Maatstaf. Jaargang 25

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Donald Weeks Rolfe and the Venice Letters

‘Rupert, who had a free period, went quietly indoors to study, in typescript, some pirated letters written in Venice by a dirty old man called Fr. Rolfe’ (Pamela Hansford Johnson, The Honours Board, 1970). This opinion is cast by the author herself and not by any character in the book.

How, then, was ‘Fr. Rolfe,’ the author of Hadrian the Seventh, ‘a dirty old man’? On the Saturday night of 25 October 1913, Frederick William Rolfe and Thomas Pennefather Wade-Browne dined at the Albergo Cavalletto. Rolfe ordered his favourite dish: beefsteak - and consumed a greater-than-usual amount of wine. He was just beginning to suffer from a cold. The two men finished their meal about 21.00 and walked to their apartment, Palazzo Marcello, where they talked for at least an hour before retiring to their separate rooms. Rolfe never saw the end of that day. He died almost immediately after reaching his own room - before midnight. His sudden death, at the age of 53, meant a loss of £200 to the manager of the Cavalletto in uncollected rent from Rolfe. Exactly four years earlier - 25 October 1909 - Rolfe dated his second letter to Masson Fox of Falmouth, England - one of the series now known as the Venice Letters, with ‘their ramping [homo]sexuality’ (Pamela Hansford Johnson, 1961). For the ‘dirty old man’ question, the answer is simple to the uninitiated: Because, during 1909/1910, Rolfe wrote the Venice Letters. Doing so blackened his whole life in the eyes of those who accept as ‘gospel truth’ only basic generalities. In the early 1920s, A.J.A. Symons was horrified when he read them. In The Quest for Corvo of 1934 he says that ‘what shocked me about these letters was not the confession they made of perverse sexual indulgence... but that a man of education, ideas, something near genius, should have enjoyed without remorse the destruction of the innocence of youth, that he should have been willing for a price to traffic in his knowledge of the dark byways of that Italian city...’ In his book, Symons quotes only seven words from the 25 letters, post cards and telegrams - and quotes them incorrectly. From 1934 until 1974 - a period of 40 years - essayists had to be content with Symons' shocked attitude of the letters - never having read them themselves.

Symons' contentions are broken down - and negated to a degree - in Corvo (1971, chap. 13). The fundamental purpose for their being written was merely to act as begging letters. This fact can easily be seen in a careful examination of them. However, the sexual themes in them can only be explained by probing Rolfe's nature - and mind. Yet the moralists must have their say. And, in their say, they have degradingly spoken about the letters and Rolfe. As moralists, they have reacted against ‘unnatural things’ and have never withdrew themselves far enough apart from the letters. from their own inborn ‘collective human behaviour’ to view them with clinical vision. The ‘germ of truth’ in the Venice Letters to promote Rolfe's ‘unsavoury conduct’ may have

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been only an imaginary germ inside his head. The ‘confession’ in the letters may have been no more than the numerous ‘confessions’ coming into police courts each day and only hamper, instead of assisting, general routine. If a germ of truth lurk anywhere in the letters, it should be remembered that a little truth (whatever its origin) can make the grossest fictions palatable and fiction grows by that on which it feeds. ‘Human beings are too complex to be wisely talked about by any but the one or two human beings who love and know them best’ (Olive Schreiner).

The ‘ramping sexuality’ in the Venice Letters was never vulgar, in trite pornographic terms. They were not the boastful maraudings of Frank Harris' sexploits - even if they were all true. In one letter, Fox was told that Rolfe had previously written ‘a specimen 10,000 words or so’ on the subject of discussion, ‘giving it as my personal experiences’. This had been sent to England and Rolfe was later furious when the recipient destroyed it, first calling it both ‘beautiful’ and ‘wicked’. This alone should have warned Fox about the ‘truthfulness’ of Rolfe's ‘confession’ in the letters sent to him. One idea Rolfe outlined to Fox was to write a book on such a subject, ‘told artistically with vividness and a plainspokenness hitherto unheard of. Such books, privately published in Paris or Antwerp at £1 would sell like blazes.’

