Hoy Campbell:The Effect of Ms Political Ideas on Ms PoetryD. M. A. F. MIddleton, Freiherr Von der ValkensteinDepartment of English, University of Rhodesia, Salisbury,It is usual in criticism, especially if thecritic disagrees with his subject's views, to dis-miss a poet's politics as being those of a manwith no grasp of high affairs or the intricaciesof politics. This, however, is not always a validjudgement. Yeats and Eliot, for instance, hadcoherent views of history and very definite viewsas to the future order and conduct of society.Roy Campbell nevertheless would justify thelazy critic. Both in his poetry and in his auto-biography his political worldview is incoherentand rambling. Yet. however hard it might beto construct a theory from his writings, it mustbe noted that in his later life he regarded him-self as a 'committed' poet; a poet who took avery definite stand in the controversies thataroused the English Literary World of the1930s. In the Spanish Civil War he sided withFranco and wrote Flowering Rifle, a longpolemic in defence of the Franco coalition. Inaddition, if it is remembered that he remainseasily the best poet English-speaking SouthAfrica has produced, his views are of some sig-nificance; and it is important to see how hispolitical beliefs enter into the wider context ofhis general ethical view, indeed of his wholesensibility, and thus illuminate certain qualitiesof his verse.Of his early life in Natal and Rhodesia theonly source at the present time is his auto-biography Light on a Dark Horse.1 Factuallythe work appears not to be completely trust-worthy, as the following typical example shows:A subconscious absenteeism, which hashypnotic power, camouflages me completely... it was proverbial in the army how Icould stand on parade at Brecon, with faultyequipment Š without a respirator, or on theday when my rifle was missing Š and getaway with it.2Nevertheless the evidence of his poetry andthe internal consistency of the work with re-gard to his moods and development suggest thatit is accurate enough on his early life.In his youth he imbibed his values largelyfrom his society. If his values changed later thechange was in accord both with his nature andthe values they replaced. He grew up on whatone would call, with some hesitation, the vesti-ges of the English Frontier. It has almost beencommon cause (and even a source of pride tomany Anglo-Africans) that no Frontier exper-ience, comparable with the Afrikaners' trekinto the far interior, can be found in the lifeof the English colonists.Recently there has been an attempt on thepart of Professor Butler of Rhodes University todiscover such an heritage,3 and the emphasison the 'Pioneer Column' in teaching history inRhodesian Schools4 is to the same end. Never-theless the majority of Anglo-Africans have, inthe past at any rate, declined to fabricate or55discover such origins, partly through a lack ofmaterial and partly through a fear of appearingto imitate Afrikaners. Roy Campbell's attitudetowards such an attempt to create an identity,as can be seen in his ruthless contempt forcontemporary South African writers, wouldhave been the same. Of the novelists he said:You praise the firm restraint with whichthey write ŠI'm with you there of course:They use the snaffle and the curb all right,But where's the bloody Horse.5Again he will attack the myth of vast open,spaces, much exploited by early writers andstemming from the 1820 settler Pringle,6 andhe frequently showed a contempt for what heregarded as a provincialism in his own back-ground. Of this more will be said later. Never-theless, while, as in the passage just quoted, hethought nothing to be 'there', it would neverhave occurred to him to question that he wasof pioneer stock; for proof of his pride in thepart his family played in the European settle-ment of Natal, the student need go no furtherthan the introduction to his autobiography.7He never called in question certain ideals whichthe English colonists believed to be English andadapted to a rougher environment. His auto-biography reveals from his earliest days an ad-herence to ideals of popular British publicschool fiction: a concept of honour involvingpride in thrashings both received and meted out,pranks played on people regarded as being un-pleasant and outside the pale, and a rathernaive attitude towards women. He has adefinite concept of manliness, which manifestsitself in the all but interminable descriptions ofhunting on land and sea. The implication isalways there that a man who does not hunt,shoot and (deep sea) fish is probably a Blooms-buryite, a Jew, or a communist.On the purely political level he denned him-self predictably in his attitude towards theAfrikaners and Africans with whom his peopleshare the country. The usual English attitudetowards the Afrikaner was (and to some extentstill is) of his being a slightly superior versionof the native and with whom intermarriagecould be permissible under certain specialconditions. There is no evidence that Campbelldid not fully endorse this attitude. Afrikanersseldom appear in his poems and then only asfigures of fun. In reply to the Afrikaanspoet Toon van den Heever, he wrote:The Land Grabberor a poet who offered his heartfor a handful of South African soil.The bargain is fair, the bard is no robber,A handful of dirt for a heartful of slobber.8Beneath the joke there is a deadly seriouspoint Š attachment to the South African soilis not fit sentiment for a white man. In hisautobiography, when talking of internationalpolitics and colour in the post-war world of1945, he says: 'what is really laughable is thatour Afrikaners should be hauled up beforeU.N.O.'9 It is there we have it: 'our Afrikan-ers' speaks more than could any amount ofexegesis.In regard to Africans, Campbell's attitudehas been largely misunderstood. In the period1925-7 when he and his fellow poet WilliamPlomer attempted to found their magazineVoorslag, there was an uproar mainly onaccount of the critical attitude it evinced to-wards what was then called the 'Colour Bar'.Plomer himself was outspokenly critical especi-ally in his novel Turbot Wolfe where he advo-cated miscegenation as a panacea for SouthAfrica's social ills.10 Roy Campbell himselfnever took up so definite a position and anysuggestion that he did is entirely due to hisassociation with his friend. It is his autobio-graphy11 and the volume Adamastor12 thatprovide the evidence of his attitude, ratherthan the shocked gossip of his fellow