Frederick Rolfe
Frederick William Rolfe (surname pronounced /roʊf/ ROHF[1]), better known as Baron Corvo (Italian for "Crow"), and also calling himself Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe[2] (22 July 1860 – 25 October 1913), was an English writer, artist, photographer and eccentric.
"Baron Corvo" redirects here. For the Italian director who used the same pseudonym, see Alberto Cavallone.
Frederick William Rolfe
22 July 1860
Cheapside, London, England
25 October 1913 (aged 53)
Venice, Italy
Baron Corvo
Frank English
Frederick Austin
Prospero
A. Crab Maid
Fr. Rolfe
Novelist, artist, fantasist, eccentric
English
Hadrian the Seventh
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
Nicholas Crabbe
Stories Toto Told Me
Don Renato
Don Tarquinio
Chronicles of the House of Borgia
Homosexuality[edit]
Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality and associated and corresponded with a number of other homosexual Englishmen. Early in his life he wrote a fair amount of idealistic but mawkish poetry about boy martyrs and the like. These and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them. As he himself matured, Rolfe's settled sexual preference was for late adolescents. Towards the end of his life he made his only explicit reference to his specific sexual age preference, in one of the Venice letters to Charles Masson Fox, in which he declared: "My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large."[5] Grant Richards, in his Memories of a Misspent Youth (1932), recalls "Frederick Baron Corvo" at Parson's Pleasure in Oxford – where scholars could bathe naked – "surveying the yellow flesh tints of youth with unbecoming satisfaction".
Those of whom it is either speculated or surmised that they had sexual relations with Rolfe – Aubrey Thurstans, Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas, John 'Markoleone', Ermenegildo Vianello and the other Venetian gondoliers – were all sexually mature young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one (with the exception of Douglas,[6] who was considerably older). The idealised young men in his fiction were of a similar age.[7]
In 1904, soon after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, the convert Robert Hugh Benson formed a chaste but passionate friendship with Rolfe. For two years this relationship involved letters "not only weekly, but at times daily, and of an intimate character, exhaustingly charged with emotion." There was a falling out in 1906. For some time previously, Benson had made plans to write jointly with Rolfe a book on St Thomas Becket, but Benson decided that he should not be associated (according to writer Brian Masters)[8] "with a Venetian pimp and procurer of boys". Afterwards, Benson satirised Rolfe in his novel The Sentimentalists. Rolfe returned the favour a few years later, putting a caricature of Benson named "Bobugo Bonsen" in a book named Nicholas Crabbe. Their letters were subsequently destroyed, probably by Benson's brother.[9]
Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.
Posthumous literary reputation[edit]
Rolfe's early books were politely reviewed but none of them was enough of a success to secure an income for its author, whose posthumous reputation began to dim. Within a very few years, however, coteries of readers began to discover a common interest in his work, and a resilient literary cult began to form. In 1934 A. J. A. Symons published The Quest for Corvo, one of the century's iconic biographies, and this brought Rolfe's life and work to the attention of a wider public. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a further surge of interest in him which became known as "the Corvo revival", including a successful adaptation of Hadrian for the London stage. Two biographies of Rolfe appeared in the 1970s. These led to his inclusion in all the major works of reference and engendered a stream of academic theses on him. Although his books have remained in print, no substantial monograph has ever appeared in English on his work.[16] With the growing academic interest in the history of literary modernism and acknowledgement of the central importance of life writing in its genesis, the true importance of Rolfe’s autobiographical fictions has come into focus. His influence has been discerned in novels written by Henry Harland, Ronald Firbank,[17] Graham Greene,[18] and Alexander Theroux,[19] and in his coinage of neologisms and use of the Ulysses story there is some perhaps coincidental prefiguring of the work of James Joyce.[20]
Rolfe's works include:
