Corvo's Appendix III - A Guest Post by Fogus

While perusing my pipe-leaf-haunted 1931 Modern Library edition of A History of the Borgias, I came across a footnote about the tribulations surrounding Baron Corvo’s original manuscript and its ill-fated Appendix III:

The suppressed “Appendix III on a suggested Criterion of the Credibility of Historians” was a vivid and virulent impeachment of five historians—Pontano, Infessura, Guicciardini, Varchi, and John Addington Symonds—in the matter of admitting the evidence of moral turpitude. Every copy save one was destroyed by a cautious publisher.

The footnote hopelessly compelled me to search for this elusive Appendix III, and a preliminary investigation quickly dispelled the convenient legend of a lone surviving copy. The second edition of Cecil Woolf’s A Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (1972) states that the appendix was printed and numbered but suppressed before publication. Woolf says that the appendix was destroyed save for a few copies that circulated as unbound proof sheets of nine leaves and in three bound proofs. I found a listing in the Autumn 2014 Elysium Books catalog for a 1901 first edition proof from Grant Richards with the Appendix III bound into the book. That copy passed from Richards to Shane Leslie, through A.J.A. Symons and then to Donald Weeks, who owned it until his death in 2004 after which it was sold in auction in 2014. Woolf’s bibliography states that Weeks also owned the proof sheets of the appendix with annotations in Corvo’s hand, but it’s not clear where those leaves are today. A second bound proof passed from Richards to Oliver Brett Esher and was once held in the Martyr Worthy collection, Columbia University. Sadly, it’s not clear if that collection still holds that proof. The third bound proof appears to still be in the Bodleian Library’s special collections at Weston Library, Oxford.

Despite finding locations for the bound proofs, I still found myself in the soup. Given my present circumstances, Oxford and Columbia might as well be on the moon. However, after digging a bit further I came across a reference to P.H. Muir’s Points: Second Series 1866-1934 (1934) which is a collection of disparate bibliographic materials for a wide range of authors. Inside I found a bibliography of Rolfe’s works containing more information about the suppressed appendix, including a facsimile of the first page having deliciously Corvine passages such as: ‘Great men in the world’s history, chiefly men of intellect and men of sovereign rank, have been its victims. At one time or another time, they inadvertently have trodden upon some human worm; and the worm has turned, and stung them.’ The quote starts a scathing attack on the credibility of the aforementioned historians, but it’s difficult to garner the trust of the attack in this singular page. Finding this did nothing but make me yearn for more.

Eventually, my search led me to a revised version of the appendix published as "Suggestion for a Criterion of the Credibility of Certain Historians" in volume 160, issue 4 of the Westminster Review (Oct 1903, pp 402-414). Corvo’s critique starts by stating that claims of homosexuality by the aforementioned historians against Pope Sixtus IV were based on vagueries like “ut fertur vulgo” (as is commonly reported) and “ut dicunt quidam” (as some say) rather than on testimony from credible witnesses. Corvo then takes great pains to refute the accusations against Sixtus IV of favoring his “pages of the bed-chamber” by examining a long list of the people who were promoted. By enumerating proof of age and station for each, Corvo attempted to disprove the accusation that Sixtus rewarded his “puelli delicati.” Corvo then spends numerous paragraphs relitigating the charge of lustful motivation for the promotion of family members to a lesser charge of common nepotism. Finally, he tackles the accusation that Sixtus IV promoted his supposedly base-born young valet Giangiacomo Sclafenati to cardinal. Corvo masterfully uses the historical record to show that Sclafenati was not base-born, nor young when he was promoted, and indeed that he was not even a valet. In short, the essay was clearly an Edwardian-era manifestation of Brandolini's law.

From a modern perspective, Corvo’s linguistic games around the homosexuality charges seem needlessly baroque, but I found that the byzantine use of Latin served two purposes. First, since the original accusations often were in Latin, Corvo’s use serves to give the essay an air of academic precision. Second, Latin formulations like “puerorum amator et sodomita fuit” serve as a linguistic mechanism to navigate fraught taboos of the time. Corvo directly attacks the way that the historian Symonds used “mollific suggestion” and euphemisms to distance the accusations from historical fact. By using the original Latin accusations, Corvo deftly avoids euphemism by using learned distancing instead. In the cases where he felt an absolute requirement for obfuscation he turned to Greek spellings of certain terms that were “too gross” to print outright.

If such veiled utterances were unprintable, then Corvo's appendix, in light of its inevitable suppression, may hint at a form of courageousness on his part. However, I'll try to avoid conjuring virtues that can't be proved, and instead express my admiration for his fiery attempt to contest calumnies typical of the "weapon with which spite is wont to stab the back of scorn." Indeed, the accusations and his defense must have struck very close to home for him and his linguistic devices in the essay are diagnostic of the age in which it was published and indeed the author himself.

(Fogus) 

Derek Raymond and 'The Black Novel': A Guest Post by Fogus

The British crime writer Derek Raymond, best known for his bleak "Factory" novels, coined the term "Black Novel" in his autobiography The Hidden Files (1999) which describes a challenging strain of fiction. For Raymond, Black Novels are not instances of crime fiction (though many are) but instead a mode of story-telling fusing depictions of systemic rot and brutality with social critique. At their core, they necessarily immerse the reader in the dark side of humanity, and serve as lenses to view the human condition. Black Novels are almost always brutal, but are always compassionate and insist on an empathetic stance towards characters who live outside of the margins of respectability.

The attributes of the Black Novel are four-fold:

- A street-level focus capturing life's raw texture

- Characters' inner depths brought to the forefront

- Social critique woven into depictions of crime, poverty, and oppression

- Written in the language of the street

Raymond places his own works alongside a Black Novel lineage that, despite their strict definition, offer a surprising amount of room for nuance in the way that they focus their societal lenses.

Unsurprisingly, the Factory series fulfills the Black Novel ethos but reader beware, the novels are not for the squeamish. Set against the backdrop of Thatcher-era Britain, they follow an unnamed Detective Sergeant who prowls Fisher-esque dank locales. Violence is ever-present and treated as the stark reality of lives beset by poverty, addiction, and abuse. Through the detective’s grim investigations, Raymond captures the language of the street in all its rawness, giving voice to the disaffected while maintaining a grim and bitter dark-humor throughout. Despite the brutality, the Detective leverages a talent for seeing victims and perpetrators as fully human to administer a meager portion of justice. Raymond crafts a pitiless but empathetic record of social collapse, showing how crime fiction can confront systemic rot while plumbing the depths of empathy. Raymond's Factory series is the purest and most intense examples of the Black Novel, and while I enjoyed them, I now find his expanded list more fascinating still.

The Black Novels listed in Raymond's autobiography form a constellation of works that fulfill the attributes he outlined in vastly different ways. First, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) introduces the wisecracking detective Marlowe in a Los Angeles populated by despicable characters who cross and double-cross each other at every turn. The Big Sleep is probably the most congruous ancestor to the Factory series and is clearly a huge influence on Raymond. Moreover, George Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970) captures the fatalism of working-class criminals that ritualistically engage in power-plays for fleeting gain. The character Eddie Coyle is as Factory-like a criminal as could be written, and his analogue is found throughout the Factory novels. 

Similarly, Charles Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) attempts to explore the gothic underside of Victorian respectability in its unfinished form. While it's unclear how the novel would have progressed had Dickens lived to complete it, it's clear that John Jasper would have felt at home in a Factory novel. The last pure Factory-esque precursor is the titular character in Emile Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1866). The novel explores bourgeois respectability tainted by infidelity and betrayal, and inevitably spirals toward a ruthlessly macabre ending. While the novel lacks any supernatural elements, some ghastly hallucinations are used to great effect in the story and adopted by Raymond in his posthumously published pre-Factory novel Nightmare in the Street.

Moving further afield, George Orwell's Coming Up for Air (1939) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) both dissect the grinding effects of class, money, futility, and thwarted aspiration. Bitter, acerbic humor saturates both novels and hons a sharp edge to the former's theme of nostalgia and the latter's 1930's prefiguration of "turn on, tune in, drop out." On the other hand, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry and Albert Camus' The Stranger both depict violence in an uncannily poetic, detached fashion. This detachment is used to great effect in Raymond's Factory novels, albeit ratcheted up to even more extremes. 

Next, Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust (1939) follows a young artist as he navigates a Depression-era Hollywood steeped in affectation and spectacle. While Raymond's novels use street denizens as its tools of social critique, West's novel targets the "American Dream" by focusing its lens onto the Hollywood fringe. Finally, Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925) absurdly depicts the crushing banality of bureaucratic inscrutability. Kafka (I would add Borges and Ligotti also) was a master of what I would call contraptional fiction which is a technique where a writer builds an absurd conceptual machine in their stories, and runs their characters through it in a way that adheres to the machine's internal logic. The Factory novels operate in a similar way by building a grotesque meat-grinder for its poor characters.

