SOURCE: Larsen, Stephen, and Robin Larsen. “The Hero (1945-49).” In A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell, pp. 327-46. New York: Doubleday, 1991.

[In the following essay, Larsen and Larsen chronicle the circumstances surrounding the writing and publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.]

The miracle is, that the magic is effective in the tiniest, nursery fairytale: as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a single droplet; or as the full mystery of the teeming life of the earth is contained within the egg of a flea. For myth is not manufactured; rather, it is a spontaneous production of the living psyche; it bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

—Joseph Campbell, early draft of The Hero with a Thousand Faces

During the early 1940s, as darkness afflicted the whole world, the Mellons' heroic young venture, the Bollingen Foundation, came under scrutiny.

There was in force a Trading with the Enemy Act, which forbade American citizens commerce of all kinds with the nations with whom the United States was at war. On a flight through Bermuda in 1941, carrying a portfolio of photographs for her archive, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn had come under suspicion from British intelligence, who in turn contacted the FBI. Perhaps state secrets were being smuggled among the archetypal images of sphinxes and great mothers? Evidently the Bollingen Foundation was thought to resemble typical covers used by German spy systems. The files were later closed on Olga for want of any evidence, but in 1942 the Bollingen Foundation was urged, in the strongest terms possible, to cease all activities relating to Switzerland, even though that country was neutral.

After the war, Mary Mellon again resumed communication, at first somewhat hesitantly, with Ascona and Zurich. Zimmer was gone, but his spirit very much in evidence as several ambitious projects were undertaken: Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization appeared in 1946 under Campbell's careful editorship, and the Timaeus and Critias of Plato. Translator Cary Baynes's long labors were to culminate in publication of the I Ching in 1950, with Jung's interesting psychological commentary. It was the first real introduction of The Book of Changes to an American readership. Later the book would become one of Bollingen's all-time best-sellers.

IN PRAISE OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM

“It is unlikely that there will be another event during the current publishing season as important as this,” wrote W. H. Auden in his review in the New York Times on November 12, 1944. His subject was the publication of Pantheon's complete edition of the immortal Grimm's Fairy Tales, a reedited version of Margaret Hunt's nineteenth-century translation. The book was lavishly illustrated by Josef Scharl, an exiled painter from Munich, and introduced by the Irish poet and playwright Padraic Colum.¹ The Folkloristic Commentary at the end was by the talented young writer Joseph Campbell.

It was Colum's conviction that the art and magic of the storyteller had withered away for one simple reason: the coming of indoor lighting. At first this literal kind of “enlightenment” began with only kerosene lamps, but then came electric lights with full illumination. The activity that had flourished in another kind of refulgence—the twilit, more psychological illumination belonging to the storyteller's hearthside or the candlelit room, the vestibule to the world of dreams—was now replaced by the printed word, by the reading of newspapers and extended concern with the events of the day.

Campbell's commentary, which comprises about thirty pages at the end of the book, notes that at first authentic fairy tales may seem like grotesque chunks of an archaic literature not fully developed in sophistication or with artful surfaces. In fact, the parents of the literate world had greeted the appearance of the complete, authentic Grimm's tales with mixed feelings. A trove of magic and creativity certainly lay within the volume, but at the same time it didn't really seem to be “children's literature.” The principle of Evil (which, Ramakrishna remarked, “thickened the plot”) indeed lies thickly everywhere in the tales—in the forms of cannibal witches, corrupt stepparents, greedy emperors. There is instruction in lying and in all forms of guile; in magic; in violence.

But as Campbell wrote:

The “monstrous, irrational and unnatural” motifs of folktale and myth are derived from the reservoirs of dream and vision. On the dream level such images represent the total state of the individual dreaming psyche. But clarified of personal distortions and profounded—by poets, prophets, visionaries—they become symbolic of the spiritual norm for Man the Microcosm.²

Mythology is psychology, misread as cosmology, history and biography. Dante, Aquinas and Augustine, al-Ghazali and Mahomet, Zarathustra, Shankârachârya, Nâgârjuna, and T'ai Tsung, were not bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching a wisdom of life and death.³

There is a difference between myth and fairy tale, however, Campbell insisted. The storyteller in the glow of the firelight had to entertain as well as instruct, so there are devices to engage, astonish, pique the imagination, and keep the attention of the listener. Because fairy tales were not seriously regarded, they could contain profundities in a kind of innocent wrapping. Hence, as Campbell put it, “when the acids of the modern spirit dissolved the kingdom of the gods, the tales in their essence were hardly touched. The elves were less real than before; but the tales, by the same token, more alive.”⁴

The goal of the fairy tale was to communicate “instructive wonder,” a subtle kind of wisdom that permeates the soul as the listener sits entranced by an old, old story. Campbell's message was one that would not change in essence throughout his life: He was as determined to see wisdom in the humble folktale as in the great mythological epics. He was not averse to comparing the insights of Navajo medicine men with those of European storytellers; in fact, in his commentary he likened the wisdom that may be drawn from the fairy tales to the Navajo “pollen path of beauty,” on which his meditation of the time also lay. “The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.”⁵

