The Poems of Roy Campbell

Roy Campbell's reputation is sad proof that decisions about artistic merit are often made on political grounds. At a time when Communism was fashionable Campbell converted to Catholicism.  When much of the literary world was endorsing the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War Campbell supported Franco. When the avant-garde was experimenting with new forms in poetry, music and art Campbell wrote rhyming, strictly metrical verse. I don't necessarily endorse Campbell's right wing opinions but I do say that he was no more a fool for supporting Franco  than many of his contemporaries were for supporting Stalin. The malignant power of fashion is such that Campbell's poetic reputation will probably never be restored and those who love words will always be the poorer for that. 

Campbell was proud of his efforts to live in the physical world as a cowboy, a fisherman, a soldier, a farmer, a sailor. He was proud of his familiarity with horses, bulls and the wild animals of his native South Africa. He liked to emphasise his physical vigour as a  point of difference between himself and most other poets (An amusing version of him appears as the character Zulu Blades in the 1930  satirical novel The Apes of God, written by his friend Wyndham Lewis). Campbell's  poems reflect those aspects of his life. On the other hand he exaggerated his physical prowess and is a highly unreliable witness about details of his own life. Truth to tell he was a bullshit artist, but a bullshit artist of genius. Somewhere, many years ago, I came across a quote from Campbell that I've never been able to locate since.  As I recall, it was "When I'm among poets I'm a cowboy and when I'm among cowboys I'm a poet".  If anybody can tell me where the quote actually comes from I'll be very grateful. (My thanks to Under Protest for identifying the source of this quote.  It appears in David Wright's 1961 biography of Campbell.)

When I first read Campbell I was astonished by the sharpness of the mirror which he held up to the real world. Have you ever encountered a snake at close quarters?   The opening lines of "To A Pet Cobra" are alive with sibilants in mimicry of the hissing snake.

With breath indrawn, and every nerve alert,

As at the brink of some profound abyss,

I love on my bare arm, capricious flirt,

To feel the chilly and incisive kiss

Of your lithe tongue that forks its swift caress

Between the folded slumber of your fangs,

And half reveals the nacreous recess

Where death upon those dainty hinges hangs.

Have you ever hauled on a rope?  The "r" sounds in the opening words of "Choosing a Mast" echo the whirr of a rope being pulled through an opening before being fixed in position as  part of the standing rigging of a boat. 

This mast through which I rive the rope... 

Have you ever seen a diver touch down on the sea floor?  In Campbell's astounding   The Flaming Terrapin he describes a diver who

Along the shaft of his own shadow slides

With knife in grinning jaws; and as he glides.

Nearing the twilight of the nether sands,

Under him swings his body deft and slow,

Gathers his knees up, reaches down his hands

And settles on his shadow like a crow.

I suppose hardly anybody reads The Flaming Terrapin these days. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica it 

exalts the instinctive vital force that brings forth intelligent human effort out of apathy and disillusionment. 

Well, maybe. I've read it several times over the last half-century or so and I'm still not sure what it's about . The words are so vigorous, the images so original that I sometimes find myself gawping at those individual components and losing track of the overall conception.

A couple of Campbell's poems are still deservedly anthologised: "The Zulu Girl" (a prophecy about racial conflict in South Africa which may yet prove to be not only eloquent but true);  "The Zebras" (which, I was delighted to discover in Campbell's Collected Poems, was dedicated to Chips Rafferty) and "The Serf" (which exalts poor people in pre-industrial societies). 

Campbell's abrasive personality led him to sneer at his fellow-citizens of South Africa and to admire the disenfranchised non-European population. I've no reason to doubt his sincerity in these matters.  Returning to South Africa after his first literary successes in England (the Wikepedia article about Campbell, from which the following quotation is taken, is comprehensive and fair):

Campbell was at first enthusiastically received. However, he then courted outrage in the literary magazine Voorslag by accusing his fellow white South Africans of racism, parasitism, and cultural backwardness as well as calling for granting racial equality to black South Africans. In response, Campbell lost his job as editor and was subjected to social ostracism, even by his own family. Before returning to England ..., Campbell retaliated by writing The Wayzgoose, a mock epic in the style of Alexander Pope and John Dryden, which skewered the racism and cultural backwardness of colonial South Africa

. 

His long satirical poems, though,  whether about Afrikaner farmers, South African dilettantes  or Bloomsbury intellectuals  have amusing passages but are far from Campbell's  best work.  Personally, I like his epigram "The Land Grabber: on a poet who offered his heart for a handful of South African soil."

The bargain is fair and the bard is no robber;

A handful of dirt for a heartful of slobber.

Most of his poems, even the best of them, have  annoying elements of self-dramatization. Whether he is describing a snake or Mazeppa's ride on the wild horse (his version of this story is as good as Byron's) or the isolated South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha he can't resist saying "I'm a bit like that, too". Undoubtedly this tendency detracts from the overall impact of the poems but, even allowing for that flaw, individual lines and passages have an impact like Mike Tyson in his prime.

Consistent with the general trend of Campbell's attitudes was his belief in the essential unity of all things and all processes

Clouds, crystals, ferns - the ecstasies of matter,

All the fixed forms of beauty whereunto

Habituated atoms, when they scatter,

By rays and showers are builded up anew -

All these are rhythms woven from the joy 

With which live atoms touch, and kiss, and chime,

Yet through the silent chemistry of time,

Weaving smooth harmonies from change and storm,

Come hankering back to their appointed form

As waves to rhythm, or as words to rhyme.

Campbell's translations (from French, Spanish and Portuguese) have been highly praised by people skilled in  those languages. My only personal basis for assessing them is that I remember as a schoolboy being required to translate a poem by Baudelaire which Campbell had also attempted. I think his version is better than mine.

I despise people who automatically dismiss artists with whose politics or religion they disagree. What sort of fool would stop reading Yeats just because he flirted with Theosophy and absurd  cyclical theories of history?  Should I never listen to Bach on the grounds that he was not only a Christian but (horror of horrors!) a Protestant?   Is   "Five Bells" a bad poem  because Kenneth Slessor used to write editorials for Frank Packer?  Tom Cruise is undoubtedly a dingbat but does that make Rain Man  a bad film?.  Roy Campbell is one of the finest poets of the twentieth century. You don't have to like him: just read the poems. Read the fucking poems.