Some years ago, while walking dogs in Park Slope, I came across a pile of books that someone had left out on the street to give away--a wonderful local tradition of which I have availed myself as both donor and recipient. On this occasion I came across a volume called The Quest for Corvo which seemed a good one to take home. When I began it was hard for me to tell if it was a fictional biography or an actual one, and as the subject, Baron Corvo, was a person of some mystery, I went along for the ride blindfolded and let his story unfold without the aid of an internet search. Corvo, it turns out, was real--an author who had written a novel titled Hadrian the Seventh, which had attained some notoriety in its day. "Baron Corvo" was born Federick Rolfe, and either acquired the title Baron legitimately from an Italian benefactor of some royalty or made it up entirely. The biography is written like a detective story, with the biographer inserted as a character, a literary sleuth. While this approach has been replicated since, at the time it was new and quite different. When I finished I felt the need to know more about Corvo, most especially the novel which had so interested the biographer--A.J.A. Symons, whose off-beat biography revitalized interest in Hadrian such that it was easy for me to acquire the book online more than a hundred years after it first appeared.
Hadrian the Seventh is an unlikely tale of a low-born, fastidious, defrocked priest who is elevated to Pope. It is strange and wonderful, and Hadrian has many ideas about how to run the papacy that are far outside the norms. The new British Pope is highly intellectual, dispassionate to a fault, and persnickety to the point of hilarity. The novel is a tour de force, if a bit claustrophobic, and I could see why it was a minor hit in its day and fell out of favor subsequently. The author employs a specialized brand of English that is, at times, difficult to make one's way through but also tickles the fancy of the true linguaphile. After completing the book I found myself wanting to know more about Corvo’s biographer and why he was so infatuated with his subject. Fortunately for me there was a third book, A.J.A. Symons, His Life & Speculations, written by his brother, Julian Symons, himself a mystery and crime writer of some note. This book tells the story of a man of supreme talent who chose to spend it chasing after schemes that would make him his fortune as well as partaking of fine wine, food and company, while ignoring his true ambitions. He supposed, perhaps as we all do, “time enough for that”, as he spent years not fully pursuing his literary interests--e.g. a seminal biography of Oscar Wilde had only a handful of chapters written at the time of Symons' death. As it turns out he and Corvo both had shortened lifespans, failing to accomplish their major goals, while for each of them, the completion of a brilliant book, gave a hint of what went missing when they died before their times. There is a fourth book I could track down, Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from his Friends, but to be frank, his life does not interest me enough, it doesn’t have the tragic element that Corvo and A.J.A. Symons possessed, nor the extreme manner of living—he lived to be eighty--and while I say, “good for him” for being a more consistent writer, living in a reasonable manner and to a ripe old age, he simply doesn’t hold my attention as do his brother and the Baron.
If you’ve gotten this far into my wordy post, I would say that you are a candidate for one, two or all three of these volumes. I commend them to you without reserve, but I would note that the correct order in which to read them is simply chronological to when they were published: Hadrian, Corvo and then Symons. May your immersion in these lives be as rewarding as my own exploration of this shining triptych.
