Hoy Campbell: the Effect of Ms Political Ideas on Ms Poetry D
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The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals. This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. Hoy Campbell: The Effect of Ms Political Ideas on Ms Poetry D. M. A. F. MIddleton, Freiherr Von der Valkenstein Department of English, University of Rhodesia, Salisbury, It is usual in criticism, especially if the the work appears not to be completely trust- critic disagrees with his subject's views, to dis- worthy, as the following typical example shows: miss a poet's politics as being those of a man A subconscious absenteeism, which has with no grasp of high affairs or the intricacies hypnotic power, camouflages me completely of politics. This, however, is not always a valid ... it was proverbial in the army how I judgement. Yeats and Eliot, for instance, had could stand on parade at Brecon, with faulty coherent views of history and very definite views equipment — without a respirator, or on the as to the future order and conduct of society. day when my rifle was missing — and get away with it.2 Roy Campbell nevertheless would justify the lazy critic. Both in his poetry and in his auto- Nevertheless the evidence of his poetry and biography his political worldview is incoherent the internal consistency of the work with re- and rambling. Yet. however hard it might be gard to his moods and development suggest that to construct a theory from his writings, it must it is accurate enough on his early life. be noted that in his later life he regarded him- In his youth he imbibed his values largely self as a 'committed' poet; a poet who took a from his society. If his values changed later the very definite stand in the controversies that change was in accord both with his nature and aroused the English Literary World of the the values they replaced. He grew up on what 1930s. In the Spanish Civil War he sided with one would call, with some hesitation, the vesti- Franco and wrote Flowering Rifle, a long ges of the English Frontier. It has almost been polemic in defence of the Franco coalition. In common cause (and even a source of pride to addition, if it is remembered that he remains many Anglo-Africans) that no Frontier exper- easily the best poet English-speaking South ience, comparable with the Afrikaners' trek Africa has produced, his views are of some sig- into the far interior, can be found in the life nificance; and it is important to see how his of the English colonists. political beliefs enter into the wider context of his general ethical view, indeed of his whole Recently there has been an attempt on the sensibility, and thus illuminate certain qualities part of Professor Butler of Rhodes University to of his verse. discover such an heritage,3 and the emphasis on the 'Pioneer Column' in teaching history in Of his early life in Natal and Rhodesia the Rhodesian Schools4 is to the same end. Never- only source at the present time is his auto- theless the majority of Anglo-Africans have, in biography Light on a Dark Horse.1 Factually the past at any rate, declined to fabricate or 55 discover such origins, partly through a lack of The Land Grabber material and partly through a fear of appearing or a poet who offered his heart to imitate Afrikaners. Roy Campbell's attitude for a handful of South African soil. towards such an attempt to create an identity, The bargain is fair, the bard is no robber, as can be seen in his ruthless contempt for A handful of dirt for a heartful of slobber.8 contemporary South African writers, would Beneath the joke there is a deadly serious have been the same. Of the novelists he said: point — attachment to the South African soil You praise the firm restraint with which is not fit sentiment for a white man. In his they write — autobiography, when talking of international I'm with you there of course: politics and colour in the post-war world of They use the snaffle and the curb all right, 1945, he says: 'what is really laughable is that But where's the bloody Horse.5 our Afrikaners should be hauled up before Again he will attack the myth of vast open, U.N.O.'9 It is there we have it: 'our Afrikan- spaces, much exploited by early writers and ers' speaks more than could any amount of stemming from the 1820 settler Pringle,6 and exegesis. he frequently showed a contempt for what he In regard to Africans, Campbell's attitude regarded as a provincialism in his own back- has been largely misunderstood. In the period ground. Of this more will be said later. Never- 1925-7 when he and his fellow poet William theless, while, as in the passage just quoted, he Plomer attempted to found their magazine thought nothing to be 'there', it would never Voorslag, there was an uproar mainly on have occurred to him to question that he was account of the critical attitude it evinced to- of pioneer stock; for proof of his pride in the wards what was then called the 'Colour Bar'. part his family played in the European settle- Plomer himself was outspokenly critical especi- ment of Natal, the student need go no further ally in his novel Turbot Wolfe where he advo- than the introduction to his autobiography.7 cated miscegenation as a panacea for South He never called in question certain ideals which Africa's social ills.10 Roy Campbell himself the English colonists believed to be English and never took up so definite a position and any adapted to a rougher environment. His auto- suggestion that he did is entirely due to his biography reveals from his earliest days an ad- association with his friend. It is his autobio- herence to ideals of popular British public graphy11 and the volume Adamastor12 that school fiction: a concept of honour involving provide the evidence of his attitude, rather pride in thrashings both received and meted out, than the shocked gossip of his fellow Natalians. pranks played on people regarded as being un- The African makes few appearances, but pleasant and outside the pale, and a rather they are significant. There had been in the long naive attitude towards women. He has a satirical Wayzgoose (1928) a note of aristo- definite concept of manliness, which manifests cratic contempt for the behaviour of his more itself in the all but interminable descriptions of ignorant countrymen: hunting on land and sea. The implication is Our sturdy pioneers as farmers dwell. always there that a man who does not hunt, And, twixt the hours of strenuous sleep, shoot and (deep sea) fish is probably a Blooms- relax buryite, a Jew, or a communist. To shear the fleeces or to fleece the On the purely political level he denned him- blacks.13 self predictably in his attitude towards the In Adamastor in the poem 'The Pioneers, A Afrikaners and Africans with whom his people Veld Eclogue' he ridicules two poor whites: share the country. The usual English attitude Sometimes with busy twigs they switched towards the Afrikaner was (and to some extent the flies still is) of his being a slightly superior version Or paused to damn a passing nigger's of the native and with whom intermarriage eyes.14 could be permissible under certain special Colour-prejudice is seen as the prerogative of conditions. There is no evidence that Campbell ignorant white trash, but later in the poem we did not fully endorse this attitude. Afrikaners find something a little startling. Campbell is seldom appear in his poems and then only as writing of two rural poor whites, one English figures of fun. In reply to the Afrikaans and one Afrikaner, and he is at pains to tell poet Toon van den Heever, he wrote: 56 Think not that I on racial questions boyhood memories of his autobiography. Speak- touch ing of the suckling child he writes: For one was Durban born, the other ... his flesh imbibes Dutch. Yet an inconsistency follows: An old unquenched unsmotherable I drawn no line between them: for the heat— two The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes, Despise each other and with reason too! The sullen dignity of their defeat. But, in this case, they forgave the sin, Her body looms above him like a hill Each loved his other as a very twin— Within whose shade a village lies at rest, One touch of tar-brush makes the whole Or the first cloud so terrible and still world kin.15 That bears the coming harvest on its Here he has definitely changed his ground breast. and we would know, if we did not already, that These are memorable lines, in itself the the aspersion of coloured blood was an insult poem is splendidly realised and has expressed often used by the prosperous Anglo-African of much of the thought of his contemporaries. But the poor whites. There is nothing for it (especi- still we cannot avoid the impression of an atti- ally in the context of this utterly contemptuous tude struck, the approach of a reporter looking poem) but to read the last line quoted as for good copy rather than a. man giving ex- betraying the assumption that to have coloured pression to a profoundly apprehended vision.