Roy Campbell (poet)

Roy and Mary Campbell (left), Jacob Kramer and Dolores (right), 1920s

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (born October 2, 1901 in Durban , Natal colony , † April 22, 1957 near Setúbal , Portugal ) was an important South African poet, essayist , translator and bullfighter.

Campbell can rightly be described as possibly the most important poet of South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. He was also one of the most important authors in South Africa in the twentieth century. To this day, his work has been misunderstood in South Africa and around the world.

The eccentric poet, who flirted with moderate fascism , could not be pigeonholed and is considered to be one of the most dazzling figures that South Africa ever produced, especially since he often turned himself against fascism.

Life

Roy Campbell was born in Durban to Samuel George Campbell and is of Scottish-Irish descent. At the age of two he learned the Zulu language , as a child he was often in the bush and in the great outdoors, which he loved so much, and was in constant contact with the local children and young people who treated him warmly. That was also the reason why, despite his affinity for fascism, he not only rejected racism against blacks or Africans in general, but also fought it. As a teenager, his favorite pastimes were reading and literature, fishing and being in the great outdoors. He attended Durban High School. As a young man he opposed apartheid and criticized the Boers , who closed themselves to black participation. This fact forced him to leave the country and go into exile. His country of exile was England in 1918 , where he lived and worked from then on.

In 1922 he married the painter Mary Garman, with whom he had two daughters. The young family moved to Lleyn , a peninsula in north Wales , where they wanted to live in peace.

After a stay of several months in South Africa in 1926, he briefly edited the literary magazine Voorslag as co-editor alongside Laurens van der Post , which was mainly aimed at Buren and appeared in Afrikaans. He was allowed to stay in South Africa for a few months, but not live there permanently, so this short odyssey was possible.

After a short stay in London , the couple lived again in their idyll in Wales until 1931, when the decision was made to dismantle the tents and pitch them in Spain in 1931 . The first stop was Barcelona , where the young couple fell in love with Iberian culture and decided to only want to live in Spain or Portugal from now on. Then the move to Toledo followed .

The Toledo massacre

During the Spanish Civil War, Campbell sided with Franco . Impressed by the Catholicism of the Spanish and on their spiritual quest, the couple decided to join the Catholic Church. The baptism was performed by the old bishop of Toledo, Cardinal Isidro Gomá y Tomás , in the Carmelite monastery. The monks and family became friends and often attended monks' public services. In one day, Toledo was attacked by republican troops and a good 600 clergy, religious, pastors, nuns and lay people were murdered. The 17 monks of the local Carmelite monastery also realized that they were threatened. The abbot turned to Campbell, who was also trusted for his literary work, and gave him much of the monastery's priceless library, including priceless original manuscripts of St. John of the Cross .

The large and spacious house also served for a while to temporarily accommodate some of the monks and to offer them shelter. When the Republicans also stormed the monastery, they captured all of the brothers, ravaged the monastery and shot all 17 brothers in public in the street. Campbell, who was in Toledo at the time but to whom nothing happened - perhaps also because he was a foreigner - found the bodies and later wrote that he had "waited over puddles of blood" and that mountains of corpses had come towards him.

But Campbell himself later came into the focus of the Republican Guards: his house was also searched. With a tip, he was able to move all religious objects and books to a safe place in good time, as well as the valuable manuscripts from the monastery. The house search did not reveal anything and so the family was left alone from then on.

Campbell later translated the works of St. John of the Cross from the original manuscripts and was an enormous success with Catholics within the Commonwealth and in Spain, which finally ended in 1954 in a reading tour in Madrid with stormy applause and an unforgettable reception. Overall, Campbell had lived in Spain from 1931 to 1936, at times also in the country. In Spain Campbell had also worked as a torero (bullfighter) and had even won a prize at a bullfighting gala in 1931. The massacre was processed by him in the poem The carmelits of Toledo . The devout Catholic had called on St. John of the Cross in prayer; in the event that he and his family were spared, he wanted to translate his work into English, as he later said on a radio broadcast.

World War I, England, France and Portugal

During the Second World War Campbell served as a soldier for the British and was stationed in Kenya as a member of the British East African Corps .

After the war, the family lived for a while in England and in the Camarque and Provence in France, before moving to Portugal in 1952 and living there near Setúbal until Campbell's death. Portugal was chosen because of its similarity to Spanish culture and because, unlike Franco, Salazar left the blacks and Africans living in the country alone. During this time he also worked as a publishing editor in the USA .

On April 22, 1957, he and his wife from Setúbal wanted to drive their little Ford to Seville to take part in Holy Week . However, due to an axis jump, the car came off the road a few kilometers from Setúbal and hit a tree. While Mary was only slightly injured, her husband died instantly. She later told a journalist that she had noticed that on the day of his death her husband had been very calm and serious, as if he sensed it was coming to an end.

circle of friends

Campbell had numerous celebrity friends. His two closest friends were the poet Dylan Thomas , with whom he drove around the houses, and the fantasy writer JRR Tolkien .

