Violent views
PATRICK ANDERSON
Light on a Dark Horse Roy Campbell (Hollis and Carter 35s) Selected Poetry Roy Campbell (Bodley Head 30s) The late Roy Campbell was a man of violence. He enjoyed the intenser forms of physical exertion. Back in his native South Africa he scorned the 'effeminate' surfboard when surfing; he often finished off the bush- buck he had wounded with no more than bare hands and knobkerrie, and on one occasion wrestled a stag until he had brought it down and could drown it 'gradually ... in less than eighteen inches of water': later, as a well-known poet and expatriate, he still raised money 'jousting' from boats on the lagoons of the Rhone or fighting bulls for their cocardes in the towns of Provence. During his life his pro- fessions included those of seaman, fisher- man, soldier, boxer, trick-rider, sea-diver and cattleman.
He liked to pit himself against the forces of nature, riding a tidal bore in a small boat or insisting on standing in the bows of a steamer as it nosed into the forty foot rollers off the Cape. He admired the stoicism and ferocity of the animal world, the sharks which 'devoured their own en- trails as they sank out of sight, without any loss of gusto or enjoyment', the giraffe
whose kick all but severed a lion's head, the great pythons and deadly green mambas.
His childhood north of Durban, or on holidays in Rhodesia, was full of fighting and killing. When he and his friends were not peppering colonies of baboons or fruit- bats—in off-moments from their serious trading in horns and hides—they would stage lights in the swimming-pool between a boy and a secretly imported octopus in order to draw a sympathetic crowd, or they would urge their pet scorpions into con- tests of exemplary savagery until, the attractions of death being multifarious, the hoariest old victor was offered as a titbit to someone's baboon. 'The baboons snatch off the scorpion's sting with considerable skill and pop the scorpions straight into their mouths.' What a pity, Campbell adds in his faronche satiric vein, that Mr Geoffrey Grigson, 'the hedge-happy English author', does not try them.
For Roy Campbell was also a man of violent opinions; in Light on a Dark Horse, his second and far more considered autobiography now re-printed, he thumps them at one without much in the way of rational argument. Intellectuals, psychiat- rists, sexologists and leftists of all descrip- tions were his pet hates. Socialism was 'base, self-seeking greed': Franco became a shining star in the Regular Army of Christ. There was a 'mephitic stench' about what he called the Havelock Clinic. Blooms- bury he particularly detested (ride his long poem 'The Georgiad'). Approaching a long-haired artist in the south of France under the impression that this was Julian Bell, he was just about to offer the pinch on the bottom and the squeak in the ear whictrfcomprised the usual Bloomsbury greeting, when he realised that his pro- posed target was Winston Churchill. He recovered himself in time, the statesman smiled, and Campbell 'went around feeling about two inches taller'.
Effeminacy was another of his abomina- tions. Momentarily filming in London—he graduated to stuntman with expected rapidity—he worked under 'the most noisome pansies 1 have ever seen or smelt. They fairly oozed lavender and, at the same time, had green drug-poisoned faces.' Yet Campbell put up with the homosexual alcoholic, Hart Crane, admired (and trans- lated) Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and for all his anti-intellectualism prided himself on the friendship of Eliot, William Walton, the Sitwells, as well as that other wild man, Wyndham Lewis. (He admits his bo- hemianism tended to sap these higher intimacies: after all one of his greatest Soho friends lived off kippers phosphores- cent with age which he sandwiched between slices of linoleum.) Nor had his editorship of Yoe rslag, together with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post, been illiberal. He opposed the colour bar. I only met Campbell once but I think his bark was worse than his bite and that in personal relations he was a warm-hearted man. His book tells of only three acts of real violence against his fellow human beings; for the rest there was much old- school chivalry. When still a boy he had to contend with a hostile white storekeeper of dubious reputation; he shot the man's Great Dane, fusilladed his shop with a catapult and, having finally caught him poaching, beat him up and stole both his gun and his illegal prey. Much later, during the jousts, he thought his opponent to be a notorious (hence 'verminous') socialist with the result that he hurled himself against him with such passion that he actually landed in the enemy boat: 'I struck this man so terribly hard that to this day lay right collar-bone is just a lump of pul- sensed animal concrete.' Almost certainly less excusable is his treatment of a Jewish refugee from Germany whom he caught' uttering 'obscenities and blasphemies' in a Spanish church when he had moved to that country on the eve of the Civil War: 'I caught the biggest one, Dr Meyerstein, and brought him into the square where I broke his glasses and watch, and then throttled out his false teeth and broke them to pieces too.'
The first 170 pages of Light on a Dark Horse are, however, mostly about animals, from whales to tarantulas, from the rhino to the kingfisher. Here, and indeed else- where in the book, a poet's sensitivity to form and colour is combined with practical information patiently and courteously de- livered; there are also good, sometimes tall stories and the whole thing is laced with a breezy humour tending to the grotesque. In particular the reader will find marvellous descriptions of rose-coloured bee-eaters diving over a prairie fire in search of the insects exploding from it and of snow- clouds of gannets fishing a shoal of sar- dines; violent, even lurid scenes in both instances but caught with great skill. And is there anything more beautiful, Roy Campbell asks, than a heap of red mullet dying on the quay 'while their fins and Nca les tingle and hum'?
Why then is this book not a masterpiece --not even, so far as I know, the sort of sensuous but masculine stuff that school- masters plug in the schools, another Grimble or Attenborough or van der Post? I confess myself baffled to find a really satisfactory answer. Is it the `fascism'? Or the suggestion of boastfulness, of piling it on? Or the rambling, digressive inability to establish the incidents in terms of the interior life, to let them settle, to brood upon them, to make them more than the. defiant gestures of a muddled, immature personality? Is it finally a failure of the shaping spirit of the imagination, a failure, indeed, of intelligence? For, although the book has great merits, it isn't somehow as good as it might be. Personally I suspect that as a poet Campbell despised prose and didn't work hard enough on it. To give One example he uses the uninteresting epithet 'gorgeous' twice in his description of the mullet: the schoolgirl's summarising Word lies parallel with the real, concrete evocation. To give a more important one, from the point of view of structure and balance, he omits periods of his life which he has already covered in poems.
But was he a gcod poet? Judging by the Selected Poetry, I would say that he was not. Although his vigour and the orgiastic visions of such a work as 'The Flaming Terrapin' must have seemed refreshing in the world of Jack Squire and Humbert Wolfe, he had nothing new to contribute to the language and his imagination, for all the violence that both inspired and narrowed it. conjured up traditional romantic material in the traditional forms and rhythms. There is little tension. He simply bobs by you, fiery-faced but curiously relaxed, on the groundswell of English prosody and amongst the flotsam of fire, lyre, strife, life, corn, morn. But there are one or two splendid epigrams and I would except Rimbaud-dominated lyrics such as 'The Zulu Girl' and 'The Sisters'. Generally a good translator, his version of 'Le Bateau lyre' strikes me as excellent.
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