Roy Campbell: The Storms of a Poet

...Light On A Dark Horse is a very uneven book...

...But then, almost in spite of himself it would seem, Ciardi concludes: "It would be comforting to one's sense of liberalism to report that the result is merely thud-thud...

...We had tea in the afternoon in the Campbell's former house, which, when we were there, had become a state-run hotel...

...They were pretending-to fence and foil with their huge horns that rolled over their backs in magnificent spirals to a length of four or five feet...

...He spent much of his life in the active pursuit of such knowledge: in isolated fishing villages in Wales and southern France...

...Needless to say, Roy Campbell was a complex man...

...Walking along a narrow, crooked street a man would rush out of a doorway calling "Roy...

...Roy Campbell was an anachronism in the modern world...

...He was born in Durban, in the South African Province of Natal, in 1901, the son of a prominent and extremely energetic South African doctor and an equally energetic Scottish Highland mother...

...and I remember his obvious pride when he showed us the telephone from which the commanding officer, during the siege of the Alcazar in the Spanish Civil War, had told his young son, who was held hostage by the enemy and had been instructed to tell his father that he would be killed unless his father surrendered, "Die like a Spaniard, my son...

...He had a wonderful sense of humor, was unpretentious, warm-hearted, and capable of great generosity and gentleness...

...To add to Campbell's bitterness, he was called a fascist for taking what he considered to be the side of Christian Europe in the Spanish Civil War against those who would destroy it...

...These visits were memorable occasions, not only for our family, but for the whole neighborhood...

...Roy stayed at our house during each of his visits to Chicago, both times for several days...

...His college visits worked out best when he could meet informally with students, especially the football team...

...Where else but in Spain, Roy asked, would people indulge themselves in such innocent pleasures as reciting their own poetry and rolling in thyme...

...and so did the dazzling white stripes that harness their red-golden bodies...

...Some time later, he said, he was riding in the country and carrying such a skin of wine...

...By the time we published the first of three volumes of Roy Campbell's collected poetry* in 1955, the ideological lines had hardened, in consequence of which the critics were inclined to view his work, not as poetry, but as the work of a man whose politics they did not approve...

...He knew much of English poetry by heart, particularly from the Elizabethan period...

...One of his more formal lectures, though, was particularly successful...

...Besides the three volumes of collected poetry and Talking Bronco, we published, in 1968, a one-volume collection called Selected Poetry, which was edited and supplied with an introduction and explanatory notes by Joseph M. Lalley...

...he brought the audience immediately back to life with the imagery and vigor of his poetry, and ended it all singing "John Brown's Body" in Swahili...

...trait hangs in the (arnegie Art Gallery in Pittsburgh.: that set him apart, that made almost anyone who came even slightly under the influence of his personality realize that he was no ordinary man...

...I drank a whole bottle of wine in one swallow"which he was perfectly capable of doing-' 'and do you know what it felt like...

...He never succumbed again, he assured us, and was in Rome when the news came that Franco had entered Madrid...

...with bullfighters and circus performers, and as a soldier...

...or of the shade of mulberry, white poplar trees or cloves...

...It leaves the traveller free to make expeditions into the adjoining country, to follow honey-guides and take hives, or to make a hunting detour, yet never get left behind by his bed and kitchen...

...But where else but in Spain would people burn churches and murder priests and nuns, and then ask forgiveness a few days later at confession...

...What he did give me, even then, was a sense of vocation and how a man can live for his art...

...and in Spain as a horse trader and correspondent...

...the beauties are so many, the poet's imagination so daring, his descriptive powers so fresh and triumphant, his imagery so strong and often so delicate, that the very immaturity and wildness of his Muse will interest the discerning" (the Nation, June 7, 1924...

...It was an unforgettable experience to be shown that wonderful, old city with its layers of history-the "heart of Spain," in Roy's opinion-by such guides as the Campbells...

...It was at this time, just as the Civil War had started, that the Campbells joined the Catholic Church, by no means a safe thing to do in a city politically dominated by the "Reds," as Roy always called them...

...but he was willing to put not only his pen, but his life and reputation on the line for a cause he believed in...

...Louis with Roy in the bar car...

...There would be a great embrace, followed by much talk and laughter...

...We made various excursions-to the Escorial, Segovia, etc.-but the most memorable was to Toledo, where Roy and Mary and their two children had lived during the years immediately preceding the Civil War, when Roy supported himself, or so he said, as a trader and trainer of horses...

...A nearby caf& he said, had been the scene one year of the annual spring congress of poets, in which Roy had participated...

...It finally dawning on him who the rather diffident person was who had accosted him, he enveloped me in a huge embrace...

...In the fall of 1955, my wife and older daughter and I visited the Campbells, first in Portugal, where Roy and his wife Mary were living in an old house on a winding road above Sintra, and then in Madrid...

