Literary Giants Literary Catholics

by Joseph Pearce

  Durrell was wrong, however, when he wrote that “his politics became a faith”. It would be much truer to say that Campbell’s faith became his politics. In being received into the Church, he had grafted himself onto Catholic Spain, and his politics thereafter would be determined by his desire to defend Catholic Spain from her enemies. In fundamental political terms, he perceived the Church as the defender of the integrity of the family against those “rebels”, anarchist or communist, who sought the family’s disintegration. For Campbell, the “Heart of Rome” and “hearth and home” were one and indivisible.

  In March 1936 the anticlerical contagion spreading across Spain reached the streets of Toledo, the ancient city in which the Campbells had made their home. Churches were burned in a series of violent riots in which priests and monks were attacked. During these bloody disturbances, Roy and Mary Campbell sheltered in their house several of the Carmelite monks from the neighboring monastery. In the following weeks, the situation worsened. Portraits of Marx and Lenin were posted on every street corner, and horrific tales began to filter in from surrounding villages of priests being shot and wealthy men being butchered in front of their families. Toledo’s beleaguered Christians braced themselves for the next wave of persecution, and the Campbells, in an atmosphere that must have seemed eerily reminiscent of the clandestine gatherings of early Christians in the catacombs of Rome, were confirmed in a secret ceremony, before dawn, by Cardinal Goma, the elderly Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain.

  In July 1936 the civil war erupted onto the streets of Toledo, heralded by the arrival in the city of communist militiamen from Madrid. With no one to defend them, the priests, monks and nuns fell prey to the hatred of their adversaries. The seventeen monks from the Carmelite monastery were rounded up, herded into the street and shot. Campbell discovered their murdered bodies, left lying where they fell. He also discovered the bodies of other priests lying in the narrow street in which the priests had been murdered. Swarms of flies surrounded their bodies, and scrawled in their blood on the wall was written, “Thus strikes the Cheka”.11 It should also be noted that Father Gregorio, the simple parish priest who had received Roy and Mary Campbell into the Church, was also murdered in cold blood by communist militiamen.

  Having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his friends and acquaintances, it was not likely that Campbell was going to support the cause of the perpetrators. Bearing these horrific facts in mind, it is clearly a gross oversimplification to dismiss Campbell’s stance in the Spanish civil war as evidence that he was a fascist. Such an obvious mitigating circumstance was, however, almost universally overlooked by Campbell’s detractors in England, all of whom appended the “fascist” label to his person, employing it, and the accompanying stereotypical effluvia with which such an epithet is associated, with the cynical glee of seasoned character assassins.

  The overriding irony of the misnomer with which he was shackled is that the protofascist tendencies evident, to a limited degree, in early poems such as The Flaming Terrapin were actually softened, or perhaps even exorcised, by his embrace of Catholic Christianity. His admiration for the cult of Mithras, the religion of the warrior, had been moderated by his acceptance of Christianity, the religion of the slave. The Nietzschean philosophy of “might is right” had been conquered by the Christian concept of the rights of the meek. Thereafter, far from being a believer in totalitarianism, Campbell’s politics reflected the social vision of the Catholic Church, particularly in relation to the Church’s teaching on “subsidiarity”, the sociopolitical belief that the family should be the most powerful institution in society and that, in consequence, small government and small business is preferable to big government and big business. Subsidiarity emphasizes that power should be devolved upward from the family, not imposed downward by the state. This, surely, is the very antithesis of, and antidote to, “fascism” in either its national socialist or international socialist variations.

  Campbell encapsulated his adherence to subsidiarity in his invention of a humorously apposite neologism: “fascidemocshevism”.12 Coined as a criticism of the whole concept of the postwar vision of the welfare state, Campbell insisted that such unwarranted state intervention in people’s lives constituted a combination of fascism and bolshevism under the guise of democracy. It can be seen, therefore, that, far from being a fascist, Campbell deserves a place of honor among those other writers of the twentieth century who have espoused the cause of the political liberty of the family against the encroachments of the state. Others who shared Campbell’s subsidiarist vision include Eliot, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh, Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, all of whom, with the exception of Orwell, shared Campbell’s Christian religion as well as his Christian politics. Campbell is, therefore, in illustrious company. He is not, however, a pygmy among giants. On the contrary, he deserves to be seen as a giant in his own right. Few artists, even among those just named, have more successfully united the art of politics with the politics of art. Few artists have shown more successfully the subservience of politics and art to religion. Few artists of such stature have been so maligned and treated so unjustly. Few artists that have shone so brightly have been eclipsed so shamefully. An eclipse is, however, a transitory phenomenon. It is to be hoped that this great poet of the sun will emerge from the shadow of lesser lights and that, having done so, his art, his religion and his politics will shine forth more brightly than ever.

