THE UNSPEAKABLE SKIPTON (249 pp.)—Pamela Hansford Johnson—Harcourt, Brace ($3.95).
"I am fifty years old today, on this feast of St. Mark, the beloved evangelist with whose lion heart my own . . . beats like a drum; and if you think that I am going to starve for your benefit, so that you may pirate my work after my death, you are a sillier man even than your pug-dog's eyes and slopping lips would indicate ... I await your cheque."
This is not the tone in which an author normally begs his publisher for a handout. But Daniel Skipton is no normal author. Pamela Hansford Johnson has modeled him on that unholy terror Frederick William Rolfe, alias "Baron Corvo," who was recently reintroduced to U.S. readers in his previously unpublished novel Nicholas Crabbe (TIME, Feb. 2). Rolfe bit every hand that fed him and died penniless in Venice in 1913. Novelist Johnson has changed his name and shifted time and place to modern Bruges in Belgium, but she has kept intact his characteristics. Skipton boasts a Corvo-like title: Bulgarian "Knight of the Most Noble Order of SS, Cyril and Methodius." He scorns everything in creation save the Creator and his saints, spends prissy hours washing and tidying himself like an obsessed cat. rewrites his latest "masterpiece" endlessly in green, black and red inks. His belly swings interminably between empty and half-full, but his attitude to foes and benefactors alike is unvarying: "I will take your money without a pang; my pride has nothing to do with you."
Author Johnson's novel covers the last summer of Skipton's life. A party of English tourists comes to Bruges, and Skipton sets out to fleece them for his winter wear. He finds a whore for one of the men and snob delights for the woman in the party; for both sexes he arranges a Pigalle-type "spectacle." But by summer's end Skipton has himself been swindled out of what little money remains to him: his sole consolation is that death is close enough to save him from the agonies of another winter.
British Novelist Johnson parodies Rolfe to perfection in all his attributes save one; the mad genius that cut Hadrian the Seventh into one of the diamonds of modern fiction. But she tells her tale waspishly and well, and transports to the canals of Bruges much of the sacred luster and glory that Frederick Rolfe adored in Venice.