James Campbell (3) (1951–)

James Campbell interweaves the cultural and societal happenings in post-WWII Paris. Writers, musicians, communists, opportunists; some combination of them all – they gathered on the Left Bank. Jazz, “rude and erotic,” “the black man’s mastercrime of cultural defiance” thrived.

In literature, Merlin magazine’s writers collaborated with Olympia Press’ Maurice Girodias to mass-produce pornography, while the Paris Review did its own thing.

Black American writers and musicians came to escape racism in the U.S., and some with communist leanings were escaping that stigma.

The main thing they all sought in the Left Bank was freedom, Campbell believes. And for the most part, there they found it.… (meer)

James Campbell's This is the Beat Generation is a good, if perhaps excessively East Coast-centric, overview of the beats. The New York bias means that Gary Snyder, far and away the most impressive of the bunch, gets slighted, though one applauds Campbell's recognition of William Burroughs as the most original of the East Coasters, and perhaps of the whole gang. Campbell's style, too, is attractive. He opts to write interestingly rather than pedantically and never quite falls into the trap of parodying in his own prose the artists about whom he's writing.… (meer)