A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (6 page)

I read Joyce and Mann and Spengler. Spengler speaks about Nietzsche. I go to Nietzsche. I then find you can’t read Nietzsche until you’ve read Schopenhauer, so I go to Schopenhauer. I find you can’t read Schopenhauer until you’ve read Kant. Then I go to Kant—well, okay, you can start there, but it’s tough going. Then Goethe.

The exciting thing was to see that Joyce was actually dealing with the same material. He never mentions the name of Schopenhauer, but I can prove he was a major figure in Joyce’s construction of his system. Then I read Jung, and I see that the structure of his thinking is basically the same as that of Spengler’s, and I’m putting all this stuff together…

I don’t know what it was during those five years, but I was convinced I would still be alive for a little while. I remember one time when I had a dollar bill in the top drawer of a little chest, and I knew as long as that was there I still had resources. It was great. I had no responsibilities, none. It was exciting—writing journals, trying to find out what I wanted. I still have those things. When I look into them now, I can’t believe it.

Actually, there were times when I almost thought—
almost
thought—”Jeez, I wish someone would tell me what I
had
to do,” that kind of thing. Freedom involves making decisions, and each decision is a destiny decision. It’s very difficult to find in the outside world something that matches what the system inside you is yearning for. My feeling now is that I had a perfect life: what I needed came along just when I needed it. What I needed then was life without a job for five years. It was fundamental.

As Schopenhauer says, when you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it’s a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect. So, I have a theory that if you are on your own path things are going to come to you. Since it’s your own path, and no one has ever been on it before, there’s no precedent, so everything that happens is a surprise and is timely.

I
n the midst of my time in Woodstock, I decided I would look for a job. I had a little Model A Ford, and I drove it across the continent right in the middle of the Great Depression. I will never forget that drive. I’d pass automobiles on the road that had broken down with whole families in them. It was awful. People of today have no notion of what went on at that time.

When I started driving to the west coast from New York in that car, I drove down through Virginia and stopped at a beautiful natural bridge. I spent two hours just walking back and forth in that natural bridge area, thinking how George Washington was a surveyor here and all that kind of thing. Somehow I felt that it was teaching me something, that I was learning something. I put it in my diary as a very important experience.

When I arrived out here, there was no job, and when you get to California, you can’t keep driving west. On a boat back from Hawaii in 1925, I had met a girl who was living in San Jose. We’d kept a long-range correspondence, little postcards from here and there. I was going down to Carmel, so I thought, “Why not drop in on Idell and just say ‘Hi.’” So I dropped in—“Hello, hello, hello.” “You’re going down to Carmel? Let me go down with you. My sister Carol’s down there. She’s married a chap who wants to be a writer. I’ll introduce you.”

Her sister was married to John Steinbeck, so I met him. And I discovered a world of wonderful people sitting around wondering what to do next. The people in this crowd were John and Carol Steinbeck, Rich Lovejoy and his wife, Natalya—“Tal,” who was doing Steinbeck’s typing—and Ed Rickets—”Doc” in John’s novels. Rich and Tal are the couple in
Cannery
Row
. By the way, that party in
Cannery Row
was given for me—Steinbeck put another cast of characters in it.

Nobody, except Ed, had a job or anything of the kind. Everybody was “without any strings,” you know, just flopping around. Steinbeck was writing and writing and writing. He’d just finished a book called
Pastures of Heaven
and was starting
To A God Unknown
. When I arrived, the first thing he said was, “Come, let me read you the first chapter of my book.” I was twenty-eight, and he was about thirty-four or -five. He found me a place to live, a tiny little house on 4th Street called the Canary Cottage, right next to a house owned by Ed.

When you’re at a loss, you’re really at a loss. I had no philosophy. I had no anything after Columbia—we had been studying John Dewey for God’s sake. In the Carmel library, my hand went up to a book in two volumes,
Decline of the West
by Oswald Spengler, and, boy, that was the thunderbolt. Spengler says, “Young man, if you want to be in the world of the future, put your paintbrush and poet’s pen on the shelf and pick up the monkey wrench or the law book.” I said to Stein-beck, “Listen, you have to read this thing.” When I had finished the first volume, I gave it to him. He came back a little while later and said, “Oh, I can’t read this. Oh—my art.” He was knocked out for about two weeks and couldn’t write.

