Roy Campbell (poet)
Encyclopedia
Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell, (October 2, 1901 – April 22, 1957) was an Anglo-African
poet
and satirist
. He was considered by T. S. Eliot
, Dylan Thomas
and Edith Sitwell
to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First
and Second World Wars. Campbell's vocal attacks upon the Marxism
and Freudianism popular among the British intelligentsia
caused him to be a controversial figure during his own lifetime. It has been suggested by some critics that his support for Francisco Franco
's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War
has caused him to be labelled politically incorrect
and blacklist
ed from modern poetry anthologies.
, Colony of Natal
, the fourth child of Dr. Samuel George Campbell, who was the son of Ulster Scots parents, and of his wife Margaret, daughter of James Dunnachie of Glenboig, Lanarkshire
, who had married Jean Hendry of Eaglesham
. Educated at Durban High School
, he counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. Campbell, an accomplished horseman
and fisherman
, became fluent in Zulu
. He left the Union of South Africa
in December 1918, being sent to Oxford University, where he arrived early in 1919. However, he failed the entrance examination. Reporting this to his father, he took a philosophical stance, telling him that "university lectures interfere very much with my work", which was writing poetry. His verse-writing was stimulated by avid readings in Nietzsche, Darwin
, and the English Elizabethan and Romantic poets. Among his early fruitful contacts were William Walton
, the Sitwells
, and Wyndham Lewis
. Campbell wrote verse imitations of T. S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine
. He also began to drink heavily, and continued to do so for the rest of his life.
Campbell left Oxford for London in 1920. Holidays spent in wandering through France and along the Mediterranean coast alternated with periods in Bohemian London. In 1922 he married without parental consent and forfeited, for a time, the generous parental allowance. His wife was Mary Margaret Garman
, eldest of the Garman sisters
. They had two daughters, Teresa (Tess) and Anna.
, Campbell completed his first long poem, The Flaming Terrapin, a humanistic allegory of the rejuvenation of man projected in episodes. It was published in 1924.
Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started Voorslag
, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the Afrikaans word voorslag) on South African colonial society, which he considered backwards and inbred. Before the magazine was launched, he invited William Plomer
to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post
was invited to become Afrikaans
editor of Voorslag. Campbell lasted as the magazine's editor for three issues but then resigned because of interference from the magazine's proprietor, Lewis Reynolds; Reynolds reacted against Campbell's negative comments about colonial South Africa and informed him that he would remove some of his editorial control over the content of Voorslag. Campbell moved back to England in 1927. While still in South Africa, he had written The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in rhyming couplets, on the racism
and other cultural shortcomings of South Africa. It was published in 1928.
The Flaming Terrapin had established his reputation as a rising star and was favourably compared to Eliot's recently released poem The Waste Land
. His verse was well received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others.
Now moving in literary circles, he was initially on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group
but then became very hostile to them; he declared that they were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian.
According to Roger Scruton
,
Referring to the Bloomsbury Group "intellectuals without intellect," Campbell penned a verse satire of them entitled The Georgiad (published in 1931).
According to The Georgiad:
According to Joseph Pearce
,
The Campbells moved to Provence
in southern France
in the early 1930s.
The French period saw the publication of, among other writings, Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography, Broken Record (1934). In 1932, the Campbells retained the Afrikaner
poet Uys Krige
as tutor to Tess and Anna. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Roman Catholic
faith, a process which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled Mithraic
Emblems (1936).
A fictionalized version of Campbell at this time ("Rob McPhail") appears in the novel Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis (1932). Campbell's poetry had been published in Lewis' periodical BLAST
; he was reportedly happy to appear in the novel but disappointed that his character was killed off (McPhail was gored while fighting a bull).
, where they were joined a few days later by their children, Uys Krige, the children's French governess, the dog Sarah, and whatever luggage they could carry between them.
The family settled in Toledo
. They were formally received into the Catholic Church in the small Spanish village of Altea
in 1935. The English author Laurie Lee
recounts meeting Campbell in the Toledo chapter of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
, the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy.
According to Joseph Pearce
,
Campbell later immortalized the incident in his poem The Carmelites of Toledo.
On August 9, 1936, the Campbells boarded the HMS Maine, which was engaged in evacuating British subjects to Marseilles. Within weeks, they were back in England. After the atrocities he had witnessed, Campbell was deeply offended by the generally pro-Republican sympathies in Britain, and on January 29, 1937, the family set sail to Lisbon on a German vessel, the Niasa.
alongside Franco's armies, travelling on a journalist's pass issued by Alfonso Merry del Val, the head of the Nationalist Press Service. Leaving Toledo on June 30, 1937, Campbell was driven to Talavera where he suffered a serious fall, twisting his left hip. The following day, the special car travelled southwards from the front, ending its lightning tour in Seville. This visit appears to have been Campbell's only frontline experience of the war. However, that would not keep him from later suggesting that he had seen far more action than he had. He did not fight for the Nationalists during the Spanish conflict, despite later claims.
