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Literary Giants Literary Catholics

Page 20

by Joseph Pearce


  The vitriolic attacks on Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury group were spoiled by Campbell’s vindictiveness and lack of charity. Yet, embedded between the vitriol, mounted like pearls of wisdom in the basest of metal, were instances of a deep yet inarticulate yearning for faith. The Georgiad confirmed Campbell’s rejection of postwar pessimism and its nihilistic ramifications and placed him beside others, such as Eliot and Waugh, who were similarly seeking glimmers of philosophical light amid the prevailing gloom.

  Desiring an escape from the world of the “intellectuals without intellect”, Campbell moved with his wife, Mary, and their two daughters to Provence and, later, to Spain. Throughout this period, he and Mary found themselves being slowly but irresistibly drawn toward the Catholic faith. The seemingly somnambulant process of conversion was charted by Campbell in a sonnet sequence entitled Mithraic Emblems, which shows the progress of a soul in transit. The earliest sonnets, written in Provence, show the poet groping with an uncomprehended and incomprehensible paganism, relishing the irrational, the obscurum per obscurius—the obscure by the still more obscure. It is Mithraic “truth” whispered with Masonic secrecy—the affirmation of faith without reason. In the later sonnets, written after Campbell’s arrival in Spain, Christianity emerges triumphant, not so much to vanquish Mithraism as to make sense of it. In these later sonnets, the sun is no longer a god to be worshiped, but only a symbol of the Son, the true God, who gives the sun its meaning and its purpose.

  Oh let your shining orb grow dim,

  Of Christ the mirror and the shield,

  That I may gaze through you to Him,

  See half the mystery revealed.

  Roy and Mary Campbell, together with their daughters, were received into the Catholic Church in the Spanish village of Altea in June 1935.

  They had chosen a dangerous time and place to profess their faith. In the following year, Spain was plunged into a fratricidal civil war. By its end, 12 bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks and about 300 nuns had been murdered by the anti-Catholic Republican forces. Details of these atrocities horrified Catholics around the world. Father Gregorio, the parish priest of Altea, who had described the day in which he had received the Campbells into the Church as the best day of his life, was murdered by Republican militiamen only a year later. The Campbells, too, narrowly escaped with their lives, escaping from Spain only days after their friends the Carmelite monks of Toledo had been murdered in cold blood.

  The horrors of the Spanish civil war would inspire some of Campbell’s finest verse. In much the same way that the sonnet sequence Mithraic Emblems had been the outpouring of a poetic baptism of desire, so the poems inspired by the Spanish war would be the outpouring of a poetic baptism of fire.

  The towers and trees were lifted hymns of praise,

  The city was a prayer, the land a nun:

  The noonday azure strumming all its rays

  Sang that a famous battle had been won,

  As signing his white Cross, the very Sun,

  The Solar Christ and captain of my days

  Zoomed to the zenith; and his will was done.

  23

  _____

  ROY CAMPBELL

  Religion and Politics

  IT IS ONE OF THE TRITE ASSUMPTIONS of modern life that the subjects of religion and politics should not be discussed in public. Somehow it is considered impolite or indecorous to broach either topic in a social setting. The result, of course, is that the art of conversation either stagnates in the swamps of trivia or else descends to the level of the banal or the profane. Thankfully, this social stricture has been wholeheartedly ignored by the key literary figures of the past century. Writers as diverse as George Orwell and Graham Greene, G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh and J. R. R. Tolkien, have spiced their lives, their conversation, their correspondence and their works with a healthy cocktail of the religious and the political. Few, however, have employed the spice of religion and politics as robustly or as candidly as Roy Campbell. It would, in fact, be true to say that Campbell, more perhaps than any other writer of his generation, is defined by his religion and his politics. This being so, any failure to understand Campbell’s religious or political stance is a failure to understand Campbell himself and, therefore, a failure to understand, or fully appreciate, his work. Sadly, many of Campbell’s critics have been unfailing in their failure in this regard, so much so that it has been Campbell’s fate to be misunderstood, again more perhaps than any other writer of his generation, by those who lack either empathy or sympathy with his politics or his faith. Put simply and succinctly, he has been judged by the prejudiced.

