Word: corvo
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FREDERICK ROLFE: BARON CORVO by MIRIAM J.BENKOVITZ 332 pages. Putnam...
Apart from Hadrian the Seventh, a bitingly satirical novel about a destitute writer who becomes Pope, the books of Frederick Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, are little read. But his life as self-styled genius and unrepentant poseur continues to tantalize. In the 1930s, two decades after Rolfe's death, A.J.A. Symons made him the subject of a celebrated literary whodunit. The Quest for Corvo. In 1971, Donald Weeks wrote a more conventional biography, Corvo. Miriam Benkovitz, an English professor at Skidmore College, offers a new and exhaustive study. Her style is academic and sometimes awkward, but the Baron radiates...
...soiled priest in any event. As Rolfe said throughout his life, he found "the Faith comfortable and the Faithful intolerable." That he survived at all seems due to his unearthly genius as a con man. Writing from Italy, he styled himself the Rev. Rolfe; in England, he was Baron Corvo, grandson of an Italian countess. He continually sold his talent to benefactors, pledging pictures and books that rarely materialized...
...ball as a raven and voiding a pint of whitewash from his tail in front of the Prince of Wales. He converted to Roman Catholicism and, in pursuit of holy orders, got himself expelled from two different seminaries for "lack of vocation." He then assumed the bogus title Baron Corvo and tried his loser's hand at painting, photography, journalism and schoolteaching - ending his days in Venice as a mincing homosexual with a monumental case of paranoia...
...novel Hadrian VII, an account of how a once-rejected candidate for the priesthood was astonishingly elected Pope out of a clear blue Roman sky. Now Hadrian has been skillfully dramatized by Peter Luke, who also relies on A.J.A. Symons' biography of Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo. The result is an effulgent theatrical success in a wan London dramatic season...