Literary Giants Literary Catholics (26 page)

Apart from his African roots, the other great influence on Campbell’s work was that of the great Elizabethan dramatists. He was an avid admirer not only of Shakespeare and Marlowe but of lesser Elizabethans, such as Chapman, Peele and Dekker.

By Jove they are marvellous poets. . . . Their poetry is so living and fresh it makes even the greatest work of Keats and Shelley seem just a little bit artificial. . . When you come back you’ll find us ranting long passages of bombast and fire. . . . I am absolutely drunk with these fellows. They wrote poetry just as a machine-gun fires off bullets. . . . They don’t even stop to get their breath. They go thundering on until you forget everything about the sense and . . . end up in a positive debauch of thunder and splendour and music. . . . They are raw, careless, headstrong, coarse, brutal. But how vivid they are, how intoxicated with their own imagination.

In this intoxicated and intoxicating letter, Campbell had unwittingly described many of the characteristics of his own work. The flamboyance of the Elizabethans had colored the imagery of
The Flaming Terrapin
with a vivid sharpness that distinguished it from most other contemporary verse in much the same way as the vivid sharpness of the Pre-Raphaelites had stood out from the monochrome subtleties of impressionism. In describing the “bombast and fire”, the writing of poetry “just as a machine-gun fires off bullets”, the failure to stop to catch one’s breath, Campbell could have been describing his own satires. These too could be “raw, careless, headstrong, coarse, brutal” and would be written in a breathless stream of invective, in stark contrast to the measured and meticulous care that he always took with his lyrical verse.

In the spring of 1931 Campbell informed Wyndham Lewis that he was “just finishing a long satire, the Georgiad”. This was a scathing attack on the Bloomsbury group, the sexually promiscuous and implicitly anti-Christian literary set who exerted a fashionably iconoclastic and culturally subversive influence in the years between the two world wars. Campbell attacked the Bloomsburys as “intellectuals without intellect” whose

     hate dribbles, week by week,

     Like lukewarm bilge out of a running leak.

The vitriolic attacks on Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group were spoiled by Campbell’s vindictiveness and lack of charity. Yet, embedded between the vitriol, mounted like pearls of wisdom in the basest of metal, were instances of a deep yet inarticulate yearning for faith.
The Georgiad
confirmed Campbell’s rejection of postwar pessimism and its nihilistic ramifications and placed him beside others, such as Eliot and Waugh, who were similarly seeking glimmers of philosophical light amid the prevailing gloom.

Desiring an escape from the world of the “intellectuals without intellect”, Campbell moved with his wife, Mary, and their two daughters to Provence and, later, to Spain. Throughout this period, he and Mary found themselves being slowly but irresistibly drawn toward the Catholic faith. The seemingly somnambulant process of conversion was charted by Campbell in a sonnet sequence entitled
Mithraic Emblems
, which shows the progress of a soul in transit. The earliest sonnets, written in Provence, show the poet groping with an uncomprehended and incomprehensible paganism, relishing the irrational, the
obscurum per obscurius
—the obscure by the still more obscure. It is Mithraic “truth” whispered with Masonic secrecy—the affirmation of faith without reason. In the later sonnets, written after Campbell’s arrival in Spain, Christianity emerges triumphant, not so much to vanquish Mithraism as to make sense of it. In these later sonnets, the sun is no longer a god to be worshiped, but only a symbol of the Son, the true God, who gives the sun its meaning and its purpose.

     Oh let your shining orb grow dim,

     Of Christ the mirror and the shield,

     That I may gaze through you to Him,

See half the mystery revealed.

Roy and Mary Campbell, together with their daughters, were received into the Catholic Church in the Spanish village of Altea in June 1935.

They had chosen a dangerous time and place to profess their faith. In the following year, Spain was plunged into a fratricidal civil war. By its end, 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns had been murdered by the anti-Catholic Republican forces. Details of these atrocities horrified Catholics around the world. Father Gregorio, the parish priest of Altea, who had described the day in which he had received the Campbells into the Church as the best day of his life, was murdered by Republican militiamen only a year later. The Campbells, too, narrowly escaped with their lives, escaping from Spain only days after their friends the Carmelite monks of Toledo had been murdered in cold blood.