One day, after he had recovered from the paragraph in Spengler, he was walking around, rubbing his sides, saying, “I feel creative.” Steinbeck was always going around rubbing his sides. He loved to rub his sides. Another day, he came in and said, “I’ve sold
Pastures of Heaven,
and they want my next two books.” Well, I know now that every publisher who takes your first book wants your next two, because they’re not going to advertise you and then lose you to somebody else. That was a great day, so we had a party.

After I’d read Spengler’s book, which was a major experience for me, I said to Ed, “Say, Ed, you know, I’ve been saying ‘no’ to life all my life, and I think I’d better begin saying 'yes.’” He said, “Well, the way to do that is to get drunk. Let’s have a party." It was in the middle of, not only the Depression, but also Prohibition. He said, “I’ll use my laboratory alcohol, and we’ll put something together."

Jesus, that was a night! He mixed this concoction of fruit juice and alcohol in a bowl. Then he put that bowl in a larger bowl, and put salted ice around it to keep it cold. We started the party around four in the afternoon, and at three o’clock in the morning, a police car pulled up to the front door and two cops came in. They said, “What's going on here?” Well, Steinbeck knew them, so he said, “We’re having a party. Here, have a drink.” Now we had stopped drinking about an hour before, and meanwhile, the center bowl had shipped salt water, so it was now alcohol, fruit juice, and salt water. Well, when those two cops tasted that drink, they just looked at us as if to say, “What the hell are you people drink-ing here?” And that was that.

E
d Rickets was the only one who had work. He had a laboratory and collected sea cucumbers and little jellyfish and so forth for schools. He’d fertilize a group of starfish eggs, and then cut them off at different stages to show the whole series for a biology class. When the tide was low where there was good catching—for instance, up at Santa Cruz—we would all go off to collect these damned things for Ed.

He was great with animals. He had two rattle-snakes in a box in the lab, and he invited us all down one day to see him feed white mice to the snakes. Well, this was something. Steinbeck actually wrote a short story about it. Here’s this snake that’s been asleep for weeks—snakes with nothing to do are like that. Ed drops this white mouse in the cage with the snake, and we’re all gathered around to watch. Somehow, you’re automatically on the mouse's side. The little mouse sniffs around and goes up the length of the snake, and finally he gets the idea that this isn’t a good place to be, so he goes into the corner and sits there. The rattlesnake looks at the mouse, moves over, and—“Bing!”—hits it. Two little red spots appear on the mouse’s nose, and it just spins up and flops back. So, the mouse is dead, and the snake is alive, so now you’re on the side of the rattlesnake trying to eat that mouse—the mouse is bigger around than the snake’s diameter.

Ed says, “Now watch him. He’s going to unhook his jaws.” He unhooks his jaws and begins injesting the mouse—you could see it changing shape in the snake’s mouth, because the saliva has digestive qualities. I tell you, you felt it right in your throat. The most absurd moment was when the rattlesnake got tired, and there was nothing left but two legs and a tail sticking out of its mouth. But presently that went down too.

E
very detail of those years stands out in my memory. In Goethe’s wonderful book
Wilhelm Meister’s Student Years
, and again in
Wilhelm Meister’s Wander Years
, there’s the idea of bumping into experience and people while you’re wandering. You really are experiencing life that way. Nothing is routine, nothing is taken for granted. Everything is standing out on it’s own, because everything is a possibility, everything is a clue, everything is talking to you. It’s marvelous. It’s as though you had a nose that brought you into the right places. You are in for wonderful moments when you travel like that—for example, my putting up my hand in the Carmel library and finding a book that became a destiny book. It really did! That rambling is a chance to sniff things out and somehow get a sense of where you feel you can settle.

The poor chap who gets himself in a job and goes down that groove all his life.… A friend gave me a list of things that let you know you are old. Some of them are silly, others are serious. One is “…when you sink your teeth into a juicy steak and they stay there.” Another is “…when your back goes out more often than you do.” “…When you see a pretty girl, the garage door flies open responding to your pacemaker.” The really serious one is “…when you’ve gotten to the top of the ladder and find it’s against the wrong wall.” And that’s where so many people are. It’s dreadful. And then, Jesus, to descend the whole ladder and start up another… Forget the ladder and just wander, bump around.

I spent eight months rambling. I studied Russian for no reason except that it was the next language to learn after I’d learned Spanish, French, and German. I read
War and Peace
in Russian. I can’t read two words in Russian now, but it got me into the Russian community in Los Angeles, where there were lots of people who’d come here after the revolution. It was wonderful Then I got into my car and went somewhere else.

After a year in California, I returned to New York to take a job in a prep school. I was paid nine-hundred dollars for teaching the boys corrective German and French, Ancient History, and English. Meanwhile, I was their nursemaid: I put them to bed at night, got them up in the morning, made them obey, and then took them out on the athletic field. I’ll tell you, that was another kind of life, and I couldn’t take it. I was in a beautiful school, a beautiful job, but I knew I was off the rails. I went right back on the Depression.

Oh, those were grand experiences. I was just flop-ping around, sniffing out what I would do and what I wouldn’t do. I only wanted to do what made sense to my interior. I don’t see how one can live otherwise. And nothing is better than reading when there is nothing else to do.

When you wander, think of what you want to do
that
day, not what you told yourself you were going to want to do. And there are two things you must not worry about when you have no responsibilities: one is being hungry, and the other is what people will think of you. Wandering time is positive. Don’t think of new things, don’t think of achievement, don’t think of any-thing of the kind. Just think, “Where do I feel good? What is giving me joy?”

I mean it. This is simply basic. Get those pressure ideas out of your system, and then you can find, like a ball on a roulette wheel, where you are going to land. The roulette ball doesn’t say, “Well, people will think better of me over there than over there.” Take what comes and be where you like. What counts is being where you feel you’re in
your
place. What people think is
their
problem.

“What will they think of me?”

—must be put aside for bliss.

My parents never pushed me around. I had special luck there. By the time I was invited to teach at Sarah Lawrence, I had decided that I didn't need a job and did not want one. It would interrupt my reading. But when I saw that school full of gorgeous girls, I thought, “Well this is alright.” When I finally got that job, I was thirty years old, and Dad said, “Joe, I thought you were going to be a literary bum.” But until I got the job, he never said a word. He was a good father. When
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
came out, he said, “I prophesy this is going to be a wonderful book.” He hadn’t read a word of it, but he knew his boy had done it.

I know that wandering might seem a strange form of life to someone with a science background, which tends to give you a prospect out ahead of what you’re doing, but while wandering, you experience a kind of mysteriously organic process. It’s like a tree growing. It doesn’t know where it’s growing next. A branch may grow out this way, then that way, and then another way. If you let it be that way and don’t have pressures from outside, when you look back, you’ll see that this will have been an organic development. Just remember: Parzival blew the job when he did what people expected him to do.

T
HE
Grail Hero—particularly in the person of Perceval or Parzival, the “Great Fool”—is the forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart. In the words of the poet Wolfram von Eschenbach…describing his Grail Hero’s childhood in the forest: “Of sorrow he knew nothing, unless it was the birdsong above him; for the sweet-ness of it pierced his heart and made his little bosom swell: His nature and his yearning so compelled him.”
²⁴
His widowed, noble mother, in their forest retreat had told him of God and Satan, “distinguished for him dark and light.”
²⁵
However, in his own deeds light and dark were mixed. He was not an angel or a saint, but a living, questing man of deeds, gifted with paired virtues of courage and compassion, to which was added loyalty. And it was through his steadfast-ness in these—not supernatural grace—that he won, at last, to the Grail.
²⁶