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

diplomatic stalemate with Italy over the occupation of the Papal States and resolves the other European antagonisms that were to lead to World War I only a decade after the book was published. Hadrian VII dies suddenly at the hand of an anarchist, a martyr to the success of his political insight and diplomacy.
      Corvo (as we may continue to call him) returned to Italy and settled in Venice in 1908 , never to leave. Friends he came to distrust tried to do what they could to pay his passage home and settle his debts, but he turned on everyone who came to his aid. The prose of the works completed in the Venice years is like the prose of Hadrian but progressively more satirical as Corvo became progressively more paranoiac. The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole: A Romance of Modern Venice (published 1934 ) and Nicholas Crabbe; or, The One and the Many (published 1958 ) feature caricatures of everyone who had ever crossed his path, including the expatriates who gave him shelter after he was reduced to sleeping in a gondola. The satirical portraits may have interfered with the publishability of these late works, but a greater problem was the sexual content. Some early commentators were troubled by the celebration of the attractions of adolescent boys in the Toto stories. But the celebration of decadent androgyny in turn-of-the-century Venice was more troubling in the works of this late period although they are less explicit than the Venice Letters to Charles Masson Fox (published 1974 ) composed at the same time. Much more openly than the stories of a decade earlier, these last two novels combine sensuality with Corvo’s control of the stylistic flourishes in his Renaissance novels, and, as a result, these last novels have an interest for contemporary readers now that time has both dimmed awareness of the targets of satire and forestalled shock about content.
      Fr. Rolfe, Baron Corvo died 23 October 1913 in Venice. Corvo has a considerable cult following, perhaps traceable to the 1934 A. J. A. Symons biography The Quest for Corvo . Corvo’s curious subject matter and checkered publication history have also given his works a special value to collectors. A major stylist of fin-de-siècle decadence, Corvo fueled his writing career with personal vendetta but also found for himself the perfect subject matter with which to create the distinctive characteristics of all three incarnations of Corvine prose.
      Stories Toto Told Me includes six early stories essentially narrated in the words of the servant boy Toto. Stories I, II, and III are narrated directly by Toto to his Master. Stories IV, V, and VI have a filtering frame narration by the Master, V and VI perhaps to justify the technical theological knowledge that these stories include. The narrative transitions of Story VI, “About One Way in Which Christians Love One Another,” include a number of naturalistic representations of oral composition. At one point Toto backtracks to supply missing detail, saying, “Now I ought to have told you this,” and afterwards returns to the main narrative, saying, “Now I must go to another part of the story.” The frame narration serves a different purpose in Story IV, “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro,” than in Stories V and VI. The tale of Beatrice is a slight but engaging anecdote of the discovery by the Master of the androgynous character of Toto’s beloved. It has no necessary relationship to the story that Toto then narrates and seems to exist for its own sake as a celebration of this romantic ideal of androgyny.
      The character and charm of Toto are consistent. But Toto’s English is perhaps implausibly good if not impossible. And in some places his knowledge of theology seems improbably complete in light of his moral naïveté in other places. For example, his recreation of Heaven relies on a childlike vision of the afterlife as a place of fun and games. In “About the Lilies of San Luigi,” which is set