Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell

Roy Campbell (1902-57) led an unquiet life marked by numerous affairs (both real and imagined), brawls (he once attacked Stephen Spender on stage during a poetry recital), and assorted stunts (with the help of Dylan Thomas, he once ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David’s Day). It was also marked by numerous scandals, often concerning Campbell’s relationship with Virginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury group, about whom he remarked in “The Georgiad”: “Hither flock all the crowds whom love has wrecked / Of intellectuals without intellect / And sexless folk whose sexes intersect….”
Capturing the imagination of the English intelligentsia with his romantic background and controversial style, Campbell was acknowledged as one of the finest poets of his generation. Joseph Pearce’s biography vividly recounts the story of Campbell’s wonderfully romantic life, including his youth in South America, his dangerous sojourn in revolutionary Spain during World War II, the literary friendship he forged with figures such as C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and the Sitwells, and his and his wife Mary’s eventual conversion to Roman Catholicism. In Pearce’s judgement, Campbell’s poetry was “both perplexing and challenging – yet no more so than the poet himself.”