...A s a young man, Roy was tall, lithe, a great horseman, and, as the Augustus John portrait shows, strikingly handsome...

...Not surprisingly...

...The duty of the poet, Auden went on to say, is "to defend one's language from corruption...

...The hill was covered with thyme, so he proposed that the poets conclude their recitations by rolling in the blossoms, which they did with great delight...

...The journey took four days by train and several more by ox-wagon, "a leisurely method of travel," he says, which is surely the best in the world...

...This reminded him of his miracle...

...the conversation of these inebriated, aggressively masculine types soon got around to boasts about their strength...

...He could even recite the Prologue to Faust in German, although he knew no German-Goethe's - magnificent cadences had made a deep impression on him, as they had on Shelley, who was one of the first to translate the Prologue into English...

...W hen in the spring of 1953 someone from Poetry magazine asked me, as the publisher of one of his books, to meet Roy Campbell upon his-arrival in Chicago, I had a vague idea, having read his autobiography, of what to expect...

...When one of the football players remarked that his legs were not what they used to be, but that his arm was still "pretty good," Roy challenged him to the trial of strength involving elbows on the table...

...Roy took us not only to El Greco's house, but to the hill from which the composition of "The View of Toldeo was in part worked out...

...John of the Cross, which begins: Upon a gloomy night, With all my cares to loving ardours flushed, (Oh venture of delight...

...The collection of poems related to his experience in the Spanish Civil War and World War II, brought together under the title Talking Bronco,t strikingly illustrates two sides of Roy Campbell...

...Fur all his heaviness and his unconnion.al...

...In any case, the day was hot, he was thirsty, he became more and more tempted, and finally succumbed...

...Yet, however justified his bitterness may have been, one wishes that he had not wasted his talents on unproductive quarrels and on satirical couplets that are by now largely meaningless...

...There were many such leather wine bottles, or botas, in the store windows that day, and Roy was finally tempted to buy one, which he filled with red wine at the first opportunity...

...At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, he told us, he had made a firm vow to the Virgin not to drink a drop of wine until the "Reds" were defeated...

...I finally got him into the station and was looking for a taxi when two men came rushing up saying, "One more drink...

...The Irish poet AE (George Russell) wrote that he knew of no one else who could command "such a savage splendour of epithet or could marry the wild word so fittingly to the wild thought...

...His reason for coming to Chicago was to take part in a series of lectures by contemporary poets arranged by the University, but his autobiography had far more to say about his boyhood adventures in South Africa, his performances in the bull ring, and his battles in London with left-wing poets than about his poetry...

...With nobody in sight I went abroad when all the house was hushed...

...When we stopped for gas on the way back to Madrid, he got out of the car and demonstrated his proficiency to several admiring bystanders, and then passed the bota around, for each to have a turn...

...Roy had hoped, on his two visits to America, to lecture at various universities, read his poetry, and make a little money for his family, but both tours, from a financial standpoint, were unsuccessful...

...They were both steel salesmen, they said, but had started out as professional football players...

...The longer, thinner, and more forcible the jet, the more it aerates the bouquet of the wine or water...

...The center of that mind--and its poetic style-is all sledgehammers...

...sh edition as it was, bur reset it, aid tri id g i (ne tf (ampbneleA drawllngs and, a- s fbr itsice a repdac toi (,f the pc:a trait oft Campbell by Augustus Joan of 1924...

...On the other hand, if we are to believe his own accounts, as a young man he loved fighting and brawling, and was capable of attacking his enemies, or supposed enemies, with the fury of an enraged bull...

...On another page we meet the enraged, irrational bull attacking his ideological enemies, in this case the "leftwing" poets who supported the other side in the Spanish Civil War, to whom Campbell gave the collective name "MacSpaunday...

...Once the residence of a cardinal, it stands below the high wall of an ancient Carmelite cloister...

...Although I had never met him before going to the station that day, with instructions to bring him to the editorial office of Poetry where a group of Chicago poets would be waiting to greet him, I had no difficulty identifying the large man, wearing a cape and a broad-brimmed, black hat, who came staggering up the platform after everyone else had passed, as Roy Campbell...

...When they caught sight of us, with their noble heads flung back, their horns undulating level with their backs, their great white bushy tails erected, their manes and beards streaming out, and their bodies bounding and scattering dew and pollen, they galloped off barking loudly into thelabyrinths of flowers that closed behind- them, firing off clouds of golden smoke in their wake...

...He told stories to the children, about his boyhood in South Africa, about bareback riding, bullfighting, and whaling, which he would illustrate as he went along...

...From two and a half feet away you can say: "This water tastes of marble, of violets, of thyme, of iron, or of quartz...

...The Virgin had saved him from breaking his vow...

...About twenty miles a day is the average trek...

