Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE ADVENTURES OF SIR LAUNCELOT GREAVES” by Tobias Smollett (first published 1762)

There are some adventures in reading which you undertake for no particular reason, other than that you want to undertake them.

Some years ago, when I finished reading Don Quixote for the second time, I decided to investigate some of the many books that were imitations of Cervantes’ masterpiece. Imitations of Cervantes were quite common in England and France before the twentieth century. I bought a few of them and duly placed them on my shelves. There was Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, published in 1742, with its Quixotic hero the Reverend Abraham Adams. [Look up Joseph Andrews on the index at right]. There was Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), which, I regret to say, is still sitting unread on my shelf. Tipped off by a critical article, I discovered that Thackeray’s fourth-best-known novel The Newcomes (1854-55) has, in Colonel Newcome, a major character who models himself on the values of Don Quixote, even if the novel is a Victorian novel with a coherent (if baggy) plot, rather than a loose picaresque novel. I read it with great pleasure.

And then there was a work by Tobias Smollett (1721-71).

Let me admit at once my very mixed feelings about the dyspeptic and grumpy Scottish doctor who turned to literature, via copious hackwork, after doctoring in the Royal Navy. I think Smollett is one of those novelists who lives a half-life. He appears on any Eng.Lit. course about the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, along with Defoe, Fielding and Richardson. But my impression is that he would be largely forgotten if he did not appear on such courses. Defoe was a garrulous liar who made up his stories as he went along, but he has enough verve to keep you reading. [Look up Colonel Jack on the index at right]. Fielding and even the pompous, prolix Richardson have their devotees outside Academe. [Look up Pamela on the index at right].

But Smollett?

The boy Charles Dickens read Smollett’s violent knockabout and was influenced by it. Most people have at least heard of his three best-known novels Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker. But are they actually read (outside university courses)? It’s not just that Smollett’s novels are all picaresque and loose in structure; but there is the author’s particular lack of sympathy for his own characters. Humphrey Clinker is a pleasantly gossipy epistolary novel about a holiday in Bath. But generally Smollett follows Le Sage’s Gil Blas in preferring real rogues to sympathetic characters, as in his Ferdinand, Count Fathom. And, as a doctor, he loves laying on the gross physical details.

And yet Smollett was one of the people who most publicised Cervantes’ work to an English audience.

This at last brings me to The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves.

Apparently Smollett wrote it shortly after having produced his own translation of Don Quixote. Apparently, too, he wrote it for serial publication and in great haste – and it shows! Picaresque is one thing, but picaresque with an extremely inconsistent central figure is a random affair at best and often sorry stuff. Anyway, for your edification, here is what happens:

Sir Launcelot Greaves has gone crazy (or has he?) because of his thwarted love for Aurelia Darnel, and he ventures forth as a knight errant, in eighteenth century England, on his steed Bronzomarte, accompanied by his squire Timothy Crabshaw who rides his own horse Gilbert.

Certainly Sir Launcelot sets out to right wrongs and is on the side of justice – but so often does Smollett make him the voice of common sense in his denunciations and social criticisms that even Smollett seems unsure whether he can sustain the idea that Sir Launcelot has gone crazy for love. Therefore Smollett arbitrarily creates Captain Crowe who, followed by his legal clerk Tom Clarke, aspires to emulate Sir Launcelot by becoming a knight errant too! So we have not one, but two, knights errant trotting around the countryside, and it is often Captain Crowe who does the crazier Quixotic stuff.

Let’s be clear about this. Much of The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves is crude, tiresome slapstick – pranksters daubing themselves with liquid phosphorous to frighten Captain Crowe with “ghosts” when he is keeping vigil in a village church; Launcelot Greaves frightening the unjust magistrate Gobble into justice by confronting him with the “ghost” of a man he thought dead; a mistakes-of-the-night scene at an inn etc. Not to mention the clanking machinery of romantic plot as Captain Crowe wins the estate out of which he has been cheated, Sir Launcelot wins Aurelia, Tom Clarke wins Dorothy Cowslip etc. I can imagine the boy Charles Dickens lapping it up and having his imagination fired. But I can’t really imagine anyone older than boyhood getting much joy out of it.

Yet having said all these dismissive things, I am bound to report that much of this slapdash effort still entertains.