In July 1944, the Skeleton Key was published, to critical acclaim. Rondo had done the last editing, and Campbell had written to him: “I am simply amazed at the job of compression, some six thousand words have disappeared. It is a fine little piece—and should come into the field of contemporary American criticism like a small visitor from another planet. I am not surprised it widened [Norman] Cousins' eyes.”⁶

Robinson, in turn, complimented Campbell on the fantastic job of decoding he had accomplished on Part II of Finnegans Wake. “Thank you for your appreciation,” Campbell wrote back. “I am sure we have the only Key that will ever be made to that seven-sealed cave of smoke … they are the densest chapters in the library of European fiction!”⁷

Their sometime partisan Edmund Wilson said in The New Yorker:

Campbell and Robinson deserve a citation from the Republic of Letters for having succeeded in bringing out their Skeleton Key at this time. … The chance to be among the first to explore the wonders of Finnegans Wake is one of the great intellectual and aesthetic treats that these last bad years have yielded.

Max Lerner in the New York Times said, “Joyce has found in Mr. Campbell and Mr. Robinson the ideal readers who approach his book with piety, passion and intelligence, and who have devoted several years to fashioning the key that will open its treasures.”

The “two Micks,” as one newspaper critic had referred to Joe and Rondo during the Thornton Wilder affair, had done their homework, ranging almost as far as Joyce himself to track the arcane movements of the Irish word wizard: the Swahili, the Sanskrit, and the Russian, the obscure mythic figures. The redolent puns and double and triple entendres were unfolded and displayed in this portmanteau work—and they made sense.

Norman Cousins had evidently placed Robinson's name ahead of Campbell's in an article, and Robinson had profusely apologized to Campbell, insisting the latter had done the lion's share of the work. Campbell, however, demurred gracefully, acknowledging his debt to Robinson. The publisher had thrown the Campbells into an uproar by asking for a photo for the jacket at the last minute. The only one that could be found was from 1929! Joe told Rondo, “Jean says I look like your son! I tell her I am, in a way, and that the whole thing is quite proper from a metaphysical point of view.”⁸

These were the years in which Campbell first began to be known, though mainly to a scholarly and literate community: first a Navajo commentary, then a book of fairy tales, now this obviously exhaustive interpretation of the Wake. Then too, in 1946 and 1948, the Zimmer works began to appear under his editorship. How indeed, some people wondered, could a scholar encompass these diverse and seemingly unrelated zones? They didn't realize he had been preparing, perhaps serendipitously, but diligently nonetheless, for competence in all these areas for a decade and a half. The leaven of his writing was somehow richer because of the varied ingredients used by the author. But the concern of the specialists didn't distress Campbell. He was following what he delighted in, and in the bargain establishing his own field: comparative mythology. There had been, in fact, a few major scholars before this time who had attempted to synthesize the world of myth, but all were European, none an American. No one previously had attempted the broad cultural and ethnographic purview of Campbell, and no one else had so boldly explored the comprehensive “field of effect” of myths—literature, the arts, psychology. Campbell would study any mythology that came his way, but from now on, that would be all he studied—with ancillary works, following the myths as they led him—and everything would relate to the central enterprise of discerning the instructive wonder in the many discrete forms and traditions. Campbell's literary career had begun.

A TIME OF PEACE

In the summer of 1944 the Campbells were part of the Bennington intensive. They went to Nantucket afterward, as they had the previous year, the summer of Joseph's first labors on what would become The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Their more consistent summer and weekend locus, however, was still Woodstock, where they spent the whole summer of 1945. Rondo and Gertrude Robinson had been gradually improving their home, and sometimes the Campbells would house-sit for them, in its relatively greater comfort. The Campbells also house-sat for Lucille Blanche, a Woodstock artist and friend of theirs.⁹ Tom Penning, who had returned safely from the Army, went back to his sculpture again, and the parties around the famous quarry pool were resumed.

This was also the year in which Constance Warren retired, and the young philosopher Harold Taylor was recruited to be president of Sarah Lawrence College. Taylor had received his Ph.D. at London University, and had returned to the University of Wisconsin as an instructor. Six years later, Sarah Lawrence College, which had received a strong recommendation on Taylor's qualifications, sent a recruiter, the noted sociologist Helen Lynd, to the campus to interview him. He said that he really didn't fancy being a college president and that probably his name should be taken off the list. Finally, against his better judgment, he was persuaded to travel East for the interview.

The first person the trustee who had arranged the interview wanted Taylor to meet was Joseph Campbell, Taylor recalled.

They figured that he would appeal to me as somebody who had the same kind of background and interests that I had, because I was an athlete when I was in college and had a jazz band of my own, and I was an intense student of philosophy. I was rather a happy young man, I would say, and not too morbid about anything.

Joe and I walked around the campus and he told me about the college. Among other things, he said, “Why don't you come and have a go at it.” I was impressed by the fact that here he was, a young man who had refused to go to Columbia's graduate school, yet he was involved in two major works, one being the Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake and the other being The Hero [The Hero with a Thousand Faces].

When I did go there, he and I became friends immediately. It had begun when he was assigned to look me over—and be looked over. … I fell in love with the place and had a wonderful time. … I suppose they knew I was on the level because I didn't want the job. Everybody they'd ever interviewed was trying to look good. And I've never believed in that, you just are who you are. That's the way Joe was. …

We would have dinner together every Monday night after my classes at the New School for Social Research, where I had been invited to teach. We got to know each other quite well. I also got to know Jean in those early days—and Martha Graham was around quite a bit.¹⁰

The increased money coming in for the Campbells from Joseph's publishing ventures was now to be invested in two paintings by the German abstractionist painter Paul Klee, Vogelsterbend and Allegorisches Figur. One Klee “for the living room and one for the library.” (“Very grand little couple looking for a picture!” Joseph gibed in his journal.) Kurt Roesch had also given them another painting, Sounds at Night, which they had gotten framed, and Jean had bought one of Xenia Kashevaroff Cage's mobiles.

“It was around that time that John Cage gave his first concert in New York City, at the Museum of Modern Art,” Jean remembered, “and all of us were playing in it. It was percussion, and we were all dressed up in black clothes. I was playing sleigh bells, twelve against eight, thirteen against four, as I remember. It wasn't easy, but I enjoyed it. Merce [Cunningham] was playing a drumlike thing that was a metal gong that he lowered into the water and brought up again. Xenia was a fantastic drummer and would perform with John.”¹¹

“It's hard to picture again what it was like in those days,” Jean Erdman reminisced forty years later. “It all felt very safe in the city. We would troop around from one friend's apartment to another, sometimes several performances, or parties, or informal gatherings in an evening. It all seems [looking back] so relaxed.”

“The evenings Xenia and I spent with Jean and Joe were what you might call lordly entertainment,” said John Cage, recalling the forties. “One could also say it was like going to the movies! It was vastly entertaining.”

There was an opera which Campbell was planning to do with John Cage: Perseus and Andromeda. In style it would be modern, but with reference always to the classical. Beginning with “the Music of the Infinite Void,” Campbell wrote the opening scene to cater to Cage's special style in music, which was not at that time entirely nonobjective. The piece was never produced, but fragmentary outlines, some annotated scores, dialogues and poetry to be used for the planned libretto, were found among Campbell's papers. The story is based upon the myth of Andromeda, who is chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster, and Perseus, who must complete a series of marvelous quests in order to rescue her.

The operatic fragments show the fluidity and creative scope of Campbell's imagination, and provide an early example of his determination to make his own artistic contribution in a wedding of contemporary aesthetic sensibility with that timeless vision which draws from the depths of mythological vitality. Jean remembers with amusement how Joseph would hum and sing parts of the opera as he went about his daily work.

Campbell wrote in his journal of the time:

Another Item: John and Xenia Cage were having trouble, and Xenia came to me for a talk. It was decided that she should go for a spell to Pacific Grove. She left about the 27th. John, who had been reading my myth manuscript, came and had a long talk with us after Xenia's departure, and we all learned a lot—I about the way in which the myth images look in life!

It was not possible to repair the relationship, and in 1947 John Cage and Xenia Kashevaroff were divorced after eleven years of marriage. The Campbells continued to be on friendly terms with both. Cage later credited Campbell with precipitating some of his own major insights about musical composition: “Campbell introduced me to The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, and that whole Eastern spiritual world, and then it was followed by studies in Buddhism and finally Zen.” It was Zen's “mind which is no mind” and its emphasis on the paradoxical nature of living that Cage then sought to express in his music. At about the same time, the scholar who is credited with introducing Zen to the Western Hemisphere, the whimsical and seemingly immortal Daisetz Suzuki, was lecturing at Columbia. After Cage heard him speak, he became an aficionado and then a friend of the Japanese master. Suzuki also became a friend of the Campbells.

THE ART OF READING MYTHS

Because of the visibility engendered by the Wake controversy, Henry Morton Robinson had been approached by an editor from Simon & Schuster, Wallace Brockway. Brockway wanted to know who Campbell was. Robinson “gave me a wonderful spiel,” as Campbell put it, and in January 1943, he had lunch with Brockway at the Mayan restaurant in New York. “Don't say anything negative to this man,” Robinson had primed him before the meeting. “I don't want to close any doors.”

Brockway told Campbell that for years he and Simon & Schuster had been interested in doing a modern Bulfinch's Mythology. “I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole,” said Campbell.

Brockway then asked Campbell what he would be interested in doing: “I said, a book devoted to the archetypal myth forms, not anecdotes about Greek divinities. He was excited and asked for a prospectus. I sent one, they liked it, and asked for a first chapter.” Campbell went to work on it the very last day of the school semester of 1943. “Typed and scribbled till midnight, and felt dissatisfied with what was happening. That night I dreamed.”

