Redeeming Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom, the greatest literary critic of his age! Look on his works, ye Mighty, and despair: by the end of his long, super-contemplative and rather oddball life, he'd published almost 50 original books, edited hundreds of critical works in his role as general editor at Chelsea House Publishers (a job he undertook to support a disabled son), and read untold millions, nay, billions of words so that you and I wouldn't have to. And now we have the first published volume of Bloom's correspondence, The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, which may prove the tip of a pretty massive iceberg — if, that is, enough readers remain in the world to support such a project. Six years after Bloom's death, and deeper still into an all-screens, post-literate age, he is arguably best remembered for a single phrase — "the anxiety of influence" — and for having allegedly put his hand on Naomi Wolf when she was a graduate student.
In his time, Bloom was a kingmaker among poets and fiction writers, who knew all too well that their places on the greasy pole of posterity would be somewhat determined by whether or not he saw fit to include them in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his definitive list of lasting books that was a New York Times best-seller in 1994. John Updike, whose oeuvre was even more stupendous than Bloom's, might have regretted calling Bloom's writing "torturous" when he saw that his only canonical book, according to Bloom, was The Witches of Eastwick — and so much for his Rabbit tetralogy, hundreds and hundreds of other novels, short stories, poems, essays, and never mind his face on the cover of TIME magazine when Couples was published in 1968. Philip Roth, on the other hand, made a point of engaging Bloom in a friendly correspondence while the latter was working on his list for the Canon, and was rewarded with no fewer than six mentions.
However, by the time Roth's biographer (I'm that biographer) got around to asking Bloom about his late friend, the old man had become, shall we say, cranky — with Roth, among many others. "He knew about sexuality," Bloom told me, "but he knew nothing about love." In the letters, however, written when Bloom was at his most expansive, Roth is lavishly praised ("Zuckerman Bound, a great work"), while in turn Roth — ever the canny fellow — had his assistant write Bloom: "Philip says to tell you he sends all his love." Note the word "assistant."
Bloom's latter-day notoriety — as a critic, I mean, not as a would-be lothario — was somewhat due to the main thesis of The Western Canon: namely, that some books are better than others, and a lot of the better kind are written by dead white males. (For what it's worth, Bloom also believed that Elizabeth Bishop, say, was the best poet of her generation, and Anne Carson the best of hers.) "Shakespeare is God," he declared, to the dismay of those who thought that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Kafka, et al., were to be mined for evidence of historical oppression against women, minorities, and other marginalized people, and that aesthetic merit was mostly a canard promoted by "hegemonic" oppressors.
Happily, at the height of his fame, Bloom could afford to address an audience of literate amateurs who simply wanted to know what they should read during their little spans on earth, versus English majors (a dwindling cohort) fixated on race, class, and gender. "What are now called 'Departments of English' are actually 'Departments of Resentment,'" he told one correspondent, a former student. The man himself was so formidably well-read that he made one feel better about the enterprise of literature per se — the fact that it matters, that it's worth the trouble of reading and teaching. What a contrast with today's MLA, where the sessions are largely devoted to Foucault, Derrida, "eco-critical approaches," and the rest of it.
When it came to his signature conviction, the so-called anxiety of influence — which, said The New York Times, "has something to upset everyone" — Bloom was prepared to go to the mat with even his most formidable detractors. Over time he would elaborate the idea in various ways, at forest-slaughtering length, but the gist was that a poet's work is naturally influenced by the work of eminent precursors, and the anxious struggle to form one's own vision — and thus ensure lasting fame — is Oedipal in nature and hence, implicitly, between men. "If you mean influence in the literal sense of the transmission of thought and imagery and the like from earlier poet to later one," the great Northrop Frye replied in 1969, when Bloom first tried running the idea by his revered mentor, "I should think that this was simply something that happens, and might be a source either of anxiety or of release from it, depending on circumstance and temperament." One senses a faint bemusement on Frye's part, even after Bloom had elaborated the idea at considerable length in subsequent letters.
By the Nineties, Bloom had become famous enough to attract more hostile interlocutors. As he wrote to the critic Denis Donoghue in 1999: "I remain puzzled by the controversy, since all I advocate is a return to aesthetic criticism with an awareness of historicity, as opposed to ideological reductionism." Bloom had a way of staking out the middle ground in a manner that antagonised virtually everyone.
For the lay reader, it can get a little wearying, but the title reminds us that these are the Literary letters of Harold Bloom, and not what he might have written or said to certain of his comelier grad students. Still, I found myself wishing he'd go to Disney World or something, and almost wept with gratitude when he paused in his Laputan musings to complain about his diet (he struggled with his weight): "I'm trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water, and cigars." Such a rare glimpse of the personal was for the benefit of arguably his dearest friend, Ammons, whom Bloom wrote avidly throughout his life. White, the editor, wisely chooses a single 18-month slice of their vast correspondence, shortly after their first meeting — when "their emotional and intellectual engagement was at its peak" — the better to conform to her overall method of arranging Bloom's letters into roughly chronological chapters that each contain most or all of his correspondence with a given figure.
And so a chastened Bloom became all the more devoted to the Life of the Mind. "Like our ancestors," he'd written Hollander in 1975, "we must study, we must ponder, and then we do the best we can when we write and teach.… We live in the mind — as [Wallace] Stevens said." Such a life has its homely pleasures, but it's a lonely business at the best of times and became even more so, for Bloom, as the people he considered "close friends" such as Ashbery, Ammons, and Merrill — whom, we know from this book, he hardly ever saw in person — died off one by one.
He would never meet his final and most engaging correspondent in The Man Who Read Everything, Le Guin, who was six months older and just as lonely. "May we use first names?" she shyly inquired when they first got in touch. "I'd like that." After a two-month flurry of delighted emails, Le Guin mentioned that she'd "run out of steam" after an hour and a half of teaching the day before; she died of a heart attack three weeks later, in January 2018. Harold Bloom would follow in October 2019.