Since finding Raymond's description of the Black Novel I've tried to find other examples of the sub-genre that Raymond didn't list, but have met with little success. However, one that stands out so far is Horace McCoy's novel They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935). The story follows an economically strapped couple participating in a Depression-era dance marathon. The sardonic closing line echoed in the book's title left me breathless and would have fit hand in glove with Factory novel dialogue. The search for more Black Novels continues, but if Derek Raymond was right the world will always provide the raw material for them. Indubitably there are more out there waiting to be found and more waiting to be written.

(Fogus)

On 'Baron Corvo: The Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived': A Guest Post by Fogus

I’ve previously written about the Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection at Georgetown University, originally owned by the publishing house and preservation society Boo-Hooray, founded by Swedish-born Johan Kugelberg in 2010. Because of this provenance, materials and references from Boo-Hooray feature prominently in the collection. Among its rarities is a slight booklet by Kugelberg himself titled Baron Corvo, the Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived. Below, I’ll offer a brief account of this curious artifact.

First, let me address the title, which is the literary equivalent to “click-bait.” That said, there’s a deeper meaning to the predicate nominative in the title. Almost certainly, if we held a vote for someone better exemplifying its colloquial usage, then Baron Corvo would certainly place far below any number of people populating even modern headlines. Rather, Kugelberg uses a meaning more in line with Georges Bataille’s idea of The Solar Anus, which to risk oversimplification, is a surrealist metaphor for cosmic inevitability. It’s easy to view Baron Corvo as merely a tragic eccentric (he was), but Kugelberg paints a picture of him as someone whose vitality burned so hot that it could only ever destroy and then burn itself out.

In a bit of literary flair, Kugelberg likens Baron Corvo to a Dickensian figure seen through the lens of Lautréamont: larger than life, exaggerated, darkly fascinating, and grotesque. An example of Corvo playing as such a character is revealed in the story behind the book Hadrian the Seventh. The work isn’t merely a novel, but instead serves as a revenge fantasy where a man suspiciously like Corvo himself becomes Pope and through force of will attempts to mold the Catholic Church in his own image. Picturing Corvo slumped over his writing desk furiously scrawling his lurid and lovely rancor onto the page is sardonic and saturnine all at once. I personally find these glimpses beyond the veil, where the novel is the man and vise-versa utterly compelling when reading Corvo and Kugelberg captures this intrigue masterfully.

Indeed, in the tempest that was his life, Baron Corvo himself became a machine that turned failures and grudges into fiction. Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs. Every one of Corvo’s novels are fundamentally autobiographical, sometimes pathetic, sometimes brilliant, but they are always unmistakably Corvine. I can’t help but find this side of Corvo haunting. Years ago I watched a BBC Two documentary on the life of Mervyn Peake and I have since been haunted by the utterly Peakian life that the author lived. Certainly there are innumerable authors who wrote their own experiences into their works, but I suspect that there are very few authors who lived such fictionalized existences as Peake and Corvo, both of whom seemed to inhabit their own narrative universes.

Moreover, the booklet briefly describes (nearly to the point of libel) the picaresque life that Baron Corvo lived: drifting from job to job, bouncing from one benefactor to another, perpetually on the move, and always making very bad decisions along the way. Corvo had a unique talent for the English language, but that ability was dwarfed by his truly epic talent at burning bridges. People would help him, and he’d inevitably turn on them. He perpetually desired patrons, but was even more driven by a hatred for being patronized. He was his own worst enemy, always and without fail. Baron Corvo never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, nor did he ever fail to fail in spectacular ways. In A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, the reader quickly understands that every critical friendship and benefaction was inescapably burdened by the weight of Corvo’s imminent unravelling. That said, the Baron’s betrayals and blow-ups weren’t accidents but instead they were the way he functioned at the deepest level of his being, and many readers find it very difficult to look away.

Baron Corvo was a genius, a crank, a con, and a visionary all at once. He wrecked his life at every turn, but unlike most who go down in flames, he turned the ashes into art. Kugelberg’s booklet is the best elucidation of the paradox at the heart of the Corvo cult, describing a man who was repellent and objectionable while simultaneously magnetic and irresistible, who continues to fascinate more than a century after his death.

(Fogus)