Chapter 13 presents the merry little anecdote of two red-coated soldiers bullying villagers. When they are confronted by Sir Launcelot, they admit that they are merely tailors’ apprentices who have donned the uniforms they were supposed to be delivering, as they wished to gain some respect as they travelled. This could almost be The Captain from Kopenick.

Some strong comic characters are introduced and then dumped after a few scenes – the surgeon Fillet (a typical Smollett-ian name) and the misanthrope Ferret, although the latter returns as a charlatan fortune-teller in the last chapters.

On the whole the prose style is strong, muscular and straightforward. I was surprised at how few (eighteenth century) archaisms there were in the text – and this was a great advantage in such complicated action scenes as the four-way fight between Sir Launcelot, the rascally squire Sycamore, Captain Crowe, and Sycamore’s insinuating henchman Dawdle. Smollett’s prose is far less stilted than that of Sir Walter Scott, who was writing half a century later.

There are definite precursors of the young Dickens – the catch-phrases and tics of comic characters in particular – the way Captain Crowe uses nautical slang in every circumstance (like Captain Cuttle in Dombey and Son) and the way the lachrymose Tom Clarke keeps bursting into tears on the least provocation (like the “lone, lorn creature” in David Copperfield). One of the best chapters, Chapter 9, is a rough-and-tumble country election with Whig and Tory both equally satirised. It seems a direct ancestor of the Eatanswill election in Dicken’s own most picaresque (but much more humane) novel The Pickwick Papers and immediately brings to mind Hogarth’s series of paintings about a rigged country election.  The prison scenes (Chapters 20 and 21) are much harsher and more unsentimental than they would be in a Victorian novel, as is Chapter 23 where Sir Launcelot is confined to a madhouse.

This madhouse scene also exposes the novel’s inconsistency, for as Sir Launcelot discovers he is surrounded by lunatics, he reflects on his actions rationally and “he heartily repented of his knight errantry, as a frolic which might have very serious consequences, with respect to his future life and fortune”. A “frolic”, being cheerful and conscious practical joking, is neither the Quixotic delusion nor the madness-for-love from which we were told Sir Launcelot was suffering. Smollett is rumbled by his own vocabulary.

Interestingly, in this same madhouse chapter, Sir Launcelot further reflects that English lunacy laws are worse, because they are more inconsistent than, either the Bastille or the Inquisition, which are at least run by real justices and aimed at real criminals. Not all eighteenth century Britons saw foreigners as irredeemable inferiors.

It is also interesting to have the evil Ferret, in the novel’s last chapter, justifying his villainies with these words:

“I look upon mankind to be in a state of nature; a truth which Hobbes has stumbled upon by accident. I think every man has a right to avail himself of his talents, even at the expense of his fellow creatures.”

Even in the eighteenth century, some people had hit upon the guiding principle of liberal market capitalism.

Having said all this, though, I do not urge you to rush out and buy a copy of The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves. It is interesting in revealing the times in which it was written, it has some amusing moments, but it really is the work of a hack novelist dashing it off at speed to fulfil a contract. Maybe the right place for it is the bedside, where random dippings into it might turn up the palatable stuff. Or not.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

CHILD’S EYE VIEW

Here’s one of those odd things, which you re-visit and re-interpret in adulthood after a first encounter in childhood.

In the mid-1950s, when I was four or five years old, I remember there was a popular piece of orchestral music, which received a lot of play on the radio. I did not know the name of this piece of music, but I do know that (to use a childish piece of vocabulary) I found it “creepy” and unsettling. It had a sort of shimmering effect in the string section, and a male choir singing wordlessly but (as I interpreted it) malignly, as well as a forlorn and somewhat cracked member of the brass section playing along in solo.

It wasn’t quite the realm of nightmare, but almost. At the age of 4,5,6 or 7, it was not the type of music I wanted to hear as I was going to bed.

Flash forward fifty-plus years. I visited Canada briefly a couple of months ago and remember one evening there, looking through the window of my host’s house and seeing a spectacular sunset. At once the words Canadian Sunset came into my head.  This was not the tune that had unsettled me as a child. I remembered both the title and the tune Canadian Sunset from my childhood. So, fooling around on Youtube, I found the recording of it that Hugo Winterhalter and his orchestra made in 1956 and listened to a piece of cheesy pop romanticism that I hadn’t heard since I was a kid.