...his love of life and his understanding and appreciation of nature derived from an innate sense of piety...

...This way of drinking," he writes, brings out the flavor and perfume, both of the wine and water, and once one has mastered the art without choking, drinking wine or water from a glass seems flat and insipid compared to it...

...The reviewers in the Boston Transcript, the Nation, the Dial, and the Times Literary Supplement were equally carried away: "Mr...

...In Spain, with its gypsies, donkeys, and shepherds, with the peasant women in their severe black dresses sitting in front of their whitewashed houses, always sewing, and with the dignity of its poverty and the unashamed opulence of its wealth, the tragic and heroic aspects of life were still apparent, death was a part of life and was not tastefully hidden...

...his acceptance as a poet, were understandable...

...I approached this rather formidable figure with some apprehension, and at first got no response when I introduced myself...

...After finishing a good school in South Africa, he was sent by his father to Oxford, where he met and became a close friend of William Walton and immersed himself in English poetry...

...The ox-wagon is the traveller's house, or his ship, with bunks and table complete...

...Campbell' s introduction to the Horace, which has never been published, ends with this characteristic paragraph: At no other time was it ever more thrilling and enjoyable to be a poet, and to be alive, than it is today, when the life of the whole planet is triggered by a hair, when every moment is as precious as bread and wine, and when the rumble and roar of chaos is challenging us for every atom of faith, hope, and courage, in a measure which our Maker has never before done us the honour of expecting from His creatures...

...Roy Campbell wrote two accounts of his life, Broken Record, published in England in 1934, and Light On A Dark Horse, which was published first in England in 1951, and appeared under our imprint a year later...

...None has presented a mind-to me at least-more despicable, a mind compounded of storm-trooper arrogance, Sieg Heil piety, and a kind of Nietzschean rant sometimes mixed with a ponderously uncomical sense of satire...

...They played and bounded in the sunlight as if they had just sprung from the hand of the Maker on the fifth day of Creation...

...I remember Roy pointing out to us, in the magnificent cathedral of Toledo, the long, tattered banner that had hung from the Spanish flagship at the battle of Lepanto, when the Turks were finally turned back from Europe...

...The following description, from one of these treks, is typical of Roy Campbell: Immediately after this scare, completely out in the open, I saw four majestic koodoo bulls on the edge of a wood of brilliant golden mimosa trees...

...into Swahili...

...This Campbell also did, as his mastery of poetic form and his beautiful lyric poetry amply testify...

...Even if Roy had made money from his American tours it would not have been of much use to him: If he had money in his pocket he was as likely as not to give it to the first person he saw who seemed to need it more than he...

...This included "Flaming Terrapin" and the first publication of Roy Campbell's translation of Horace's Ars Poetica...

...During his time of service he translated the manual of a rm...

...In spite of its uneven quality and some obvious padding, consisting mostly of accounts of various brawls and physical exploits, which I am sure the author expected no one to believe, the book is well worth reading and a pleasure ,o g ak toLa f u Firou r im' n iu f r no ot-ier reason tPhan :he vial a e te a, rl' /ar . .. to aDissident Iouotllsaer, z1 oe uP kzan1f h...

...Through Walton, Campbell met the people who, he said, influenced and helped him most in his literary career: the Sitwells, T.S...

...Our new friends, it soon became apparent, had spent the entire time from St...

...What must be reported instead is that the sledgehammers are sometimes magnificent...

...When Roy's turn came it was as though a fresh breeze had come into the room...

...He treks during the cool of the morning and afternoon, outspanning during the heat of the day to let the oxen graze and drink, and to pass a pleasant siesta under some great shady fig, mahogany, or marula tree...

...He was unpredictable, for one thing, as his would-be hosts at Poetry magazine discovered, and did not fit the usual college English department's conception of a poet...

...Their beautiful shaggy silver beards, manes, and tails flashed electrically in the pure morning sunlight...

...He would recite not only his own poetry, which took on a new dimension when it came from him, but much else besides...

...He would sing sea chanties and Scottish ballads in his peculiarly nasal but appealing voice, and though he had no understanding whatever of classical music, he had a good ear and true pitch...

...His account of his boyhood as part of a large, congenial family, of long vacations in the bush country, is told with infectious enthusiasm, and includes descriptions of the African countryside that must be among the most beautiful ever written...

...The tea given by the Chicago poets had to get along without the guest of honor...

...1Thts por...

...His mastery of poetic form, his sensitivity, and his innate humility are clearly apparent in his beautiful translation of En Una Noche Oscura of St...

...Wherever he was, whatever he did, it was with all the intensity and commitment of which his strong personality was capable...

...John Ciardi, writing in the Nation, for example (December 10, 1955), almost lost control of himself: "No poet writing in English has equalled Campbell's violence...

