[Andrew Frisardi]

The South African Roy Campbell is another mid-twentieth-century poet who deserves to be more widely read than he is now. I'm copying here a biography on him and some poems taken from the Roy Campbell Web Page. There's also something on him at Wikipedia. He could be quite the fanatic, but he sure kept things lively in the literary world. He was also an excellent translator, notably of Baudelaire and St. John of the Cross.


Roy Campbell was born in Durban in 1901 and educated at Durban High School. Passionate about literature as a child, he was also passionate about the outdoor life -- he was a keen horseman, fisherman, hunter, and swimmer, and partook of all these activities in Durban and along the north coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In 1919 he left South Africa for Europe, where, as poet, cowboy, fisherman, Spanish Civil War partisan, raconteur, and translator, he became a legend in his own time. He published many volumes of poetry, including the long poem The Flaming Terrapin (1924), which established his reputation. He also published, to give some idea of his considerable output as a writer, two quirky autobiographies, books on Provence and Portugal, numerous reviews, some remarkable translations of romance language poets, and a small book on Federico Garcia Lorca. His reputation suffered considerably when he sided with Franco during the Spanish Civil War, at a time when most Western artists and intellectuals sided with the republicans. His reasons were complex, and had to do with his new found Catholic faith, his belief in traditional values, his anti-communism, his anti-Bloomsbury stance, and his equestrian/ aristocratic ideal. A few years later he was fighting against the fascists as a sergeant in the British army, but his reputation never recovered. This is a great pity because, while much of his polemical writing is mere bluster, being boring and repetitive in nature, Campbell has a true lyric gift and is a skilled craftsman of traditional verse. This fact should be taken into account by readers, especially if we consider the current interest in established forms of verse epitomised by the new formalism. Sidelined by the predominant poetic trends of the twentieth-century, Campbell now needs to be reconsidered and reassessed. He died in 1957 in a car accident in Portugal, his home country at the time.


Luis de Camões

Camões, alone, of all the lyric race,
Born in the black aurora of disaster,
Can look a common soldier in the face:
I find a comrade where I sought a master:
For daily, while the stinking crocodiles
Glide 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.
Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss,
Led by the ignis fatuus of duty
To a dog’s death -- yet of his sorrows king --
He shouldered high his voluntary Cross,
Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty,
And taught his gorgon destinies to sing.

The Zulu Girl

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder,
Down where the sweating gang its labour plies,
A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder
Unslings her child tormented by the flies.

She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled
By thorn-trees: purpled with the blood of ticks,
While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled,
Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks,

His sleepy mouth plugged by the heavy nipple,
Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feeds:
Through his frail nerves her own deep languors ripple
Like a broad river sighing through its reeds.

Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes
An old unquenched unsmotherable heat --
The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,
The sullen dignity of their defeat.

Her body looms above him like a hill
Within whose shade a village lies at rest,
Or the first cloud so terrible and still
That bears the coming harvest in its breast.

The Serf

His naked skin clothed in the torrid mist
That puffs in smoke around the patient hooves,
The ploughman drives, a slow somnambulist,
And through the green his crimson furrow grooves.
His heart, more deeply than he wounds the plain,
Long by the rasping share of insult torn,
Red clod, to which the war-cry once was rain
And tribal spears the fatal sheaves of corn,
Lies fallow now. But as the turf divides
I see in the slow progress of his strides
Over the toppled clods and falling flowers,
The timeless, surly patience of the serf
That moves the nearest to the naked earth
And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.

The Zebras

From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.
The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
Flashes between the shadows as they pass
Barred with electric tremors through the grass
Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.

Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,
With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight,
Engine of beauty volted with delight,
To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.

Horses on the Camargue

In the grey wastes of dread,
The haunt of shattered gulls where nothing moves
But in a shroud of silence like the dead,
I heard a sudden harmony of hooves,
And, turning, saw afar
A hundred snowy horses unconfined,
The silver runaways of Neptune’s car
Racing, spray-curled, like waves before the wind.
Sons of the Mistral, fleet
As him with whose strong gusts they love to flee,
Who shod the flying thunders on their feet
And plumed them with the snortings of the sea;
Theirs is no earthly breed
Who only haunt the verges of the earth
And only on the sea’s salt herbage feed --
Surely the great white breakers gave them birth.
For when for years a slave,
A horse of the Camargue, in alien lands,
Should catch some far-off fragrance of the wave
Carried far inland from his native sands,
Many have told the tale
Of how in fury, foaming at the rein,
He hurls his rider; and with lifted tail,
With coal-red eyes and cataracting mane,
Heading his course for home,
Though sixty foreign leagues before him sweep,
Will never rest until he breathes the foam
And hears the native thunder of the deep.
But when the great gusts rise
And lash their anger on these arid coasts,
When the scared gulls career with mournful cries
And whirl across the waste like driven ghosts:
When hail and fire converge,
The only souls to which they strike no pain
Are the white-crested fillies of the surge
And the white horses of the windy plain.
Then in their strength and pride
The stallions of the wilderness rejoice;
They feel their Master’s trident in their side,
And high and shrill they answer to his voice.
With white tails smoking free,
Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show
Their kinship to their sisters of the sea --
And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow.
Still out of hardship bred,
Spirits of power and beauty and delight
Have ever on such frugal pastures fed
And loved to course with tempests through the night.

