.
TRULY SAD...........UNSUPPORTED BY ANY EVIDENCE Finally, our anger at Gill gives way to a kind of sadness. It is truly a pity that a man like Gill, a fine writer and a successful and respected person, must stoop to such an attack on a “friend” as this. Along with that pity comes the sadness that an intelligent man could have watched the six hours of stimulating dialogue between two men as different and intelligent as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell—talk that literally stimulated a nation—and come away with only this pettiness. That is truly sad.
To the Editors:
As long-time subscribers to and appreciators of The New York Review of Books as well as friends—both personally and intellectually—of the late Joseph Campbell, we were dismayed and angered by Brendan Gill’s vicious attack on Campbell’s character and on his work. We were angry because that attack was unfounded. The man Gill describes was not the man whose character and ideas we knew. And we were dismayed because this
piece of character assassination was essentially unsupported by any evidence; amazingly, not even anecdotal evidence was offered to support the charges of bigotry.We came to know Joe quite well over the past twenty years, much better, we suspect, than did Gill. He stayed in our home on numerous occasions when he was lecturing in our end of the world and had several days free between engagements. During those times we had ample time to share our common interests in mythology, art, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann (Roberta wrote her PhD dissertation on Mann, and didn’t always agree with Joe, so the discussions were often vigorous—Joe did speak his mind to defend his positions, but occasionally Roberta convinced him to change his mind). And Joe also shared with us, often in great detail, the problems and fascinations of the book he was currently working on—first The Mythic Image, then the multi-volume Historical Atlas of World Mythology, and finally that gem of a book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. And we talked of our own work in Mesoamerican myth and ritual which fascinated him and which he generously encouraged, finally writing, despite the press of his own work, the Introduction to our Masks of the Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica which will be released by University of California Press in early November.
On the basis of this extensive experience of the man, we can say unequivocally that the charges levelled against Joseph Campbell are utterly false. Strangely, Gill’s article itself seems to bear witness to their falsity since he offers no real support for his accusations, support which one would surely expect to be forthcoming if it existed. The charge of anti-semitism provides an apt example of Gill’s modus operandi. First he makes the accusation:
Campbell’s bigotry had another distressing aspect, which was a seemingly ineradicable anti-Semitism. By the time I came to know him, he had learned to conceal its grosser manifestations, but there can be no doubt that it existed
Then, hard on the heels of this accusation, comes another:
and that it tainted not only the man himself but the quality of his scholarship.
After the double accusation, Gill presents his “evidence.” But note how it is done. That evidence relates only to the second charge—that Joe’s work was “tainted” by his supposed anti-semitism. By this sleight-of-hand Gill evidently hopes to evade the necessity of demonstrating the truth of the primary accusation. But how does he know Joe was anti-semitic? How does he know that that “taint” was manifested more grossly before he even knew him? It is clear that emotionally loaded language substitutes here for evidence in the classic mode of the character assassin, presumably because the charge of anti-semitism is unsupportable.
And Gill’s evidence for the second half of the charge? Simply that Joe preferred Jung to Freud. Even the slightest knowledge of Joe’s work makes obvious two things. First, Joe did not “despise” Freud; he uses his ideas frequently. Second, his reasons for preferring Jung are rooted in the similarity between his own fundamental assumptions about mythology and those of Jung. In fact, had Gill been listening more carefully he would have heard this explained quite simply in the second of the Moyers interviews. Joe was discussing the most fundamental idea underlying his work on mythology—that the same motifs appear over and over again throughout the mythology of the world. “How do you explain these similarities?” Moyers asked.
Campbell: There are two explanations. One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths.
Moyers: What are archetypes?
Campbell: They are elementary ideas, what could be called “ground” ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. “Archetype” is the better term because “elementary idea” suggests headwork. Archetype of the unconscious means it comes from below. The difference between the Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded, whereas the Freudian unconscious is a collection of repressed traumatic experiences from the individual’s lifetime. The Freudian unconscious is a personal unconscious, it is biographical. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological. The biographical is secondary to that.
This is obviously not the place to argue the relative merits of Freud and Jung, but that passage makes clear the incontrovertible fact that Joe’s attraction to Jung was based on an attraction to his ideas, not on “bigotry.” That this is true should be obvious to anyone even casually familiar with Joe’s whole body of work; there is no thinker to whom he is indebted more clearly and admittedly than Jung. And this attraction Joe felt is common on the part of artists and those who work with art who often find Jung’s formulations more meaningful than those of Freud. Thus the one shred of “evidence” Gill adduces to support his obviously wild charges is not really evidence for them at all.
But, interestingly, Gill doesn’t stop there. He follows this Freud/Jung “example” with the fact that Campbell opposed generally the involvement of artists in urging American entry into the developing war in Europe and that he sought Thomas Mann’s approval of his ideas, an approval which was not forthcoming. What are we to make of the placement of this anecdote? Is Gill insinuating that these actions were also rooted in Joe’s unproven “bigotry”? Are we to gather that that “bigotry” led him to a tolerance of “the menace of Hitler and the Nazis” and to the evils resulting in the holocaust? These are terribly serious charges; they cry out for evidence, and Gill provides none. Knowing Joe as we did, we know why that evidence is not presented. It does not exist.
Having assailed Joe’s character, Gill turns to his work with the same viciousness and lack of principle. All of Joe’s ideas, lengthily discussed and supported in his lifetime of writing and speaking are to be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Did he prefer Jung to Freud? Anti-semitism! Did he think Mann’s later novels inferior to his earlier ones? Personal pique! Was a substantial part of the nation stimulated intellectually and spiritually by Joe’s insights as they poured forth in the Moyers interviews as the unprecedented popularity of those interviews would seem to indicate? Not really! Gill, and Gill alone presumably, has discovered the “covert message that most of his listeners may have been responding to,” presumably without knowing it. (It is fascinating in this regard that Gill later in the article castigates Frank Lloyd Wright for lacking respect for the masses, saying that he “wrote sneeringly of the common herd.” Perhaps this is where Gill learned his own clear disrespect for the intelligence of the American people, at least that portion of them who watch public television.)
That “covert message” is hidden within Campbell’s admonition to “follow your bliss.” And the “message,” according to Gill, is this: following one’s bliss “as Campbell has defined it” means doing “whatever makes one happy” and Campbell thereby “sanctions selfishness on a colossal scale.” Rubbish. If Gill had listened to the Moyers interviews or read Joe’s works, especially The Hero with a Thousand Faces and Creative Mythology he would know what Campbell meant by that admonition and what, we believe on the basis of numerous conversations with students, colleagues, and acquaintances, his audience by and large knew Campbell meant. Joe explains it clearly the first time it is brought up in the interviews, about midway through the series (just imagine, all of those millions of viewers had to sit restlessly through all of that preliminary stuff of the first three hours waiting for their “message”!):
Campbell: Remember the last line [of Babbitt]? “I have never done the thing that I wanted to in all my life.” That is a man who never followed his bliss. Well, I actually heard that line when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Before I was married, I used to eat out in the restaurants of town for my lunch and dinners. Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxville, so that many of the families were out in restaurants. One fine evening, I was in my favorite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about twelve years old. The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.”
And the boy said, “I don’t want to.”
Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.”
And the mother said, “Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”
The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he only does what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”
And I thought, “There’s Babbitt incarnate.”
That’s the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it—what kind of life was it? What good was it—you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.
Moyers: What happens when you follow your bliss?
Campbell: You come to bliss. In the Middle Ages a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are at the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage you—I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you. That is following your bliss.
It would be hard to imagine a more direct answer to Gill’s accusations than this. No, Joe does not mean material success or selfishness by “bliss,” and we find it impossible to believe that any significant number of his viewers or readers think he did. Nor did he mean to endorse the right-wing individualism of Reagan and Rand as Gill charges. Rather, he was speaking to the widespread malaise in this country and in the other developed nations. Many today surely feel that beneath our undoubted prosperity, unequally divided as it certainly is, lies a vast gulf of despair, anguish, and meaningless in the lives of even the most successful. While the solution to the unequal division of prosperity may be political, the solution to this other problem, if there is to be a solution, cannot be found in either left or right wing programs. Thus the malaise; thus the recurrent disillusionment with politics; thus the fascination with Joe’s ideas. We do not write here to argue the workability of those ideas or the solubility of that complex problem, but rather to suggest that no “covert meaning” is needed to explain the fascination with Joe’s ideas.
We could, if there were time and space, answer all of the other charges Gill makes, and we are sorely tempted to take on the cheap “guilt by association” accusation linking Joe to Ayn Rand, of all people. It would be easy to demonstrate how foolish an association that is. But there is no time, and our point is already clear. Finally, our anger at Gill gives way to a kind of sadness. It is truly a pity that a man like Gill, a fine writer and a successful and respected person, must stoop to such an attack on a “friend” as this. Along with that pity comes the sadness that an intelligent man could have watched the six hours of stimulating dialogue between two men as different and intelligent as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell—talk that literally stimulated a nation—and come away with only this pettiness. That is truly sad.
Roberta H. Markman
California State University
Long Beach, California
Peter T. Markman
Fullerton College
Fullerton, California
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
