Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell
*Starred Review* Pearce's meticulous biography of the twentieth-century Anglo-African poet Campbell (1901-57) has been wisely retitled (fromBloomsbury and Beyond) to grab the eyes of Americans who know Campbell from nothing but certainly catch the allusion to Albee's famous play. Indeed, Campbell wasn't afraid of Woolf, whose lover Vita Sackville-West seduced his wife, Mary Garman, and whose influential set he caustically denounced for its "sex socialism" and snotty atheism. Inured to danger by a strenuous South African youth, during which he set aside petty racism, he seemed afraid of nothing. Repairing to England for college, he instead dove into the restless existence he continued, save for five years in Provence while his daughters were small, for the rest of his life. In 1933 he moved his family to Spain, converted to Catholicism, and witnessed the anarchist-Communist rape of Toledo and anticlerical rampage; he thereafter controversially supported Franco for defending the church. He loved common farmers, fishers, and laborers; essayed strenuous folk sports, including bullfighting; drank and argued nearly as prodigiously as his friend Dylan Thomas, whose broadcasting career he launched; and published 28 books. His tempestuous, thrilling life ended in a road accident. His reputation quickly shrank, but Pearce's generous quotation of his poems, essays, autobiography, and letters strongly argue for its revival. He was, perhaps, the "real" Hemingway, an athlete-aesthete par excellence.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved