Hope & Despair

Jean Erdman Campbell, wife of the famed mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and a famous dancer- choreographer in her own right, passed away at age 104 on May 4th of 2020. Although she is now eclipsed by her more-famous husband, for the greater part of their marriage it was Jean who was the famous personality. Hopefully, her own enormous contributions to the world of dance and theater will come to the fore again as we remember a century of glorious creativity.

There was a period of about 15 years - 1989-2004 - where Jean and I spent a lot of time in each other's company. My parents were very close friends with Joseph Campbell and although Jean rarely came to visit because she was so involved with her dance and theater company, we felt her presence since Joe spoke of her so frequently and with such affection and admiration. After his death in 1987 we started to see a lot more of Jean as she began traveling the country to spend time with all the folks who had been close to Joe and were furthering his important work in mythology.

I had started the Joseph Campbell Society in Chicago and she honored us with several visits in our start-up years. A couple of years later when I actually began working for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, the organization she established to keep Joe's work in the public eye, we were frequently in each other’s company. I spent time in New York City staying in the tiny apartment that she and Joe had shared for decades near Washington Square Park, and I visited Jean several times in Honolulu (equally tiny apartment!) where they made their winter home after Joe retired from Sarah Lawrence. For many years I also had the privilege of being Jean’s “roomie” during the Joseph Campbell Week at Esalen and picked up her habit of doing leg exercises in the morning in pajamas before getting out of bed - which was, she insisted, “the best way to wake up.”

It was due to that work and our ongoing collaborations that I received, in 2016, a fat envelope in the mail which contained a folder filled with the letters and photos that I, my mother, and sister had exchanged with Jean over the years. Bob Walter, president of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, had been helping Jean clear out cabinets in preparation for a move and had come upon the file and thoughtfully sent it along to me. Rereading these letters was an extraordinary trip down the proverbial memory lane. There was one letter, dated January 23, 1995 that stood out to me, both because of the content of the letter and because it sparked a memory of another conversation I’d had with Jean.

In the letter I am describing for Jean some of the events on a short lecture tour I had done, talking about Joseph Campbell's work. One of the lectures had been given in Springfield, Illinois where 80 people had turned out on a Sunday afternoon to listen to a lecture simply called “Joseph Campbell & the World of Mythology.” I was exultant that I had sold all of the Campbell books that I had brought with me and that the interest in Campbell’s perspective appeared to be alive and well in this town of farmers and politicians in southern Illinois.

Let me quote from the letter now:

“Interestingly, Jean, one of the questions that was posed to me in Springfield after the lecture is the same one that I've heard over and over again from so many people in so many places: ‘Was Joseph Campbell optimistic about the future of our world?’ In responding to that question yesterday I said:

‘Based on my reading of Campbell and my recollections of conversations my family had with him over the dinner table on multiple occasions, I would say this: Campbell didn't have a need to feel optimistic or pessimistic. He reached a place where he could say ‘Yes’ to everything. Once you have touched the invisible world and understand the transience of the visible world, you can remain interested but not anxious about outcomes in the visible world. Campbell cared about the world, but not in the political way that ‘optimistic’ or ‘pessimistic’ implies.’

“Jean, do you think that's a fair response to that sort of question? I know that people want to believe that a man of Joe's intelligence and stature was hopeful about our world. Please let me know! Lots of love! Rebecca”

Jean never answered that question in a letter, but we touched upon it in another conversation that we had during one of her visits to Chicago. The idea came up during a long stroll we had through the park one afternoon. I had asked Jean what a typical day might have looked like on the lower west side of Manhattan where she and Joe lived and worked together for so many decades. Joe had always insisted that Jean was his closest collaborator and that he read her everything that he wrote and took her critiques very seriously. Jean confirmed this and recalled the many hours they used to spend in their tiny living room there at the Waverly Street apartment where she would talk about how the day’s rehearsal had gone at Theater of the Open Eye that she directed, and Joe would read her the pages that he’d worked on for one of his books. She said they would always marvel at the intersection of their work even though on the face of it they were operating in very different disciplines – hers the pure flow of movement and his the labored specificity of words. Nevertheless, they were both trading in the symbolic language of soul and in that there was much in common to discuss.

She reminded me again that Joe's greatest distress was that he felt modern man had lost the capacity to grasp symbolic language; that literalism had eradicated metaphor which, therefore, could not be used as currency for the purchase of insight that leads to true wisdom. He lamented over and over again that his work depended on the reader's ability to understand and appreciate metaphor, the mythopoetic intent behind story, and without that capability much of what he was trying to say would fall on deaf ears.

“And he did not see this complaint as being divorced from the world of the everyday, from politics and headlines and newspapers and actions between people on the street.” Jean insisted. [I am paraphrasing what Jean said based on what I remember of that extraordinary conversation.] “He felt that so much of our modern violence was predicated upon incorrect interpretations of world views and religion. If people could recognize the metaphor that was the foundation of their own religious stories, they could then appreciate that the religious stories of their neighbors were in fact the same story, and not find the differences in the façade frightening or fragmenting to their sense of community.”

“I think most artists and intellectuals come to a place where they appreciate the patterns and cycles of history,” Jean said at one point. “I mean, most artists are great borrowers of what's been done in the past. Like scientists we are well aware that we're always standing on the shoulders of the great ones who have gone before. We live on that delicate edge between ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ and ‘I can say this in a way that it’s never been said before, and better!’ In that sense, artists are always careening between hope and despair.”

“Joe knew he was trying to say something original about things immemorial which is what drove him on when he despaired of anyone really appreciating his insights. You know that it must have been terribly hard for him to have so few people who recognized the importance of what he was trying to do. I had managed to make my mark in New York with my theater and dance and was getting enough accolades that I felt respected in my circles, but he really felt he was a voice crying in the wilderness for much of his writing career.”

Jean stopped speaking and we walked in the deepening twilight in silence for quite some time. She seemed to be lost in her reverie so I said nothing, but walked quietly beside her thinking my own thoughts. Then Jean turned to me and said something that pierced me to the heart, a single sentence with such deep emotion that it filled the air around us:

“Sometimes, I’d come back from the theater and he’d be working in his studio surrounded by books and papers and he’d look up at me and sigh and say with a little laugh: ‘Jeanie, if even one other person truly understands what I’m trying to say, it will all have been worthwhile.’”

Jean stopped and her eyes filled with tears and she said in almost a whisper; “What would he think if he could see all the people who are reading his work now?”

Whenever I think of hope and despair I come back to this moment in the park and the image of a man seated in a hard-back chair at a plain wooden table with stacks of books opened around him and an old typewriter clacking away in a cramped room with crude floor-to-ceiling bookcases and two windows like birds eyes facing north and west over a darkening city. He is writing for that invisible one person, the reader who will understand what he is trying to say. He will read his words to the visible, warm presence of the woman who knows the agonies of the artist and will take in his words appreciatively and critically. Then he’ll return to the solitary vigil of writing with hope restored, having said ‘Yes’ to the inner imperative to express the truth as he sees it; knowing that the inner ‘Yes’ is the same as the outer ‘Yes’ to the one that says I still have faith in the world as a place worth the loving of it.

In that light I wish you all a spirited transition in the twilight of the world as we knew it. Let that which is to come be filled with hope and the creativity which animates our species.

Rebecca

P.S. Visit The Joseph Campbell Foundation website - www.jcf.org - for more stories and photos of Jean’s work.

Image: animated gif of Jean Erdman dancing the role of Medusa from her her own choreography overlaid on the new cover of Campbell's book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces