Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Trouble and Travel with James Campbell

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Growing up in Glasgow in the 1960s James Campbell got into loads of trouble. At the age of 15 he left school and started work at a printing factory. But then he discovered the magic of the road and the wonderful world of “away” We talk with the author about his new memoir, “Just go down to the road”

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I'm doing something a little different for this episode. I'm running a conversation I recently had with one of my favorite writers, James Campbell. James Campbell is the author of Talking at the Gates, one of the first and the best biographies of James Campbell. James Campbell's the author of Talking at the Gates, one of the first and the best biographies of James Baldwin. He's also the author of Paris Interzone, a book about a moment when spies and writers and pornographers all converge in literary Paris in the 1950s. For many years, James Campbell was also an editor and columnist at the Times Literary Supplement and a journalist for The Guardian. He's just a terrific writer who I can't get enough of. And so last spring when I saw he had a new book out, I couldn't help but pick it up.

Just Go Down to the Road is billed as a memoir about trouble and travel, but it's really much more. It's the story of a young person growing up in Scotland in the late 60s, a boy who fails out of school at the age of 15, but still makes his own way, eventually, to the world of ideas and literary success. I met up with Jim this summer at his flat in London. We spoke in his living room for a few hours. The following is a condensed version of our conversation. This phrase, just go down to the road, pops up a number of times in the book.

It's almost like a magic mantra. But the first time young Jim Campbell hears it is from a potential mugging victim. It first occurs in the book when a rather delinquent schoolboy friend of mine suggested that we carry out a mugging. And we went ahead and kind of planned this in a really stupid way. There was a woman approached, I can picture her now, in a quiet, respectable back streets of Glasgow. And we approached her and simply asked for directions to the bus stop or something. And from that moment, the idea of any crime was off.

We chickened out, thank God. We would almost certainly have been caught. But she was extremely friendly and she thought she was speaking to two lovely Glasgow schoolboys. And she said, of course, bus stop, just go down to the road and you'll see the bus stop right there. Now, young Jim was never a violent hoodlum. He reminds me more of the angry young men we meet in books like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

There's boredom, limited options, and petty crime. But after young Jim gets busted for playing hooky and forging his grades, he has to leave school and he starts an apprenticeship at a factory. And this leads us to the main question I had for James Campbell. You see, while young Jim hated school, he loved books and ideas and intellectual conversations. And yet, remarkably, walking into this factory, he didn't seem to think he was cut off from all that or afraid that the path he was on led away from that world. When I did leave school at the age of 15,

and just turned 15, I should say, and went to work in a 19th century printing factory in Glasgow under conditions that wouldn't be allowed now. I moved into a bed set, and I was lucky. It was in the university area, and I moved into this house with several of those rooms where there were lots of bohemian characters. Very interesting people, very nice to me.

So I didn't feel it was blocking me off because all this other world was there around me. And in fact, now I could make more of it because I didn't have to put up with the blooming school. Yeah, no, this is, I think, around the time in the book where you talk about this thing that you call the room, this place where you and your sisters and your friends come together you talk about this thing that you call the room, this place where you and your sisters and your friends come together to talk about books and ideas. And it's

such a lovely visualization. And, you know, hearing you talk about the rooms next to your bed sit, when you think about this place now, what's the first one you visualize? Is there a particular room that comes to mind? I mean, you just talked about a few. The one that I do call The Room, with a capital R in the book, was one that I was a little tiny bit older, and by that time I had fallen in with a lot of university students from Glasgow. And there were two girls. It wasn't, in fact, my sister. There were two girls, Lorraine and Kate, Kate Reader. Neither of them was my girlfriend in the ordinary sense, but we were close friends.

I suppose they were substitute twin sisters. I'd grown up with twin sisters. And then I'd left home. Oh, I had to find another pair of twin sisters, otherwise I really would be lost. And Kate and Lorraine, they were terrific people. And again, they had a great intellectual influence on me. Kate, for example, who was the daughter of a postman, she collected photographs of T.S. Eliot. And that seemed to me an unusual hobby, but quite a nice one.

