Word: corvo
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This is not the tone in which an author normally begs his publisher for a handout. But Daniel Skipton is no normal author. Pamela Hansford Johnson has modeled him on that unholy terror Frederick William Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo," who was recently reintroduced to U.S. readers in his previously unpublished novel Nicholas Crabbe (TIME, Feb. 2). Rolfe bit every hand that fed him and died penniless in Venice in 1913. Novelist Johnson has changed his name and shifted time and place to modern Bruges in Belgium, but she has kept intact his characteristics. Skipton boasts a Corvo-like title: Bulgarian...
NICHOLAS CRABBE (245 pp.) -Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo) -New Directions...
...Crabbe has lain for almost half a century in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Now exhumed for first publication, the novel fulfills the pungent promise hinted by literary investigators who have concerned themselves with the strange case of its author, Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo...
Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, was born in 1860 with (it would appear) a hole in his head. It was by no means the usual cranial gap of infancy but, according to those who had felt it, a "perceptible hole." Though markedly intelligent, he never caught hold at school. He quit at 15 and bounced about such places as Oxford, probably on allowance from his father, a piano manufacturer. At 26, after taking a few places as schoolmaster, he was converted to Roman Catholicism and entered preparation for the priesthood...
...rich repertory of ecclesiastical jokes, ran up bills with a tailor, was expelled again as "lacking vocation." Convinced he had been dealt foul, Rolfe cursed the Church and went on cursing it energetically for the rest of his life-while remaining a Catholic. He borrowed a title, Baron Corvo, took it to Scotland and began to dine out in great pretension. The canny Scots, however, would not con. Soon he was back on his rent, and the landlord meant business. "They entered the Baron's bedroom," ran an account in the Aberdeen Free Press, "and the Baron was given...