Editors were once lionized for issuing banned books (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” “Lolita”). In these times, he wrote, “an editor is in danger of being sacked for publishing something that doesn’t fit someone else’s definition of ‘appropriate.’”
He defended what’s become known as cultural appropriation, in every direction. (“If the art is good, it justifies its own creation. If bad, it predicts its own oblivion.”)
He was no special fan of Margaret Thatcher, but he was weary of hearing her tenure as prime minister damned in hyperbolic terms. When Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing a memoir by Jeanette Winterson in The New York Review of Books, described Winterson as “a fierce and eloquent supporter of the literary arts, having lived through Thatcher’s England as a university student at Oxford,” Campbell was moved to reply:
Is that Thatcher’s England in which tanks rolled on to campuses, soldiers rounded up the intelligentsia and bonfires were made out of books beloved by Jeanette Winterson? Or Thatcher’s England where a working-class girl from Accrington could go to Oxford and receive not just a free education but a generous maintenance as well?
He printed Elmore Leonard’s now-famous 10 rules for writing fiction (“Never open a book with the weather,” “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip”) and tore them apart. He noted that, in nearly every case, each could be replaced with its opposite. “Our rule for the cultivation of good writing is much simpler,” he wrote. “Stay in, read and don’t limit yourself to American crime fiction.”
Campbell wrote about writers who pretend not to read their reviews, and biographers who hate their subjects. He wrote about pop lyrics derived from classic literature. He took note of mentions of the TLS in literature. (He missed one of my favorites, from a biography of Angela Carter. She described the vibe in the critic Lorna Sage’s house as “tea bags, Tampax and the TLS.”) There are animadversions against literary back-scratching. Campbell sought to distinguish the sham from the genuine.
He was interested in everything. When he needed material for a column, he would sometimes walk to a bookstore, buy something unusual and write about its contents. He made it work.