But, while on-line, I saw there were other pieces of “easy listening” 50s pop available near the one I was listening to – so I decided to try some. And, by pure chance, the first I heard was the one that unsettled me so long ago and whose name I did not know. It turned out to be Lisbon Antigua, recorded by Nelson Riddle and his orchestra, also in 1956. Heard by my adult ears, it is no more than chintzy mid-1950s wallpaper muzak, adapted from a Portuguese original (which I also watched on line). Basically kitsch and nothing to get worried about.

So what had I found “creepy” about it as a child? I really don’t know, and I don’t think I was a particularly nervous kid. Maybe those shimmering strings sounded to a 4-year-old like midnight music or music that would be heard in a scary film. Maybe I was unnerved that adults made wordless noises. But I really do not know. All I know is that something trite and harmless had frightened me.

I must tell a similar story related to another medium.

As children, my brother (18 months older than I am) and I regularly visited the local flea-house on Saturday afternoons to see a “picture”. (We never used the terms “movie”, “cinema” or “film”). This was just before television closed all the suburban picture theatres down.

One afternoon, before the big feature, we saw something really horrible.

In a short subject called Hurry, Hurry, there was this fat old man with a horrible whiney voice who got into a dangerous car chase, with wailing sirens as police chased him and the strong possibility that somebody was going to get injured or killed. It had us on the edge of our seats. It took a long time for us to calm down, and we were totally mystified that this awful film concluded with a young woman looking straight to camera and saying that the man was her uncle and that she loved him.

We had found it terrifying.

About twenty years later I saw this short subject again. It turned out to be eight minutes extracted from the 1941 comedy Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, starring the whiney fat old man W.C.Fields. It was of course meant to be funny, a car chase with all the improbabilities of driving the wrong way up a one-way tunnel, getting entangled with the ladder of a passing fire-engine, making pedestrians scatter in all directions as cars raced through, and so forth. Your standard funny (i.e. desperately unfunny) car-chase fare.

One thing I would note is that you never can tell what will frighten or impress children. Harmless stuff can be unsettling, while they don’t turn a hair at what adults regard as really frightening stuff.

More to the point, though, and especially with regard to the short film, which we misapprehended, children haven’t yet learnt the codes and conventions of different entertainment genres. A grown-up knows that a crazy and improbable car-chase is more fantasy than reality. For a child it is reality, and in reality a crazy car-chase would probably end in injury or death. Understood this way, the child’s vision is more acute than the adult’s.

And maybe mid-50s pop romanticism really is creepy.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“DESTINY – THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A SELF-MADE APOSTLE” by Peter Lineham (Penguin, $NZ45)

            When a sophisticated and theologically-literate Associate Professor of History writes a book about a fundamentalist church that has a wealthy and charismatic leader, there may be the expectation that the book will be a hatchet job.

Peter Lineham is such an academic and Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church is such a church.

Yet the refreshing and enlightening thing about Destiny – The Life and Times of a Self-Made Apostle is how scrupulously fair Lineham has been. True, Brian Tamaki is highly unlikely to like this book, and certainly he will not like the description “self-made” in the title. Like most Pentecostal leaders, Tamaki believes he is not “self-made”, but is responding to a special call from God. True, Peter Lineham dislikes many things about Destiny, and does not hesitate to say so. But he is not interested in sensationalism, and he is fully aware of how glib many journalistic responses to Destiny have been.

So in his preface, Lineham declares “I have focused on explanation rather than indictment. This is more difficult, because on the whole I do not like the phenomenon of Destiny.” (p.9) Further, he warns that there are particular sensitivities in his own interpretation because “as a gay man and a Christian, I was likely to face sharp criticisms and to be perceived by Destiny as a very dubious observer.” (p.10)

Destiny has not been noted for its positive attitude to homosexuals. Following the Preface, the book opens with Destiny’s “Enough is Enough” march in Wellington in August 2004, against both the legalisation of prostitution and the civil unions bill. As Lineham notes, the marching black-shirted members of Destiny provoked some journalists into making comparisons with the Nazis; but a few more astute commentators had the uneasy sense that the protestors actually stood for something real in the Maori world, no matter how unpalatable it might have been to acknowledge it.

