The Life and Ideas of James Hillman Vol. I: The Making of a Psychologist
 by Dick Russell
 Helios Press

 Eminent American psychologist James Hillman is known most widely through his many books. The Oprah Imprimatur helped The Soul’s Code become a best seller in 1996, and his next book (The Force of Character) also spent some time on the lists. Hillman had devotees long before that, however, thanks to Re-visioning Psychology (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), The Myth of Analysis and more than a dozen other books.

 But except for a few remarks and references (notably in his last book, A Terrible Love of War in 2004, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle) he didn’t write directly about his life, and neither did anyone else. I exchanged emails with Michael Ventura, his coauthor on We’ve Had A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, who thought Hillman wasn’t interested in his own biography being written.

 Since Hillman centered The Soul’s Code on other people’s biographies, this seemed at least ironic. But he asserted that a person’s biography (especially childhood) was overemphasized, and psychological biographies were of little use. Still, the barest outlines of his life were intriguing: for example, he was Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich during Jung’s lifetime, and an American in a bastion of European intellectuals.

 In his last years (he died in 2011) it turns out Hillman was cooperating with a biographer, and a highly unlikely one. When you think about who would write the life of the founder of archetypal psychology, the most subtle, sophisticated and successful post-Jungian approach, you don’t necessarily think immediately of a sports writer who coauthored books with wrestler-turned-governor Jesse Ventura, and wrote about JFK assassination conspiracy theories.

 So this long volume turns out to be surprising on several scores. It is remarkably well written in every respect. The prose is graceful, the narrative and description are well-proportioned and involving, and Russell solicited and presents interesting commentaries from Jungian analysts at key moments. Russell also excerpts relevant passages from Hillman’s writings, and furnishes scholarly footnotes.  This appears to be a careful and well crafted biography, done with creativity and taste.

 The other surprise is what a remarkable life James Hillman lived. It began in America’s first entertainment mecca of Atlantic City (Russell’s description of the city in the early 20th century is fascinating.) Hillman's parents owned and ran prominent and fashionable hotels, where notables in many walks of life stayed (including Eleanor Roosevelt.) Young Jim met and listened to the talk of visiting movie stars, politicians and intellectuals. He rode in a car beside Amelia Earhart.

 Hillman’s family also had roots in Jewish religious life; his maternal grandfather was a prominent American rabbi. With World War II underway, Hillman got an early admission to the Jesuit Catholic Georgetown University, where he became interested in government and politics. He traveled to Central America and hitchhiked across the U.S. before being drafted into the Navy in 1944. Because of weak eyesight he was assigned to the hospital corps, and began learning therapy by treating disabled veterans.

 But it wasn’t his first choice of career. He turned to broadcast journalism in Europe and then to a literary career as a novelist. He eventually attended Trinity College in Dublin, in the environs James Joyce immortalized, and among his closest friends were the future novelist J.P Donleavy and poet Patrick Kavanagh.

 About halfway through this volume Hillman makes his circuitous way to Zurich, first as student and then an analyst and the founder as well as first Director of Studies. He’s made a very fortunate marriage to a Swedish woman who was beautiful, intelligent and rich.

 Hillman’s few but important meetings with Jung in the last year of his life are documented. So are the hothouse politics of the Jungian community, which eventually fan the flames of a scandal when Hillman engages in sexual relations with a patient. His chief antagonist is his own analyst and mentor, who himself had seduced a patient—Hillman’s own wife.

 This episode is handled without sensationalism or moralizing either way, along with Hillman’s own thoughts about it later. The book ends with Hillman about to return to America in the late 60s, deposed from his position in Zurich and ready to confront changing times in his native country.

 Along the way, Hillman’s writings are ably described, enriched by contexts of the time. Though Hillman was an inspiring and beloved figure to his students, patients, and colleagues, there are probably many more who know him chiefly and perhaps only through his books. He applied his creativity and literary craftsmanship to these writings in a genre that he more or less invented. He often noted the roots and history of words, and language and story were key elements in his psychological approach. Among the few personal comments in his books were assertions that he felt himself to be above all a writer. So it is that Hillman continues to have new readers, while we profit from re-reading his work.

