Collected Essays (19 page)

1934

FREDERICK ROLFE: FROM THE DEVIL’S SIDE

‘H
E
was his own worst enemy’: the little trite memorial phrase which, in the case of so many English exiles, disposes discreetly and with a tasteful agnosticism of the long purgatories in foreign
pensions
, the counted coppers, the keeping up of appearances, sounds more than usually unconvincing when applied to Frederick Rolfe. It is the measure of the man’s vividness that his life always seems to move on a religious plane: his violent hatreds, his extreme ingratitude, even his appearance as he described it himself, ‘offensive, disdainful, slightly sardonic, utterly unapproachable’, have about them the air of demonic possession.
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
, the long autobiographical novel of the last dreadful years in Venice, the manuscript of which was rediscovered by Mr A. J. A. Symons, has the quality of a medieval mystery play, but with this difference, that the play is written from the devil’s side. The many excellent men and women, who did their best, sometimes an unimaginative best, to help Rolfe, here caper like demons beside the long Venetian water-fronts: the Rev. Bobugo Bonsen (known on the angels’ side as Monsignor Benson), Harry Peary-Buthlaw, Professor Macpawkins, Lady Pash. It is instructive and entertaining to see the great and the good for once from the devil’s point of view.

And the devil has been fair. Anyone who has read Mr Symons’s biography of Corvo will recognize how very fair. The facts (the correspondence with Bonsen and Peary-Buthlaw, for example) appear to be quite truthfully stated; it is Rolfe’s interpretation which is odd. Offer the starving man a dinner or the homeless man a bed and instantaneously the good deed is unrecognizably distorted. The strangest motives begin obscurely to be discerned. Is it that one is seeing good from the devil’s side: ‘The lovely, clever, good, ugly, silly wicked faces of this world, all anxious, all selfish, all mean, all unsatisfied and unsatisfying’: or is it possibly only a horribly deep insight into human nature?

The difficulty always is to distinguish between possession by a devil and possession by a holy spirit. Saints have starved like Rolfe, and no saint had a more firm belief in his spiritual vocation. He loathed the flesh (making an unnecessary oath to remain twenty years unmarried that he might demonstrate to unbelieving ecclesiastics his vocation for the priesthood) and he loved the spirit. One says that he writes from the devil’s side, because his shrill rage has the same lack of dignity as Marlowe’s cracker-throwing demons, because he had no humility (‘he came as one to whom Mystery has a meaning and a method, as one of the intimate, and fortunate, as one who belonged, as a son of the Father’), and because, of course, he had a Monsignor among his enemies. But the devil, too, is spiritual, and when Rolfe wrote of the spirit (without the silly rage against his enemies or the sillier decorated style in which he tried to make the best of a world he had not been allowed to renounce) he wrote like an angel; our appreciation is hardly concerned in the question whether or not it was a fallen angel:

He slowly paced along cypress-avenues, between the graves of little children with blue or white standards and the graves of adults marked by more sombre memorials. All around him were patricians bringing sheaves of painted candles and gorgeous garlands of orchids and everlastings, or plebeians on their knees grubbing up weeds and tracing pathetic designs with cheap chrysanthemums and farthing night-lights. Here, were a baker’s boy and & telegraph-messenger, repainting their father’s grave-post with a tin of black and a bottle of gold. There, were half a dozen ribald venal dishonest licentious young gondoliers; quiet and alone on their wicked knees round the grave of a comrade.

It was Saturday. The little triptych on the altar lay open –
Sedes Sapientiae ora pro nobis.
– How altogether lovely these byzantine eikons are! That is because they have Christian tradition – they alone, in religious art. Undoubtedly that council of the Church was inspired divinely which uttered the canon prohibiting painters from producing any ideals save those ecclesiastically dictated. Whoever dreams of praying (with expectation of response) for the prayer of a Tintoretto or a Titian, or a Bellini, or a Botticelli? But who can refrain from crying ‘O Mother!’ to these unruffleable wan dolls in indigo on gold?

Literature is deep in Mr Symons’s debt, and in debt, too, to all the libelled philanthropists without whose permission this book could hardly have been published.