Lineham’s account shows how Destiny began with the strong sense that it could change the moral climate for all New Zealanders; but it has subsequently retreated from this view. As he notes in Chapter 8:

“When it first came to public attention, Destiny was on a moral crusade. Indeed, one might have supposed that this was the essence of the movement. If so, it has lost its mojo. Destiny may have decided that the rest of us are such moral delinquents that there is no hope of persuading us to reform. Or possibly Destiny has realised that rescuing New Zealand is actually better achieved by rescuing New Zealanders.” (p.127)

While Destiny opposed the reform of prostitution laws and the civil unions bill, it has more recently kept its head down about gay marriage. Its emphasis on personal morality is still there. It has strict bans on its members smoking or drinking alcohol and (despite its opposition to the “anti-smacking” legislation) it does not encourage corporal punishment of children. But as Lineham interprets it, Destiny is now more concerned to keep its own house in order. In other words, it has turned inward after its more flashy public campaigns a few years ago.

Partly this is related to its singular failure to become an effective political party, as Lineham chronicles in Chapters 9 and 12. Like other avowedly “Christian” parties (including the “Christian Heritage Party”, which was disgraced by the crimes of its leader and disintegrated), the Destiny Party did not become a major force and attracted at most a handful of voters. The author says Destiny church members were hoping for a “miracle” in 2005, with a vision of their leader sweeping into power. But the miracle never happened, and Destiny’s forays into national politics since 2005 have been both complex (in terms of trying to find allies) and desultory. At this point, I would note that Lineham could have made more forcefully the obvious point that the great majority of observant, church-going Christians never voted for “Christian” parties anyway, but stuck with the mainstream parties. Indeed most New Zealand Christians resent the appropriation of the term “Christian” by narrowly focused political groups.

As an analyst of the Destiny phenomenon, part of Lineham’s fairness is signalled by his willingness to declare the smug nature of some anti-Destiny commentary in the mainstream media. He notes (Chapter 5) that the liberal press is too ready to jeer without actually analysing. He notes (Chapter 8) the single-minded illiberality of many of Destiny’s opponents – all those cliché comparisons with the Nazis made by David Benson-Pope and others. In Chapter 13 he states “The collectivist, ostentatious, verbal culture of Destiny means that middle-class academics and journalists are bound to dislike it.” (p.199). Destiny’s blokey culture is a red rag to bulls who want to froth in editorials – and who perhaps look down on those uppity Maori.

When he looks at Brian Tamaki’s background, and how his church was formed (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), Lineham’s tone is quite dispassionate and neutral. Tamaki (born in 1958) was a bumptious young man who got into a number of minor scrapes (nothing too scandalous – booze; car accidents), but who found a strong and ambitious woman in his wife Hannah. She wanted to keep Brian focused. Brian frequently feels called by God. It would take only a few tweaks to Lineham’s text at this point to make the story sound wholly laudatory.

The same goes for the sober and straightforward account of Tamaki’s background in a small Pentecostal denomination, the Apostolic Church, first in Te Awamutu then in Rotorua. Lineham writes as a theological sophisticate – he is aware of both the roots of, and the tensions within and between, these minority churches. He quotes from Tamaki’s own account of his calling. Only occasionally his tone is mildly sardonic. Speaking of “church-planting” he says:

 “In some respects, the pioneering of new churches can refocus a movement that feels tired. Starting anew is better than the wave of spiritual gimmicks (laughing, barking, falling down or what was called being ‘slain by the Spirit’) which became Pentecostal entertainments in the 1990s.” (p.54)

When Tamaki split from the Apostolic denomination, he emphasised the primacy of the local church. Lineham presciently notes that this took Tamaki away from any concept of the church universal, with a social gospel. When Brian and Hannah Tamaki moved to Auckland and adopted the name Destiny, Lineham outlines how their movement became a “megachurch” on a very American model and he discusses at length the way Destiny avoids the audience-seeking gimmicks of other Pentecostals. As he comments, aspiration and hope are Destiny’s main message:

“Brian Tamaki is, above all, a preacher. There is nothing particularly profound about the preaching. People who are struggling with rejection and failure may find it shallow. Yet, for those who are hopeful, there are words to stimulate and encourage. Bible verses are used in a random sequence, often to back up assertions, but these verses, often from the Old Testament, do not always validate the point. Tamaki acquired a simple evangelical theology at Te Nikau, and it did not develop much. He works hard at his sermon preparation early in the mornings, thinking through what he feels he should say, and reads a little but not primarily in biblical or theological issues.” (p.67)