  If, therefore, we are to understand Campbell objectively, leaving our subjective presumptions aside, we must come to terms with, and get to grips with, his core beliefs. In order to do this, it is essential to begin at the beginning, through an examination of the earliest influences in his life.

  Taken collectively, the politics, culture and religion of Campbell’s childhood constituted a conundrum of contradictions. His mother’s Jacobite romanticism, passed on to her son in the singing of old Scottish ballads, conflicted with her dourly lackluster Presbyterianism. Similarly, the songs of Jacobite rebellion reverberated discordantly with the unquestioning acceptance of British imperialism and resonated in uneasy and unusual counterpoint to the jingoism of empire. Finally, the family’s privileged position as white colonials in the heart of black South Africa added to the political and cultural tension. These diverse and divisive forces fought for supremacy in the youthful Campbell’s mind and heart. The Highland Catholicism of the Jacobites jostled with the Lowland Presbyterianism of the family’s lukewarm faith; the Scottish nationalism thumbed its nose at the pomp and circumstance of the British Empire; and the prestige and privilege of the colonial looked down its imperious and impervious nose at the presumed “inferiority” of the nonwhite natives. The overall effect was that Campbell had inherited from his family the psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressor, the legacy of defeat and the spoils of victory.

  “The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon”, one of Campbell’s earliest poems, probably written prior to his arrival in Oxford in 1919 or very shortly thereafter, indicates that he had sought to resolve the religious contradictions inherent in his family by an escape into agnosticism. With youthful impatience at the centuries-old conflict between the Catholic thesis and its Protestant antithesis, he rejected dialectic in favor of diversion, or even derision. Possibly inspired by Yeats’ poem “An Indian upon God”, “The Theology of Bongwi, the Baboon” is, in spite of its playful theological subversion, utterly devoid of the cynical world-weariness of so much iconoclastic, antireligious satire. On the contrary, its jovial tone has much in common with the satirical verse of G. K. Chesterton, as becomes instantly apparent if Campbell’s poem is compared with Chesterton’s “Race Memory (by a dazed Darwinian)”.

  The cultural and political conflicts at the heart of Campbell’s upbringing came to creative fruition in two more early poems, “Zulu Girl” and “The Serf”, in which he exhibits, simultaneously, both sympathetic admiration for, and suppressed fear of, the native Africans, the contradictory emotions clashing in tensile creativity. Ironically, Campbell would be given the nickname “Zulu” upon his arrival in Oxford, finding himself a misfit, a wild colonial boy, who rejected, and was rejected by, the mother culture. This rejection of, and rejection by, the elitist atmosphere of the English public school, which was all-pervasive in the hallowed halls of Oxbridge in the years following the First World War, not only reawakened the latent antagonism to Anglo-Saxondom inherent in the Jacobite romanticism of Campbell’s boyhood but placed him, culturally, in a similar position to that of the Zulus in South Africa. Thus the psychology of the oppressor was eclipsed by that of the oppressed.

