Harold Bloom’s Literary Letters Rescue the Jewish Soul of the Western Canon’s Champion

“The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom” is a slim volume that discloses an intimate side of the prolific critic — more magus than man, it sometimes seemed — who loomed over literature in the second half of the 20th century. The anthology, edited by Heather Cass White, gathers correspondence between Bloom and writers he admired. It offers a tantalizing glimpse of the oracle at home. Bloom’s biography has bolstered his bardic reputation. Born to an Orthodox Jewish family with roots at Odessa and raised at the Bronx’s Grand Concourse, he knew Yiddish before English. He relates that an early encounter with the poetry of Hart Crane seduced him to the peaks of English literature from the sea of the Talmud. His memory was photographic, and he read through entire branches of the New York Public Library while still a child.Bloom would go on to attend Yale and teach there for 60 years. His output was prodigious, encompassing more than 50 books of criticism and hundreds of edited anthologies. He was a champion of the Romantic poets, John Milton, and above all William Shakespeare, who he provocatively claimed “invented the human.” Bloom’s “Anxiety of Influence” proposed a new theory of how poetry gets written. He could be gnomic, baffling, astounding.Bloom was one of the few critics whose fame escaped the academy. His “Western Canon” offered a rousing defense of the best that has been thought and written, a category from which he unwaveringly excluded the works of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. His rival critic James Wood called him “Vatic, repetitious, imprecisely reverential, though never without a peculiar charm of his own.” He somehow managed to be both campy and colossal. Bloom was always performing — YouTube is full of videos of him declaiming the wonders of the canon and the debasement of the contemporary. His letters are no less performative, but in a more murmuring key. Bloom’s correspondents are an illustrious bunch — the poets John Hollander, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Henri Cole, Alvin Feinman, the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin and the critic Northrop Frye.Bloom claimed to read 1,000 pages an hour with perfect comprehension, and these letters show him constantly imploring his correspondents for more writing — another poem, another essay, a draft. He was voracious, but also insecure. He wrote to Ammons in 1970, at the age of 39, that he was “fated to remain an unknown critic.” He also wrote “I am a failure, by my figuring, whatever even my friends tell me.”Ammons, though reassured Bloom, hailing him as “multi-landscaped, rugged, wide. In short, continental. You are no man’s island.” There was flattery and flirtation in Bloom’s back and forth with poets, a prose of mutual admiration and mutual ego stroking . He tells Ammons in 1971 “We haven’t anyone but you.” Nearly three decades later he writes to Mr. Cole that, “there is no poet now writing in English under the age of 60 who is your equal.”Bloom persistently sought for what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “roll, the rise, the carol, the creation” in literature. In 1963 he wrote to Feinman “I don’t really believe in truth, not even the truth of the imagination — just in the sound of a voice.” Ms. Cass White writes in her introduction that the” sound of Bloom’s voice was unforgettable. His pronunciation was like no one else’s.” His parents, she writes, envisioned a “rabbinical future.”Ms. Cass White relates that in the 1960s Bloom used to play a party game where he would take a swig of Fundador brandy and ask guests to pick a line from Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” He would begin at that point, and recite the rest of the poem’s 10,550 lines from memory. A letter written from Jerusalem in 1959, though, finds him stumped by the nascent Jewish state, writing to Feinman that “I can’t describe Israel or how I feel about it.”Bloom, though, was struck by Israel’s “visibly impressive and omnipresent army” and hoped that “everyone here will simply push the Jordanians out” — which came to pass in the Six Day War. Bloom was hardly a Zionist, but he was aware of the antisemitism that then — and now — pervades the academy. In 1973 he describes himself, in an allusion to James Joyce’s hero, as “L. Bloom, out of Grodno and Brest-Litovsk, the Rebbe Bloom.”Two years later, in 1975, Bloom writes to Hollander — their letters are dappled with Yiddish — that “like our ancestors, we must study, we must ponder, and then do the best we can when we write and teach.” In another missive, this one to Ammons, Bloom reckoned that he was “not a critic.” He rues “I would like to have been that, but it isn’t to be — I’m not a writer. I belong finally to the Oral Tradition of the Jews.”

Harold Bloom’s Literary Letters Rescue the Jewish Soul of the Western Canon’s Champion

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