The world did not know that it needed a biography of Baron Corvo before A.J.A. Symons was gripped with the desire to write one. For that matter, I did not know I needed to read The Quest for Corvo before it was brought to my attention last month. Certainly, I did not pick it up because of an inherent interest in its subject: a little known British author of the early twentieth century whose novels I had neither read nor even heard of. The great achievement of Symon’s biography is that the reader can end up appreciating the book and even liking its author without caring for the subject at all. Symons himself becomes the self-effacing protagonist of Corvo’s biography; though he writes almost exclusively of Corvo and reveals scant detail about himself, it is his research that provides the dramatic tension that propels the story. In this way, it is more like a plot-driven novel than a traditional biographical chronicle. Symon’s desire to uncover the character and lost works of Baron Corvo parallels the reader’s desire to know whether Symons will succeed in his quest to know and see all. (SPOILER ALERT: All will be satisfied in the end!)
Symons begins his work as an ardent admirer of Corvo’s roman à clef, Hadrian the Seventh. In the course of his research, Symons discovers that his subject was not who he might have imagined at the outset. Indeed, his name was not even really Baron Corvo, but rather Frederick Rolfe, though that is among the least remarkable of the revelations. In spite of having written admirable works of literature, Rolfe himself was a disagreeable person. After failing to become a Roman Catholic priest (for reasons that seem entirely justified to all but Rolfe himself), he lived by sponging off a series of benefactors, wheedling them for money even as he heaped vitriolic abuses upon them, estranging himself from one after another. Rolfe was also, as it turns out, a pedophile. Without excusing his actual crimes and faults of character, Symons find a way to view them with sympathy. His love of Rolfe’s creations survives his discomfiting discoveries about their creator. Ultimately he celebrates the fact that he was able to recover several of Rolfe’s lost works in the course of his research. Symons concludes his book:
It was a deeper satisfaction still to know that every one of the works which had been left and lost in obscurity when Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe died suddenly and alone at Venice had been collected together by sympathetic hands, and that, alone of living men, I had read every line of every one. Nothing was left to be discovered; the Quest was ended. Hail, strange, tormented spirit, in whatever hell or heaven has been allotted for your everlasting rest!
This last paragraph reveals something crucial about the relationship between biographer and subject which I imagine must be nearly universal. That is: the relationship is essentially a personal one. Whatever scholarly detachment we might exercise in our research, some personal affinity drew each biographer to his subject. When Symons exults that he alone has read all of Rolfe’s creative work, he is celebrating his intimacy with his subject. Others have admired Rolfe’s work, but only Symons knows it comprehensively. There is, almost, possessiveness in this. Consider two meanings of “subject”: 1. the person or thing being described, 2. one placed under the authority or control of another, as a vassal. If Rolfe was Symons’ subject in the latter sense as well as the former–and arguably a writer is always in control of their subject–at least Symons was a benevolent ruler, who cast his subject in the most favorable light possible, given the life in question.
As a biographer myself, I have never consciously felt possessive of any of my subjects, but I have come to feel connected, at times protective, and yes–intimate–with the people being described. On my last trip to Massachusetts, for my current research into the life of Charles Fisk, one of my “sources” (whom I’ve gotten to know well enough that I’d really prefer to call him my “friend”) jokingly asked if my husband was getting jealous because of how seriously involved I was getting with Charlie. Fisk has been dead for over thirty years, so it’s not literally like that, you understand. But I have spent months now delving into his life, talking to so many of his family members, former work associates, friends, clients–even random acquaintances, when they’ve sought me out. I’ve read through hundreds of his letters, and begun working my way through all the other extant writings and recordings I can find about him. I really am getting in deep, at this point.
I sometimes think I may end up knowing Fisk in a way I don’t even know those closest to me. I have never interviewed my husband’s old friends, family members, business associates, or old acquaintances about seminal moments in their relationship, his achievements, his failings, or other aspects of his character. I don’t, as a rule, investigate my husband behind his back, and I have not trolled through all his correspondence. I grant him privacy when he wishes for it, and his thoughts are often his secrets, whatever they might be. On the one hand, I know him deeply from sixteen years of closely intertwined co-existence. On the other hand, I know him only from my own experiences with him, and not from the layered and textured array of sources that I have on Fisk. I don’t suppose I will ever know everything about my husband, any more than I will ever know everything about Charles Fisk. That’s what make’s my friend’s joke so painfully apt. No, my husband is not jealous of a dead guy, because it’s not his style. I should just feel grateful for that.
It is a strange sort of relationship–that of biographer and subject–which has few parallels in other aspects of human experience. It is a long-term commitment that is deep, hopefully enduring, and yet entirely without reciprocity. My husband and I each had a say in choosing each other. Fisk had no say in being chosen by me. He does not seem like someone who would have chosen to be the subject of a biography at all. If, hypothetically, he were able to express a preference from the next plane about who was to write his biography, I would not be his first choice. Conscious as I am of this, I am undeterred. “Don’t worry, Charlie,” I would say to him. “I am competent. I am kindly disposed towards you. I know the limits of my own knowledge, and I am constantly pushing at the edges of them. Relax.”
Having the cooperation and blessing of Fisk’s children and his professional successors seems to legitimize my efforts, even though I have moments when I wonder whether he doesn’t deserve the same kind of privacy that I afford my husband. I shake it off. I don the mantle of the biographer. I sally forth: to investigate, to analyze, even to pry.
Next time: Cutting the cords on Fisk’s old bundles of letters.
Laura Sewell Matter 
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