"Nicholas Crabbe or the One and the Many" 1958 Corvo, Frederick Baron

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CORVO, Frederick Baron

[246] pp.

New Directions Books

1958

8" x 5 1/2"

Introduction by Cecil Woolf

Printed in England

… Read more CORVO, Frederick Baron

[246] pp.

New Directions Books

1958

8" x 5 1/2"

Introduction by Cecil Woolf

Printed in England

Small printing 1560 copies.

Nicholas Crabbe, also called by its author The One and the Many, is at once an hilarious satire of literary life at the turn of the century — or at any time, for readers will delight in recognizing contemporary types and present-day literary rackets — and an account of Rolfe's own heart-breaking literary struggles in London. It is told with that odd, captivating mixture of wish-fulfilment and unwincing self-analysis that is the characteristic of all his work. Bizarre, tragic, humorous and subtle by turn, it is one of the most entertaining and amazing books this strange man ever wrote.

The story of Nicholas Crabbe, a gentleman of cultivation, who saves and then is loved and cared for by a boyish girl in her teens, this novel is as transparently auto-biograpical as Hadrian the Seventh and Nicholas Crabbe. It is shot through with brilliant description and phrases, with magnificent delusion and genuine grandeur. For years Corvo had been sharpening his verbal claws, and here there is a monstrous display of invective, as pleasing in the printed page as it might be frightening in life.

The love for Zilda, the boyish girl, may be disguised homosexuality, but a second love of the hero/author, for the city of Venice, is shown without guile, Here are descriptions of Venetian life of a vividness almost unequalled in all the literature about that city. See less