To say that one person's mind is devious is not to place that mind within any suspicion of sanity. Rolfe did possess a devious, a most twisted maze of mental prowess. Rolfe was serious in all things, even in his sense of humour. An example of his private ideas and one for publication can be noted here in two things. Less than a decade earlier, he wrote to somebody in New York: ‘Carnal pleasure I thoroughly appreciate, but I like a change sometimes. Even partridges get tiresome after many days. Only besotted ignorance or hypocrisy demurs to carnal lust, but I am stupefied. I suppose we all deceive ourselves. To blow one's nose (I never learned to do it) is a natural relief. So is coition.’ But the crooked lanes in his individualistic mind could bring to bear a whole history in a single name. His animosity against the Church for rejecting him as a candidate for Orders dated back to 1897 in Holywell, North Wales. The object of this outburst of religious emotion was Fr. Beauclerk, whose searing portrait in Hadrian occurs in several guises. One is Fr. St. Albans. And, by this, Rolfe had his full revenge. Fr. Charles Sidney de Vere Beauclerk never enjoyed his first name. But, as a de Vere, he was proud to be related to Shakespeare - that is, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who was gifted, neurotic and a homosexual. (Even Freud held that he was the true author of Shakespeare.) To add his little bit to the ‘family tradition,’ in 1897 a small volume was privately printed: Poems by ‘Sidney de Vere Beauclerk’. He could have claimed more regal ancestry. The de Vere and Beauclerk families were united in 1694 when Charles Beauclerk married Diana de Vere, daughter of the last Earl of Oxford. The choice of the priest's first name as an irritant and its link with St. Albans can be found in the pages of history. In 1684, Charles Beauclerk was created the first Duke of St. Albans. He was also the son of King Charles ii - and of Nell Gwyn.

In trying to access any person, something has to be known of his background. For three generations, Rolfes lived in Cheapside in the City of London, managing a good business from the manufacture of pianos until, in 1860, Freddy was born. He was to be the oldest of three brothers and three sisters. A pronounced religious atmosphere permeated the home. Yet, as religion remained steadfast with the family, its fortunes rocked. At only 2, Freddy was moved away from the City. The family business dwindled until his father was no more than a piano-tuner. At his death, he left his widow the grand estate of 17 shillings and 6 pence - or less than 5 dollars. Freddy was ashamed of his father and of the lack of oppor-

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tunity afforded him. His formal education ended at 14, from which time he became a provincial student-teacher. The religious training he had from his earliest days stayed with him throughout his life. His sisters (one of whom was blind) never married. His brothers did - one becoming an Anglican minister and another composed church music and played a church organ.

What appear to be simple words written by Rolfe does not mean that they can be easily defined. In his naivete, he spoke of playing ‘the fool from seventeen to twenty,’ sowing ‘my wild oats’. But, unlike others who use the same phrase, sowing wild oats merely meant that, from 17 to 20, Rolfe relished the layman's existance of student-teacher more than an ecclesiastical one. At such a stage in his life, it can be deduced that his mental processes were ‘retarded’. At 20, he was still conducting his life as a younger teenager. At 30, his life at Scots College, Rome, compares with the activities of a student of 20. Through the 1890s, instead of from the age of 30, his life seemed to have developed, at least as far as society is concerned, as from the age of 20. He rejoiced in being taken for a person younger than his calendar years. He was never in mental conformity with his contemporaries. Also, a child brought up in a strict environment can rebel against it when he grows older. Although religion tingled within the last fiber within his soul, Rolfe rebelled against the staid Anglicanism of his upbringing - first by attending a ‘ritualistic’ Church and then by ‘verting’ to Rome when he was 25. As a student-teacher, he was ‘thrown in’ with boys at the all-boys schools of that time. In his growing years, he knew no difference between male and female - one as a ‘partner’ for the other. So, when ‘of age,’ his first ‘romantic bouts’ were over the boys he taught. He was thus forming homosexual inclinations - which is not the same as a professed or practicing homosexual. In Rome, at 29, he swore a twenty years' celibacy, which he renewed in 1909.

In writing the Venice Letters, Rolfe at least knew his audience - and leading actors. They were addressed to Masson Fox, a practicing homosexual and a Quaker. (The Quakers were founded by a Fox.) Names in the letters included various species. John Gambril Nicholson knew Rolfe since 1880. He was a schoolmaster and was aware of his love for boys and wrote verses and novels about his ‘loves’. But he never practiced what he dreamed. He was a neurotic, with an illness directly connected with his sexual frustrations and he died a helpless hypochondriac. Henry Scott Tuke, another Quaker, painted nude boys - one release for his pent-up desires. (Because of its ‘unnatural subject,’ Tuke's father, Dr. Hack Tuke, warned Havelock Ellis against the publication of the Ellis-J.A. Symonds Sexual Inversion - in that it might even corrupt the type-setters! Symonds' literary executor, Horatio Brown of Venice - known to Fox and to Rolfe - bought up the whole edition of the book.) Charles Kains-Jackson lived within the confines of a love for Youthful Beauty - through an appreciation of art, the composing of poetry and a passionate love for his cousin, nine years his junior. One poem he composed for the cousin is mindful of a short prose entry in the Venice Letters. Kains-Jackson wrote:

Lie thou above me, breast to breast,
And lie above me, face to face,
The beauty of thy body pressed
Against my heart in my embrace;
Let me be clasping and enfold
Thy body's ivory and gold.
Sacred companionship of thighs
And arms that round my body twine,
The magic of thy glowing eyes
Which light my own and melt in mine!
Let one more raptuous clasp be tried,
Then, let us slumber side by side.

All these people were alike in one way. Regardless of the faults in their sexual make-up, they were normal people-in-the-street. (Even Nicholson can be called a ‘normal’ neurotic.) But Rolfe differed from all of these - as he

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also did from another name from the letters: Fr. Robert Hugh Benson, a homosexual whose desires were drowned by unbounded activity. Rolfe's portrayal of him as the Reverend Bobugo Bonsen in The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole is both accurate and masterful. Rolfe's keen target-hitting sarcasm also called Benson ‘that banausic fire-insurance agent,’ a phrase inspired by War of the Worlds - the sarcasm being well aimed, as H.G. Wells was Benson's favourite author.

In one 1915 issue of The Month, praise was given to the late Mgr. Benson's ‘psychological’ novels. Whatever the word ‘psychological’ meant in 1915, it is not apparent today in the almost unreadable books into which Benson fused Catholic propaganda. In his last book, Initiation (1914), the girl Enid is based on Rolfe. At the first sign of outburst in the novel, Nevill stares at her. ‘So extraordinarily savage was the face turned on him that he recoiled; yet a strange feeling came upon him that Enid was not quite genuine.’ How much of the ‘terrifying’ Enid was Rolfe - in whose character ‘there is really no light or shade - it is all dark there’? Was Benson looking at Enid-Rolf e only through his own eyes? He himself was unstable of character and would fly off into the most outragious spasms, induced by next-to-nothing provocation. He had been spoiled by his parents. The youngest son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he thought only of himself when he turned to Rome. He grew up within the luxury of the prominent and developed into a snob. He would say that ‘since I became a Catholic I have learned to appreciate the value of absolute naturalness and humanness,’ but his actions were different. He was never popular among the general English Church body. His wishes were commands and he could never understand being disobeyed. In Catholic eyes, Rolfe lived in ‘the sin of Holy Poverty,’ a form of disgrace to the clergy and general public alike, thinking that poor people were synonymous with dirt - black fingernails and all. Although Benson himself caused it, he could never fathom the reason for the breach in the friendship between him and Rolfe. And it was Rolfe who would have to apologize to Benson! For the priest there was no other way. Enid may not have been the truest picture of Rolfe, but Benson did display the former's feline (female) nature. Knowing both Rolfe and Benson, James Walsh of New York said that ‘Rolfe seemed very bitter in the matter’ over Benson and that ‘his attitude was very much that of a jealous woman’.

In reading his own Hadrian in print, Rolfe became aware that Rose-Hadrian (his own self) had a poly-personality. Rolfe never confessed to creating any of his novels, but always maintained that they ‘wrote themselves’. Yet his was the guiding hand - the hand of a person with a poly-personality.

There is a current theory that historic man developed a ‘collective schizophrenia’ or ‘cosmic fear’ - resulting from the chaotic cataclysms within the memory of modern man. The folklore of every ancient people points to such disturbances and the folklore of yesterday can be compared with today's news services. The most relegated form of such tales centre around Mount Olympus, describing Earth's upheaval in the guise of gods, goddesses and their messengers. ‘Collective schizophrenia’ may have been interpreted by Aristophanes - related in Plato's Symposium and borrowed by Rolfe as ‘the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love’. The notion that human beings were originally hermaphroditic is ancient and widely accepted. In Genesis (1:27) God created man - male and female, supposedly in one body.

In Hadrian, Rose-Rolfe pleas: ‘Why, O God, have You made me strange, uncommon, such a mystery to my fellow-creatures, not a “man among men” like other people?’

