Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  Art is not developed by a lot of long-haired fools in velvet jackets. It develops itself and pulls those fools wherever it wants them to go . . . Futurism is the reaction caused by the faintness, the morbid wistfulness of the symbolists. It is hard, cruel, and glaring, but always robust and healthy.

  It is art pulling itself together for another tremendous fight against annihilation. It is wild, distorted, and ugly, like a wrestler coming back for a last tussle against his opponent. The muscles are contorted and rugged, the eyes bulge, and the legs stagger. But there it is, and it has won the victory.[446]

  Campbell escaped from England’s “drabness” to Provence where he worked on fishing boats and picked grapes. Despite his agnosticism, he was impressed by the simple faith of the peasants and the fishermen with whom he worked, and started writing poems of a religious nature such as Saint Peter of the Three Canals—The Fisher’s Prayer, which took ten years—beginning in 1920—to complete, and portrays Campbell’s spiritual odyssey. He returned to London in 1921, married Mary Garman, and became highly regarded among the Bloomsbury coterie, who were impressed with his rough manners and hard drinking.

  His wife inspired his first epic poem The Flaming Terrapin, written while the couple lived for over a year in a remote Welsh village where their first daughter was born. T. E. Lawrence was immediately impressed with the poem and took it to Jonathan Cape for publication.[447] This established Campbell’s reputation as a poet.

  Nietzsche, Christ, & the Heroic Poet

  The Flaming Terrapin is a combination of Christianity and Nietzsche. In a letter to his parents, Campbell sought to explain the symbolism as being founded on Christ’s statements: “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire” (Matthew 7: 19) and “Ye are the salt of the earth: but if that salt shall have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is henceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men” (Matthew 5: 13).

  Campbell now realized that Christ was the first to “proclaim the doctrine of heredity and survival of the fittest,” and that his “aristocratic outlook” was misunderstood by Nietzsche as being a religion of the weak. World War I had destroyed the best breeding stock and demoralized humanity. The Russians, for example, had succumbed to Bolshevism. But Campbell hoped that a portion might become ennobled from the suffering.[448]

  He continued to explain that the deluge in The Flaming Terrapin represents the World War and that Noah’s family represents “the survival of the fittest,” triumphing over the terrors of the storm to colonize the earth. The terrapin in Eastern tradition is the tortoise that represents “strength, longevity, endurance, and courage” and is the symbol of the universe. It is this “flaming terrapin” that tows the Ark, and wherever he crawls upon the earth, creation blossoms forth. He is “masculine energy,” and where his voice roars man springs forth from the soil. His acts of creation are born from “action and flesh in one clean fusion.”[449]

  The poem, published in 1924 in Britain and the United States, received critical acclaim from the press as a fresh and youthful breath, as breaking free from both the banalities of the past and from the skeptical nihilism of the new generation.

  Campbell and his family returned to South Africa where he was welcomed as a celebrity. Campbell lectured on Nietzsche, praising Nietzsche’s condemnation of the meanness of modern democracy.[450] He also started expressing a life-long neo-Luddite attitude to technology:

  Our progress in mechanical science during the last century has so far outpaced the development of our intellectual and moral faculties that we have suddenly lost ourselves. All those useful mechanical toys which man primarily invented for his own convenience have begun to tyrannize every moment of his life . . .[451]

  This was a theme that concerned Campbell throughout his life. In a poem written a year later entitled “The Serf,” Campbell proclaimed the tiller of the soil as “timeless” as he “ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.” The tiller of the soil, states a hopeful Campbell, endures through eternity while the cycles of history rise and fall around him. This gives a sense of permanence in a constantly shifting world. It is a theme shared by other literati of the time, in particular Knut Hamsun and Henry Williamson.

  His poem in honor of his wife, “Dedication to Mary Campbell,” is Nietzschean in theme but also a criticism of his fellow South Africans, referring to the poet as “living by sterner laws,” as not concerned with their commerce, and as worshipping a god “superbly stronger than their own.”

  Estranged from South Africans

  In 1925 Campbell became editor of Voorslag[452] and was closely associated with William Plomer whose first novel, Turbott Wolfe, involves interracial marriage. However, despite their friendship and Campbell’s disdain for the racial situation in South Africa, he reviewed Plomer’s novel and found it to have “a very strong bias against the white colonists.” Nevertheless, Campbell was not impressed by what he considered as white South Africa, “reclining blissfully in a grocer’s paradise on the labor of the natives.”[453]

  Some of Campbell’s poems written in South Africa at this time are considered to be among his best. “To a Pet Cobra” returns to Nietzschean themes, describing poets in heroic terms, the Zarathustrian solitary atop the mountain peaks:

