Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past - Updated Edition

By William McGuire

This lively, intimate, sometimes disrespectful, but always knowledgeable history of the Bollingen Foundation confirms its pervasive influence on American intellectual life. Conceived by Paul and Mary Mellon as a means of publishing in English the collected works of C. G. Jung, the Foundation broadened to encompass scholarship and publication in a remarkable number of fields. Here are wonderful portraits of the central figures, including the Mellons, Jung himself, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, D. T. Suzuki, Natacha Rambova, Vladimir Nabokov, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, and Kurt and Helen Wolff.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691218335

Book preview

BOLLINGEN SERIES

Jung’s tower at Bollingen

BOLLINGEN

AN ADVENTURE IN

COLLECTING

THE PAST

By William McGuire

BOLLINGEN SERIES

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guilford, Surrey

Revised edition and first

Princeton Paperback printing, 1989

THIS IS AN OUT-OF-SERIES VOLUME IN BOLLINGEN SERIES

SPONSORED BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

McGuire, William, 1917-

Bollingen, an adventure in collecting the past.

(Bollingen series)

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

1. Bollingen Foundation.     I. Title.     II. Series.

AS911.B63M35   1982            061′.47′1         82-47625

AACR2

ISBN 0-691-09951-0

ISBN 0-691-01885-5, pbk.

eISBN: 978-0-691-21833-5

R0

For

JACK BARRETT

VAUN GILLMOR

WOLFGANG SAUERLANDER

NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION (1989)

During the seven years since the appearance of this story of a unique adventure in publishing and cultural benefaction, Bollingen Series moved closer toward the completion of its original program. Still remaining to be published are several more volumes of the Notebooks of S. T. Coleridge, the Collected Coleridge, the Samothrace archaeological reports, C. G. Jung’s seminars, Emile Mâle’s studies in religious iconography, and the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Nearly three-quarters of the volumes in the original list remain in print; many titles have been issued in paperback editions; other titles—the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldûn, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition, C. G. Jung’s Letters, Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, and E. R. Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period—have been reworked in abridged editions, which reach a broader public; selections of Jung’s writings have been regrouped topically in paperback editions useful to students and general readers.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary public interest focused on the work of the late Joseph Campbell because of Bill Moyers’ television interviews created a great demand not only for Campbell’s contributions to the Series but also for related volumes—notably those of Zimmer, Jung, Neumann, Eliade, and other writers identified with the Eranos conferences. Furthermore, the famous Baynes/Wilhelm translation of the I Ching, regarded as the most authentic by aficionados according to the New York Times, has continued to prosper in its compact, hip-pocket-size format.

For the present edition of Bollingen, the text remains the same except for minor corrections; the list of the titles comprising Bollingen Series, beginning on page 295, however, has been brought up to date.