In his writing, Rolfe not only mastered a play on words, but also a play on people. He used the people he knew for his characters. And he used his own person the most. He could be the

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hero of a novel, as well as, at times, seeing or speaking to himself. (This is so in Hadrian.) ‘The typical “narcissistic character” delights in the devotion of others, but gives little warmth in return. The “narcissistic” type of homosexual takes enormous pride in his appearance... In personal relationships, however, he tends to be cold and self-centred’ (D.J. West, Homosexuality, 1960).

The Venice Letters were written by a man of the Victorian Age - ‘a period in which not only commercialism in public life, but cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the human body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in clothes, the “impure hush” on matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labour, and the cruel barring of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives, were carried to an extremity of folly difficult for us now to realise’ (Edward Carpenter, 1914). Rolfe's schoolboyish poems about boys were not rare. Perhaps as Rolfe did, on a lesser scale, John Henry Newman, an archetype of Englishman, passed through homosexual and religious crises. He inspired a clinging devotion in Frederik William Faber, whose collected poems of 1856 include many emotional verses to men and youths. All this was in the realm of a state Church in England. ‘A dependent force at work [towards homosexuality in England since 1850] was the alternating current in the Oxford Movement, the subsequent evolution of High Anglicanism, and its persistent temptation to convention in a very English and psychosomatic form of Romanism. It can be argued I think that the Roman Church had greater attraction than any Protestant Church for the homosexual’ (Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics, 1970).

In his recent Hidden Life, Trevor-Roper compares Sir Edmund Backhouse with Rolfe; but Rolfe was neither confidence man nor crook. Unwittingly, Benson's Enid revealed a

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vital aspect of his nature: the feminine. When Sholto Douglas first met Rolfe, the latter ‘skipped into the room. Skipped is the right word.’ Although of the same inclinations, this appearance of Rolfe ‘utterly surprised’ Douglas. Rolfe had a very strange mental equilibrium. He was a man of no compromise with a notion of duty, his notions of duty going exceptionally deep in some direction and having all the characteristics of a ‘martyr complex’. Almost of his whole life can fit under this category. (His religious Ideals were youthful martyrs - from St. George and St. Sebastian to little St. Hugh and St. William.) Believing in (at least white) ‘magick,’ his life was shrouded in mysticism. He was a citadel unto himself. The one religious command uppermost in his mind was Truth and he used Truth as a weapon. No other contemporary writer left such vivid pen-portraits of Henry Harland, John Lane and Benson. But Rolfe had his own definition for Truth and was not averse to the white lie. As early as 1903, he employed make-up for his facial features and later used it in Venice. (Thomas Mann may have seen him there with make-up on his face and incorporated it into Death in Venice.)

He asked for things to be done for him - at others' expense. It is not surprising in the world of psychology to associate religiousity with hysteria, even though it be in a mild form. He displayed a cunning exaggeration. And an emotional streak within him would at times explode with furious anger. He even dreamed of a Prince Charming - his Ideal Friend. His unethically unrealistic mind can be illustrated in one way. In 1893, H.H. Champion discussed with him the wrongs committed by the economic and industrial society of the day agaist the working man of England. Rolfe had the solution to this problem. It could easily be accomplished, he said, by a New Message of Redemption to be launched in the form of an encyclical as soon as he achieved his ambition and became Pope Hadrian vii! Almost all of his deeds were an af-

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fair of passion rather than of reason. He was more a child of emotion than of intellect. And, without his knowing it, the female portion of his personality engaged him in a life so similar to a Greek tragedy - which, once wound up, has only one course to run.

Only the male members of his family were ever mentioned in his work. Hadrian, it is true, was dedicated to his mother. However, if his father had lived beyond 1902, the dedication would have been to both of his parents. Yet there are some odd moments to be accounted for in his life. After he had left Christchurch in 1891, rumours said that he had asked for the hand of 14-year-old Cicely, the daughter of Gleeson White. Hardly two years later, other rumours in Aberdeen, Scotland, said that he had asked for the hand of the elderly Georgiana Hay, the ward of the two Hay boys he tutored. Also in Aberdeen, his one friend was a young medical student by the name of Cruickshank. Rolfe often visited his home, but always when his sister was present. If there had been any romantic thoughts of his part, they were certainly quashed by his abject poverty. This poses a psychological question. Did Rolfe don poverty's robes in order to be free of any romantic entanglement? Embracing the Franciscan Order, he took an oath to maintain poverty. This oath combined with the one for celibacy could have been combined in Nicholas Crabbe when the question of the married state of George Arthur Rose (Rolfe) is asked Crabbe (Rolfe), who answers that Rose is ‘running for Popedom’.

