On the afternoon of Friday 2nd October 2009 at the Town Hall (Berkhamsted, UK) Tom Aitken gave a fascinating talk to the Graham Greene International Festival on the title “Eccentric Catholics; Graham Greene and Frederick Rolfe as Spoiled Priests”.
Beginning with definitions of "Spoiled Priests", Tom enlightened and entertaining in a witty and erudite paper, in which he mingled analysis and narration, argument and quotation, fact and anecdote concerning sin, guilt, faith, doubt, depair and hope.
Tom’s research led him to the mid-1930s, when Greene reviewed a biography of a man who styled himself, according to circumstances as either Frederick, Baron Corvo or Fr. Rolfe. In 1904, the year of Greene’s birth. Corvo/Rolfe had published his best-known novel, Hadrian the Seventh. This text took the outline of his own life, and turned it into possibly the most outrageous, but possibly the best, egocentric paranoid fantasy ever written. In it, a twice-rejected candidate for the priesthood is plucked from a life of embittered, anonymous poverty and becomes, in rapid succession, a priest, then Pope. In Rolfe Greene had found a man whose Catholicism was even more eccentric than his own. His faith lay in liturgy rather than doctrine. Given the smallest excuse, he would explain at length the significance of a button on a priest’s cassock, the shape of the traditional mitre, the use of a certain dye for the cardinal’s red robe and other details of which most Catholics are ignorant. He was also capable of borrowing and never repaying large sums of money and of abusing in vile terms anyone foolish enough to help him. During the final period of his life he became virtually a squatter in Venice, conducting graphically described homosexual affairs with young "gondolieri".
Greene was transfixed: “These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the starving pander on the Lido and a man born for the church”. Between these bounds, between Paradise and the Inferno, he turned back and forth, victim of his own “devilish pride which would not accept even Heaven, except on his own terms”. Greene’s fascination with Rolfe’s mixture of piety and sheer nastiness is thought by some to have given Greene the germ of Pinkie in Brighton Rock --- along with other echoes and resonances throughout the fiction.
Tom, who is a favourite speaker at the Festival, became a freelance writer in the early Eighties, and has published articles, reviews and obituaries for various newspapers and magazines, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Charleston Magazine.
Beginning with definitions of "Spoiled Priests", Tom enlightened and entertaining in a witty and erudite paper, in which he mingled analysis and narration, argument and quotation, fact and anecdote concerning sin, guilt, faith, doubt, depair and hope.
Tom’s research led him to the mid-1930s, when Greene reviewed a biography of a man who styled himself, according to circumstances as either Frederick, Baron Corvo or Fr. Rolfe. In 1904, the year of Greene’s birth. Corvo/Rolfe had published his best-known novel, Hadrian the Seventh. This text took the outline of his own life, and turned it into possibly the most outrageous, but possibly the best, egocentric paranoid fantasy ever written. In it, a twice-rejected candidate for the priesthood is plucked from a life of embittered, anonymous poverty and becomes, in rapid succession, a priest, then Pope. In Rolfe Greene had found a man whose Catholicism was even more eccentric than his own. His faith lay in liturgy rather than doctrine. Given the smallest excuse, he would explain at length the significance of a button on a priest’s cassock, the shape of the traditional mitre, the use of a certain dye for the cardinal’s red robe and other details of which most Catholics are ignorant. He was also capable of borrowing and never repaying large sums of money and of abusing in vile terms anyone foolish enough to help him. During the final period of his life he became virtually a squatter in Venice, conducting graphically described homosexual affairs with young "gondolieri".
Greene was transfixed: “These were the astonishing bounds of Corvo: the starving pander on the Lido and a man born for the church”. Between these bounds, between Paradise and the Inferno, he turned back and forth, victim of his own “devilish pride which would not accept even Heaven, except on his own terms”. Greene’s fascination with Rolfe’s mixture of piety and sheer nastiness is thought by some to have given Greene the germ of Pinkie in Brighton Rock --- along with other echoes and resonances throughout the fiction.
Tom, who is a favourite speaker at the Festival, became a freelance writer in the early Eighties, and has published articles, reviews and obituaries for various newspapers and magazines, including The Times Literary Supplement and The Charleston Magazine.