...Auden (one of the objects of Campbell's barbs) remarked long afterward that he regretted his political poetry from the Spanish Civil War days-the only one who benefited, he added, was he...

...The steel salesman went crashing to the floor, to the amusement of the other and to Roy's intense satisfaction...

...in London as a poet and man of letters...

...It was at a downtown college in Chicago, on a hot, humid evening...

...I protested that no more drinks were necessary, but Roy was more than willing, and off to the bar we went...

...Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Thomas Earp, Philip Heseltine, Cecil Grey, among others...

...Roy Campbell won his first recognition as a poet with the publication in 1924 of his epic poem The Flaming Terrapin, which caused a sensation...

...In Light On A Dark Horse, Roy speaks lovingly of the Spanish method of drinking from a wine skin...

...He drew well, particularly African animals...

...This is doubtless the reason that he loved Spain, which, in his day at t Originally published in England by the Bodley Head...

...R oy Campbell was a serious poet: However much he may have enjoyed representing himself as a man of violent action, poetry was his life...

...manner of dre.'singn he had aquality W"c I.:t ,ovr t i:I text of .: bhe EngS...

...Campbell's verse has a wild unrestrained vigour and strength about it such as has not recently been seen in modern poetry" (Boston Transcript, September 27, 1924...

...boo Mnu T r o ; Bracej .}ovanoich...

...In Spain in those days Roy was a well known and much admired figure, and as his friends we were treated with a degree of deference to which we were unaccustomed...

...When I finally managed to get Roy into a room in the Bismark Hotel, he passed out almost instantly...

...The following excerpt from the twelve, rather dreary pages of the poem which gives its name to the whole collection, is an example of the less appealing side of Roy Campbell: While joint MacSpaunday shuns the very strife He barked for loudest, when mere words were rife, When to proclaim his proletarian loyalties Paid well, was safe, raked in the heavy royalties, And made the Mealy Mouth and Bulging Purse The hallmark of contemporary verse...

...Just one more drink...

...Roy was preceded by Robert Lowell, who apologized for coming before such a heroic figure as Roy Campbell, and then went on to read what seemed to me rather dreadful poetry about incest and similar disagreeable subjects...

...The modern world, with its great cities, its exploitation of nature, its longing for comfort and security, was hardly a place for Roy Campbell...

...Only a man of enormous energy who, as he said, "lived for his art," could, in addition, have produced the considerable body of poetry he has left to us...

...As his autobiography makes clear, Roy Campbell exulted in the gift of life, and never lost his wonder at its variety and mystery...

...it was obviously hurriedly written and carelessly edited...

...The clerk, of course, had no idea who Roy Campbell was, but he somehow realized that the man he had served, who might easily have been mistaken for a bum when he came in, was an extraordinary person...

...Yet he stayed at Oxford only one year: To exploit what he called his "minor talent," he felt he needed the sort of knowledge that is to be acquired only from "travel, adventure, and rubbing shoulders with all sorts of people...

...We will never have a chance to meet such a man again as long as we live...

...Why, in view of his vow, he was carrying the wine he did not explain...

...His strong feelings, however detrimental they may have been to t First published by Faber & Faber in England in 1946, and by us in a much revised edition ten years later...

...Although Campbell was overage at the time of World War II, he volunteered for active service in the British army and was badly injured, while those who coined "the catchwords and phrases for which to be slaughtered" joined the "knife and fork brigade" in the rear...

...least, had not entirely emerged from the Middle Ages...

...Walton, Campbell tells us in Light On A Dark Horse, was unable to "arouse in me the least feeling for classical music...

...to, sa the lea.s...

...When I knew him he was quite heavy, and badly crippled and ungainly from a war injury-he had served in World War II as a Sergeant Major in the King's African Rifles, a fact of which he was very prud...

...One of Roy's contributions to civilization was to rescue, at great risk to himself, the priceless library of the cloister from destruction by the Communists...

...Like angels going down my throat in velvet slippers...

...I have seldom seen an Arab or English horse, or a Spanish bull, that could equal them in their graceful and aristocratic carriage...

...He was terribly drunk...

...There is a particularly interesting account of the trip from Durban to Rhodesia, which Roy made several times as a boy to visit relatives...

...Sitting under the shade of a tree, he raised the wine skin, opened his mouth, and what should come out but ice cold, pure water...

...Once, when I took him into a department store to put him into some decent clothes in preparation for a lecture at Princeton, the clerk who took care of him asked, as we left, if he might have his autograph...

...When Roy left his Chicago hotel after four or five days to stay with us, at least a dozen hotel employees-busboys, waiters, maids, bar men-came to see him off, with expressions of great esteem and affection...

...The reviewer in the New York Times was less impressed, and Harriet Monroe was later to complain of Campbell's "adolescent posturing...