WILLIAM MCGUIRE

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS  ix

PREFACE  xv

IFrom Kansas City to Lake Maggiore  1

II"Bollingen Is My Eranos!"  43

IIIBollingen Revived  83

IVEranos, Jung, and the Mythic  117

VLetters, Arts, and the Ancient Past  183

VIA Legacy  271

APPENDIXES  293

BOLLINGEN SERIES  295

THE BOLLINGEN FELLOWS  311

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  329

INDEX  345

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece

Jung’s tower at Bollingen. Leni Iselin

Plates, following page 168

1 Mary Mellon, 1938. Oil on canvas, by Gerald L. Brockhurst. Courtesy of Paul Mellon

2 Mary Conover, graduate of the Sunset Hill School, 1921. Courtesy of the Sunset Hill School

3 Mary as song leader at Commencement, Vassar, 1926. Courtesy of Gertrude Garnsey

4 Mary Conover Brown, photographed by George Platt Lynes, about 1934. Courtesy of John Barrett

5 Paul Mellon with the dragoman Mohamed Sayed, Luxor, March 1935. Courtesy of Nancy Wilson Ross

6 John Barrett, Venice, about 1935. Courtesy of John Barrett

7 Jung’s tower at Bollingen as it appeared at about the time of the Mellons’ visit in 1938. Courtesy of the Jung family

8 Mary, Paul, and Cathy at Ascona, 1939. Eranos Foundation

9 Casa Eranos and Casa Gabriella from Lake Maggiore. Pancaldi, Ascona

10 Paul Mellon and Heinrich Zimmer, Eranos 1939. Eranos Foundation

11 Mary Mellon with two Eranos guests, 1939. Eranos Foundation

12 Ascona. William McGuire

13 Olga Froebe-Kapteyn and C. G. Jung, Eranos 1933. Eranos Foundation

14 An Eranos picnic, 1935: Heyer, Jung, Cary Baynes, and Toni Wolff. Eranos Foundation

15 Jolande Jacobi and Gustav Heyer, Eranos 1935. Eranos Foundation

16 Symbolic device at Casa Eranos, by Olga Froebe. N. T. Gidal

17 Genio loci ignoto : To the unknown genius of this place. N. T. Gidal

18 Mary Mellon at Oak Spring, around 1944. Darling, Middlebury, Virginia, courtesy of Gertrude Garnsey

19 Mary, around 1946. Courtesy of John Barrett

20 Genius Row. 41 Washington Square South is the second house from the right. Drawing by Edward C. Caswell, The Villager, September 25, 1947

21 Stanley Young and Nancy Wilson Ross, Rome, 1945. Toni Frizzell, courtesy of Nancy Wilson Ross

22 Denis de Rougemont, New York, 1942. Kate Weissmann

23 Huntington Cairns, late 1940s. Beville, National Gallery of Art

24 Kurt Wolff and Jacques Schiffrin in the Pantheon office, about 1946. Courtesy of Helen Wolff

25 Hermann Broch, late 1940s. Courtesy of Vaun Gillmor

26 Paul Radin, early 1940s. Courtesy of Melba Phillips

27 Maud Oakes at Todos Santos, 1946. Hans Namuth

28 Bernard V. Bothmer, Alexandre Piankoff, Helene Pian-koff, and Natacha Rambova at the temple of Edfu, south of Luxor, January 1950. L. F. Husson

29 Ximena de Angulo and C. G. Jung, Eranos 1950. Eranos Foundation

30 Olga Froebe, Kurt Wolff, and Gilles Quispel, Eranos 1950. Eranos Foundation

31 Joseph Campbell, Jean Erdman, R.F.C. Hull, and Jeremy Hull, on the Piazza, Ascona, 1954. Eranos Foundation

32 D. T. Suzuki and Mihoko Okamura, Eranos 1953. Eranos Foundation

33 John Barrett, Eranos 1956. Eranos Foundation

34 Mircea Eliade and Louis Massignon, Eranos 1956. Eranos Foundation

35 Gershom Scholem, Eranos 1958. N. T. Gidal

36 John Layard and Erich Neumann, Eranos 1958. N. T. Gidal

37 Karl Kerényi, Eranos 1958. Eranos Foundation

38 Chung-yuan Chang lecturing, Eranos 1958. N. T. Gidal

39 Conversation at the Albergo Tamaro, Eranos 1958: (from left) Herbert Read, Vaun Gillmor, R.F.C. Hull, and John Barrett. N. T. Gidal

40 Olga Froebe at Casa Gabriella, 1958. N. T. Gidal

41 Adolf Portmann, second director of Eranos, 1974. Luciano Soave

42 The Round Table, 1975. Luciano Soave

43 Emma Jung and C. G. Jung at Bollingen, 1954. William McGuire

44 Gerhard Adler, Hella Adler, Frieda Fordham, and Michael Fordham, at the Adlers’ cottage in Oxfordshire, late 1950s. William McGuire

45 A.S.B. Glover and Janet Glover at the British Museum, 1965. Elizabeth Oldham

46 Herbert Read and the Yorkshire moors, 1964. William McGuire

47 Dorothy Leger, Francis Biddle, Alexis Leger, and Katherine Biddle at Les Vigneaux, October 1960. Dalmas, courtesy of Mme Alexis Leger