For a British intellectual to oppose the Spanish Republic was virtually unheard of, as was Campbell's glorification of military strength and masculine virtues. His reputation suffered considerably as a result. According to Pearce,
Campbell had been a strong opponent of Marxism
for some time, and fighting against it was also a strong motivation. In his poem, Flowering Rifle Campbell attacked the Republic, praised Franco, and accused Communists of committing far more heinous atrocities than any Fascist government. In a footnote
attached to the poem, he declared,
Marxists the world over were enraged and the Scottish Communist Hugh MacDiarmid
wrote a blistering response entitled The Battle Continues. The second stanza included the lines
In September 1938, the Campbell family went to Italy, where they stayed until the end of the Spanish Civil War. After the publication of Flowering Rifle in February 1939, they became popular in the higher echelons of Roman society. They returned to Spain in April, 1939. On May 19, Roy and Mary Campbell travelled to Madrid for the Victory Parade of Franco's forces.
and returned to Britain. He did duty as an Air Raid Precautions
warden in London. During this period he met and befriended Dylan Thomas
, a fellow alcoholic, with whom he once ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David's Day. Although he was over draft age and in bad physical shape, as well as having a bad hip, Campbell finally managed to get enlisted in the British Army
. He was accepted by the Intelligence Corps because of his knowledge of languages and began training as a private with the Royal Welch Fusiliers
on April 1, 1942. Having completed basic training
, Campbell was transferred in July to the I.C. Depot near Winchester, where he was trained in motorcycles. In February 1943 he was promoted to sergeant
, and in March he was posted to British East Africa. On May 5, he arrived in Nairobi
and was attached to the King's African Rifles
, serving in a camp two miles outside the city. After having worked as a military censor he was transferred in June to the 12th Observation Unit of the commando force being trained for jungle warfare against the Japanese. However, any hope of seeing real action in the Far East was thwarted when Campbell during training in late July suffered a new injury to his damaged hip in a fall from a motorcycle. He was sent back to hospital in Nairobi, where the doctors examined an X-ray of his hips and declared him unfit for active duty.
In the aftermath, Campbell was employed, between September 1943 and April 1944, as a coast-watcher, looking out for enemy submarines on the Kenyan coast north of Mombasa
. During this period, he spent several sojourns in hospital due to attacks of malaria. On April 2, 1944, he was discharged from the army as unfit owing to chronic osteoarthritis in his left hip. The intention was to transport him home to England, but due to an administrative error, he was sent by sea to South Africa. Early in June he set sail north again through the Suez Canal on the hospital ship Oranje, arriving in Liverpool towards the end of the month. After convalescing in a hospital in Stockport, Campbell rejoined his wife; since their house had been bombed, they lived for a time in Oxford with the Catholic writers Bernard and Barbara Wall.
On October 5, 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis
and J. R. R. Tolkien
at Magdalen College, Oxford
. Lewis disliked, "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism
and Fascism
" and had attacked him in a poem titled "To the Author of Flowering Rifle." In the poem, Lewis had lampooned Campbell's "lack of charity" and called him a "loud fool" who had learnt the art of lying from his enemies on the left. Lewis had further declared,
During the evening, Lewis, feeling belligerent after consuming several glasses of porter
, insisted upon reading the poem aloud, while Campbell laughed off the provocation.
Tolkien, who was then hard at work writing The Lord of the Rings
, was charmed by Campbell. In a letter to his son Christopher
, Tolkien compared Campbell to Trotter, a torture-crippled hobbit character who appeared in an early draft of The Lord of the Rings
. Tolkien further commented,
According to Tolkien, Lewis' hostility to Campbell was grounded in residual Anti-Catholicism
from his upbringing in Northern Ireland
.
at The Eagle and Child
.
and remained a fixture. During a poetry recitation by the outspoken Stalinist Stephen Spender
, Campbell stormed the stage and punched him. However, Spender refused to press charges, saying, "He is a great poet… We must try to understand." Spender later broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain
and presented Campbell with the 1952 Foyle Prize for his verse translations of St. John of the Cross.
In 1952, the Campbells moved to Portugal
. Although Estado Novo was not Fascist, emigrating to it after the War further contributed to Campbell's bad reputation among the British intelligentsia
. Ironically, the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar
was by then far more to Campbell's tastes than Franco's Spain, which was compromised in his mind by an intimate collaboration with Adolf Hitler
and Benito Mussolini
. In Portugal, he wrote a new version of his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse. In 1953 he embarked on a lecture tour of Canada and the United States. Organized by the Canadian poet and editor John Sutherland
, the tour was largely a success, though not without attacks on Campbell's "Fascistic opinions." During the 1950s
, Campbell was also a contributor to The European
, a magazine published in France and edited by Diana Mosley. The European could also boast contributions from Ezra Pound
and Henry Williamson
.
Campbell's conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. Campbell's translations of the Catholic mystical poetry by St. John of the Cross were lavishly praised by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
, who considered them, in some ways, superior to the original Spanish
. Campbell also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He began translating poetry from languages such as Spanish
, Portuguese
, and French
. Among the poets he translated were Francisco de Quevedo
, Fernando Pessoa
, Manuel Bandeira
and Ruben Dario
. Some of Campbell's translations of the symbolist verse of Charles Baudelaire
and Arthur Rimbaud
have appeared in modern anthologies.
Intriguingly, Campbell also produced sensitive translations into English of Federico García Lorca
, an acclaimed poet who was murdered at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
by anti-communist death squads. In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Campbell wrote,
Roy Campbell died in a car accident
near Setúbal
, Portugal
, on Easter Monday
, 1957. At the time of his death, he was working upon translations of 16th and 17th century Spanish plays. Although only the rough drafts were completed, Campbell's work was posthumously edited for publication by Eric Bentley
.
