Maatstaf. Jaargang 24

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Donald Weeks Corvomorphology

There are ghosts in Hadrian the Seventh - written by a man with more than a mere touch of magic.

The oldest is that of ‘an old lady who chose to call herself my grandmother.’ This was the kind, understanding, Socialist-minded Duchess Sforza-Cesarini of English stock, who befriended Rolfe in 1890. After five months at the Scots College, Rome, due to his own misconduct, Rolfe was bodily dismissed from the seminary on 3 May 1890. Through an Italian school-fellow he had known in England two years earlier, Rolfe was introduced to the elderly duches and became her guest throughout the rest of that year. And is was the ‘vast barrack of a palace’ belonging to the Sforza-Cesarinis that Rolfe celebrated his thirtieth birthday. The duchess took it upon herself to ‘adopt’ Rolfe as a ‘grandson’ and even to be the cause of his moulding an immediate future with the use of a title: Baron Corvo. She was instrumental in Rolfe's returning to England as 1891 began, promising him financial aid until he could earn a living for himself through poetry, painting or photography. But, before 1891 had reached its end, ‘the defalcations of a Catholic ruined’ him.

This Catholic is both a mere ‘priest’ and the ‘Patriarch of Byzantion’ in Hadrian, who wrote ‘defamatory letters to duchesses... in 1890.’ The original of this character was James Laird Patterson, Bishop of Emmaus, whom Rolfe first met at Oxford in 1887 and who induced Duchess Sforza-Cesarini to discontinue her mode of pension to Rolfe in 1891. He died in December 1902, four months after the death of Rolfe's father on July 30th, just eight days after Freddy's forty-second birthday.

A possible descendant from Rollo who accompanied William the Conqueror to England, one member of the Kent family of Rolfe moved to the City of London late in the eighteenth century to set up a pianoforte-manufacturing business. Three generations later, Freddy was born at the same address in Cheapside. The family had been mildly prosperous and examples of the Rolfe piano were displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Yet, as a third-generation member of this business, Freddy's father James had let it evolve into a vapour of proud memories. In his Prooimion to Hadrian, Rolfe walks along Islington Upper Street, eyeing people as they pass him. One is ‘a venerable shy drudge of a pianotuner’ - James, whose business acumen was about all Freddy inherited from him. But this mention of him was written in loving memory. Hadrian was dedicated to Freddy's mother. Yet, had James lived another year or two, his name would have been included as co-dedicatee.

As Rolfe began to pen Hadrian, he predicted another ghost: that of Dr. Courtleigh, who at one point ‘pleaded age, infirmity.’ Establishing his role as George Arthur Rose, Rolfe speaks to this distinguished prelate when he ‘suddenly saw that this was the chance of his life of saying the right thing to the right person; and he determined to fight every step of the way with this cardinal before death claimed him.’ ‘This cardinal’ was Herbert Vaughan, Cardinal of Westminster, who died at the age of seventy-one on 19 June 1903, less than three months after these words had been committed to paper.

(With an almost omnipotent accuracy, one of Rolfe's facilities was an exact delineation of a particular subject - similar to his contemporary, the German artist, Heinrich Kley. Bertram Blighter in Hadrian was Henry Harland, champion to the literature Rolfe

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composed. As editor of The Yellow Book, he accepted the first Toto stories and suggested several efforts which materialized into book form. About a year after Hadrian, Rolfe completed Nicholas Crabbe, in which Harland appears as Sidney Thorah, an ‘unhealthy personage’. He died in December 1905 at the age of fifty-six.)

A haunted garden is even glimpsed in this novel - above ‘the Nemorensian Lake,’ the scene of the Sforza-Cesarini country palace in the Abruzzi. This was the locale of the first Toto story of 1891 and the place Rolfe met Toto and the other ‘slaves’ so faithfully portrayed in In His Own Image. This same district of ‘Diana's Forest of oaks and the spurs of the Alban Mount’ inspired two novels which were started in 1904 (but which have not survived): ‘The King of the Wood (a romance of Diana's grove at Nemi, which I know by heart, where the priest.... had to be a run-away slave, to pick the Golden Bough (mistletoe) from the oak in the sacred grove to slay his predecessor); Duchess Attendolo (the amazing courtship of Duchess Sforza and her four legal marriages within one month to the Duke her husband).’