48 Ralph Manheim, Marthiel Mathews, Mary Manheim, and Jackson Mathews, Paris, around 1958. William McGuire

49 Charles S. Singleton, around 1960. Courtesy of C. S. Singleton

50 William McGuire and Hans Meyerhoff, Bad Godesberg, 1963. Mary Meyerhoff

51 Kathleen Coburn working on the Notebooks—a recent photograph. David Lloyd, courtesy of Kathleen Coburn

52 Bart Winer, London, early 1970s. Courtesy of Bart Winer

53 Kathleen Raine, London, early 1950s. Courtesy of Kathleen Raine

54 Vladimir Nabokov, Montreux, about 1970. Courtesy of Véra Nabokov

55 T. S. Eliot and E. McKnight Kauffer, about 1949. Courtesy of Vaun Gillmor

56 Wolfgang Sauerlander, Munich, 1965. Paula McGuire

57 Bi Hull, Anthony Kerrigan, Aniela Jaffé, R.F.C. Hull, and Elaine Kerrigan, Palma de Mallorca, 1962. Courtesy of Bi Hull

58 The Kariye Djami, Istanbul, with the rebuilt minaret at left, 1976. William McGuire

59 Paul Underwood, Dumbarton Oaks, 1960. Courtesy of Irene Underwood

60 Sardis: the apse of the Roman synagogue, before restoration. Sardis Expedition, Harvard University

61 The sanctuary at Samothrace: the Hieron, 1976. William McGuire

62 Phyllis Williams Lehmann at the excavation, Samothrace, 1964. Nicholas Ohly

63 Karl Lehmann, aboard ship en route to Samothrace, 1947. Phyllis W. Lehmann

64 140 East 62nd Street: the three joined houses, headquarters of the Bollingen Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation from 1949 to 1969 and thereafter of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. J. Kellum Smith, Jr.

65 Vaun Gillmor and John Barrett, Princeton University, 1971. William McGuire

66 John Barrett and Paul Mellon, Antigua, mid-1970s. Courtesy of Paul Mellon

67 Bollingen Series, 1982. Howard Allen, courtesy of Paul Mellon

PREFACE

On a sunny New York fall day in 1948, I first visited the premises shared by the Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books, at 41 Washington Square South, a nineteenth-century row house that had been converted into studio apartments. The upper floors had in turn been converted into offices, which, with their large casement windows, still had the air of time-worn ateliers. After climbing two flights of scuffed stairs and entering a former hall bedroom, where two or three women, at desks very close together, were working on typewriters and ledgers, I was shown into the adjoining large front room, overlooking the Square. This, the main office, contained (also quite close together) the desks of the editor and assistant editor of Bollingen Series and, for visitors, a couple of lounge chairs set around a brass Moorish coffee table with a sunken center, like a soup plate. There was a wide fireplace, and on the walls were unframed prints of, as I later discovered, Navaho pollen paintings. I was vaguely aware that Bollingen Series was a program of book publishing sponsored by the Foundation. I had come to deliver some editorial work I had taken on in order to help out another freelance editor who had been obliged suddenly to leave town with the work unfinished. I did so with the approval of Helen Wolff, of Pantheon, who at that time arranged editorial services for both Bollingen and Pantheon, and now I was to hand over my sheaf of galleys to the editor of the Series, John Barrett. I had not been very long in the book world, for, after abandoning academia, I had started out as a newspaper and magazine reporter and then worked as an all-purpose editor/writer in the United Nations Secretariat. A compulsion to write on my own had prompted me to cast loose and become, not a published writer, but a freelance editor of almost anything that came my way.