This is Campbell celebrating fertility and sexuality, in Anadyomene (1924):
On the subject of nature, Campbell could produce poetry such as this in his The Zebras (1931):
Anglo-African
Anglo-Africans are primarily White African people of largely British descent who live or come from Sub-Saharan Africa and are Anglophone. A large majority live in South Africa...
poet
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
and satirist
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
. He was considered by T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
and Edith Sitwell
Edith Sitwell
Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell DBE was a British poet and critic.-Background:Edith Sitwell was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the oldest child and only daughter of Sir George Sitwell, 4th Baronet, of Renishaw Hall; he was an expert on genealogy and landscaping...
to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and Second World Wars. Campbell's vocal attacks upon the Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
and Freudianism popular among the British intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
caused him to be a controversial figure during his own lifetime. It has been suggested by some critics that his support for Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...
's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
has caused him to be labelled politically incorrect
Politically incorrect
The phrase "politically incorrect" may refer to:* Someone or something which does not meet a standard of political correctness* Politically Incorrect, a late-night U.S. political talk show* Politically Incorrect, a German political blog...
and blacklist
Blacklist
A blacklist is a list or register of entities who, for one reason or another, are being denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition. As a verb, to blacklist can mean to deny someone work in a particular field, or to ostracize a person from a certain social circle...
ed from modern poetry anthologies.
Early life
Roy Campbell was born in DurbanDurban
Durban is the largest city in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal and the third largest city in South Africa. It forms part of the eThekwini metropolitan municipality. Durban is famous for being the busiest port in South Africa. It is also seen as one of the major centres of tourism...
, Colony of Natal
Colony of Natal
The Colony of Natal was a British colony in south-eastern Africa. It was proclaimed a British colony on May 4, 1843 after the British government had annexed the Boer Republic of Natalia, and on 31 May 1910 combined with three other colonies to form the Union of South Africa, as one of its...
, the fourth child of Dr. Samuel George Campbell, who was the son of Ulster Scots parents, and of his wife Margaret, daughter of James Dunnachie of Glenboig, Lanarkshire
Lanarkshire
Lanarkshire or the County of Lanark ) is a Lieutenancy area, registration county and former local government county in the central Lowlands of Scotland...
, who had married Jean Hendry of Eaglesham
Eaglesham
Eaglesham , is a village and parish set in the west central Lowlands of Scotland - population 3,127 . Today it is chiefly a dormitory town for commuters to nearby Glasgow. The village is distinctive in being based around a large triangular green...
. Educated at Durban High School
Durban High School
Durban High School is an all boys public school in Durban, South Africa.- History :DHS opened its doors in 1866 in two rooms and with seven pupils in Smith Street. From there it moved to a disused granary in Cato Square in 1880, just after the Zulu War, and then to the Old Hospital on the foreshore...
, he counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. Campbell, an accomplished horseman
Horseman
Horseman may refer to:* Horse rider; see Equestrianism* Wrangler , in the United States* Stockman , who works with horses rather than with cattle or sheep* Horseman, a 2003 Croatian film...
and fisherman
Fisherman
A fisherman or fisher is someone who captures fish and other animals from a body of water, or gathers shellfish. Worldwide, there are about 38 million commercial and subsistence fishermen and fish farmers. The term can also be applied to recreational fishermen and may be used to describe both men...
, became fluent in Zulu
Zulu language
Zulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
. He left the Union of South Africa
Union of South Africa
The Union of South Africa is the historic predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into being on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the previously separate colonies of the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and the Orange Free State...
in December 1918, being sent to Oxford University, where he arrived early in 1919. However, he failed the entrance examination. Reporting this to his father, he took a philosophical stance, telling him that "university lectures interfere very much with my work", which was writing poetry. His verse-writing was stimulated by avid readings in Nietzsche, Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
, and the English Elizabethan and Romantic poets. Among his early fruitful contacts were William Walton
William Walton
Sir William Turner Walton OM was an English composer. During a sixty-year career, he wrote music in several classical genres and styles, from film scores to opera...
, the Sitwells
The Sitwells
The Sitwells , from Scarborough, North Yorkshire, were three siblings, who formed an identifiable literary and artistic clique around themselves in London in the period roughly 1916 to 1930...
, and Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
. Campbell wrote verse imitations of T. S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine
Paul Verlaine
Paul-Marie Verlaine was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry.-Early life:...
. He also began to drink heavily, and continued to do so for the rest of his life.
Campbell left Oxford for London in 1920. Holidays spent in wandering through France and along the Mediterranean coast alternated with periods in Bohemian London. In 1922 he married without parental consent and forfeited, for a time, the generous parental allowance. His wife was Mary Margaret Garman
Mary Garman
Mary Margaret Garman Campbell was the eldest of seven sisters known for their glamorous, bohemian lifestyles and their many love affairs with famous artists, writers and musicians of interwar London...
, eldest of the Garman sisters
Garman Sisters
The Garman sisters were members of London's bohemian Bloomsbury set. The complex lives of Mary, Kathleen and Lorna included affairs with writer Vita Sackville-West, composer Ferruccio Busoni, painter Bernard Meninsky, sculptor Jacob Epstein, poet Laurie Lee and painter Lucian Freud-Mary :Mary...
. They had two daughters, Teresa (Tess) and Anna.
Poet and satirist
While living in a small converted stable on the coast of North WalesNorth Wales
North Wales is the northernmost unofficial region of Wales. It is bordered to the south by the counties of Ceredigion and Powys in Mid Wales and to the east by the counties of Shropshire in the West Midlands and Cheshire in North West England...
, Campbell completed his first long poem, The Flaming Terrapin, a humanistic allegory of the rejuvenation of man projected in episodes. It was published in 1924.
Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started Voorslag
Voorslag
Voorslag was a literary journal published in Durban, South Africa in 1926 and 1927. It was founded by Roy Campbell and William Plomer; Laurens van der Post was invited to become Afrikaans...
, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the Afrikaans word voorslag) on South African colonial society, which he considered backwards and inbred. Before the magazine was launched, he invited William Plomer
William Plomer
William Charles Franklyn Plomer CBE was a South African author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor. He was educated mostly in the United Kingdom...
to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post
Laurens van der Post
Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE was a 20th century Afrikaner author of many books, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer, and...
was invited to become Afrikaans
Afrikaans
Afrikaans is a West Germanic language, spoken natively in South Africa and Namibia. It is a daughter language of Dutch, originating in its 17th century dialects, collectively referred to as Cape Dutch .Afrikaans is a daughter language of Dutch; see , , , , , .Afrikaans was historically called Cape...
editor of Voorslag. Campbell lasted as the magazine's editor for three issues but then resigned because of interference from the magazine's proprietor, Lewis Reynolds; Reynolds reacted against Campbell's negative comments about colonial South Africa and informed him that he would remove some of his editorial control over the content of Voorslag. Campbell moved back to England in 1927. While still in South Africa, he had written The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in rhyming couplets, on the racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
and other cultural shortcomings of South Africa. It was published in 1928.
The Flaming Terrapin had established his reputation as a rising star and was favourably compared to Eliot's recently released poem The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. His verse was well received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others.
Now moving in literary circles, he was initially on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
but then became very hostile to them; he declared that they were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian.
According to Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton
Roger Vernon Scruton is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination , Sexual Desire , The Aesthetics of Music , and A Political Philosophy: Arguments For Conservatism...
,
"Learning that his wife had been conducting a passionate affair with VitaVita Sackville-WestThe Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...
(to the enraged jealousy of Vita’s other lover, Virginia WoolfVirginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
), Campbell began to see the three aspects of the new elite—sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics—as aspects of a single frame of mind. These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up. The new elite, in Campbell’s opinion, lived as bloodless parasites on their social inferiors and moral betters; they jettisoned real responsibilities in favor of utopian fantasies and flattered themselves that their precious sensibilities were signs of moral refinement, rather than the marks of a fastidious narcissismNarcissismNarcissism is a term with a wide range of meanings, depending on whether it is used to describe a central concept of psychoanalytic theory, a mental illness, a social or cultural problem, or simply a personality trait...
. The role of the poet is not to join their Peter PanPeter PanPeter Pan is a character created by Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie . A mischievous boy who can fly and magically refuses to grow up, Peter Pan spends his never-ending childhood adventuring on the small island of Neverland as the leader of his gang the Lost Boys, interacting with...
games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal."
Referring to the Bloomsbury Group "intellectuals without intellect," Campbell penned a verse satire of them entitled The Georgiad (published in 1931).
According to The Georgiad:
- Dinner, most ancient of the Georgian rites,
- The noisy prelude of loquacious nights,
- At the mere noise of whose unholy gong
- The wagging tongue feels resolute and strong,
- Senate of bores and parliament of fools,
- Where gossip in her native empire rules;
- What doleful memories the word suggests -
- When I have sat like Job among the guests,
- Sandwiched between two bores, a hapless prey,
- Chained to may chair, and cannot get away,
- Longing, without the appetite to eat,
- To fill my ears, more than my mouth, with meat,
- And stuff my eardrums full of fish and bread
- Against the din to wad my dizzy head:
- When I have watched each mouthful that they poke
- Between their jaws, and praying they might choke,
- Found the descending lump but cleared the way
- For further anecdotes and more to say.
- O Dinners! take my curse upon you all,
- But literary dinners most of all...
According to Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is an English-born writer, and Writer in Residence and Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida; previously he had a comparable position, from 2001, at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is known for a number of literary biographies, many of...
,
As with so much of Campbell's satire, The Georgiads invective is too vindictive. It is all too often spoiled by spite. This underlying weakness has obscured the more serious points its author sought to make. Embedded between the attacks on Bertrand RussellBertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
, Marie StopesMarie StopesMarie Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist, campaigner for women's rights and pioneer in the field of birth control...
, Vita Sackville-WestVita Sackville-WestThe Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH , best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933...
, Virginia WoolfVirginia WoolfAdeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
and a host of other Bloomsbury's and Georgians are classically refined objections to the prevailing philosophy of scepticism, mounted like pearls of wisdom in the basest of metal. "Nor knew the Greeks, save in the laughing page, The philosophic emblem of our age."... The "damp philosophy" of the modern world, as espoused by the archetypical modern poet, was responsible for the prevailing pessimism and disillusionment of the post-war world. In preaching such a philosophy, which was "the fountain source of all his woes", the poet's "damp philosophy" left him "damp in spirit". NihilismNihilismNihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...
was self-negating. It was the philosophy of the self inflicted wound. In the rejection of post-war pessimism and its nihilistic ramifications... Campbell was uniting himself with others, such as T.S. Eliot and Evelyn WaughEvelyn WaughArthur Evelyn St. John Waugh , known as Evelyn Waugh, was an English writer of novels, travel books and biographies. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer...
, who were similarly seeking glimmers of philosophical light amidst the prevailing gloom. In his case, as in theirs, the philosophical search would lead him to orthodox ChristianityChristianityChristianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
.
The Campbells moved to Provence
Provence
Provence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
in southern France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
in the early 1930s.
