Roy Campbell (poet)

According to Campbell, his family history had been traced out, despite their differing views about the Spanish Civil War, by, "that valiant and fine writer, my friend, the late George Orwell."[4]

Campbell's paternal ancestors were Scottish Covenanters and members of Clan Campbell, who left the Gàidhealtachd of Scotland after their Chief, the Earl of Argyll, was defeated in battle by the Royalist Marquess of Montrose in 1645. The Campbell family then settled as part of the Plantation of Ulster at Carndonagh, in Inishowen, County Donegal.[5][6]

During the centuries when they lived in Donegal, the ancestors of the poet were, "bog-trotting Scotch-Irish peasants who were tenants of the Kilpatricks, the squires of Carndonagh." Many of the Campbell men were said to have been talented fiddlers. The living standards of the Campbell family improved drastically around 1750, when one of the poet's ancestors eloped with, "one of the Kilpatrick girls," whom he had met, "while he was fiddling at a ball given by the Squire."[7][8]

The poet's grandfather, William Campbell, set sail for the Colony of Natal with his family aboard the brigantine Conquering Hero from Glasgow in 1850. When they arrived, there was little sign of the city of Durban, which would become the greatest port city in Southern Africa, except a fortress and a few mud huts. However, William Campbell adapted well to life in Africa and built the breakwater that still forms the foundation of the great North Pier in Durban harbor. He also built a large and very successful sugar cane plantation.[9]

The poet's father, Samuel George Campbell, was born in Durban in 1861. In 1878 he traveled to Edinburgh to study medicine and won prizes for surgery, clinical surgery, and botany. He graduated with honors in 1882 and completed postgraduate work at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He also studied ear, nose and throat ailments in Vienna. In 1886, he returned to Scotland to take his M.D. and to become a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. While in Scotland, Dr. Campbell married Margaret Wylie Dunnachie, daughter of James Dunnachie, of Glenboig, Lanarkshire, a wealthy self-made businessman, and Jean Hendry of Eaglesham.[5][10]

In his memoirs, however, Campbell alleges, "My maternal grandmother was a Gascon from Bayonne and though I never met her, I inherit through her my love of bulls, and of Provençal, French, and Spanish poetry."[11]

Also according to the poet, his Dunnachie ancestors were, "Highland Jacobites who fled Scotland," after the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, but returned after the act of indemnity.[5][12]

Also according to the poet, his maternal grandfather, James Dunnachie, was an acquaintance of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, and also corresponded for many years with Mark Twain.[13]

In 1889, Doctor and Mrs. Campbell moved back to Natal, where he established a very successful medical practice. He would often travel long distances on foot to treat his patients and, in an unprejudiced approach deeply rare in Colonial South Africa, would treat both black and white patients. His generosity to patients who could not afford to pay was also legendary. For this reason, "Sam Joj", as he was called, was deeply loved by the Zulu people of Natal.[14]

Returning to South Africa with Mary in 1925, Campbell started Voorslag, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the title in Afrikaans) on South African colonial society, which he considered "bovine". Before the magazine was launched, Campbell invited William Plomer to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post was invited to become the magazine's Afrikaans editor. Voorslag was, according to Joseph Pearce, one of the first bilingual literary journals ever published in South Africa.[91]

The first issue included a book review in which Campbell praised Plomer's recent novel Turbott Wolfe. The novel depicted a White artist filling his studio with Black women as his models and sexual partners, much to the outrage of the artist's racist White neighbors. Plomer courted further controversy by ending his novel with an interracial marriage between a Black man and a White woman. For these reasons, Plomer's Turbott Wolfe had been dubbed, "A Nasty Book on a Nasty Subject," by the Natal Advertiser.[92]

In his review for Voorslag, Campbell praised Turbott Wolfe as "just and true", but also criticized Plomer for dehumanizing the White racists in his novel. Campbell wrote:

Mr. Plomer has shown his white characters when acting under the influence of race-feeling, behaving with typical ferocity and injustice. But he fails to let them relax enough into their individual and comparative dignity. He keeps pointing at them all the time and nudging the reader. I have known many farmers who capable of the most callous and criminal behaviour to the blacks, were guilless sons of the soil, as innocent as sleeping babes, with devout souls and sky-blue eyes. Their cruelty and impulsiveness was not even remembered when they relapsed again into their individual rationality. This type is much more normal than the bloodthirsty type described by Mr. Plomer and it confronts one with a far more terrible enigma. If Mr. Plomer had realized this his satire would have been more devastatingly complete and he might have achieved a masterpiece.[93]

