Soiled Priest

By Mayo Mohs

FREDERICK ROLFE: BARON CORVO by MIRIAM J.BENKOVITZ 332 pages. Putnam. $10.95.

"You call me mad, rash, incorrigible, proud, irreconcilable, deluded and all the rest," Frederick William Rolfe once wrote to a critic. "But you must allow me to lead my life upon that higher and uncrowded plane where supernatural influences work unchecked . .. Have you not realized yet that it is not an ordinary, but an extraordinary man with whom you have to deal?"

Extraterrestrial was more like it.

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 through it with a satanic intensity.

Frederick may indeed have been afflicted with genius. Born in 1860 to a piano-manufacturing family, he quit school at the age of 14--but was teaching by the time he was 18. In his 20s and 30s, he pursued painting and photography with a dilettante's passion. Rolfe did not commit himself to serious writing until he was almost 40. The work barely bought dinner: his Chronicles of the House of Borgia was composed on a paltry advance of -L- 1 per week.

After his conversion to Catholicism at the age of 25, Rolfe nourished a grand obsession: to become a Roman Catholic priest. But he was expelled from two seminaries, one in Britain, one in Rome, where he continued to paint and photograph, cavalierly charging materials to the bishops who sponsored him. His superiors may have detected an even more distressing strain. Rolfe was in the habit of employing pen, camera and oils to attract young men. The results could be artful sublimations--poems or paintings exalting saintly martyrs. But when he was candid, as in his "Ballade of Boys Bathing" ("Wondrous limbs ... lithe round arms"), the poet made his role as a gay Humbert Humbert painfully obvious.

Biographer Benkovitz suggests that he would have been a 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.

Yet for all the self-pity and bitterness, Baron Corvo possessed animal magnetism as well as remarkable resilience. He could eke out a season on an open boat in the Venice lagoon, then bounce back to a life of high style.

In his last year, Rolfe borrowed enough to buy a dazzling gondola, draped in leopard and lynx skins, which he ostentatiously poled through the canals.

In return, the gondolier was supposed to devote himself to writing. No volumes appeared. In the fall of 1913, his sponsors gone and his vessel ship wrecked, still promising great projects, Rolfe died alone in his Venice flat.

The books that followed were not his.

But they were -- and are -- about him.

Disappointed in earthly endeavors, this supreme egotist has won his measure of celebrity after all.

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