  There shines upon the topmost peak of peril

  There is not joy like them who fight alone

  And in their solitude a tower of pride

  Bloomsbury & Provence

  On their return to Britain, Campbell and his wife were introduced to the Bloomsbury coterie, including the poetess Vita Sackville-West, her husband the novelist Harold Nicolson, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Richard Aldington, Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, et al. The robust Campbell found their refined manners, pervasive homosexuality, and pretentiousness sickening, writing in “Home Thoughts on Bloomsbury” that his own voice is the only one he likes to hear when around all the “clever people.”[454]

  It is little wonder that Campbell found such an affinity with the fierce critic of Bloomsbury, Wyndham Lewis, becoming Lewis’ militant defender when Bloomsbury savaged him. Several years later in The Georgiad, Campbell satirizes the dinner parties of Bloomsbury where, wishing to stop the “din” in his “dizzy” head, he imagines stuffing his ears with fish and bread, and wishes the diners would choke on their food so that their chattering would cease.[455]

  To septuagenarian Peter-Pans,

  To Bloomsburies, to Fabians, to Sissies,

  To swotters-up of philosophic blisses,

  To busybodies of the wagging tongue

  And all whose follies have remained unsung,

  Some of whom are good fellows, I admit,

  And gain in niceness what they lack in wit:

  But whose collective dictatorial rule

  Would wake the devil in the tamest mule . . .

  . . . Our whole identity into one same

  Class, sex, community, where even name

  And all distinctions in the dust shall slumber . . .

  . . . When prudery, anonymity, and chat

  Have killed all difference between this and that . . .[456]

  In 1928 the Campbells returned to Provence. The atmosphere was altogether different from England’s wealthy socialist intelligentsia, from whom he sought escape. The Campbells fully involved themselves in the community, celebrated the harvest feasts, and welcomed the local folk into their home. Campbell became a celebrated figure in the dangerous sport of “water jousting.”[457] He also assisted in the ring at bullfights. In the customs and culture of the Provençal villagers, he found a stability and permanence in a changing world obsessed by science and “progress.” His own aesthetics, at the basis of his rejection of liberalism and socialism, was a synthesis of the romanticism of Provence and the classicism of the Greco-Roma
ns. He admired Caesar and the stoicism and martial ethos of the ancients. His ideal was a combination of aesthete and athlete.

  In Taurine Provence, which his publisher described as the “philosophy, technique, and religion of the bullfighter,”[458] Campbell writes of this: “So men in whom the heroic principle works will be driven by their very excess of vitality to flaunt their defiance in the face of death or danger, as in the modern arena.”[459]

  Campbell, freed from the English intelligentsia, now renewed his attack with fury. In an essay on contemporary poetry published in Scrutinies, he states that the dominant philosophy of the contemporary writer is dictated more by “fear of discomfort, excitement, or pain than by love of life.”[460] His attack on the “sex-socialism” of Bloomsbury as being flabby and effete is contrasted with his own robust nature that could not fit in with the simpering and decadent atmosphere of the intellectual salon.

  Following on from Wyndham Lewis’ scathing attack on Bloomsbury, The Apes of God, which Campbell enjoyed immensely, Campbell wrote his own broadside, The Georgiad. This would bring down on him the same mixture of condemnation and silence that the intellectual coterie had used against Wyndham Lewis.

  Not surprisingly, Campbell relished being Lewis’ literary “bodyguard.” After the Bloomsbury literary boycott in response to The Apes of God, Campbell wrote “Wyndham Lewis: An Essay,” but this too was boycotted and was not published until recently. In this essay, Campbell sets out to explain and defend the key polemical positions of Lewis’ books. He describes Lewis’ Paleface, an attack on D. H. Lawrence’s revival of the “cult of the primitive,” as “scrupulously fair,” Lewis and Campbell considering Lawrence to have launched a literary attack on “the consciousness of the European white, [which] exalts the blind tom-tom beating instincts of the savage.”[461] Paleface moreover should be read in conjunction with Lewis’ book Hitler, where Lewis shows that the “racial solution of Hitlerism should not entirely be despised (if not necessarily to be swallowed whole),” whereas the revival of the utopian preconceptions about the noble savage from the eighteenth century is “an entirely despicable and crass form of sentimentality.”[462]

  The 1918 novel Tarr, in which Lewis satirizes Parisian bohemia, is described by Campbell as “prophetic and inspired.”[463] Campbell characterized The Art of Being Ruled as:

  . . . a colossal work which focuses from an entirely new point of view the whole modern social world in a state of transition, and the whole history of the modern social revolution from the time of Rousseau. . . . the liberal-democratic European idea is doomed, for in its tendency towards petty franchises and nationalisms and in its superficial idea of “freedom,” it is anarchistically hostile to the organization of the white race as a whole, and is one of the chief causes of the decline of European power.[464]

  Campbell also takes up the theme of the nature of liberal-democracy and plutocracy in describing Doom of Youth where, as Campbell puts it, “it is ‘big business’ that rules the state”:

  Instead of centralising itself in the state it rules the masses impersonally and indirectly through the Press, which for all the “freedom” and “independence” of the individual, democracy can turn him into cannon-fodder in two seconds. . . . Big business, of course, with the gradual unification of trusts and cartels, becomes more and more like a dictatorial government, as in the bolshevik state—but not being identified with the life of the state, it operates independently of the welfare of the state, and quite irresponsibly . . .[465]

  As for Bloomsbury, The Apes of God “crashes finally and triumphantly through the barriers of modern social and literary shams.”[466] Although the essay was not published during Campbell’s lifetime, his defense of Lewis was still costly to Campbell’s career.

