POETS Day! CS Lewis and Roy Campbell Agree to Disagree

In Tolkien’s telling, Lewis got snippy and accusative and Campbell laughed and brushed off criticisms.

Illustration by Rene Sears

Major League Baseball season is upon us. The Sweet Sixteen is under way. You need not to be at work. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.

First, some verse.

***

Roy Campbell says that in February of 1936 he was forced at gunpoint to vote, using a dead Spaniard’s identity, for the Popular Front. This would have been months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Peter Alexander writes, in a footnote in his Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography that he was “unable to verify this story.” It’s important to note that he notes this because Campbell was an outrageous story teller whose facts regarding his own exploits need checking. But the truth is, Campbell led an outrageous life filled with noble, clownish, ill-considered, shrewd, Quixotic, and valiant, depending on the situation, deeds.

He’s hard to believe. Campbell bragged he was a spy for Great Britain during World War II. That wasn’t the lie. The lie was that he was good at it. His espionage involved getting drunk in Spain, cosying up to fellow bar patrons, and saying “Don’t tell anybody, but I’m a spy for England. Have you heard anything about what the Germans are up to?” (Not kidding.) You get enough of his exaggerations and then hear a surefire whopper where he claims to have played matador “bullfighting” a rhino in the wild, and it turns out he’s telling the truth. He survived, but the beast charged through his makeshift cape and made a mess out of his brother-in-law’s Range Rover. Such is the complicated task of making sense of the life of Campbell.

I say this because Peter Alexander is a well-respected biographer. That he points out when he can’t verify something should tell about what he tells you without qualification. The following from Campbell’s life he presents without such couching.

In March of ‘36, amid a wave of anticlericism sweeping Spain, Campbell and his wife Mary hid local Carmelite monks in their large rented Toledo home. This was risky. Not just because hiding clergy was risky, but because he and his wife were recent converts to Catholicism and active; they made an effort to be known to the community as such. Hiding at the Campbell house was safer for the monks than staying at the monastery, but they were hiding at an address on the short list of places sure to offer shelter. It was a poorly-kept secret, and when the monks went back to their home, when danger seemed to have passed or become something to get used to, a fact not passing, people resented Roy and his wife.

To get a sense of the mood in the city, before the election a bartender who knew Campbell showed him his guns, adding that he’d shoot him “when the time came, ‘if you are still here… and haven’t been bumped off by anyone else.’” Things only got worse after. On March 16, members of the Assault Guard—Cuerpo de Seguridad y Asalto, the real name of an organization under the Second Republic—harassed Campbell while he was out on a horseback ride and… did their thing. He wrote about the incident where he was beaten with rifle butts and the Assaulteers “paraded him back into town to be thrown in prison,” again, per Alexander who reports the incident, but calls Campbell’s later poem recounting the incident “histrionic”:

from To My Jockey

And four of those black bastards
To hold a single man:
And four to take him to the gaol –
Proclaiming thus my clan.

Campbell certainly indulged in a little chest beating (Alexander said he had at least two different stories of his daring escape from captivity), but he’s embellishing his reaction, not the circumstances in Toledo at the time. Still more from Alexander:

“He was very lucky not to have been shot as so many Spaniards were under similar circumstances, and as his companion that day, a gypsy named ‘Mosquito’ Bargas, who did occasional odd jobs for him, had been shot by the roadside just minutes before Campbell’s arrest.”

His wife was harassed on the way to morning mass, his family glared at, and threatened on the streets.

On July 18, Franco rebelled. The Popular Front went hunting for enemy sympathizers. The Carmelites had asked the Campbells to hide a chest of documents, including the personal papers of St. John of the Cross, in their home. A cross on the wall could get you shot, such was the communist zeal, but Roy and Mary agreed. On July 22, all seventeen of the Carmelite monks were shot and killed in a nearby square, their buildings torched. Alexander says Campbell snuck out in the evening and found his friends’ bodies covered, but lying where they died.

Toledo, July 1936
Roy Campbell (1901-1957)

Toledo, when I saw you die
And heard the roof of Carmel crash,
A spread-winged phœnix from its ash
The Cross remained against the sky!
With horns of flame and haggard eye
The mountain vomited with blood,
A thousand corpses down the flood
Were rolled gesticulating by,
And high above the roaring shells
I heard the silence of your bells
Who’ve left these broken stones behind
Above the years to make your home,
And burn, with Athens and with Rome,
A sacred city of the mind.

