Word: corvo
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Frederick William Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, was one of the more freakishly talented eccentrics of English letters. A homosexual, a paranoiac, a scoundrel, a petty blackmailer and a fake, he was constantly in debt, sponged on his friends, excoriated his enemies and died in 1913 in self-imposed exile in Venice. At 26 he converted to Roman Catholicism and trained for the priesthood. Twice dismissed from seminaries, he retained a lifelong conviction of his priestly vocation...
...earliest literary critics, handsome Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, whose books, largely about marriage and the private worlds of modern people, are less ambitious but far better crafted than her husband's; her most recent: The Unspeakable Skipton, a witty, waspish caricature of the famed adventurer, "Baron Corvo." The Snows share a ten-room London flat and a 6½-year-old son. Snow likes to be in the worldly swim and throws parties conspicuously free of fellow novelists. Sir Charles is a shade stuffy about most 20th century authors; of another practicing panoramist, Lawrence Durrell, he says...
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terror Frederick William Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo," who was recently reintroduced to U.S. readers in his previously unpublished novel Nicholas Crabbe (TIME, Feb. 2).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...