  Bulwark of Christendom

  In 1933 the Campbells left Provence for Spain due to financial hardship, despite the success of Campbell’s acclaimed volume of poems, Adamastor. This was the final work to be well-received by the Bloomsbury crowd, while The Georgiad was met by a “conspiracy of silence,” as the Times Literary Supplement would recall in 1950.

  The Campbells arrived in Barcelona, where a right-wing electoral victory resulted in strikes and violence by the anarchists and machine guns were much in evidence on the streets. However, the Campbells were greatly impressed by the traditional Catholic culture.

  Campbell described himself for the first time as a “Catholic” in his 1933 autobiography Broken Record, attacking both English Protestantism as “a cowardly form of atheism” and the Freudianism that pervaded the Bloomsbury progressives. He contrasted this with the “traditional human values” that continued to form the basis of Spanish culture. Broken Record was a break with modernism, Campbell writing: “The modern healer, who has usually more interest in, and sympathy with, the disease than the patient, spreads about ten infections for every one he cures, and invents ten chemical poisons for every cure.”[467]

  Despite the reference to Catholicism, Campbell had not yet converted, but spiritual questions had long occupied him. An interest in Mithraism had emerged in Provence, where traces of the cult still remained. Mithraism was the religion most favored by the Roman legions. Its strong martial ethos, together with the mythos of the slaying of the bull,[468] appealed to Campbell.[469]

  However, he had also been strongly impressed with the faith and traditionalism of the fishermen and farmers among whom he had been so popular in Provence. His Mithraic Sonnets are a reflection of Campbell’s own spiritual odyssey, beginning with Mithras and ending with the triumph of Christ, a mixture of the two religions. The Mithraic conquering sun, Sol Invictus, the byword of the Roman legions, becomes transmogrified as the Sun of the Son of God, “the shining orb” reflecting as a mirrored shield the image of Christ.[470]

  It is with these vague feelings towards Christianity and Catholic culture that the Campbells moved south to the rural village of Altea in 1934. Campbell continued to sing the praises of Catholicism in martial terms, of the solar Christ as the “Captain” winning the battle of faith. Spain breathed the martial Catholic tradition, and in The Fight Campbell writes of an aerial dogfight for his soul, his “red self” of atheism shot down by the “white self” of the Solar Christ, “the unknown pilot.” At Altea, Campbell was again impressed with the “freshness, bravery, and reverence” of the people. In this atmosphere, Campbell’s whole family—actually at the initiative of his wife—converted to Catholicism in 1935 and were received by the village priest Father Gregorio.[471]

  Campbell’s daughter Anna related many years later that for her father, Spain was the last country left in Europe that was still a pastoral society while much of the rest had become industrialized under the influence of Protestantism. Such was Campbell’s aversion to machinery that he never used a typewriter or learned to drive.[472]

  At this time Campbell wrote “Rust,” the rust of time that brings ruin to the intentions of those who would industrialize and modernize:

  So there, and there it gnaws, the Rust,

  Shall grind their pylons into dust . . .

  Lackeys of Capitalism

  Campbell’s political outlook becomes coherent with his religious conversion. An article published in 1935 in the South African magazine The Critic shows just how clear Campbell’s knowledge of politics now was:

  The artist as romantic “rebel” is the tamest mule imaginable. He dates from the industrial era and has been politicized to play into the hands of the great syndicates and cartels. First by dogmatizing immorality, breaking up the “Family,” that one definitive unit that has withstood the whole effort of centuries to enslave, dehumanize, and mechanize the individual, thereby cheapening and multiplying labour. It is the “Intellectual” which had been chiefly politicized into selling his fellow mates to capitalism, whether the capitalism be disguised as a vast inhuman state[473] or whether a gang of individuals. The last century has seen mo
re class-wars, and wars between generations, than any other period. They have been deliberately fostered by capitalism, of which bolshevism is merely an anonymous form.[474] Divide and rule, said Cicero: encourage your slaves to quarrel and your authority will be supreme. A thousand artists and reformers with the highest ideals have leaped ignorantly and romantically into these rackets, and by means of causing hate between man and woman, father and son, class and class, white and black, almost irretrievably embroiled the human individual in profitless, exhausting struggles which leave him at the mercy of the unscrupulous few.[475]