New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm observed that books of letters convey more and give a stronger sense of immediacy than biographies. What can be more thrilling than reading an intense correspondence, as if over the shoulders of the letter-writers? Perhaps only a performed reading of those letters, in which the writers speak aloud their private sentences to us.
In this workshop, we’ll have an opportunity to do both. We’ll discuss some fascinating letters, based on my award-winning book, The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C.G. Jung: Writing to the Woman Who Was Everything, and watch a performed reading of a selection of the letters by Shakespearean actors Michelle Giroux, John Cleland and Tom McCamus, directed by Richard Rose.
The Argentinian Victoria Ocampo was perhaps the foremost Spanish-speaking cultural figure of her time, building bridges between continents and leading the way for 20th-century feminism in South America. The Baltic Count Hermann von Keyserling, now almost forgotten, was a popular philosopher and the founder of a School of Wisdom where Hermann Hesse and Rabindranath Tagore lectured. Jung, the renowned Swiss psychiatrist, creator of the Zurich school of psychoanalysis, encountered them both. Ocampo and Keyserling met in 1929. Ocampo and Jung met in 1934. The correspondence that preceded and followed these meetings (much of it translated from the French, German and Spanish for the first time) illuminates an essential story of three great minds of the first half of the 20th century.
The relationship of Ocampo and Keyserling was fraught with misunderstandings. But Jung described it as “one of the most beautiful animus-anima stories I have ever heard.” Keyserling stressed, “It is possible to experience… in the encounter and collision with one woman, the whole history of Creation.” Only after Keyserling’s widow published a chapter entitled “V.O.” in his posthumous memoirs, did Ocampo decide to make public her version of the events, as if “in a dialogue beyond the grave.”
In the first half of the workshop, we will view the recording of the performed reading and in the second we will discuss.
Here is a link to the book by Craig Stephenson:
The Correspondence of Victoria Ocampo, Count Keyserling and C.G. Jung