Natalians.The African makes few appearances, butthey are significant. There had been in the longsatirical Wayzgoose (1928) a note of aristo-cratic contempt for the behaviour of his moreignorant countrymen:Our sturdy pioneers as farmers dwell.And, twixt the hours of strenuous sleep,relaxTo shear the fleeces or to fleece theblacks.13In Adamastor in the poem 'The Pioneers, AVeld Eclogue' he ridicules two poor whites:Sometimes with busy twigs they switchedthe fliesOr paused to damn a passing nigger'seyes.14Colour-prejudice is seen as the prerogative ofignorant white trash, but later in the poem wefind something a little startling. Campbell iswriting of two rural poor whites, one Englishand one Afrikaner, and he is at pains to tell56Think not that I on racial questionstouchFor one was Durban born, the otherDutch.Yet an inconsistency follows:I drawn no line between them: for thetwoDespise each other and with reason too!But, in this case, they forgave the sin,Each loved his other as a very twinŠOne touch of tar-brush makes the wholeworld kin.15Here he has definitely changed his groundand we would know, if we did not already, thatthe aspersion of coloured blood was an insultoften used by the prosperous Anglo-African ofthe poor whites. There is nothing for it (especi-ally in the context of this utterly contemptuouspoem) but to read the last line quoted asbetraying the assumption that to have colouredblood is a degradation and indeed both a symp-tom and a cause of the degeneration of hischaracters. In other poems he tried a differenttack. The lyrical poems of Adamastor areheavily influenced by Rimbaud16 and it is notsurprising that Campbell assayed his apocalyp-tic tone in referring to the colour question.'Rounding the Cape' is a poem of farewell toSouth Africa written when he left the country,more or less for good, in 1928. Personifyingthe African Continent as Adamastor he writes:Across his back, unheeded, we havebrokenWhole forests: heedless of the bloodwe've spilled,In thunder still his prophecies arespoken,In silence, by the centuries fulfilled.17This attitude arises from (and reciprocallythis poem has fostered) the fear of Anglo-Africans at having the Africans subject to themand that retribution will be swift. The lasttwo lines promise violence and horror:The land lies dark beneath the risingcrescent,And Night, the Negro, murmurs in hissleep.In a far better poem, 'The Zulu Girl',81 hedescribes a Zulu mother working in the fieldsand suckling her child. Campbell writes witha foreboding of an African Apocalypse founduneornmonlv in his work, either in prose or verse.Certainly there is no suggestion of it in theboyhood memories of his autobiography. Speak-ing of the suckling child he writes:... his flesh imbibesAn old unquenched unsmotherableheatŠThe curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,The sullen dignity of their defeat.Her body looms above him like a hillWithin whose shade a village lies at rest,Or the first cloud so terrible and stillThat bears the coming harvest on itsbreast.These are memorable lines, in itself thepoem is splendidly realised and has expressedmuch of the thought of his contemporaries. Butstill we cannot avoid the impression of an atti-tude struck, the approach of a reporter lookingfor good copy rather than a. man giving ex-pression to a profoundly apprehended vision.Perhaps in its very miniature perfection thepoem seems too pat and a little glib. When weturn to Campbell's autobiography, however,the suspicion becomes a certainty. Much of hisyouth was spent with Africans and he knewnot a little comradeship with them. The rela-tionship was however alwavs one of master toservant, or in later life of N.C.O. to the ranks.The Africans who meant most to him were hisbearers on hunting trips. His attitude towardsthem was one of benevolent and sometimeskindly condescension. He sees no menacewhatsoever arising out of the nature of such arelationship. Nevertheless he felt that justicewas not done to the African:White rule at its worst is actually prefer-able to what the Zulus and Matabele sufferedand inflicted on other tribes. But that is noexcuse for it being as bad as it is.1'He exculpates, however, by saying that thebehaviour of the Israelis towards the Arabs andthe Russians towards their subject peoples isinfinitely worse. He does not go far in suggest-ing an answer: and the answer, such as it is,is one of paternalism, a doctrine which survivedin Rhodesia longer than in South Africa. Byhis complaint he defines, however, vaguely, hissolution:There is no doubt that the average nativeis socially inferior to the white man, but heshould not and cannot be prevented arti-ficially from eventually becoming his equal,for the good of all concerned. The present57disqualification of the native from so manyaids to his own betterment is exactly on apar with the natives' treatment of eachother. We are behaving about a quarteras badly as the Zulus and Matabeles didto their fellow Bantu, and it will do uslittle more good than it did them . . . 20One cannot help the questions: 'Is that all hesaw the problem as being? Was it only that forhim?' It is distressing that the best literarymouthpiece English-speaking South Africashould have to offer should pronounce in amanner so facile and so superficial. The offhandtone of the passage shows clearly how littlethe problem afTected him and belies the concernexpressed so briefly in Adamastor.21Such was Roy Campbell's political back-ground. Politics had formed little of his experi-ence, such views as he had being those of the'advanced thinkers' among the English colonials.Like many of them he emigrated from Philistia.He found a moral fate peculiarly similar tomany of those he left behind. He was to beconfronted, in another form, with the revolutionhe had sensed and partially sympathised with;and his revulsion was characteristic. He hadrejected the seventeenth-century Calvinisticworld view of the Afrikaner and was to acceptthat of seventeenth-century Roman CatholicSpain. That he should do so is at first sightcurious and difficult to explain.Spanish writers have had little influence ontheir English counterparts, perhaps because incertain ways no war has gone deeper than theEnglish-Spanish War of 1588. Despite harrow-ing wars the cultures of France and Germanyhave seemed less remote to the English mindthan the Roman Catholic, and once imperialisticideas which dominate Spain to this day. It isnecessary to suggest the reasons for this, as itwas under