Background
Roy Campbell was born on the 2nd of October 1901 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was the son of Samuel George who was a physician and Margaret (Wylie Dunnachie), Campbell.
Roy Campbell was born on the 2nd of October 1901 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He was the son of Samuel George who was a physician and Margaret (Wylie Dunnachie), Campbell.
Roy Campbell attended Natal University College in Durban in 1917-18. He studied at Merton College in Oxford in 1919-20.
While living in a small converted stable on the coast of North Wales, Campbell completed his first long poem, The Flaming Terrapin, a humanistic allegory of the rejuvenation of man projected in episodes. It was published in 1924.
Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started Voorslag, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the Afrikaans word voorslag) on South African colonial society, which he considered backward and inbred. Before the magazine was launched, he invited William Plomer to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post was invited to become Afrikaans editor of Voorslag. Campbell lasted as the magazine's editor for three issues but then resigned because of interference from the magazine's proprietor, Lewis Reynolds; Reynolds reacted against Campbell's negative comments about colonial South Africa and informed him that he would remove some of his editorial control over the content of Voorslag. Campbell moved back to England in 1927. While still in South Africa, he had written The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in rhyming couplets, on the racism and other cultural shortcomings of South Africa. It was published in 1928.
The Campbells moved to Provence in the early 1930s. The French period saw the publication of, among other writings, Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography, Broken Record (1934). In 1932, the Campbells retained the Afrikaner poet Uys Krige as tutor to Tess and Anna.
Campbell's vocal attacks upon the Marxism and Freudianism popular among the British intelligentsia caused him to be a controversial figure during his own lifetime.
It has been suggested by some critics that his support for Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War has caused him to be labelled politically incorrect and blacklisted from modern poetry anthologies.
Roy Campbell was married to Mary Margaret Garman who was an art student in 1922. They had children: Teresa and Anna.