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)

Meeting Corvo and Weeks in Georgetown: A Guest Post by Fogus

  

Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, better known as Frederick Rolfe, or better yet still Baron Corvo, was a British writer, artist, photographer, and eccentric. Born in London in 1860 and passing away in Venice in 1913, he's discussed more frequently for his flamboyant lifestyle and often outrageous behavior than for his literary works. However, his undeniable talent as a writer continues to captivate readers. His flamboyance alone, nor even the strength of his writing, could fully explain the century-long fascination by a "Corvo Cult" with the minutest details of his life and works. This fascination, explored in depth by Robert Scoble in The Corvo Cult (2014), has attracted many intriguing figures, but few of them pursued their quests for the Corvine as obsessively as Donald Weeks (1921–2003).

Weeks penned the biography Corvo: Saint or Madman? (1972), an exasperating read in my experience. Donald Weeks (né Norman Donald Jankens) was also a writer and artist who worked in graphic design, and lived the first part of his life in Detroit, Michigan, before eventually moving to London to live out his final days as a researcher for Gale Publishing, eclectic writer for The Tragara Press, and bibliophile. Like many before and after him, Weeks' obsession with Rolfe germinated from a read of A.J.A. Symons' seminal experiment in biography, The Quest for Corvo (1934).

Recently, I had the good fortune to examine the “Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection” (Identifier: GTM-141102.1) held in the Georgetown University Booth Family Center for Special Collections located in Washington, DC. The collection included 4 document cases filled with various photographs, drawings, letters, and ephemera related almost entirely to Baron Corvo collected by Donald Weeks. Although Georgetown doesn't hold Weeks' entire collection related to Baron Corvo, the cases available offer a fascinating exhibit of a life-long obsession. Myself a bibliophile, I was immediately struck by the 2-page typewritten inventory that Weeks created, indexed by "Woolf numbers" — the entry numbers in Cecil Woolf's A Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe, of which I have the 2nd edition published in the Soho Bibliographies series (1972). It's unclear when Weeks created the inventory, but his collection continued to grow beyond the confines of the typewritten page onto a further 2-pages of hand-written items. While the collection at Georgetown held a few of the items listed in the inventory, a bulk of the material is ephemera related to various Corvine functions and Weeks' own correspondence to friends and family regarding his quests.

I'll avoid going into exquisite detail about the contents of the collection in this post, but will instead briefly describe a couple items of particular interest. First, the collection contained an announcement and order form dated in 1967 for a Victim Press publication entitled Corvo's Venice by Victor Hall, having an introduction by Timothy d'Arch Smith, priced at $6 plus $0.25 postage. The marketing copy states that the book had three parts: a sequence of captioned prints, or sketches from photographs by Corvo of Venice, followed by a reprinting of the prose piece "Venetian Courtesy", and concluded by 16 photographs of Corvo's place of death in October 1913 and relevant environs near the Palazo Marcello, Venice. 

 

 

I was unable to find much information about this publication beyond this announcement, but I'm struck by the macabre possibilities in the concluding section of the book. In that same macabre spirit, also in the collection is a hand-drawn map by Weeks of San Michele Island, Rolfe's final burial site. The drawing is made for maximum utility for visitors and belies the gravity of that monument to human mortality. The scrawled rectangular box containing the letter "A" does little to express the foreboding "boat landing" used to receive visitors to the small island crypt. As a matter of practical course, Weeks recommends that visitors present the island attendants with a piece of paper having only the name "ROLFE, F W" rather than attempting to ask after the burial site's location in broken Italian. Useful advice indeed!

The collection is fascinating and it compelled me to spend numerous days in the Georgetown reading room, despite the beautifully sunny December weather in DC. There are many more items of interest to Corvines and bibliophiles, but I'll defer further explorations for another day.

(Fogus)

THE CORVO CULT by Robert Scoble

Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled (for a time) "Baron Corvo," lived from 1860 to 1913 and published a  handful of unusual books that did not sell well but which found some fervid devotees. Aspects of his life and experiences frequently tower over his literary work. And over the years there have been three full-length biographies concentrating more on the man than on his writings--the first being A.J.A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo (1934), an "experiment in biography" (as its subtitle states) which is more a detective-story quest for information than a straightforward biography.  This first biography was followed by Donald Weeks's Corvo: Saint or Madman? (1971) and Miriam J. Benkovitz's Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (1977). Last year, Strange Attractor Press published Robert Scoble's Raven: The Turbulent World of Baron Corvo (2013), which is not a full biography but a collection of fifteen essays on various aspects of Corvo's life.

Now, also from Strange Attractor Press, comes Robert Scoble's The Corvo Cult: The History of an Obsession (2014), which tells the story of Rolfe and his followers from the very beginning to the present. A wonderful volume that fills in the blanks and backgrounds of the earliest Corvines to those of the present day. These people include Hugh Benson, the publishers John Lane and Grant Richards, all three biographers, as well as significant associates such as publisher and bibliographer Cecil Woolf, Brocard Sewell, and many others.  It wouldn't have occurred to me beforehand that this was a book we need, but very quickly after I started reading it I realized how wonderfully it pulls together all the threads of previous interest in Corvo, and puts them in a fascinating context.  I'd call it a thoroughly brilliant book, save for some serious missteps at the beginning of the final chapter, "The Anatomy of a Cult," which attempts to generalize about literary cults and reputations. (Scoble is excellent with details, but not with erratically defined generalizations.)

Basically this book is the history of a small elite literary fandom. I expect we'll see more books like this in the future.