Elsewhere in the same issue, Campbell "attacked Colonial South Africa with unrestrained venom". He wrote that the White man's racial superiority was "a superstition which was exploded by science ten years ago and by Christianity two thousand years before." As a nation, he wrote that South Africa lagged "three hundred years behind modern Europe and five hundred years behind modern art and science." Furthermore, he accused White South Africans of being little more than a nation of parasites. Campbell concluded:

We have no excuse for our parasitism on the native and the sooner we realize it the safer for our future. We are as a race without thinkers, without leaders, without even a physical aristocracy working on the land. The study of modern anthropology should be encouraged as it would give us a better sense of our position in the family tree of Homo sapiens - which is among the lower branches: it might even rouse us to assert ourselves in some less ignoble way than reclining blissfully in a grocer's paradise and feeding on the labour of the natives.[94]

Both Voorslag articles outraged the White population of Natal. In response, the magazine's owner, Lewis Reynolds, informed Campbell that, in the future, his editorial control over Voorslag was going to be drastically limited. Campbell resigned in protest.

To his grief and horror, Campbell found himself subjected to social ostracism by the Whites of Durban and found that even members of his own family wanted nothing to do with him. Left destitute, Campbell wrote to his friend C.J. Sibbett, a wealthy Cape Town advertising executive, and asked for a gift of £50, so that he and his family could return to England. Campbell concluded, "None of my relations will look at me because of the opinions I have expressed in Voorslag."[95]

Sibbett, who immediately sent Campbell the money, wrote to the editor of the Natal Witness, "I am very glad to hear where your sympathies lie in the Voorslag controversy. Roy and Plomer were like thoroughbreds pitted against pack-mules. Natal seems to me to be Wesleyan-ridden with a strong dash of Calvinism thrown in and it is astonishing how these two Cuckoo eggs came to be hatched there."[96]

Before leaving South Africa with his family in 1927, Campbell reacted to his ostracism by writing the poem The Making of a Poet:

"In every herd there is some restive steer

Who leaps the cows and heads each hot stampede,

Till the old bills unite in jealous fear

To hunt him from the pastures where they feed.

"Lost in the night he hears the jungles crash

And desperately, lest his courage fail,

Across his hollow flanks with sounding lash

Scourges the heavy whipcord of his tail.

"Far from the phalanxes of horns that ward

The sleeping herds he keeps the wolf at bay,

At nightfall by the slinking leopard spoored,

And goaded by the fly-swarm through the day."[97]

Campbell also wrote Tristan da Cunha,[98] and The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in heroic couplets, on the racism and other cultural shortcomings of Colonial South Africa. The poem included belligerent attacks against those who Campbell felt had wronged him in the controversy over Voorslag. The Wayzgoose was published in 1928.[10][99]

In a 1956 letter to Harvey Brit, who had accused Campbell of being a Fascist, the latter wrote, "I am an exile...from my country because I stood up for fair play for the blacks - is that Fascism?"[100]

Having returned to London, Campbell began to move in literary circles. Though initially on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group, the poet subsequently became very hostile to them, declaring that they were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian.

According to Roger Scruton,

Learning that his wife had been conducting a passionate affair with Vita (to the enraged jealousy of Vita’s other lover, Virginia Woolf), 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 narcissism. The role of the poet is not to join their Peter Pan games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal.[101]

Referring to the Bloomsbury Group as "intellectuals without intellect", Campbell penned a verse satire of them entitled The Georgiad (1931). According to Joseph Pearce,

As with so much of Campbell's satire, The Georgiad's 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 Russell, Marie Stopes, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf 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". Nihilism 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 Waugh, 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 Christianity.[102]

The Campbells moved to Provence 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.[103] 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).

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 Barcelona, where they were joined a few days later by their children, Uys Krige, the children's French governess, their dog Sarah, and whatever luggage they could carry between them.[104]

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,

"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 beleaguered 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 Rome, 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 Madrid. 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 CHEKA.'"[105]

Campbell later immortalized the incident in his poem The Carmelites of Toledo.[106]

On 9 August 1936, the Campbells boarded HMS Maine, which was evacuating British subjects to Marseilles.[107] 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, where large numbers of young men were volunteering for the International Brigades and where only British Catholics raised a dissident voice.[108]

While staying with his openly Stalinist in-laws at Binstead,[109] Campbell found himself being courted by Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. As his family was destitute, Campbell made the most of the contact and his poem 'The Alcazar' was published in Mosley's BUF Quarterly magazine that same year.[110]