As an academic with considerable theological training, Lineham is able to examine the underlying theology of Destiny. It has a strong sense of God’s purposefulness and hence possibly a theoretical tendency towards predestination. Yet it also has a strong sense of the potential of the human will. This concept is appealing to those who wish to change their lives. Lineham calls it “a pragmatic version of supernaturalism… deliberately attuned to the aspirations of its followers.” (p.74)

Lineham lingers (Chapters 6 and 10) over Destiny’s relationship with other denominations of the Pentecostal sort and its attempts to become more than a one-church group. For outsiders like this reviewer, the differentiation of Elim and New Life and Charismatic and Pentecostal Churches can be obscure. Lineham refutes the wit who said Destiny was “a franchise and not a church” by pointing out that a franchise is exactly what it is not. It is very hierarchical with pastors bound to Brian Tamaki himself. After telling in detail the story of Destiny churches (most of them, incidentally, very small) Lineham suggests that Tamaki in fact stifles the initiative of his subordinates, remarking:

“Pentecostal fervour flourishes when local creativity is given scope. The Destiny operation is limited and cramped by the vision of its bishop. While this vision is perhaps creative, it is incapable of allowing that others may have the same gift. Denominations need good leadership. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, expelled many leaders and was called ‘Pope John’ by some, but he also allowed local initiatives to flourish. Destiny is the author of its own weaknesses.” (p.110)

Inevitably, then, this brings a discussion of Brian Tamaki’s own vision for his church. Lineham says the ecclesiastical terms which Destiny uses must be taken seriously, including Tamaki’s becoming “Bishop” in 2004. The term gave Tamaki status within his church and reinforced his authority, especially among Maori and Polynesian members. There are links to the black Pentecostal tradition in America and the influence of the black preacher Eddie Long. Prestige (and wealth) are part of his congregation’s aspirations.

Two issues are related to this.

First (Chapter 11), what is Brian Tamaki’s relationship with the Maori people? Tamaki (who speaks no Maori) only gradually discovered his Maori side. At first Destiny was not specifically identified with Maoritanga, but it has increasingly so identified itself since its defeat as a political party in 2005 and the end of its direct political involvement. It now sees itself as closely allied to Kingitanga. Lineham (pp.182-183) compares Destiny with Ratana in its desire to turn Maori lives around and reject a pre-Christian pagan Maori past while at the same time holding to traditional and unifying standards. There is indeed a moment in the text where, despite his personal distaste for the church, Lineham seems almost to admire the cleverness and cheek with which Tamaki was able to ingratiate himself with the Maori Queen and upstage a teeth-gritting Helen Clark at a famous meeting on the Maori Queen’s marae.

Given Destiny’s hierarchical nature, and the personal power of Brian Tamaki, the other relevant question is whether Destiny is a cult, as Helen Clark once intemperately said it was. This is dealt with in Chapter 17 where, among other things, we are told of the bizarre ceremony in which 700 (mainly Maori) male members of the church swore a “covenant” with Brian Tamaki personally (not with Jesus Christ or with the church in general) and received a special “covenant ring” for so doing. Lineham weighs up the evidence against the accusations made by Cultwatch, the movement that watches vigilantly for any sign of destructive cults forming. His conclusion is that Destiny is certainly authoritarian, and its practices would be too exclusivist for nearly any other Christian church. But on the other hand, Brian Tamaki has sometimes admitted his mistakes to his followers. And members of the Destiny church do live in the world at large and are not isolated from it. Without harassment, some members have decided to leave the church. (Ex-members of Destiny are among Lineham’s sources.) Lineham’s conclusion is that the term “cult” is inappropriate.

By this stage in reading this review, you might have come to the conclusion that Peter Lineham’s account of Destiny is altogether too benign. He has noted its developing sophistication in political matters, the way it meets the aspirations of its followers and the fact that it isn’t a cult, even if he has bridled at its take on matters of sexual morality. He has said some positive things about the movement.

But this is to miss one major judgement that is made in Destiny – The Life and Times of a Self-Made Apostle. From the very beginning, Lineham casts a negative light on Destiny’s tendency to confuse spiritual wellbeing with material wellbeing.

As an epigraph to the book, he gives his own very free translation of a familiar scriptural passage, in which St Paul speaks autobiographically. You will find the passage translated thus in the RSV:

“I think I am not in the least inferior to these superlative apostles….Did I commit a sin in abasing myself so that you might be exalted, because I preached God’s gospel without cost to you?” 2 Corinthians 11:5,7

Lineham cheekily translates it thus:

“I reckon that I’m every bit as good as these super-apostles… but my mistake was that I was so humble that I honoured you by proclaiming the gospel without expecting a financial reward.”

