Roy Campbell (poet)

According to Campbell, his paternal ancestors were Scottish Covenanters and members of Clan Campbell, who left Scotland after the defeat of the Earl of Argyll by the Royalist Marquess of Montrose in 1645 and settled as part of the Plantation of Ulster in Carndonagh, in Inishowen, County Donegal.[3]

During the centuries when they lived in Donegal, the Scotch-Irish ancestors of the poet were small farmers. Many of the men were talented fiddlers. According to the family's oral tradition, the living standards of the Campbell family improved drastically around 1750, when one of the poet's ancestors eloped with the daughter of Carndonagh's Anglo-Irish landlord.[4]

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.[5]

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.[3][6]

According to the poet, his Dunnachie ancestors were Jacobites who fled Scotland after the Jacobite Uprising of 1745, but returned after the act of indemnity.[3]

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.[7]

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.[8]

Campbell left the Union of South Africa in December 1918 aboard the Inkonka, a 2,000 ton tramp steamer. Almost as soon as the ship lost sight of land, the third mate entered Roy's cabin and, objecting to the large number of books, threw all of them, as well as Roy's painting and drawing materials,out of the porthole and into the sea. "Campbell," according to Joseph Pearce, "looked on as his cherished volumes of Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Dryden, Pope, and Marlowe," disappeared over the side.[24]

In the absence of his books, Campbell spent much of the voyage on the fo'c'sle, watching, "all those strange and beautiful creatures that inhabit the majestic southern extremity of our continent."[25]

According to Joseph Pearce, "Campbell's love affair with the sea, thus far expressed only in poetically imagined theory, was consummated by the cascading waters off the Cape."[26]

Despite his sympathy for Black Africans under colonialism, Roy was horrified when the Inkonka docked at Dakar and he encountered rampant interracial sex, which was almost unheard of in Colonial South Africa.[27]

When the Inkonka docked at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Campbell went ashore with one of the ship's apprentices, who was a Roman Catholic. While inside Las Palmas Cathedral, Campbell was shown several holy relics, including the heart of Bishop Juan de Frías, "who sacrificed himself to the protection of the Guanches or natives of the Canaries."[28]

According to Pearce, "Campbell recalled that the heart was so magnified by the glass and the spirits in which it was kept that he laughed in a superior way and swore it was the heart of a rhino or hippo. His skepticism suggests an antagonism towards Catholicism, but was also indicative of a general disillusionment with Christianity. He had moved from a lukewarm and half-hearted acceptance of his parents' Presbyterianism towards an inarticulate agnosticism."[29]

In February 1919, "during a bitterly cold English winter which was a further new experience for Campbell," the Inkonka steamed into the estuary of the Thames River.[30]

Campbell later wrote, "It was certainly by far the widest river I had ever seen... Then warehouses and other phantasmal buildings loomed out of the most on the distantly converging banks. Slowly, forests of masts and banks began to appear, and moving almost impercebtibly we berthed in the East India Docks cracking the first film of ice I had ever seen."[31]

After a brief tour of London on a donkey cart, Campbell took a train to Scotland to meet his maternal grandfather. James Dunnachie gave his grandson £10, with which Campbell replaced the books he had lost at the beginning of the voyage.[32]

According to his daughter Anna Campbell Lyle, Roy had grown up where, "everything was beautiful, and like paradise," and then he came to, "this funny little country full of fog, with no wild animals, very little sun and no mountains - he had a really mystical feeling about mountains... So he got a funny thing about England. I think he was terribly anti-Anglo-Saxon. He had a passion for Celts."[33]

Campbell later wrote in his memoir Broken Record, "My ancestors cleared out of Britain at the first whiff of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I only came back to see what made them clear off in such a hurry, which I soon found out."[34]

After a brief stay with his grandfather, Campbell travelled to Oxford University, where he hoped to pass the entrance exams to Merton College.[35]

During the early spring of 1919, Oxford was filled with returning servicemen. Painfully shy, Campbell his himself away in an attic room and read voraciously. He later wrote, "Never before, or since, have I done so much reading as I did at Oxford. Had I taken an ordinary course in English for three years,I would not have read a quarter as much."[36]

The Irish War of Independence was then taking place and, despite his descent from Orangemen, in letters to his parents, Roy expressed support for Irish Republicanism.[37]

However, he failed the Oxford entrance examination.[38] 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.[6] His verse writing was stimulated by avid readings of Nietzsche, Darwin, and the English Elizabethan and Romantic poets. Among his early fruitful contacts were C.S. Lewis, William Walton, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis.[6] 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 London's literary bohemia.