The French period saw the publication of, among other writings, Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography, Broken Record (1934). In 1932, the Campbells retained the Afrikaner
Afrikaner
Afrikaners are an ethnic group in Southern Africa descended from almost equal numbers of Dutch, French and German settlers whose native tongue is Afrikaans: a Germanic language which derives primarily from 17th century Dutch, and a variety of other languages.-Related ethno-linguistic groups:The...
poet Uys Krige
Uys Krige
Mattheus Uys Krige was a South African writer of novels, short stories, poems and plays in both Afrikaans and English. He was born in Bontebokskloof in the Cape Province and educated at the University of Stellenbosch.From 1931 to 1935 he lived in France and Spain, acquiring fluency in both...
as tutor to Tess and Anna. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Roman Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
faith, a process which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled Mithraic
Mithraism
The Mithraic Mysteries were a mystery religion practised in the Roman Empire from about the 1st to 4th centuries AD. The name of the Persian god Mithra, adapted into Greek as Mithras, was linked to a new and distinctive imagery...
Emblems (1936).
A fictionalized version of Campbell at this time ("Rob McPhail") appears in the novel Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis (1932). Campbell's poetry had been published in Lewis' periodical BLAST
BLAST (journal)
BLAST was the short-lived literary magazine of the Vorticist movement in Britain. Two editions were published: the first on 2 July 1914 and the second a year later on 15 July 1915...
; he was reportedly happy to appear in the novel but disappointed that his character was killed off (McPhail was gored while fighting a bull).
Move to Spain
In the autumn of 1933, Tess's goat broke through a neighbour's fence and in the course of a night destroyed a number of young peach trees. The neighbour demanded compensation, which Campbell felt unable to pay. The neighbour then successfully sued for a considerable sum. Campbell still saw no way to pay the indemnity and faced the prospect of imprisonment. He and his wife escaped the authorities by surreptitiously escaping across the border into Spain. They traveled by train to BarcelonaBarcelona
Barcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
, where they were joined a few days later by their children, Uys Krige, the children's French governess, the dog Sarah, and whatever luggage they could carry between them.
The family settled in Toledo
Toledo, Spain
Toledo's Alcázar became renowned in the 19th and 20th centuries as a military academy. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 its garrison was famously besieged by Republican forces.-Economy:...
. They were formally received into the Catholic Church in the small Spanish village of Altea
Altea
-External links:*, Portal de Altea*, Good Information-Guide of Altea - in German and English**, Photo gallery of Altea*, spherical Panorama of Altea...
in 1935. The English author Laurie Lee
Laurie Lee
Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist, and screenwriter, raised in the village of Slad, and went to Marling School, Gloucestershire. His most famous work was an autobiographical trilogy which consisted of Cider with Rosie , As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and...
recounts meeting Campbell in the Toledo chapter of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is a memoir by Laurie Lee, a British poet. It is a sequel to Cider with Rosie which detailed his life in post First World War Gloucestershire...
, the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy.
According to Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce
Joseph Pearce is an English-born writer, and Writer in Residence and Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida; previously he had a comparable position, from 2001, at Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He is known for a number of literary biographies, many of...
,
"In March 1936 the anti-clerical contagion spreading across Spain reached the streets of Toledo, the ancient city in which the Campbells had made their home. Churches were burned in a series of violent riots in which priests and nuns were attacked. During these bloody disturbances, Roy and Mary Campbell sheltered in their house several of the Carmelite monks from the neighboring monastery. In the following weeks, the situation worsened. Portraits of Marx and Lenin were posted on every street corner, and horrific tales began to filter in from surrounding villages of priests being shot and wealthy men being butchered in front of their families. Toledo's beleagured Christians braced themselves for the next wave of persecution, and the Campbells, in an atmosphere that must have seemed eerily reminiscent of early Christians in the Catacombs of RomeCatacombs of RomeThe Catacombs of Rome are ancient catacombs, underground burial places under or near Rome, Italy, of which there are at least forty, some discovered only in recent decades. Though most famous for Christian burials, either in separate catacombs or mixed together, they began in the 2nd century, much...
, were confirmed in a secret ceremony, before dawn, by Cardinal Goma, the elderly Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. In July 1936, the civil war erupted onto the streets of Toledo, heralded by the arrival in the city of Communist militiamen from MadridMadridMadrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. With no one to defend them, the priests, monks, and nuns fell prey to the hatred of their adversaries. The seventeen monks from the Carmelite monastery were rounded up, herded on to the street and shot. Campbell discovered their murdered bodies, left lying where they fell. He also discovered the bodies of other priests lying in the narrow street where the priests had been murdered. Swarms of flies surrounded their bodies, and scrawled in their blood on the wall was written, 'Thus strikes the CHEKAChekaCheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
.'"
Campbell later immortalized the incident in his poem The Carmelites of Toledo.
On August 9, 1936, the Campbells boarded the HMS Maine, which was engaged in evacuating British subjects to Marseilles. Within weeks, they were back in England. After the atrocities he had witnessed, Campbell was deeply offended by the generally pro-Republican sympathies in Britain, and on January 29, 1937, the family set sail to Lisbon on a German vessel, the Niasa.