In brief, Lineham is profoundly troubled by Destiny’s attitude to personal wealth. He describes the ostentatious bling of Mr and Mrs Tamaki and their inner circle, the multiple properties they own, the flashy vehicles they drive, the frequent expensive overseas holidays they take; but most offensive all, the promises they make that church members (some quite impoverished) will receive more “blessings” the more that donate to the pastor. In Chapter 8 he excoriates them for failing to speak out on matters of poverty and exploitation and materialism, while being only too ready to speak out on matters of sexual morality. He sharpens up his attack in Chapter 15, “The Prosperity Gospel”, where he speaks of the way money is handed over for Brian Tamaki’s personal enrichment:

“ This aspect of Destiny is one that makes my and many others’ blood curdle. Christianity is led by the Galilean who had no home of his own, no possessions except the clothes he stood up in. How can Christian values have been so seduced? As it turns out, this is Tamaki at his least original.” (pg.218)

The “prosperity gospel” is a development of American Pentecostalism. It takes out of context scriptural passages about the prosperity of the nation and applies them to the individual. In effect, it turns Jesus into a cheerleader for capitalism and the accumulation of personal wealth. Obviously this is a very attractive message to many of the materially-impoverished, and many who have made their pile and wish to be reassured that their way of life is a moral one (Destiny has members of both types). As Lineham says, Destiny often serves up low-quality financial seminars in guise of sermons, and

“…believing that unemployment and the unemployment benefit were morally unacceptable, Destiny pastors also urged people who came from a poor background to clean up their act, stop wasteful gambling, get a job and start saving and giving. It was a simple and effective message which enabled many a poor person to make a turnaround in their lives, but probably did not make them rich.” (p.222)

So, to the very end, Lineham’s verdict remains mixed.

Being both gay and a committed Christian, Lineham has a particular take on Destiny and Brian Tamaki which will not be the same as that of Destiny’s other critics. But he does not skew the evidence. He is outraged by some things about Destiny, but is too astute to resort to stereotypes or polemic. This is a very fair book.   

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE QUEST FOR CORVO” by A. J. A. Symons (first published 1934)

There are some books that have an enduring reputation among connoisseurs and that continue to be published, even though they have never had a huge mass audience. “Caviar to the general” as Bill Shakespeare would have put it.

One such is A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo, which is subtitled An Experiment in Biography.

In 1925, says Symons in his opening paragraph, his friend the antiquarian Christopher Millard introduced Symons to Frederick William Rolfe’s novel Hadrian the Seventh (published in 1904). That novel and Symons’ book are still the best-remembered things about Rolfe. Hadrian the Seventh is essentially a fantasy about an Englishman who unexpectedly, and in a very short time, becomes pope and proceeds to shake up the papacy in unprecedented – but oddly ineffectual – ways, before being assassinated by a fanatical Ulster Protestant. In the late 1960s, long after Symons’ time, the novel was dramatized rather unimaginatively by Peter Luke. I remember seeing a performance of the play at Auckland’s Mercury Theatre when I was a teenager.

Reading Hadrian the Seventh effectively set Symons off on his quest to find out more about Rolfe, the self-styled “Baron Corvo”. The Quest for Corvo is not a biography of Rolfe, but literally an account of Symons’ search for the remains of Rolfe and for materials about Rolfe. Most of Rolfe’s work had either never been published, or had not been reprinted from its first limited and small-circulation editions, at the time that Symons was writing. This was less than two decades after Rolfe’s death.

Symons (1900-1941) writes in the first person, thrusts himself into the foreground of his narrative, and makes his quest itself the main focus of his book, rather than the man after whose life he is questing. In 1934, this was a very modern and indeed pioneering way to write about somebody, quite at odds with the way biographies tended to be written up to that time. As a result The Quest for Corvo has sometimes, a little misleadingly, been called a “postmodern” work, because it adopts an approach and a method that became commonplace only decades after it was written. (The world is now awash with books called “In Search Of…” this person or “The Quest For…” that person.)

Re-reading The Quest for Corvo, I am once again struck by the justness of Symonds’ judgements on Frederick Rolfe (1860-1913).

