Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind by Stephen Larsen

Author:Stephen Larsen [Stephen and Robin Larsen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2012-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

12:00

Lunch, private or with a friend

1:00–4:00

Correspondence, read, write

4:00–6:00

Workout (usually forty laps in New York Athletic Club pool)

6:00–7:30

Dinner with Jean or guests

7:30–10:30

Write, read

10:30–12:00

Relax, read

12:00

Bed

Though the schedule was rather unvarying, it was not rigid. If friends were visiting from out of town, or Jean had a performance, or some special event was imminent, the Campbells were always willing to accommodate, without complaint.

Sue Davidson Lowe, who, as Mrs. Peter Geiger, became Joseph Campbell’s first research assistant, typist, and preliminary editor in February 1945, describes his work habits:

Quite terrifyingly precise, they were. On the two weekday mornings Joe was free of teaching, I would show up at the apartment shortly before nine. Sitting at the side of a long table, near one end, I would go over the pages he had written over the weekend or the night before, preparatory to taking them home to type on the days he was at Sarah Lawrence. He, meanwhile, would settle down at the far end of the table’s opposite side, notes, references, foolscap, and sharpened pencils at the ready. At precisely nine o’clock, his pencil would start to race across the page. When it dulled, he exchanged it for another, but the writing did not halt until noon. The outpouring was incredibly consistent, interrupted only rarely for a glance at notes or the sharing of an insight, a question, a joke. I began to believe that this was the way real writers wrote, and found his performance so intimidating, in fact, that for years—knowing that I could never be so fluent—I didn’t even try seriously to write.

We almost always lunched together, usually at the worktable. Sometimes we walked briskly to Washington Square, picnicked on a park bench, and were back again in time for Joe’s pencil to resume its customary gallop at one o’clock, precisely. Afternoons, I would often leave him to track down sources or an illustration in the Public Library archives or a museum, or to consult with Kurt Wolff at Pantheon about the reproduction quality of a print Joe wanted to use. The editing function I took on gradually, at his request. We worked as friends; there was barely any sense of boss and employee.

Sometimes the strict limits of the lunch hour were abandoned to celebrate the end of a chapter or the finding of an especially coveted illustration. On these occasions, Joe took me extravagantly to the Coach House on Waverly Place or to Charles’s French Restaurant on Sixth Avenue. If I had stayed through the afternoon and Jean was delayed, we went now and then to one of his favorite haunts for a drink. The Jumble Shop on Macdougal Alley was a good place to recover from forays into the Eighth Street Bookshop, or from longer, more distant browses in the secondhand bookstalls on Fourth Avenue.

In later years, we would tackle again and again our disagreement over the relevancy of politics to a meaningful life, our arguments traveling like trains on parallel tracks—in opposite directions. If we shared a common platform sometimes only briefly, at least we never leaped the tracks to crash head-on.

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