Ovviamente – e questo vale per personaggi trattati tanto nei vari articoli quanto nei libri – il giudizio complessivo su figure di spicco della letteratura, ora eccentriche, ora controverse, deve tenere come supremo criterio quello della Dottrina Cattolica: salvare il buono, rigettare il cattivo, usare prudenza per tutto [RS]

Luca Fumagalli

In 1912, thanks to the intervention of the Reverend Justus Stephen Serjeant, a benevolent financier, the novel The Weird of the Wanderer finally saw the light of day, published by William Rider & Son. Although the eccentric English writer Frederick Rolfe, the self-styled Baron Corvo, had extensively reworked the book, transforming it into a highly personal work, the signatures on the cover were those of Prospero and Caliban, the nicknames he had coined for himself and his former friend Charles Harry Clinton Pirie-Gordon during their collaboration in Wales.

Rider, editor of “The Occult Review” and specializing in alchemy, philosophy, and spiritualism, included it in a series of sensationalist novels in which there were also new editions of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Édouard Schuré’s A Priestess of Isis. What made The Weird of the Wanderer appealing to him was perhaps its exotic, oriental setting, which had become very popular in England following the works of Ebers, Flinders Petrie, Burton – the translator of One Thousand and One Nights – and Amelia Blandford Edwards.

Intended as a sort of sequel to The World’s Desire by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang, the novel marks the return of Nicholas Crabbe, one of Rolfe’s recurring characters, this time on a wandering journey into the past. His exploits take place in a world dominated by mythological heroes and deities. History, imagination, and magic thus give rise to an adventure described in elaborate language, with Dantean and Homeric influences combining with the characteristic theme of the hero’s struggle for survival and self-affirmation.

The plot unfolds with the discovery in Armenia of an ancient tomb containing the perfectly preserved mummy of a young man, alongside a watch and a pistol. In the room there are also some papyrus scrolls, written in ancient Greek. Driven by a feverish desire to learn more, Grand Master Arry, an amateur archaeologist, sends the papers to Reverend Adam Howley for a complete translation. Thus, the story behind Nicholas Crabbe’s mysterious disappearance, which has occurred recently, is uncovered. Thanks to his study of the magical arts, the man embarked on a journey back in time, first to Egypt under Roman rule, then incarnating as Odysseus and even managing to redeem Helen from the underworld. Having married the woman and been accepted among the gods as their equal, he finally settled in Armenia as king, ever since known as Balthazar.

The Weird of the Wanderer, which could at least aspire to become a successful entertainment novel, one of the many clones of the Allan Quatermain saga, unfortunately at times tends to lapse into a delirious self-satisfaction in which the desire for redemption verges on the grotesque, especially when Rolfe places his hero in in the fanciful dimension of Olympus. Likewise, the book’s sadism, with its split heads, rivers of blood, and dismemberments, finds its justification precisely in the moralistic indignation of the “just” Übermensch.

Autobiographical details appear here and there. The protagonist, for example, retains Baron Corvo’s characteristic boldness and his love of beauty (both physical and spiritual) and with Hadrian the Seventh‘s Rose he shares a frustrated priestly vocation. Crabbe’s story is also connected, albeit with a contrived device, to the events recounted in the previous novel, Nicholas Crabbe. Despite the obvious similarities, the two protagonists remain very different.

Besides the notes, which constitute an important correction to the text’s tone, shifting it towards an anti-lyrical, downplaying and prosaic tone, Rolfe’s other notable insight in The Weird of the Wanderer is the open ending, an example of refined yearning. In one of his finest moments, he creates a perfect correspondence between personal fulfilment and the Christian ideal. In the final papyrus, Helena speaks, describing the appearance of a strange comet in the sky and how her husband suddenly sets out on a journey to follow it. The reader thus discovers that Balthazar is none other than one of the Three Wise Men.

Wildside Press recently republished The Weird of the Wanderer with a brief introduction by Karl Wurf. This is therefore an excellent opportunity to read – or reread – one of Rolfe’s lesser-known works, certainly not among his best, but not without interesting insights.

To buy the novel, visit the publishing house’s website: https://wildsidepress.com/

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