  24

  _____

  CAMPBELL IN SPAIN

  Outside, it froze. On rocky arms

  Sleeping face-upwards to the sun

  Lay Spain. Her golden hair was spun

  From sky to sky. Her mighty charms

  Breathed soft beneath her robe of farms

  And gardens: while her snowy breasts,

  Sierras white, with crimson crests,

  Were stained with sunset.1

  MORE THAN MOST MEN, more even than most poets, Roy Campbell was a paradox. He was at once rooted and rootless; at home and in exile. These apparent contradictions were, however, not in conflict. On the contrary, they were in creative and harmonious tension, the apparent rootlessness of his wanderlusting spirit serving merely to emphasize the rootedness of his creative imagination. Enigmatically, and sometimes ironically, the counterpoise was the very cause of his muse’s counterpoint.

  Although Campbell’s multifarious roots were always being uprooted, they were never discarded or left to decay in soilless and soulless isolation. Instead, they were taken with him on his wanderings and replanted in whatever new soil he happened to find himself. What, then, were Campbell’s roots?

  Born into the culturally exotic catalyst of Durban in South Africa, he imbibed the Celtic legacy of his family’s Scottish ancestors, the colonial privileges of his family’s social status and the tribal traditions of his family’s African servants. From thence, enamored of the colonial predilection for the motherland, he drifted from Africa to England and, disillusioned, drifted back again. Then, having rebelled against the white South Africa of his birth, he rebounded back once more to England. His disillusionment with all things Anglo-Saxon was soured still further by his disgusted rejection of the psychosexual babble of the Bloomsbury circle, and retreating to the rustic simplicity and sanity of Provence, he discovered, for the first time, Catholic Europe. Here, for a while, his restive spirit found rest. It was not, however, until he arrived in Spain in November 1933 that the poet finally felt that he had found a true home.

  “The impact of Spain on Roy was profound”, wrote Campbell’s daughter, Anna Campbell Lyle. “He was quite unprepared for this impact, this deep new experience, and it had a lasting effect. The romantic in his personality was stirred and awakened”.2 To take issue with the last part of Mrs. Campbell Lyle’s statement, it is patently untrue that Campbell’s romantic personality had not been stirred and awakened long before his arrival in Spain. His African poems, such as “The Serf” and “The Sisters”, resonate and ripple with romantic
intensity, whereas the Provencal poetry overflows with the stirrings of a fully awakened romantic personality, most notably perhaps in “Mass at Dawn”, “Autumn” and “Choosing a Mast”. Yet his daughter’s observations are true in the sense that the impact of Spain on Campbell’s psyche was more profound and more permanent than any of his previous experiences. The romantic in his personality had never been as stirred, nor had it been as startlingly awakened. Take, for instance, the erotically charged imagery of “Posada”, a sensual hymn of praise to a supine seductress of superlative beauty, reclining in primeval splendor. Seldom has a Spanish lady been courted so eloquently. Yet the object of this particular hymn of praise is no ordinary Spanish lady but Lady Spain herself. It is a hymn in homage to Campbell’s adopted home.

