Who does not love the spring deserves no lovers

I take my title from the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957), who knew a thing or two about lovers and haters.

It’s from Georgian Spring, in which Campbell lampooned his fellow poets for their cosy triteness:

New quarterlies relume their yellow covers,
Anthologies on every bookshelf sing.
The publishers put on their best apparel
To sell the public everything it wants—
A thousand meek soprano voices carol
The loves of homosexuals or plants.

(Given the high probability that Campbell had affairs with men, that slice of internalized homophobia is rather revealing.)

In Georgian Spring (1930), Campbell lampooned the Georgian poets, mocking what he saw as their superficial and self-indulgent verse.

He took particular aim at the Bloomsbury Group, and Vita Sackville-West in particular. Sackville-West had recently won the Hawthornden Prize for her long poem The Land, and Campbell, who had personal as well as ideological reasons to resent her, unleashed a merciless attack.

His satire, filled with venom and precision, played a key role in his exclusion from both the literary canon and the social circles that felt he had gone too far.

And anyway—his politics stank.

Water is Wet

Basically, he was having a go, as he often did—especially when it came to unrestrainedly vicious verse. We don’t need poets to tell us water is wet, he says:

We know, we know, that ‘silver in the Moon’,
That ‘skies are blue’ was always our belief:
That ‘grass is green’ there can be no denying,
That titled whores in love can be forgot—
All who have heard poor Georgiana sighing
Would think it more surprising were they not:
As for the streams, why any carp or tench
Could tell you that they ‘sparkle on their way’.

By 1928, Campbell had already slammed the prevailing poetic taste, particularly its excesses of sentimentality when it came to nature and animals. He listed the criteria that defined a poet in England at the time:

1. Have you ever been on a walking tour?
2. Do you suffer from Elephantiasis of the Soul?
3. Do you make friends easily with dogs, poultry, etc.?
4. Are you easily exalted by natural objects?
5. Do you live in one place and yearn to be in another place?
6. Can you write in rhyme and metre? “Any of these conditions, combined of course with the sixth, if conscientiously complied with, is a safe passport to half a dozen anthologies.”

(From his essay “Contemporary Poetry,” published in Edgell Rickword’s Scrutinies by Various Writers .1928.)

The Brawling Bard

Campbell cultivated the image of a swashbuckling colonial outsider, too wild and untamed for the effete literary salons of England. He was a brawler, but his sharpest weapon was always his verse. He admired and emulated the satirical poets – Dryden, Swift, and Byron. He was also a master of mythmaking, particularly when it came to his own life, where he remained an unreliable narrator of his own legend.

He had married Mary Garman in 1922, and after a notorious brawl with Jacob Epstein, the couple left London for Ty Corn, a converted a primitive converted stable near the village of Aberdaron in Gwynedd, Wales. They lived there for over a year on a small allowance, homegrown vegetables, seabirds’ eggs, poached game, and seafood bought from local fishermen. At Ty Corn, their first child was born, and Campbell completed The Flaming Terrapin—the poem that launched his career.

The Campbells returned to London before relocating to South Africa. When they later moved back to England, Campbell was welcomed into literary circles. He and Mary were invited to stay at the gardener’s cottage at Long Barn, the home of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. It was here that he first mingled with members of the Bloomsbury Group—a connection that would end in acrimonious tears. 

Resentment and Revenge

Campbell’s marriage to Mary was tempestuous, and their life was littered with dramatic encounters. When Mary had an affair with Vita, Roy’s world was upended. After drunken binges and violent scenes, he eventually took off for Provence in Byronic self-exile. Mary, disappointed that Vita—who was also conducting several other affairs—was not as keen on her as she was on Vita, eventually joined him.

Campbell delivered his revenge in The Georgiad (1931), in which he viciously ridicules the social set on which he had now turned his back. The Georgiad is a scathing satire targeting the so-called Georgian poets (now mostly forgotten) orbiting Sackville-West and Nicolson, as well as Bloomsbury figures such as Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, and Bertrand Russell. What could have been a more  serious philosophical critique of modernism is marred by the excessive bile and venom of his portraits. His depiction of Vita Sackville-West is particularly vicious and cruel.

