Roy Campbell (poet)
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Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 22 April 1957) was a South 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 two World Wars, but his connections to right-wing ideology have impaired his reputation. A willingness to make bitter enemies of influential literati also helped consign him to the outskirts of literature. As of 2006, his life and works – both singularly colorful – are little-known.
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[edit] Early life
Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, was born in Durban, South Africa, the son of Dr. Samuel George Campbell. Educated at Durban High School, he counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. Campbell was an accomplished horseman and fisherman and he also became fluent in Zulu. He left South Africa in 1918 intending to matriculate at Oxford University but he never did, yet his intellectual life bloomed in the university city. Campbell wrote verse imitations of T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine, and later met Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis. He also began to drink heavily, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. He published his first collection of poems The Flaming Terrapin in 1924 when he was just twenty-two. In 1921 he married Mary Margaret Garman, with whom he had two daughters Tess and Anna Campbell.
[edit] Poet and satirist
Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started Voorslag, a literary magazine along with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, which promoted a more racially integrated South Africa; he lasted as its editor for three issues, then resigned because his radical views caused the magazine's more conservative publisher to meddle with its content. However, he found the local cultural scene to be too introspective. After writing the satirical poem The Wayzgoose (published in 1928) he moved back to England in 1927.
The Flaming Terrapin had established his reputation as a rising star and was favorably compared to the recently released poem of Eliot's The Waste Land. His verse was critically well-received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others.
Now moving in the literary set, he criticized the Bloomsbury Group whom he thought sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian. Calling them "intellectuals without intellect," he penned a satire entitled The Georgiad (published in 1931) that was a scathing attack on them. His wife’s alleged affair with Vita Sackville-West (who was the lover of Virginia Woolf) was a contributing cause to this. The Campbells moved to southern France in the early 1930s.
The French period saw the publication of Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography, Broken Record (1934), among others. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Catholic faith, which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled Mithraic Emblems (1936).
[edit] Franco, the Second World War, Campbell's changed reputation
Moving on to Spain, he and his family converted to Catholicism in the small Spanish village of Altea in 1935. His reputation as a poet suffered considerably when he sided with General Francisco Franco and fought alongside the Nationalist Army during the Spanish Civil War, at a time when most Western artists and intellectuals sided with the Republicans.
For an author to support Franco in this era was unusual, as was Campbell's glorification of military strength and masculine virtues. He had also been a strong opponent of communism for some time and fighting it may have been a strong motivation. The authors who supported the Republicans also tended to be like the ones he mocked in his previous life as a poet, but whether this is relational is uncertain. His role in the war harmed the later reviews and analysis of his work. His political thought, fueled by his stubborn independence (which in turn was fueled by his drinking), tended to be more bluster than deeply-held belief. His religious convictions, on the other hand, appear to have been more sincere and inspired what is arguably his better poetry.
Although he was over draft age, Campbell enlisted in the British Army, (rising to the rank of sergeant) and fought against the fascists during the Second World War (something many of his most vocal critics managed to avoid doing). Nevertheless, his reputation remains clouded. During the war he met and befriended Dylan Thomas, with whom he once ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David's Day.
[edit] Post-war life and works
Campbell was invalided out of the army in 1944. He worked for many years at the BBC and remained a fixture, however derided for his anti-socialist views, in the arts scene. During a poetry recital by Stephen Spender, Campbell stormed the stage and punched him. But Spender refused to press any charges, saying, "He is a great poet… We must try to understand." In 1952 he moved to Portugal. Although Estado Novo was not precisely fascist, emigrating to it after the war may have enhanced or exaggerated the image he had developed. Or it could be said to have clarified it, as the dictator Salazar's regime was more like traditionalist Catholic authoritarianism – which is perhaps more in line with what he envisioned than Franco's rule. In any event, in Portugal he wrote a new version of his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse. (Both his memoirs are considered unreliable.)
Campbell's conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. He translated the mystical poems of St. John of the Cross and documented his conversion in verse in Mithraic Emblems. He also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He also began translating poets from languages such as Spanish and French. Some of his translations of Baudelaire have been published in anthologies. Campbell, by now a self-styled "dark horse," produced what may be the most idiomatically sensitive translations into English of the Spanish martyr-poet Federico García Lorca, who was killed by Nationalist-associated fanatics at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The happy union of the gay and left-leaning Lorca and his rightist, ultra-macho translator – they never met – is a fascinating challenge for any student of modernist poems.
Roy Campbell died in a car accident near Setúbal, Portugal on Easter Monday, 1957.
[edit] Selected Works by Campbell
- 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).
- Songs of the mistral. (1938).
- Talking Bronco. (1939).
- 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).
[edit] Books about Roy Campbell
- Wright, David (1961). Roy Campbell.
- Smith, Rowland (1973). Lyric and Polemic: The Literary Personality of Roy Campbell.
- Povey, John (1977). Roy Campbell.
- Parsons, David, Stewart Japp (1982). Roy Campbell: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography, With Notes on Unpublished Sources.
- Campbell, Anna (1986). Poetic Justice : A Memoir of My Father, Roy Campbell.
- Alexander, Peter (1989). Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography.
- Pearce, Joseph (2001). Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell.
- Pearce, Joseph (2004). Unafraid of Viginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell.
- Connolly, Cressida (2004). The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives Of The Garmans.
