Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe and Frederick William Rolfe (1969, Paperback)

My experience with Rolfe's writing antedates most readers' experience with anything, and I recall the delight I experienced when realizing that I was the first person ever to have borrowed many of his works from two of the world's most prestigious research libraries. In passing, I offer a prayer of gratitude to those anonymous librarians of decades past who were sapient enough to grab these books while they were still to be had.
Two small ground-rules. First, Rolfe's surname is pronounced "roaf" (to rhyme with "loaf"), not "rolf" (to rhyme with "golf"). Second, while this author is generally called "Baron Corvo", that is mis-leading and un-historical, being a pseudonym which he dropped fairly early in his career, and indeed had left far befind by the time he created masterpieces like DON RENATO and THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE.
Perhaps we should add a third ground-rule. Fact: Rolfe was gay, and a sectarian bigot in religion and politics, and pathologically, even self-destructively combative. Yepp: all of those things. Now, deal with it, so that you can study, savour, and even love the free spirit, the yearning, the wit and the learning which vibrate through this and all but one of his books.
The "schtick", if you will, in HADRIAN is simply that a lonely, frustrated writer named George Arthur Rose -- a man bearing more than a little resemblance to what we know Rolfe to have been -- suddenly finds himself elected Pope. The time is the early Twentieth Century. Taking the name used by the last English-born Pope, Rose (now Hadrian) proceeds to use his authority (and wealth) to re-arrange the world according to his lights, giving his attention to everything from homes for boys to dividing the political world among a few great imperial powers (in the manner of his Renaissance predecessor Alexander VI, whom Rolfe much admired).
As we know from considering the career of the current Pope, one's past is inescapable, no matter how far one has risen, and similarly, Hadrian finds himself entangled with petty -- and not so petty -- vexations from his earlier life in the world. Then too, despite his own high-mindedness, vicious Church politicking surrounds him. These two stresses converge in a climax which leave this reader in tears every time he re-reads the book, which he does at regular intervals, and which he suspects (and hopes) will be the case with many other readers who discover it.
There is comparatively little background or critical material on Rolfe generally, or on this book specifically. There was a flurry of interest in the late Fifties and the 1960s, culminating in a popular play version -- more accurately a perversion -- where the big deal was the Pope's smoking cigarettes on the Papal throne. Then in the 1970s, Donald Weeks wrote his invaluable study CORVO: SAINT OR MADMAN? Only God knows whether that sensationalistic title was his choice or that of an opportunistic publisher, but regardless, it is hands-down the best of the three full-length studies of Rolfe. That book, plus Symons' pioneering, but rather distorted QUEST FOR CORVO and Miriam J. Benkowitz's biography appear regularly in eBay listings. An obscure but valuable ancillary book is Goddard Graves' HARMONY JUNCTION, in which there is discussion of Rolfe, and much of the Rolfian spirit.
A small matter of text. Although this review covers the 1969 edition, any edition will do for any reader.