Support for Franco
In June, Campbell left Portugal for Spain, going to Salamanca and then to Toledo. He served as a war correspondentWar correspondent
A war correspondent is a journalist who covers stories firsthand from a war zone. In the 19th century they were also called Special Correspondents.-Methods:...
alongside Franco's armies, travelling on a journalist's pass issued by Alfonso Merry del Val, the head of the Nationalist Press Service. Leaving Toledo on June 30, 1937, Campbell was driven to Talavera where he suffered a serious fall, twisting his left hip. The following day, the special car travelled southwards from the front, ending its lightning tour in Seville. This visit appears to have been Campbell's only frontline experience of the war. However, that would not keep him from later suggesting that he had seen far more action than he had. He did not fight for the Nationalists during the Spanish conflict, despite later claims.
For a British intellectual to oppose the Spanish Republic was virtually unheard of, as was Campbell's glorification of military strength and masculine virtues. His reputation suffered considerably as a result. According to Pearce,
"Having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his friends and acquaintances, it was not likely that Campbell was going to support the cause of the perpetrators. Bearing these horrific facts in mind, it is clearly a gross oversimplification to dismiss Campbell's stance in the Spanish Civil War as evidence that he was a Fascist. Such an obvious mitigating circumstance was, however, almost universally overlooked by Campbell's detractors in England, all of whom appended the 'Fascist' label to his person, employing it, and the accompanying stereotypical effluvia with which such an epithet is associated, with the cynical glee of seasoned character assassins."
Campbell had been a strong opponent of Marxism
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
for some time, and fighting against it was also a strong motivation. In his poem, Flowering Rifle Campbell attacked the Republic, praised Franco, and accused Communists of committing far more heinous atrocities than any Fascist government. In a footnote
Footnote
A note is a string of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document or at the end of a text. The note can provide an author's comments on the main text or citations of a reference work in support of the text, or both...
attached to the poem, he declared,
"More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle AgesMiddle AgesThe Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
."
Marxists the world over were enraged and the Scottish Communist Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...
wrote a blistering response entitled The Battle Continues. The second stanza included the lines
- Franco has made no more horrible shambles
- Than this poem of Campbell's
- The foulest outrage his breedClan CampbellClan Campbell is a Highland Scottish clan. Historically one of the largest, most powerful and most successful of the Highland clans, their lands were in Argyll and the chief of the clan became the Earl and later Duke of Argyll.-Origins:...
has to show - Since the massacre of GlencoeMassacre of GlencoeEarly in the morning of 13 February 1692, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite uprising of 1689 led by John Graham of Claverhouse, an infamous massacre took place in Glen Coe, in the Highlands of Scotland. This incident is referred to as the Massacre of Glencoe, or in...
!
In September 1938, the Campbell family went to Italy, where they stayed until the end of the Spanish Civil War. After the publication of Flowering Rifle in February 1939, they became popular in the higher echelons of Roman society. They returned to Spain in April, 1939. On May 19, Roy and Mary Campbell travelled to Madrid for the Victory Parade of Franco's forces.
The Second World War
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Campbell denounced Nazi GermanyNazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and returned to Britain. He did duty as an Air Raid Precautions
Air Raid Precautions
Air Raid Precautions was an organisation in the United Kingdom set up as an aid in the prelude to the Second World War dedicated to the protection of civilians from the danger of air-raids. It was created in 1924 as a response to the fears about the growing threat from the development of bomber...
warden in London. During this period he met and befriended Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, a fellow alcoholic, with whom he once ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David's Day. Although he was over draft age and in bad physical shape, as well as having a bad hip, Campbell finally managed to get enlisted in the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
. He was accepted by the Intelligence Corps because of his knowledge of languages and began training as a private with the Royal Welch Fusiliers
Royal Welch Fusiliers
The Royal Welch Fusiliers was an infantry regiment of the British Army, part of the Prince of Wales' Division. It was founded in 1689 to oppose James II and the imminent war with France...
on April 1, 1942. Having completed basic training
Basic Training
Basic Training may refer to:* Basic Training, a 1971 American documentary directed by Frederick Wiseman* Basic Training , an American sex comedy* Recruit training...
, Campbell was transferred in July to the I.C. Depot near Winchester, where he was trained in motorcycles. In February 1943 he was promoted to sergeant
Sergeant
Sergeant is a rank used in some form by most militaries, police forces, and other uniformed organizations around the world. Its origins are the Latin serviens, "one who serves", through the French term Sergent....
, and in March he was posted to British East Africa. On May 5, he arrived in Nairobi
Nairobi
Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The city and its surrounding area also forms the Nairobi County. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyirobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, it is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun" and is...
and was attached to the King's African Rifles
King's African Rifles
The King's African Rifles was a multi-battalion British colonial regiment raised from the various British possessions in East Africa from 1902 until independence in the 1960s. It performed both military and internal security functions within the East African colonies as well as external service as...
, serving in a camp two miles outside the city. After having worked as a military censor he was transferred in June to the 12th Observation Unit of the commando force being trained for jungle warfare against the Japanese. However, any hope of seeing real action in the Far East was thwarted when Campbell during training in late July suffered a new injury to his damaged hip in a fall from a motorcycle. He was sent back to hospital in Nairobi, where the doctors examined an X-ray of his hips and declared him unfit for active duty.
In the aftermath, Campbell was employed, between September 1943 and April 1944, as a coast-watcher, looking out for enemy submarines on the Kenyan coast north of Mombasa
Mombasa
Mombasa is the second-largest city in Kenya. Lying next to the Indian Ocean, it has a major port and an international airport. The city also serves as the centre of the coastal tourism industry....