 This volume enriches that reading experience, and like the best biographies it tells us a lot about those years (the 1920s into the 1960s) in the world. The book is clearly printed on not exceptionally good paper, and the sections of photographs are well done. For some reason the publication of this biography was delayed for something like a year, which for me meant the difference between reviewing it for a print periodical or only here online. That’s too bad, because it doesn’t seem to have received many reviews, and it deserves them.

 Of course, people with prior experience and interest in James Hillman constitute the readership that was waiting for a biography. They shouldn't be disappointed.  But others could find a way into Hillman’s work through this book. Hillman was surprisingly involved in the wider world in a fascinating time, the 1920s through the 1960s of this volume. From a hotel in Atlantic City to James Joyce’s Dublin to Jung’s Zurich! He introduced the jitterbug to Ireland! It’s a fascinating tale, fostering insights into a creative new psychological method with roots deep and true. This book is not sensationalistic and though it’s not necessarily for everybody, it could well be a rich reading experience for more than the already initiated.

For Pleasure: Summer Reading
So I noticed on several newspaper and magazine sites this weekend a feature about books that people (usually famous people) are reading this summer, usually accompanied by a photo like the one above (the pipe stem is a nice if unintended touch--I used to smoke it many years ago, and now I keep it around for the occasional phantom pipe tobacco taste, but mostly as decor.)

So in addition to my never-dwindling pile of books to review (many still to go from this past spring), my summer reading so far is this pile of books.  I wish I could say it was a considered literary program, but all of them were recent finds in used bookstores and a big bookstore sale (except the Vonnegut and the James Hillman, which I've had for years and am re-reading; I generally do a Hillman around my birthday, especially big ones.)

I've just completed reading (for the first time, I'm ashamed to say) Memories of My Melancholy Whores, so far the last published novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  It's better than the reviews I remember.  I kept waiting to find a proper hardback used or remaindered, but at this late date I settled for this new paperback.  It was also an interesting book to read around my birthday (though still a quarter century from my 90th, which is the narrator's age.)

I've been re-reading Vonnegut's novels more or less in order.  I read Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan last month and started Cat's Cradle, only to realize I re-read this one last year.  But it has been years since I've read the rest.  I'm also intrigued by the idea of re-reading J.D. Salinger.  I haven't re-read any of those books in decades.

I've started Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder collection of stories. The voice is very similar to that in the occasional pieces in Writing With Intent--same sort of humor, of little leaps and connections, but with more literary qualities.  The first story in the collection, "The Bad News," is an absolute masterpiece, the best apocalyptic in everyday life story I can recall since one by Charles Baxter many years ago.  I'm enjoying this a lot--come on, Nobel Prize committee!

I've started Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Galileo's Dream. I've been a little wary of his historical/alternate history novels, though I can't exactly explain why.  I guess I couldn't see how they could be as good as his s/f and future vision novels.  And Galileo has always seemed more of a symbol to me--he seems to be treated that way in several plays about him--and not my choice for someone I'd like to see Doctor Who visit.  But he's a real character here, and not at all stiff or stuffy.  I am enjoying this, and I sense there's more to it in regard to the contemporary world than noted in reviews or descriptions.

Earlier this year I had a chance to buy a remainder copy of Jack Kornfield's The Wise Heart, and passed on it.  Though I went back to get it, I'd lost my chance.  Faced with it again as a sale paperback, I couldn't pass it up again. I tend to start but not finish his books, though I don't know why.  I started reading it as a spiritual balance to the soul concerns of Hillman (Hillman makes a big distinction between soul and spirit, and it makes a lot of sense.)  Its subtitle is "A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology" which is of great pith and moment.

That's the summer so far, though I'm likely to roam through my library (and probably a few more bookstores) in search of another kind of moment, another reading experience, as the spirit (and the soul) moves.

A Terrible Love of War
by James Hillman

reviewed by William S. Kowinski in the San Francisco Chronicle
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2004

Now in his 80s, James Hillman notes in the first of his interpolated personal commentaries in this volume: "Strange indeed that what I'm assuming to be my last book should land on the shores of this theme..." Strange but perhaps fated, for this uncompromising examination of war arrives as portraits of flag-draped coffins and images of young Americans abusing captives in Saddam's torture prison hover over its pages. They illustrate the gripping mythic power of war that Hillman insists we recognize and acknowledge.

"James Hillman is an artist of psychology," Thomas Moore writes in his still indispensable Prologue to A Blue Fire, his 1989 selection of Hillman's early writings. " He turns upside down many ideas people hold dear and unreflected. After an hour with Hillman's writing, a reader might feel himself twisting and turning in the wind." In the cruel spring of 2004, this reader certainly did.

James Hillman studied with Carl Jung in the 1950s, and wrote prominently on Jungian themes while deconstructing psychoanalysis in the 1970s in such landmark books as The Myth of Analysis and Re-Visioning Psychology. His "archetypal psychology" and re-imagined concept of soul, soon resonated with artists and others outside his first audiences of professional therapists.

By the 1980s, Hillman engaged in book-length dialogues with Italian journalist Laura Pozzo (Inter/Views) and Los Angeles writer Michael Ventura (We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse.) After A Blue Fire and a collaboration on men's poetry with Robert Bly and Michael Meade (The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart), he went public in a big way beginning in the 1990s with Kinds of Power (addressing the psychology of business) and his best-sellers, The Soul's Code and The Force of Character.

This book is perhaps his most accessible, and therefore his most devastating. Hillman has never been one for therapeutic bromides or blanket comfort. He has counterbalanced the usual emphasis on spiritual growth, hope and happiness with a call to experience the soul's depths of complexity, limitation, loss, patience and relationship with death. Soul confronts what ego would like to deny.

For instance, the reality---and normality---of war. It is with us every hour now, but even in the supposedly placid 1990s, something like 6 million people died in at least 14 wars. More than 60 million were killed in the 20th century's wars. For every year of recorded human history there have been at least two wars. This is not a pretty picture of humanity but to avoid it entirely leads to such products of denial as neglecting to confront the damage that ruins the lives of many returning soldiers. The "failure of imagination" we heard about concerning 9-11 (and have heard long enough to be noted in this book) is a failure to painfully apply imagination to the nature of war, so our stupidity masked as innocence leads us into avoidable repetitions of mass killing.

But reader beware: there is nothing pacifist about Hillman's approach. He says war is normal, not just usual. He says it is inhuman, but not just for its horrors---it is inhuman as are the gods, even if their autonomy resides in our psyches. War is not just the province of Mars but of Venus, so war has its sublime beauty and love. This book's title is not rhetorical-the subject is the terrible love of war. "Because war reveals our being, we are brutal and insane in action," he writes, "and we are ethical and loving in essence."

Hillman agrees with political philosophers who say war is inherent in the existence of states. His most aggressively presented theme is that war is a result of the either/or of monotheistic religions. Polytheism (not as literal belief but as a way of exploring the human soul and the soul of the world) shows us the complexity of shadings, relationships and contained contraries. One of his more startling illustrations is a Homeric Hymn to the Greek god of war that ends, "give me courage,/let me linger/in the safe laws of peace..."

Our task, he writes, is to dig "below the blanket of hypocrisies" and stop blaming the beliefs of others, especially when the inflammatory clerics and history of religious warfare we decry are mirrored in our own. "Psychoanalysis has moved civilization to where it must do what its patients do: take back easy blame from out there in search of the more difficult blame in here."

At times Hillman's concluding pages sound as bleak as the despairing H.G. Wells in his last book, Mind At the End of Its Tether. But he dares to make a case for beauty and the complexities of culture as a necessary counterbalance even more strongly than the case for consciousness that Jungian Anthony Stevens shapes in his new book on war and terrorism. And while Hillman states starkly that "There is no practical solution to war because war is not a problem for the practical mind..." he also says that recognizing "War belongs to our souls as an archetypal truth of the cosmos" may help us focus more effectively on preventing war's bloody enactment in the world. "We may understand it better, delay it longer, and work to wean war from its support in hypocritical religion."

Hillman can be a seductive writer. Living now in Wallace Stevens' Connecticut, Hillman's voice on a recent audiobook sounds eerily like Stevens', and there are lines of his prose that could easily be slipped into certain Stevens' poems, and vice versa. But this book presents more of his provocative side, and much more of his intriguing personal history than he's shown before. Its' a skillfully constructed tour de force with more virtues than omissions. It took a warrior courage to publish it, and it will take warrior courage to absorb it. But without either endorsing or denying all its conclusions, this reader can recommend it as important reading for our time, as we try to make sense of its terrors.

A Terrible Love of War by James Hillman (The Penguin Press; 256 pages, $23.95.)