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?



[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited June 03, 2008).]

[John Whitworth]

Anyone who hung Stephen Spender upside down out of a window can't be bad. He also punched Louis MacNeice who promptly punched him back. They then bought each other drinks. Campbell is a good poet and you're quite right; his reputation suffered mainly because he picked the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. You were supposed to pick Stalin's lot. The poems that you post are all better than anything produced by Spender or Day Lewis, the boring back half of the MacSpaunday pantomime horse. At least that is my opinion. Campbell's autobiography 'Light on a Dark Horse' is also a good read.

[Tim Murphy]

Wonderful poems, Andrew. He reminds me a lot of AD Hope. I'm dimly aware of him, but I'd go get him if he's in print. Thank you very much.

[Michael Cantor]

Originally posted by John Whitworth:
Campbell is a good poet and you're quite right; his reputation suffered mainly because he picked the wrong side in the Spanish Civil War. You were supposed to pick Stalin's lot.

You neglected to mention, John, that the alternate (utilizing the same, simplified analysis that you initiated) was Hitler's lot.



[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited June 03, 2008).]

[Martin Rocek]

May I add to Michael's point, and ask whether you would
say George Orwell took "Stalin's lot"? Have you read
Homage to Catalonia? It was (and is) possible to be
neither a Fascist nor a Communist.

Martin



[This message has been edited by Martin Rocek (edited June 03, 2008).]

[Andrew Frisardi]

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).]

[Andrew Frisardi]

I forgot to add another of Campbell's lyrics, these as well as the others from his 1930 collection Adamastor:


Autumn

I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.

Already now the clanging chains
Of geese are harnessed to the moon:
Stripped are the great sun-clouding planes;
And the dark pines, their own revealing,
Let in the needles of the noon.

Strained by the gale the olives whiten
Lke hoary wrestlers bent with toil
And, with the vines, their branches lighten
To brim our vats where summer lingers
In the red froth and sun-gold oil.

Soon on our hearth's reviving pyre
Their rotted stems will crumble up:
And like a ruby, panting fire,
The grape will redden on your fingers
Through the lit crystal of the cup.


Reflection

My thought has learned the lucid art
By which the willows lave their limbs
Whose form upon the water swims
Though in the air they rise apart.
For when with my delight I lie,
By purest reason unreproved,
Psyche usurps the outward eye
To trace her inward sculpture grooved
In one melodious line, whose flow
With eddying circle now invests
The rippled silver of her breasts,
Now shaves a flank of rose-lit snow,
Or rounds a cheek where sunset dies
In the black starlight of her eyes.



[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited June 04, 2008).]

[John Whitworth]

Michael, I did originally write 'Hitler's lot' but took it out because it made the whole thing sound too aggressive. Martin, Orwell fell out with the left and lost his publisher (Gollancz) mainly because of what he experienced in Catalonia fighting for the anarchists (just to show you that I know). What I said about Campbell is true. Nobody reads him because he picked the wrong side in Spain and was therefore a fascist. If you read his books and find out why he did then you might decide he wasn't a fascist after all. But then almost anyone (P.G. Wodehouse, Winston Churchill)is a fascist if just CALLING them one makes it so.

[Janet Kenny]

In the case of the Spanish civil war in which all sides behaved like bastards there's no avoiding the fact that Guernica kind of confers the Order of Bastardry on the Francoviles.

(A quatrain from my redoubled sonnet chain about Auden (and Eliot). This is Auden:

In Spain he blundered uselessly around,
rejected as a militant, consigned
to propaganda radio, till it was found
he spoke no Spanish. Laughter is unkind.


______
Surely Campbell, in attitude though not in style, was in some sense a follower of Futurism which was the mode of the time in Italy? All balls and bluster and poems praising blood-roses. A macho militarism which didn't necessarily oblige actual physical action, although in Italy and Spain there was a lot of uniform wearing and polished leather. LIke ballroom dancing we all know what that leads to.

He had a great sweep to his phrases and he could evoke landscape and nature. The zebra poem is fantastic.




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 04, 2008).]

[Philip Smith]

Didn't Auden reject this poem later as being "untrue"