ROY CAMPBELL

Voorslag Days

by

William Plomer

In my book Double Days [1943] I give a brief account of my association with Roy Campbell in Natal in 1925-26, and of our joint efforts in producing the magazine Voorslag. Now that his life is being written and he is being variously recollected, I have been asked to enlarge upon this distant phase of his life and mine.

I must briefly explain how Campbell and I came together. In the year 1925 I was twenty-one years old and running a trading station in Zululand with my father. Neither of these conditions had prevented me from writing a novel, or phantasmagoria, Turbott Wolfe, which bears that date but was in fact not published until early in 1926, because of the printer’s strike. Although isolated, I was not quite cut off. I had read The Flamming Terrapin, and I knew that Campbell was a son of the most eminent doctor in Durban. The poem was too loud for my taste, but I had admired its dash and gusto, and some of its imagery and turns of wit. A mutual acquaintance told me of his return to Durban and urged me to get in touch with him. So on my next visit to Durban I invited Campbell to lunch with me at Twine’s Hotel, where I use to put up. With its shady balconies overlooking the palm trees of the Esplanade---now thronged with cars, but in June 1925, quiet enough for the passing of a rickshaw to be audible---the place had, like the Durban Club next door, an air of Victorian Colonial stateliness.

We got on well, and after lunch we walked on the sand in the Bay, the tide being out, and talked for hours. Campbell’s wife, Mary, joined us in the evening. Among other things, he told me of a projected new literary monthly, to be called Voorslag. I understood that the idea of floating it had originated with Lewis Reynolds, the son of a well-known sugar planter, that a certain Maurice Webb in Durban was to be its business manager, and Campbell its editor. He asked me to help him to produce it, to contribute to it, and to stay with him at Umdoni Park, where he and his wife had been lent a house.

I think it was in September, 1925, that I first went there on a visit. Umdoni Park, at Sezela, on the south coast of Natal, was an estate brelonging to Reynold’s father, who lived, some way inland and away from the canefields, in a house something like a smallish late Victorian country house in England. It was approached by a drive and surrounded by a park, with well kept lawns, spiky palms, and ornamental sub-tropical trees and shrubs---poinsettia, hibiscus, bourgainvillea, and so on. Inside, it was solidly and comfortably furnished: one had an impression of paneling, deep leather chairs, antlers, and cigar smoke. Lewis Reynolds was an amiable young man who had been up at Oxford and later attached to General Smuts as some aide at the Versailles Conference. He collected books, and was a keen reader of Aldous Huxley, who was then in fashion. I remember him, young and boyish-looking, with a new copy of Those Barren Lives in his hand, and speaking appreciatively of the book’s appearance.

Among the features of the estate were a golf course; a hilltop house given by Lewis Reynold’s father to the nation as a holiday residence for tired Prime Ministers; and a swimming pool constructed among the rocks on the seashore. A few hundred yards further south, in the bush above the sandy beach, from which it was separated only by the railway track, stood a bungalow sometimes occupied by a well-known South African painter, Edward Roworth. It was in this house, which I believe had been lent to them by Roworth, that the Campbells and their infant daughter were living. The house had a verandah on three sides, and was built on a seaward slope overlooking the Indian Ocean. There was little or no garden: the house stood in a clearing in the bush, and steps led down in front to the railway line and a path of deep, dry, white sand through the bush to the beach, only a few yards away. It was just an ordinary Natal house of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, with a corrugated iron roof and boarded interior walls covered with shiny khakhi varnish. At a short distance from the house was a rondavel, a round, one-roomed dwelling, which was adapted as a guest-room for me.

Early in 1926 my novel was published in London. It set off a hullaballoo in the South African press, and Campbell wrote to me in Zululand to say that the editor of a Durban newspaper had been seen by Reynolds ‘with his jaws chattering together with rage’ after reading it. But it was I who was the angry young man of that place and period. From the first Campbell was enthusiastic about the book and, I cannot help thinking, more generous in his private and public championing of it than it really deserved. But though immature it was not, as its effects upon various readers showed, insignificant: in fact, it went off like a bomb.

I think it must have been in May, 1926, that I quitted Zululand and went to stay at Umdoni Park and help prepare the mater for Voorslag.
The first number appeared in June. An editorial now compiled I suppose by Reynolds and Webb, explained that it was to be bilingual and to offer ‘an open platform for the consideration of social and political questions free from party or racial prejudice. Campbell contributed a poem, ‘The Albatross’; a long essay on Turbott Wolfe; another (under the name of Mary Ann Hughes) on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and some notes on George Moore, T. S. Eliot, and Sir James Frazer. There was a philosophical essay by General Smuts. And there was fiction, a satirical ballad signed by Pamela Willmore, and a review by myself. I also provided some memories of Van Gogh sent to me by an uncle who had been a fellow student of his at Antwerp in 1885. Finally there was little sottisier of extracts from the South African press.