A brisk and pretty fish with a knowing eye was frisking in a pool; I was baiting a hook on the bank. The worm had come in two and I was trying to tie it with a sailor's knot. I tied it and began to push the hook right through the knotted part, knowing well that the worm would then be dangling dangerously. It was a beautiful fat worm … but very soon it was not a worm but a great flat fish that I was reaming onto the hook, and the big iron hook was going down the backbone of the beast and I could feel it terribly in my own backbone! The whole thing was becoming awful.¹²

On awakening, Campbell wondered if the dream meant he was to abandon the project, his book on “the serpent wisdom.” Who was the bait and who the fish? Was he hooking Simon & Schuster, or they him? While meditating on the implications of his dream, Campbell chose one piece of his subject (instead of attempting the whole knotty problem) and wrote a thirty-page chapter, which he sent to Brockway. He received a contract from the publisher in May, with an agreement that the manuscript should be delivered by September 1944. The advance royalties would be ＄750, paid in three installments.

Thus Campbell began work on the book that would become The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It is characteristic of him that he took the cue offered by his fish-and-worm dream to alter the way in which he approached the task.

Early drafts of the work dealt more with “how to read a myth” than with the actual figure of the hero, though the later text integrated both. His problem was that he felt it necessary to introduce his own value stance and methodology before he began the type of analysis he had in mind on the ubiquity of the hero mythos. “All the religions of all time,” he wrote in one of his early drafts, “the social forms of prehistoric and historic man, the arts, the philosophies, the prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep boil up from the simple basic, magic ring of myth.”¹³

These vivid words may seem familiar to readers of The Hero, but the following invocation, directed more to the clarification of myth than the theme of the hero, never made it to the final work.

Myth is as fluid as water: without forfeiting its character, it assumes and vivifies whatever shape the conditions of time and space may require. Gentle as the blossoming of spring flowers, it flourishes in the gardens of the planting-folk of the Sudan. Hard and strong as flint, it flies with the arrow of the Cheyenne hunter. Terrible as fire, it rides fiercely over the steppes with the Hun. Slow, magnificent in its towering as the growth of a giant tree, it burgeons multifariously and mightily in the great cultures of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, the Yang-tze and Huang-ho, Peru, Yucatan and the isles of Greece. …

A spectacle of brilliant myth-transformations, a magnificence of wildly colliding and intermelting forms, is revealed through the long history of the Americas. Ours is a continent where waves from all directions have sloshed against each other and broken. The land itself, furthermore, has given forth a mythology of its own.¹⁴

Campbell's exhaustive readings in the dozens of culture matrices he had selected were evident at this time. He couldn't think of Osiris or of Jesus now without summoning their brothers, the dismembered and resurrected gods of Polynesia, the Yucatan, or for that matter of the Indian shamans of North America. But the book was being asked to contain too much; in time this material would fill a score or so of volumes. Campbell eventually had to choose between writing a book on how to read a myth and writing one that focused on the hero.

In the fall of 1944, Campbell gave Simon & Schuster his manuscript. He received little response. The book was “sitting around Brockway's apartment,” he wrote to Robinson; then came a request for some substantial revisions. He worked on these throughout the next year, and in 1945 gave the revised manuscript back to the publisher. They kept it until 1946. Just before Joseph and Jean were to leave for a summer in Hawaii, “I learned that Simon & Schuster did not want to publish the myth book: They were terribly embarrassed, having already accepted it twice (through Brockway, who meanwhile had left them).”

Disgusted, Campbell retrieved the book, and began to plan another rewrite. But first he decided to consult Robinson. The following letter to Robinson in Woodstock (October 1946) reveals both Campbell's insecurity and desperate feelings about his writing and the fun and warmth of his ongoing friendship with Robinson:

Dear Rondo,

Back from Never-Never Land, fat, subdued in mental vigor, trying to pick up life where it left off, and thinking to spend our following summer among the mosquito-swamps of the Maverick (where there will be time for work), I recall, with pleasure and no little pride, a phone-call received from my great colleague of the filled fountain-pen, somewhat to the tune of his kind willingness to cast a sympathetic eye upon the pages of my boomerang myth book. Sensible of many earlier favors, days of our youth spent among the frangible Queen Anne's lace of the manured fields, evenings by the fire, mornings by the dozen, nights with our wives (two sparkling daughters of), and no little desirous of your further regard, I now (with your kind permission) write to know whether it would be convenient for you, within the next few days, to receive my burden by registered mail. With love to your sweet Gertrude, and to the father, son, and pretty twilling-bugs, hoping that their summer was greatly profitable both to purse and to the psychosomatic system, yearning to see you, one and all, in the earliest possible nick of time, I am (and Jean joins me in my cry of love),

Your most humble admirer

In a follow-up letter, timed to the arrival of the manuscript, he added: “try not to dissolve into Nirvana before the end.” Robinson encouraged Campbell to begin with the juicy stuff, make his best points at the beginning, and then follow through with the substance of his discussion. The formula affected the way in which Campbell subsequently approached writing tasks. Campbell soon decided that the book should be decisively steered toward the subject of the hero.