The horrors of the Spanish civil war would inspire some of Campbell’s finest verse. In much the same way that the sonnet sequence
Mithraic Emblems
had been the outpouring of a poetic baptism of desire, so the poems inspired by the Spanish war would be the outpouring of a poetic baptism of fire.

     The towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,

     The city was a prayer, the land a nun:

     The noonday azure strumming all its rays

     Sang that a famous battle had been won,

     As signing his white Cross, the very Sun,

     The Solar Christ and captain of my days

     Zoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.

23

_____

Religion and Politics

I
T IS ONE OF THE TRITE ASSUMPTIONS
of modern life that the subjects of religion and politics should not be discussed in public. Somehow it is considered impolite or indecorous to broach either topic in a social setting. The result, of course, is that the art of conversation either stagnates in the swamps of trivia or else descends to the level of the banal or the profane. Thankfully, this social stricture has been wholeheartedly ignored by the key literary figures of the past century. Writers as diverse as George Orwell and Graham Greene, G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien, have spiced their lives, their conversation, their correspondence and their works with a healthy cocktail of the religious and the political. Few, however, have employed the spice of religion and politics as robustly or as candidly as Roy Campbell. It would, in fact, be true to say that Campbell, more perhaps than any other writer of his generation, is
defined
by his religion and his politics. This being so, any failure to understand Campbell’s religious or political stance is a failure to understand Campbell himself and, therefore, a failure to understand, or fully appreciate, his work. Sadly, many of Campbell’s critics have been unfailing in their failure in this regard, so much so that it has been Campbell’s fate to be misunderstood, again more perhaps than any other writer of his generation, by those who lack either empathy or sympathy with his politics or his faith. Put simply and succinctly, he has been judged by the prejudiced.

If, therefore, we are to understand Campbell
objectively
, leaving our subjective presumptions aside, we must come to terms with, and get to grips with, his core beliefs. In order to do this, it is essential to begin at the beginning, through an examination of the earliest influences in his life.

Taken collectively, the politics, culture and religion of Campbell’s childhood constituted a conundrum of contradictions. His mother’s Jacobite romanticism, passed on to her son in the singing of old Scottish ballads, conflicted with her dourly lackluster Presbyterianism. Similarly, the songs of Jacobite rebellion reverberated discordantly with the unquestioning acceptance of British imperialism and resonated in uneasy and unusual counterpoint to the jingoism of empire. Finally, the family’s privileged position as white colonials in the heart of black South Africa added to the political and cultural tension. These diverse and divisive forces fought for supremacy in the youthful Campbell’s mind and heart. The Highland Catholicism of the Jacobites jostled with the Lowland Presbyterianism of the family’s lukewarm faith; the Scottish nationalism thumbed its nose at the pomp and circumstance of the British Empire; and the prestige and privilege of the colonial looked down its imperious and impervious nose at the presumed “inferiority” of the nonwhite natives. The overall effect was that Campbell had inherited from his family the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressor, the legacy of defeat and the spoils of victory.

“The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon”, one of Campbell’s earliest poems, probably written prior to his arrival in Oxford in 1919 or very shortly thereafter, indicates that he had sought to resolve the religious contradictions inherent in his family by an escape into agnosticism. With youthful impatience at the centuries-old conflict between the Catholic thesis and its Protestant antithesis, he rejected dialectic in favor of diversion, or even derision. Possibly inspired by Yeats’ poem “An Indian upon God”, “The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon” is, in spite of its playful theological subversion, utterly devoid of the cynical world-weariness of so much iconoclastic, antireligious satire. On the contrary, its jovial tone has much in common with the satirical verse of G. K. Chesterton, as becomes instantly apparent if Campbell’s poem is compared with Chesterton’s “Race Memory (by a dazed Darwinian)”.