Nothing remotely like this had ever appeared in South Africa before. It was too much for South Africa at that time---too European, too cultivated, too forceful, too ironical, too direct, too confident, too young, too strange. The journalists were puzzled and alarmed. Dimly conscious that they had made fools of themselves over Turbott Wolfe, they tried to be respectful, to stick to their prejudices, and to hide their ignorance: most of them floundered. Reynolds and Webb were a little rattled. Campbell and I were enjoying ourselves.

Propinquity had brought us together. It is unlikely that we should have been mutually attracted at Oxford or in London, the differences in our backgrounds, temperaments, outlooks, ambitions, and tastes were great. But in South Africa we were isolated, and isolation can be a social cement. We were of about the same age, and both high-spirited. Each was dedicated to the written word, to the recognition and perpetuation of the first-rate in literature, and to the art of creative writing. We liked the same sort of jokes, and agreed that the cultural pretensions of English-speaking South Africa at that time were mostly absurd. Campbell, instantly recognizable as a poet, began to widen and enrich my understanding of poetry. At the same time, an evident intensity in my feelings about racial conflicts in South Africa, and my open sympathy with Africans, was not without its effect, its temporary effect, upon him. This short period of our close association was in fact remarkably fruitful for both Campbell and myself. Every moment seemed fertile. A writer going through a strongly creative phase may find that he develops a more than ordinary power of immediate assimilation. A few words overheard, a chance incident or encounter, a paragraph or even a phrase in some book or newspaper, stray facts or current ideas may hurry forward and offer themselves just when and where they are wanted: earlier or later they might be useless or unnoticed. In this state of acute impressionability the distinction between living and writing seems almost to disappear: every impression, every action, seems integrated in a single function and purpose. So it was with us. And those whom our youthful and headstrong self-confidence exasperated were not soothed by our either ignoring or refusing to take them seriously.

The second number of Voorslag led off with ‘Fetish Worship in South Africa’, a vigorous attack on the colour bar by Campbell. From the same hand, only thinly disguised as that of ‘Lewis Marston’, came an essay on modern poetry, with tributes to Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Rimbaud, and a poem called ‘To a Young Man with Pink Eyes’ caused Lewis Reynolds to ask if it referred to him. Campbell’s contributions were far more striking than mine or anybody else’s.

Annoyance was now caused to us by interference with the editing of the magazine. Textual alterations had been made and extraneous matter introduced without Campbell’s or my permission or knowledge, and it became clear that a sharp divergence of opinion had developed between the editor on the one side and Reynolds and Webb on the other. Campbell wanted a freer hand than they were prepared to give him. He thought them timid, conventional, and provincial; they thought him wild and imprudent. The fact was that two quite different conceptions of the functions of the magazine were now seen to be irreconcilable, and Campbell was not a man dedicated to compromise, but to scorn. Naturally, I was wholly on Campbell’s side of the dispute. It was a matter of total indifference to me whether Voorslag paid its way or not. I believed that it ought to be a medium for original creative and critical writing, not a dulcet dinner-bell regularly summoning old women of both sexes to a lukewarm collation of accepted ideas.

On the 25th July Campbell made it forcefully plain that he would have no more to do with the editing of a magazine which he was not allowed to edit as he thought fit. There was not question of our continuing indefinitely at Sezela as if nothing had gone wrong, and two days later I wrote to Manilal Gandhi, whom I had met at Phoenix, the Tolstoyan settlement founded by his illustrious father, ask if any house there was available for us.

After this, much happened in a short time. Under the stress of friction and uncertainty Campbell’s poetic facilities were very fertile. On the night of the 28th July, just after I had gone in the rondavel, he came hurrying in with the manuscript of ‘The Serf’. He was very excited, and said it was the best thing he had ever done. I think he was right. In the morning I sent a copy of this poem and of ‘The Zulu Girl’ to Leonard Woolf in London so that they could be printed and become known as soon as possible. He arranged for them to be printed in the New Statesman and the Nation---an ironical circumstance, in view of Campbell’s later hostility to all forms of liberal and leftward opinion. On the night of Saturday, 31st July, he finished both ‘To a Pet Cob’ and ‘The Making of a Poet’, and the next day read them all to me. On Thursday, 5th August, I read aloud some passages from a letter addressed to me from Oxford by my schoolfellow D. R. Gillie. In one of them was a translation of part of Kuhleman’s ‘Tristan d’Acunha’. This so enkindled Campbell that he began to write a poem on the same subject. He worked at it all night and brought me the first version just after sunrise. It was not until Saturday, 14th August, that he read me the completed version. He had not in those days the mannered South African accent and read it so well that I was moved to the verge of tears.

Sunday, 29th August, was our last day at Umdoni Park. I had the intention of returning to England with him, but went to Japan instead. I have heard that in later years he pretended to have been left in the lurch, or to face the music. But there was no music. The Voorslag episode was virtually over. Without its motive force and two main contributors it soon dwindled away. Campbell had an idea that he would bring out a successor called Boomslang (The Snake), but it remained unhatched. His final comment on Durban was his satirical Wayzgoose, better humoured than much that he wrote later. Early in 1927 he and his wife and two small daughters left for England.

