Victoria Ocampo

The pioneering Argentine intellectual Victoria Ocampo first encountered Hermann Keyserling in 1929 in the Hôtel des Réservoirs, Versailles, a moment both parties would struggle to understand for the rest of their lives.

Keyserling, who was born in 1880, had acquired a following as an erudite aristocrat in exile. His Livonian estate had been lost to the Russian Revolution in 1918, and he lived in Germany with his wife, the granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Keyserling’s best- known work, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, describes his quasi- philosophical responses to the places and people he encountered on the road in Europe and Asia in 1911. In 1920, at the invitation of the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig von Hessen, he opened a so- called School of Wisdom at Darmstadt, Germany, in which he advocated a kind of generalized renewal of “Spirit”: “Its particular teachings … aim at nothing else than a regeneration of mankind on the new basis created by the War”.1 He invited thinkers such as Paul Tillich, Herman Hesse, Richard Wilhelm, and C. G. Jung to address contemporary European problems of Spirit by looking to wisdom traditions from other cultures.
Victoria Ocampo was a cultural icon both in her native Argentina and in Europe throughout the twentieth century. The magazine Sur, which she founded in 1931 on the advice of the American writer Waldo Frank and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the publishing company Sur, which she founded a few years later (in 1933), acted as a bridge between South American and North American intellectuals and those of Europe. Born to one of the wealthiest Argentine families of the turn of the century, Ocampo used her power and her fortune to promote culture – literature, music, architecture, photography – on three continents, and she was instrumental in publishing in Spanish not only Jung and Keyserling but Aldous Huxley, Paul Valéry, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Yourcenar, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, and many others. An indication of her perceptive eye is that, for instance, her magazine published an issue on Canadian literature in which she included Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye, years before they became household names.2 She would ultimately become the first woman elected to the Argentine Academy of Letters.

At first an enthusiastic reader of Keyserling, Ocampo initiated an intense epistolary exchange with him in 1927. She later arrived in Paris, paid for his room in the Versailles hotel, and attended devotedly to (and was bemused by) his many demands for things that should be made ready for him there – red ink, a ball of string, blotting paper, large envelopes. But their encounter in room 250 would prove so explosive that Keyserling would turn to Jung as he tried to assimilate it, and Jung would offer analytic interpretations and advice. The encounter would inform Keyserling’s South American Meditations in such an offensive way that Ocampo would be appalled by his views and Jung would counsel him against publishing the book unless he extensively revised it.
The crossing of these three fi gures’ paths had professional repercussions for all three and significant personal repercussions for Ocampo and Keyserling.

Ocampo would bring Keyserling to South America, the trip that led to his South American Meditations, but soon thereafter she would end contact with him even as she remained fascinated by Keyserling’s spiritual prose. Later, Keyserling’s widow would publish posthumously Keyserling’s memoirs, including chapters on Ocampo and Jung, and both of them found themselves arguing in print with the persistent ghost of a dead man. In her response, Ocampo refuted both Keyserling’s writings on Argentina and his published portrayal of her.

Ocampo and Jung would also meet in person, if briefly. In June 1934, as she was mid- Atlantic on an ocean liner making her way from Buenos Aires to Paris, Ocampo wrote to Jung at his house in Küsnacht on the edge of Lake Zürich. Ocampo says she has read Jung’s book Psychological Types in an English translation, and she passionately expresses her gratitude to him for whatever psychological serenity she can claim. But while she says, “We have common friends, I believe,” she tentatively adds, “and maybe you have heard my name, maybe not”.3 She carefully avoids mentioning Keyserling, though she mentions Ortega y Gasset, another mutual acquaintance. If we read between the lines, we might understand that Ocampo assumes that Jung has heard about her, in complaints from Keyserling.

Writing her letter, Ocampo couldn’t know that her meeting with Jung, in October of that year at his Küsnacht house, would be brief and singular. Jung agreed to see her for a few minutes between patients; later, she would write about the meeting (and appreciatively about him) for the newspaper La Nación of Buenos Aires, and she included that piece in her memoirs. She would publish Spanish translations of Jung’s books and introduce his work to Argentinians, indeed, to all Spanish speakers. Ocampo and Jung would not meet again, but Ocampo would declare Jung’s critical psychology important to her experience as a South American.

As his memoirs attested, Keyserling remained fascinated by Ocampo and felt fatefully connected to her; in his collision with her he avowed he had experienced everything, “the whole history of Creation”. Jung too remained a significant figure in Keyserling’s life. In the memoirs he described Jung as “not only psychologically, mythologically, and theologically, but humanistically … the most educated man of his time”. In turn, Keyserling may have caused Jung to articulate his own cultural arguments more carefully.

Despite her enthusiastic advocacy of his earlier work, Ocampo read Keyserling’s South American Meditations from what we would now understand to be a decolonizing and feminist stance. Coming to the end of the book, she realized that the count had toured her continent as her guest, projecting his European psyche on everything and perceiving almost nothing.

He had transcribed anecdotes about Argentina that she had shared with him and then presented them in the book, distorted beyond recognition, as his own insights. And animating the book was what he has called the “South American spiderwoman”, Keyserling’s image for his negative experience of Ocampo herself perversely personalized and absurdly generalized. He was like Christopher Columbus seeing manatees for the fi rst time, believing them to be mermaids and complaining that they were “not half as beautiful as they are painted”.4 (...)

