Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell

Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell.  By Joseph Pearce. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2004.

 

Unafraid of Virginia Woolf is a biography of the British poet Roy Campbell, as well as a portrait of the Spanish Revolution and the ensuing persecutions of Catholics during that time.  Joseph Pearce has made a career of exploring Catholicism in literature, as well as bringing heretofore obscure aspects of religious history to his readers.  This book was originally published in England under the title Bloomsbury and Beyond.  The new title is better.

 

Early in his career, Campbell was a golden boy in British literary circles, and was taken into the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.  Campbell renounced this privileged position after his wife was seduced by Vita Sackville-West, the noted author and Virginia Woolf’s mistress.  Campbell fled England with his wife and daughters, rebuilt his marriage, experienced a religious crisis, and converted to Roman Catholicism. (113-121) The expatriate poet quickly developed a burning distaste for the pretension and permissiveness he believed that the Bloomsbury Group embodied– and for that matter, all that they desired to accomplish as modernists– and sought to attack them and their ideology in his work.  In his poem The Georgiad, he specifically targeted the Bloomsbury Group, their sexual mores, and their irreligion for satire.  

 

“Nor knew the Greeks, save in the laughing page,

The philosophic emblem of our age,

Whose Hoof is stamped on all, whose voice is law,

Whom every poet serves with reverent awe.

And makes his voice one deafening he-haw,

One loud complaint of devastating grief,

Against his life, his loves, and his beliefs,

Still in his tender disillusion sore

Because, ten years ago, there was a war,

Seeing in all things woes to wound his nerves–

Save in, the damp philosophy he serves.

Which is the fountain-source of all his woes

And yet to which the fool for healing goes.” (167)

 

After the poem was published, it is not surprising that the Bloomsbury Group attacked Campbell.  Their criticisms were much more subtle than Campbell’s jibes at them, however, and they spread false rumors about Campbell’s inferiority complex compared to the rest of Bloomsbury (a lie, Campbell’s ego convinced him that his work was superior than that of anyone else from Bloomsbury), and poorly educated (another fib, Campbell was multilingual and perfectly capable of reading authors the vengeful Bloomsbury authors claimed he could not possibly understand outside of translations). (166)

 

Pearce observes that Campbell’s attack on the Bloomsbury Group, as well as his verbal assaults on other enemies, was notable for its absence of charity and its vitriolic tone.  One of the reasons why Campbell made so many enemies is that he was reluctant to drop grudges and he was able to continually refuel the fires of anger.  Nevertheless, his friendships were often real and lasting, and such as when he befriended the  some of the Inklings; the academic, Christian writers such as J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis who were polar opposites of the Bloomsbury Group.  Campbell made a distinct impression on his similarly-minded friends.  Indeed, Tolkien based the physical description of Strider the Ranger from The Lord of the Rings on Campbell.

 

Pearce describes the turbulent world of the Spanish Civil War.  At that time, the Catholic clergy was specifically targeted for attack by the Republican forces, who intended to erase the influence of the Church from Spain.  An entire monastery of monks who had befriended the Campbell family was killed.  Other members of the clergy would be tortured in sadistic ways, such as by having rosary beads stuffed into their ears.  Twelve bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 monks, and approximately 300 nuns were slaughtered during the war.  The Campbells themselves were nearly killed, but his experiences and the religious lessons he learned during this time would influence his poetry for the rest of his life.

 

In “Mass at Dawn,” an example of Campbell’s religious poetry, Campbell expresses the centrality of religion in his new Catholic worldview.

 

 Mass at Dawn

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines


Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes


In whose great branches, always out of sight,


The nightingales are singing day and night.


Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,


My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,


And silver in my baskets shone the bream:


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.

 

In his essay “Roy Campbell: Bombast and Fire,” (http://www.catholicauthors.com/roy_campbell.html) Pearce writes, “Roy Campbell was considered by many of his peers, most notably by T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Edith Sitwell, as one of the finest poets of the 20th century. Why then, one wonders, is he not as well-known today as many lesser poets? The answer lies in his robust defense of unfashionable causes, both religious and political, but also, and more regrettably, in his unfortunate predilection for making powerful enemies. Seldom has a life been more fiery, more controversial, and more full of friendship and enmity than that of this most mercurial of men.”  

 

Unafraid of Virginia Woolf  is a fascinating look at how religious faith can shape a creative artist’s imagination, as well as heal seemingly irreparable fissions in a marriage.  It also provides an indelible picture of the often-overlooked atrocities that took place during the Spanish Civil War.

 

 

–Chris Chan