Not only are these specific ghosts apparent in the book, but there is a very definite ghost of a ghost: pertaining to Rolfe himself.

In 1908, Rolfe wrote to Prof. Dawkins, the man who took him to the city of Venice, which proved to be the final chapter in his life. As part of one letter, he spoke of Hadrian and added that the reading of it ‘would give you a clearer idea of the present writer.’ He further stated that the ‘blatant Popery of the thing is undeniably offensive, far more than any ordinary controversial diatribe I ever met, because of its icy assumption and its piercing air of disdain. You know that I can't claim credit [for the exquisitely felicitious phrasing].

I certainly wrote it: but even now I cannot imagine how I did it, excepting on the hypothesis of a 4 poly-personality, symptoms of which Walsh the American specialist did detect in the writer of the book. If there are more of Me than one, all well and good. One can understand then the many facetted individual who is his books.’

Earlier, in 1904, he had written to Dr. James J. Walsh of New York about the same book: ‘It should teach you a little more of me.

When you have studied it carefully, I do hope that you will send me a long psychiatric prognosis of Hadrian. There is a distinct assertion of a second personality there, which greatly puzzles me & I feel that you could say something very illuminating.’ (Although Walsh may not have replied to Rolfe's satisfaction, the question put to him in 1904 did cause him to include a chapter on ‘Secondary Personality’ in his Psychotherapy on 1912. Patients with a secondary personality, he wrote in part, ‘at least think that the subconscious (or their subliminal self) plays a large role in their conduct. As a consequence, they assert, it is more or less beyond their power to control themselves, and their responsibility for certain acts is surely somewhat impaired. This is a rather satisfying doctrine for those who do not feel quite equal to the effort of conquering vicious or unfortunate tendencies. Those who like to have some excuse for self-indulgence take refuge in this supposedly scientific explanation to absolve them from blame, and from the necessity of self-control.’ This was written by Walsh after he had learned that Rolfe's actions were, at times, almost past human endeavour and somewhat inconsistent for a normal person.

The publication of Hadrian in 1904 had brought Rolfe one hoped-for dream in the formation of a friendship with the newly-converted Catholic, Fr. Robert Hugh Benson. He trusted Benson to the degree that on the priest's dictation Rolfe destroyed two manuscripts, Rose's Records and Ivory, Apes and Peacocks, each a sequel to Hadrian - a loss to the world of probably two pieces of fiction as powerful and masterly as their prototype, a loss due to petty judgement of a mind narro-

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wed to the single cause of Catholic propaganda. At first, Benson's admission toward friendship was sincere. But, clinging to a more noble goal, for himself, of material gain and fame, he condescended to the invocations of others defaming Rolfe for the sin of poverty and saying that Benson must break all relations with his new friend. The suddenness of this act and the brutality of its conviction on Benson's part were blows almost fatal to Rolfe. Subject to paranoia, Rolfe rued the day which brought the two converts to Rome together. In his Romance of Modern Venice, he rightfully ridiculed Benson - in a book not printed before the newly-created monsignor's death in 1914. And, in his final year, Benson's book, Initiation, depicted characteristics of Rolfe's personality in a vitriolic woman named Enid. Unfamiliar with either book, Walsh, who had actually met Benson, later wrote to an acquaintance that Rolfe's behaviour toward the priest ‘seemed very bitter in the matter and it always struck me that he was really jealous of the success which Monsignor Benson had achieved after his conversion to the Church. His attitude was very much that of a jealous woman.’ And he writes in his Psychotherapy: ‘That most of the phenomena of so-called dual personalities are mainly hysterical seems now to be clear.’

