Rolfe embraced Catholicism in 1886, and enrolled to train as a priest. Contemporaries recalled a poseur, an outsider. Peculiar and caustic of tongue, he was feared and mocked.
Rolfe had expensive tastes. His debts mounted. A ferocious smoker, his tobacco was ordered by the kilo. In his room, under the beady stare of a stuffed raven, he devoted time to a vast painting of the burial of boy-saint William of Norwich, painting each of the picture's 150-odd figures with his own features.
Rolfe was expelled for reasons never made clear. He pursued his vocation at the Scots College in Rome: again, his arrogance and eccentricity made him few friends. He lasted just five months. Remaining in Italy, he cultivated the Duchess Caroline Sforza Cesarini, at whose estate he stayed, and who - he claimed - gave him the title of Baron Corvo. With an annual income from the Duchess, he returned to England in 1890 to eke out a living painting church murals and banners, and failing to patent the results of odd experiments into underwater photography. Occasional nude shots of adolescent boys appeared in magazines.
Wherever the would-be priest went, acrimonious dispute followed. Bills remained unsettled; friendships were abused and broken; libels were published and bitterly challenged. Rolfe ended up homeless, and begged to be certified insane and thus guaranteed free lodgings.
By 1899 he was in London, penniless, friendless. Armed with a fountain pen that held a quarter pint of ink, he reinvented himself as a writer. His Stories Toto Told Me - legends recounted to the author by a "splendid, wild" Italian peasant boy - appeared to major acclaim, as did a history of the Borgias, followed by Hadrian VII, an auto-biographical fantasy about a Catholic outcast made Pope.
Rolfe remained impossible. Pathologically sensitive to slights real and imagined, he demanded complete and unquestioning devotion from acquaintances, publishers, agents and collaborators, and was predictably disappointed. In 1908, his possessions in a laundry basket and wearing an enormous crucifix, Rolfe left for Venice, where he worked as a gondolier and trashed his vow of celibacy. His fortunes changed depending on who he managed to charm, cajole or terrify into supporting him. He slept in his boat or in damp, rat-infested cellars. He starved. Countless letters of recrimination and abject entreaty were written, as he completed the manuscript of his extraordinary, scandalous novel Desire and the Pursuit Of The Whole.
Rolfe was hospitalised with pneumonia in 1910 and received the Last Rites, but recovered. A clergyman was persuaded to give him a regular stipend. Rolfe moved to a luxury hotel and leased a private boat, decked out with leopardskins and silk sails. A year later, the money ran out. He received no more.
Rolfe died in 1913 and was buried in a pauper's grave. Deluded, vindictive, obsessive, visionary, his martyrdom was complete. All told, his books made him about £100.
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