And Lorraine was reading Albert Camus in French and Jean Cocteau. And Jean Cocteau wrote a novel called Les Enfants Terribles, which keeps the title in English. And in that novel, there is the room where they are locked into this room and they just live there and they go to bed at seven in the morning and get up at five in the afternoon and live through the night. And we did that kind of thing and took some drugs i wasn't a great drug taker but there were drugs around but um it was never my scene but there was there was the atmosphere of the room you could go to the park

across the road take some lsd and go to the park and stay there all night so i think of that one that's that's the room with Kate and Lorraine, the substitute twin sisters. So you just brought up drugs, and that is one aspect of trouble that I would say is missing from this book. And I found myself thinking a lot about this because you have friends who are doing drugs, you know musicians and writers who are doing a lot of drugs,

and you don't. And I'm wondering what you make of that now, looking back, because to be blunt, I feel like you avoided some, the kind of trouble that you don't get to write about decades later. Yes. First of all, I never got high in the way that other people did. And also, I suppose at the time, certainly now, even then, I didn't really like the effect it was having on people. I saw people kind of going down, even people who were just sticking to dope and were smoking marijuana more or less morning till night, every weekend and so on. And I saw it even then, and I didn't like it, and certainly LSD people were destroyed.

There wasn't that much narcotics in Glasgow in those days. But you had these literary idols who were destroyed. Yes, I did. I did. I was very attracted to one particular drug addict writer, two in fact, William Burroughs, but also a Scottish drug addict, Alexander Trockey, who was from Glasgow, from the same streets in which I was now moving around. And I was very attracted to him and his novel, Kane's Book, which seemed to me a completely different type of novel. I got to know him and he confessed that he had been, he was a world champion drug addict and he confessed that it had been destructive. But somehow or other I didn't, I had my head screwed on too tight you know. I was out for adventure all the time but i was still a sensible kid you know

um but i want to come back to one last thing in the factory because you know you seem as you you know said a few minutes ago kind of okay with the factory as a as a path you know you're three years in to a six-year apprenticeship, and you're still discovering books and music. You've got a great pub. You've got access to culture and ideas. And I caught another reference to something down the road, the Sterling Library, which seems very, very important to you. So you've got a path that you can kind of see that I think for a lot of people today would just not make that, would now we're going to late 60s, maybe even 1970, 71, people who came from working class backgrounds, in most cases more working class than mine, people who, but were also interested in this sort of intellectual music that I mentioned, who were interested in Herman Hesse and other hip writers, you know.

Strangely enough, not so much Jack Kerouac and all that, although there were people who liked that, but they weren't our idols. We were a little bit more switched on than that. The Black Mountain poets, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Gary Snyder, those were our kind of heroes. And these writers, they brought a whole mythology with them. You know, if you read Gary Snyder, you read about really kind of wandering into the outback and meditating for a whole day and going to Japan and studying to be a monk. It was all amazing

stuff, you know. It wasn't just sitting down and writing books. They brought this mythology with them. And I probably, I didn't think about the future all that much. If there's one, well, there are many deficiencies in my makeup, but I think that's been one of them, is that I've never really thought about the future all that much. That kind of brings me to the turning point, which is fascinating. You describe it as like this comment or look you get from a fellow

co-worker as something that makes you realize that, oh, maybe you don't belong in the factory. And since there's a lot of what could have been in this book, I think it's fair of me to ask, you know, what if she had worked a different shift? Yeah, well, we all work. Yes, Jeanette. You're referring to Jeanette. Don't try and get away with anything with Jeanette because you won't. But one day we were at the machine and these printing machines, I describe them in the book, that we worked on, they were made of wood. Wooden printing machine. And I operated this machine. But you needed a girl,

we always said a girl, a girl feeder to feed the paper into the machine. And Jeanette had many functions in the factory, but that was one of them, to feed the paper into the machine. And she revealed to me one day

that she had said to the boss that I was not going to complete my apprenticeship and I said why not and she said oh I just told him I said he's too clever for it and that was a moment of great revelation as it happened I did get a kind of chest ailment, which meant a prolonged absence from the factory. I had to reclaim it from the welfare. But then I was able to do my own thing, and that was what I had. And then I realized this is the life for me.

Absolutely. And that brings us to travel. You know, the second main theme in this memoir of yours, the allure of being one of the chosen who gets to go away and this lack of specific destination. I mean, yes, you want to go to Morocco, but you go to a lot of other places following more of a logic of just going down to the road, it seems, at the beginning. Yes, I think it did. I think I placed my trust in the road. I slept outside by the side of the road. When I set out for India I didn't even take a rucksack.

