Roy Campbell

I last saw Roy Campbell at the Catherine Wheel in Kensington three years ago. After closing time he took me on to Wyndham Lewis’s. Lewis I had never met before. He was sitting in an old-style Morris chair, sallow and sightless. His skull seemed gradually to be working through its parchment integument, underscored by the contrived porcelain of his smile. The mark of death was on him. When later I read at the close of The Demon of Progress in the Arts his remark—so full of personal longing—about our “wonderful shining eyes,” I remembered his skull-haunted look.

By contrast Roy Campbell, that hulking giant with his amiable domed head and his face that even at night always seemed sunlit, was life itself, vital and durable as the earth. The last of the scalds, Mr. Russell Kirk has called him. He looked an elemental, indestructibly proven in two wars and in the peace interlude through which he lived as violently as in war. As we walked down Kensington High Street after leaving Wyndham Lewis, he was telling me of a recent meeting of the Ethical Culture Society presided over by Stephen Spender. Roy, under the absurd pseudonym of Marmaduke Sherbert, had worked his way ticketless into the hall and then had stood up to protest the proceedings “in the name of the sergeant’s mess of the King’s African Rifles.”

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Francis Russell

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I last saw Roy Campbell at the Catherine Wheel in Kensington three years ago. After closing time he took me on to Wyndham Lewis’s. Lewis I had never met before. He was sitting in an old-style Morris chair, sallow and sightless. His skull seemed gradually to be working through its parchment integument, underscored by the contrived porcelain of his smile. The mark of death was on him. When later I read at the close of The Demon of Progress in the Arts his remark—so full of personal longing—about our “wonderful shining eyes,” I remembered his skull-haunted look.

By contrast Roy Campbell, that hulking giant with his amiable domed head and his face that even at night always seemed sunlit, was life itself, vital and durable as the earth. The last of the scalds, Mr. Russell Kirk has called him. He looked an elemental, indestructibly proven in two wars and in the peace interlude through which he lived as violently as in war. As we walked down Kensington High Street after leaving Wyndham Lewis, he was telling me of a recent meeting of the Ethical Culture Society presided over by Stephen Spender. Roy, under the absurd pseudonym of Marmaduke Sherbert, had worked his way ticketless into the hall and then had stood up to protest the proceedings “in the name of the sergeant’s mess of the King’s African Rifles.”