Mad but Memorable

NICHOLAS CRABBE (245 pp.) -Fr. Rolfe (Baron Corvo) -New Directions ($4.75).

Like a stink bomb with a time fuse, a typescript of Nicholas Crabbe has lain for almost half a century in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Now exhumed for first publication, the novel fulfills the pungent promise hinted by literary investigators who have concerned themselves with the strange case of its author, Frederick William Serafino Austin Lewis Mary Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo."

The son of a piano manufacturer, Rolfe became a Roman Catholic convert at 26, studied for the priesthood but was expelled from his seminary in Rome. For the rest, he was a weirdly gifted writer, schoolmaster, painter, photographer, workhouse inmate, homosexual, paranoiac, and perhaps the most merciless autobiographer ever to snarl at his own image. In his famed, partly autobiographical novel, Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe created a fantasy in which the College of Cardinals chooses as Pope an expelled English novice (like himself) who reforms the church and the world, and dies a martyr. In The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, Rolfe told the truth, little less fantastic, about his years as a sort of gondola bum in Venice. Nicholas Crabbe concerns Rolfe as a pitiful but unpitying literary hack in turn-of-the-century London -badgered, betrayed and swindled by a gallery of grotesque clowns called publishers and editors. The spite of this novel is now 50 years old, but time has been no deodorant.

Oranges & Oatmeal. The scene, recalling the world of Oscar Wilde, The Yellow Book and Gissing's New Grub Street, is set in London's "grey and grisly filth and fog," where the lamps seem fueled by sewer gas, and Nicholas Crabbe alone shines by the unflickering integrity of his own malice. Crabbe, "as still and alert as his eponym," making his sidelong way through the bitter brine and marine fauna of a demented imagination, is a memorable creature.

He hopefully sets out on a writing career with a -L-250 legacy. His tactics might seem strange and austere to modern graduates of schools of creative writing, summer conferences, or writers' workshops. He pays four years' advance rent on an attic, a "cave" where he can "agonize in secret," buys some paper, a Waterman Ideal pen, a bed, a mug, a plate, a crate of oranges and a sack of coarse oatmeal. Except that he is "tired and sick to death of all people who on earth do dwell," he has no enemy in the world. But soon he has plenty. They range from "rhypokondylose* violent stultified editors" to literary agents who are "effete homuncules" or "detected Jesuit's jackals."

Gin & Lobster. While Crabbe is doomed to have a bad time with publishers, Author Rolfe clearly had a wonderful time writing about them, and British Bibliographer Cecil Woolf, in his introduction, provides a convenient Who's Who. Grant Richards, publisher of such authors as Shaw and Housman, appears in the novel as Doron Oldcastle, "an ostentatious tyrannical turpilucricupidous half-licked pragmatic provincial bumpkin." Publisher John Lane, who published works by Anatole France, Ernest Dowson and Francis Thompson, is seen as Slim Schelm, "a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer." Oldcastle commissions Crabbe to write a history of the Medici family for -L-1 a week and -L-10 on publication. Young writers today, who may count on being filled with gin and lobster if they so much as admit to a publisher that they are sickening for a book, may wonder at those unenlightened times when publishers left Crabbe to his oranges and oatmeal.

Occasionally, Crabbe frequents the literary salon of Sidney Thorah, editor of The Blue Volume, "a lank round-shouldered bony unhealthy personage" (in real life Henry Harland, literary editor of John Lane's Yellow Book, made famous by Beardsley and Beerbohm). In his cast-off dinner jacket, Crabbe does not flourish amid the strangely innocent Ninetyish wickedness of this salon.

Bovril & Euripides. This strange hero's private life is told with all the rhetorical flimflam of a Victorian romance, but with the shocking -or comic -difference that what should be the heroine is a boy. Except for this novelty, all the period's literary conventions are present. Crabbe's heterodoxy is an "alabaster" youth named Kemp, as "pure as a moonstone," whose hair had turned white the month after he was sent down from Oxford (for an unspecified offense). Reduced to the martyrdom of earning his keep as a telegraph messenger, Kemp goes blind. Crabbe installs the miserable stripling in his rooms, fills out his "exquisitely pale" skeleton with Bovril.

The "lovely little person" spends his days knitting towels (which Crabbe hawks after dark on the streets), reciting Euripides and telling his benefactor, "Oh you're inimitable." The affair does not last. Kemp recovers his sight and encounters an old friend, an officer in the Horse Guards named Theophanes Clayfoot. In high Victorian style, this "howling swell" sweeps Kemp off to his manor, and Crabbe is left faint with starvation, beset by creditors, an outcast. "Festering in his shell," he is "alone and naked -all alone with The Alone."

The wonder is that a man as patently mad as Rolfe should have been sane enough to write Crabbe's story. He saw himself, not as others saw him, but, worse, as he saw others. Yet a strong echo of religious faith and a capacity for lacerating laughter relieve the baleful monomania of his vision.

* An elaborate Greek insult to editorial pencil wielders. Rhypokondylos, used in a fragment of Plato Comicus (sth century B.C.) and meaning "with dirty knuckles," can also, by a slight linguistic stretch, be taken to mean "with dirty pencils," since a later Greek word for pencil is kondylion.

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