Here's a bit more on Campbell, taken from Wikipedia. It's true that he made some unwise political choices, but it's also true that it is easy to judge from a distance.
Campbell and his family moved to Spain, where they were formally received into the Catholic Church in the small Spanish village of Altea in 1935. The English author Laurie Lee recounts meeting Campbell in the Toledo chapter of As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy. Campbell's reputation suffered considerably when he expressed Fascist sympathies, most notably in his 1934 autobiography Broken Record, and supported Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. He did not fight for the Nationalists during the Spanish conflict, despite later claims.
For an author to support Franco during this period was unusual, as was Campbell's glorification of military strength and masculine virtues. He had also been a strong opponent of communism for some time, and fighting it may have been a strong motivation. The intellectuals and authors who supported the Republicans also tended to resemble the ones he mocked in his previous life as a poet, but it is hard to gauge how relevant this was to the stance he took. It was probably affected by the violent Anti-Catholicism of some elements on the Republican side and the atrocities they committed against priests and nuns.
Here are a few satirical pieces on the literary scene in the 1920s:
Home Thoughts on Bloomsbury
Of all the clever people round me here
I most delight in Me--
Mine is the only voice I care to hear,
And mine the only face I see.
Untitled
There once came a highbrow from Britain
Whose praises can never be written,
So steep rose his highbrow
From his heel to his eyebrow,
With a bump in the middle to sit on.
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.
[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited June 04, 2008).]
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