The literary world came down firmly on one side of the Spanish Civil War. Of 121 responses to W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender’s questionnaire for the 1937 book Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, 100 were pro-republic (Samuel Beckett’s reply was “¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!”), 16 were neutral (including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Vera Brittain), and five were opposed (Evelyn Waugh declared that if he were Spanish he’d fight for Franco). 

The now virtually unread Durban-born poet Roy Campbell (1901-1957) was another writer in the pro-Franco camp. Campbell’s support of the caudillo, combined with his furious attacks on the Bloomsbury Group, have meant that this talented and sometimes unsavoury character has faded into an undeserved obscurity. Campbell, who was well-known during his lifetime, viewed himself as a poetic outsider and an outsider he remains given his works have now fallen out of print.  

Campbell emerged on the English literary scene in a wave of masculine animation. After the abandonment of studies at Oxford and marriage to the unconventional, St. Teresa of Avila-reading artist Mary Garman emerged The Flaming Terrapin in 1924. This redemptive allegory uses the Genesis flood narrative to represent the catastrophe of the First World War, and it enraptured critics with its sheer energy and linguistic power:

Now he comes prowling on the ravaged earth,
He whores with Nature, and she brings to birth
Monsters perverse, and fosters feeble minds,
Nourishing them on stenches such as winds
Lift up from rotting whales.

The poet soon found himself moving in the highest of bohemian circles after meeting Virginia Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. Friendliness with the Bloomsbury Group was short-lived after the revelation of his wife’s affair with Vita. From this experience emerged The Georgiad, Campbell’s revenge satire of 1931 which mauls “intellectuals without intellect”. It explicitly names or obviously refers to various figures including Sackville-West and her diplomat husband Sir Harold Nicolson, Lytton Strachey, Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Robert Graves, and Laura Riding. Clearly, Campbell was not afraid of making enemies. 

Then came Spain. The Campbells moved in 1933 to a nation riven by factionalism as Nationalists and Republicans clashed over vastly different visions of the future. While the country tumbled inexorably toward civil war, the Campbells entered the Catholic Church. Instructed by a priest who would later be shot dead in the conflict, their conversion was influenced by the faith of a rural peasantry that resolutely ordered daily life around the Church’s calendar with its feast days, processions, and devotions. Campbell explored his newfound faith in the 1936 collection Mithraic Emblems, but the civil war was never far away from his pen. His adoptive city of Toledo witnessed the murder of his Carmelite friends during the horrors of the war, and Toledo (July, 1936) refers to the destruction of their monastery:

With horns of flame and haggard eye
The mountain vomited with blood,
A thousand corpses down the flood
Were rolled gesticulating by…

In Toledo, the Campbells found a city saturated by older forms of faith and beauty. Campbell writes in his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse, which takes the reader up to the beginning of the civil war, that Toledo “was the whole embodiment of the crusade for Christianity against Communism and I felt it the minute I set foot in the city”. This brings us to the main black mark against the poet’s name — his backing of Franco. Taking the caudillo’s side in the civil war has meant that the enduring view of Campbell is of an unreadable reactionary.

Animosity towards some of Campbell’s writing in the civil war period is justified. His poetic nadir Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain is Francoist propaganda which contains a deeply uncomfortable blend of faith and violence. The critical reaction at the time was split along ideological lines, but it is this work which cemented the general unfavourable view of the poet. Campbell’s exaggeration of his own actions during the war doesn’t help his case. 

Biographer Peter Alexander argues that Campbell “was a political simpleton” rather than anything more nefarious. On this view, Campbell can be seen as anti-communist rather than pro-fascist. Either way, it should be possible to disagree with Campbell’s politics and still appreciate (or at least read) his work. We can abhor the poet’s darker views as we do in the case of the still widely analysed modernist Ezra Pound. 

While there is a complex legacy to consider, it simply will not do to ignore his life and work

While Campbell was naive in so closely aligning himself with Franco’s cause, this must be placed into context. It is not exactly surprising that a Catholic convert living in Toledo during the civil war supported the Nationalists given the alternative was to be on the side of anti-clericalists who were murdering religious and burning churches. Unspeakable atrocities were committed against clergy, the cloistered and lay faithful. But, of course, there was also unbearable barbarousness suffered by those on the other side of the ideological fence. The Franco regime should certainly not be seen as synonymous with the defence of Christian civilisation, given its actions and policies, as some on the right are sometimes tempted to view it. Put not your trust in princes. 

Saying that, the black-and-white romanticisation of the Republican cause seems untenable. Literary supporters (some of whom fought with the international brigades in Spain) are still, even if unrepentant communists, lauded to a man and woman as progressive freedom fighters for “the last great cause” while Campbell is dismissed as a backwards fascist. This highlights a double standard. Writers who backed the Republicans, from Auden to Louis MacNeice, should not be beyond criticism for their views and actions during the war. A more nuanced approach is necessary. The disaffected George Orwell’s sage comment that civil war “atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection” should be contemplated. 

Campbell’s greatest work has nothing to do with the civil war. There is a notably crisp simplicity throughout his 1930 collection Adamastor. The symbolism of Mass at Dawn points to the poet’s slowly changing sympathies towards the Christian faith as the figure of the exhausted fisherman returns to land:

My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

For a period after the Second World War, Campbell’s star shone bright as his deeply beautiful translation of the poetry of St. John of the Cross won the Foyle Prize. It is fitting that one of Campbell’s poetic highlights regards the former monk prisoner of Toledo, whose papers he had protected almost two decades previously (the Carmelites, before being shot in the street, gave Campbell the papers of St. John of the Cross to save them from the flames). The translation displays an obvious appreciation of Christian mysticism and support the argument that the portrayal of him as a completely unredeemable and uncultivated figure should not be allowed to stand: 

Lost to myself I stayed
My face upon my lover having laid
From all endeavour ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

In the decades since his passing, Campbell has been forgotten. While he cannot be called a consistently top-rate poet, he has inspired and insightful moments and is fundamentally too talented a writer to be completely absent from poetry anthologies and university reading lists. While there is a complex legacy to consider, it simply will not do to ignore his life and work.