As I look back I feel justified in saying that Campbell and I do seem to have been the forerunners we felt ourselves to be in those days. Forerunners of what? At least of a stronger consciousness of the functions, status, durability, and influence of imaginative literature than had (for obvious reasons) been previously conspicuous in South Africa---in English-speaking South Africa at least. And forerunners of fine and various efforts made by South African writers to apply the powers of the artist to the hidden forces in the heart as well as the patent conflicts and complexities on the surface of life in their extraordinary country.

In later life Campbell and I were estranged, but from the Voorslag days I retain a clear memory of his poetic energy and of his generous encouragement, like of an older brother, of myself and my work. Before he had read it he expected that Turbott Wolfe would be a milder and politer book than it is. It surprised and impressed him, and when the South African press reacted violently to it, he defended and praised it. The romantic idea of himself as a wronged and persecuted hero already recurred in his writings, and perhaps he did not quite like the idea of my drawing all the fire, so in his ‘Poets of Africa’ we appeared as ‘twin Sebastians’, each in his ‘uniform of darts’. I , who had woken up one morning to find myself notorious, felt that, if I was in fact a martyr, I had had a quite unexpected promotion to the noble army. Until Campbell perceived how violently I had reacted against accepted ideas about what used in those days to be called ‘the Native Question’ he had, I think, tended to share the prevalent white South Africa attitude to the black South African---a mixture of tolerance, contempt, and impercipience, at its extremes extending to brutality in one direction and affection in the other. My obsession with the situation of the black African, whom I had been brought up to regard as a human being with a head and heart and vast potentialities, and whom I had seen frustrated and wronged, did not, I know, leave him uninfluenced, and perhaps attuned itself for a while to his feeling, or attitude, of conscious isolation and pugnacious independence.

Although high-spirited, he was in a state of constant nervous tension, which he called neurasthenia. He seemed much affected by the death of his father, but much more persistently by his environment. His native land had got on his nerves. ‘The whole of this country,’ he said one day, ‘has an acid smell, and all the white people have khaki faces.’ It is the function of a poet to say things for effect, and allowance must be made for that, but when he remarked, on the 18th August, 1926, ‘One must be theatrical at all costs,’ I felt a sudden chill. In view of his already formed habit of rodomontade and fantastication, it seemed a dangerous principle.

This was not a phase of his life in which he was taking bulls by the horns: we were too busy twisting the tails of asses. His much quoted epigram that ends with the line
                               ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’
was the admirable outcome of a casual remark by me. I said I had noticed that a certain South African novelist, then much reviewed in England, was constantly being praised for ‘restraint’: I said I could not see what this writer was supposed to be restraining, and that the only novel by this writer which I had read seemed to me like a dog-collar without a dog inside.

Much of Campbell’s time was spent in a recumbent position which suited him for the production both of his own poetry and of material for Voorslag.He worked at night, slept in the morning and appeared at lunch-time. He ate scantily and at odd moments took no exercise to speak of, had a great many baths, and was often sucking lemons or smoking cigarettes. He sometimes was fishing, or flew a kite from a fishing rod, and he would sometimes make a bonfire at night on the rocks near the sea, which seemed to me the sort of thing Shelley might have done---not that he took after Shelley. He was much under the influence Nietzsche and somewhat under that of the French Symbolists, and I do not remember his speaking with warmth of any English poet, alive or dead, except Marlowe, Pope, and Robert Nichols. I think English tradition and English life were alien to him, and that he neither understood nor responded to them; he was a wild Highlander.

Sometimes we went for a swim, or strolled in the bush, or along the railway track to the store at Sezela. In the evenings Mary Campbell sometimes played a guitar, and large, blue-headed lizards appeared, and remained motionless on the walls of the house, watching with the cold eyes of music critics this brunette of striking appearance. A tendency on her and her husband’s part to sing the sort of sea-shanties the could be found in The Week-End Book was fairly typical of some of the younger intellectuals of the Twenties. In my mind these songs are associated with the rediscovery in the same decade of Herman Melville. Since then Melville has been the object of such a cult in America , and of such innumerable theses and sterile academic combings, siftings, proddings, and probings, that this very name has set up a strong reader-resistance. But in those days he burst upon many a young imagination as a splendid revelation. His romantic voyages in the last haunts of noble savagery, his isolation, his grandeur, and the neglect he suffered in his lifetime had all appealed strongly to Campbell. My own interest in Melville was much stimulated by Campbell, and in later years I wrote introductions to reprints at various times of Redburn, Whitejacket, and Billy Budd, and also edited a selection of Melville’s poems.

Copies of Voorslag are rare and have become collectors’ pieces. Those first two numbers were put together with energy, seriousness, and ebullience---a blend always disturbing to those who think solemnity a duty whenever the arts are approached. They were mostly created by Campbell, and although much of his later activity may be thought unworthy of his best self, they show that his youthful imagination had a vitality quite out of the ordinary.