Rolfe was the son of English Protestant parents, rather evangelical, the sort whom Anglicans used to call “dissenters” or “non-conformists”. Rolfe was homosexual by inclination and appears to have misread his lack of interest in women as a sign that he had a vocation for the Catholic priesthood. So he converted to Catholicism and trained to be a priest. But his misbehaviour (presumably of a sexual nature) caused him to be expelled successively from two Catholic seminaries, Oscott College near Manchester and Scots College in Rome. He never reached ordination. Nevertheless, Frederick Rolfe took to signing himself “Fr. Rolfe” with the obvious intention of deceiving people into thinking that he really was a priest.

Rolfe, by Symons’ account, quarrelled with nearly everybody who associated with him, including (or perhaps especially) with those who attempted to help him in some way. After failure in a succession of jobs – writing on commission, painting church decorations – he ended up in Venice, writing pornographic letters and attempting to lure a wealthy patron to Italy by promising to procure boys for him. In his early fifties, he died of a heart attack while attempting to lace his shoes.

Symons describes Rolfe as “paranoiac” and says that in some sense all his writings were revenge fantasies, wish-fulfilment fantasies, or a combination of both. This is certainly true of Hadrian the Seventh, in which somebody who never made it to the priesthood gets his imaginative revenge by promoting himself to pope. The novel’s main character is clearly a self-portrait by Rolfe and the novel is filled with that main character’s systematically correcting all the slights he has been offered in life, promoting his friends and demoting his enemies.

Two things dominated my response to The Quest for Corvo.

The first had to do with Rolfe’s attitude to religion.

Rolfe fancied himself as an artist, and his response to Catholicism was a purely aesthetic “camp” one. Symons notes that when studying in the two seminaries he attended, Rolfe would look away or fall silent or stop taking notes whenever lecturing clergy laid out the church’s teachings on sexual morality. He was, in effect, the ultimate smells-and-bells Decadent-era Catholic convert, all incense and vestments and absolutely no moral sense. Like many such, he saw the Protestantism in which he had been raised as a vulgar thing, not worthy of refined sensibilities such as his. The Ulster Protestant in his most famous novel is a crude boor.

As The Quest for Corvo makes clear, Catholic clergy who came into contact with Rolfe usually treated him with great kindness and consideration until he became absolutely impossible. On one occasion something mean was done against him, which involved a priest. This was when Rolfe’s name was taken off the title page of a book upon which he and Father Robert Hugh Benson had collaborated. (Like Rolfe, Father Benson was both a writer and a convert to Catholicism from Protestantism – indeed Benson’s father was the Archbishop of Canterbury.) According to Symons, however, the decision to remove Rolfe’s name was the publishers’ decision, not Benson’s. I should add here that Symons, writing in the early 1930s, seems to have been unaware that Rolfe’s and Benson’s relationship was much closer than he knew. While there is no suggestion of a physical relationship between them, it is now known that Rolfe and Benson exchanged passionate letters for a year or so. The letters were duly destroyed by Benson’s family after Benson’s death.

The second thing that surprised me about The Quest for Corvo was my discovery that Rolfe really was a serious writer. Given that he did not move into literature until the late 1890s, when he was already in his thirties, he wrote a great deal – a history of the Borgias, translations of Omar Khayyam and Maleager, a volume of short stories and three novels apart from Hadrian the Seventh, even if the style of all of them was recherché, rococo, over-laden with obscure epithets of his own devising, in a word, camp.

He was an unpleasant and impossible man, but he was not idle.

I must add two end-notes to this little appreciation. One is trivial. Frequently in The Quest for Corvo, Symons characterizes Rolfe as “queer”. He clearly means the word in the old sense of “odd, eccentric, out-of-the-way”, but given that this is one of the more frequent insult words for homosexuals, it can be jarring to encounter it in the text.

The second is the result of my inevitable researches after I reconsider something I have previously read. Looking up Frederick Rolfe on the internet, I note that at least half-a-dozen sites that mention him are specifically gay ones. Rolfe (especially in his later Venice years) is now being hailed as a pioneer gay writer, and there is much aestheticizing over his last and most explicit novel The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, which was only published first in 1934, over twenty years after his death, and then in an expurgated version. I can’t deny that Rolfe really was a gay writer, but I think Symons’ estimation of the man is both more robust and more convincing than what such sites are offering.