There is one other vital aspect of his life which has to be added. His near-fatal illness in 1910 was a combination of ‘bronchitis, pneumonia, heart,’ a result, he said, ‘of exposure & privation’. He could have included loneliness - in the light of a recent American study, which lists higher figures for people dying of heart disease among the socially isolated than the more average persons. He knew only too well of this one condition and his letters repeat it: ‘It is horrible, horrible, never having a friendly word from anyone’ - ‘You can't think how horrible it is not to have a soul to talk to’ - ‘I am lonely and unhappy’ - ‘I wonder why you are liked... and I abhorred.’ His material effects weighed equally with his social defects. Earlier in London, he declined an invitation to stay with some people because his clothes ‘all are in rags & tatters’ and he therefore could not ‘expose my nakedness in any decent house’. In Venice, he was an expatriot, not only from England, but from the sanity of social realism.

His mental faculties finally became unable to brook contradiction or even argument. His suggested ideas seemed ridiculous to others. After two months in Venice, he wrote to Pirie-Gordon about the possibility of keeping a shop - ‘Only,’ he said, ‘I firmly abhor from the notion that one might “begin small”.’ All children live within a secret world in which the details and shapes of their imagination appear strangely distorted to adults. Rolfe was a perpetual Peter Pan. In the dedication of a play written before Rolfe was born, the author wrote: ‘To those who, believing in the realisation of the highest aspirations of the human mind, claim for the drama the proud position of being one of the chief means by which that realisation is to be attained.’ (Sacha Guitry added: ‘Acting is a trick.’) Rolfe's life can be followed from event to dramatic event. Although his can be called a multitudinous mind, he was emotionally unstable. He was even ‘idle’ - in his impudent, crab-like isolation from society. Yet he survived by a sheer psychotic perserverance. His own view about Hadrian (or himself as its hero) were summed up in these words: ‘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’ - renewing his earlier words that ‘There is some impenetrable mail of ice about me’. In Hadrian he also cites: ‘Women? What do I know of women. Nothing.’ From

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his researching the Borgia history in The British Museum, 1899, he had found ‘some quaint directions for the Taming of the Shrew,’ which were printed in The Gentleman's Magazine, February 1906, and signed ‘Misogynist’.

With few exceptions of time (1891, 1895/1897, 1906/1908), his life was a cruel ordeal. He craved intimate human relationships, but of a sophisticated order. Mediocrity he could not stand. In his case, an hour with a friend was actually worse than no time at all; for that hour came to an end and he once more was plunged back into the depressive loneliness that clung to his soul for so many years. In Aberdeen, in the middle of the night, he would shake his head out of the window and shriek to the baleful blackness of night because of his loneliness. The continual human response in so many lives was denied him - through poverty and his own mental conflict. He sought the Ideal Friend, which he never found. This he could not understand, solely because he was never taught love - one critical aspect of human condition his parents never taught him. Nor could he appreciate the lack of fulfilling his earnest, insatiable appetite for at least one complete friendship. (This escaped him for most of his life - until 1913, nine months before he died.)

The Venice Letters were written for financial gain. He wrote a glowing description of a male brothel, as told to him by Amadeo. For this, Fox sent him a mere £ 6.25, which caused Rolfe to comment: ‘I'm afraid I made rather a failure of the Amadeo incident.’ In another letter, he spoke of his writing: ‘Tell me, do they make you see, & feel, & give you pleasure, really? I particularly want to know: because writing is my trade, & I am always seeking to find out my faults & weaknesses so that I may improve them. Writing's a poor sort of a job: but I want mine as perfect as I can.’ Although these resulted in little monetary return, the same thought about writing is prefixed to the opening of his Romance of Modern Venice: ‘My job is simply to write down the bare facts concerning my friends Nicholas and Gilda as they were told by them to me. If the result seems to be unusually categorical, that (of course) is my fault as a bad story-teller.’ In one way, the Venice Letters and The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole have to be given parallel consideration - as twin creations from Rolfe's pen - the enormous fountain pen given to him in 1905 by Waterman's and which exhausted itself in 1910 after writting 7,000,000 words.