  How, then, did this love affair begin? It began, perhaps unpromisingly, in an atmosphere of surreal uncertainty accentuated by real and threatened violence. Roy and Mary Campbell arrived in Barcelona at the height of the anarchist unrest that followed the right-wing victory in the recent elections. The abortive “revolution” was at its most violent in the Barrio Chino, the prostitutes’ quarter of the city, where the Campbells had found rooms in a tenement. “The worst part of the ‘revolution’ was in this and the adjoining street”, Campbell reported to his friend C. J. Sibbett soon after their arrival. “Machine guns were posted at every corner and we had to keep indoors after dark.”3 At the height of the violence, a bomb exploded about two hundred yards from where the Campbells were staying, shaking the doors and windows of their apartment. “The anarchists have made their bombs so badly that they either were duds or when they did go off it was generally during their manufacture—blowing up a posse of anarchists, which discouraged them rather. The only serious tragedy was the derailment of the Seville express by a bomb.” 4

  This baptism of fire seemed to have inflamed Campbell’s passion for Spain and its people. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis, he described Barcelona as “a fine place . . . full of dancing girls”.5 To Sibbett he wrote that it was “the strangest town I have seen, the most extraordinary clash of modern and ancient”. The city was “seething with politics and strikes. . . . For the Catalonians, as with the Irish, politics is a national industry.”6 Yet, if politics was their national industry, the national religion of the Catalonians, as with the Irish, was Catholicism. Thus the “extraordinary clash of modern and ancient” was a clash between modern ideologies, such as communism, anarchism and fascism, and the ancient faith of the Spanish people. The impact of the latter on Campbell and his family was exemplified by Anna Campbell Lyle’s memories of her first impressions of Barcelona:

  The quantity of churches was a surprise and the fact that they were usually full at least twice a day. Their bells were a delight. Such a variety ringing for so many different services. Such a variety of different tolls and pitches ringing all through the day for Mass, for Benediction, for the dead and for the Angelus. The Angelus ringing every six hours in memory of Our Lady and to venerate her with a short prayer was especially beautiful, especially when heard in the country at some distance from the church when the ringing of the bell was wafted across the fields giving one an ineffable sense of peace and age-old civilization.7

  These words, written many years later and colored by subsequent experience, illustrate nonetheless the real impact that Catholic Christianity exerted on the whole family following their arrival in Spain. The “sense of peace and age-old civilization”, wafting across the fields with the bells of the Angelus, was evocative of the Church at prayer. Its peaceful potency, encapsulated so timelessly in Millet’s famous painting, would prove to be a powerful stimulus to the imagination of both Roy and Mary as Spain seeped ever more deeply into their psyches.

  It is perhaps significant that, in his autobiography, Broken Record, which he wrote in great haste following his arrival in Barcelona, Campbell refers to himself for the first time as a Catholic, although it seems that he does so more as a means of thumbing his nose at English Protestantism than as an affirmation of his own belief in Christian orthodoxy.

  Protestantism is a cowardly sort of Atheism, especially in the anglo-Oxfordish-Henry VIII sense. It has even betrayed great minds like Milton’s, who in Comus attacks female virtue, reducing it to lawcourt, technical terms and destroying the idea of virtue as “value”, charm or valour, in a manner that would make Sappho, Sulpicia, Heloise and the holy Saint Teresa . . . turn somersaults in their graves.

  To read a few pages of Saint Teresa and then turn to this unholy onslaught makes one regret the wreck of the Armada and the loss of the Inquisition.8

  As with so much of his satire, the shrillness of tone and the desire to shock or offend dulls the sharpness of the point he seeks to make, but Campbell’s evident preference for pre-Reformation thought, or what on the following page he terms “traditional human values”, is clear enough. Clearly, in the “clash of modern and ancient”, he is siding resolutely with the latter.

  If the impact of his arrival in Spain had signaled more clearly than ever Campbell’s break with intellectual modernism, he still had no ordered or coherent philosophy with which to counter it. Having diagnosed the disease, he was still uncertain of the cure and was left groping, with little more than fragments of a truth only dimly discerned, with elusive shadows. This groping after the shadows of truth found expression in Mithraic Emblems, a sequence of sonnets that serves to illustrate his spiritual quest from its tentative beginnings in Provence to its final fulfillment under the protective mantle of Lady Spain.