  In The Flaming Terrapin (1924), the long and ambitious poem that established his reputation, Ca
mpbell reacted against the prevailing pessimism and nihilism of postwar England and against the hedonism of the “bright young things” with whom he had flirted and from whom he had recoiled. Although awash with remnants of a confused and confusingly heterodox Christianity, The Flaming Terrapin regards postwar politics and culture more through the prism of Nietzsche, Darwin and Einstein than through the teaching of Christ. The idealization of the Nietzschean “strong” and the Darwinian “fittest” provides the first inkling of a protofascism. There is also an implicit aversion to communism as the product of postwar demoralization and stagnation and the hope that it might be countered by those who, refusing to become demoralized or stagnant, are instead “ennobled” by the sufferings of war. Beneath the surface of the poem, submerged and potent as the terrapin itself, is the sublime influence of Eliot’s subliminally cathartic tour de force, The Waste Land, published eighteen months earlier. A pose-modern cri de coeur exuding postwar angst and superficial cynicism, Eliot’s hidden agenda pointed, paradoxically, toward the resurrection of Christian tradition. Campbell’s Terrapin lacked the profound philosophical coherence of The Waste Land but shared intuitively the latter’s traditionalist aspirations, albeit inarticulately. Certainly, with the wisdom of hindsight, it can be seen that both poems—and both poets—were grappling with the same issues and groping toward the same, ultimately religious, goal.

  Following the publication ofThe Flaming Terrapin, Campbell enjoyed a brief period of fashionable celebrity. He was seen by many of his contemporaries as the finest poet of his generation, with the exception of the universally lauded Eliot. He was, however, to fall from favor following his vicious attack on the Bloomsbury group in the long satirical poem The Georgiad (1931). Written in the manner of Dryden and Pope, this merciless broadside against the self-styled elite of England’s literati would render him anathema in the eyes of many of the contemporaries who, a few years earlier, had praised him for his achievement. The Georgiad is a vituperative invective, “venomous with truth”1, against the Freudian gospel of self-gratification in general and against the sexual mores of the Bloomsbury group in particular. Campbell’s poem rests on the premise that sexual “liberation”, so-called, leads to a culture of death, devoid of joy. Sex was not a subject for morbid fascination, Campbell argued, but was a glorious mystery to be enjoyed in the purity of passion. As such, every attempt to strip it of its mystery strips it of its higher meaning. All that remains when sex is removed from the glory of its romantic heights is a gaudy remnant festering in the furtive frustrations of its sterile depths. Sex, as preached and practiced in Bloomsbury, was the omnipotence of impotence. Such is the leitmotif of The Georgiad. Androgyno, the poem’s hero, is so shocking to the puritanically prurient sensibilities of Bloomsbury because he flouts their adolescent furtiveness in an unrestrained fertility rite. Androgyno is the shamelessly potent vanquisher of psychosexual impotence, the exorciser of Bloomsbury’s perverse spirit.

  Although it is an uncompromising attack on “modern” attitudes to sex, the spirit and language of The Georgiad is neither puritanical nor prudish but, on the contrary, is a passionate and prudent response to prurience.

  As with so much of Campbell’s satire, The Georgiad’s invective is too vindictive. It is spoiled by spite. The result is that the abuse obscures the truth Campbell is seeking to convey. Embedded between the attacks on Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and a host of other Bloomsburys 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”. This age’s “damp philosophy” is “the fountain source of all [the] woes” of modern man, who is left “damp in spirit” by his adherence to it. His nihilism is self-negating. It is the philosophy of the self-inflicted wound.

  Whatever its objective merits, and objectionable flaws, The Georgiad clearly displays a soul utterly alienated from the society and philosophy of his contemporaries and peers.2 Escaping from such an inhospitable environment, Campbell fled to Provence. It was here, perhaps for the first time in his turbulent life, that he found a degree of peace.3

  Rest under my branches, breathe deep of my balm

  From the hushed avalanches of fragrance and calm,

  For suave is the silence that poises the palm.

  The wings of the egrets are silken and fine,

  But hushed with the secrets of Eden are mine.4

  Why, one wonders, did Campbell find such peace in Provence whereas he had found nothing but emotional turmoil in England and during his abortive return to South Africa in the mid-twenties? The answer, if the witness of his poetry is to be taken as authoritative, is to be found in the rustic culture that he discovered there and into which he submerged himself wholeheartedly. For Campbell, the peasant had always represented the permanent. Civilizations rise and fall. Only the peasant remains.