I took a shoulder bag and a sleeping bag and I had on my feet a pair of sandals. I don't remember that I took soap but but maybe I did. And I had hardly any money, but I thought it was enough to get me to India. And I took advice from what I called the hippie elders, who would say, oh, hitchhike to Istanbul, a cinch. And in Istanbul, you get a bus to Tehran. They're very cheap.

People always said they were very cheap. They always turned out to be much more expensive. And once you're in Tehran, you can figure out how to get to Kabul. And, I mean, they were talking about as if you were going through the different boroughs of New York or something. You know, once you're in the Bronx, ask somebody how to get to Manhattan.

It was really a bit like that. No one I knew ever consulted a guidebook or a map or anything. And no one I knew ever had walking boots. You make it to Istanbul, but then something happens. I hitchhiked to Istanbul and one day I was in the street and I was approached by a man who was German who said to me

that he knew I wanted to go to Tehran. And I said, oh, how did you know that? And he said that he heard me talking to friends the night before in a cafe or something. And he recognized my hair, which was very long and very blonde. And he said he was a lorry driver and he was going to Tehran the next morning.

I said, oh, terrific. So he said, you can come with me. And he mentioned this certain amount of money that he would like to have and then this was the really naive bit he said that he could make an exchange for me i would need money when i got to tehran whatever the currency was there forgotten but i would need that and he could do the exchange, but I would need to give him the money now. So I handed over, I didn't have all that much money, but I handed over a substantial sum. He took me to a rendezvous point for the next morning at nine o'clock.

And when I turned up, he wasn't there. Before leaving Glasgow, I had a vision of myself as one of those who was going to India. I was going away. Jim, where's Jim? Oh, he's away. This was the word everybody used. Now I belonged to another elite, those who had been ripped off. Did you hear about Jim? He was ripped off. Did you hear about Jim? He was ripped off. But deep down, I was relieved

because I probably wouldn't have got anywhere near India. I don't know, I probably would have disappeared. So that lorry driver, he did me a favor. He was one of my friends of the road. So what happened was that I took a bus, after all, to the Greek-Turkish border, Turkish-Greek border, crossed over into Greece and hitchhiked from there down to Athens with some Americans in a VW bus. And one day I was walking along, walking around Syntagma Square, and there was a fellow at a cafe. Picture him now, big bushy beard, obviously American. And he summoned me over to his table. And he said, and this is how the conversation went, he said, are you from Scotland?

I said, yeah. And he said, your name's Jim Campbell, right? And I thought, this sounded familiar. It sounded like the lorry driver who'd seen me in the cafe the night before. I thought, how did he know that? Well, it turns out that one year before, and I think we worked it out that it was exactly to the day, I had met him and a friend, an American friend of his, in a park in Glasgow, and I had put them up on the floor of my bed set. They slept on the floor, they got up the next morning, and off they went up to the Highlands of Scotland. And his name was Jerry Roebuck. And he was sitting there at this table and he had a job on the island of Spetsie

looking after five horses. And his job was going to be, it hadn't started yet, it was about to start, to take people round the island on tours of the island, on horseback. But he was on his own at the time, and he had a sign in front of him, and it said, Girl Wanted to Work on Island with Horses. It was the kind of thing that people did in those days, and people responded to it. So, I told Jerry Myers Myers sorry story about the lorry driver, if he ever drove a lorry

probably not, and he looked at me, he just looked and he said, you want this job? I said, but it says girl wanted. Jerry said, we'll get a girl. I said, but I've never been on a horse. He said, we'll teach you. And so suddenly I had a job. And we went to the island of Spezia and stayed there for two and a half months, I think. We did get a girl that afternoon. And she was very nice and she was a good rider. And she taught me how to ride a horse in about three days.

And I spent the whole summer whole summer never wore anything like a riding cap or knee pads or anything like that I spent the whole summer trotting galloping and I never fell off. You know it's an incredible journey to go from feeling ripped off to taking tourists around on horses and supporting yourself for summer. But, you know, trusting yourself to the road is kind of one of the themes of the travel parts of this book. And it's just, you know, thrilling to follow along.