He sent it to Kurt Wolff at Pantheon, who had liked his work on the Navajo myth and the Grimm tales. Wolff liked the book, but was not sure it belonged at Pantheon, so he forwarded it to Bollingen. Three readers there, Huntington Cairns, Wallace Brockway, and Hugh Chisholm, responded enthusiastically, and it was Cairns's words, relayed through Wolff, that Campbell thrilled to hear: “The Hero is a honey.” The Hero would be published under the Bollingen imprint. After the book turned out to be very successful, Wolff, who had become a good friend of Campbell's, apologized for his initial rejection, and confided he had also rejected Spengler's Decline of the West when it first crossed his desk.¹⁵

But there were more concerns that needed to be addressed in the writing: Campbell looked at the manuscript and went numb. Once again he called upon Rondo, who responded in a familiar fashion:

Dear Joe,

You honor me right up to the full measure of my capacity by asking me to take a last look at your Myth book. I did look at it last night when I came home from New York, and once again I was impressed by its power and originality. It is a very great piece of work, my friend, and it deserves the most careful study before any editorial changes can be made. The challenge it presents is most attractive to me, and I shall be delighted to do what I can. You must be very weary of the thing by now, but I am glad the Titan is willing to make one more tremendous effort to bring the true fire to men. There will be a blaze from the mountain tops right down into the valley when your book is published, Joe. Therefore hang on for one more round, Old Prometheus, while the editorial buzzard gnaws away little pieces of your liver.

By January 1948, having gone over Robinson's suggestions and cuttings, Campbell was greatly heartened. “I profoundly marvel at the magic of the master,” he wrote to Rondo. “I think that this (at last) is going to be the book that I was trying to write.”¹⁶ Robinson began to send Campbell samples of his The Cardinal (which became a best-seller on its publication), but Campbell wrote back, “I have small hope that I shall be as useful to your manuscript as you have been to mine.”¹⁷ After looking over what Robinson had begun to do, however, he wrote:

As I told Gerty, the view of your new novel has given me the feeling that it must be a really grand experience to produce such a work. The business of letting the material pull you along, and build itself, through you, into an only half-foreseen configuration never before seemed to me so fascinating; somehow having heard from you last year what you were doing and then seeing the partially finished opus, brought the whole thing out very vividly. My thoughts are now that before going on with my pedantic, semi-scholarly performances, I should try my hand at the paramount task of the writer, namely a novel of some kind …¹⁸

In fact, it was those “pedantic, semi-scholarly performances” of Campbell's in which the world would most delight. He never did publish that novel, and the only short story on which he was working was a strange surreal creation called “Voracious,” about a young man who is brought back from death by his parents' unrelenting love; but then, a zombie, he is initiated into one of the Northwest Coast Indian cannibal societies and develops a kind of cosmic appetite: he tries to eat the world. The story, which ends in a great world-annihilating catastrophe, is vivid and unforgettable, but neither its artistry nor its content make it in any way comparable to the quality Campbell achieved in his writings on mythology.

The difficult beginning of The Hero's journey took on its own mythic tones—it was as if the book had passed through a tempering zone of trials. In 1949, it became the seventeenth work published in the Bollingen Series. Once published, the work was to have vast staying power. Forty years later The Hero with a Thousand Faces is still in print and was most recently on the New York Times best-seller list in 1989.

THE LAST DREAM JOURNAL

Myth is related to dream as the deeper zones of the sea to the shallows. In myth, as in dream, it is the secret of the inner world that comes to us, but the deepest secret, and from profundities too dreadful to be lightly known. Out of our own depths arise the forms; but out of regions where man is still terrible in wisdom, beauty, and bliss. This Atlantis of the interior realities is as strange to us as a foreign continent. Its secrets must be learned. And the way of learning is not that of laboratory and lecture hall, but of controlled introspection.

—Joseph Campbell, “The Art of Reading Myths”

In June 1945 Joseph Campbell began the last dream journal of which we have any record. Xenia Kashevaroff Cage had gone into personal analysis and was finding it valuable. She talked over her experience with the Campbells. These talks inspired Joseph to resume his own self-analysis.

G. Stanley Hall, the psychologist who had been the American host to both Freud and Jung in the early part of the century, said analysis “speeds up the process of maturation.” For Joseph, Bourdelle's immortal words still ringing in his head: C'est la personalité qui conte, the aspects of his life he wished to address were his relationship with Jean and the issue of his own mid-life maturation. “Age of the patient: 41,” he wrote in his journal.

The first thing he noted from analyzing a small cluster of dreams was that somehow now he was “to return to the world of the father,” like the boys in the Navajo legend. He had made it through the danger zone of the war. The year before, he had completed the final touches on his comprehensive and subtle filing system for notes on mythology, the one he would continue to use and evolve until the end of his life. Things had begun to open up for him in the world of publishing, and he and Jean had been married for seven years, a number with potent symbolic associations.

One dream showed his father, “tired and old, standing on a beach.” The image had come to him before, and he recognized the immediate message of his father's mortality. Somehow he had to begin to move toward the father role himself, though he would have no biological children.

In another dream he loses his book (an important personal talisman) on a train. He rushes back to find it, but the train is full of military personnel, and everything has changed. His own efforts are exhausted,

… While I am feeling hopeless a colored porter appears, very friendly, recognizing me, and bringing to me the book. I greet him with a warm feeling of familiarity, and also with a feeling that it would be very nice to travel regularly in a train where the porter and conductor would come to know me and regard me and where I should feel on warm familiar terms with them.