Mary Garman, a runaway member of the English nobility, was then living in a flat near Regent Square with her sister Kathleen. The sisters regularly paid court to young artists and musicians and often hosted bohemian parties.[39]

Although Mary was already intimately involved with the Dutch composer Bernard van Dieren, Roy Campbell caught her attention immediately when she first saw him. Mary later wrote, "My sister Kathleen... and I were riding on the top of a bus in Tottenham Court Road... When we saw Roy for the first time. He got off the bus when we did and made for the Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Charlotte Street. We were quite intrigued, he was so good-looking, so foreign, who could he be? Once inside the restaurant he went straight to a table where a golden-haired girl, Iris Tree, was sitting alone, evidently waiting for him."[40]

When they formally met a few weeks later Roy found himself confronted with, "the most beautiful woman I had ever seen."[41]

As Campbell was homeless and as the Garman sisters were, "uninhibited by questions of morality," Mary and Kathleen invited Roy to move in with them.[42]

Their daughter, Teresa Campbell, would later write, "In their different ways they were trying to escape convention. As my mother was always saying when she was about eighty - 'Roy and I were the first Hippies' and she seemed very proud of the fact."[43]

In the evenings, the three would lie arm in arm next to the fire, and Campbell would read his poetry aloud and would entertain both women with stories of his adventures in Provence and in the South African bush.[44]

Mary later wrote, "I suppose it was my love of poetry that was the main cause of our marriage, the marriage of Roy and myself. At twelve years old I was in love with poetry. I remember reading Blake and Shelley with the greatest delight. When I met Roy he seemed to me the personification of poetry and when he recited couplets from The Flaming Terrapin which he had just begun to write I realized that I had met a poet in flesh and blood."[45]

For a time, Bernard van Dieren continued to visit the Garman sisters' flat, but eventually he admitted defeat. Kathleen, however, was already the mistress and muse of the married American sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was, "violently jealous," and increasingly certain that Campbell was sleeping with both sisters.[46]

Years later, Anna Campbell asked her mother how Roy had proposed. Mary angrily replied that Roy never proposed, "We took it for granted that we would marry when we first spoke to each other!"[47]

In the winter of 1921, just two months after they had met, Campbell accompanied Mary and Kathleen to their family's estate at Oakeswell Hall, near Wednesbury, Staffordshire, to spend Christmas with the Garman family.[48]

Upon their arrival, Kathleen Garman said to her father, "Father, this is Roy, who's going to marry Mary."[49]

Horrified, Dr. Garman cried, "My eldest daughter?! To a complete stranger?!"[50]

Campbell later admitted that he felt deeply uncomfortable during the visit and knew that the eyes of the Garman family were always watching him. At first, desperate for them to accept him, Campbell refused to drink wine during meals. In time, however, he was regularly escaping the anxiety of the visit by going on drunken binges at the local pub. In response, Dr. Garman tried to persuade his daughter to call off the wedding, saying that she was, "marrying a dipsomaniac."[51]

Anna Campbell Lyle, however, later wrote, "All their good sense was useless. My parents already considered themselves eternal partners."[52]

On February 11, 1922, Roy Campbell and Mary Garman were married in the Church of England parish at Wednesbury, near her family's estate. As Campbell owned no formal suit, he had purchased one second hand for 12 shillings. Mary, however, was horrified and demanded that Roy change back into his usual clothing. Mary wore a long black dress with a golden veil, not to be eccentric but simply because she had nothing else. During the ceremony, when Campbell knelt before the altar, he exposed the holes in the soles of his shoes to the whole congregation. In response, Mary's former nanny was heard to lament, "Oh dear, I always thought Miss Mary would marry a gentleman with a park!"[53]

After the Campbells returned to London, their wedding was celebrated with a wild and raucous party at the Harlequin Restaurant on Beak Street. Roy's brother George Campbell, who had just completed his medical studies at Edinburgh, arrived unexpectedly and stared in shock at, "the howling dervishes of London Bohemia."[54]

Roy Campbell later wrote, "My father heard of our marriage too late to stop it; he was naturally hurt that, being a minor, I had not consulted him about it, since he had always been so good to me and always sent me any money I asked for when I was hard up. My excuse was, and still is, that I was taking absolutely no risks at all of not getting married to this girl."[55]