In the fall of 1936, Percy Wyndham Lewis arranged a meeting between Mosley and Campbell. Campbell later recalled of the meeting, "I not only refused Mosley's and Lewis's offer of a very high position and lucrative position in the Fascist party but explained that I was returning to the ranks to fight Red Fascism, the worst and most virulent variety, and that when the time came I was ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism and that I could (though badly disabled) knock both of their brains out there and then! I explained that I was only fighting as a Christian for the right to pray in my own churches, all of which (save 3) had been destroyed in Red Spain...I then asked for my coat and hat: Lewis has never forgiven it."[111]

Roy Campbell returned home from the meeting looking "wan and tired". When Mary questioned him about it, he responded, "It's no good, kid. He's as bad as the others". Mosley, however, was not put off and continued his courtship of Campbell through senior BUF member William Joyce. Despite Mosley's promise to make him "the official poet" of the Fascist movement in the United Kingdom, Campbell refused to be recruited and the effort was abandoned.[112]

Soon after the meeting with Mosley, Campbell read Mein Kampf and said of Adolf Hitler, "Good gracious! This man won't do - he's a teetotalitarian vegetarian!"[112]

On 29 January 1937, the family set sail to Lisbon on the German vessel Niasa.[113]

In June, Campbell left Portugal for Spain, going to Salamanca and then to Toledo, where he retrieved the personal papers of Saint John of the Cross from a hiding place in his former flat. Campbell then attempted to enlist in one of the Carlist militias, but was informed by Alfonso Merry del Val, the head of the Nationalist Press Service, that he could better serve as a war correspondent alongside Franco's armies. Travelling on a journalist's pass issued by Merry del Val, Campbell left Toledo on 30 June 1937 and was driven to Talavera, where he suffered a serious fall, twisting his left hip. The following day, the special car traveled southwards from the front, ending its lightning tour in Seville. This visit appears to have been Campbell's only front line experience of the war. However, that would not keep him from later suggesting that he had seen far more action than he had.[114] He did not fight for the Nationalists during the Spanish conflict, despite later claims.[115]

Campbell's glorification of the military strength and masculine virtues of Franco's Spain drew a poor reaction back home, and his reputation suffered considerably as a result. 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 mocked the combat deaths of Republican soldiers, praised the Nationalists for defending the Church, and accused Communists of committing far more heinous atrocities than any Fascist government. In a footnote 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 Ages."[116]

According to South African Campbell scholar Judith Lütge Coullie, "Many of R[oy] C[ampbell]'s contemporaries, as well as his biographer Peter Alexander, felt that he was extremely naïve politically and thus did not grasp the implications of his support for the Party that defended the Catholic Church."[117]

Republican sympathisers the world over were outraged and the Scottish Communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid wrote an angry 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 breed has to show
Since the massacre of Glencoe![118]

Campbell's former friend C. S. Lewis, who had first met him as an Oxford undergraduate, also attacked him in a poem titled "To the Author of Flowering Rifle". In the poem, Lewis denounced Campbell's "lack of charity" and called him a "loud fool" who had learnt the art of lying from the very Communists he so claimed to despise.[119] Lewis had further declared,

—Who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?[120]

Lewis concluded his poem by arguing that in a conflict as mutually bloody as the Spanish Civil War, only a neutral course could be considered honourable.

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 19 May, Roy and Mary Campbell traveled to Madrid for the Victory Parade of Franco's forces.[121]

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Campbell denounced Nazi Germany 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 enlist in the British Army. He was recruited into the Intelligence Corps because of his knowledge of foreign languages and began training as a private with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on 1 April 1942.[122] Having completed basic training, Campbell was transferred in July to the I.C. Depot near Winchester, where he was trained in motorcycles.[123] In February 1943, he was promoted to sergeant, and in March he was posted to British East Africa.

On his way there in a convoy, Campbell addressed, "one of the native porters, who came aboard the troopship, in Zulu." Stunned, the porter replied in the same tongue, "How did you, an English soldier, learn my language?"[124]

Campbell replied, "Am I not the nephew of Machu and the son of Sam-Joj?"[125]

The porter snapped, "Like Hell you are - the nephew of Machu would be a Colonel; so would the son of Sam-Joj - not a Sergeant, like you."[126]

On 5 May, Campbell arrived at 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 Imperial Japanese Army.[127] However, any hope of combat was thwarted when Campbell in late July suffered a new injury to his damaged hip in a fall from a motorcycle. He was sent to hospital in Nairobi, where the doctors examined an X-ray of his hips and declared him unfit for active service.