He knew this dream also had to do with the world of his father. Charles W. Campbell had always had a genial way about him with porters and conductors, and they in turn respected and liked him. But the “old world” of gentlemanly politeness and such clearly delineated roles was now blurring. He mused on the world in which he had grown up and which would never be the same again. He realized that he now rather enjoyed the respectful attention of waiters in the Sea Fare restaurant, which he frequented. He found himself always carrying a wad of bills in his pocket, as his father used to do, even ordering the same foods—oysters and scrod, his father's favorites—and he would always be conscious of a slight internal twinge as he did so.

Campbell ruminated about the symbolic sentinels of his rite de passage: “The Book, the N.Y. Times with my article … my name; my Connection (i.e., Jean, my ‘better half’); my maturity as Success in the World and in my marriage.”

His self-diagnosis went as follows:

It is through “Dad's World” that I will find myself and make my connection. I must begin to cultivate those “Dad aspects” of my character and life which I have been neglecting in favor of the “Artist Idyll.”

But another issue of the father complex that arose visibly in his dreams of this time was his attitude toward “authority figures”:

A policeman is going to arrest someone. … He is moving away from me and I observe him from behind. He is a burly man with a thuggish chin and big feet (“all policemen have big feet”). I notice that his coat is built out across the shoulders with some kind of wire frame, to make the man seem even stronger than he actually is.

“Policemen have always represented a kind of threat to me,” he mused: “the State, the Law, stupidity in power, ‘Justice’ as the enemy of life.” He noted that he did not often confront authority straight out. Identifying himself with Indians, he used furtive maneuvers, hiding in the forest of the creative unconscious, and relying on his speed, the figure of the Indian runner.¹⁹ Should he now integrate those authority figures—enter and deliberately embrace the father world?

He knew his inner Indian was not well from an earlier dream: … An American Indian wearing the sort of hat and blanket that Indians wear nowadays comes to the hospital for treatment. He is somewhat suspicious of what is to be done, and there is a feeling that his suspicion is not unjustified.

The dream challenges him to give his Indian the right treatment—and evidently the Western medical model does not have the correct quality to win the Indian's trust.

Jean would later complain that Joseph always paid the utmost attention to the elevator men in their building, inquiring courteously after their personal well-being, even to the detriment of whatever conversation Joseph and Jean might have been having when the elevator arrived. Eventually she realized that Joseph was just naturally attentive to the individuals in his environment, no matter what role they might play.

After one of Campbell's lectures at the New School, he and a group of faculty members went out to a local Village restaurant. Several of the group who had formed ideas about Campbell's aristocratic social aloofness were surprised to see a warm embrace and an exchange of intimacies with the black proprietor, a man whom Campbell had befriended some years earlier. If later in life he could sometimes seem “old worldish” and aloof to observers who didn't really know him well, in personal encounters Joseph Campbell was usually accessible and friendly.²⁰

In a dream of this time Campbell affectionately kissed an elderly black porter on the lips. Was it his father, who had been subservient to the needs of the family and carried them (porter) thus far? Jungian analysts would say that this dark man was a “shadow figure” for Campbell, and probably represented his “feeling function,” of which he had been, heretofore, fairly unconscious. (In Jung's system, the opposite of one's dominant mode of functioning would be the “inferior function,” an area of personal difficulty, to be integrated only slowly and with effort into the whole personality. In Campbell's case the dominant would probably be “thinking”; the inferior, “feeling.”) This, in fact, seems fairly clear at this time: he was coming to know, even be more friendly toward, his feelings, which before this had been somewhat mistrusted—as dark, unruly sorts of things. It had been a younger Joseph who said to Jean, “I have no feelings.”

Campbell also saw in his dreams a further playing out of his childhood opposition between the Indians and General Crook. The dark men were victims of the white Anglo conquerors; there must have been a special kind of debt which Campbell felt must be repaid. How to compromise between the patronizing attitude of his father's generation and his own socialistic and egalitarian leanings of the late twenties? In one dream the conflict presented itself in a poignant, almost inescapable way that touched him greatly. In the beginning, Campbell is trying to visit a black friend who works in a kitchen. He has various trials in his attempt to get to the kitchen, but the last is the most formidable. He opens a door to be

encountered by an ill-tempered, sallow, Greek-Bulgarian-Syrian sort of kitchen man with a long butcher's knife. He snarls at me, declares I can't come in, declares I am not to see my negro friend, and drives me back …

A second scene now unfolds, in the way some dreams have of providing instructive sequels:

Then I am sitting in a well-upholstered waiting room (precisely where the white hallway had been before; the door is in one of the walls), and it seems to be understood that the ill-tempered door guardian has told me to wait. Presently he appears, but now meticulously dressed in an expensive suit. He sits down with great assurance, in a big chair to the left of mine, and there is a large circular low table by us.