  The timeless, surly patience of the serf

  That moves the nearest to the naked earth

  And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.5

  Akin to the permanence of the peasant was the permanence of the peasants’ religion. In Provence, for the first time, Campbell found himself immersed in a Catholic culture. From this time, his poetry begins to proliferate with Catholic imagery. It is, however, Catholic imagery without Catholic faith, as is exemplified most poignantly in the tranquil agnosticism of “Mass at Dawn”. There are, however, hints of a faith desired, if not necessarily attained, in the final verses of “Saint Peter of the Three Canals”, a poem that transforms itself beguilingly from the apparently faithless frivolity of the early verses to the tacit acceptance of faith in its invocatory finale.

  It is not, however, until the poet’s arrival in Spain in 1933 that the Faith finally claims the poet, or, at least, that the poet finally acclaims the Faith,

  under the stretched, terrific wings,

  the outspread arms (our soaring King’s)—

  the man they made an Albatross!6

  Campbell’s conversion was charted in the sonnet sequence Mithraic Emblems, the earliest of which were written in Provence and the last of which were written in Spain. Taken as a whole, they display a soul in transit. The early sonnets show the poet groping with an uncomprehended and incomprehensible paganism, relishing the irrational, the obscurum per obscurius—the obscure by the still more obscure. The poet makes an affirmation of faith without reason, whispering Mithraic “truth” with Masonic secrecy. In the later sonnets, Christianity emerges triumphant, not so much to vanquish Mithraism as to make sense of it. Fides is now married to ratio, faith to reason. In the final sonnets, the sun is no longer a god to be worshiped, but only a symbol of the Son, the true God, who gives the sun its meaning and purpose. The Mithraic emblem is transformed by Christian typology and becomes Christ transfigured.

  Oh let your shining orb grow dim,

  Of Christ the mirror and the shield,

  That I may gaze through you to Him,

  See half the miracle revealed.7

  Campbell’s reception into the Catholic Church on 24 June 1935 confirmed him in his love for Spain, which he later described as “a country to which I owe everything as having saved my soul”.8 As with his rustic experience of Provence, he felt a deep admiration for the Spanish peasants, whose lives and traditions were centered solely on the feasts of the Church and the changing seasons of the year. He never ceased to find their ordered lives, which resembled what might be termed a life-dance, absorbingly interesting, whereas the frantic lives of modern people, which resembled a race against time, was inimical to the flourishing of the human spirit. In this, of course, he was rekindling his affinity with Eliot, who had waxed contemptuously about the “unreal” and “time-kept city” in The Waste Land.

  Campbell’s conversion would also accentuate still further his alienation from the secularist ascendancy in British literature. The reaction of his former friend
s and present enemies among the British literati to the news of his conversion can be gauged by Virginia Woolf’s horrified response to Eliot’s embrace of Anglo-Catholicism several years earlier.

  I have just had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.9

  There is little doubt that Campbell’s submission to Rome would have elicited similar sneers of contempt. Already dead in the eyes of Bloomsbury, he could now be considered well and truly buried.

  His conversion would also place a catechetic chasm between himself and the new generation of left-wing poets, such as Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Cecil Day-Lewis. Campbell’s faith was inextricably linked to politics—and his politics became increasingly linked to, and colored by, his love for Spain. With the Spanish civil war looming, Campbell would find himself on the opposite side to these young atheist and socialist poets.

  Few of his contemporaries would understand his stance during the Spanish civil war, but of the few who did understand, few would understand better than his friend Lawrence Durrell. Unlike so many others, Durrell understood the importance to Campbell of the potent trinity of influences—religious, cultural and political—with which his life in Spain was entwined. Durrell explained that he was “simultaneously happy and saddened” when he discovered that Campbell had become a Catholic: “happy for him, sad because I myself could not participate. . . . But Roy had taken from Spain the brocades and the dust of the bull-ring and how can anyone penetrate to the heart of Spain without embracing the faith which animates its brutal vivid life? It was totally right for him—‘a second motherland’.”10

 

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