Due to his decision to marry without paternal consent, Roy Campbell forfeited, for a time, his generous parental allowance.[6][56]

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.[70]

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.[71]

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.[72]

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.[73]

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."[74]

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."[75]

Before leaving South Africa with his family in 1927, Campbell reacted to his ostracism by writing the poem The Making of a Poet, which compares himself to "some restive steer', who "keeps the wolf at bay" from the cattle herd that has cast out and rejected him.[76] Campbell also wrote Tristan da Cunha,[77] 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.[6][78]

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?"[79]

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.[80]

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.[81]

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.[82] 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.[83]

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.'"[84]

Campbell later immortalized the incident in his poem The Carmelites of Toledo.[85]

On 9 August 1936, the Campbells boarded HMS Maine, which was evacuating British subjects to Marseilles.[86] 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.[87]

While staying with his openly Stalinist in-laws at Binstead,[88] Campbell found himself being courted by Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. As his family was destitute, Campbell hmade the most of the contact and his poem 'The Alcazar' was published in Mosley's BUF Quarterly magazine that same year.[89]

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."[90]

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.[91]

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!"[91]

On 29 January 1937, the family set sail to Lisbon on the German vessel Niasa.[92]

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.[93] He did not fight for the Nationalists during the Spanish conflict, despite later claims.[94]

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."[95]

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."[96]

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![97]

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.[98] Lewis had further declared,

—Who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?[99]

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.[100]

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 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 Welsh Fusiliers on 1 April 1942.[101] Having completed basic training, Campbell was transferred in July to the I.C. Depot near Winchester, where he was trained in motorcycles.[102] In February 1943, he was promoted to sergeant, and in March he was posted to British East Africa. On 5 May, 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.[103] 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 made several sojourns in hospital due to attacks of malaria.[104] On 2 April 1944, he was discharged from the army as unfit owing to chronic osteoarthritis in his left hip.[6] 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.[105]

On 5 October 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis later wrote that he detested what he considered "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism".[106]

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 [...][63]

According to Tolkien, Lewis's 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."[63]

In the aftermath, Campbell joined Tolkien and Lewis at several meetings of the Inklings at The Eagle and Child pub, where his "poetry, political views, and religious perspectives caused quite a stir."[107]

For many years, Campbell worked at the BBC and remained a fixture. During a poetry recitation by avowed Communist poet Stephen Spender, Campbell stormed the stage and punched him, saying that he had an objection to Spender's poetry from the Sergeant's mess of the King's African Rifles. However, Spender refused to press charges, saying, "He is a great poet… We must try to understand."[108] 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.[109]

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."[110]

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.[111]

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."[112]

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".[113] 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.[114]

After Campbell's conversion to Catholicism, he wrote spiritual verse. Campbell also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He began translating poetry from languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and French. Among the poets he translated were Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira, the Ancient Roman poet Horace, and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío.

Campbell also produced sensitive translations into English of Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet, outspoken Marxist, and homosexual, who was abducted and murdered by the Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.[115][116] In a self-deprecating poem titled "On the Martyrdom of F. Garcia Lorca", Campbell wrote,

Not only did he lose his life
By shots assassinated:
But with a hammer and a knife
Was after that—translated.[117]

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".[118]

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."[119]

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."[120]

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.

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 and by his daughters in their memoirs that his support for Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War has caused him to be labelled a Fascist and blacklisted from modern poetry anthologies. Efforts have been made to restore Campbell's literary reputation. According to his daughters and his biographer Joseph Pearce, the poet's opposition to the Spanish Republic was based on a belief that it was controlled by the Stalin's NKVD and on real experience with both Republican war crimes and the religious persecution of Spain's Roman Catholic majority. Also according to Pearce, Campbell's verse satires, which his wife and daughters often begged him to stop writing, were modelled after similar satires composed centuries earlier by eminent poets John Dryden and Alexander Pope.[121][122][123]

Campbell's translations of the French Symbolist poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud have appeared in modern anthologies.

Also, in a 1968 lecture at Harvard University, Campbell's translations of the Catholic mystical poetry of St. John of the Cross were lavishly praised by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges called Campbell, "a great Scottish poet who is also South African", and called his versions of St. John's poetry, in some ways, superior to the original poems in Spanish.[124]

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."[125]

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 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