Spanish precept that Campbell be-came a politically committed poet.While enjoying the physical excitement offeredby a relatively savage environment outsideDurban, he felt, as a poet, the need of a moreintellectually stimulating one. The Mecca forthis aspiration was London and England:'Home' as the Anglo-Africans, until recentlycalled it. In England, as a young poet of vigourand promise he was accepted into literary circlesand made important and influential friends suchas William Walton, Augustus John (whopainted his portrait), Wyndham Lewis, T. S.Eliot and Edith Sitwell.He made no secret, however, of his not feelingat home in such a milieu; The Georgiad andthe relevant chapters of his autobiographyclearly reveal this.22 The great literary cliquesof London with their leftish outlook andsedentary bookishness were repugnant to himalthough he made clear exceptions of thefriends listed above. The values he had learnedin his early life were conspicuous by their ab-sence; like many colonials he discovered thatthe England he thought he represented hadsimply disappeared. He found the Englishriddled with 'softness', riddled with literarynepotism, obsessed with a clinical attitudetowards sex and displaying a rampant homo-sexuality. Once Campbell's violence of ex-pression is allowed for, there was probably muchtruth in his allegations. His satiric poem TheGeorgiad gives the impression of being an attackon some rather tedious people by a man whovery curiously was able to mingle both clever-ness and oafishness.His disaffection with this led him to movewith his family to the continent, first the Ca-margue and later Spain. Here he made hisliving as a market gardener, fisherman, bull-fighter and cowboy (vaquero). Here, amonga largely pious agrarian people, he was able tofeel himself as belonging to a community andbeing able to share its ideals in a way he hadnever known before. This contentment foundits best expression in a poem written even beforehis conversion to Roman Catholicism, in thetouching and unpolemical 'Mass at Dawn' fromA damastor:I dropped my sail and dried my drippingseinesWhere the white quay is chequered by coolplanesIn those great branches, always out ofsight,The nightingales are singing day andnight.Though all was grey beneath the moon'sgrey beam,My boat in her new paint shone like abride,And silver in my baskets shone the bream;My arms were tired and I was heavy eyed,But when with food and drink, at morninglight,The children met me at the water-side,Never was wine so red or bread so white.2358Had this been written in free-verse It couldalmost be D. H. Lawrence finding the 'spon-taneous life' he yearned for. The identificationwith a way of life and a generalised sense ofcoming home could not be more obvious. Herethere was for Campbell a recognition, albeitby unlettered people, of his literary gift and anadmiration for his physical strength and skillnot to be found in Bloomsbury. It was inevit-able that he should be drawn to the religion ofthese people and consider it to be the sacra-mental force that made their life so worthhaving. Here Roman Catholicism was thereligion of the people of the soil and theirnaturalness confirmed an anti-intellectualismlearned in the bush of Natal and Rhodesia. Inhis autobiography he records, with disgust, see-ing a man in a Barcelona cafe reading Plato'sRepublic, He notes in semi-Wordsworthiandoggerel:The illiterate peasants of Spain readFar less nonsense from their runningbrooks,Than waiters primer-proud with knowinglooksCan mumble out of newspapers andbooks.24The meaning is clear even if the metrics of thelast line are deplorable. Campbell always dis-trusted what he thought of as too much book-learning: for him it destroyed common senseand was generally debilitating.Book-learning was hardly without its in-fluence at this time, however. Campbell camein contact with the literature of Spain. Spain,as has been said, has been neglected in Englandand its literature is less familiar than that ofany other major European country with thepossible exception of Poland. The writings ofthe Spanish Renaissance in Epic, Dramatic,and Metaphysical poetry are of an excellencewhich rivals the English. Ercilla is no Miltonand the great dramatists may not quite matchShakespeare but they remain considerable men.In all there is an ardent belief in the destiny ofSpain in the world, the magnificent virtues ofher people and the mission of the RomanChurch. English writers are diffident on mattersof nationalism and England's crusading role,at least when they write well: their stance isquite alien to their counterparts in Spain.Shakespeare's history cycle reveals an ambiva-lent attitude towards the rise of England'spower which is not to be found in the drama-tists of Spain who wrote when their countrywas easily the most powerful in the world.Campbell was to side with those who lookedback to the former times and when his lovingtranslations are read it is obvious that theplays influenced his political outlook.23In the rise of the Popular Front in SpainCampbell saw a threat to the whole ethos hehad come to love and had embraced. As theforegoing might suggest, no man could havebeen more out of sympathy with the workingclasses of the towns. For him they werecanaille, boot-blacks, taxi-drivers, miners andsuchlike and for al! of them he had an unmiti-gated contempt.26 His sympathies lay with whathe regarded as the lowest paid workers:Paradoxically enough it is the workerswho produce the chief necessities of life:grain, meat, and leather, for food, clothingand footwear, who get the lowest pay andthey are generally conservative and do notwant romantic upheavals.27i - rf the I*1,, r-,, nhiTib i '' n ijHisalsc orWJIOT Ł> 1tan k "1in the urd to him waso supported it,1 ind of Puri-dant typifiedRJle:And whether it would better them or not,Upon all others would impose his lot:To figures who would subjugate our soulsAnd hold a meeting when the tempest rollsBy dead statistics would control a cityAnd run a battleship with a committee.28Some of these jeers apply only to the SpanishAnarchists but. they are offered as generallyapplicable. Here, in his hatred of a way of lifehe saw as degrading, he showed his early valuesas much as his embrace of Spain. Socialism wasplainly unmanly, preached bv boobies andsissies. In explaining this phenomenon heaccepted two doctrines cherished in CatholicSpain. Firstly that the Jews, Freemasons of theGrand Orient Lodge and. to a certain extent,the Protestants were bv definition on the sideof the godless socialists and that the very riseof the latter was due to Protestantism. Talkingof his friend, the Afrikaans liberal poet UysKrige, he says:Uys ... as an incurable Calvinist . . .could never understand Spain or Provence.Protestants go to these countries for spiritu-al fresh air, vet, with the tainted opportun-ism which is their chief raison d'etre, they59ascribe the attraction, which is really thatof the church and the people who have notbeen amputated from the Church by forceof tyrants like Henry VIII or crooks likeLuther and CalvinŠto the climate or thelandscape or to anything else except theculture a.nd civilisation which holds themso spellbound. They also consort with themalcontents. They have not the courageto disown what is wrong in themselves.They would sooner join the atheists anddiabolists, as they did in the Spanish War,than with anything straightforwardly Euro-pean or Roman . . . 