He leans back, like a man of great means and worldly wisdom. Then he tells me, with an air of vast self-assurance, fatherly tolerance, and impersonal good will, that my negro friend has not the wealth or education that I have, that he cannot afford expensive clothes. …

I have a feeling that my pompous, self-appointed instructor is judging me on the basis of a fixed formula of some kind. Actually, I had had no thought of despising my friend; no thought of wealth or clothing ever entered my mind in connection with the relationship between him and myself. …

I try to control my tears. I know that he thinks I am crying because his words are so illuminating; actually I am crying because I feel some tragic quality in my relationship to my friend.

Campbell never did like social polemicists or people who assumed they knew his value stance on any particular issue. The dream seemed to be reminding him that while he was untouched by what he felt were pseudo-liberal harangues about what he should be feeling, his own emotions, left to themselves, would know what was right.

Campbell went on to analyze his problems with his brother next. The military elements on the train he associated with Charley, still an officer in the Signal Corps. His mother showed a certain pride in Charley in uniform that perhaps did not flow toward Joseph, who had avoided the military. He began now to analyze the “brother battle.”

Joseph had always had some difficulties with Charley. The two just seemed to be different. Charley was an Anglophile who had affected a British accent, Joseph an Anglophobe. Charley was a roué, a womanizer of sorts, Joseph a more Platonic admirer of women. Charley had very little appreciation for Joseph's style of intellectual discourse or writing, and vice versa. Joseph worked ceaselessly at whatever he was doing, whereas Charley seemed to go through long-term emotional doldrums in which he had very little in the way of ambition.

Joseph, for his own part, always resented the fact that younger brother Charley was an inch taller than he. Charley was an extraordinarily handsome man and enjoyed great admiration from many women—including Campbell mère. Charley was more popular, more socially recognizable, easier to understand. This “brother-battle must be investigated,” Joseph told his dream journal. He knew the same dynamic existed at every level of the mythological realm, from the myths of the Navajo to Cain and Abel, Balin and Balan, even Joyce's Shem and Shaun, “the pen and the post,” the dichotomy on which the structure of Finnegans Wake is based.

There were also sister problems, which he felt it necessary to deal with in this largely Freudian section of his self-analysis. A whole series of women had fallen into the role originally held only by Alice: Angela, Xenia, Elizabeth Penning, his women students, and—not quite appropriately, he thought—Jean. Sometimes he felt for Jean emotions more in the sister realm than those appropriate to a spouse; there was some of the automatic distancing that characterized how he felt around women who were in the forbidden zone. Had the sister fixation grown into a habit for him?

Now, he chided himself, the same sort of thing had happened with Sue Davidson Lowe, whom he had taken under his wing emotionally, and yet the closeness of the relationship threatened to rock the domestic boat in an alarming way. He feared there might be dishonesty in his “strictly Platonic,” but highly affectionate relationships with women. Was he really sublimating lust into friendship? Maybe he should take that Columbia job after all, he mused; it would be more honest to teach men—whether he liked the experience or not.

He had an evident desire to confront all the knots and tangles he would find in his own psyche, but he maintained a sense of humor and perspective throughout.

In one dream:

The sun is shining, but I am wearing my heavy overcoat. A pigeon flies overhead, and lets fly, and I am convinced that the dung has dropped on the tail of my coat; for I am leaning or ducking forward to avoid the shot. I get up and take the coat off to show it to someone (probably to John Cage), but find that the bird really missed me. His dropping is lying on the pavement by the chair.

Campbell set down his associations ironically in his journal: “Birdshit episode: Carpentier-Dempsey fight, where, among a crowd of 80,000, my hat was selected by a high flying pigeon for its deposit.” He felt the dream provided a rather amusing corrective: Don't forget about the near-misses in this serendipitous universe. Don't be paranoid. “Things are not so bad as I make them out,” he concluded.

While the first part of Campbell's dream analysis was almost entirely Freudian, suddenly, after about sixty pages, he decided to go back and look at the whole series from a Jungian perspective. Whereas the Freudian method is directed to the retrospective, the anamnesis or “remembering” as it is called, the Jungian looks forward in time. Its question is, then: What can be done with the givens revealed or emphasized by the dream? He was able to make more sense of the “shadow” figures who appeared—the black men, the Indians, the little black boys who were pelting people with coal, the coal truck which dangerously dumped its load on three men. These were the alchemical nigredo, the dark elements asking for integration. The kiss with the black man, then, would make another kind of sense. The round table which appeared in the dream of the savage kitchen guardian was a mandala, a reference to his potential wholeness. By seeing the multitudinous feminine figures of his dreams as projections of his “anima,” a figure who often appears in male psychology, Campbell was able to experience the exploratory, rather than “fixated,” aspects of his relationship to the feminine.

Even more important than the integration of Freudian and Jungian approaches to his own inner life, however, was another practice that Joseph and Jean developed during these early years of their marriage: sharing the night's dreams at breakfast. In this way, the couple was able to address certain areas of incompatibility manifested in the dream imagery. For example, on one night they noticed that the dreams of each had some expression of resentment toward the other. By looking into the specific nature of the resentments, rather than acting them out, they were able to take measures to avert them. “Joe, this winter,” he wrote, “must work on his psyche problem, so that there will be some energy available for him to send from his sister-complex over into the field that Jean will prepare!”

