Editors were once pelted for publishing banned books (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” “Lolita”). In these times, he wrote, “an editor is in danger of being fired for publishing something that doesn’t fit anyone else’s definition of ‘proper’.”
He defended what has come to be known as cultural appropriation, in all directions. (“If the art is good, it justifies its own creation. If it is bad, it presages its own oblivion.”)
He wasn’t a particular fan of Margaret Thatcher, but he was tired of hearing her tenure as Prime Minister cursed in hyperbolic terms. When Joyce Carol Oates reviewed a memoir by Jeanette Winterson in The New York Review of Books, describing Winterson as “a fierce and eloquent proponent of the literary arts, who lived through Thatcher’s England as a university student at Oxford,” Campbell moved to reply:
Is that Thatcher’s England, where tanks rolled into campuses, soldiers rounded up the intelligentsia and bonfires were made from books that Jeanette Winterson loved so much? Or Thatcher’s England, where a working-class girl from Accrington could go to Oxford and not only receive a free education, but also a generous support?
He printed Elmore Leonard’s now-famous 10 Rules of Fiction Writing (“Never open a book with the weather,” “Try to leave out the part readers tend to skip”) and tore them apart. He noted that in almost all cases each could be substituted for the opposite. “Our rule for cultivating good writing is much simpler,” he wrote. “Stay in, read and don’t limit yourself to American crime novels.”
Campbell wrote about writers who pretend not to read their reviews and biographers who hate their subjects. He wrote about pop texts borrowed from classical literature. He noted mentions of the TLS in the literature. (He missed one of my favorites, from a biography by Angela Carter. She described the atmosphere in critic Lorna Sage’s house as “teabags, Tampax, and the TLS.”) There are anima adversities against literary underhandedness. Campbell tried to distinguish the sham from the real thing.
He was interested in everything. When he needed material for a column, he sometimes went to a bookstore, bought something unusual and wrote about its contents. He made it work.