My obsession with Roy Campbell,
Playwright Anthony Akerman describes his long journey with the controversial poet, from writing a celebrated
I’d been in England for a year and had just started experiencing the first pangs of homesickness when a South African friend lent me Roy Campbell’s Light on a Dark Horse. Campbell believed the only writing deserving of that name was poetry – and referred dismissively to his autobiography as an “autobuggeroffery”.
It’s a swashbuckling narrative, full of transparently improbable tall stories and achingly beautiful evocations of Africa that enhanced, rather than assuaged, my homesickness.
Campbell was a contradictory figure. He was – in the words of the South African poet David Wright – “among cowboys a poet and among poets a cowboy”.
He was also no stranger to controversy. As a convert to Catholicism in the 1930s, he sided with the church – and therefore Franco – during the Spanish Civil War. For this, he was labelled a fascist by the left-wing English poets Louis Macneice, Stephen Spender, WH Auden and Cecil Day-lewis.
Not one of these “fire-eating belligerents”, as Campbell labelled them, had been on active service during World War 2, whereas Campbell had volunteered. In retaliation, he created the portmanteau name Macspaunday for the four of them, but he had a particular score to settle with Spender.
A few months before I was born in 1949, Campbell heard that Spender was going to be reading some of his verses for the Poetry Society at the Ethical Church in Bayswater, London, and decided to denounce his detractor. Fortified by more than a few drinks, he and several friends arrived at the venue.
Campbell got to his feet, registered his protest “on behalf of the Sergeants’ Mess of the King’s African Rifles” and advanced on the stage. The audience could have been forgiven for thinking they were watching a French farce when Campbell flung open a door he thought would give him access to the stage and found himself limping off towards the lavatory. Yelling curses, he doubled back, climbed up on the stage and took a swipe at Spender. The blow clipped Spender’s nose, which began bleeding profusely.
When Campbell stomped off, shouting – in Spender’s version – “He’s a fucking lesbian”, the organiser of the event offered to call the police. Spender demurred, saying: “He is a great poet; he is a great poet. We must try to understand.”
I hadn’t heard this story when I was introduced to Spender at Poetry International in Rotterdam. That was in 1982, the year Peter Alexander’s Campbell biography appeared. In it, he retells this story and, for the first time, went public with another – a story Campbell had done his best to suppress since 1927.
It was an event that, according to Alexander, “scarred the poet’s mind and affected his verse to the end of his life”. When Campbell’s wife, Mary, told him what was going on, he caught the train to London, no doubt intent on getting blotto, and bumped into the author CS Lewis in a pub.
They were only slightly acquainted, but Campbell felt the need to unburden himself. After he’d done so, Lewis remarked: “Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!”
Mary had fallen in love with their hostess, Vita Sackville-west, and it would have destroyed the Campbells’ marriage had the predatory Vita not tired of Mary and moved on to her next sexual conquest.
I felt an affinity with Campbell. We’d both been born in Durban, had grown up in Natal, had left the country as young men and – albeit for different reasons – had lived in exile. Mary disliked South Africa and, after their 1925/26 sojourn, would never return. Apart from three brief subsequent visits, Campbell never saw his home again.
During the war, he was shipped out to serve in East Africa and docked in Durban on the outbound and homebound journeys. In 1954, he flew out to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Natal. On that trip, his brother George drove him out to visit their mother in Botha’s Hill and passed my parents’ home in Hillcrest while I was playing cowboys and crooks. If I’d been hiding near the stone gatepost with my cap gun, I might have seen him driving past.
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When Mary wouldn’t give up Vita, Campbell fled to Provence. She eventually joined him. From there the family moved to Spain, where they converted to Catholicism. Campbell believed that saved their marriage.
In what the writer Laurie Lee described in the 1930s as Campbell’s “expatriate heart”, he remained unalterably South African. Paradoxically, the longer he was away from home, the more pronounced his South African accent became.
Alan Paton believed his prolonged absence from home adversely affected his poetry. After his death, Mary showed Paton – who at the time was contemplating writing Campbell’s biography – notebooks kept during his final years. Paton concluded they were “the notebooks of a man who wants to write and cannot”. They were strewn with unfinished fragments, attempts to conjure up the lost Eden of his childhood.
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He remained unalterably South African. Paradoxically, the longer he was away from home, the more pronounced his South African
accent became
In 1957, the Campbells spent Holy Week in Seville. Driving back, just south of Setúbal in Portugal, a front tyre burst, their Fiat 600 crashed into a tree and, by the time he and Mary had been dragged from the smoking wreck, Campbell was dead. He was 56. He was buried in São Pedro cemetery.
By mid-1988, I’d started making notes towards a play about Campbell. A year later, I still hadn’t settled on my story, but I knew the heart of it would be a love story. That’s something else I had in common with Camp