With these and other insights, Campbell concluded his years of introspective journal keeping. From now on, with the exception of a travel journal that he kept through India and Japan, and his extensive correspondence, Campbell's writing would be almost entirely directed toward publication.

A CREATIVE TIME

Campbell wrote to Henry Morton Robinson in March 1946, just a couple of weeks before his own forty-second birthday:

Jean and I have been having an extraordinarily busy winter: coping with our several families-in-law while dancing and writing respectively. The Zimmer volume has gone through 4 sets of proofs; the agony of an index; and all the marvels of Greek, Sanskrit, German, French, Latin and English typographies. It will appear two seconds before my death. My own myth book has been ready for some time now, but lying in Brockway's apartment. Zimmer volume #2 is almost ready for the publisher. And I have decided to take another year off from teaching.²¹

A clever strategist, as well as an inveterate planner of schedules, Campbell would use one project to relax from another. Tired of the recondite intricacies of Joyce, he would allow himself to settle comfortably into the Navajo myth. Exhausted with Sanskrit, he would enjoy himself with Goethe's vigorous German, and find a quote he liked for his own manuscript, or embellish a gothic detail in one of his short stories. And so it went on—a polyphonic style of creation that would characterize his working from this period on.

It was in this same year that Joseph Campbell began to edit the Eranos Yearbooks. His task for Bollingen was to read the seventeen Jahrbücher volumes, each of which represented the proceedings of the Tagung, the Eranos Conference for that year, usually written in German or French, and select those which would be most appropriate to translate, edit, and then publish in Bollingen's own American series. It was an enormous job. The papers were by such luminaries of myth, symbol, and comparative religion as Henry Corbin, the scholar of Sufi mysticism; Mircea Eliade, the religious historian, who eventually came to the University of Chicago; Erich Neumann, the Israeli student of Jung and author of the classic work on the archetype of the Great Mother; and Gilles Quispel, the world authority on ancient Gnosticism.

That summer, just before the Campbells left New York, Walter Neurath of Thames & Hudson offered Campbell an opportunity to edit a series on mythology. Campbell acknowledged that the invitation intrigued and excited him. In the imagery of his old friend Duke Kahanamoku, he was now “riding on a new kind of wave.”

His first recommendation was that they give a contract to his friend Maya Deren. He felt the filmmaker should do a book on her experiences among the wizards of Voudoun (or “Voodoo,” as it is sometimes called), an Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion which uses trance and dance to evoke and propitiate the gods. Campbell would also play a significant part in the extraordinary actualization of the book, which was to be published as Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti.

Jean's dance intensives would be taking her to Colorado this summer (and for a few summers thereafter); Joseph would come along too, bringing his reading and writing.

Joseph did not relate all that well to the dance and theater crowd, and he complained vociferously to his journal about the rigors of being the husband of a performing artist. Nonetheless, after New York, the mountain air felt invigorating, and Joseph pleased himself by going to the campus library and looking up: Campbell, Joseph. They had the first four of his books. From then on he felt at home in that library as he launched into the Eranos volumes. He and Jean would stroll in the soft summer evening as the sun set over the Rockies and then return to sit at the little student desks in their room. Their usual time of retirement was somewhere between nine and ten o'clock. This couple was now boding to become, as Campbell put it, “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise.”

Notes

1. Padraic Colum (1881-1972), a specialist in fable and folktale, was the author of Wild Earth, The King of Ireland's Son, Dramatic Legends, and many other books.

2. Campbell, Folkloristic Commentary, The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, pp. 861-62.

3. Ibid., p. 860.

4. Ibid., p. 863.

5. Ibid., p. 864.

6. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, May 30, 1943, courtesy of Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

7. Ibid.

8. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, June 16, 1943.

9. She and her husband, painter Arnold Blanche, were friends of the Campbells during this time.

10. Interview with Harold Taylor, April 1990.

11. Interview with Jean Erdman, November 1989.

12. Mathiesson-Loomis Farm Journal, p. 11a.

13. “The Art of Reading Myths,” unpublished manuscript, ca. 1943.

14. Ibid., p. 3.

15. Maguire, Bollingen, p. 142.

16. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, January 18, 1948.

17. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, January 25, 1948.

18. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, August 29, 1948. Campbell did go back to work on The Mavericks, a novel he had completed after his Monterey sojourn. Under the later title, Of the 64 Alternatives, it was probably sent around to publishers, but evidently never accepted.

19. Campbell knew that Indians were actually formidable runners, even before Jim Thorpe proved the point in the Olympics. Indians would not atypically run distances of from a modern marathon up to even a hundred miles or more at a time, which was what also allowed them to run down horses. Campbell identified with this kind of athleticism.

20. Interview with Jean Erdman, November 1989. Among the fifty or so persons with whom we discussed Campbell's life (including at least a dozen people of Jewish background) all confirmed this perspective. One woman met almost every minority criterion one could imagine: being an American black, married to a Jew, and formally initiated into an American Indian tribe. She was also much younger than Campbell and had approached him to act as an academic resource for her. “He was wonderful,” she said, “there was no trace of [prejudice].”

21. Campbell to Henry Morton Robinson, March 13, 1946.