I’ve previously written about the Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo Collection at Georgetown University, originally owned by the publishing house and preservation society Boo-Hooray, founded by Swedish-born Johan Kugelberg in 2010. Because of this provenance, materials and references from Boo-Hooray feature prominently in the collection. Among its rarities is a slight booklet by Kugelberg himself titled Baron Corvo, the Greatest Asshole Who Ever Lived. Below, I’ll offer a brief account of this curious artifact.
First, let me address the title, which is the literary equivalent to “click-bait.” That said, there’s a deeper meaning to the predicate nominative in the title. Almost certainly, if we held a vote for someone better exemplifying its colloquial usage, then Baron Corvo would certainly place far below any number of people populating even modern headlines. Rather, Kugelberg uses a meaning more in line with Georges Bataille’s idea of The Solar Anus, which to risk oversimplification, is a surrealist metaphor for cosmic inevitability. It’s easy to view Baron Corvo as merely a tragic eccentric (he was), but Kugelberg paints a picture of him as someone whose vitality burned so hot that it could only ever destroy and then burn itself out.
In a bit of literary flair, Kugelberg likens Baron Corvo to a Dickensian figure seen through the lens of Lautréamont: larger than life, exaggerated, darkly fascinating, and grotesque. An example of Corvo playing as such a character is revealed in the story behind the book Hadrian the Seventh. The work isn’t merely a novel, but instead serves as a revenge fantasy where a man suspiciously like Corvo himself becomes Pope and through force of will attempts to mold the Catholic Church in his own image. Picturing Corvo slumped over his writing desk furiously scrawling his lurid and lovely rancor onto the page is sardonic and saturnine all at once. I personally find these glimpses beyond the veil, where the novel is the man and vise-versa utterly compelling when reading Corvo and Kugelberg captures this intrigue masterfully.
Indeed, in the tempest that was his life, Baron Corvo himself became a machine that turned failures and grudges into fiction. Kugelberg likens Corvo to Joni Mitchell who turned her heartbreaks into songs and also to Lester Bangs who wrote music reviews that were really about Lester Bangs. Every one of Corvo’s novels are fundamentally autobiographical, sometimes pathetic, sometimes brilliant, but they are always unmistakably Corvine. I can’t help but find this side of Corvo haunting. Years ago I watched a BBC Two documentary on the life of Mervyn Peake and I have since been haunted by the utterly Peakian life that the author lived. Certainly there are innumerable authors who wrote their own experiences into their works, but I suspect that there are very few authors who lived such fictionalized existences as Peake and Corvo, both of whom seemed to inhabit their own narrative universes.
Moreover, the booklet briefly describes (nearly to the point of libel) the picaresque life that Baron Corvo lived: drifting from job to job, bouncing from one benefactor to another, perpetually on the move, and always making very bad decisions along the way. Corvo had a unique talent for the English language, but that ability was dwarfed by his truly epic talent at burning bridges. People would help him, and he’d inevitably turn on them. He perpetually desired patrons, but was even more driven by a hatred for being patronized. He was his own worst enemy, always and without fail. Baron Corvo never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, nor did he ever fail to fail in spectacular ways. In A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, the reader quickly understands that every critical friendship and benefaction was inescapably burdened by the weight of Corvo’s imminent unravelling. That said, the Baron’s betrayals and blow-ups weren’t accidents but instead they were the way he functioned at the deepest level of his being, and many readers find it very difficult to look away.
Baron Corvo was a genius, a crank, a con, and a visionary all at once. He wrecked his life at every turn, but unlike most who go down in flames, he turned the ashes into art. Kugelberg’s booklet is the best elucidation of the paradox at the heart of the Corvo cult, describing a man who was repellent and objectionable while simultaneously magnetic and irresistible, who continues to fascinate more than a century after his death.
(Fogus)
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