The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

The posthumous battle that was engaged by Brendan Gill against his deceased Centurion friend and intellectual sparring partner, Joseph Campbell [NYR, September 28], is easy to account for. In the banter of the bar “in the art gallery off the landing of our grand marble stairway,” perhaps Brendan Gill was the verbal match of Joseph Campbell. In death Joseph Campbell won, and it is easy to see why. It is the triumph of ideas and insight over style, of originality over reaction.

As one of the executive producers of the series “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers,” and, incidentally, a new member of the Century Club, I’d like to join the give and take of what, unfortunately, Joe is no longer here to make into a vigorous discussion.

First, Mr. Gill advances an interpretation of one of Campbell’s most frequently quoted phrases, “Follow your bliss,” that I believe is hardly vigorous and, in fact, off-base. He writes that the meaning of Joe’s message is to do only that which makes one happy, and, as such, that it sanctions the selfishness that has become deplorably familiar to us in the Reagan years. With that interpretation, he likens Campbell’s philosophy to that of Ayn Rand, one of the absolutists for the value system of materialism.

After years of working with this material, I would suggest that this interpretation is the opposite of what Campbell meant. Campbell says: “We are so busy doing things of outer value that we no longer know what we intend,” and he says this in many different ways. What Joe meant—and continues to mean in this period of infant mortality that so irks Mr. Gill—is that the impositions of our culture, have caused us to lose touch with our inner selves and our own inner sense of being that directs us toward those things that are most meaningful in our lives.

Further, he said: Follow your bliss no matter what the cost, though society may revile you, though you may live as an outcast and in poverty. This is the philosophy he followed in his own life in pursuing his intellectual passion—mythology. It is the message he gave to his students, young and old, and it is the reason he drew their admiration and love.

I have been asked many times by those who admired the series why I think it was so successful. My answer, uncertain though I am, is that in this society, which is competitive and materialistic, there is little outlet for our spiritual selves. We are so engaged in activities of outer value—the pursuit of financial security and social gain—and our sense of reality, our sense of ourselves, is so dominated by a popular culture that admits only what is tangible, quantifiable, and measurable that we have little validation of our inner life, our souls, if you will. It used to be that there were institutions and other forums that were a home for the expression of what we call the soul—houses of religious worship, the corner bar, the community, the family. All of these have changed, and many have ceased to serve as sanctuaries for spiritual concerns. Most are operating at a deficit and have less time for the spirit than for their own survival.

Nevertheless, there is something inside—call it the soul—that needs expression, and what I think the Campbell series did is to give it an outlet, to acknowledge and address it through an exploration of the literature of the spirit. The electronic hearth became for six hours a sacred place for the human tribe which, throughout history, has asked the same questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What does my life mean? Why must we kill? How can there be evil if God is good? How can I forgive and be forgiven? Is there a God? And more.

Ironically, the series is now called a “cash cow” by public television stations which originally questioned the whole production. Stations are using it, successfully, for fundraising, and so our culture confirms the existence of the soul in its very own terms—in ratings that can be quantified and contributions that can be counted.

Some additional observations:

Yes, Joe said “Yes” to life, the good and the evil, the paradox, the suffering. One person told me that she believed the series was successful because Joe expressed the difficulty of everyone’s life so well and yet he was so affirming. “Is this a private fight,” Joe would paraphrase an old Irish saying, “or can anyone get in?” And: “It’s a wonderful opera, only it hurts.” That’s an accurate reflection of the experience of being alive and accepting it as it is. It says we all share the suffering, and the sharing without pretense is comforting.

Yes, Joe loved the German culture. And the Japanese culture, and the war years were painful and puzzling for him.

And yes, Joe viewed the Jewish God, Yahweh, and the Old Testament, as a mythology (like all religions) that was the expression of a war-like, punitive culture, as he says in the series, and many would agree. None of that means that Joe was anti-Semitic, which, in fact, as an alumna of Sarah Lawrence and, possibly, because I am Jewish, I have been told many times. I will not dispute it. I can only say that none of it emerged during the twenty-four hours of interview.

