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As for the permanent values at risk in time of war, they included capacity for critical objectivity, the apparently useless diligence of the disinterested scientist and historian, the work of the literary man and the artist, education as human beings rather than as patriots, the preaching of religion free of those "always ready to deliver God into the hands of their king or their president." ("We hear of it already—this arminarm blood brotherhood of democracy and Christianity.") 9
Much of this is of course unexceptionable on one level. Few sober observers can deny that the evil which is war has its ways of corrupting participants on all sides, that the first casualty of war is often truth, and that the best means of maintaining some degree of sanity amid war's horror is to keep in contact with permanent values forever above and beyond the battlefield. But in 1940 the apparent moral equivalency which Campbell, unnecessarily, kept positing between the democracies and their totalitarian adversaries, as though no more was involved than a personal quarrel between "Mr. Churchill" and "Mr. Hitler," or as though Britain, for all its faults, was on the same abysmal moral level as the Nazi regime, was more than many then or since could swallow. One critic was his onetime idol Thomas Mann, who by now had fled to America. In his Weimar period Campbell had been much influenced by Mann's 1918 Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (''Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man,") a disillusioned statement from the end of World War I. In that tract for the times the great novelist wrote with disdain of the onesided tendentiousness of every political achievement, and celebrated instead the balanced and fullblooded portrayals of the human condition accessible to the artist and poet. That transcendent vision, Campbell thought, Mann had achieved in his own manylayered and luminous novels. But by 1940 Mann had undergone a considerable awakening to the profound evil of which politics was capable, and the danger of viewing evil in the Hitlerian degree with aloof neutrality.
Campbell had sent to Mann a copy of the "Permanent Human Values" talk at the suggestion of Mrs. Eugene Meyers, an older student who knew both the professor and the German exile. Campbell had earlier met the novelist through her mediation. Even then, Campbell had been disturbed by Mann's 1938 book The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which the refugee from the land of concentration camps had simply identified the good with democracy and evil with fascism. The once
"Great Master of Objectivity," as Campbell called
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him, who had started out as the supreme advocate of seeing both sides of every question, was now so far in the partialities of the temporal world as to see God, or the timeless Absolute, as on the side of the "democracies."
Then, in a letter of January 6, 1941, in response to the talk, Mann pointedly asked Campbell what would become of the five "permanent values" of which he spoke if Hitler triumphed. "It is strange," the novelist declared, "you are a friend of my books, which therefore in your opinion probably have something to do with Permanent Human Values. Well, those books are banned in Germany and in all countries which Germany rules today. And whoever reads them, whoever sells them, whoever would even publicly praise my name, would end up in a concentration camp, and his teeth would be beaten in and his kidneys smashed.'' 10
Campbell replied to Mann equivocally enough, but to his journals he confided his disappointment: "The letter which I received from Thomas Mann in reply was one of the most astonishing revelations to me: it signified for me the man's practical retraction of all his beautiful phrases about the timelessly human which no force can destroy, and about the power of love over death and about the Eternal altogether. It exhibited a finally temporalpolitical orientation, and not only that, but a fairly trivial and personal view of even the temporalpolitical." 11
Here as elsewhere in his journals, he set against the evils ascribed to the fascist side the British role in Ireland and India, the American conquest of the continent and its native population, and the situation of "Negroes" in the South, together with all the graff and hypocrisy of which democracy was capable. It would be unjust to say Campbell was then or ever pronazi or profascist; he several times expresses his distaste for the crudeness, brutality; and antiSemitism of Germany's present masters.
But against all that, he put his freely admitted love for Germany as a country and a culture, and also the passion of hatreds closer to home. He possessed an Irishman's bitterness toward the British Empire, and he was the sort of American intellectual who despised many of his countrymen's shallow patriotism and selfsatisfied complacency with the vitriol of an H. L. Mencken, whom he read. Unfortunately, it was perhaps his yearning for transcendent, mythical purity of thought, together with a lack of such actual experience as Mann had had, that kept him from willingness to admit any degree of
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proportionality in the political evils of the world, or any absolute moral obligation to oppose as well as transcend the worst of them.
Moreover, not only did Campbell like to see himself as an Olympian above the fray, as we have seen he also liked a good argument and had a tendency, which more than once got him into trouble, to argue for the opposite point of view from that prevailing among the company he was keeping. As American public opinion moved more and more decisively toward Britain, whose claims to superior virtue left Campbell quite unimpressed, he remained blind to anything but equivalency and a deeply felt pacifism. When the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, Campbell wrestled with his conscience, reading among other things pacifist literature from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, for nearly three months before finally registering for the draft. He soon found, to his immense relief, that he was just past the age limit for being called up to active service.
Refugees from the other side, however, kept coming into his life. And while it is clear that Campbell had long felt deep inner currents flowing in the direction of mythological interests, the new contacts during World War II seem to have moved him decisively in that direction. Both connections were with Germans who, like Mann, were in the United States because of Hitler. Heinrich Zimmer, an Indologist whose wife was part Jewish, and who was a friend of both Mann and Jung, had fled Nazi Germany in 1938. After teaching at Oxford for two years, he had come to New York and Columbia University in 1941. There Campbell was among his first pupils. He had first met Zimmer through Swami Nikhilananda of the Vedanta Society. When Zimmer died prematurely in 1943, Campbell received the responsibility for editing his manuscripts for publication.
That was through the agency of the other new contract, Kurt Wolff, a halfJewish German publisher who, after a few years in Italy, also arrived in New York in 1941.
There, initially on a shoestring, he established the Pantheon Press, dedicated to books of intellectual and spiritual significance. Among its first projects was the Bollingen Series, a Jungiantinged (it was of course named after Jung's hideaway) set of volumes on myth and world religion funded by Paul and Mary Mellon. At Zimmer's suggestion Campbell was named first editor of the series. An early work was Maude Oakes, Where the Two Came to Their Father: A Navajo War Ceremonial. Zimmer, knowing of Campbell's