Literary Giants Literary Catholics (27 page)

As with so much of Campbell’s satire,
The Georgiad’s
invective is too vindictive. It is spoiled by spite. The result is that the abuse obscures the truth Campbell is seeking to convey. Embedded between the attacks on Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and a host of other Bloomsburys 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”. This age’s “damp philosophy” is “the fountain source of all [the] woes” of modern man, who is left “damp in spirit” by his adherence to it. His nihilism is self-negating. It is the philosophy of the self-inflicted wound.

Whatever its objective merits, and objectionable flaws,
The Georgiad
clearly displays a soul utterly alienated from the society and philosophy of his contemporaries and peers.
²
Escaping from such an inhospitable environment, Campbell fled to Provence. It was here, perhaps for the first time in his turbulent life, that he found a degree of peace.
³

     Rest under my branches, breathe deep of my balm

     From the hushed avalanches of fragrance and calm,

     For suave is the silence that poises the palm.

     The wings of the egrets are silken and fine,

     But hushed with the secrets of Eden are mine.
⁴

Why, one wonders, did Campbell find such peace in Provence whereas he had found nothing but emotional turmoil in England and during his abortive return to South Africa in the mid-twenties? The answer, if the witness of his poetry is to be taken as authoritative, is to be found in the rustic culture that he discovered there and into which he submerged himself wholeheartedly. For Campbell, the peasant had always represented the permanent. Civilizations rise and fall. Only the peasant remains.

     The timeless, surly patience of the serf

     That moves the nearest to the naked earth

     And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.
⁵

Akin to the permanence of the peasant was the permanence of the peasants’ religion. In Provence, for the first time, Campbell found himself immersed in a Catholic culture. From this time, his poetry begins to proliferate with Catholic imagery. It is, however, Catholic imagery without Catholic faith, as is exemplified most poignantly in the tranquil agnosticism of “Mass at Dawn”. There are, however, hints of a faith desired, if not necessarily attained, in the final verses of “Saint Peter of the Three Canals”, a poem that transforms itself beguilingly from the apparently faithless frivolity of the early verses to the tacit acceptance of faith in its invocatory finale.

It is not, however, until the poet’s arrival in Spain in 1933 that the Faith finally claims the poet, or, at least, that the poet finally acclaims the Faith,

     under the stretched, terrific wings,

     the outspread arms (our soaring King’s)—

     the man they made an Albatross!
⁶

Campbell’s conversion was charted in the sonnet sequence
Mithraic Emblems
, the earliest of which were written in Provence and the last of which were written in Spain. Taken as a whole, they display a soul in transit. The early sonnets show the poet groping with an uncomprehended and incomprehensible paganism, relishing the irrational, the
obscurum per obscurius
—the obscure by the still more obscure. The poet makes an affirmation of faith without reason, whispering Mithraic “truth” with Masonic secrecy. In the later sonnets, Christianity emerges triumphant, not so much to vanquish Mithraism as to make sense of it.
Fides
is now married to
ratio
, faith to reason. In the final 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 purpose. The Mithraic emblem is transformed by Christian typology and becomes Christ transfigured.

     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 miracle revealed.
⁷

Campbell’s reception into the Catholic Church on 24 June 1935 confirmed him in his love for Spain, which he later described as “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul”.
⁸
As with his rustic experience of Provence, he felt a deep admiration for the Spanish peasants, whose lives and traditions were centered solely on the feasts of the Church and the changing seasons of the year. He never ceased to find their ordered lives, which resembled what might be termed a life-dance, absorbingly interesting, whereas the frantic lives of modern people, which resembled a race against time, was inimical to the flourishing of the human spirit. In this, of course, he was rekindling his affinity with Eliot, who had waxed contemptuously about the “unreal” and “time-kept city” in
The Waste Land
.

Campbell’s conversion would also accentuate still further his alienation from the secularist ascendancy in British literature. The reaction of his former friends and present enemies among the British literati to the news of his conversion can be gauged by Virginia Woolf’s horrified response to Eliot’s embrace of Anglo-Catholicism several years earlier.

I have just had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.
⁹

There is little doubt that Campbell’s submission to Rome would have elicited similar sneers of contempt. Already dead in the eyes of Bloomsbury, he could now be considered well and truly buried.

His conversion would also place a catechetic chasm between himself and the new generation of left-wing poets, such as Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. Campbell’s faith was inextricably linked to politics—and his politics became increasingly linked to, and colored by, his love for Spain. With the Spanish civil war looming, Campbell would find himself on the opposite side to these young atheist and socialist poets.

