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

in Heaven, Toto depicts two patron saints of adolescence laughing at a third for preferring the lilies of this world to those of the next, and God allows the two to play a trick on the third to show him that his earthly venerators do not do proper honor to his memory. This is all good, clean fun in terms of this world, but the events are set in the next world without any acknowledgment of the fundamental principle of Christianity that the Beatific Vision of the saints in Heaven makes good, clean fun irrelevant. On the other hand, in “About the Heresy of Fra Serafino” Toto’s narrative turns on tracing the source of a citation in a sermon by a Franciscan preacher back through Pope Gregory the Great to St. Paul’s Epistles.
      The narrative structure of the stories is also a mixture of the conventional format of literate culture and the less predictable connections of folktale and myth. For example, like a fable out of Aesop, “About the Heresy of Fra Serafino” ends with structured foiling of the Jesuit antagonist who is shown up as thinking he knows more about theology than the Holy Ghost, but the story lacks the literary coda needed to explain that all the characters have misunderstood the text “No one shall be crowned unless he has contended lawfully” by taking it to mean that physical martyrdom is necessary to salvation.
      “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro” indicates in its very title the mixing of genres. Having in the voice of the Master exclaimed over the attractions of adolescence perhaps just so much as he thought readers could accept, Corvo has the Master snatch at a passing observation of Toto’s to turn the conversation to something else: “Here I saw a chance of changing the subject, and remarked that it would be nice to know what sort of a mamma the Madonna had given to San Pietro.” What follows is Toto’s elaborate fable of someone (the mother of St. Peter) so anxious to prevent other people from an undeserved welcome into Heaven that she loses her own chance. Beatrice disappears from the story and from the consciousness of the Master, whose closing remark after Toto’s story is only “I chuckled at Toto’s moral reflections.” On the whole, however, Stories Toto Told Me is particularly good at balancing the requirement of narrative closure against the pose of innocence.
      One indication of judicious control of style in these stories is the way Italian vocabulary is used. Although there is quite a bit of Italian, it never appears as central terminology necessary to understanding the meaning of a passage. Typically it occurs in direct address, exclamations, and colorful characterizations, the negative implications of which can be surmised from the context. On the other hand, a reader who knows Italian will see that one character has a name that, while plausible, actually means “Dumbbell the Parrot.” And cultural references are also manipulated to have maximum effect for those with minimum knowledge. The Italian form of the saints’ names and of various monuments in Rome disguises for English readers without the language one level of reality, but the names nevertheless provide additional atmosphere the way the exclamations do. The people and places are, however, real, and for those who do possess this knowledge, it can ground in historical reality stories with a playful and escapist surface. Some facts of this sort are that the saints in “About the Lilies of San Luigi” are patrons of adolescence, that the artworks mentioned in “About Beata Beatrice and the Mamma of San Pietro” celebrate young men erotically, that the opera singer Lina Cavalieri was renowned for the tightness of her corsets, and that Mehemet Ali helped rebuild the Basilica of St. Paul-without-the-Walls after one of its collapses.
      The prose style is the most distinctive virtue of these stories. While Corvo’s historical works are famous—and justly admired—for their baroque