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 made several sojourns in hospital due to attacks of malaria.[128]

According to Joseph Pearce, "During the long months of boredom on the Kenyan coast or in hospital in Mombasa, Campbell began to brood over his predicament. In particular, he began to resent the fact that, in spite of his efforts to fight against Hitler, he was still being branded a fascist for having supported Franco. He compared his own position as a volunteer in the armed services with the position of leading left-wing poets such as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis, who had settled for 'soft jobs' at home or, in the case of Auden, had emigrated to the United States at the first hint of the coming war."[129]

On 2 April 1944, Roy Campbell was medically discharged from the British Army owing to chronic osteoarthritis in his left hip.[10] The intention was to transport him home to England, but due to an administrative error, he was sent by sea to South Africa aboard the Free Dutch hospital ships Oranje.

Of his arrival in his native Durban, Campbell later recalled, "I had already discarded my crutches and was able to get about with two sticks. Two of my brothers, whom I hadn't seen for eighteen years, were on leave from the South African Forces in Durban - one a Colonel in the South African Air Force, the other a Sergeant-Major in the Anti-Tanks. We drove about revisiting old scenes with my mother, sister and eldest brother, and recalling a thousand happy incidents which I had forgotten.[130]

After, "four weeks of sheer paradise," Campbell reboarded the Oranje to return to England.[131] He later wrote, "As the Oranje began to sail out of Port Natal harbour, after refueling on Salisbury Island, I saw the great town of Durban, which I had known when it was little more than a village, rising up so steeply, in tiers of skyscrapers, that nearly all the landmarks I had previously known were dwarfed or hidden by the new buildings. Yet everywhere I could seemarks of what members of my family of ex-Irish bogtrotters have done to decorate, enliven, or deface the landscape, monuments of their energy, fantasy, or eccentricity, were visible in the shape of universities, colleges, hospitals, gardens, statues, and plantations."[132]

Early in June the Oranje set sail through the Suez Canal, arriving in Liverpool towards the end of the month. After convalescing in a hospital in Stockport, Campbell rejoined his wife; since their house in Campden Grove had been severely damaged in a German bombing raid, the Campbells lived for a time in Oxford with the Catholic writers Bernard and Barbara Wall.[133]

On 5 October 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1962, Lewis recalled that he detested what he dubbed, "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism".[134]

When he met Campbell, Lewis, feeling belligerent after consuming several glasses of port, recited his poem To the Author of Flowering Rifle aloud, while Campbell laughed off the provocation.

Tolkien, who was then hard at work writing The Lord of the Rings, found their conversation with Campbell delightful. In a letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien compared Campbell to Trotter, a torture-crippled hobbit in his novel, who would be renamed Aragorn in later drafts. Tolkien described Campbell as follows, "Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona — 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 Red 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 [...][78]

According to Tolkien, Lewis' belief that support for the Nationalists equated to Fascism was grounded in a refusal to face facts about Republican war crimes, which in turn was based in residual Anti-Catholicism from his Protestant upbringing in Northern Ireland, "But hatred of our church is after all the real 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 Sacrament, 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). But Campbell shook him up a bit."[78]

According to Joseph Pearce, "Yet, however much Lewis had been 'shaken' by the meeting with Campbell and however much he loathed his politics, the three men parted amicably at the end of the evening. It was midnight when Tolkien and Campbell left Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College with all three agreeing to meet again in the future."[135]

In the aftermath, Campbell joined Tolkien and Lewis at several meetings of the Inklings at Lewis's flat and at The Eagle and Child pub, where Campbell's "poetry, political views, and religious perspectives caused quite a stir."[136]

According to Pearce, "At these gatherings, Campbell and Lewis would continue to cross swords, although it would be their differences on literature rather than religion or politics that would fire the debate. The gist of their differences is encapsulated in one of Lewis's poems, entitled simply, To Roy Campbell, in which he criticizes Campbell for his negative attitude towards Romanticism. Interestingly, however, Lewis's tone is far more friendly than in his violent lampoon To the Author of Flowering Rifle, suggesting that the two men had warmed to each other in subsequent meetings."[137]

At the same time, T.S. Eliot reached out to Campbell and expressed a desire to publish a new volume of Campbell's poetry for Faber & Faber. The two poets met regularly throughout 1945, discussing arrangements for a poetry collection which Campbell titled, Talking Bronco, after Stephen Spender's hostile review of Flowering Rifle in the New Statesman.[138]

