Of all Roy Campbell's poems, perhaps the best known is a four-line squib called `On Some South African Novelists': "You praise the firm restraint with which they write - /I'm with you there, of course:/ They use the snaffle and the curb all right,/ But where's the bloody horse?" With never a snaffle in sight, the Natal-born Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell rode the hobbyhorse of his "raw, careless, headstrong, coarse, brutal" poetry (his own description of it) through English letters with memorable panache from the 1920s until his death in a car crash in 1957.
Campbell was a born troublemaker. An early attempt to forge a career for himself in South Africa terminated with an outspoken article on the aforementioned novelists in the magazine Voorslag ("Whiplash", appropriately enough). Coming to England, he attracted the attention of T.S. Eliot and began to achieve success as a poet with volumes like Adamastor and The Gum Trees. But something stubbornly African in him never assented to English life. When Campbell wrote about "Dreaming Spires", he meant giraffes, not Oxbridge colleges. As for the epicene coteries of Bloomsbury, they filled him with loathing. "You are about as detached morally, physically and intellectually as the animal you most resemble", he told Lytton Strachey: "a tapeworm". Most hateful of all in his eyes was Vita Sackville-West, the lesbian poetaster whose affair with his wife nearly wrecked his marriage, as well as provoking the jealous Virginia Woolf to write Orlando. Campbell's revenge was `The Georgiad', a spitting assault on Bloomsbury and all it stood for. Bloomsbury's revenge was to put it about that Campbell only felt so annoyed because he couldn't keep up with their dinner-table conversation. Escaping to Provence, he greatly enjoyed bullfighting (and teasing readers of the New Statesman with how much he enjoyed it), and was visited by Wyndham Lewis and Liam O'Flaherty, "who was a bit too wild" even for the hard-drinking Campbell. From Provence he moved on to Spain, where he found religion. Joseph Pearce's last book, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde, expended much energy on fanciful unmaskings of Catholicism in Wilde's life and work. Unmasking Campbell as Catholic, by contrast, would have all the investigative enterprise of discovering that Karl Marx was a Communist. From his conversion in 1934, a spirit of exuberant Catholicism courses through everything he wrote. His religion drove his politics too; having witnessed the murders of a community of Cistercian monks in Toledo, he espoused the Francoite cause in the Spanish Civil War, singing its praises in the almost unreadable Flowering Rifle. For a while it seemed he would follow Wyndham Lewis into supporting Hitler too, but on the German invasion of Poland he immediately volunteered for service at the British Consulate in Madrid. Predictably, Campbell was less than taken with his contemporaries Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day Lewis, inventing "MacSpaunday" as a pantomime horse of the left-wing orthodoxy he took them to represent. Where Spender was concerned though, stronger measures were called for. Campbell clambered on stage during one of his readings to denounce him "on behalf of the Sergeants' Mess of the King's African Rifles" before bloodying his nose. The police were called but Spender declined to press charges; "he is a great poet", he gamely observed, "we must try to understand". MacNeice took a less conciliatory line, swinging a punch at Campbell in the George pub near the BBC, to which the South African replied by blackening MacNeice's eye. Satisfied MacNeice was not a coward, Campbell thereafter treated him with kindly respect.
Much about Campbell remains deeply unpleasant but, likeable or not, the poet of `Horses on the Camargue' and `Tristan de Cunha' and the translator of St John of the Cross was an exhilarating writer. In Pearce he has found more a devoted fan than a gifted explicator of his poetry or an intellectual historian of his turbulent times, and with its constant use of his daughters' testimony, Bloomsbury and Beyond sometimes comes close to resembling a family chronicle. But Pearce has done his subject a useful service. Long after Stephen Spender's star has gone out, Campbell will continue to pack his unique punch as someone who, in the words of his poem `Luis de Camoes', "shouldered high his voluntary Cross,/ Wrestled his hardships into the form of beauty,/ And taught his gorgon destinies to sing."
David Wheatley's poetry collection Misery Hill was published last winter by Gallery Press