Paranoid Pope

HADRIAN THE SEVENTH (350 pp.)--Frederick Rolfe--Knopf ($3.50).

D. H. Lawrence said of it: "If it is the book of a demon, as ... contemporaries said, it is the book of a man demon, not of a mere poseur. And if some of it is caviar, at least it came out of the belly of a live fish." This week, for the first time in 27 years, one of the major literary curiosities of modern times was reissued on the U.S. literary counter. Hadrian the Seventh might seem caviar to some, to others only a mess of purple eggs laid by a very odd fish indeed. To all, however, it offers one of the wildest sights ever flashed on the brainpan of a madman, a kind of interior cinema of a grand delusion. The author's life is a necessary prologue to the book--and its inevitable epilogue.

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.

One day during the refectory silence, the pale, fastidious young novice burst out: "Oh, what lovely legs!" He referred, as he later told his superior, to the legs of an insect approaching his soup plate, but the fathers took a dark view of the matter. After further exposure to Rolfe's eccentricities, the fathers expelled him.

He took to a life of cadge-as-cadge-can until he got a second chance at Orders in the Scots College in Rome. There he sported a 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 ten minutes to dress and clear out . . .

He seized hold of the iron bedstead and clung for dear life. He was dragged forth, wearing only his pyjamas . . . His clothing was thrown after him." A Point for Jesuits. After this disaster, Rolfe tried to have himself committed to an insane asylum, then fled to London and buried himself in surly isolation, getting queerer by the minute. He always contended that he could speak cat lan guage, and he proved it by jabbering in the moonlight in such a way that the local tabbies came by dozens and prowled between his legs. He wore a ring with a sharp spur in the bezel, for use in case the Jesuits should attempt to ab duct him. He trusted no man and insulted all, yet the least imagined slight could ruin a week for him. To conceal his sensitivity, he cultivated a poker face.

Once, when an angry acquaintance broke a maulstick over his head, Rolfe did not even bat an eye.

At this point Rolfe passed himself off as a painter of religious subjects, and soon had a commission to decorate a shrine at Holywell. With due care he managed to prolong the work for more than two years. Finally the priest had to show him the door. Furious, Rolfe claimed he had been cheated, joined the staff of a local magazine and filled its columns with vituperations against the priest. What he couldn't get into the paper he put in poison-pen letters that flooded the community. The paper folded; Rolfe went back to London.

Approaching middle age and permanently cased in a paranoid "mail of ice," Frederick Rolfe somehow found the strength to begin a new career as a writer.

Astonishingly, he sold six Stories Toto Told Me to the Yellow Book, a quarterly.

Then he published a history of the Borgias that held the critics fascinated in the gothic embrace of its style. Then, in 1904, he wrote Hadrian.

Pope by Fluke. Rolfe's masterpiece is, first of all, his biography. Almost every event of his life, every least triumph and shame, is described in it somewhere as an event in the life of his hero, George Arthur Rose. It is also a story of the life he longed for. He longed, in a word, to be Pope, and Pope his hero becomes by a marvelous fluke of history that Rolfe manages to make almost credible--and supremely exciting.

A deadlock is reached in the election of a Pope. A British cardinal, between sessions, is mulling over the case of George Arthur Rose, a divinity student expelled some 20 years earlier. Suddenly the cardinal realizes that a great injustice has been done to a man of extraordinary spiritual gifts. His mind flashes a connection between the problem of Rose and the problem of the papacy. As a last resort, he suggests that, if a Pope cannot be found within the priesthood, why not without? The cardinals are struck by the suggestion. An investigation is made. Rose is found worthy and is elected.

Instantly he knows what he must do.

Week by week, with master strokes of theology and diplomacy, he reforms the Church. He shears away the last of her temporal power, sells the treasures of the Vatican. He smashes the power of the Jesuits. He reorganizes the Church in England. He raises up a score of vigorous young cardinals. He issues brilliant epistles. He strikes up a close friendship with Kaiser Wilhelm II. He deals mighty blows of policy against the revolutionaries who have taken over France and Russia. At last he is called as supreme arbitrator over a world conference. By his decree, France and Russia are destroyed, and the world is divided between Germany, Italy, Japan, England and the U.S.

For all its blue-eyed guesswork, the story of Hadrian's adventures in the Vatican carries a kind of unshakable conviction. Nor is it all a vision: Rolfe is well aware of the humor of his hero's situation, and plays it often for laughs and even for smiles. Yet when the Pope at last dies, felled by an assassin, the moment is quite as high and tragic as the language Rolfe renders it in.

"The Apostle raised himself a little, supported by imperial hands. How bright the sunlight was, on the warm grey stones, on the ripe Roman skins, on vermilion and lavender and blue and ermine and green and gold, on the indecent grotesque blackness of two blotches, on apostolic whiteness and the rose of blood." After Hadrian, Rolfe managed to write a vivid small novel, Don Tarquinio, but then financial troubles closed him round.

In 1908 he went with a friend (who paid) to Venice, and stayed on there at the ex pense ' of one and another acquaintance for five years. When money was low, he slept in open boats and fought off the big wharf rats. When it was high, he spent it crazily, keeping his own gondola and dyeing his hair red. By fits and starts, he completed another novel, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. Without cease he wrote venomous letters to all his old ac quaintances demanding support. To one, in 1913, he wrote pathetically in a sudden break of tone: "I am so awfully lonely.

And tired. Is there no chance of setting me straight?" He died the next month.

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