Campbell also wrote, "a violently polemical preface," and many verse satires in which he lashed out against Left-Wing poets MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day-Lewis, and Hugh MacDiarmid, whom he accused, among other things, of cowardice for refusing to "join up" during the war.[139]

According to Pearce, "It fell to Eliot to dissuade him. Like a skilled horseman endeavoring to bring a bronco under control, Eliot worked all his powers of persuasion to bring Campbell to his senses. He hinted that he agreed with Campbell's hostile opinion of much contemporary verse, but added that he still felt it better to abstain from comment, suggesting that Campbell do likewise."[140]

Campbell agreed to drop the preface entirely, but resisted Elliot's efforts to convince him to remove the multiple poems that attacked the Left-Wing poets as well. Reluctantly, Campbell agreed to make all but one of the changes Eliot requested and in particular, softened the attacks against Stephen Spender. What remained, however, "was still destined to cause great offense."[141]

In a letter to Eliot, however, Campbell conceded, "Anyway, it only shows how hard up we are if we consider courage or patriotism as a criterion of poetry. (One might as well condemn the paintings of Cézanne because he deserted from the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War)."[142]

On April 10, 1947, Campbell, "continued his war of attrition against Spender," by attending a poetry reading by the latter, which was being hosted by the Poetry Society at Bayswater. When Spender stepping up to the podium, Campbell shouted that he wished to, "protest on behalf of the Sergeant's Mess of the King's African Rifles." Campbell then stormed the stage and punched Spender in the face, which left the Communist poet with a bloody nose. Campbell's friends and family immediately removed him from the premises. As wet handkerchiefs were pressed to Spender's nose, he was urged to call the police and press charges. Spender refused, saying, "He is a great poet; he is a great poet. We must try to understand." He then insisted on finishing his poetry reading.[143]

In a letter to the organizer of the event, Campbell wrote, "No doubt you will wonder at my reason for disturbing your session the other night. There was no other option left me by the speaker's own announcement that he was going to denounce me from every public platform as, 'a fascist, a coward, and a liar,' - merely because I had called attention to his war record. As I volunteered when over-age and while my own country (S. Africa) was still neutral, to fight fascism which is merely another form of communism... I could not allow myself to be called a coward by one who during the struggle against fascism had employed no other weapon to the adversary than his own knife and fork and his highly lucrative but innocuous pen - while I was on ranker's pay suffering malaria in the jungle."[144]

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.[145]

On May 1, 1952, Campbell dined with fellow Catholic convert and satirist Evelyn Waugh. In a subsequent letter to Nancy Mitford, Waugh called Campbell, "a great beautiful simple sweet natured savage," and said that he felt, "quite dizzy from his talking to me."[146]

A few days later, Campbell had lunch with fellow South Africans Laurens van der Post, Enslin du Plessis, Uys Krige, and Alan Paton. During the lunch, the five men composed and signed an open letter to the South African Government, in which they denounced the ruling National Party's plans to disenfranchise Coloured voters. The letter was subsequently published by several South African newspapers.[147]

On May 9, 1952, the Campbells moved to Linhó, Sintra, on the Portuguese Riviera. In Portugal, he wrote a new version of his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse.

In his new autobiography, Campbell expressed his disgust for South Africa under Apartheid. In one passage, Campbell argued that treating the non-white majority as an underclass in their own country was not only immoral but destructive, "The present disqualification of the native from so many aids to his own betterment is exactly on a part with the natives' treatment of each other. We are behaving about a quarter as badly as the Zulus and Matabeles did to their fellow Bantu, and it will do us little more good than it did them... and we may end by ranking the majority of the population in violent opposition to the white minority, which happened in the mad revolution in Haiti, when the black Emperor, Jean Christope, out-Caesared Nero and Caligula in the name of Liberty and Equality. We must never forget that theoretical Bolshevism is the most attractive dream-bait that was ever invented. Though practical Bolshevism may be the most diabolical and cruel hook ever inserted into bait... You can expect a rustic Zulu to be proof against the seductive blarney which completely seduced the 'knowing and sophisticated' intellectuals of England and Western Europe for so many years."[148]

In 1953, Campbell 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 it did cause protests to be organized by members of the American and Canadian Communist Parties against Campbell's allegedly "Fascistic opinions".[149]

South Africa

In December 1953, Campbell learned that the University of Natal wished to confer an honorary doctorate upon him. Overjoyed, "at this belated recognition from his native land," Campbell began planning what would be his final visit to South Africa.[150]

