Stories Toto Told Me (Valancourt Classics) by Barón Corvo, Frederick Rolfe

INTRODUCTION

    Frederick William Rolfe , who sometimes expanded his name to Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe and often wrote as Baron Corvo, was born on 22 July 1860 in London. Although he had obviously developed a strong interest in learning in his youth, he left school early in his teens. Having converted to Roman Catholicism, he eked out a living as an artist, a photographer, even a school teacher.
      In 1880 he published the poetry chapbook Tarcissus and began writing to add to his income. Six stories by Corvo narrated primarily in the voice of an Italian servant boy were published in the literary magazine The Yellow Book . The magazine became a flashpoint of fin de siècle decadence, and publication in this organ brought with it a good deal of visibility, leading in 1898 to publication of the stories as the book Stories Toto Told Me reprinted here. These stories were revised and twenty-four were added to make In His Own Image , which appeared in 1901 . In Stories Toto Told Me , the primary narrator of the stories, simultaneously naïve and precocious, is an idealized companion for the bachelor Englishman who employs him. The boy is charming and loquacious with an anecdote for all occasions.
      But writing never provided a regular income, and Rolfe’s (or Corvo’s) real desire was ordination. When his vocation was questioned—apparently because of his perceived homosexual sensibility—he took a twenty-year vow of chastity. His obsession with Roman Catholicism is clear in a group of works begun at this time. These works show the distinctive characteristics of a Corvine prose style with self-consciously arcane vocabulary and a focus on Renaissance historical subjects. The works also show an insistence on the good works of the notorious Borgia family. The 1901 book Chronicles of the House of Borgia presents sympathetic portraits of Pope Alexander VI, of Lucretia, and of Cesare (whose Borgia paternity Corvo perversely doubts). There is evidence of extensive historical research in this work although the rehabilitation of the Borgias has not won many converts. A related novel is the 1905 Don Tarquinio: A Kataleptic Phantasmatic Romance , a careful reconstruction of one day in the life of a condottiere (or soldier of fortune). A similar novel written in prose even more baroque is Don Renato: An Ideal Content (printed in 1909 but not released for sale until 1963 ).
      Corvo also tried collaboration during this period. Hubert’s Arthur with C. H. C. Pirie-Gordon was completed although not published until 1935 . It is an imagined life of Arthur, Duke of Brittany, had he escaped death at the hands of King John. Arthur becomes a crusader, marries the heiress of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and returns to fight for the English crown in trial by combat with John’s son, his historical successor King Henry III. Another collaboration with Pirie-Gordon is The Weird of the Wanderer ( 1912 ), a tale of reincarnation.
      At the end of the term of self-abnegation represented by the vow of chastity, Corvo proved to his own satisfaction his worthiness of ordination, but his failure to be ordained in fact had two consequences. One was personal. He accepted his sexual feelings. The second was that he developed a new writing style, the first published fruit of which was the autobiographical masterpiece Hadrian the Seventh ( 1904 ). This is the inaugural use of the authorial name Fr. Rolfe, perhaps as an act self-ordination. The prose is less baroque than in his historical works of this period and consequently more accessible. It is also satirical. He tells his own story with the same romantic turn as used in the tale of Arthur, Duke of Brittany. In the novel Hadrian the Seventh , George Rose, an expelled seminarian whose poverty and other tribulations rebuke the Catholic Church for failure to recognize a genuine vocation, is elected Pope as a compromise choice in a deadlocked Papal election. As Pope, Hadrian VII ends the