29They are Humanitarians and therefore perverse.We read in the preface to Flowering Rifles:Hurnanitarianism, their [the wowsers']ruling passion, an ersatz substitute forcharity, invariably sides where there is mostroom for sentimental indulgence in thefilth or famine of others. It sides auto-matically with Dog against Man, the Jewagainst the Christian, the black against thewhite, the servant against the master, thecriminal against the judge. It is a suicidalform of moral perversion due to over-domestication, protestantism gone bad, justas are all the other perversions with whichour intellectuals are riddled.30Here we have the true racial feelings of RoyCampbell, those of his own people. A readingof the poem decisively shows that the collationof Jews and blacks with dogs and criminals isno mere slip of a furious pen. The anti-semit-ism is endemic in the poem, contempt for theblacks is occasional. An interesting sidelight onthe filth and famine of others is provided in theautobiography. Talking of the attitude towardsbeggars in Spain he recalls his own Anglo-Saxonbackground and remarks, 'Coming from a landwhere poverty is regarded as a loathsomedisease to one where it is a sacrament; . . .this . . . was a revelation to me'.31 Truly hesaw the panacea of Spanish Catholicism in amost remarkable light.Threatened by so many ills, how better couldhe defend his values than by joining the regulararmy of Christ, the force majeure. Stalin onceasked, 'How many divisions has the Pope?';Campbell would have been ready to answerhim:From the very beginning (1934-5) mywife and I understood the real issues inSpain. There could be no compromise inthe war between the East and the West . . .Up to then we had been vaguely andvacillatingly Anglo-Catholic: but now wasthe time to decide whether, by staying in theterritorials, to remain half-apathetic to thegreat fight which was obviously approach-ingŠor whether we should step into thefront ranks of the Regular Army of Christ.Hitler himself had said, even by then, howmuch more easy the Protestants were toenslave and bamboozle than the Catholics:Stalin, Trotsky and Lenin in their writingshad shown they despised the latter as beingof no more hindrance to them than theagnostic intellectuals whom they all moreor less laughingly contemn . . . 32The dogmas of Spanish Catholicism and itsideas of world-order, medieval in kind, were tosuffice as an interpretation and explanation ofthe world to his simple and rather violent soul.The sensitive and troubled probings of RomanCatholic writers such as Greene or Bernanoswere not for him, the Regular Army of Christmarched in step with the Cardinal Archbishopof Toledo. Campbell had found a spiritual andphysical home unknown in South Africa or inEngland.These considerations serve as an introductionto his poems of the Civil War in Spain. Thefascinating but not central problem of the extentand nature of his participation in it will be lefton one side.33 It is sufficient to remark, hethought of his role as combatant and propa-gandist. The handful of lyrical poems areexcellent.34 There is a power which was absentfrom the rather tepid other poems in MithraicEmblems?5 They are realised and forceful andattempt little intellectual preaching. The open-ing of 'Christ in Uniform' is magnificent:Close at my side a girl and boyFell firing, in the doorway here,Collapsing with a strangled cheerAs on the very couch of joy.36Another poem, 'Christ in Hospital' recapturesthe fullest excellence of Adamastor and is theonly truly adult and realised expression Camp-bell ever gave to his deepest religious convic-tions. The lyric poems are few, however, andthe majority of his war poems are polemical,the most important being the long poem,'Flowering Rifle'.We are told on the dust jacket that this isan epic and that Campbell regarded it as hismaster work. Epic, by any standards, it is not.601I A AIt has no story or plot in any recognisable form;indeed in its allusions it depends so much onan external knowledge of the Spanish Civil Warthat it is unintelligible without reference tohistorical works. It is mainly taken up withinvective against the Republicans and praisefor the Nationalists, interspersed with descrip-tions of fighting (places and names usuallyunspecified except in Campbell's own notes),and it ends with a vision of a Christian, recon-structed and fruitful Spain. For these reasonsit must be classed as a polemic. It is a longand extremely repetitive poem. Its ideology hasalready been sketched from another source andit is sufficient to cite two passages which shouldbe enough to suggest its quality and, more par-ticularly the way in which Campbell held hisideology and how it caused him to write.The first illustration is from Canto I. Camp-bell has outlined the red atrocities and theindignant rising of the Spanish people. He thenturns to General Franco's flight from Tenerifeto lead the uprising of 18th July, 1936:To meet her chief, his Rubicon the straits,His country roseŠbut to fling wide thegates:The cry was not to challenge but to im-plore,With which she shook the desolated shore:*A headless phantom, she, in ragged attireWhose flying streamers flogged the windswith fire,Swung. like a lantern her dismemberedheadIn which, like coals, the eyes were blazingred.Those jet-black curls that taught the grapesto growHad whitened in a night to banks ofsnow,With sleety whistle from her hand theyspreadAnd seern'd the smoke of that suspendedhead;With which she turned to lamp him on hiswayThrough scenes of madness that defied