Roy Campbell (poet) - Poet and Satirist

Poet and Satirist

While living in a small converted stable on the coast of North Wales, Campbell completed his first long poem, The Flaming Terrapin, a humanistic allegory of the rejuvenation of man projected in episodes. It was published in 1924.

Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started Voorslag, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the Afrikaans word voorslag) on South African colonial society, which he considered backwards and inbred. Before the magazine was launched, he invited William Plomer to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post was invited to become Afrikaans editor of Voorslag. Campbell lasted as the magazine's editor for three issues but then resigned because of interference from the magazine's proprietor, Lewis Reynolds; Reynolds reacted against Campbell's negative comments about colonial South Africa and informed him that he would remove some of his editorial control over the content of Voorslag. Campbell moved back to England in 1927. While still in South Africa, he had written The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in rhyming couplets, on the racism and other cultural shortcomings of South Africa. It was published in 1928.

The Flaming Terrapin had established his reputation as a rising star and was favourably compared to Eliot's recently released poem The Waste Land. His verse was well received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others.

Now moving in literary circles, he was initially on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group but then became very hostile to them; he declared that they were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian.

According to Roger Scruton,

"Learning that his wife had been conducting a passionate affair with Vita (to the enraged jealousy of Vita’s other lover, Virginia Woolf), Campbell began to see the three aspects of the new elite—sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics—as aspects of a single frame of mind. These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up. The new elite, in Campbell’s opinion, lived as bloodless parasites on their social inferiors and moral betters; they jettisoned real responsibilities in favor of utopian fantasies and flattered themselves that their precious sensibilities were signs of moral refinement, rather than the marks of a fastidious narcissism. The role of the poet is not to join their Peter Pan games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal."

Referring to the Bloomsbury Group "intellectuals without intellect," Campbell penned a verse satire of them entitled The Georgiad (published in 1931).

According to The Georgiad:

Dinner, most ancient of the Georgian rites,

The noisy prelude of loquacious nights,

At the mere noise of whose unholy gong

The wagging tongue feels resolute and strong,

Senate of bores and parliament of fools,

Where gossip in her native empire rules;

What doleful memories the word suggests -'

When I have sat like Job among the guests,

Sandwiched between two bores, a hapless prey,

Chained to my chair, and cannot get away,

Longing, without the appetite to eat,

To fill my ears, more than my mouth, with meat,

And stuff my eardrums full of fish and bread

Against the din to wad my dizzy head:

When I have watched each mouthful that they poke

Between their jaws, and praying they might choke,

Found the descending lump but cleared the way

For further anecdotes and more to say.

O Dinners! take my curse upon you all,

But literary dinners most of all...

According to Joseph Pearce,

As with so much of Campbell's satire, The Georgiad's invective is too vindictive. It is all too often spoiled by spite. This underlying weakness has obscured the more serious points its author sought to make. Embedded between the attacks on Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and a host of other Bloomsbury's and Georgians are classically refined objections to the prevailing philosophy of scepticism, mounted like pearls of wisdom in the basest of metal. "Nor knew the Greeks, save in the laughing page, The philosophic emblem of our age."... The "damp philosophy" of the modern world, as espoused by the archetypical modern poet, was responsible for the prevailing pessimism and disillusionment of the post-war world. In preaching such a philosophy, which was "the fountain source of all his woes", the poet's "damp philosophy" left him "damp in spirit". Nihilism was self-negating. It was the philosophy of the self-inflicted wound. In the rejection of post-war pessimism and its nihilistic ramifications... Campbell was uniting himself with others, such as T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, who were similarly seeking glimmers of philosophical light amidst the prevailing gloom. In his case, as in theirs, the philosophical search would lead him to orthodox Christianity.

The Campbells moved to Provence in southern France in the early 1930s.

The French period saw the publication of, among other writings, Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography, Broken Record (1934). In 1932, the Campbells retained the Afrikaner poet Uys Krige as tutor to Tess and Anna. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Roman Catholic faith, a process which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled Mithraic Emblems (1936).

A fictionalized version of Campbell at this time ("Rob McPhail") appears in the novel Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis (1932). Campbell's poetry had been published in Lewis' periodical BLAST; he was reportedly happy to appear in the novel but disappointed that his character was killed off (McPhail was gored while fighting a bull).