From teenage delinquent to man of letters: James Campbell’s remarkable career

The great age of the Scottish autodidact must have ended a century ago, but it had a prodigious impact while it lasted. To read John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) is to be plunged headfirst into a world of kenspeckle lads studying Nietzsche behind the crankshaft and miners quoting Burns to each other as they were winched up from the Lanarkshire coal face. If James Campbell (born 1951) isn’t quite a figure to rank with James Thompson the Younger (1834-82) or the Rev. George Gilfillan (1813-78), to name a couple of Gross’s exemplars, then he is certainly their spiritual heir – a man whose preliminary knowledge was picked up on his own and whose take on contemporary literature is all the more pointed for having been acquired outside the usual channels of school and university.

Gross turns up towards the end of Just Go Down to the Road (the title derived from a friendly Easter Ross shepherd’s advice on how to get a lift) as a reserved yet encouraging editor of the TLS with whom Campbell begins a four-decade engagement in the early 1980s. Before this introduction to the landscapes of modern Grub Street come a dozen or so chapters on the bohemian life, as lived out by a near-hoodlum (outright violence is narrowly avoided) who quits school the moment his termly report card becomes impossible to forge, takes an apprenticeship in the printing industry, grows his hair, leaves home – the Campbells are solidly respectable lower-middle class – and, in out-at-elbows hippy-era Glasgow, starts hanging out with some very strange people indeed.

You suspect at an early stage in the proceedings that something is going on here, and that all manner of prime cultural plums are about to be dredged up out of the adolescent bran tub; and, sure enough, the young Jim attracts formative influences like a Highland rambler going down under a swarm of midges.