Hadrian the Seventh

Overview: English literature is full of bizarre figures, but few led a more extraordinary life than Frederick William Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo who scandalised society around the turn of the century. Failed schoolmaster, painter, and photographer, he was nevertheless a literary genius. He was also his own worst enemy. His paranoia an an unremitting conviction of his own merit brought him a deluge of disasters, and left him literally destitute for much of his adult life. He eventually died penniless and unknown in Venice in 1913. From this unhappy life, however, he managed to produce some highly original and erudite books, most notably Hadrian the Seventh and Stories Toto Told Me. They were virtually ignored during Rolfe's lifetime, but since his death they have become established as modern masterpieces. Almost immediately after his death a cult began to develop around his life and work, particularly after A.J.A. Symons published his seminal biography The Quest for Corvo in 1934. Symons did a masterly job in promoting Rolfe's works and getting much of his unpublished work in print. **From Amazon.com:** One day George Arthur Rose, hack writer and minor priest, discovers that he has been picked to be Pope. He is hardly surprised and not in the least daunted. "The previous English pontiff was Hadrian the Fourth," he declares. "The present English pontiff is Hadrian the Seventh. It pleases Us; and so, by Our own impulse, We command."Hadrian is conceived in the image of his creator, Fr. Rolfe, whose aristocratic pretensions (he called himself Baron Corvo), religious obsession, and anarchic and self-aggrandizing sensibility have made him known as one of the great English eccentrics. Fr. Rolfe endured a lifetime of indignities and disappointments. However, in the hilarious and touching pages of this, his finest novel, he triumphs. 'If there be one place in all this orb of earth where a secret is a Secret, that place is a Roman Conclave' Part novel, part daydream, part diatribe, this strange masterpiece tells the story of George Arthur Rose, a poor, frustrated writer who lives in a shabby bedsit, saving his cigarette ends and eating soup - until one day he is made Pope. As the first English pontiff in five centuries, he is a mass of contradictions: infallible and petulant, humble and despotic. Yet Hadrian the Seventh is really a knowing self-portrait of its flamboyant author Baron Corvo, a would-be priest with aristocratic pretensions, and one of the greatest eccentrics of English literature.