It kind of makes no sense, you know, from my point of view, like how you end up in Israel at a kibbutz. But, you know, for you as a writer for you as the it's your story connecting the dots of your own story there is a logic to it i guess but yeah israel it wasn't even on your original away list no it wasn't on my away list um i never thought about going to a kibbutz it was jerry who had just come from the kibbutz kibbutz mishmarot small kibbutz between Tel Aviv and Haifa. And everybody was going home.

But you see, remember, I wasn't a student. Everybody else was a student, really. So when it came to the autumn, they would all go back to their ordinary lives. But I didn't really have an ordinary life. My life was away. My life was the road. So I didn't really know what to do next and Gerry said, why not go to Israel? You can go to the kibbutz. You can work there. They need people to take in the avocados quite soon. He hadn't been on this kibbutz. So he

gave me directions and we got together enough money for an air ticket. It was my first time in the air. Jerry got the ticket for me and I got on the plane. And then I just went down to the road. He explained to me how to go to the kibbutz, which I did. And he said, ask for a woman called Tutsa and mention my name. Okay. Life was simple in those days. So I went, I found my way to the kibbutz. I could find my way anywhere. That also surprises me. I never looked at a map. Don't ask me how. But I got to the kibbutz and entered the kibbutz.

There were no guard railings, I suppose there are now, sad to say. But I just wandered on to the kibbutz, and a woman saw me, and I said, I'm looking for Tertza. She said, I am Tertza. I said, oh, Jerry Robox sent me. My name's Jim. And I want to join the kibbutz. And she really, honestly, she looked at me with incredulity. And she said, you can't just come down here and say you want to go on the kibbutz. And as I say in the book, a flesh and blood refutation of that statement stood before her. And she said, well, now you're here, you may as well get a job. And she introduced me to a chap

and he took me in hand and he gave me a bunk and all that. Jim's life on the kibbutz is pretty monotonous, mostly it's work or volunteering. But still, young Jim finds time for literature, music, and adventure. He discovers that the Peter who sleeps in the hut next to him is Peter Green, the mysterious missing founder of Fleetwood Mac, the guitarist who famously walked away from money and fame. Eventually, though, Jim discovers that he wants to live closer to that world of books and intellectual ideas. He decides to go to university.

But first, he has to get home. And getting off the kibbutz turns out to be more of a challenge. Once again, he finds himself flirting with trouble. On the kibbutz, I really was stuck. And it's an amazing fact that I wrote to my father and told him my situation and asked if he could forward me the money for a boat trip not to not a flight home just a boat trip from Haifa to Paris Athens. From there I could hitchhike up to Glasgow five nights sleeping by the side of the road, no problem. All I needed was the boat trip and he wrote back and his letter which I received one morning it said remember the family motto, no reward without effort.

Now, I didn't know there was a family motto. I sure knew it now because he didn't send me any money. And it's absolutely incredible. I tell this story to people, you know, who've got children who are in Thailand or something, and they're emailing them every day. And my parents didn't even know where I was. And it was a little bit of payback, I suppose. You just thought, this kid has given me so many headaches.

He can deal with his own headache now. So I was really stuck. And someone gave me a newspaper, a local newspaper, and I saw American Pizzeria in Dizengoff, the main street in Tel Aviv. They needed help. So I phoned up from the kibbutz and the guy said, can you be here tomorrow morning at 10?

Just like that, I had a job. And then I was promoted very quickly to becoming a pizza maker. And I got on very well with the guy who ran it. It was called Jim, like me. The only problem was that the money they were paying me was barely enough to get from Tel Aviv back to the kibbutz, never mind to get from Haifa back to Europe. It really was really low. And I was working maybe 10 hours a day or something. And then I had to also have a place to live. So one evening I met an English intellectual in a cafe. And we started talking. Intellectualism was always my downfall. We started talking and we came up with a scheme whereby I could get the money to get me back,

get me across the Mediterranean to Europe. Anyway, it went like this. I went up to Jim, the boss, and I told him that I was sleeping in a dorm with 10, 12 people, which was true. I wasn't getting good sleep because people are coming in at all hours. But I had the chance of a room of my own. And I said I needed a bit of space. I was writing a novel. He was interested in that. And I said, there's a landlady, but the only problem is she wants a deposit for the room.

And he looked quite serious and he said, how much? And I told him. And let's say it was the equivalent of, at the time, $50, something in that region. Not a huge fortune, but a substantial sum of money. He said, we really like you. We hope you'll stick around because we get people who work and then they go home, they go to college. You're not at college, so maybe you'll stick around.

