Tomorrow I leave for Spain to promote the new Spanish edition of my biography of Roy Campbell and to give a paper at a Chesterton conference in Madrid. My Spanish publisher has lined up a number of television and newspaper interviews and I’ll be meeting with various academic groups who are interested in the Catholic literary revival. I’m particularly excited to be visiting Santiago de Compastela and I look forward to paying homage to the great St. James.

I’m excited by the amount of attention that the publication of the Campbell biography has received in the Spanish media. On Sunday, February 12 El Mundo, the Spanish equivalent of the New York Times or the UK Daily Telegraph, published a full page article that I had written on the connection between Campbell and St. John of the Cross, especially on the role that Campbell played in saving the personal papers of the great Spanish mystic from destruction at the hands of the communists at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Today, Zenit has published an interview with me on Campbell ahead of my arrival in Spain on Wednesday. Here’s a link to the Zenit interview:   http://www.zenit.org/article-41533?l=spanish

Additionally, the following is an English translation of the interview:

1.      What were the former ideas of Campbell on religion, previous to his conversion?

 

Like most modern people, Campbell’s religious beliefs were confused and incoherent prior to his conversion. His pre-conversion beliefs are best conveyed in The Flaming Terrapin, the poem that established his reputation. The underlying philosophy in this powerful work is an unholy amalgam of a weak yet residual Christianity, melded with an idealization of the Nietzschean “strong” and the Darwinian “fittest”.

 

2.      Which were the main reasons for him to become Roman Catholic?

 

On the one hand, he had become very disillusioned with the vacuity of modernity, his disillusionment echoing that of T. S. Eliot as expressed by the latter so evocatively in The Waste Land. On the other hand, the relative sanity and sanctity of the life of the peasants in Provence, and then in Spain, in which Catholicism was an integrated part of daily life, had an immense impact.

 

3.      How was understood this change in Bloomsbury’s group?

 

Campbell had become estranged from the Bloomsbury Group several years before his conversion, primarily because of the way that he had lampooned their prurient and puritanical materialism in his verse satire, The Georgiad. There’s no doubt, however, that the Bloomsbury Group would have treated news of his conversion with scorn, much as Virginia Woolf had scornfully dismissed T. S. Eliot as being “dead” after she’d heard of his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism.

 

4.      Why did he say that the Spanish way of living religion was so important in the conversion of Roy and Mary?

 

Campbell’s love and admiration for Spain is expressed most powerfully in his poem “Posada”, in which Spain is personified as a beautiful woman “sleeping face-upwards to the sun”. He and Mary revered the way in which the cultural life of Spain was interwoven with the spiritual life of the Church. Roy and Mary found life in Spain a balm for the soul in such a powerful way that Campbell stated that Spain had saved his soul.

 

5.      How did the martyrdom of the priest who baptized him and of his carmelite friends influence his posterior life?

 

Clearly and understandably he was shocked and horrified to discover that the village priest who had received him into the Church, and the Carmelite monks, whom he and Mary had befriended, had been murdered in cold blood by communist militiamen at the start of the Spanish civil war. This being so, it really was unjust for people to see Campbell as a “fascist” because of his opposition to the communist terror in Spain. He saw the war as a religious struggle between Christian tradition and atheistic modernity, not as a political struggle between two modern totalitarian ideologies.

 

6.      What did he think about Spanish processions?

He loved the outward and communal manifestation of the life of faith in Spain. This was clearly in evidence when he and Mary travelled from their home in Portugal to Seville for the Holy Week celebrations in 1957. It was on the return home from this pilgrimage that he was killed in a fatal car crash.

 

7.      Can he be compared with Chesterton or Tolkien or others converted writers? Which would be the similar points, and which the differences?

 

Roy Campbell is one of the illustrissimi of literary converts to Catholicism who graced the twentieth century with their lives and works. He is part of that network of minds and that communion of grace that made the Catholic literary revival such a powerful force in the past century. Tolkien admired Campbell greatly, as is clear from Tolkien’s letters. Campbell’s poetic voice was singular, conveying something of his larger-than-life persona and charism; as such, he stands alone as a great poet in his own right, even as he is part of the larger movement of Catholic convert writers.