1934

FREDERICK ROLFE: A SPOILED PRIEST

H
UBERT’S
A
RTHUR
, the latest work of Frederick Rolfe to be brought into print by Mr Symons, is a laborious experiment in imaginary history. The assumption is that Arthur was not murdered by King John but escaped and, after recovering a treasure left him by Richard Lion-Heart, won the crown of Jerusalem and finally, with the help of Hubert de Burgh, the chronicler of his deeds, gained the throne of England. Originally Rolfe collaborated with Mr Pirie-Gordon, but after the inevitable quarrel he rewrote the story during the last months of his life. The style, we are told, ‘was meant to be an enriched variant upon that of the
Itinerarium Regis Ricardi
and of William of Tyre, with an admixture of Maurice Hewlett’. Hewlett, alas, in this appallingly long and elaborate fantasy is too much in evidence, and perhaps only a knowledge of the circumstances in which it was written, to be gained from Mr Symons’s biography, gives it interest.

For if Rolfe is to be believed (a very big assumption) he brought this book to its leisurely decorative close at the very time when he claimed to be starving in his gondola on the Venetian lagoons.

The moment I cease moving, I am invaded by swarms of swimming rats, who in the winter are so voracious that they attack even man who is motionless. I have tried it. And have been bitten. Oh my dear man you can’t think how artful fearless ferocious they are. I rigged up two bits of chain, lying loose on my prow and poop with a string by which I could shake them when attacked. For two nights the dodge acted. The swarms came (up the anchor rope) and nuzzled me: I shook the chains: the beasts plopped overboard. Then they got used to the noise and sneered. Then they bit the strings. Then they bit my toes and woke me shrieking and shaking with fear.

The very same day that he was writing this letter (whether truth or fiction doesn’t really matter: one cannot doubt the imaginative vividness of the experience) he was penning, as if he had the whole of a well-fed life before him, some such slow decorative sentimental description as this of the dead St Hugh singing before King Arthur:

The pretty eyes were closed, the eyes of the innocent perfectly-satisfied happy face of the little red-gleaming head which reposed on the pillow of scarlet samite: but the smiling mouth was a little open, the rosy lips rhythmically moving, letting glimpses of little white teeth be seen . . .

That to me is the real dramatic interest of
Hubert’s Arthur.

For on the whole it is a dull book of small literary merit, though it will be of interest to those already interested in the man, who can catch the moments when he drops the Hewlett mask and reveals more indirectly than in
The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole
his painfully divided personality. Reading his description of St Hugh, ‘the sweet and inerrable canorous voice of the dead’, one has to believe in the genuineness of his nostalgia – for the Catholic Church, for innocence. But at the same time one cannot fail to notice the homosexual, sadistic element in the lushness and tenderness of his epithets.

When he writes in the person of Hubert de Burgh:

They would not let me have my will (which was for the life of a quiet clergyman). . . . So once every day since that time, I have cursed those monks out of a full heart,

one pities the spoiled priest; when he describes Arthur,

the proud gait of the stainless pure secure in himself, wholly perfect in himself, severe with himself as with all, strong in disgust of ill, utterly careless save to keep high, clean, cold, armed, intact, apart, glistening with candid candour both of heart and of aspect, like a flower, like a maid, like a star.

one recognizes the potential sanctity of the man, just as one recognizes the really devilish mind which gives the formula for throat-cutting with the same relish as in his book on the Borgias he had translated a recipe for cooking a goose alive. He is an obvious example to illustrate Mr T. S. Eliot’s remark in his study of the demonic influence:

Most people are only a very little alive; and to awaken them to the spiritual is a very great responsibility: it is only when they are so awakened that they are capable of real Good, but that at the same time they become first capable of Evil.

1935

REMEMBERING MR JONES

T
HIS
book
*9
is as much a memorial to Edward Garnett as to Conrad: a memorial to the greatest of all publishers’ readers, the man behind the scenes to whom we owe Conrad’s works. A publisher’s claim to the discovery of an author is suspect: it is the author who usually discovers the publisher, and the publisher’s part is simply to pay a reliable man to recognize merit when it is brought to him by parcel-post. But we have Conrad’s own testimony that had it not been for Edward Garnett’s tactfully subdued encouragement he might never have written another book after
Almayer’s Folly
, and one suspects it was Garnett who organized critical opinion so that Conrad had the support of his peers during the years of popular neglect. As for Garnett himself nothing could be more illuminating than his son’s biographical note. Edward Garnett was brought up by parents who blended ‘Victorian respectability with complete liberality of opinion. The children were undisciplined and completely untidy; only when they exhibited anything like worldliness or self-seeking were their parents surprised and shocked.’