My first assignment for Bollingen Series had been to read the proofs of Lectures in Criticism, a literary symposium that had been held at the Johns Hopkins University. As I had been a graduate student there only a few years earlier, I approached the proofs with a certain sentiment and sedulously capitalized the article before the name of the university. That improvement was apparently appreciated, for Mr. Barrett, a youngish man whose elegance, calm, and kindness made an immediate impression, and his breezy yet seemly and sympathetic secretary Vaun Gillmor (Mr. B. and Miss G. they always were) found other assignments for me. Meanwhile, I made the acquaintance of the people working in the back rooms on the same floor. These were chiefly the staff of Pantheon Books, the firm that published the Series for the Foundation alongside its own list, which was devoted to notable European literature. The occupants of the large back room, overlooking the ailanthus trees in the courtyard, included some secretaries or file clerks, sometimes a small boy (the Wolffs’ son Christian) stuffing envelopes, and Helen Wolff herself, a gracious and overburdened woman who seemed to do nearly everything at Pantheon, and who soon afterward gladly ceded to Miss G. the responsibility of finding freelance editorial help for the Bollingen books. Kurt Wolff, who with his wife had founded the firm several years earlier, had the tiny hall bedroom to himself. The Foundation’s legal counsel and secretary-treasurer, Ernest Brooks, sat at a desk in the corner of Pantheon’s back room, as, being a newcomer, he could not be squeezed into the front office, which Mr. B. had to share with the assistant editor, Hugh Chisholm. When a Draft Board office in the basement of an adjacent house had become free after the war, the space was occupied by Pantheon’s sales manager and president, Kyrill Schabert; the designer and production manager, Jacques Schiffrin; the bookkeeper, Wolfgang Sauerlander; and the stock of both Pantheon and Bollingen.

I embarked on my next Bollingen assignment also at the proof stage, because the original editor had gone abroad. The book was Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, whose galleys I eagerly began to read as I took them home on the subway. An encounter with psychoanalysis made me see significance in every image. (The encounter had been Freudian; some time passed before I realized that the Bollingen Foundation had something to do with C. G. Jung, not to mention Paul Mellon.) When I met Campbell over the Moorish coffee table, as we went through the index I had been commissioned to make, he seemed the easiest person in the world to please, though the index, my first, ventured in directions far from index orthodoxy. The defection of the previous editor had thrown the publishing date out and desolated Campbell, who would have welcomed almost any literate and willing substitute. My enthusiasm seemed to encourage him. When I commented on the aptness of the correspondences he traced between symbolic instances drawn from many mythologies and folklores on one hand, and individual dreams and fantasies on the other, he exclaimed, Yes! You see, it all fits!

Soon enough, I came to see that, diverse as the contents of the Bollingen books appeared to be, everything somehow fitted a larger scheme. Another assignment helped to drive the point home. Because of my success with Joe Campbell and the Hero index, I was asked to minister to Professor Gladys Reichard, an anthropologist at Barnard College, whose direct abruptness dismayed the polite Bollingen editors. She was understandably wrought up because, in the proofs of her book Navaho Religion, based on her diligent field studies over many summers on the reservation, something had gone wrong with the setting of words in the Navaho language. To avoid resetting most of the 700 pages, we argued out a compromise that managed to save face, time, and money (and was not deprecated by any scholarly reviewer). Professor Reichard could never understand why her ethnological treatise was keeping company with Jungian psychology and St.-John Perse’s poetry. Her study in symbolism was, in fact, full of meat for students of Jung’s school.

In 1949, evicted when New York University proceeded to demolish the area south of Washington Square for its own expansion, Pantheon moved a block west to 333 Sixth Avenue, in an office building tenanted also by New Directions and the Nation; the Foundation moved uptown to a four-story brownstone in a sedate block of East Sixty-second Street. I worked at home, on Morningside Heights near the Columbia University libraries, and traveled as business required to the East Side or Greenwich Village. In the library of the new Bollingen premises there was hung an oil painting of the late Mary Conover Mellon, and I became aware, for the first time, of the remarkable woman who in the early 1940s had been the founding nurturer of the Series and the Foundation and, with the editorial aid first of Ximena de Angulo and then of Stanley Young, had led the program until her sudden death in 1946. In the day-to-day editorial routines that involved me, her name had scarcely been mentioned, but I realized that the dominant impulses of the program had originated with Mary Mellon. I learned from her close friend Maud Oakes, whose book The Two Crosses of Todos Santos I was working on at the time, that Mary had been deeply interested in ethnology, the mystical, and Jung’s psychology. From John Barrett, as old and close a friend of Mary’s as Maud, I learned that she had been devoted to European literature, archaeology, and the ancient past. Joseph Campbell told me that mythology, folklore, and the Orient were driving concerns of hers. Natacha Rambova, with whom I began to work on publications in Egyptian religion, was witness to Mary’s abiding interest in the occult tradition. Mary Mellon had woven these and other strands into her Bollingen design, which Barrett was carrying forward at Paul Mellon’s wish.

As the assignments that Miss G. gave me began to occupy my full time, I was given the title Special Editor and later, when my responsibilities warranted it, Managing Editor. Around 1951 I began to serve also as the house editor for the first volume in the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, which— it had come home to me—was the keystone of Bollingen Series. My personal experience in another camp of depth psychology, it seemed to me and perhaps to the Bollingen administration, gave me an edge of objectivity and also a certain relish in the plunges into the unconscious that Jungian editing entailed. As the edition moved forward, volume by volume, I was obliged to make an annual circuit of visits to the Editors of the Collected Works, in London, and to Professor Jung himself, usually at his retreat at the village of Bollingen, on the Lake of Zurich, which was indeed the omphalos of the Foundation’s program. At Ascona, in Italianspeaking Switzerland, I conferred with the translator of the edition and paid my respects to the mistress of the nearby Eranos establishment, which, if a being could have more than one, was Bollingen’s other omphalos.

During nearly twenty years of those journeys I met and worked with many of the people in the Bollingen world, besides many others who came to East Sixty-second Street. I acquired a sense—though more intuitively than rationally— of the enlacements and mutualities that created the coherence of Bollingen, though I also became aware of areas of activity that had no communication with one another, except in the mind of Mary Mellon or of John Barrett.

In a way, the Bollingen enterprise was an ambitious effort to collect the past, or certain departments of the past. The entire campaign—embracing archaeology, mythology and folklore, the evidence of ethnology, religious manifestations, the art of all ages, prehistorical and historical records, and the literature of imagination—resembled nothing more than the gathering, ordering, and observing of amplificatory data in a Jungian analysis. From another point of view, collecting the past is among the loftiest of obsessional activities. However regarded, the Bollingen program resulted in an enrichment both of the common culture and of the intellectual and imaginal storehouse of the individual who chose to share it.

A predominant stimulus of Bollingen came from abroad— not only the subject matter of the Series and the other programs, but the vigorous tide of refugee intellect on which the Foundation drew and the numerous foreign scholars, analysts, and artists who became involved as authors and fellows. And yet the members of the Bollingen work force— the officers, editors, advisers—were chiefly in the American grain. They represented not only the Eastern Establishment and Mary Conover’s hometown, Kansas City, but almost every quarter of the United States, including Salt Lake City.

After 1946, the guiding hand and mind were John Barrett’s, working in close concert with Vaun Gillmor and Ernest Brooks. Many projects were generated through the Jungian focus and the seedbed of Eranos; others, outside those areas, through the Foundation’s general interest in the mythic and religious impulse. In the other principal mode, the aesthetic, including the historical, the energy of Barrett himself was most influential, and other clusters of activity flowered from the ideas of Kurt Wolff, Huntington Cairns, and Herbert Read. Paul Mellon was a tactful overseer always, first as the Foundation’s president, later as its chairman of the board. If his compelling interests seemed to veer away from those that motivated the establishment of Bollingen, his sympathy was unwavering. In 1961, he spoke of the Bollingen Foundation as the extension of Jung’s intellectual influence into the far distant future, and in 1980, more than forty years after his first encounter with the world of Jung, he could write of archetypal symbols that will always stir up deep and moving ancestral memories in every human being.

As early as 1956, the principal editorial adviser to Bollingen Series, Wallace Brockway, proposed to John Barrett the preparation of a book to be called The Bollingen Century, in which he would survey the first hundred numbers in the Series. His model was The Nonesuch Century, a record of the first hundred publications of the Nonesuch Press of London. Essentially, he had in mind a lavish catalogue, with full data on each book, biographies of authors, illustrations, and so on. Brockway’s proposal was accepted in principle by John Barrett, a supplement was added to his annual fee, and over the next ten years he evidently worked on the Bollingen survey, in New York and during several extended trips to Europe that he made on the Foundation’s behalf. His connection with the Foundation ended in 1969, and when Brockway died in November 1972, none of his work on the survey was found, either in the Foundation’s files or in his own papers. Meanwhile, in the mid-1960s, Mary Curtis Ritter, administrative assistant at the Foundation, began to compile a Twenty-Year Report of the Foundation’s activities, which appeared in 1967 and listed almost everything the organization had accomplished between 1945 and 1965, though it cast its net back to the beginning of the Series under the Old Dominion Foundation in 1943 and forward to 1967, the year the Series was transferred to Princeton University Press. As a record, the Report—a handsome 200-page book, designed by Bert Clarke, bound in red and illustrated with facsimiles from the books and archaeological photographs— accomplished much of what Brockway’s survey had intended.