. During this period, he spent several sojourns in hospital due to attacks of malaria. On April 2, 1944, he was discharged from the army as unfit owing to chronic osteoarthritis in his left hip. The intention was to transport him home to England, but due to an administrative error, he was sent by sea to South Africa. Early in June he set sail north again through the Suez Canal on the hospital ship Oranje, arriving in Liverpool towards the end of the month. After convalescing in a hospital in Stockport, Campbell rejoined his wife; since their house had been bombed, they lived for a time in Oxford with the Catholic writers Bernard and Barbara Wall.
On October 5, 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
and J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
at Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College, Oxford
Magdalen College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2006 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £153 million. Magdalen is currently top of the Norrington Table after over half of its 2010 finalists received first-class degrees, a record...
. Lewis disliked, "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
and Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
" and had attacked him in a poem titled "To the Author of Flowering Rifle." In the poem, Lewis had lampooned Campbell's "lack of charity" and called him a "loud fool" who had learnt the art of lying from his enemies on the left. Lewis had further declared,
- --Who cares
- Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?
During the evening, Lewis, feeling belligerent after consuming several glasses of porter
Porter (beer)
Porter is a dark-coloured style of beer. The history and development of stout and porter are intertwined. The name was first used in the 18th century from its popularity with the street and river porters of London. It is generally brewed with dark malts...
, insisted upon reading the poem aloud, while Campbell laughed off the provocation.
Tolkien, who was then hard at work writing The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
, was charmed by Campbell. In a letter to his son Christopher
Christopher Tolkien
Christopher Reuel Tolkien is the third and youngest son of the author J. R. R. Tolkien , and is best known as the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. He drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings, which he signed C. J. R. T. The J...
, Tolkien compared Campbell to Trotter, a torture-crippled hobbit character who appeared in an early draft of The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...
. Tolkien further commented,
Here is a scion of an Ulster protUlster-ScotsThe Ulster Scots are an ethnic group in Ireland, descended from Lowland Scots and English from the border of those two countries, many from the "Border Reivers" culture...
. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in BarcelonaBarcelonaBarcelona is the second largest city in Spain after Madrid, and the capital of Catalonia, with a population of 1,621,537 within its administrative limits on a land area of...
— in vain, they were caught & butchered, and R.C. nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the RedRed Terror (Spain)The Red Terror in Spain is the name given by historians to various acts committed "by sections of nearly all the leftist groups" such as the killing of tens of thousands of people , as well as attacks on landowners, industrialists, and politicians, and the...
country. [...] However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left - the 'corduroy panzers' who fled to America [...]
According to Tolkien, Lewis' hostility to Campbell was grounded in residual Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism
Anti-Catholicism is a generic term for discrimination, hostility or prejudice directed against Catholicism, and especially against the Catholic Church, its clergy or its adherents...
from his upbringing in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
.
But hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C[hurch] of E[ngland] — so deep laid that it remains even when all the superstructure seems removed (C.S.L. for instance reveres the Blessed SacramentIn the aftermath, Campbell joined Tolkien and Lewis at several meetings of the InklingsBlessed SacramentThe Blessed Sacrament, or the Body and Blood of Christ, is a devotional name used in the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Catholic Churches, Old Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches, to refer to the Host after it has been consecrated in the sacrament of the Eucharist...
, and admires nuns!). Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered — he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it).
Inklings
The Inklings was an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford, England, for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949. The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction, and encouraged the writing of fantasy...
at The Eagle and Child
The Eagle and Child
The Eagle and Child is a pub in St Giles', Oxford, England which is owned by St. John's College, Oxford. The pub had been part of an endowment belonging to University College since the 17th century. It has associations with the Inklings writers' group which included J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S...
.
Post-war life and works
For many years, Campbell worked at the BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
and remained a fixture. During a poetry recitation by the outspoken Stalinist Stephen Spender
Stephen Spender
Sir Stephen Harold Spender CBE was an English poet, novelist and essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle in his work...
, Campbell stormed the stage and punched him. However, Spender refused to press charges, saying, "He is a great poet… We must try to understand." Spender later broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain
Communist Party of Great Britain
The Communist Party of Great Britain was the largest communist party in Great Britain, although it never became a mass party like those in France and Italy. It existed from 1920 to 1991.-Formation:...
and presented Campbell with the 1952 Foyle Prize for his verse translations of St. John of the Cross.
In 1952, the Campbells moved to Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
. Although Estado Novo was not Fascist, emigrating to it after the War further contributed to Campbell's bad reputation among the British intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
. Ironically, the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar
António de Oliveira Salazar, GColIH, GCTE, GCSE served as the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968. He also served as acting President of the Republic briefly in 1951. He founded and led the Estado Novo , the authoritarian, right-wing government that presided over and controlled Portugal...
was by then far more to Campbell's tastes than Franco's Spain, which was compromised in his mind by an intimate collaboration with Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
and Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
. In Portugal, he wrote a new version of his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse. In 1953 he embarked on a lecture tour of Canada and the United States. Organized by the Canadian poet and editor John Sutherland
John Sutherland (Canadian writer)
John Sutherland was a Canadian poet, literary critic, and magazine editor based in Montreal, Quebec. Although he published numerous poems of his own, he was perhaps better known as the founder and editor of two important Canadian literary magazines, First Statement and Northern Review...
, the tour was largely a success, though not without attacks on Campbell's "Fascistic opinions." During the 1950s
1950s
The 1950s or The Fifties was the decade that began on January 1, 1950 and ended on December 31, 1959. The decade was the sixth decade of the 20th century...
