While perusing my
pipe-leaf-haunted 1931 Modern Library edition of A History of the Borgias,
I came across a footnote about the tribulations surrounding Baron Corvo’s
original manuscript and its ill-fated Appendix III:
The suppressed
“Appendix III on a suggested Criterion of the Credibility of Historians” was a
vivid and virulent impeachment of five historians—Pontano, Infessura,
Guicciardini, Varchi, and John Addington Symonds—in the matter of admitting the
evidence of moral turpitude. Every copy save one was destroyed by a cautious
publisher.
The footnote
hopelessly compelled me to search for this elusive Appendix III, and a
preliminary investigation quickly dispelled the convenient legend of a lone
surviving copy. The second edition of Cecil Woolf’s A Bibliography of
Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo (1972) states that the appendix was printed
and numbered but suppressed before publication. Woolf says that the appendix
was destroyed save for a few copies that circulated as unbound proof sheets of
nine leaves and in three bound proofs. I found a listing in the Autumn 2014
Elysium Books catalog for a 1901 first edition proof from Grant Richards with
the Appendix III bound into the book. That copy passed from Richards to Shane
Leslie, through A.J.A. Symons and then to Donald Weeks, who owned it until his death
in 2004 after which it was sold in auction in 2014. Woolf’s bibliography states
that Weeks also owned the proof sheets of the appendix with annotations in
Corvo’s hand, but it’s not clear where those leaves are today. A second bound
proof passed from Richards to Oliver Brett Esher and was once held in the
Martyr Worthy collection, Columbia University. Sadly, it’s not clear if that
collection still holds that proof. The third bound proof appears to still be in
the Bodleian Library’s special collections at Weston Library, Oxford.
Despite finding
locations for the bound proofs, I still found myself in the soup. Given my
present circumstances, Oxford and Columbia might as well be on the moon.
However, after digging a bit further I came across a reference to P.H. Muir’s Points:
Second Series 1866-1934 (1934) which is a collection of disparate
bibliographic materials for a wide range of authors. Inside I found a
bibliography of Rolfe’s works containing more information about the suppressed
appendix, including a facsimile of the first page having deliciously Corvine
passages such as: ‘Great men in the world’s history, chiefly men of intellect
and men of sovereign rank, have been its victims. At one time or another time,
they inadvertently have trodden upon some human worm; and the worm has turned,
and stung them.’ The quote starts a scathing attack on the credibility of the
aforementioned historians, but it’s difficult to garner the trust of the attack
in this singular page. Finding this did nothing but make me yearn for more.
Eventually, my
search led me to a revised version of the appendix published as
"Suggestion for a Criterion of the Credibility of Certain Historians"
in volume 160, issue 4 of the Westminster Review (Oct 1903, pp 402-414).
Corvo’s critique starts by stating that claims of homosexuality by the
aforementioned historians against Pope Sixtus IV were based on vagueries like
“ut fertur vulgo” (as is commonly reported) and “ut dicunt quidam” (as some
say) rather than on testimony from credible witnesses. Corvo then takes great
pains to refute the accusations against Sixtus IV of favoring his “pages of the
bed-chamber” by examining a long list of the people who were promoted. By
enumerating proof of age and station for each, Corvo attempted to disprove the
accusation that Sixtus rewarded his “puelli delicati.” Corvo then spends
numerous paragraphs relitigating the charge of lustful motivation for the
promotion of family members to a lesser charge of common nepotism. Finally, he
tackles the accusation that Sixtus IV promoted his supposedly base-born young
valet Giangiacomo Sclafenati to cardinal. Corvo masterfully uses the historical
record to show that Sclafenati was not base-born, nor young when he was promoted,
and indeed that he was not even a valet. In short, the essay was clearly an
Edwardian-era manifestation of Brandolini's law.
From a modern
perspective, Corvo’s linguistic games around the homosexuality charges seem
needlessly baroque, but I found that the byzantine use of Latin served two
purposes. First, since the original accusations often were in Latin, Corvo’s
use serves to give the essay an air of academic precision. Second, Latin
formulations like “puerorum amator et sodomita fuit” serve as a linguistic
mechanism to navigate fraught taboos of the time. Corvo directly attacks the
way that the historian Symonds used “mollific suggestion” and euphemisms to
distance the accusations from historical fact. By using the original Latin
accusations, Corvo deftly avoids euphemism by using learned distancing instead.
In the cases where he felt an absolute requirement for obfuscation he turned to
Greek spellings of certain terms that were “too gross” to print outright.
If such veiled
utterances were unprintable, then Corvo's appendix, in light of its inevitable
suppression, may hint at a form of courageousness on his part. However, I'll
try to avoid conjuring virtues that can't be proved, and instead express my
admiration for his fiery attempt to contest calumnies typical of the
"weapon with which spite is wont to stab the back of scorn." Indeed,
the accusations and his defense must have struck very close to home for him and
his linguistic devices in the essay are diagnostic of the age in which it was
published and indeed the author himself.
(Fogus)
