Sponge or stingray?
Francis King
Venice Letters Baron Corvo (Cecil and Amelia Woolf £2.10) Collected Poems Baron Corvo (Cecil and Amelia Woolf £2.10) The Armed Hands Baron Corvo (Cecil and • Amelia Woolf £2.50) Only one of these three elegantly produced volumes, the Venice Letters, is likely to be of more than passing interest to anyone who is not either a pederast or a Corvo scholar. The history of the Letters is a fascinating one, not least because of the generally stuffy attitude taken to them by people who might be expected to have known better — and worse. A. E. Housman said that he had "been more amused with things written in urinals" — a remark which conjures up a diverting image of the eminent scholar peering to decipher some text
• on the wall of a malodorous Cambridge public lavatory. A. J. A. Symonds wrote of "letters that Aretino might have written at Casanova's direction." For many years copies were passed around in typescript, existing (as Cecil-Woolf, the present editor, puts it) "in a penumbra of curiosity, scandal and speculation." In 1964 an edited and incomplete version of them was published in that excellent and lamentably short-lived periodical Art and Literature. Now, at last, they are published in full for the first time; and the astonished reaction of the reader who comes fresh to them is likely to be "So that's what the fuss was all about!" Corvo's Last Exit to the Fondamenta Osmarin contains
little worse than accounts of "panting and gushing torrents — torrents" with this or that venial Venetian urchin and skittish descriptions like "as for his rod — lawks!" an.d "You'd have shrieked to see his great black eyes and his big white teeth and his rosy young lily-fragrant face."
The recipient of these letters was an outwardly respectable timber-merchant, Masson Fox, about whom, as about so many other shadowy figures in the Corvo story, one would like to know much more, though one is now never likely to do so. Two members of his circle were Henry Tuke, the painter, and J. G. F. Nicholson, a schoolmaster poet. In those unknowing days at the turn of the century, Tuke could exhibit year after year affectionately painted studies of youths posed naked on boats, their buttocks catching the reflections of the sunlight on the water, without any viewer at the Royal 'Academy feeling obliged to raise an eyebrow or an umbrella; and Nicholson could publish books with titles like A Garland of Ladslove and The Romance of a Choirboy and yet cause no alarm to the parents of the youths who visited him with the object (among other things) of having photographic records kept of their growth.
It was of Masson Fox that another member of the circle, Kains Jackson, wrote in a poem:
... Your name should bid you go
The road to Rome, make ending orthodox; And certainly like Peter you show Yourself an authority on cocks.
Corvo obviously saw a possible source of income in this Quaker, met in 1909 when he was on the spree in Venice with an . America pederast even richer than himself. Fox returned to England and at once Corvo began to deluge him with letters in which importunate requests for money alternated with passages of highclass, home-made pornography. In the last letter extant Corvo pleads: "Lend me five pounds. With that in my pocket I fancy I can do the trick." But one guesses that by then Masson Fox felt that too many tricks had been played on him already. No doubt, as Mr Woolf surmises, other, more acrimonious letters followed from Corvo when it became clear that the springs of charity had dried up — the sponge was invariably converted into a sting-ray when it could sop up no more; but Masson Fox must have destroyed them.
Like those scholars who insist that Shakespeare's sonnets are no more than literary exercises, the most recent of Corvo's biographers, Donald Weeks, seems to incline to the view that, in writing the letters, Corvo was fabricating what would titillate his patron, back home among the proprieties of his native Falmouth, rather than giving truthful accounts of his own experiences. But the letters leave me in no doubt that now at last, at the end of a life of tormented struggle against his true nature, Corvo gave up, came to terms and let things rip. Throughout the letters there are cries of anguish about his financial predicament and cries of rage against those people who either helped him too little or refused to help him at all; but the dominant note is one of joyful sexuality.
In manner the poems are .not different from any number of verses of that period. Some are archly roguish ("Here's a little New Year pitched out of the sky, With a great bag of mystery under his arm .. ."); some are tediously religiose ("The laurelled martyrs in their white robes stand, Around the Queen of Martyrs ..."). It is only the subject, matter — opening lines include "Listen boys, I tell the story", "Dear little boy whose bright face will no longer smile on me" and "A glorious boy — so tall, so straight, so fair" — that sets them apart. Corvo himself coined a word for this kind of thing: "tommerotica."
The selection of stories and other miscellaneous writings has little more literary merit. In 'many of the stories the sinister machinations of the Jesuits figure as prominently as do those of the CIA in the disturbed minds of present-day paranoiacs. Corvo was an extremely uneven
writer — the characters in his books, like the figures in his paintings, too often seem to have been fashioned out of either plasticine or ectoplasm — and he touched the heights only when his sense of persecution and his frenzy for self-justification both boiled over. Here neither really gets up steam.
Francis King has most recently written A Game of Patience.
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