Conrad’s prefaces are not like James’s, an elaborate reconstruction of technical aims. They are not prefaces to which novelists will turn so frequently as readers: they are about life as much as about art, about the words or the actions which for one reason or another were excluded from the novels – Almayer suddenly breaking out at breakfast on the subject of the ambiguous Willems, then on an expedition up-river with some Arabs, ‘One thing’s certain; if he finds anything worth having up there they will poison him like a dog’; about the prototype of Mr Jones of
Victory
:

Mr Jones (or whatever his name was) did not drift away from me. He turned his back on me and walked out of the room. It was in a little hotel in the Island of St Thomas in the West Indies (in the year ’75) where we found him one hot afternoon extended on three chairs, all alone in the loud buzzing of flies to which his immobility and his cadaverous aspect gave a most gruesome significance. Our invasion must have displeased him because he got off the chairs brusquely and walked out, leaving with me an indelibly weird impression of his thin shanks. One of the men with me said that the fellow was the most desperate gambler he had ever come across. I said: ‘A professional sharper?’ and got for answer: ‘He’s a terror; but I must say that up to a certain point he will play fair . . .’ I wonder what that point was. I never saw him again because I believe he went straight on board a mail-boat which left within the hour for other ports of call in the direction of Aspinall.

They make an amusing comparison, these germs of stories, anecdotes remarkable as a rule for their anarchy (an appalling Negro in Haiti) or ambiguity (as when Lord Jim passed across Conrad’s vision – ‘One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by – appealing – significant – under a cloud – perfectly silent’) – they make an amusing comparison with those neat little dinner-table stories which set James off constructing his more intricate and deeper fictions, holding up his hand in deprecation to prevent the whole story coming out (‘clumsy Life again at her stupid work’), just as the settings are socially widely dissimilar: Conrad on a small and dirty schooner in the Gulf of Mexico listening to the ferocious Ricardo’s low communings ‘with his familiar devil’, while the old Spanish gentleman to whom he served as confidant and retainer lay dying ‘in the dark and unspeakable cudd’; and James on Christmas Eve, before the table ‘that glowed safe and fair through the brown London night’, listening to the anecdotes of his ‘amiable friend’. It was a strange fate which brought these two to settle within a few miles of each other and produce from material gained at such odd extremes of life two of the great English novels of the last fifty years:
The Spoils of Poynton
and
Victory.

The thought would have pleased Conrad. It would have satisfied what was left of his religious sense, and that was little more than a distant memory of the Sanctus bell and the incense. James spent his life working towards and round the Catholic Church, fascinated and repelled and absorbent; Conrad was born a Catholic and ended – formally – in consecrated ground, but all he retained of Catholicism was the ironic sense of an omniscience and of the final unimportance of human life under the watching eyes. Edward Garnett brings up again the old legend of Slavic influence which Conrad expressly denied. The Polish people are not Slavs and Conrad’s similarity is to the French, once a Catholic nation, to the author for example of
La Condition Humaine
: the rhetoric of an abandoned faith. ‘The mental degradation to which a man’s intelligence is exposed on its way through life’: ‘the passions of men short-sighted in good and evil’: in scattered phrases you get the memories of a creed working like poetry through the agnostic prose.

1937

THE DOMESTIC BACKGROUND

T
HE
domestic background
is
of interest: to know how a writer with the peculiar sensitivity we call genius compromises with family life. There is usually some compromise; few writers have had the ruthless egotism of Joseph Conrad who, at the birth of his first child, delayed the doctor whom he had been sent to fetch by sitting down with him and eating a second breakfast. The trouble is that a writer’s home, just as much as the world outside, is his raw material. His wife’s or a child’s sickness Conrad couldn’t help unconsciously regarding them, as Henry James regarded the germinal anecdote at the dinner table, as something to cut short when he had had enough human pain for his purpose. ‘Something human’, he put as epigraph to one of his novels, quoting Grimm, ‘is dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.’ But no quotation more misrepresented him in his home, if Mrs Conrad’s memory is accurate.
*10
Out of a long marriage she has remembered nothing tender, nothing considerate. On her own part, yes; she is the heroine of every anecdote.