thedayŠHumanity, benighted at midnoon,Had howled the sun into a small redŁAllusion to that tremendous passage in Lucan whereRome appears to Caesar at the Rubicon, to try tostop him.And saw, through smoke, that high andholy lightAs grey Baboons behold the moon atnight.But with the Gorgon-Beauty of her face,Where Medusa's would have chilled theraceOf blood, and walled the heart with chill-ing stone,She turned his heart to adamant alone . . ?7This is Roy Campbell's assault on the grandstyle and it cannot be denied power in its goryexuberance. Nevertheless in its very imagery,striving admittedly after the rhetorical fury ofLucan, it displays certain lack of focus by virtueof its very striving after the violent and theextravagant. Streamers, even with fire, cannotflog the wind even when it is shamed; withoutdevelopment the verb seems used purely for anot very clear effect. How hair can teach thegrapes to grow, even if there is a similarity incolour, is hardly clear. The comparison of thewronged Spanish people to baboons (it isdeveloped from the howling of the small redmoon two lines earlier) may be very strikingin describing their state but is hardly appropri-ate to their spiritual condition with which hewishes us to sympathise. It is one thing to saythat people have been physically reduced to thephysical state of baboons, it is another to implybaboonish behaviour (e.g. 'howl' 'as grey Ba-boons behold'). The uneasy use of 'lamp' asa verb is a little matter," at other times Camp-bell could succeed at this.38The muddle of the imagery becomes a moreideological matter in the last couplet of thepassage. The implied antithesis between 'stone'and 'adamant' is just not sufficient, the sub-stances are similar: the difference in popular orany other association of the two substances isslight, and the quality of being adamant may ormay not be excellent. Certainly it makes noappreciable contrast with stone. WhateverCampbell intended, and there is enough in thepassage to guess he might have meant the diff-erence between indifference and determination,the reader is left with the impression of GeneralFranco being a very hard-hearted man indeed.He is also left feeling that this is a qualityCampbell admired.In this last matter we have a symptom of thefailing, the crass loss of an artistic opportunityŠa Civil War is an occasion of high tragedy.When men enter such a war, however strongly61they may feel as to the righteousness of theircauses, it is surely with a sense of grief that apeople should come to such a pass. Even Lucan,a highly committed writer, felt that. The senseof moral infallibility and triumph in the faceof even the most heinous suffering which typi-fied the left-wing poets Campbell despised wasalso his. The taking of even an enemy's lifeis, and should be for a Christian, a grave andsorry matter. To Campbell the polemic is all.In the other passage for consideration we donot seem far from 'the necessary murder' ofAuden. He is expressing the view that evenatheists are diabolists and perverted wor-shippers :Even the fiend, to reinforce his sprite.And get the courage for his daily fight,Though Backwards, says his rosary everynight!And what if Garcia Lorca died for thisCaught bending over that forlorn AbyssFor some mephitic whim his soul hadspliced,As he once boasted, with the AntiChrist?This weary Faustian hunger for the voidAn age of irttplW'tir^iq h^s dp=trovpd;In him r'K^The vict iIt was IT fThat of f1 ŁAnd let tWhose p'"iso pale,Are light and thunder on the roaring galeOf battle and have man times repaidThe Genius lost in him for Spain betrayed.*The amazing amount of paper wasted over thisalmost unique stain on Nationalist arms is typicalof the Anglo-Saxon Press. When the Nationalistsentered Granada the unbelievable babooneriesperpetrated by the Reds made them trigger-happyas they rounded up and shot all corrupters ofchildren, known perverts and sexual cranks. Anatural reaction considering that the week beforethe Reds had slaughtered and tortured anyone whowas under suspicion of any sort of decency at all.Maetz, Calvo de Sotelo, Munoz Seca, Padre Eusebio(about to be canonised) and Antonio Primo deRivera were all killed not for their vices but fortheir virtues. They were intellectuals on a higherscale, and died better than the cowardly Lorca. Ifthe author of this poem, a better poet than Lorca,so Borges the leading South American critic pointsout, had not been resourceful, he would have died,like Lorca, but at the hands of the Reds.39Vb r,,i Tr, ' n"- lo( A f.-p T' < I -n(bitir1 died* 'H.ed.*<- 10 dieŠM d eye,' <he skv,t' foundThe final sentence of Campbell's note canbe taken as a typical piece of the author'sbraggodoccio, though the opinion of Borges isone to be respected. The poem itself continuesin praise of de Rivera in terms verging onblasphemy which surely would have offendedthat pious man. Campbell in this passage is onfirmer ground than when he is praising, pro-bably wrongly, for having a heart of particularlyhard stone. It attempts to represent a coherentdoctrine which, in itself, is eminently defensible,although the 'two wrongs make a right' tone ofthe note is hardly sound ethics. It is again thefacility, the lack of realisation, despite a hand-ful of proffered images, which one objects to.The note hints that Lorca was in some waysexually disordered; that this is not discussed inthe verse is of little importance. What is, is theglib adjective 'Faustian' which is asked to dofar more work than should ever have beenasked of it. We are asked to think of Marlowe'splav and, perhaps, Goethe's, not anythingCampbell's poem might be achieving. We aretold Lorca. was a man of genius whose soul wasgiven to Nihilism and the Devil, but that is all.We are offered the tasteless image: 'Caughtbending over that forlorn Abyss'.There is no suggestion of the quality of theexperience he is attacking, no concretelyrealised picture of the object of his discrimina-tion, either in negation or affirmation. Thepassage that follows is hardly clearer as to whywe should admire Primo de Rivera. Campbellis angry, convinced that he is right and deter-mined to make political capital, not poetry.The blustering and bigotry lead to a loss ofhumanity, a simple lack of evocation and con-crete detail, a failure even to explore a situationwhich should move us with the force of tragedy,and these failings weaken the presentation ofthe very position he seeks to exalt.The final impression left by 'FloweringRifle' is that of all Campbell's