, once you accustom yourself to the Corvine style, described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘highly ornate and idiosyncratic; his vocabulary is arcane, his allusions erudite’. This after all is a man who subtitled his novella Don Tarquinio ‘A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance’. Rolfe has no truck with anything so commonplace as a prologue; preceding Chapter One is a ‘Prooimion’. In a mere handful of pages the reader may encounter such oddities as ‘picric’, ‘lethific’, ‘epiphytic’ or ‘saxificous’. Adding to the mystic muddle, Rolfe’s spelling is strange; Cystine instead of Sistine, for example. The Vatican generally appears without its definite article. It’s the work of a stubborn autodidact and wilful pedant. But there is much to enjoy. In the opening pages, George Arthur Rose is a vivid presence in his tiny attic bedroom-studio, musing on his impecunious fate, upbraiding himself for his own weakness and failure, and amused by the antics of his little cat, Flavio. George, with his endless cheap roll-ups, indifference to food, penchant for working out with dumbbells and morbid fear of lizards, bears a distinct resemblance to the author. Perhaps we all harbour a secret desire to return to the scene of our greatest ignominy in triumph, ready to punish or pardon adversaries and nay-sayers. If so, Rolfe raised a common fantasy to high art. In that ‘Prooimion’, George is visited in his humble lodgings by a repentant bishop and cardinal seeking to entice him back to the priesthood. The account of his life that George Rose gives them is a mirror of his creator’s. After being trounced by George’s superior intelligence, the cardinal announces he is there to offer ‘Amends and restitution . . . you are simply to say in what form you will accept this act of justice from us.’ George receives this handsome tribute with more grace than his creator was ever to muster. The scene shifts to Rome, where argumentative cardinals in conclave are deadlocked over the election of a new pope. George, newly frocked, is gazing all about him when there’s a sudden commotion and an astonishing summons. ‘The Sacred College has elected thee to be the successor of St Peter. Wilt thou accept the pontificality?’ George becomes Hadrian, named after the only other English pope. The transformation is sudden and profound; his pronouns promptly become capitalized. Before turning His attention to the overhaul of the Catholic Church and, beyond that, nothing less than the whole world order, His first job is to oversee the redecoration of the pontifical apartments in a sober, restrained, yet high-spec fashion. We can take a moment here to appreciate how fulfilling this exuberant fantasy must have been to its impoverished author. The zest and energy of the story, its dizzying sensuous detail, form a tragic counterpoint to Rolfe’s actual situation. The novel is written in such a bravura style that even the more shameless moments of self-congratulation raise a wry smile rather than outright derision. Sceptical cardinals are soon won over, astounded by the new Pontiff’s grasp of world affairs; emperors and kings bow down before him. Hadrian begins drafting a series of Letters to the nations of the world, all received with awe and rapture. He redraws the world map, creating powerful new blocs and erasing France and Russia in the process, while England becomes ‘the Ninefold Kingdom’. He sells off Vatican treasures and helps Himself to the papal bank account – all for good causes. Some of His acts are highly prescient. By making Joan of Arc a saint, for example, Rolfe anticipates the Papacy by almost two decades. Hadrian’s analysis of the world order at the turn of the century is as eccentric as everything else in the novel but has a quirky charm. For readers of The Quest for Corvo there’s an especial piquancy in the lofty exchange between Hadrian and the German Kaiser, in which they ponder the annexation of Austria, the threat from Russia and the fate of the Balkans. One of Symons’s informants reported that Rolfe occasionally referred to his godfather, ‘slightly emphasizing the word’. Then one day, when they were discussing a newspaper article about the Kaiser, Rolfe suddenly observed: ‘So my godfather’s been at it again, has he?’ Hadrian is perforce celibate, but there is scope for a chaste passion with the young prelates in whom the Pope takes a slightly more than paternal interest. The solitary female character to appear in the strictly masculine world of Hadrian is treated with impatient contempt. Mrs Crowe has come to Rome to reignite her unrequited passion for the former George Rose. She’s accompanied by a resentful political activist, Jerry Sant of the ‘LibLab’ party, thoroughly opposed to Hadrian’s spiritual authority. Rolfe, a natural aristocrat of spirit, if not blood, mocks Sant’s left-wing attitudes with lofty sarcasm in the book’s most amusing pages, but Hadrian underestimates the malice of the pair at His peril. Like its author, Hadrian the Seventh is strange, passionate, idiosyncratic, unconsciously silly and decidedly flawed, but the book wouldn’t be improved by removal of those flaws; rather it would lose its essential flavour. In sticking so stubbornly to his self-willed, self-exculpating fantasy Fr. Rolfe created something unique, and there will always be readers eager to follow the swish of his cassock down the sumptuous, susurrating halls of his imagination.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 77 © Suzi Feay 2023


About the contributor

Suzi Feay is currently President of the Critics Circle and writes regularly for The Spectator, The Tablet and the Financial Times.

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