In a breach of normal practice, I’m posting the text of a book review that is published in the latest issue of the Saint Austin Review. Although we normally publish only one article from the print edition, together with the table of contents, I feel that the great Roy Campbell is so neglected that Dena Hunt’s excellent review of the book warrants the widest audience possible. For those visitors to this site who have committed the cultural sin of not yet subscribing to the magazine, I urge you to do so. In the interim, I urge you to learn more about the neglected and much-maligned poet, Roy Campbell, by reading the following review.

Remembering Roy Campbell: The Memoirs of his Daughters Anna and Tess

Edited by Judith Lütge Coullie

Winged Lion Press, 2011

349 pp., $25.00

ISBN: 978-1-936294-04-6

Reviewed by Dena Hunt

Following a preface by Joseph Pearce, author of several works on Roy Campbell, editor Judith Lütge Coullie’s introduction to this volume of the memoirs of Campbell’s daughters might seem at first glance to be unnecessarily lengthy. On the contrary, the essay is so meticulously instructive that it could stand alone as a succinct separate text. Coullie’s careful and enlightening distinctions between memoir and autobiography are very helpful, not only for the book she introduces but for other similar works as well. She clarifies, for the sake of readers’ expectations, that the memoirs are not autobiographies of the two daughters themselves, nor biographies of their famous parents; rather, they are memoirs of the daughters’ lives with their parents. The distinction is an important one. It turns out that this format of a child’s memoir can be uniquely revealing, maybe more than an impersonal biography could be.

I first became aware of Roy Campbell when I read J. R. R. Tolkien’s description of him in one of his letters to his son Christopher.1 Tolkien writes that he was having drinks and conversation with C. S. Lewis at the Eagle and Child pub when he “. . . noticed this strange, tall, gaunt man half in khaki, half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner.” The conversation happened to be about Wordsworth, and Campbell finally interrupted it with a comment of his own. He was invited to join them. A few days later, they met again in Lewis’s rooms at Oxford. That evening, Tolkien was even more impressed by Campbell’s tales of his experiences in the Spanish civil war, among other things, and by Campbell himself, whom Tolkien described as “such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert”.

This book astonishes the reader just as Tolkien was astonished by Campbell. It might be imagined that such a character as Tolkien described would be anything but a family man, but again, the truth would be surprising. We learn from his daughters that this hard-drinking man (a friend of Dylan Thomas, among other famous hard-drinkers); this bullfighting, soldiering idealist (an admirer of Franco) was devoted to his wife and children. In fact, devoted seems an apt description of Campbell in all areas of his life: family, faith, work—and devoted also to his ideals, very much to his detriment, both personally and professionally.

He was an incongruous mix of a man. Add to that mix his conversion to the Catholic Church, his devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and to his rosary. Although he lived as an expatriate at various locations in Provence, Spain, and Portugal, he took his family home to England when Britain was attacked by Hitler’s blitzkrieg. (The journey alone is a saga of danger and courage.) When he wasn’t allowed to enlist immediately, due to his age, he became an air warden until the Army finally accepted him, first as a soldier, then as a worker in British Intelligence.

Campbell’s life was—to further abuse the word beyond its current cliché status—epic. A companion of gypsies in Toledo, he learned horse-trading. A friend of the Carmelite friars in the same city, he accepted manuscripts from them for safekeeping—the poetry of St. John of the Cross—when the communists overran the city. Shortly thereafter, the friars were lined up and shot while the manuscripts remained in the Campbell home just meters away. Later, when the communists invaded the Campbell home in search of Bibles, religious writings, or—even worse—hidden priests, they completely overlooked the precious manuscripts stored in a chest on which one of the soldiers sat while the others searched the house. As he sat there, the soldier chatted with Campbell about the superiority of all things “Russian”. (He’d found Dostoevsky on Campbell’s bookshelf and decided that Campbell was sympathetic to his cause.) Years later, when he finally had sufficient peace for the task, Campbell fulfilled a promise he made in prayer to St. John while the communists were sacking his home: If his family and the manuscripts were kept safe, he would translate the saint’s poems. English-speakers now enjoy the fruits of that promise and of his labor.

Campbell’s ideals and experiences, his loves and hates, were the foundation of his poetry. Both memoirs describe his working habit as very much like the life of an ascetic hermit, completely withdrawn from the world of which he was so much a gregarious part at other times. His poems are among the best the twentieth century produced, yet he is almost unknown outside his native South Africa, a situation Pearce calls in his Preface to the book a “literary scandal”. Pearce says the reason his poetry is overlooked is that Campbell had chosen the “wrong side” in Spain’s civil war.

Campbell had already incurred the ire of the Bloomsbury in-crowd when he satirized the tyranny of their homosexualized insularity in The Georgiad. But most of England’s literati at that time were also sympathetic to communism, a worldview that Campbell hated, most of all for its mandatory atheism (and he was not a man to keep his opinions to himself). When Hitler rose to power, many saw the world as divided between communists and fascists; not to be the one was to be the other. Campbell was labeled “fascist”, and much of the literary world was closed to him. He was ostracized both personally and professionally. The memoirs expose the pain of that ostracism.

As devastating as it was for that country, most of the west has little understanding of Spain’s civil war, and even less of the importance of its outcome. With the threat of Nazism before them, anything contradictory may have seemed preferable, and communism was already very fashionable. But the failure of the Soviet-driven attempted takeover of Spain was of huge consequence for all of Europe and the Americas. It stopped what would almost certainly have been a violent conquest of Europe by the Soviet Union in the years following WWII when Europe was crippled and defenseless. It is not the first time in history that Spain’s agonies have saved Europe; it was Spanish defense that saved Christendom from the Islamic hordes centuries earlier. For the Campbells, the war had little to do with political philosophy (to which Campbell remained more or less indifferent all his life), but it had everything to do with saving Christianity in Spain from complete annihilation. In their description of events that the daughters personally witnessed as well as those in the rest of the country, there can be no doubt that the primary purpose of the Nationalist forces was not class supremacy, as it was propagandized at the time. The countless lower-class soldiers who fought and died at Franco’s side tell the truth: This was a religious war, a struggle for the survival of Christianity. Perhaps it could only be won in Spain, where life and faith were one and the same—for all classes.

The memoirs of Anna and Tess Campbell shed a light that is personal, not merely historical, on the lives of their famous parents, and on life in France, England, Spain, and Portugal during some of the most horrific years of those nations’ histories. The book contains a great many family photographs taken at various locations and times, which seem to add poignancy to the daughters’ memories.

Remembering Roy Campbell is an excellent read for those who know Campbell’s poetry, and maybe especially for those who don’t.

Dena Hunt lives in Georgia. Retired from teaching at Valdosta State University, she is working on her second novel.

References

1. Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 95–96.