Campbell had come to view the Bloomsbury Group with undisguised contempt, seeing them as immature, narcissistic intellectuals who rejected responsibility in favor of self-indulgent Peter Pan-like fantasies. He saw them as parasites, feeding off their social inferiors and moral betters while imagining their sophisticated cultural taste had depth.

Poets Behaving Badly

The Campbell of The Georgiad is a prime example of that perennial breed: poets behaving badly. All fields have their rivalries but literary feuds take on an extra edge: Think H.G.Wells and Henry James; Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy; Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The list is long.

His primary target wasn’t Bloomsbury per se but a particular literary type: the self-regarding, performatively progressive, smugly superior set. According to Campbell, they were too timid, parasitic and self-involved for genuine engagement with the real world. Instead they construct carefully curated echo chambers where they cosplay as artistic revolutionaries and edgy artistes while toying with allegedly subversive ideas. And when confronted with their own ineffectuality, they retreat into their favorite pastime—malicious gossip.

Campbell skewers this dynamic in a particularly vicious couplet:

Cain had more Christian mercy on his brother
Than literary nancies on each other.

There was, of course, more to Campbell’s fury than just ideological disdain. The Georgiad was, at its heart, an act of revenge. His disgust for England’s literary milieu was fueled as much by personal betrayal as by artistic loathing. He had been cuckolded, humiliated—and now he would have his say.

“Dinner, most ancient of the Georgian rites,
The noisy prelude of loquacious nights,
At the mere sound of whose unholy gong
The wagging tongue feels resolute and strong,
Senate of boors and parliament of fools,
Where gossip in her native empire rules…”

That was Campbell’s verdict on a group with whom, initially, he had meant to be on friendly terms.

“The Stately Homes of England ope their doors
To piping Nancy-boys and crashing Bores,
Where for week-ends the scavengers of letters
Convene to chew the fat about their betters—”

But, What If?

Of course, there’s always another perspective. Writing in 1958, after Campbell was dead, Harold Nicolson offered his own version of events:

The current legend is that out of charity we lent him the gardener’s cottage… That we introduced him to several of our literary friends… That some of these friends, notably Raymond Mortimer and Edward Sackville-West, did not pay sufficient attention to the Campbells… That Roy Campbell was incensed… and thereafter revenged himself on all of us in The Georgiad.

So there you have it: Campbell was boorish, unsophisticated, and therefore ungrateful and vengeful.

In his autobiography Broken Record (1934). Campbell defends himself against the various charges;

I have been accused of a thousand crimes in representing modern England in my Georgiad; and of attitudes I have never taken, such as (for instance) moral indignation about ‘nancies’. After writing the Georgiad, I had seventy anonymous letters from them: accusing me of sinning against the laws of hospitality, ‘hitting below the belt’, ‘letting the cat out of the bag’, and exaggeration. In the first place, I only object to ‘nancydom’ as the badge of the paid literary flunkey. My attitude to my lively hero Androgyno is one of affection, and I have lived among sailors from my earliest youth. As for sinning against any laws of hospitality, it was simply the sort of ‘walk into my parlour’ hospitality of the spider to the fly….

So there you have it – the Nicolsons engaged in entrapment which justified his attack and his homophobic verses are OK because some of his best friends were nancies, well sailors!

Communists, Fascists, War, Poets, Brawls

Of course there were other fights ahead The Spanish Civil war looms and Campbell takes on the Communists in the Spanish Civil War in The Flowering Rifle (1939), 

“And whether it would better them or not,
Upon all others would impose his lot:
To figures who would subjugate our souls,
And hold a meeting when the tempest rolls,
By dead statistics would control a city
And run a battleship with a committee:
Though through the world wherever he prevailed,
His meddlesome experiments have failed …”

And we haven’t even got to his contempt for, and feud with, the 

“fat snuggery of Auden, Spender, 
and others of the selfsame breed and gender…”

…but that’s for another post.

Literal bloody noses ahead.

Meanwhile,  it’s almost Spring!

Notes:

Peter Alexander: Roy Campbell: A critical biography
Roy Campbell, the Collected poems
Joe R. Christopher, Roy Campbell and the Inklings
Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell
Robert Richman, The Case of Roy Campbell 

Spring photos of Wave Hill and Morningside Drive in NYC.