In further conversations, Johnson came to understand Campbell better. The mythologist called himself a "classical conservative," citing the story of the Grail Quest as an example of the staunch individualism on which that position is allegedly based: the knights agree among themselves that they will not follow in another's footsteps, but that each should pursue his own path to the holy object, beginning at that place in the forest that was darkest and most alone. Campbell, in fact, according to Johnson prided himself on not really being part of the modern world. He never watched television and had no interest in popular culture. (Eliade too, incidentally, during the Chicago years when I knew him, never read newspapers or sat in front of a TV and had virtually no awareness of what was happening in the outer world.) In Campbell then we see, in this context, an extreme and obviously idealized individualism—the assumption that the knights of capitalism would voluntarily all start equally distant from the prize—combined perhaps with something of the puritanism of his Irish Catholic background, were the dominant constituents of Campbell's social views. He explained to Toby Johnson that the real danger in modern society was the threat of swamping personal freedom with concern for collective needs, which would lead the government to meddle in people's lives and cater to pressure groups.
By the time the Masks series had been completed, Joseph Campbell was famous. He had reached several audiences who believed that
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what he had to say about myth and contemporary civilization was worth hearing. The Hero with a Thousand Faces had fascinated a quorum of writers and literary critics like himself, and together with the rest of the postwar mythmood had helped launch the "myth criticism" of scholars like Northrop Frye. The Bollingen Series work, especially the edited Eranos Yearbooks, had made him a familiar name in the large professional and lay circles interested in comparative religion, Jungianism, and related inquiries. Now the Masks series hit the nation's bookshops and coffee tables in another decade, the sixties, much taken with recovering the wisdom behind myths and symbols from out the race's occult past. Their impact was abetted by active lecturing and media appearances on the part of an author who looked so much the Hollywood image of the popular, winsome yet wise professor. There were critics, but few of them had royalties to match Campbell's.
The next book, Myths To Live By (1972), reworked lectures given over many years at the Cooper Union in New York. 32 Emmett Wilson, Jr., in the Saturday Review called it "badly written," retaining "the cloying chatter of a rather unstructured lecturer talking to an undemanding audience." 33 The book did, however, continue something of a new departure for the mythologist begun in Creative Mythology: writing directly and centrally concerned with the contemporary need for new myths in a time of what he called "pathology of the symbol," when religions based on outdated views of the cosmos have been losing their force, but the new gods have not yet arrived. In Creative Mythology he had become very concerned with the role of mythology in social stability: For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe. For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work . . . there follows inevitably a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and without, for life, which the brain will take to be for 'meaning.'" 34
In Myths To Live By Campbell returned to Spengler and Frobenius for ways of understanding the current critical eschatological situation, and talked of finding new mythologies in Outer Space. J. A. Appleyard, writing in Commonweal, was disconcerted by Campbell's " weknowbetter" attitude toward the wisdom of the past, but others, like Peden
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Creighton in the Journal of Religious Thought recognized that the present symbol situation was schizophrenic, and whether or not Campbell had all the answers he was at least asking the questions. 35
There were other books by the mature mythologist: The Flight of the Wild Gander, a collection of his most scholarly papers; the late three volumes of the Historical Atlas of World Mythology, and another lecture collection, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, as well as posthumous journals. 36 Transformations of Myth Through Time was the posthumous publication of his last lecture tours, also videotaped for a PBS series. 37 That final collection of lectures no doubt gratified Campbell's numerous fans, but did little to quiet critical concerns about the mythologist's oversimplification of historical matters and tendency to make myth mean whatever he wanted it to mean. Indeed, one has a familiar but disturbing sense of an old man becoming more and more set in his opinions as the years advance. That is apparent in his treatment of the Semitic element in European and American culture.
In Transformations, he recalls scolding a student of his at Sarah Lawrence for saying that if she didn't think of herself as Jewish, she wouldn't know her identity.
Campbell told her that he knew who he was even apart from thinking of himself as an Irishman. On the same page (91) he presents a confrontation he had with the celebrated Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whom he took to task for expressing horror at the sacrifice of children to the pagan god Moloch despite Abraham's willingness to obey Yahweh's command to sacrifice his own son Isaac. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the argument, it is apparent that examples of what Campbell considers bad religion often seem to involve Judaism and its progeny. The return from East to West did not necessarily mean a return to these religions. In chapter 11
of the same book, "Where There Was No Path: Arthurian Legends and the Western Way," he makes those famous stories speak of a lingering pagan individualism standing over against an oppressive "Near Eastern tradition" imported by Christianity, buttressing the case through hopelessly selective use of the material, and despite the fact that we know King Arthur only as a Christian hero. Anyone who, despite great learning, could so forget both the ruthless and repressive sides of tribal paganism, and the stunning examples of Jewish and Christian individualistic heroes from David to Jesus, to embrace such a simplistic view of European culture, is beyond rational argument.
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Regrettably, in Joseph Campbell one sees a man in whom, for all his celebratory status and accomplishment, some levels of promise remained unfulfilled. In place of ongoing growth in wisdom and understanding, there is a life too soon foreclosed around views that seem more firmly rooted in quirks of temperament than intellectual analysis. He seems one of those golden youths to whom too much came too soon and too easily, and who thereafter does little but repeat the homilies that first won him the laurels of popular acclaim.
Yet there is another Campbell, a counterpart to the charismatic public figure, a Campbell who was almost bafflingly inward. This mysterious persona surfaced in one of his most remarkable books, one that only he could have written, The Mythic Image (1974).