In his three reviews of Keyserling’s books, Jung explicitly defined as a cultural phenomenon the problems he discerned in Keyserling – the best- selling writer, the guest speaker, and the director of a “wisdom institute” – and observed in Keyserling’s work evidence of a progressive psychological development. Critiquing Keyserling’s Das Spectrum Europas (1928), Jung warned the thoughtful common reader neither to dismiss the monocled aristocrat as a joke nor to be misled by the author’s attempt to employ a humorous tone in order to lend his book lightness. Rather, Europe was Keyserling’s very serious effort to classify a spectrum of European national psyches, “a psychological view of the world where nations are seen as functions”. Employing his own psychological typology, Jung identified Keyserling’s argument as extraverted and intuitive, as spiritual and archetypal rather than rational and philosophical, informed by a perspective that is elevated and collective, distanced and megalomaniacal in its solitude. It is a cosmic view that sees humanity from the outside and, as a result, is limited to daylight and vast surfaces, without addressing the opposing possibility of night or interiority. Still, Jung praised the specific descriptions of Italy, Holland, France, and Spain, as brilliantly precise.

And he noted his counter- transference response to the description of Switzerland: “As soon as I became aware of my ruffled national pride, I read the chapter on Switzerland as though Keyserling had been writing about me personally, and behold! my irritation vanished.”17 The brunt of the review then plays with the oppositions between aristocratic Keyserling as an extravagant spendthrift man of “the spirit” and the Swiss as curmudgeonly aristocrats of “the earth”, his idealistic fiery lightness versus the solid and conserving darkness of the Swiss, yang and yin each implicated in the other. One can observe Jung working hard to transpose Keyserling’s take on Switzerland into a compliment.

Later, in his review of Keyserling’s assessment of the American psyche, America Set Free (1929), Jung concurs with certain of the count’s impressions of the United States, disagrees with others, and claims now to see evidence of psychological progress in the writer. According to Jung, Keyserling continues to function out of extraverted intuition as a “mouthpiece of the collective spirit”,18 but in contrast to Europe, in the new book Keyserling has also allowed the American earth to have its say. Curiously, as a result of listening to the earth, Keyserling concludes that America has not yet acquired a soul: “No gods have yet sprung from its union with man” (§926). Jung emphasizes how much Keyserling articulates a secret spiritual hunger in the American earth and intuits the implicit presence of “silent ones in the land”. Jung is intrigued that Keyserling has again worked to discern intuitively, from above, as it were, the collective attitude of the United States, its genius or spiritus loci, but has also tried to “listen below” for the gods in the land. If he hears only chthonic silence (where the indigenous peoples of America can hear so much from which they derive wisdom and peace), at least, Jung seems to say, in leaning down, Keyserling has opened within himself a psychological receptive space.

Four years later Jung reviewed La Révolution Mondiale et la responsabilité de l’Esprit (1934), which was based on Keyserling’s Paris lectures, and he again warned Keyserling’s readers to adjust their expectations by explaining what precisely Keyserling is good and not good for. He said Keyserling voices well the Zeitgeist for the spiritual man, “condensing the utterances of the collective spirit, speaking through a thousand tongues, into a single discourse”.19 But readers need to reorient themselves towards these ideas to comprehend them not as concepts but as images. They are symbols and symptoms to be interpreted psychologically, not hypostatised. And Jung questions the Enlightenment assumptions that inform Keyserling’s stance.

As Veronika Fuechtner puts it, Jung “described Keyserling’s call for ‘creative understanding’ as stuck on a historically outdated mind- set of always wanting to understand everything. According to Jung, there were times when spirit was completely obscured, when the experience of this power should not be weakened by an attempt at understanding”.20 In the end, Jung expresses scepticism about the feasibility of Keyserling’s solution for humankind’s spiritual dilemma, if read literally. Jung observes a power dynamic in Keyserling’s imagining of a kind of cultural monastery for the dark ages ahead (it is 1934), and concludes that it would only work if the aristocratic Keyserling assigns himself to labour daily in the kitchens; that is to say, in typological terms, if he integrates gradually, personally, his inferior function, his introverted sensation.21 In this regard, according to Jung, the fact that Keyserling wrote the book in the “refined, cultured and elegant” French language did not bode well. But in that case, what has happened to Keyserling’s nascent capacity to lean down low enough to let earth have its say? Jung seems to know but doesn’t tell.

21 In The Original Protocols for Memories, Dreams, Reflections (forthcoming Philemon series/ Princeton University Press), Jung states, When I was with Keyserling I was completely flooded. His words cascaded over me like a torrent. I could never get a word in. I saw him several times, and he always talked without stopping. I remembered that famous meeting between Professor Windelband and Carlyle in Heidelberg. Afterwards they asked the professor: So, Herr Professor, how was your visit? He replied by saying that he had spoken for two hours on the matter of holy silence! That was Keyserling! Part of his talk was always brilliant. But one was snowed under.
When he held forth, from sheer exhaustion I could no longer give ear to that constant torrent, Why did he have to spout, I wondered. Does he want to prove something to himself? As if there was an urgent need for him to make other people realise that he was present and that he absolutely wanted to show something. But I wouldn’t say that I found a thread to follow anywhere. I’d be unable to summarize a single exchange nor recall what he had spoken about. Because it was simply too much. It was completely amusing or brilliant, but always torrential, so it was futile to converse with him.”

from the book The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C. G. Jung. Writing to the Woman Who Was Everything by Craig E. Stephenson