The story of 'Baron Corvo'

Cad with streak of genius

FREDERICK ROLFE, BARON CORVO: A BIOGRAPHY, by Miriam J. Benkovitz; Putnam, 332 pp., $10.95.

By Don A. Keister

Short, bandy-legged, nearsighted, with a tiny mouth and thin lips, Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913) was about as unattractive physically as he was morally.

Son of a London piano-maker, he usually called himself Baron Corvo. Converted to Catholicism and with a self-described "vocation" for the priesthood, he made such a nuisance of himself at his training college that he was literally expelled mattress (from which he had refused to rise), blanket and all.

Loyal to his church but bitterly critical of his fellow-believers, he considered himself the sincerest of Christians — and proclaimed the "furious joy of loving enemies as enemies." Forgiving them was not his forte.

Living mostly on tick in seedy

boarding-houses and hotels, feuding with landladies and proprietors, borrowing from friends he quickly contrived to lose, indulging hopefully but futilely in lawsuits, he combined handouts, unpaid bills and what little he made from his writing into a meager living.

Homosexual, he photographed and fantasized about nude boys ("the most beautiful of God's creations"). He said of women, in the words of his alter ego in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, that "the form and ornament of them made him simply sick . . . by reason of its vapid bunchiness and vacuous, inconsequent patchworkiness."

Coming finally to Venice, he floated happily, for a time (he was not made for lasting happiness), in his gondola with the willing youths dehe picked up and for pay scribed in pornographic letters to an acquaintance with similar tastes.

My

Of the usually dreary and sadly

repetitious life of this "cad with an intermittent streak of genius," as someone once called him, Miriam Benkovitz gives all the chapters and most of the verses.

The result, unfortunately, is a sometimes pretty dreadful monotony: Rolfe tended to repeat his patterns. "Shabby... suspicious... demanding" (Benkovitz's words for him), he ends by repelling, in this book as he often did in real life.

As a curious literary character and as the author of Hadrian the Seventh, the novel which a few years ago was turned into a very successful play, Rolfe is worth knowing about. But he was probably better served by A. J.A. Symons's shorter, more ingeniously constructed Quest for Corvo.

Benkovitz, whose industry and accuracy cannot be faulted, simply gives us too much.

Don A. Keister is a former teacher and dean at the University of Akron.