I have heard other things about Joe Campbell, in particular, about his conservative politics, not only during the war years but throughout his life, not exactly a sin. And I have heard about his intolerance on several fronts. That he was opinionated I certainly came to see in daily drives to the location for taping. But that is just more of life’s mysteries, how one so learned can be, in some ways, so limited; and one so seeing can be so blind. Those, too, are questions that are hardly new, and the series was not intended to be a biography of Joe, nor an exploration of his character, nor was it intended to make him a hero. Joe Campbell was a teacher, passionate about his work and ideas, dedicated to the illumination of the spiritual traditions, a broker, an interpreter, and, to some, a sage.

Joe would be delighted at the final achievement of his life’s ambition, which was to spark a wider interest in the riches of spiritual traditions, to release the enormous energy and power that they contain, and to direct attention to their insights and wisdom. He would be excited about the discussion and dialogue about his ideas. He would be amazed, and, I think, dismayed to find the dialogue deformed into a debate, for or against, the glorification of Joe. How sad it is that Joe’s posthumous acceptance by the public has caused a friend in life to turn against him in death.

Joan Konner
Graduate School of Journalism
Columbia University
New York City

To the Editors:

As Joseph Campbell never hid his politics and prejudices, I wonder why Brendan Gill befriended him in the first place, waiting until he died to target him as his enemy.

The reason he gives is that Campbell’s posthumous Power of Myth series was a siren song to selfishness. For evidence, he cites Campbell’s counsel to “Follow your bliss” and five short nondescript glosses appended thereto.

There is no question but that “follow your bliss” is the six-hour series’ most seductive line, but like every aspect of myth it is more multivalent than the reading Gill allows it. Gill hears it as pointing to Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, and Wall Street yuppies, but if Aristotle was right in arguing that we experience eudaimonia (happiness) when we are excelling at what we do best, then “following your bliss” could mean discovering what you are good at doing, and then giving it your all. Plotinus agreed with Aristotle in considering “felicity” the condition of persons who have attained the fullness of their development, and St. Thomas considered joy the noblest human act. Blake exhorted his readers to “arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy,” and those among Campbell’s listeners who were acquainted with Asian thought would have heard in “follow your bliss” an echo of the Vedantic teaching that life’s object is to discover the ananda (bliss) that is our deepest unconscious.

There is an alternative to Gill’s explanation for the success of this series which accords more respect, not only to Moyers and Campbell, but to their audience. (The people I have heard speak of the program have impressed me as being generally intelligent, liberal, and not the sort that is easily lulled into narcissism.) Some consider Rebecca West the best reporter of our century, and when, on his Journal back in 1981, Bill Moyers asked her to identify the mood of our times, she answered, “A desperate search for a pattern.” Myth provides that pattern. As Joe Campbell never tired of explaining, it is the human way of pouring the hodge-podge of life’s experiences into molds—ultimately a single mold—that renders it intelligible and meaningful. To overlook that as the program’s appeal—or to downplay it in favor of a doctrinaire political explanation—is to abet the “politicizing of the humanities” which last year’s NEH report cited as one of the problems the humanities now face.

This does not excuse the side of Joseph Campbell that I (with Gill) consider shadow. If Gill has light to shed on how we should balance our accounts on people like Wagner, Picasso, Heidegger, and now in ways Joseph Campbell, who bless us with their genius but disillusion us in other ways, it would be good to hear his views.

Huston Smith
Philosophy and Religion
Syracuse University To the Editors:

Brendan Gill, as an outsider writing about Joseph Campbell, could not have been expected to know what happened at Sarah Lawrence. The truth is that Joe Campbell ran afoul of a strong clique of pro-Stalinist Marxists who exercised marked influence at Sarah Lawrence in those years. (People have forgotten Mary McCarthy’s brilliant satire of that in her Groves of Academe.) Even during the Hungarian Revolution there were faculty members who were still ideological Stalinists. Joe Campbell’s romantic fascism was a function of his political naivete, but also of his violent anti-Communism, aggravated by the politically repressive atmosphere at Sarah Lawrence, and under-pinned by ancient Hindu orthodoxies revived by Rene Guenon, Marco Pallis and others and also by Spengler’s Decline of the West, a book by which he, like Henry Kissinger, set much store.

The interesting comparison is with Ezra Pound, who also in the light of his predilection for ancient heroism, so amazingly misunderstood Mussolini. (We should remember, however, that it was people of both the Right and Left who were deceived by the nature of modern totalitarianism. It is hard to think now who was the more foolish—crypto-fascists like Joe Campbell or the Stalinist sympathizers who were his enemies at Sarah Lawrence.)