My hope of assembling an account of Bollingen, dwelling on its accomplishments and personalities, was encouraged by John Barrett, Vaun Gillmor, and Herbert S. Bailey, Jr., the director of Princeton University Press, which had become the publisher of Bollingen Series. Research in the Foundation’s papers, deposited in the Library of Congress, interviews with people in and on the fringes of the Bollingen world, and my own recollections and notes, all supported the effort. I discovered that there was a great deal I had never known, and much that everyone had forgotten. The significance of the ideas and aims that possessed Mary Mellon and her early advisers and determined the program that took form—this became clear. The germinal fact of Mary and Paul Mellon’s early encounter with Jung, in New York and Switzerland, emerged as I read letters and talked with witnesses. Then the amplification, enrichment, stabilization, and disciplining of Bollingen, when John Barrett succeeded Mary Mellon, came truly home. The vitality of the program sometimes seemed to emanate from a tension between two poles of its interests, the mythic and the aesthetic. I also discerned another kind of polarity, between the academic and the adventurous, which became more evident after Mary’s passing. And, in the view of the scoffers, there was a tripolarity: the effete (Valéry, etc.), the earthy (Radin, Oakes), and the obscurantist (Jung, Eranos). None of these simplistic schemes works, nor does the attempt to see Bollingen as a consciously propelled current in American thought. Bollingen eludes brief definition. Kenneth Rexroth wrote that there had never been another publishing enterprise like it, and Alan Watts praised its support of unusual, unconventional, and highly imaginative projects. To Congressman Wright Patman, it was an organization that seems to specialize in sending thousands of dollars abroad for the development of trivia into nonsense. Walter Muir Whitehill felt that it had done more to elevate the spirit of man in the United States than anything else that I know of. Paul Mellon hoped that its policies could justifiably be called imaginative, creative, and representative of the best in humanistic values. To Jung, it was a shining beacon in the darkness of the atomic age.

The author of The Education of Henry Adams claimed as his intention: to satisfy himself whether, by the severest process of stating, with the least possible comment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of human movement. The writer of such a chronicle as the following one could not hope to do otherwise.

W. McG.

I

FROM KANSAS CITY

TO LAKE MAGGIORE

Bollingen, a village of a few houses, lies within the canton of Saint Gallen at the shallow upper end of the Lake of Zurich, about twenty-five miles east of Küsnacht, the Zurich suburb where C. G. Jung had his home. Another mile eastward, on the edge of the reedy water, Jung bought a piece of land in 1922 and set to building a house. From a quarry near the village he got the raw stones; and, working with two stonemasons from nearby, he learned to split, dress, and place them himself. In 1923 he finished a tower of two stories. At intervals over twelve years he built an annex, another tower, and a loggia. The house, surrounded by woods and water, was reached by a perilous crossing over the railway tracks, which further isolated it. Without electricity or telephone, this was Jung’s refuge, a place for repose and renewal, where he went for weekends and vacations, often alone. It was spoken of as the Bollingen house, or the Tower at Bollingen, and in time it became, to Jung and those who knew him well, simply Bollingen. In Bollingen, he wrote, silence surrounds me almost audibly, and I live ‘in modest harmony with nature.’ Thoughts rise to the surface which reach back into the centuries, and accordingly anticipate a remote future. . . . There is nothing in the Tower that has not grown into its own form over the decades, nothing with which I am not linked.

