Stephen Gray
Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell by Joseph Pearce (Bloomsbury)
With the centenary of South Africa’s macho poet, Roy Campbell, in view he was born on October 2 1901 Joseph Pearce has taken the opportunity for a timely reappraisal. Despite his curious title, the work is a straight account of Campbell’s rackety life and uneven work, from the manger to the crash-site, richly embellished with all the literary gossip of the 1920s into the 1950s. It is obviously intended as a spanking good read and succeeds as such.
So meet our wild colonial boy, that “dark outsider from the South”, who became one of the great, raging English-language poets of the mid-20th century, evidently fuelled on little more than his own energetic ego. That he also was the great untouchable of the British literary pantheon for his caveman reactionary views, which were plainly disgusting, meant he was mourned by few.
Twenty years ago Peter Alexander took over Alan Paton’s research into Campbell, once Paton’s conscience had proved too fastidious for the task, and produced his scrupulous, if discreet, evaluation. Now Alexander comes in for some raps over the knuckles: for example, how could he ever have supposed that “our boy Roy”, fresh from a cushy, indulgent Durban youth, had homosexual liaisons in Oxford? when we know he did. Yet in every one of Pearce’s short, punchy chapters, he goes ahead and pillages Alexander anyway, in the best tradition of literary biography.
One prefers Alexander, somehow, because he did his legwork, the evidence being in the National English Literary Museum. Needless to say, this trove Pearce did not bother to consult, nor has he taken the trouble to verify just about any other detail to do with the major element in the Campbell pose his origins as a Natalian. That Sezela hideout where the Voorslag braggarts Campbell, William Plomer and Laurens van der Post plotted a literary nuisance was no “seaside bungalow”, but a pondok in the bush, by the way, and those environing Zulus do not usually sing beguiling songs to revolutionary poets in Shona.
Because Pearce lamely follows Campbell’s own version of himself, he too is spattered in what comes out of the back of those bulls Campbell was (supposedly) so adept at pinning down.
But Campbell was an extreme case of that colonial malady, the utter inability to adapt infantile images to adult reality, and hence a constitutional liar. At the end, in his cloak and Iberian wide-awake hat, he became more than a physical cripple: just a barfly banging on about bloody Bolshies, nancyboys and Jews.
In order to redeem Campbell, and to bypass the more exacting Alexander, Pearce does cook the books somewhat. On his page 288 he suggests that Campbell’s place in the canon of English literature was secured once the first volume of his Collected Poems was given a whole page in The Times Literary Supplement. But, in fact, what the TLS said of him is this: “He has collected no following, and nobody has seemed anxious to learn his particular tricks with the medicine-ball.” Hardly an endorsement.
All the old Campbell chestnuts are presented unchecked. At a post-war tea and poetry-reading, a bellowing Campbell purportedly swung “a right-handed blow which connected with Stephen Spender’s nose”. But Barend Toerien, who was there as he described in Contrast in April 1976 called it a mere tap, which did not even divert Spender from one stanza to the next. Disgraceful, either way.
Pearce is also biased towards defending Catholicism in all its manifestations. In his recent biography of Oscar Wilde, he would have us believe that that rakehell’s last gasp was a gulping down of the true sacraments, instead of, as gay folklore has it, a pitiful whine about either the wallpaper or himself having to go.
Once again we have Campbell’s severe wife Mary’s infidelities with other women all repeated in salacious detail, no doubt to make her conversion to the True Cross all the more telling, while Roy’s lassoing in of luscious fillies calls for no comment at all. Nor does the way the Campbells swanked about on his mum’s allowance in Hitler’s and Mussolini’s finest luxury liners. Because that mass murderer, Spain’s dictator General Franco, was evidently a Catholic as well, Pearce portrays him as rather beyond criticism, leaving the work grievously flawed, with the Campbells implicated as a result, and unabsolved.
Much of Pearce’s record is spoiled by manipulative hindsight as well. Campbell, who died in 1957, could not possibly have known that Britain was to become such a welfare state, and thus his flight to dark, backward places was no enlightened protest. He just liked the cheaper wine of his last refuge in Portugal, and that is all.