The editor once made a fuss for publishing banned books (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Lolita). In this day and age, “editors risk being fired for publishing something that doesn’t fit someone else’s definition of ‘appropriate,'” he wrote.
He defended what has come to be known as cultural appropriation on all sides. (“If art is good, it justifies its creation; if bad, it predicts its own oblivion.”)
He wasn’t a big fan of Margaret Thatcher, but he was tired of hearing her tenure denounced in exaggerated terms. When Joyce Carol Oates Review Janet Winterson’s memoir The New York Review of Books described Winterson as “an ardent and eloquent advocate of the literary arts who lived through Thatcher’s England as an Oxford college student.” answered.
Is it Thatcher’s England, with tanks entering campuses, soldiers rounding up intellectuals, and bonfires with Janet Winterson’s beloved books? Or Thatcher’s England, where a working-class girl from Accrington goes to Oxford and gets not only a free education, but generous child support?
He shared the ten rules for writing the now-famous Elmore Leonard novel (“Don’t open a book about the weather” and “Skip things that readers tend to skip”). was printed and torn up. He pointed out that in almost all cases each can be replaced by its opposite. “Our rules for cultivating good writing are much simpler,” he writes. “Please don’t limit yourself to American crime novels.”
Campbell wrote about writers who pretended not to read reviews and biographers who hated their subject matter. He wrote pop lyrics derived from classical literature. He noted his mention of TLS in the literature. (He missed one of my favorites from Angela Carter’s biography, where she described the atmosphere in critic Lorna Sage’s house as “tea bags, Tampax, TLS.” ) there is an animad version to the literary flip. Campbell tried to distinguish between the fake and the real.
He was interested in everything. When he needed something for a column, he would walk to the bookstore and buy something unusual to write about. he did it well.