Other important friends were George Orwell , Aldous Huxley , CS Lewis , Evelyn Waugh , TS Eliot . This circle of friends was a protection for him in difficult times. Many of these authors, like Orwell, he knew only briefly; they were rather good acquaintances. Others like Dylan Thomas or Tolkien were very close friends with him.

Fight against the Bloomsbury Group

His "object of hate" was the Bloomsbury Group's liberal intellectuals association , which met in London. The writers, scientists and philosophers who met under the leadership of Virginia Woolf were a problem for the poet Campbell primarily because of their prosemitic, liberal, anti-patriotic and sexually liberal worldview. Always suspecting Woolfe as a lesbian in disguise, he wrote derisive verses, sarcastic and satirical texts about this group, which, however, paid him little attention.

personality

Overall, Campbell's personality is described as unstable and searching, hence his conversion to Catholicism, which should give meaning to this search for the inner reason. Throughout his life he had problems with alcohol and repeatedly fell into severe excesses.

His relationship to fascism was ambivalent: on the one hand, when he was still a very young man, he adored Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler , from whom he broke away and later, in the 1940s and 1950s, his admiration for the Spanish dictator Franco and the Portuguese politician António de Oliveira Salazar , to whom he assumed a “gentle”, viable fascism. He was not a friend of liberalism , sexual libertinage , anti-patriotism and women's rights, as was shown in the fight against the Bloomsbury Group. But he rejected the latent racism of many whites against blacks, because he had had extremely good experiences with them as a child and adolescent. He also refused to kill people out of his faith. If he also wanted certain rights to be curtailed or people to be persecuted existentially because of their opinion, in his opinion killing a person should never be allowed, as this was forbidden according to his belief. This was also the reason why he wrote a book about the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca , one of the most important Spanish authors of the twentieth century. Although Garcia Lorca was homosexual and toying with the communists, Campbell wanted to send a signal that killing people can never be justified. The book is considered to be the best book on this subject in the Anglophone-speaking area to date.

The poet

In his work, which consisted not only of poetry, but also of travel books and prose texts, he was concerned with neo-romanticism , which is particularly noticeable and recognizable in his verses. In addition to Johannes von Kreuz as a translator, he also had Charles Baudelaire , Federico Garcia Lorca and the Portuguese Joaquim Paço d'Arcos and Eca de Queiros in his program. His poetry made him an important voice in literature in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. He also wrote an important book on Portugal that can be considered one of the most comprehensive books on Portuguese culture and history in the English language. He also wrote a volume of poetry based on the mythical figure of Adamastor , who was created by the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luis Vaz de Camoes . Portuguese culture receives special mention in his work. In both of his autobiographies the egomaniacal side of his person is evident. They are a single glorification of his life and his experiences and deeds and do not allow any self-criticism.

Campbell as a character in the Lord of the Rings

A few years after Campbell's death, one of his best friends, the writer JRR Tolkien, said that in his cycle The Lord of the Rings he had created the character of Aragorn , played by Viggo Mortensen in the film , based on Campbell's features. Tolkien had met Campbell in a pub, where he found the poet sitting in a corner, pondering lonely. This image later inspired him to create the figure of Aragorn. Although Aragorn is a king and of course does not seem comparable to Campbell in all respects, Tolkien has repeatedly expressed this publicly and certain characteristics of his friend are more or less woven into the figure. Many fans of the cycle are unaware of this fact and it has only become known in recent years. Tolkien research has yet to contribute some new knowledge to this subject.

In the German-speaking world, Campbell has remained largely unknown to this day, both the person and the work. Only his autobiography was published in German in 1953.

Works (selection)

The flaminig terrapin. 1924, poetry.
Wayzgoose. 1928, poetry.
Adamastor. 1930, poetry.
Flowering Roads. 1933, poetry.
Flowering rifle. 1939, poetry.
Talking Bronco. 1946, poetry.
Lorca: An appreciation of his poetry. 1952, biography and critical appraisal of the poetic work of Federico Garcia Lorca.
Knights without fear with rebuke. (Autobiography in German translation), 1953. (Compiled from the autobiographies Broken Record , 1934 and Light on a dark horse 1951).

literature

Peter F. Alexander: Campbell, (Ignatius) Royston Dunnachie [Roy] (1901–1957), poet and writer. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi: 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 32264 .
Knaur's Lexicon of World Literature. Weltbild-Verlag, 1999.
Bertelsmann Digital Discovery Lexicon. 2000.
Encarta encyclopedia. 2006.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Campbell, Roy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Campbell, Ignatius Royston Dunnachie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	South African poet, essayist, translator, and bullfighter
DATE OF BIRTH	October 2, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH	Durban , Natal Colony
DATE OF DEATH	April 22, 1957
Place of death	Setúbal , Portugal