Few of his contemporaries would understand his stance during the Spanish civil war, but of the few who did understand, few would understand better than his friend Lawrence Durrell. Unlike so many others, Durrell understood the importance to Campbell of the potent trinity of influences—religious, cultural and political—with which his life in Spain was entwined. Durrell explained that he was “simultaneously happy and saddened” when he discovered that Campbell had become a Catholic: “happy for him, sad because I myself could not participate. . . . But Roy had taken from Spain the brocades and the dust of the bull-ring and how can anyone penetrate to the heart of Spain without embracing the faith which animates its brutal vivid life? It was totally right for him—‘a second motherland’.”
¹⁰

Durrell was wrong, however, when he wrote that “his politics became a faith”. It would be much truer to say that Campbell’s faith became his politics. In being received into the Church, he had grafted himself onto Catholic Spain, and his politics thereafter would be determined by his desire to defend Catholic Spain from her enemies. In fundamental political terms, he perceived the Church as the defender of the integrity of the family against those “rebels”, anarchist or communist, who sought the family’s disintegration. For Campbell, the “Heart of Rome” and “hearth and home” were one and indivisible.

In March 1936 the anticlerical 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 monks 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 the clandestine gatherings 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 into 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 in which 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”.
¹¹
It should also be noted that Father Gregorio, the simple parish priest who had received Roy and Mary Campbell into the Church, was also murdered in cold blood by communist militiamen.

Having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his friends and acquaintances, it was not likely that Campbell was going to support the cause of the perpetrators. Bearing these horrific facts in mind, it is clearly a gross oversimplification to dismiss Campbell’s stance in the Spanish civil war as evidence that he was a fascist. Such an obvious mitigating circumstance was, however, almost universally overlooked by Campbell’s detractors in England, all of whom appended the “fascist” label to his person, employing it, and the accompanying stereotypical effluvia with which such an epithet is associated, with the cynical glee of seasoned character assassins.

The overriding irony of the misnomer with which he was shackled is that the protofascist tendencies evident, to a limited degree, in early poems such as
The Flaming Terrapin
were actually softened, or perhaps even exorcised, by his embrace of Catholic Christianity. His admiration for the cult of Mithras, the religion of the warrior, had been moderated by his acceptance of Christianity, the religion of the slave. The Nietzschean philosophy of “might is right” had been conquered by the Christian concept of the rights of the meek. Thereafter, far from being a believer in totalitarianism, Campbell’s politics reflected the social vision of the Catholic Church, particularly in relation to the Church’s teaching on “subsidiarity”, the sociopolitical belief that the family should be the most powerful institution in society and that, in consequence, small government and small business is preferable to big government and big business. Subsidiarity emphasizes that power should be devolved upward from the family, not imposed downward by the state. This, surely, is the very antithesis of, and antidote to, “fascism” in either its national socialist or international socialist variations.

Campbell encapsulated his adherence to subsidiarity in his invention of a humorously apposite neologism: “fascidemocshevism”.
¹²
Coined as a criticism of the whole concept of the postwar vision of the welfare state, Campbell insisted that such unwarranted state intervention in people’s lives constituted a combination of fascism and bolshevism under the guise of democracy. It can be seen, therefore, that, far from being a fascist, Campbell deserves a place of honor among those other writers of the twentieth century who have espoused the cause of the political liberty of the family against the encroachments of the state. Others who shared Campbell’s subsidiarist vision include Eliot, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, all of whom, with the exception of Orwell, shared Campbell’s Christian religion as well as his Christian politics. Campbell is, therefore, in illustrious company. He is not, however, a pygmy among giants. On the contrary, he deserves to be seen as a giant in his own right. Few artists, even among those just named, have more successfully united the art of politics with the politics of art. Few artists have shown more successfully the subservience of politics and art to religion. Few artists of such stature have been so maligned and treated so unjustly. Few artists that have shone so brightly have been eclipsed so shamefully. An eclipse is, however, a transitory phenomenon. It is to be hoped that this great poet of the sun will emerge from the shadow of lesser lights and that, having done so, his art, his religion and his politics will shine forth more brightly than ever.

24

_____

     
Outside, it froze. On rocky arms

     
Sleeping face-upwards to the sun

     
Lay Spain. Her golden hair was spun

     
From sky to sky. Her mighty charms

     
Breathed soft beneath her robe of farms

     
And gardens: while her snowy breasts
,

     
Sierras white, with crimson crests
,

     
Were stained with sunset.
¹

M
ORE THAN MOST MEN
, more even than most poets, Roy Campbell was a paradox. He was at once rooted and rootless; at home and in exile. These apparent contradictions were, however, not in conflict. On the contrary, they were in creative and harmonious tension, the apparent rootlessness of his wanderlusting spirit serving merely to emphasize the rootedness of his creative imagination. Enigmatically, and sometimes ironically, the counterpoise was the very cause of his muse’s counterpoint.