attempts at ex-tended thinking: many of the views are inthemselves defensible, though such things as theanti-semitism are not: the indefensible is,symptomatic of the way in which his undigestedviews were held Š uncritically and muddle-headedly. A forceful and sometimes lyric poet,he was incapable of the sustained thoughtespecially in politics, which could sustain poetslike Dante or Milton. His thought is often in-coherent, prejudiced, and, in its finer aspects,unrealised. He was prepared to accept a few62slogans and took no responsibility for any furtherconsideration. These failings go to the veryroots of his verse, exhibiting themselves in hisoften faulty metrics, frequently unclear or in-appropriate imagery, or a surprising obscurityas to what is actually being talked about whicharises not from any inherent complexity butfrom a sheer failure of technique. The latterfailing is disastrous in any long poem, andCampbell devoted his mature energies to thelong poem.There is a cluster of short poems groupedbefore Flowering Rifle in the second volume ofthe Collected Poems and thematicallv related toit. Partly polemical and partly lyrical, they dealwith the Spanish Civil War and war in general.The short burst of satire and the lyrical retro-spect show Campbell to better advantage thanthe longer poem. It will be seen that they offerlittle modification of the ideas displayed inFlowering Rifle.In 'A Letter from the San Mateo Front' nopoint is made that is not more fully stated inFlowering Rifle. There is a good deal of funat the expense of 'MacSpaunday' (MacNiece,Spender, Auden, Day Lewis) and how hissupport has led to the defeat of his own cause.There is also a great deal of semi-mysticalwriting as to how crops grow for Nationalistsbut not for Republicans, leading to the pointthat Nationalist methods of production weremore efficient than those of the Reds.In two other poems, 'To Mary after theRed Terror' and 'The Carmelites of Toledo',he clarifies his reasons for his religious con-version. The first poem, to his wife, praises herfor the example she set him in faith. It containsa curious stanza typical in the hagiography ofthe pious:You led me to the feet of ChristWho threatened me with lifted quirt:But by its loving fury slicedI staggered upright from the dirt.40The masochism is obvious especially when weremember that, as Campbell informs us in theautobiography, a quirt is a horse's goad, madein the Spain of his day, usually from a bull'spenis. In his poem on the Carmelites there arelines to compare with this. He praises thequality of their Christian witness as an inspira-tion to him and, speaking of the martyrdom ofPadre Eusebio, he writes:His radiant face when last I sawEusebio bade me take delight:His flesh was flame, his blood its lightThat sought the fire as fire the straw,And of his agony so cruelAs ruthlessly devoured the spiteAs eager flame devours the fuel.Small wonder then as trash too earthlyThe gunbuts drove me from the pinThe smashed to let such Princes in ...The blows acceding to the martyrRebuffed me for a Harlequin.41In the autobiography (p. 149) he slatesNietzsche, along with Marx, as a mere book-worm who knew nothing of life. With whatdelight, however, would Nietzsche have seizedupon this passage as an illustration of histheories. Here the brute beast of Campbell'smanhood is shamed by the exhibition of Chris-tian humility. When such violence is regardedwith joy the consequences can indeed be danger-ous. As poems of religious experience the qualityof these can hardly be compared with such apoem as 'Christ in Hospital'.42In another group he deals with experiencegained in the Second World War, with war andthe hardships of war. He joined the Britishforces and saw no contradiction in taking uparms against Franco's former allies. In a'Jungle Eclogue' a gnat taunts two BritishN.C.O.'s with the fact that they are righting fora bunch of money grubbing manipulators. Helumps the Anti-Axis Allies together as abusersof mass media and brothers in corruption:Destructive Titans . . .With toad-like hate puffed up beyondamazeTo rule your destinies and guide your ways,Class against class, to their eternal loss,To prime with hate Š and all against theCross;And when they wolf the income and thecash,To head your empire to its final crash.As for free-speech for which you're bluffedto fightIt's their's alone to throttle as you write.This is the Creed you have entrenched athomeBy volunteering (fools) to cross the'foam.43The gnat concludes by returning to a themealready familiar:63Your friends hunt Christians as your foesthe JewsAnd seeing that the former are morenumerous ŠWhy, that is what appeals to me as humor-ous.44The objection to the alliance with Russia is acommon and understandable Roman Catholicone. Certainly the views of the gnat as a wholeare forcefully expressed and nothing is said inreply seriously to contradict them. The firstN.C.O. (in the light of this and other referencespresumably to Campbell himself) justifies hisactions by saying that he will fight injusticewherever it occurs:One must be deftWhen liberty's attacked from Right andLeft.With my left fist the Nazis though I fightI've banged the bloody Bolshy with myright. . .Between the Jewish Fascism of RussiaAnd the gentile Bolshevism farmed onPrussia,I see no difference save in their salutes . . .45In other poems such as 'Heartbreak Camp'46and 'The Moon of Short Rations'47 much of theboredom, sickness and waste of the East Africancampaign are finely expressed and Campbellappears in the light of a 'protest poet' both inhis reaction to war and the hardship imposedby the powers-that-be on those expected to fightit. Certainly in the Second World War he feltnothing of the crusading fervour he had had inSpain. In 'Monologue' he expresses his greatestdisillusion. He sees his world as run by left-wing profiteers who exploit the blood of soldiers.In terms most reminiscent of the pseudo-dramatically expressed views of 'JungleEclogue', he refutes the idea that, he has beenduped in any way, and continues:I'm fighting for a funkhole-warrenOf bureaucrats who've come to stay,Because I'd rather, than the foreignEquivalent it should be they.And adds with a tragic vision old as Thucy-dides:We all become the thing we fight . . . 