The dual personality of Rolfe seen in his work is not that of astral projection. He was born at the Cheapside address, as was his grandfather Nicholas. James, however, was born at Stoke Newington, five years after Edgar Allan Poe's schooling there between 1817 and 1820. Across the way from Bransby's Mansion School was the mysterious building which later inspired ‘William Wilson’. The theme of this tale - the narrator meeting himself in the form of a second person - the doppelgänger motif - occurs in all of Rolfe's most important books, beginning with In His Own Image.

Not only does a more-than-one-sided personality appear in Hadrian, but the Pontiff himself outlives the novel. In ‘Cicero's “Oratio pro Joanna Pucella de Arqua”’ of 1904, Joan of Arc's name is linked with Hadrian. And in 1908 the same Pontiff penned the acid denounciation of Lord Northcliffe in The Bull Against the Enemy of the Anglican Race. But Rolfe was not without humour. In Nicholas Crabbe a conversation takes place between Crabbe (Rolfe) and a second man when the subject of George Arthur Rose arises. Asked what Rose is doing now, Crabbe replies: ‘Running for Popedom, I suppose.’ The morphological symbolism of seemingly diseased phantasticks can be told by Poe in first-person narration. In turn-about fashion, Rolfe employs only the third person throughout the unravelling fabric of his tales. Yet a primary importance in Rolfe's work is the telling of or relating to his own self or story. Since a certain day in 1897, in Holywell, North Wales, he became infatuated with a wrong done to him. Actual or imaginary, it festered within the dark limbo of his being for the rest of his days. The dual characterization of his own self to be encountered in Rolfe's books is counterbalanced by a continuing theme. In more than one place, Rolfe accused his first literary patron, the editor of The Yellow Book, of being a ‘writer of amatory novels’ with ‘variations of the same theme.’ Yet he himself could never refrain from depicting his own cause. The most consistent of such books in Hadrian, in which the main character is mirrored with an image of its author more large, more true-to-life than in anything else. Who was George Arthur Rose? Rolfe idolized certain heroes of romantic history and martyrs, especially of youthful age. Arthur was a thirteenth-century prince, ‘sprightly and lithe as his panthers [lions] of England’. George - the ‘unchangeable George of the Roses’ - was the ‘wild white primrose.... Messire Saint George,’ the patron saint of England. And Rose? Who was Rose? In the annals of the Rolfe family, the surname was pronounced with a silent l - making it Rofe. Archaic by nature and by temperament,

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Frederick William Rolfe looked upon his name as appearing in another day. The old-English long-s would make his name to appear somewhat as Rofe, but pronounced Rose.

Within the pages of Hadrian, the reader, as Rolfe himself did, can detect different aspects of the man who composed it. The most notable, of course, is when Hadrian visits his old college in Rome and encounters a ‘fastidious inmate’ whose name is William Jameson, born in England and in July. The ghosts of Rolfe's past - of events as well as of people - are illustrated throughout the book. At times they are conjured up into substantial personalities. At other times they only flit by, almost missed in the blinking of the reader's eye. ‘No Society Gossip told of Robert and William and Nicholas and James and Frederick and Herbert and Percy and Alfred’ can be found on one page. Frederick is Freddy or Frederick William Rolfe. Those in front of his name were his father and forefathers. Those following were his brothers. And there is yet another division: that of George Arthur Rose (the origin of each name explained in Hubert's Arthur) from Hadrian. Rose was the Rolfe who actually existed from the time of his conversion to Rome in 1885 until 1903, when he created this particular book. Hadrian is another personality altogether: a dream fulfilment - ‘the history of one year's pontificate of an Englishman with the temperament of a cat and a predilection for American independence, who finds himself lifted to Peter's Throne about a.d. 1910.’

Hadrian the Seventh is an exceptional and powerful document. At the same time, it is also colourful and timeless. One reason for this is the prophetic way in which Rolfe was able to scan his universe in 1903. He predicts the Russian Revolution on Bloody Sunday, 22 January 1905. And Hadrian's slicing up of the European map predates Hitler's more-than-real menaces. More than one prediction cited within the Vatican later became reality. In 1904 it was an impossible piece of heresy to even conceive such an idea as that of selling part of the Vatican's treasures - one of Hadrian's plans. Yet, in very recent years, Cardinal Heenan of Westminster, London, sold part of the cathedral's treasures to meet demanding expenses.