Earlier that day, the Republicans searched the Campbell home. Any religious item found might mean death for them all. Campbell said one soldier was worked up on finding a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, recognized Italian and assumed it was Fascist. “Campbell,” Alexander writes, “with admirable presence of mind, showed them some of his Russian novels, and so convinced them he was neutral.” The Campbells scrubbed the house of any iconography, literature—you name it—save the truly valuable. None of the soldiers looked in the trunk. They leaned rifles against it as the searched, their weapons inches from St. John’s writings. The family watched nervously, but no one opened and saw. Roy saw St. John’s hand as protecting his family in that moment and vowed to translate the Saint’s poetry for an English audience, a vow he kept.

Angelo Monico, described by Alexander as an “idiot poetaster” Campbell mentored, arrived at the Campbell home with the body of a dead child in his arms. He gave the family cash picked from the body of a dead priest. With that money they bribed their way onto a truck carting bodies out of town and made for the coast and a boat to Marseilles. Coincidentally, Robert Graves and Laura Riding were fleeing on the same boat. Whatever enmity existed between the three poets disappeared in flight, a shocking turn to any familiar with Campbell’s earlier attacks on the other two. Riding offered to loan a sizable amount to the Campbells who were in desperate need, having left nearly everything behind. Esprit de Corps.

Campbell was often accused of being a Fascist. He denied it. There was a case to be made that he was. He worked as a propagandist for Franco, claimed to have attended Franco’s victory parade, and vigorously opposed the Republicans. The British Union of Fascists tried to recruit him:

“I not only refused Mosley’s and [Percy Wyndham] Lewis’s offer of a very high position and lucrative position in the Fascist party but explained that I was returning to the ranks to fight Red Fascism, the worst and most virulent variety, and that when the time came I was ready to fight Brown or Black Fascism and that I could (though badly disabled) knock both of their brains out there and then! I explained that I was only fighting as a Christian for the right to pray in my own churches, all of which (save 3) had been destroyed in Red Spain…I then asked for my coat and hat: Lewis has never forgiven it.”

All the talk about Red and Black and Brown fit with his assertion that fascism “is merely another form of communism.” He hated them all. It got back to Campbell that Stephen Spender was going to out him as a fascist in a speech so he marched up on stage and punched Spender before he got the words out. He enlisted to fight the Nazis. He was adamant that he was not as was claimed. The claims persisted.

Flowering Rifle gave plenty more ammunition to his detractors. It’s a one hundred and sixty-five page poem published in 1939, celebrating Franco’s victory and excoriating the British intelligentsia for supporting the communists in the Spanish Civil War. He’d already put the Bloomsbury wing of British Literary Society against the wall with his 1931 attack against Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and the lot: The Georgiad. With Flowering Rifle, he went after them again, only this time handing over to them the beautifully wrapped gift of siding with the ideology menacing the minds of Europe and rightly worrying England.

It’s lost that the Fascists, under Franco, were part of a coalition made up of nationalists, monarchists, Catholics, and anticommunists. Campbell was certainly two out of the five, but I think we can push politics aside and entertain that fighting for Franco was secondary to fighting against the Communists who beat him, killed his friends, hounded his family, and chased him from his home. Why focus on politics when animosity suffices?

Roy and CS Lewis first met as undergraduates at Oxford in the years following WWI. They didn’t know each other very well, but the casual acquaintance was enough to spark recognition between the two in 1927 on a chance encounter in a London pub. Campbell was there on a mission. Mary had just confessed her affair with Virginia Woolf’s ex, Vita Sackville-West. More over, she hoped he would be okay with her continuing her infidelity with the woman. The Georgiad seeds were sown. Campbell was there to get drunk, which he did. Loosened, he relayed his sordid circumstance to Lewis, who responded, “Fancy, being cuckolded by a woman.” Roy went into a days long rage. Lewis’s comment stuck with him. The two were not on friendly terms.

Flowering Rifle was published in February of 1939. Lewis responded in the pages of Cherwell, one of Oxford’s independent student papers, with “To the Author of Flowering Rifle.”

To the Author of Flowering Rifle
CS Lewis (1898-1963)

Rifles may flower and terrapins may flame
But truth and reason will be still the same.
Call them Humanitarians if you will,
The merciful are promised mercy still;
Loud fool! To think a nickname could abate
The blessing given to the compassionate.
Fashions in polysyllables may fright
Those Charlies on the Left of whom you write;
No wonder; since it was from them you learned
How white to black by jargon can be turned,
And though your verse outsoars with eagle pride
Their nerveless rhythms (of which the old cow died)
Yet your shrill covin-politics and theirs
Are two peas in a single pod—who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?
Repent! Recant! Some feet of sacred ground,
A target to both gangs, can yet be found,
Sacred because, though now it’s no-man’s-land,
There stood your father’s house; there you should stand.

Lewis admired Campbell’s skills as a versifier, and the political divide didn’t dissuade him of that admiration as is obvious by “your verse outsoars.” Lewis does put himself on an island; not fond of the “Charlies on the Left,” but very much offended by Campbell.

The two didn’t meet again until 1944 and as the last time, at a pub. This time it was at the Eagle and Child in Oxford. Given the years, Lewis didn’t recognize Campbell. JRR Tolkien, who was there with Lewis, was writing the Lord of the Rings at the time and said the larger-than-life Campbell reminded him of Strider. He liked that Campbell was mysterious to Lewis on entering. It’s claimed that Campbell inspired some of the character’s mannerisms, that Tolkien wrote a gesture or the poet’s attitude into his descriptions.

In Tolkien’s telling, Lewis got snippy and accusative and Campbell laughed and brushed off criticisms. From a letter from JRR to his son Christopher:

“C.S.L.’s reactions [to Campbell] were odd. Nothing is a greater tribute to Red propaganda than the fact that he (who knows they are in all other subjects liars and traducers) believes all that is said against Franco, and nothing that is said for him. … Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered—he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it). Bur R.C [Roy Campbell] shook him a bit …”

Over the course of the evening, Campbell told Lewis his experiences in Spain and Lewis softened. By night’s end, Lewis offered to put Roy up at his house the next time he was in Oxford and invited him to an Inklings meeting. The two began a correspondence discussing the works of Milton. The two got chummy.

It doesn’t seem they ever agreed politically. Campbell died in a car crash in 1957. In 1963, shortly before he died himself, Lewis said he “loathed and loath Roy Campbell’s particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism, and told him so,” so that would be the last word on the subjects of fascism and Popery, but there seemed to be detente.

This next poem, by Lewis, was published posthumously. In it, Lewis chides Campbell for rejecting Romanticism. There’s no animosity. Lewis sets a clear “they” and a “we” while reminding Campbell he belongs as a member of “we”; the side of Wordsworth and the Angels.

To Roy Campbell

Dear Roy—Why should each wowzer on the list
Of those you damn be dubbed Romanticist?
In England the romantic stream flows not
From waterish Rousseau but from manly Scott,
A right branch on the old European tree
Of valour, truth, freedom, and courtesy,
A man (though often slap-dash in his art)
Civilized to the centre of his heart,
A man who, old and cheated and in pain,
Instead of snivelling, got to work again,
Work without end and without joy, to save
His honour, and go solvent to the grave;
Yet even so, wrung from his failing powers,
One book of his would furnish ten of ours
With characters and scenes. The very play
Of mind, I think, is birth-controlled to-day.
It flows, I say, from Scott; from Coleridge too.
A bore? A sponge? A laudanum-addict? True;
Yet Newman in that ruinous master saw
One who restored our faculty for awe,
Who re-discovered the soul’s depth and height,
Who pricked with needles of the eternal light
An England at that time half numbed to death
With Paley’s, Bentham’s, Malthus’ wintry breath.
For this the reigning Leftist cell may be
His enemies, no doubt. But why should we?
Newman said much the same of Wordsworth too.
Now certain critics, far from dear to you,
May also fondle Wordsworth. But who cares?
Look at the facts. He’s far more ours than theirs;
Or, if we carve him up, then all that’s best
Falls to our share—we’ll let them take the rest.
By rights the only half they should enjoy
Is the rude, raw, unlicked, North Country boy.

I’m left wondering about the papers of St. John of the Cross. At present, they reside with the Carmelites, but how they got from the Campbells’ house to their current location, I’m not sure. I’ve read that Campbell, as relayed by the man himself, made a daring return in 1937 to retrieve the documents he hid away at an apartment before leaving in 1935. It sounds very precarious, but… It’s been four or so years since I read Alexander’s Campbell biography, so there might be something in there about this return rescue mission that I’ve forgotten, but I don’t recall reading about it the book. Today I flipped through the section on 1937, checked the index for St. John, and reasonably tried to find a sentence or so of corroboration. I didn’t. It may be true that Campbell risked life and limb, and if pressed I suspect he did. I plan to keep digging, but until then...

I say this because Peter Alexander is a well-respected biographer: It may not be in there because he wasn’t able to verify it.