On March 10, 1954, Campbell flew from Lisbon to Rome, where be boarded a South African Airways flight to Johannesburg by way of Khartoum. Campbell later recalled that the airplane flew into Khartoum just after dawn, which afforded him a view of, "a magnificent sunrise over the windings of the Nile."[151]

When Campbell arrived in Durban on March 18, he was greeted by his brother George, his former schoolmaster Cecil (Bill) Payn, and many other friends and acquaintances, who swept him off to a rowdy party.[152]

While staying with his elderly mother, Campbell wrote to his friend Rob Lyle, "I'm sitting on my mother's stoep overlooking Pietermaritzburg, Table Mountain, and the Valley of a Thousand Hills. From her back stoep you can see the Drakensburg range, Cobalt and indigo taking up the whole horizon with incredible rock formations... like rampaging dragons and saw-toothed dinosaurs. Nearer, bright green and yellow, forests and crags, are the Kaarkloof and Inthloraan ranges."[153]

Pietermaritzburg City Hall

The honorary degree was awarded in a graduation ceremony at Pietermaritzburg City Hall on March 20, 1954. Abandoning his carefully prepared notes, Campbell launched into a defense of South Africa and a denunciation of the British Empire. Even though Campbell eventually denounced South African Prime Minister D.F. Malan, the ruling National Party, and Apartheid, for what he called, "the dangerous and suicidal plight of our country," the damage, according to Campbell's biographer Joseph Pearce, was already done. After decades of living abroad, Campbell may have been unaware that, due to the National Party's pervasive practice of calling all of their critics "Communists", anti-communism was sometimes taken, in South Africa under Apartheid, as support of the Government. That is why Campbell's audience listened with growing shock and unease as he denounced Winston Churchill as, "a valiant but superannuated Beefeater," and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as, "a tittering zombie," for having handed Eastern Europe over to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference. At the end of his speech, Campbell praised the anti-communist government of Spain under Franco. When Campbell finally sat down, the applause was noticeably muted and the Natal Witness later reported, "The inspiring crash of dropping bricks echoed through Pietermaritzburg City Hall."[154]

In a letter written the following day to Rob Lyle, Campbell enchoed the political opinions expressed in his speech, but also accurately accused D.F. Malan and the National Party of Anti-Catholicism. Campbell also expressed a belief, however, that people who condemned Apartheid were guilty of hypocrisy if they did not also condemn racial segregation and Jim Crow Laws in the American South. He wrote, "...the whole of the situation here has been criminally exaggerated - Zulus and Indians who got their MAs and BAs kneeling on the same cushion as me got uproarious applause from the Whites. Throughout half the USA they wouldn't even have been allowed in the same Hall."[155]

In a letter to Edith Sitwell, Campbell echoed the opinions of his speech at the City Hall. Churchill was once again dubbed a, "valiant but stupid beefeater," and Roosevelt was once again dubbed, "a tittering zombie," but also, "a criminal moron if ever there was one." Campbell also expressed anger that, "Franco, the only man who ever fooled Stalin and Hitler has been called a puppet." According to Pearce, Campbell, "also claimed, in an amazing example of selective and wishful thinking, that Spain, Portugal, and Ireland were all, 'run on papal encyclicals by kindly people.'"[156]

In a letter from their farm in Portugal, Mary Campbell wrote, "All I know is that I have had enough of being quite alone here, and I am longing for you to come back."[157]

Campbell replied, "I am longing to see you my beloved - but this is the last time I will ever set eyes on my beloved country (how I love it!) so let me take in all I can before I finish with it."[158]

Before he left South Africa for the last time, Campbell spent a week fishing with his brother on the coast near Port Edward. He also attended his sister Ethel's funeral after she died in April after a long illness. During a trip to Hluhluwe game reserve, Campbell's attempt to secure a photograph of himself bullfighting a Black Rhinoceros with his duffelcoat ended disastrously. He later wrote to his friend Charles Ley, "We had a lot of fun in Mozambique and Zululand: a rhino went for our jeep, smashed the bonnet, and removed the number plate. We took wonderful photos of Rhinos, elephants, giraffes, buffaloes, gnus, hippos, crocs, and hundreds of different antelopes and zebras."[159]

Roy Campbell died in a car accident near Setúbal, Portugal, on Easter Monday, 1957. The Campbell's were returning home from attending Easter Sunday in Sevilla.