48Unfortunately he had neither the ability northe wish to develop this insight. He consoleshimself that he is at least fighting in the ranksunlike journalistic pundits who:feast on poor men's bonesAnd cheat the worker of his bread . . .Between the armchair and the bed.49At the end he perceives a glimmer of hope:Out of the red sands of the circusThe great cathedrals climbed the skies!50Spain, however, was to remain his centralexperience of war; it seems indeed the climacticexperience of his life. In 'Talking Bronco' hereturns to the preoccupations of FloweringRifle. In it the poet sees himself as a Pegasusof most modern construction:A talking Bronco, sharked from ear to earWith laughter, like a running bandolier,With teeth like bullets fastened in theirclipsTo chew the thunder and to spit the pips,Ejecting from their breach, in perfect time,The shells of metre and the shrieks ofrhyme . . .51This rather unhappy image, a product ofCampbell's often over exuberant invention islong pursued. The. poem is a truculent retro-spect. Campbell felt that Left-Wingers had hadsupreme influence both on British intellectualsand international news-media and had used itto vilify the just religious cause of Franco. Hesees himself as a lone but able fighter against amountain of deceits.In the polemical note of these poems theearly coltish satirist in Campbell seems to havehardened to a loud commentator hard withprejudice. He often exhibits the faults of hismasters in the satiric field: he wields the sar-castic bludgeon of Drvden rather than the ironicrapier of Pope, he resembles the Byron of'English Bards and Scottish Reviewers' in thathe often loses the thread of his argument, havingbeen carried away by extraneous asides and thenecessities of rhyme. In the meditative poemsthere is much good writing, but as intimatedabove some very clear and interesting percep-tions fail to be realised in terms of actual poetry.By this time the lyric Impulse that had made somuch that was fine in Adamastor had gone andonly his anger could find a powerful expression.Like many poets of our age Campbell wasoften confused and violent: this is a stricturewhich applies to poets of all colours of theideological spectrum. As he grew older headopted certain specific views; he attempted togive his verse a commitment, a moral character.This led to a deterioration in his verse, a failureof his great promise, not because some of hisviews were poor in themselves but because ofthe wav in which he held them. An idea mav64be entirely admirable, but if it is held with anill-considered arrogance its appearance andeffect will be deplorable. With the yearsCampbell acquired not wisdom but prejudice.It is a sad spectacle: to the world he left ahandful of fine lyrics, to his own people anoenvre strangely prophetic of their own laterpolitical development.REFERENCES1. CAMPBFXL, R. 1951 Light on a Dark Horse. London, Hoilis and Carter.2. IBID., p.179.3. BUTLER, F. G. 1969 Proceedings of the Conference on English Writing: Grahamstown, English Studies in Africa,13 (i).1969 When Boys were Men. Cape Town, O.U.P.4. PEGG, H. E. 1949 A History of Southern Africa. Cape Town, Longmans. This work was used until recently inRhodesian schools.5. CAMPBELL, R. 1949-60 The Collected Poems. 3 Volumes. London, Bodley Head, vol. 1, p.198.6. BUTLER, F. G. eel. 1953 A Book of South African Verse. Cape Town, O.U.P., pp. 3 -10.7. Light on a Dark Horse, pp. 3 - 5.8. The Collected Poems, vol. I, p. 199.9. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 150.10. PLOMER, W. 1928 Turbot Wolfe. London, Hogarth Press.11. That Campbell would never have gone this far is proved in Light on a Dark Horse, p. 152: 'I think it silly to inter-breed, though I have no colour prejudice. Hybrids are seldom good, except in the case of a donkey stallion and themare of a horse. When superannuated English society-tarts take up negro lovers, it is generally a sort of perversionlike the exaggerated feeling for dogs and cats.'12. CAMPBELL, R. 1930 Adamastor. London, Faber. It is indicative of his attitude to Africa that he should namethis volume (his best in the opinion of this critic) after that menacing and repulsive giant, the numinous spirit guard-ing the Cape of Storms in Canto V of Camoens' The Lusiads. In this poem 'Rounding the Cape' he writes:Where Adamastor from his marble hallsThreatens the sons of Lusus as of old,(The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p, 27)It is interesting to note that Roy Campbell's love of this poet par excellence of colonialism and Roman Catholicdestiny was life-long. In Talking Bronco (published in 1949 and dealing with his experiences in the African Theatreof the Second World War), he writes in his poem to Camoens:I find a comrade where I sought a master.And then identifies with Camoens' life of hardship and lack of material prosperity, serving an ideal in distant places:For Daily, while the stinking crocodilesGlide from the mangroves on the swampy shore,He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles,And tells me that he lived it all before.(The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p. 159)I have ignored, in my discussion of Campbell's use of African experience, the long narrative poem The Flaming Terra-pin (London, Jonathan Cape, 1928). It uses imagery drawn from Africa extensively but largely in the colonialmanner of 'local colour' (though with a vigour and luxuriance of vocabulary alien to his predecessors) and is notgermain to our theme; no essential statement with regard to Africa is made that cannot be found in 'Rounding theCape'. The Wayzgoose (London, Jonathan Cape, 1928) is referred to in text,13. The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p. 243,14. IBID., p. 22. Poor whites in the period 1920-40 had a standard of living that was little different from that of theAfrican; they were mainly Afrikaners and held in great contempt.15. IBID., p. 23.16. Campbell had already excellently translated Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau Ivre', and the borrowing in 'The Zulu Girl'from 'Les Chercheuses de Poux' is well known. The affinity between the two is obvious and symptomatic in Campbell'scase. Both sought, or attempted to seek, the violent, the extravagant and the bizarre, vigour and movement. Bothstrove, after the vision of the seer, Rimbaud finding it in hashish, Campbell in the Roman Catholic Church. Bothsought extreme and dogmatic political solutions, Rimbaud in the Paris Commune of 1871 and Campbell among theSpanish Nationalists of 1936.17. The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p. 27. Presumably a reference to Adamastor's speech to Vasco de Gama:Listen now to me and learn what perils have been laid up against such excess of presumption, what penaltiesawait you over the vast expanse of ocean and on the land you will eventually subdue in battle . . . Here,unless I am deceived, I count on avenging myself to the full on him who discovered me. Nor will the havocto be visited on your too trusting company end with this . . .