The cultural and political conflicts at the heart of Campbell’s upbringing came to creative fruition in two more early poems, “Zulu Girl” and “The Serf”, in which he exhibits, simultaneously, both sympathetic admiration for, and suppressed fear of, the native Africans, the contradictory emotions clashing in tensile creativity. Ironically, Campbell would be given the nickname “Zulu” upon his arrival in Oxford, finding himself a misfit, a wild colonial boy, who rejected, and was rejected by, the mother culture. This rejection of, and rejection by, the elitist atmosphere of the English public school, which was all-pervasive in the hallowed halls of Oxbridge in the years following the First World War, not only reawakened the latent antagonism to Anglo-Saxondom inherent in the Jacobite romanticism of Campbell’s boyhood but placed him, culturally, in a similar position to that of the Zulus in South Africa. Thus the psychology of the oppressor was eclipsed by that of the oppressed.

In
The Flaming Terrapin
(1924), the long and ambitious poem that established his reputation, Campbell reacted against the prevailing pessimism and nihilism of postwar England and against the hedonism of the “bright young things” with whom he had flirted and from whom he had recoiled. Although awash with remnants of a confused and confusingly heterodox Christianity,
The Flaming Terrapin
regards postwar politics and culture more through the prism of Nietzsche, Darwin and Einstein than through the teaching of Christ. The idealization of the Nietzschean “strong” and the Darwinian “fittest” provides the first inkling of a protofascism. There is also an implicit aversion to communism as the product of postwar demoralization and stagnation and the hope that it might be countered by those who, refusing to become demoralized or stagnant, are instead “ennobled” by the sufferings of war. Beneath the surface of the poem, submerged and potent as the terrapin itself, is the sublime influence of Eliot’s subliminally cathartic tour de force,
The Waste Land
, published eighteen months earlier. A pose-modern
cri de coeur
exuding postwar angst and superficial cynicism, Eliot’s hidden agenda pointed, paradoxically, toward the resurrection of Christian tradition. Campbell’s
Terrapin
lacked the profound philosophical coherence of
The Waste Land
but shared intuitively the latter’s traditionalist aspirations, albeit inarticulately. Certainly, with the wisdom of hindsight, it can be seen that both poems—and both poets—were grappling with the same issues and groping toward the same, ultimately religious, goal.

Following the publication of
The Flaming Terrapin
, Campbell enjoyed a brief period of fashionable celebrity. He was seen by many of his contemporaries as the finest poet of his generation, with the exception of the universally lauded Eliot. He was, however, to fall from favor following his vicious attack on the Bloomsbury group in the long satirical poem
The Georgiad
(1931). Written in the manner of Dryden and Pope, this merciless broadside against the self-styled elite of England’s literati would render him anathema in the eyes of many of the contemporaries who, a few years earlier, had praised him for his achievement.
The Georgiad
is a vituperative invective, “venomous with truth”
¹
, against the Freudian gospel of self-gratification in general and against the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group in particular. Campbell’s poem rests on the premise that sexual “liberation”, so-called, leads to a culture of death, devoid of joy. Sex was not a subject for morbid fascination, Campbell argued, but was a glorious mystery to be enjoyed in the purity of passion. As such, every attempt to strip it of its mystery strips it of its higher meaning. All that remains when sex is removed from the glory of its romantic heights is a gaudy remnant festering in the furtive frustrations of its sterile depths. Sex, as preached and practiced in Bloomsbury, was the omnipotence of impotence. Such is the leitmotif of
The Georgiad
. Androgyno, the poem’s hero, is so shocking to the puritanically prurient sensibilities of Bloomsbury because he flouts their adolescent furtiveness in an unrestrained fertility rite. Androgyno is the shamelessly potent vanquisher of psychosexual impotence, the exorciser of Bloomsbury’s perverse spirit.

Although it is an uncompromising attack on “modern” attitudes to sex, the spirit and language of
The Georgiad
is neither puritanical nor prudish but, on the contrary, is a passionate and prudent response to prurience.