So the next morning he gave me the money. I went back, checked out of my rooming hostel got on a bus just went down to the road got on a bus to Kibbutz Mishmarot and a tremendous gloom

descended on me on the bus but I had the money in my pocket a tremendous gloom descended on me on the bus. But I had the money in my pocket, and I got to the stop for Kibbutz Mishmarot, and I describe this in the book, and it's rather important. As I got off the bus, you had to walk down the road half a mile,

a mile at the most. And on the way down to the road half a mile, mile at the most. And on the way down to the kibbutz, a dog, a little stray mangy dog, came behind me and started barking at me. It sounds almost too, it's too kind of fictional. It's like from a movie or something, but it is true. I remember that dog. He barked all the way down. And, you know, that was 50 years ago. I remember that dog to this very day. I got to the kibbutz and I told Peter Green.

And he sort of looked a bit dubious. And then I told this other friend of mine, Dennis, who was a New York taxi driver, great man. He was a lively fellow, great fun. And I had expected him to kind of slap me on the back or something and say, well, you did it, Jimmy, now you'll get off. But he didn't. He looked at me with something between concern and pity. Because we really liked each other. He was my closest friend. And I remember what he said.

He said, Jimmy, you can't go around the world ripping people off, man. You're going to end up in prison. And it went deep, you know, because I was actually ready for that kind of talk. I didn't like what I had done. And so the next day I put the money in an envelope and I posted it back to American Pizzeria and I made up some cock and bull story

about why I had to make a quick departure and hoped it hadn't been too much of an inconvenience. I hope the money got there. It probably did and so that was it and then in the end it was Dennis who gave me the money to get off the kibbutz and we were in the avocado fields one day, and he said, I'll give you the money, Jimmy. At least I'll get some blooming peace that way. Because I was talking about it all the time. And so sure enough, he did. There's a lot more trouble and travel in Just Go Down to the Road. Young Jim even makes it to Morocco.

But the main journey that James Campbell takes in this memoir is the one that he takes to the world of books and intellectual ideas. And in lieu of an ending, he gives us two codas. In the first, James tells us the story about how he wrote Gate Fever, one of his early books in which he takes up residence in a prison to document what life is like on the inside. It's a glimpse into a world filled with men unable to travel and unlucky at trouble, a world that very well could have been for James Campbell. The other coda is also personal. It's the story of when James was able to show his father that he, in fact, did understand the family motto. It's a wonderful

story about the time he first introduced his father to his friend James Baldwin. I had already known James Baldwin. I invited James Baldwin to come to the University of Edinburgh to speak to the students. While I was still a student myself again tremendous naivety and I was a great reader of Baldwin and to my horror he accepted and said he would like to come in April but of course we had absolutely no money for anything I mean I hadn't even mentioned this to anyone on the university staff fortunately to cut a long story short he, more or less at the last minute, and asked me to telephone him, which I did from a public call box in Edinburgh. As I like to say, I went into the phone box and I got the number and I got Baldwin on

the other end, he said, hey baby, how are you? We had a long conversation and I like to say, I went into that phone box as Clark Kent and I came out as Superman. My friendship with James Baldwin had begun. He wrote for my magazine in Edinburgh and I went to the south of France to visit him on more than one occasion.

We got on very well. And then in 1985, I got him invited to the Edinburgh Festival MOOC events. And I interviewed him on stage. It was at 10 o'clock in the morning or something. He was terrific. He was magnetic as always. The audience was swept off their feet. And then my mother and father had come through.

By now they had moved back to Scotland from England. And my dad approached with a copy of The Fire Next Time. And Bolden was sitting there scribbling away and asking people. And he had time for everyone. He was a remarkably gracious man. He would look up and with a great kind of wonderful healing smile. And then the man in front of him was my dad, and it was the fire next time. He said, Mr. Baldwin, I enjoyed your talk very much.

And Jimmy kind of looked up at him, you know, with big eyes. And then my dad looked at the other person behind me and said, that's my son. And Jimmy looked at him, looked at me, looked back and he asked for my dad's name and he wrote for Harry Campbell. God bless. James Campbell's new memoir is called Just Go Down to the Road, and it's published by Paul Dry Books. Order a copy from your favorite independent bookshop.

You can find a link and a list of some of my other favorite books by James Campbell on the show page at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.