The wild colonial boy

P. J. Kavanagh

The poet Roy Campbell managed, splen- didly, to antagonise on purpose just about everybody who could push his reputation. (He did not talk of his 'bog- trotting Irish ancestors' for nothing!). It now seems as though his work has been dropped into the hole reserved for those who resist the orthodox unorthodoxies of their time. He derided Bloomsbury — `13loomsberries', did not much care for his fashionable contemporaries — 'Mac- Spaunday' (MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day Lewis) and defiantly chose the Franco — Catholic — side in the Spanish Civil War. As a result about the only piece of his work that is still widely known is (I should guess) his epigram 'On Some South African Novelists':

You praise the firm restraint with which they write - I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?

There are two things to say about that: it was bound to offend, and it is good.

He was born in Durban in 1901, into a distinguished family of 19th-century Scot- tish settlers (of Irish descent) and his father, a doctor, was one of the most important men in the town. Also, for his time, one of the most liberal. Mr Alexander, in his otherwise fine biography, flirts with the idea that Campbell wrote poetry in order to cure a 'divided self', a self split between a hatred of (parental) authority and a desire to please his admired father. Possibly. But such psychoanalysing reduces poetry to a sort of psychic poultice, and leaves one to ponder the implied undivided selves of non- poets. Also — amazingly — he hints that Campbell may have been sexually impotent when he was 16 years old! (This, of a strict- ly brought-up dutiful son of a puritan Col- onial household in 1917 ... ) But such lapses of the historical sense are limited to the early pages of the book, as though Mr Alexander is trying them out and then Campbell himself drives them away.

in 1918 he sailed for Oxford where he felt himself, in self-defence, bound to play the loud, non-effete son of the Veldt (Wynd- ham Lewis portrayed him as 'Zulu Blades'). Unerringly, he began to invest in powerful enemies for the future. He shared a flat with Aldous Huxley: 'this pedant who leer- ingly gloated over his knowledge of how crayfish copulated — but could never have caught or cooked one.' The pattern of re- jection was set at once and it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, given Campbell's background and temperament and the kind of upper-middle-class epatartt le bourgeois he came across. After all, the Wild Colonial Boy had not been to an English Public school; he had no interest in shocking the bourgeois — too easy, in his view. The ones he wanted to shock were the ones who did the shocking and pretended„ themselves, to be shock-proof. It is a fine ambition but equivalent, however small the lion, to putting your head in its mouth.

He took no degree, began wandering in Provence, married the beautiful Mary Gar- man (to whom he remained devoted for the rest of his life) and then settled down in a cow-shed to write 'The Flaming Terrapin'.

The poem's extraordinary linguistic vigour, unlike anything being written at the time, made it a success, despite his efforts of self-decapitation. Campbell was famous, so he did what now seems typical of him, he went back to South Africa to do battle with his own country. There, with Wiliam Plomer, he founded the magazine Voorslag (Whiplash) and charged at once: 'When the white people came out here they gave the native the Bible and the native in exchange gave the white man a great black fetish to worship. It is this fetish that rules the coun- try — Colour prejudice.' One can wonder how many of his revolutionary enemies in England would have dared to challenge their own culture so directly. Campbell was always on the side of the oppressed, as his two fine poems 'The Serf' and 'The Zulu Girl' clearly show. Of course such straight talking could not be allowed to last and soon Campbell was forced to leave his beloved Africa and return, penniless, to England.

At once, through no fault of his own, he was forced to challenge the most exclusive literary apartheid England has ever known — Bloomsbury. His adored wife Mary was, startlingly, attracted away from him by Vita Sackville-West and it almost killed Camp- bell. 'I could hardly believe,' wrote Laurens van der Post 'that the man who had walked

the beach in the dark [in South Africa]

reciting a great poem with the voice of a prophet, and this thin, shivering hulk of a human being in torn and tattered clothes: could be one and the same person.' However, the result was the funny, vigorous, and over-long (1200 lines) 'The Georgiad':

Now hawthorn blooms above the daisied slope Where lovelorn poets after milkmaids grope ...

He not only went for their politics and morals, he went for the way they wrote — or thought they wrote. 'I don't think anything so scurrilous has appeared In England for about 150 years' wrote the hugely revived Campbell, and went to live happily, boozily and poorly with the fishermen of Provence. There, reunited with Mary, he began his greatest apostasy from revolutionary orthodoxies, a slow drift towards Catholicism. In 1933 they went to Spain, arriving in Barcelona as the bombs began to burst and as almost the whole of literary England agreed which side it was on. From this moment the word 'fascist' began to be attached to Campbell and some of his language, 'bolshies', `sheenies', etc' did not help. But Wyndham Lewis, wit°, had introduced Campbell to Oswald Mosley — a meeting from which CamPhell retreated, appalled — concluded with . disgust that Campbell was not political at all, except for 'a great antipathy for the English "gentleman" ... and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in Pub' farm and bull-ring.' In 1935, harried by Government militia in Toledo, his house searched at gun-point for, signs of pro-Catholic leanings, he is (01 course) writing back to England: 'Yester- day I had the good fortune to be baptised and married in the Catholic church. I wish you the same luck.' The dead bodies of his friends the Carmelite monks were lying 1.° the street. (There is no need to doubt his sincerity. He gave up drinking till the day Franco should be successful, and that near- ly killed him too.) He enlisted, not with Franco but with the Monarchist arm of the rebel forces, the Requetes. He saw no action but wrote verse propaganda, the unenticingly entitled 'Flowering Rifle (Never one to woo his audience, all Camp" bell's titles are unenticing: 'Adamastor , `Mithraic Emblems', etc.) When he came back to wartime London he was cut by old friends in the street. `Don't look, Nancy' [Cunard] said Robert Nichols, 'it's Roy Campbell, that horrid fascist ."I'm not a fascist, Nancy,' came the wounded bellow through the blackout. 'I'm a requete!' Such distinctions were wasted. Refusing a soft job (not without sideswipes at MacSpaunday on this point 'Vultures on the cook-house nest/Like poets on the BBC') he joined the King s African Rifles.

After the war, maddened by Stephen Spender's continued accusations of fascism, he went to one of Spender's poetry readings. Protesting — of all things, yet there is a kind of lovely logic in it — 'on behalf of the Sergeants' Mess of the King's African Rifles' he mounted the platform and punched Spender on the nose. When others wanted to call the police Spender, dabbing his bloody face, prevented them: He is a great poet. We must try to under- stand.'

Was he a great poet? Difficult to say because his work is now virtually unob- tainable. This is ridiculous, as a large hand- ful of his shorter poemS, passages from his longer poems and, above all, his stunning translations (from Lorca, Camoens and Saint John of the Cross above all) testify. Can it be that ghosts of old quarrels con- tinue to haunt his reputation after his death?

He died in 1957 in a car crash in Por- tugal. Mary was driving, and survived her injuries to help with this biography. 'Oh, old Roy,' she is quoted as saying, 'you never stopped laughing when he was around, never.' It is possible that Stephen Spender would not agree, or the shade of Louis MacNeice (who hit him — and Campbell promptly bought him a drink and defended him ever after) or Geoffrey Grigson. But there is no record here (or any that I have heard) of Campbell savaging anyone who was not better placed to savage him back. He was not a bully; and he has been worse than savaged; he has been ig- nored.