  Campbell’s interest in Mithraism was ignited by his arrival in Provence, a region awash with relics of this ancient religion that, for a time during the declining centuries of the Roman Empire, had struggled with Christianity for the hearts and minds of Europeans. As a religion that valued strength and nobility over meekness and humility, Mithraism was seen as the religion of the soldier, whereas Christianity was seen as the religion of the slave. For Campbell, who greatly admired Julius Caesar and the martial spirit of Rome Triumphant, Mithraism seemed a more natural home than Christianity. Interwoven with his preference for the faith of the warrior was his attraction to the myth, rooted in tauromachy, which lay at the heart of Mithraism. The forces of life in Mithraism are symbolized by a wild bull, by which sacrifice Mithras brought forth all the fruits of the earth. In Campbell’s fertile imagination, the courage of the arena took on a mystical transcendence, a ritualistic reenactment of the sacrificial miracle of life. The bullfight was more than a mere sport: it was a spiritual sacrifice.

  This potent imagery, reinforced by the Mithraic worship of the light-and life-giving power of the sun, combined to form the catalytic inspiration for the sonnets. The sense of obscurantism and obliqueness that pervades the sonnets is heightened by the overlaying of other Mithraic emblems, such as the image of the raven as a messenger of the Sun God, and the snake and the scorpion as images of the hateful designs of the Evil One. To complicate matters still further, Campbell christens his Mithraism with specifically Catholic imagery, such as the “seven sorrowful swords” that pierced the heart of the Blessed Virgin during the Passion of her Son.

  The towering influence of Saint John of the Cross, the great Spanish poet, mystic and doctor of the Church, emerges as a herald of divine revelations, a surrogate Saint John the Baptist preparing the way for the coming of Christ. At the end of the sequence, Mithras himself speaks, confessing that he, the god identified with the sun, is but a servant of the one true God.

  We work for the same Boss

  though you are earth and I a star,

  and herdsmen both, though my guitar

  is strung to strum the world across!

  He, Mithras, serves the same God as does the poet, the God who won His victory on the Cross. In the final sonnet, addressed “To the Sun”, the poet affirms his unequivocal embrace of Christian faith.

  The twenty-three sonnets that comprise the Mithraic Emblems clearly represent the story of a spiritual conversion. Beginning with th
e seeds of Mithraic uncertainty planted in Provence, the soul’s transformation would finally bear Christian fruit in the fertile, faithful soil of Spain. The sonnets serve as living proof that the arrival of Roy and Mary Campbell in Spain was crucial to their conversion.

  Years later, with the advantage of hindsight, Campbell rationalized, in typically uncompromising style, the nature of Spain’s importance to him and his wife.

  Protestants go to these countries for spiritual fresh air, yet . . . they ascribe the attraction, which is really that of the Church and the people who have not been amputated from the Church by force of tyrants like Henry VIII, or crooks like Calvin and Luther—to the climate or the landscape, or to anything else save in the culture and civilization which hold them spellbound . . . They would sooner join with atheists and diabolists. . . than with anything straightforwardly European or Roman, though they will hang around a place like Spain for whatever by-products of the Catholic faith they can pick up buckshee, without any responsibilities—the courtesy, hospitality, and nobility of the people.

  From the very beginning my wife and I understood the real issues in Spain. There could be no compromise . . . between the East and the West, between Credulity and Faith, between irresponsible innovation . . . and tradition, between the emotions (disguised as Reason) and the intelligence.9

  It is clear from this robust defense of the Catholic faith that Campbell considered Catholicism to be the antidote to the “psychic miasma” that he had sought to confront, somewhat inarticulately, in Broken Record and in his earlier verse satire The Georgiad. The Church to which he was to offer his allegiance was very much the Church Militant, waging war on the intellectual modernism that he despised. Until their arrival in Spain, he and Mary had been “vaguely and vacillatingly Anglo-Catholic . . . but now was the time to decide whether. . . to remain half-apathetic to the great fight which was obviously approaching—or whether we should step into the front ranks of the Regular Army of Christ”.10 Their final decision to be received into the Catholic Church was made in the small village of Altea, squeezed between the mountains and the sea, not far from Alicante. “I don’t think that my family and I were converted by any event at any given moment”, Campbell wrote later. “We lived for a time on a small farm in the sierras at Altea where the working people were mostly good Catholics, and there was such a fragrance and freshness in their life, in their bravery, in their reverence, that it took hold of us all imperceptibly.”11 Presenting themselves to Father Gregorio, the village priest, Roy and Mary requested instruction for themselves and for their two daughters, Teresa and Anna. According to Teresa, the decision had “a profound influence on our lives and filled an abysmal vacuum”.12