A final word has to be said about ‘explaining’ the Venice Letters. They should never have been made cause for discussion.

Symons has pronounced them as ‘an account, step by step, of the destruction of a soul’. But how did Symons ever have the chance to even read them? Never divorcing his private life from his published words, Rolfe led ‘an open life’ - ‘all his goods were in the shop window’. He would append to his letters from time to time, especially the vitriolic ones: ‘This is all without prejudice and I reserve all rights in all my letters to you’ - rights for publication. (In English law, a statement which is made ‘without prejudice’ for the purpose of settling a dispute cannot be construed as an admission of liability or given in evidence.) Rolfe contended that posterity would be interested in every word he had written. ‘The true life of a man is in his letters’ (Cardinal Newman). Yet the Venice Letters are the exception to the rule. They never were meant for publication. They were written for no other eyes than Fox's. Everything in them was intended for one person and one person alone. The ‘sin’ of the letters was not with the writer, but with their addressee. The very first letter addressed to Fox ended: ‘I'll always answer & burn your letters. Do this with mine please.’ Fox never burned them - and even knew that they were for sale on the market before 1920. (Fox died in 1935.) That these letters were very personal was proved by the way Rolfe spoke of his poverty and the way he foun-

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dered in its wake. He was poor, without resources, but he was proud and never would have admitted to a public-at-large the most shameful circumstances of his privations in which he existed in 1909/1910. He never imagined that Fox would save the letters and even let other people read them. (This was seen in remarks by Llewelyn Powys just after Rolfe's death.) The full parade of essayists damning Rolfe because of the letters is unfair to him because Fox did not do what was asked of him - to burn them. Rolfe, now dead and unable to defend himself, is condemned - without witnesses or jury - solely on something he had written - intended for one person only. A photograph of Fox from 1909 depicts a man with dullard-like features. Rolfe met him briefly in Venice. He never even knew of his existence before 1909. Yet, for nearly a year, he poured out his soul - yearning for some sort of understanding, some sort of recognition - and probably from a person unable to comprehend the limitless complexities of Rolfe's mind. Through the straining loneliness of his every-day survival, his mental attitude was the reverse of his natural instincts. With his hand - even with his heart - he reached out for human contact. Fox - and the other readers of the letters - accepted them at ‘face value’ - accepted the fact that they were written by a man like them - sane. But the story of Rolfe's life is not the story of a sane person. His conduct betrays him. His very words betray him. Yet, within the structure of that most individual mind - so contrary to the world's sanity - there was the piteous cry of a lonely person seeking whom he may befriend - or who would ever look upon him. His life was a perpetual swaying along the tightrope of paranoia. He was accepted as a genius. He was brilliant but mentally deranged. He was a tame psychopath. In 1913, he wrote to a London literary agent and sent him photographs - one showing himself in the nude. This was all in an open business letter. What sane person would have done that?

The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole and the Venice Letters were both begun in Dr. van Someren's palazzo. His wife was an adventurous, open-minded, democratic American, daughter of the cosmopolitan Horace Fletcher. Harry Pirie-Gordon and his father represented the English gentry, but were quite levelheaded. For almost each day during seven months, Mrs. van Someren saw Rolfe. They had many long conversations in the evenings. She respected and admired this prim, austere man of knowledge with religious overtones. As part of the family for two years, 1906/1908, Rolfe lived with the Pirie-Gordons, a family who could find no praise too great for ‘Hadrian,’ their nickname for the nomadic author. Their sympathy helped to soothe his inner pains when he lost a lawsuit in 1907 and was ordered to pay £ 132 11s 4d. These people saw Rolfe on intimate terms. They were genuine friends and meant no harm to come to him. Yet, referring to Rolf's abusive letters from Venice, Harry was led ‘to think that his mind was affected’. And, with a reasonableness of thought, Mrs. van Someren was forced to conclude that Rolfe was ‘insane’.

‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.’ Sane or insane, these words of Thoreau may still apply to Rolfe.

The Venice Letters were intended to be read by only one other person. A decade earlier, Rolfe wrote something which was meant only for his very own eyes - and no one else's. He had been translating Homer into English when... ‘Just as I had written this word ἰχϑῦς [fish] at 11.30 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1900, in my lonely attick, came a quire of unaccompanied sweet singers in the street, singing Adeste fideles... venite adoremus. Ἰησοῦς Χριστός θεοῦ ΥΙός Σωτήρ’.