One spring afternoon in 1940, Mary and Paul Mellon came out from Zurich for tea with Jung at Bollingen; afterward the name had an aura for them both, and most tellingly for Mary. It was she who gave that name to the Foundation of which a few years later she was, in Paul Mellon’s words, the inspirational initiator, the founding nurturer. By all accounts, she was an intuitive, outgoing, and dynamic woman, handsome, warmly humorous and human, whose impulsive enthusiasm and visionary planning molded the early concepts of the Bollingen Foundation and its eventual programs of fellowships, scholarly publications, and contributions to humanistic learning.

She was born Mary Elizabeth Conover in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 25, 1904. Both her parents’ families had long been in the Middle West. Her father, Charles Clinton Conover, was a locally educated physician, and her mother, Perla Petty, a trained nurse. They met on hospital duty. After postgraduate study in Boston, Dr. Conover became an internist and cardiologist, and was one of the first physicians to take up psychosomatic medicine. He read widely in psychology, medicine, and philosophy, and when Mary and her sister Catherine, ten years younger, were children, he read to them in the evenings from the myths and the classics. He was a celebrated and beloved doctor in his hometown; after his death (both of Mary’s parents lived to be ninety) a medical center there was named in his memory.

Even in childhood, Mary was prone to attacks of asthma, which, it seemed, was aggravated principally by horse dust. Dr. Conover, walking with Mary along a Kansas City street, would cross to avoid passing near a horse. It was his daughter’s case that made him a psychosomatic specialist, and he himself supervised her treatment. Mary—in those days nicknamed Mim—was sent to the Sunset Hill School for girls, which was John-Dewey-progressive and had a Vassar tradition. She studied French from kindergarten on, took piano lessons, edited the school magazine, but shied away from sports. Religion was only a low-key concern of the Conovers, who were formally Episcopalian. The exotic, the mystical, the Oriental, surely did not figure in Mary’s education. The most one can say is that she read a good deal of Kipling and the books of D. G. Mukerji, an East Indian writer for young people. Mary’s mother, a devoted Francophile, took her to France for several summers, and Mary became a reasonably fluent speaker. She saw the sights and went through the art museums of Western Europe. After Sunset Hill, she spent a preparatory year at the old Bradford Academy, near Andover, Massachusetts.

At Vassar, where she started in 1922, Mary was no bluestocking. Her average over the four years was approximately C-plus. French was her major, music her favorite subject. She scorned and sidestepped courses in psychology and Bible, and she did not go out for publications or games or student government. Her only club was Le Cercle Français. Curiously, her allergy to horses subsided while she was in college, and she liked to ride. It was in music that Mary (at Vassar, universally Mim) was renowned. She played the piano constantly, loudly, heartily. She was wonderful at ragtime, jazz, show tunes, marches, whatever required brio. She led the Glee Club and was the song leader of her class, in the traditional singing on the dorm steps, or the Sunset Lake ceremony at commencement, in which she gloried. A classmate recalls, She led the singing like someone possessed—vibrant, tense, gesturing in a staccato way. A vein in her neck stood out. And another: She was a joyous spirit who jumped into all gaiety and gave enormously to it, with an instant laugh and a quick remark. Everybody loved her. But some snubbed her, too—the Kansas City doctor’s daughter, a girl of slender means at a rich girl’s college. As for Mary, she snubbed no one.

Gertrude Garnsey, from Seneca Falls, New York, who became Mary’s close friend during the last year or two at Vassar, was the only classmate with whom Mary kept in constant touch during the rest of her life. In the mid-1930s Gertrude became the alumnae secretary of the college and served until she retired. It was she who, some twenty years later, took the initiative that led to the establishment at Vassar, in Mary’s memory, of a psychiatric guidance program for students. As a Vassar girl, Gertrude Garnsey was on the track and hockey teams, a major in economics and psychology, chief justice of the Students’ Association—all the activities that Mary made light of. When I signed up for a religion course, Gertrude recalled, Mim laughed at me. ‘What in the world are you taking all that stuff for?’ She was a great skeptic, but all the same she was interested. Gertrude Garnsey remembered how Mary loved to read aloud from Kipling’s Just So Stories, intoning On the banks of the great, grey-green greasy Limpopo River as her father must have done. "Thanks to him, Mim was steeped in literature of every kind, and especially in French literature." But even more, as her friends of those days remember, she had a zest for proms, fun, dresses, dancing, music, and bouquets.

