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plaint of a Soviet critic who, laboring under the terminology of doctrinaire marxism, complained that Hero completely divorced myth from "the real actuality in which it arises and develops" as it overlooks "the social role of a given work, its specific national traits, its artistic imagery and ideological peculiarities." 17 The universalizing and psychoanalytic study of myth in the Campbell mode would, from this perspective, undoubtedly represent its appropriation by bourgeois consciousness; the latter, in marxist eyes, tends to subjectivize and aestheticize myths and stories that had their real roots in social alienation and economic deprivation.
Campbell's own socioeconomic setting, at the time of Hero, was the unprecedented affluence of postwar America and the coldest years of the Cold War. Schools, colleges, and adult education programs were, like churches, growing briskly as veterans enrolled under the GI bill. More families had money for college than ever before, and schools and businesses prepared for the new world of the baby boomers now beginning to see the light of day. Mythology was not a major part of postwar education, but it was not an entirely insignificant factor either. To recapitulate themes from our introductory chapter, we may recall that literary discourse in the New Criticism style was serious then, and Campbell's elegant, lightly psychoanalytic and literarycritical style of mythology fitted in well. Its appeal was enhanced by the postwar yearning to retrieve the best of the premodern past, articulated in generalized mythology as well as in Vedanta, Trappist monasticism, Zen, and the Thomism of Catholic campuses. A big issue that obsessed the early fifties was the individual versus "mass society." The existentialists and social critics like David Riesman of The Lonely Crowd approached it in their own ways; Campbell did it by making the hero the central figure in myth and showing that, therefore, only in the individual is there true glory.
The Mature Mythologist
Campbell was very much a part of this world; but as usual everything was a little different for him. In the McCarthy days his problem was not to avoid blacklisting, as it was for many professors, Hollywood figures, and others; it was rather the disdain that come in such circles to one perceived as being on the other side. But Harold Taylor, president of Sarah Lawrence at the time and a friend of Campbell's,
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said of him that "Campbell's view was always more complex than could be easily grasped by most people."
One of the things Joe really didn't like was Communists. . . . [But] he didn't think we should, as a college, be just one thing; each person who came in should be given legroom to move in whatever direction his legs took him. . . . He was a man of strong, independent views. . . . He was very fond of the college and a lot of the people in it, but he was annoyed by the politics of the habitual liberals on the faculty. 18
Campbell got to know Alan Watts around this time. They were two of a kind, lively, sensual, still youngish lovers of spiritual traditions who also knew how to enjoy good food, drink, and allnight parties. In his autobiography, In My Own Way, Watts described Campbell in this manner, " . . . his attitude to life is Tantric: an almost fearsomely joyous acceptance of all the aspects of being, such that whenever I am with him his spirit spills over into me." 19
Like Watts, Campbell was part of a movement to bring the wisdom of the East into the classrooms and living rooms of the West. But for him this process was a bit more complicated than simple praise and appropriation. For one thing, he was never quite sure just how much he liked the East. Confronting it, he could swing from fulsome accolade to acerbic impatience; he loved the mythology and philosophy he had explored in the Zimmer years, and even as far back as the meeting with Krishnamurti. But the social and political reality of Asia today could be something else, above all when they seemed at right angles to the mythologist's proud individualism and staunch political opinions. In the end, he fell back on one of his first loves: the pagan or quasipagan myths of the West, from the Odyssey to the Grail to James Joyce.
The issue was exacerbated in 1954 and 1955, when Campbell took an extended tour of India, a country he had of course studied intensively by virtue of his work on the Zimmer manuscripts. He was accompanied by Swami Nikhilananda and a couple of prominent members of the New York RamakrishnaVivekananda Center.
The Ramakrishna Mission had arranged lectures and opened doors for him. But his opinions and observations, recorded in an engrossing journal, were his own. 20
Neither he nor Zimmer had actually been to the land whose rich art and thought had so influenced them, and of
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which they had undoubtedly constructed a halffantasy land of wonder. India on the ground was an experience that left Campbell shaken by no small degree of culture shock.
Campbell admitted in a letter to his wife, Jean, that nothing in the real India "was quite as good as the India I invented" in New York before the trip. 21 The religion, the temples, the gurus, the mythological background of course was there. But all was interfused with the heat, the poverty, the dirt, the beggars, and the chauvinism of the newly independent state. The repressive qualities of the ancient civilization were also more than evident, in the evils of caste and the hopeless drudgery of those on its lower rungs. For one whose ideal was obviously the cleanliness and order of Germany, India with its filth and chaos clearly left much to be desired, just as had the Central America of an earlier trip. A few scenes approached the Germanic ideal. Of the state of Orissa the visitor was able to say that it was "the best thing so far in India: lovely air, beautiful skies, fertile flatland by the sea, and, after Calcutta, clean and orderly looking people." 22
But much of India was highly unsuitable to one of Campbell's values and temperament. Most infuriating to him were the ubiquitous and persistent conmen and selfappointed guides and attendants, all clamorous for baksheesh. On top of that, he had to deal with the officious but inefficient bureaucracy, and to listen to tirades from intellectuals claiming that the United States—not even Britain—was somehow responsible for India's problems. At the same time India was, at this moment, enamored with socialist visions and the idea of friendship with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. All this definitely hit a sore spot in the devoutly anticommunist mythologist.
He found himself becoming more patriotically American than ever, and more promodern as well. Once, in response to a comment by Swami Nikhilananda that "there is no progress, only change," Campbell replied, "I used to think that too, Swamiji, but since coming to India I have changed my mind. I think there is progress, and I think India will begin to experience progress too, pretty soon." 23 Even Gandhi did not enjoy from Campbell the wholehearted admiration he received from Eliade; the American called him and his disciple Vinoba "primitivists," whose "alienation from the inevitables of modern life makes for a kind of romantic escapism." 24
Campbell also learned something about himself and his own alienation in India. In a telling remark in his journals, he said, "In the
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Orient I am for the West; in the West for the Orient. In Honolulu I am for the 'liberals,' in New York for big business. In the temple I am for the University, in the University for the temple. The blood, apparently, is Irish." 25 That sort of independent, contrarian individualism was what he missed in modern India.
After The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the journey to India came the fourvolume series of collected and annotated mythologies called The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (1959), Oriental Mythology (1962), Occidental Mythology (1964), and Creative Mythology (1968). 26 In this series the attitude toward East versus West was gradually changing, though often wavering back and forth. In Hero Campbell had, despite the individualistic theme, praised the East for its mythological subtlety, and so did he in the Oriental volume of Masks. But by the time he got to the Occidental volume, and in Creative Mythology, he was increasingly hostile to the East for its suppression of the individual.