According to his daughter Anna Campbell Lyle, "On the day, in fact at the very hour, that Father was dying in a car crash on a lonely road in Portugal, I was buying a black coat at Simpson's in Piccadilly. It was 3:30 in the afternoon of the 23rd of April 1957 - the birthday and, according to tradition, also the death day of Shakespeare. The car my parents were travelling in, a small Fiat 300, had one very worn Tyre. Mary, my mother, who did all the driving, thought she had had this Tyre put at the back, but the mechanic made a mistake when servicing the car, and put it in front of the right hand side where my father sat. He was a big man and under his weight the tyre which had held out since Seville burst, and the car crashed into a tree on a lonely road near Setubal, south of Lisbon. Both my parents were knocked unconscious instantly. Father was driven to a hospital at Setubal by some people who passed shortly after the accident. He died on the way, after murmuring some words and giving two deep sighs. Mother recovered after a long convalescence, but she was never the same, brave optimist again; though she did retain her sense of humour and enchantment. Certainly a part of her died with Father and she blamed herself for his death. This was nonsense; fate had joined them; fate had now separated them".[167]

Anna also writes, "Mary was deeply religious and it was a great happiness to her to know that Father had died two days after receiving the Sacrament on Easter Sunday, so that he was in a State of Grace when his soul left his body. Father was buried in the cemetery of São Pedro in Sintra (the Cintra of Byron's Childe Harold) on the 26th. I often go there to take flowers to his tomb in which Mary now lies. This is not to be their last resting place. The South Africans want their greatest poet to be buried in what was, when all is said, the part of the planet he loved most."[168]

According to South African Campbell scholar Judith Lütge Coullie, however, inquiries about efforts to repatriate Roy and Mary Campbell's remains to South Africa "have drawn a blank. It is unlikely, however, to be a priority in post-Apartheid South Africa."[169]

At the time of his death, Campbell 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 under the title, Life Is a Dream and Other Spanish Classics.

In a 2012 article for the Sunday Times, Tim Cartwright wrote, "In later life, when Alan Paton set out to write Campbell’s biography, it was Mary Campbell’s absolute refusal to discuss [her affair with Vita Sackville-West] that led to Paton’s abandoning the book. Paton, quite rightly, regarded this as the turning point in Campbell’s life."[170]

Meanwhile, Campbell's satirical poetry mocking the Marxism, Nihilism, narcissism, and promiscuity of the British intelligentsia caused him to be a very controversial figure throughout the English-speaking world during and long after his lifetime.

Furthermore, Campbell's similar mockery in The Wayzgoose of what he saw as the racism, cultural backwardness, and parasitism of White South Africans made Campbell an equally controversial figure in South Africa under Apartheid.

However, through his friendship and mentorship of Afrikaner poet Uys Krige, Roy Campbell's legacy also includes an enormous influence over the subsequent development of Afrikaans literature. According to his friend Jack Cope, Uys Krige's linguistic and literary talents, his passion for French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese literature, and having absorbed the literary translation philosophy of Roy Campbell made Krige the greatest translator of poetry from Romance languages into Afrikaans during the 20th century.[171] In addition to his acclaimed translations of both European and Latin American poetry, Uys Krige also translated many of the works of William Shakespeare into Afrikaans from Elizabethan English. [172]

Furthermore, Krige would also go on to become a literary and political mentor to the many young Afrikaans language poets and writers of the literary movement known as the Sestigers,[173] which Louise Viljoen, in her biography of poetess Ingrid Jonker, has described as nothing less than, "a cultural revolt," against Apartheid and the National Party from within, "the heart of Afrikanerdom." Due in large part to Krige's influence, membership in the Afrikaner intelligentsia in South Africa under Apartheid became synonymous with opposition to the South African Government.

Elsewhere, however, although Campbell's translations of the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud have been reprinted in a few modern poetry anthologies, Campbell's support for Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War has caused him to continue being labelled as a Fascist and blacklisted from the vast majority of other poetry anthologies and university literature courses.

According to his daughters and his biographer Joseph Pearce, however, the Campbell's opposition to the Second Spanish Republic was based on personal experience with both Republican war crimes and with the systematic religious persecution that targeted both the clergy and laity of the Catholic Church in Spain. Also according to Pearce, Campbell's verse satires, which his wife and daughters often begged him to stop writing, were modelled after the very similar poetry published in 17th- and 18th-century England by satirists John Dryden and Alexander Pope,[174][175][176] whom in turn had modelled their poems upon the satirical verse of Ancient Roman poets Gaius Lucilius, Catullus, Martial, and Juvenal.

Other scholars have also made efforts to restore Roy Campbell's reputation and his place in World Literature.