{Camoens, The Lusiads translated by W. C. Atkinson, Hannondsworth, Penguin, 1952, p. 129.)The prophecy, of course, refers to the misfortunes of Portuguese shipping prior to Camoens' time and not to anyevent contemporary with Campbell. Presumably Adamastor has uttered new prophecies here sensed by the poet. Inconjunction with this allusion the poem under discussion hardly, and especially in the wider context of Campbell'swork, can be taken as a rejection of colonialism. His pride in the achievements of his family, already noted, issufficient proof of this. Indeed he believed, with Carooens and his own people, in the mission of colonialism. One65remembers his discussion of Spanish efforts in parts of Flowering Rifle and his tilt against the idea of the noblesavage in Light on a Dark Horse, p. 150: 'I have always noticed . . . that the Christianised or Mahommedanisednative was a better and happier man than the "Noble Savage" with his terrible haunting fear which makes himsuspicious of his friends and . . . [an] abject prey to witch doctors.'18. The Collected Poems, vol. I, p, 30.19. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 150. 20. IBID., pp. 1534.21. It is still possible to find English-speaking South Africans who believe Roy Campbell left South Africa for politicalreasons. J. Cope and U. Krige (Penguin Book of South African Verse, London, 1968, pp. 21-2) insinuate this bytalking of a dissociation arising from a 'darkening of political horizons' leading Campbell to go into voluntaryexile. Nothing, on the printed evidence, could be further from the truth. One only has to compare the heatgenerated in Campbell by the provincialism and philistinism of contemporary South African Society with the per-functory remarks on political questions for this to be self-evident. The Wayzgoose and the punch of the epigramsshow quite clearly that Campbell felt himself in a cultural desert and that politics were a side issue, related to the mainones but hardly dominant.22. light on a Dark Horse, chapters XIV, and XVI and XVIII; CAMPBELL R. 1931 The Georgiad. London, Boris-wood.23. The Collected Poems, vol. I, p. 47.24. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 317.25. See BENTLEY, E. ed. 1959 Six Spanish Plays. New York, Doubleday (Volume III of The Classic Theatre)which contains five plays translated by Roy Campbell. The most important from the point of view of the presentdiscussion are:Cervantes: The Siege of Numantia (1585)Lope de Vega: Fuente Ovejuna (1619)Calderon de la Barca: Love after Death (1633)This feeling of Spanish destiny was of course not exclusive to one side in the Civil War: 'a very large number ofpeople wanted a "new Spain" (which might mean a hundred different things) which would be worthy of Spain'sgreat past and indeed of the continuing qualities of her superb people', H. Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (revisededition), Harmondsworth, Pelican Books, 1965, p. 160. In such a context the literary works of centuries before canalso be interpreted to mean 'a hundred different things'. Bentley notes a Stalinist interpretation of The Siege ofNumantia by Campbell's contemporary, the poet Rafael Albert! (b. 1902); but adds that, 'The author of the presenttranslation was a supporter of General Franco in war and peace: what The Siege of Numantia meant to him can bededuced from his poem Flowering Rifle (Six Spanish Plays, pp. 482, 483). There it is in a nutshell, Campbell sawthe ferocity and patriotic fervour of the play as propaganda for the Nationalist cause. Taken in its historical con-text by people who wished to revive, that context, that was the interpretation for Campbell. If modern propagandamust be extracted from the classics it seems Campbell's view would be sounder than Alberti's.26. For his hardly credible views on miners, see Flowering Rifle (The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 224). It provides anexcellent illustration of the way in which Campbell held his views and the kind of reasons that were important to him.27. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 326.28. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 139.29. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 316. Uys Krige has long argued that the true European affinities of the Afrikaner lienot with Germanic but with the Latin peoples.30. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 138.31. Light on a Dark Horse, p. 331. 32. IBID., p. 317.33. The question as to whether Roy Campbell was a combatant or not is a most vexed one. His claims to such astatus are frequent, The Collected Poems, vol. 2 pp. 224, 235-8. On the other hand Thomas, The Spanish CivilWar, p. 301n, states categorically that he did not fight. J. Weinstaub's The Last Great Cause supports this, claiminghe was no more than war-correspondent for The Tablet. It is to be hoped that Professor Gardener's posthumouswork on Campbell, shortly to appear, will help on this point. Certainly if his claim cannot be substantiatedCampbell will appear little different from those famous non-combatants, Auden, Spender and Day Lewis whom hedespised as 'wowsers'.34. The Collected Poems, vol. 1, pp. 153-8.35. CAMPBELL, R. 1936 Mithraic Emblems. London, Boriswood.36. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 154.37. IBID., pp. 154-5: 'The sunlight zihtering their flanks with fire'.38. See 'The Zebras' (The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p. 40).39. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 198. It is interesting to note that of all the many English translations of the popularLorca, Campbell's are the most substantive as English Poetry; see, Lorca, London, Bowes and Bowes, 1952.40. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, p. 25. 41. IBID., p. 50.42. The Collected Poems, vol. 1, p. 57. 43. The Collected Poems, vol. 2, pp. 78-9.44. IBID., p. 82. 45. IBID., p. 83.46. IBID., pp. 70-1. 47. IBID., pp. 72-5.48. IBID., p. 68. 49. IBID., p. 69.50. IBID., p. 70.51. IBID., p. 85. 'Talking Bronco' was the title piece of the last single volume of original verse published in Campbell'slifetime (London, Faber, 1946).66