"romantic fascist" and virulent anticommunist, was said to have objected to admitting Blacks to Sarah Lawrence, and at the time of the Moon landing in 1969 to have remarked that the earth's satellite would be a good place to send all the Jews. One woman recounted that she had been in a class of his at the height of the sixties campus upheavals; Campbell had said he would flunk any student who took part in political activism—and when she did, he made good on his threat Other correspondents rose as vehemently to the mythologist's defense. One contended that his position at Sarah Lawrence had to be understood in light of the fact that he had fallen foul of a faculty "Marxist clique"—the same academic politics satirized in Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe. Others argued that "Follow your bliss" has nothing to do with Ayn Rand individualism, much less materialistic selfishness, but the opposite—follow your own way to spiritual liberation.
Admittedly, it is hard to connect the Campbell of the bigot stereotype with a man who for nearly forty years was an immensely popular teacher at Sarah Lawrence, until recently a women's college and one which has long had a reputation as a liberal bastion with a large Jewish enrollment. Yet, if even some of the anecdotes are true, there does appear to be a paradox, the paradox of what Gill called "the savant as reactionary"—in this case, not so much a sophisticated intellectual reactionary, a de Maistre or even a Jung or Eliade, as a smooth articulate nonpolitical mythologist who, off the record, dropped remarks one might have more readily expected to hear from a country club Bourbon. One almost senses a double life.
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That perception would not, however, be correct; there were relationships between the mythologist and the political reactionary, and Campbell's political views, though strongly held and on occasion forcefully expressed, were more subtle than might appear on the surface. Campbell loved a good argument, often taking "contrarian"
positions at polar opposite to those of his circle or his interlocutors perhaps as much to spark lively debate as anything else. Yet he expressed himself with such charm and contagious intellectual enthusiasm that even many who disagreed strongly with his views remained friends and fans.
At the same time, he held deeply to political and social opinions usually identified as conservative. In his way of thinking, they stemmed from the passionate belief in individual intellectual and artistic liberty that had always been important to him. Thus, in the early fifties, he saw liberty as far more threatened by communism than by the transitory phenomenon of McCarthyism and said so, appalling his more liberal colleagues. In the sixties, despite a long infatuation with pacifism, he supported the Vietnam War on the same antitotalitarian grounds against a hostile intellectual atmosphere. Yet in 1940 and 1941 he had not been able to muster a similar opposition to Hitler, then holding instead to a very high view of the artist's and intellectual's need to remain an independent observer above the political passions of the moment.
Wandering and Wondering
One can begin to understand Joseph Campbell by looking at his life. He was born in 1904 of IrishAmerican parents, who moved frequently but always in or around New York. Both his grandfathers arrived in the United States as poor immigrants escaping the Irish potato famine, but Joseph's father, Charles W. Campbell, was a successful salesman who raised his family to uppermiddleclass status with all the advantages pertaining thereto: travel, entertainment, good private schools. They were a lively bunch, the parents always ready to give Joseph and his younger brother and sister exposure to the art and culture of the world. They went to concerts, plays, and museums, and traveled at home and abroad. Practicing Catholics without excessive piety, his family and Catholic schools doubtless bestowed on Joseph an innate sense of religion and its symbolism, and at the same time
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presented him with an experience of religious institutionalism he was later to rebel against. The wellrounded family also loved sports, and Joseph had ample opportunity to develop his natural skill as an athlete. The children all made something of themselves: Joseph's brother, Charles Jr., became an actor; his sister, Alice, a sculptor.
Like Eliade, Joseph was both an avid Boy Scout and a precocious reader. While still in grade school, particularly after being taken by his father to Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, he cultivated a strong interest in American Indians. He admired the Native Americans both for their simple way of life and their heroic though futile resistance to the Whites. He imitated Indian practices on camping trips, and by the time he was ten or eleven was reading the voluminous reports of the Bureau of American Ethnography.
After attending Canterbury, an upscale Catholic boarding school, Joseph enrolled as a freshman at Dartmouth in 1921, soon transferring to Columbia. He took English, comparative literature, and languages, and listened to lectures in anthropology by the distinguished Franz Boas. He combined an outstanding academic career with nationalclass, and some thought potentially Olympic, dash and middle distance running, a sport of course emphasizing individual strength and competitiveness.
Handsome and outgoing, he was socially popular as well. In 1923 Joseph and the family returned to the east coast from a trip to California by ship, passing through the Panama Canal and visiting points in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean en route. Campbell's letters and journals indicate he was mainly impressed by the heat, dirt, and flies of that impoverished part of the world, a "culture shock" he was much later to experience again in India, and one much in contrast with the experience Europe was to be for him the following year and later. 8 But Campbell never really resolved a deeplevel conflict between love at a distance for the culture and myths of exotic places, and a virtually physical revulsion at their characteristic lack of order and cleanliness when confronted firsthand.
In 1924, between his junior and senior years, Joseph traveled to Europe with his family, in part to attend the Olympic Games held in Paris that year. As it happened he was on the same ship with the young spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti and a small coterie of supporters. Although Krishnamurti was then being advanced by many in the Theosophical Society as the "vehicle" of a coming World Teacher, Campbell encountered him chiefly as an attractive youth full of unpre
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tentious but deep wisdom. The American toured England with this group, and through his new friends and their circle enjoyed his first real encounter with oriental spirituality. Rosalind Williams, later Rosalind Rajagopal, one of the young "messiah's" youthful companions, gave Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia to Campbell to read on shipboard; he was enthralled by this poetic story of the Buddha's quest for the greatest treasure of all, supreme enlightenment.
Joseph's undergraduate career at Columbia was followed by graduate studies in medieval literature at the same institution. He took an M.A., writing a dissertation on the Grail legend, a theme to which he was to return throughout life. In 1927 Campbell received a munificent grant through Columbia enabling him to spend two years in Europe studying Old French and Provencal in preparation for the Ph.D. he later received from the Sorbonne. Like any intelligent young man abroad he studied many other things as well. He read the Parisian publication of James Joyce's Ulysses while that controversial novel was still banned in the U.S. He kept in touch with Krishnamurti, visiting him at Eerde in Holland, a center for the Krishnamurti movement. It was after hearing Krishnamurti lecture in Paris in 1928 on rejecting all dependence on external authority that Campbell stopped attending mass; he remained free of formal religious attachments for the rest of his life.