This is not the only book ever written which parallels its creator in semblence of substance and events. But there is something which makes Hadrian unique. The doppelgänger motif does not end with Rolfe himself. Friend or foe, there are at least eighteen people from his life who appear in this book in more than one guise, each one detached from the other. The pseudonyms used earlier by Rolfe are mentioned in a concealed form: Austin White (Frederick Austin) and King Clement (Baron Corvo) (King Clement was a name made up from Pope Clement viii, who threatened to excommunicate King Henry viii of England.) Even the two main characters of the sub-plot are briefly named in other portions of the book. Mrs. Crowe (Mrs. Gleeson White in actual life) is also the scorned woman in Rose's confession to Bishop Talacryn. And Jerry Sant (Keir Hardie) has his original name condensed to Kerardy. Even the grand old duchess, who died during the 1980s, is named a second time, as ‘duchess’, and her name is commemorated in two other ways - as Cinthyanum and Attendolo. Even the Toto of the same Roman period is remembered. His lively antics are coupled with a second person to form Iulo Carrino.

Rolfe could never divorce himself from his art. He believed in astrology and drew horoscopes. He even practised magic - but he was ‘not at all clear where the line is which sharply divides white magick from black,’ and the latter he would never condone. But he relied on the character revealed ‘through the stars’ of a person's nativity ‘from the Maker of the Stars.’ The letters depicted in Don Tarquinio (1905) are from a Cabalistic Theban alphabet found by him in Francis Barrett's Magus of 1801. In his novel, Rolfe, as Hadrian,

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commissions a goldsmith to mould a beautiful image of a crucifix with a reigning Christ. This, in fact, was an exact description of his own small, purple bookplate of pagan design, as well as a crucifix (made to this design) given to him by the Pirie-Gordons a few years later, differing in only one point. Hadrian's crucifix is a cross potent. Rolfe's own was a tau cross - the oldest of crosses and, with an added handle, a crux ansata, symbol of immortality.

The immortality - as far as this world is concerned - of Hadrian the Seventh seems somewhat assured. Then, the book was the sole work of one man. Not only did he write the story, but his instructions for the original setting of the type were entirely obeyed. He also designed the book's cover. Hadrian was the only book written between the works of Baron Corvo (the male raven) and those incorporating Nicholas Crabbe (the male crab). Rose/Hadrian is feline, uncanny, and a deified personification of his alter ego.

The cat and the Pope are on the cover of the book. So is a crescent moon in her first quarter, making Rolfe a moon-child because of his birth on 22 July 1860, under the sign of Cancer. And George Arthur Rose exclaims: ‘Thank the Lord I'm English, born under Cancer, tenacious, slow and sure. Naturally I persist.’ Between 1899 and 1903 he wrote the majority of his books in the ‘eleven feet square’ attic in Broadhurst Gardens, Hampstead, London. The house's number was 69 - laid horizontally above Hadrian's head on the book's cover - a signature for a son of Cancer.

To read Hadrian seriously - to become an actual student of the book - is tantamount to an appreciation of its author. Although he never consciously was aware of the fact, Hadrian was written by an inner self - primarily as an attempt to explain himself to himself.

Although proud in some things, he knew how to be humble. This attribute of his is shown through the poverty of his life as compared to the poverty which clings to all things Christian or God-like. Such is the fabric of his life, the same fabric from the Bible, which stretches across the pages of Hadrian. Hadrian is ‘Brother Serafino of the Third Order.’ In Scotland in 1892, Rolfe adopted the name Serafino on his profession in the Third Order of St. Francis. As a Franciscan, then, he vowed wordly poverty. And in this novel, from a rented attic room, Rose becomes Hadrian, who inherits a kingdom not his own. In his poverty, he had no place of his own to lay his head - not until Hadrian is struck down in the streets of Rome - at a time ‘he was so tired.’