Profiles and Summary Assessments
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The twenty-two essays and profiles brought together by James Campbell in this new collection concern authors he has followed throughout his thirty-year career as a literary columnist and biographer. Nearly all of these pieces appeared earlier in such periodicals as the Guardian Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Granta, the Nation, and the New York Times Book Review. They are given second outings here, revised and arranged into three groupings that are loosely interconnected by themes of social class, race, and authorial identity.
Many of the writers treated in the collection began publishing in the 1940s and 1950s—John Updike, Truman Capote, William Styron, and James Baldwin, for example. (Campbell published an excellent full-length biography of Baldwin, Talking at the Gates, in 1991.) Several of the pieces are concerned with Beat and Black Mountain writers—Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Creeley among them; another section offers [End Page lxxix] assessments of the African-American authors Richard Wright, John A. Williams, Toni Morrison, and Stanley Crouch.
Campbell excels at the literary profile—an overview of an author's career, bolstered with material taken from an interview and from a biography of the writer if one has been published. (Disclosure: in the chapter entitled "Listening in the Dark," Campbell discusses my biography of Styron.) This blending of elements throws light on an author's personality and way of living. Information about the apprentice years is included, together with details of marriages and children, ups and downs of reputation, and much else. These profiles include summary judgments of the work, especially if the author is nearing the end of a career.
The assessments are direct and pithy: Campbell has little admiration for Morrison's negativity about white people, for example, or for John Williams's preoccupation with sex, or for the provincialism of the New Yorker school. For other writers (Baldwin, Styron, and Snyder, for example) he shows admiration and respect. He is perceptive about the late writings, the stories and novels and poems produced in maturity when authorial energy has diminished and inspiration is low but composition and publication continue. For these works Campbell shows sympathy, particularly if they are life-affirming—and if the authors have moved beyond old grudges and preoccupations.
An autobiographical thread binds this collection together, especially in the pieces at the end of the book on the Scottish authors Alexander Trocci, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Boswell. Campbell, a native of Glasgow, has an affinity for these writers, for their works and language, their need to define themselves as Scots, and their ambivalence about the centers of literary power in London.
Syncopations is consistently illuminating and readable. One of the best pieces in the book is the account of Campbell's legal battle to gain access to Baldwin's fbi file, an enormous body of mostly innocuous material. The agents who gathered it surely had little understanding of what Baldwin was trying to accomplish. They did, however, help to frighten him into exile in France, where his talent faded and his self-discipline vanished. Among the high points for me in this collection were the pieces on Shirley Hazzard, William Maxwell, J. P. Donleavy, and Amiri Baraka, who continues to present an ornery front to the world—not a bad practice if, like him, you live in Newark, New Jersey.
James L. W. West III has revised his biography of William Styron, which will be reissued by the LSU Press. LSU has also recently published Mr. West's William Styron: Letters to My Father.