After Vassar, Mary spent a year at the Sorbonne; then New York, and a year of graduate study in French at Columbia. In early 1929, at Trinity Church, she married a Yale graduate (’23) from Allentown, Pennsylvania, Karl Stanley Brown, at that time in advertising, later in Wall Street. With the onset of the Depression, Mary, in need of a job, answered a classified ad for a new art gallery that John Becker was opening on Madison Avenue. She became its manager, receptionist, secretary, packer, and bartender, and soon knew a great deal about avant-garde art, the stock in trade of the Becker Gallery. Her asthma problem returned, and Dr. Conover showed Karl Brown how to give Mary injections. During the summer of 1932, she went abroad and looked up friends and artists in France and Scandinavia. A Kansas City paper published her impressions of Stockholm’s modern architecture and her cruise by banana boat from Stockholm to Hamburg. Then, in the summer of 1933, Mary and Karl Brown were divorced. She kept on with the Becker Gallery, and her friends came more and more from the milieu of art. Among them were Isamu Noguchi, Fernand Léger, Marian Willard, the photographer Walker Evans, the architect Charles Fuller, and John D. Barrett, Jr., who had invested in the gallery and helped to bring Hans Arp, Georges Braque, Jean Lurçat, and Le Corbusier into John Becker’s fold. Through Barrett, Mary met Maud Oakes, from the Pacific Northwest, who had been studying art at Fontainebleau, and Nancy Wilson Ross, also from the Northwest, who had been a student at the Bauhaus in Germany, and who one summer had attended the School of Spiritual Research near Ascona, Switzerland, which was led by two sibylline women, Alice Bailey and Olga Froebe-Kapteyn.

When John Becker had to close his gallery in 1933, Mary went to work as assistant to a stylish photographer, George Platt Lynes. Also at this stage of her life, Mary experienced three momentous changes. For one, she acquired a new name, or rather nickname. Her friend Maudie Oakes from Fontainebleau (as Mary called her) transformed Mim into Mima; Mary liked the sound of it, and it caught on. The two nicknames formed a kind of watershed in Mary’s life. Friends from Kansas City, Vassar, and the earlier New York years continued to call her Mim. To her new friends, she was Mima. The dynamics of a name change can be significant; with a renaming one may behold the transformation of a persona and of deeper layers of personality. Jung wrote that the bestowal of a new name can be a magical procedure —a kind of rebirth, or the acquisition of a new soul. The name Mim, which has a down-to-earth ring, became by the simplest alteration Mima, which has connotations of the exotic. But Mary’s transformation, the shift of her interests, came gradually. One of her friends during the 1930s recalls Mary as being interested chiefly in gaiety, clothes, not least of all beauty, certainly people and music. There was a great deal of talk about psychoanalysis, but even the idea of mental therapy was distasteful to her, and she would say, ‘What’s the use of it?’ meaning ‘I don’t need it.’ Another said, Mim was completely vivacious, easy, wonderful company. She was no intellectual, but she had a terribly bright, curious mind that engaged itself in whatever happened to interest her. The novelist Glenway Wescott remembers Mary at that time as one of the most amusing women I ever knew, but she was far from being an intellectual.

On the day after Christmas 1933, with New York’s first heavy snowfall of the winter still fresh, one of Karl Brown’s college friends, Lucius Beebe, invited Mary to go sleighriding. She met him at a restaurant on Madison Avenue, where the sleigh and its driver were waiting at the curb. Beebe had brought along another friend, a young Pittsburgh banker named Paul Mellon, and they drove off together through the snow to the Central Park Casino for luncheon. Eddie Duchin was playing the piano. Reviving a pre-Prohibition custom, the Casino presented a magnum of champagne to the first party arriving by sleigh in the season’s first snowfall—Mary and her two escorts. Thus the second change.

A few weeks later, a party including Mary, Nancy Wilson Ross, Maud Oakes, and John Barrett drove up to Hartford for the premiere of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Psychoanalysis, particularly of the Jungian school, had become Nancy’s preoccupation since her return from Europe, and she was talking about it in her spirited way. Mary turned to someone and said, "I think it’s all absolute nonsense, and I just hope that nobody