Story of Story

THE QUEST FOR CORVO -- A. J. A. Symons--Macmillan ($2.50).

Frederick William Rolfe ("Baron Corvo") belongs with those eccentrics of literature whose books are caviar to the general. He experimented with words of his own concoction long before Joyce. His tales bear the stamp of strange originality. His life was that of a would-be priest, painter, novelist, historian, outcast, ascetic, sensualist, madman.

Author Symons calls his book "An Experiment in Biography." His scheme has been to take readers along with him in his "quest" for the man behind the legend while he unearths old letters, lost manuscripts, people who knew Corvo. The book is the story of a personality. It is also the story of the story. The trail begins in 1925 when Symons first hears of his man through reading Hadrian the Seventh, Corvo's tale of a young English Catholic who becomes Pope. Struck by its power and originality, he makes inquiries about the author, hears many a contradictory yarn, grows curious, turns literary detective.

Born in London (1860). eldest of five brothers, scion of a family that had been in the piano manufacturing business for a century, Frederick William Rolfe was a precocious but unstable youth. Against his family's wishes, he left school at 15, idled for a while, went to Oxford as an unattached student, became a schoolmaster. He lost his first position when he turned Roman Catholic. Thereafter he had but little contact with home. Followed brief periods of teaching and tutoring. Rolfe wanted to be a Catholic priest; that desire followed him through life. When he was 27 he studied for the priesthood at Oscott College, but was discharged for his unconventional ways, his irresponsibility. He was considered talented, vain, sarcastic, a poseur, a liar. Nevertheless there were those who believed in him. He was given another chance and sent to Rome to study for the priesthood in Scots College. Dismissed after five months for "lack of Vocation'' and as a general nuisance, Rolfe returned to England claiming he had acquired the title of "Baron Corvo." Throughout his life he remained a Catholic zealot, thought of himself as the one true Catholic, believed the Church and its modern priesthood were conspiring against him. He found "the Faith comfortable and the Faithful intolerable." Biographer Symons calls his failure to make the priesthood the first step on the road to paranoia.

He sponged on acquaintances in England, Scotland, Wales, often on the point of starving, making enemies, running up debts, a "haggard, shabby, shy, priestly-visaged individual" with a bitter tongue, a growing obsession that there was a conspiracy against him. Attracted by his esoteric learning, his writings, his often brilliant conversation, people took him up, helped him, paid dearly to get rid of him.

An article in Wide World Magazine by "Baron Corvo" telling how he was once buried alive resulted in a vitriolic newspaper attack in which his history and pretensions were reviewed. This was the second step in his persecution complex. But Stories Toto Told Me (first published in The Yellow Book), In His Own Image, Hadrian the Seventh, Don Tarquinio, Chronicles of the House of Borgia and his translation (from the French translation) of Omar Khayyam won him friends and literary recognition, although he made only about $500 out of all of them. Quarrels with publishers hurt him. Some of his best manuscripts never appeared in print. His The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole has been published since his death.

Author Symons is more interested in the facts and the conflicting opinions of those who knew his hero than in making his own judgments. But certain conclusions are unavoidable. Strangely brilliant "Baron Corvo" was an introvert drawn to the Roman Catholic priesthood as to a sanctuary. His Catholicism was genuine if unorthodox. His early life was ascetic. He was a born writer with a considerable gift for painting and invention, an extraordinary aesthetic sense for surfaces. His mental trouble, paranoia, leading to delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution, was held in check by his brilliant mind, but was unmistakably working toward his destruction. He knew nothing of reality.

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