, Campbell was also a contributor to The European
The European (magazine)
The European was a privately circulated far-right cultural and political magazine that was published between 1953 and 1959. During this tenure, it was edited by Diana Mosley...
, a magazine published in France and edited by Diana Mosley. The European could also boast contributions from Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
and Henry Williamson
Henry Williamson
Henry William Williamson was an English naturalist, farmer and prolific author known for his natural and social history novels. He won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928 with his book Tarka the Otter....
.
Campbell's conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. Campbell's translations of the Catholic mystical poetry by St. John of the Cross were lavishly praised by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, who considered them, in some ways, superior to the original Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. Campbell also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He began translating poetry from languages such as Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, and French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. Among the poets he translated were Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco de Quevedo
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñez Villegas was a Spanish nobleman, politician and writer of the Baroque era. Along with his lifelong rival, Luis de Góngora, Quevedo was one of the most prominent Spanish poets of the age. His style is characterized by what was called conceptismo...
, Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa , was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.-Early years in Durban:On 13 July...
, Manuel Bandeira
Manuel Bandeira
Manuel Carneiro de Sousa Bandeira Filho was a poet, literary critic, and translator.Bandeira wrote over 20 books of poetry and prose. In 1904, he found out that he suffered from tuberculosis, which encouraged him to move from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro, because of Rio's tropical beach weather...
and Ruben Dario
Rubén Darío
Félix Rubén García Sarmiento , known as Rubén Darío, was a Nicaraguan poet who initiated the Spanish-American literary movement known as modernismo that flourished at the end of the 19th century...
. Some of Campbell's translations of the symbolist verse of Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
and Arthur Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
have appeared in modern anthologies.
Intriguingly, Campbell also produced sensitive translations into English of Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
, an acclaimed poet who was murdered at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
by anti-communist death squads. In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Campbell wrote,
- Not only did he lose his life
- By shots assassinated:
- But with a hammer and a knife
- Was after that -- translated.
Roy Campbell died in a car accident
Car accident
A traffic collision, also known as a traffic accident, motor vehicle collision, motor vehicle accident, car accident, automobile accident, Road Traffic Collision or car crash, occurs when a vehicle collides with another vehicle, pedestrian, animal, road debris, or other stationary obstruction,...
near Setúbal
Setúbal
Setúbal is the main city in Setúbal Municipality in Portugal with a total area of 172.0 km² and a total population of 118,696 inhabitants in the municipality. The city proper has 89,303 inhabitants....
, Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
, on Easter Monday
Easter Monday
Easter Monday is the day after Easter Sunday and is celebrated as a holiday in some largely Christian cultures, especially Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox cultures...
, 1957. At the time of his death, he was working upon translations of 16th and 17th century Spanish plays. Although only the rough drafts were completed, Campbell's work was posthumously edited for publication by Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley
Eric Bentley is a critic, playwright, singer, editor and translator. He became an American citizen in 1948, and currently lives in New York City...
.
Literary style
Much of Campbell's verse was satirical in heroic couplets, a form otherwise rare in 20th-century English verse. Rhymed verse was generally his favoured medium. One modern assessment of his poetry is that "he was vigorous in all he wrote, but not distinctly original."This is Campbell celebrating fertility and sexuality, in Anadyomene (1924):
- Maternal Earth stirs redly from beneath
- Her blue sea-blanket and her quilt of sky,
- A giant Anadyomene from the sheath
- And chrysalis of darkness; till we spy
- Her vast barbaric haunches, furred with trees,
- Stretched on the continents, and see her hair
- Combed in a surf of fire along the breeze
- To curl about the dim sierras, where
- Faint snow-peaks catch the sun's far-swivelled beams:
- And, tinder to his rays, the mountain-streams
- Kindle, and volleying with a thunderstroke
- Out of their roaring gullies, burst in smoke
- To shred themselves as fine as women's hair,
- And hoop gay rainbows on the sunlit air.
On the subject of nature, Campbell could produce poetry such as this in his The Zebras (1931):
- From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
- Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
- The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
- Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.
- The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
- Flashes between the shadows as they pass
- Barred with electric tremors through the grass
- Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.
- Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
- That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,
- With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
- While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight,
- Engine of beauty volted with delight,
- To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.
Selected works
- The Flaming Terrapin. (1924).
- Voorslag. (1926–1927). A monthly magazine edited by Roy Campbell, et al.
- The Wayzgoose: A South African Satire. (1928).
- Adamastor. (1930).
- Poems. (1930).
- The Gum Trees. (1931).
- The Georgiad - A Satirical Fantasy in Verse. (1931).
- Taurine Provence. (1932).
- Pomegranates. (1932).
- Burns. (1932).
- Flowering Reeds. (1933).
- Broken Record. (1934).
- Mithraic Emblems. (1936).
- Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain. (1936).
- Sons of the mistral. (1938).
- Talking Bronco. (1946).
- Poems of Baudelaire: A Translation of Les Fleurs du Mal. (1946).
- Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography. (1952).
- Lorca. (1952).
- The Mamba's Precipice. (1953) (Children's story).
- Nativity. (1954).
- Portugal. (1957).
- Wyndham Lewis. (1985).
External links
- "A Dark Horse" American Spectator
- "Who was Roy Campbell?" National Review
- Roy Campbell Page
- Zulu Kingdom: Roy Campbell
- "Roy Campbell: Bombast and Fire" - Catholic Author’s article
- 5 FIVE POEMS by Roy Campbell
- Short bio at Washington University, St. Louis
- Welsh memories of Campbell, with quotations from other authors writing about him, and from his own autobiographies