For example, in a 1968 lecture at Harvard University, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges praised Campbell's translations of the mystical Christian poetry of St. John of the Cross. Borges called Campbell, "a great Scottish poet who is also South African", and cited Campbell's renderings of St. John's poetry as an example of how literary translation can produce superior works of poetry to the original poems in the original language.[177]

Furthermore, Campbell may be credited with bringing the traditions of mock epics and satirical poetry in heroic couplets from the lifetimes of John Dryden and Alexander Pope into the 20th-century and with updating both traditions accordingly. In this regard, Campbell continues to have followers, particularly in the literary movement within American poetry known as New Formalism.

In 1981, American poet and satirist R.S. Gwynn, a native of North Carolina, published one of the best known examples, The Narcissiad. Literary critic Robert McPhillips has dubbed Gwynn's The Narcissiad, "a Popean mock epic lambasting contemporary poets".[178]

Dana Gioia has also written of The Narcissiad, "Formal and satiric, this mock epic in heroic couplets pilloried the excesses of contemporary American poetry by recounting the adventures of Narcissicus, an ambitious but talentless poet. In Gwynn's mercilessly satiric tale American poets simultaneously realize that to achieve artistic fame in the overcrowded field of contemporary verse they must kill all competitors. After a series of outrageous comic battles fought by recognizable caricatures of fashionable American poets, Narcissus ineptly triumphs. Gwynn's irreverent poem cannot have pleased the irreverent targets of his humor, but it enjoyed a lively underground life and has been repeatedly reprinted."[179]

When The Narcissiad, takes aim at Confessional poetry, Gwynn used a level of invective that would have made Campbell proud:

"Our Younger Poet, weaned early from his bottle,

Begins to cast about for a role-model

And lacking knowledge of the great tradition,

Pulls from the bookstore shelf a slim edition

Of Poems of Now, and takes the offered bait,

And thus becomes the next initiate.

If male he takes his starting point from Lowell

And fearlessly parades his suffering soul

Through therapy, shock-treatments, and divorce

Until he whips the skin from a dead horse.

His female counterpart descends from Plath

And wanders down a self-destructive path

Laying the blame on Daddy while she guides

Her readers to their template suicides --

Forgetting in her addled state, alas,

Her all-electric oven has no gas."[180]

Furthermore, the essays which comprise American Catholic literary critic and poet James Matthew Wilson's 2016 book The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking were inspired by Wilson's experiences while attending a convention of the Modern Language Association during the early 2000s. During the convention, a female scholar praised Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen for being an only child and used Bowen to attack, "purveyors of hate," like Patrick J. Buchanan, who have praised having large families. Another scholar praised Irish playwright Samuel Beckett and used, "the famous inaction and infertility," within Beckett's plays to denounce the Roman Catholic Church for discouraging disparity of cult marriages and for similarly encouraging large families. Wilson commented, "Much like the Bowen scholar before him, he seemed interested in his author primarily as a means of striking a blow against birth."[181]

In response, Wilson writes that he was reminded of Roy Campbell's mockery of similar ideas among the British intelligentsia of the 1930s in the poem The Flowering Rifle. In the poem, Campbell vowed to, "flaunt Truth:

Before the senile owl-roosts of our youth

Whom monkeys' glands seem powerless to restore,

As Birth Control was profitless before,

Which sponsored by their mockery of a Church,

Like stranded barbels, left them in the lurch,

Whose only impact on the world's affairs,

Has been to cause a boom in Rubber shares,

Who come to battle with both arms held up

And ask to be invited home to sup -

While back at home, to sound their battle-horn,

Some self-aborted pedants stray forlorn

And pity those who venture to be born."[182]

Much of Campbell's verse was satirical and written 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."[183]

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 produced 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.

• The character of Zulu Blades in Percy Wyndham Lewis' 1930 novel The Apes of God, is modeled after Campbell.[184]
• German aggrotech band C-Drone-Defect used Campbell's literary translation of Charles Baudelaire's poem Le Rebelle as the lyrics for the song "Rebellis" on their 2009 album Dystopia.

• 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)
• Cousin Bazilio by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz (Trans. 1953)
• The Mamba's Precipice (1953) (Children's story)
• Nativity (1954)
• Portugal (1957)
• Wyndham Lewis (1985)

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Roy Campbell (poet)

• Works by Roy Campbell at Faded Page (Canada)
• "A Dark Horse" American Spectator
• 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
• Translated Penguin Book – at Penguin First Editions reference site of early first edition Penguin Books.
• Light on a Dark Horse Manuscript at Dartmouth College Library