82 The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
A
s he slumpedin his chair, listening to some interviewer or
student, Harold Bloom could seem a very picture of gloom. His
jowly head leaned lower on his hand; his eyes sank deeper in their
dark circles; his impressive belly sagged outward with each breath.
Inside that head reposed all Shakespeare’s works, both plays and
Sonnets; all the poetry of William Blake, including the most ob-
scure; Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, and as much of the Bible as was
composed in Hebrew. Besides a good deal else. He was a monu-
ment of memory and exposition, a rock round which eager pupils
gathered. But to his mind he was also a tired creature who was los-
ing, or had lost, a war. He was Samuel Johnson, best of critics, who
nonetheless grappled with “vile melancholy” all his life. And he
was Falstaff, the philosopher of Eastcheap, the charismatic larger-
than-life spirit of misrule, who was rejected in the end by Prince
Hal for simply offering him a teacher’s love.
Goodness knows, he had reason to be discouraged. Over the de-
cades that he had taught English literature, principally at Yale, he
had found himself steadily surrounded by enemies. At first it was
only the New Critics, F.R. Leavis, T.S. Eliot and the rest, with their
promotion of dry Anglican Metaphysicals and their hatred of the
Romantics he adored: Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats. By the 1960s he
had managed to install his favourites on the syllabus again. Yet all
around him the belief persisted that literature should be studied
theoretically and reductively, for its structure and etymologies, as
if genius could not appear and astonish out of a clear sky. My dear,
as he would sigh to students giving him such piffle for the ump-
teenth time, that wouldn’t do.
Worse was to come. He watched American universities, even
those of name, fall prey to a rabble of Marxists, feminists, pseudo-
historicists and cultural-hegemonists, who forced their own pro-
grammes on to English departments. His response, in 1994, was
“The Western Canon”, a clarion-call that listed, from Dante to Mo-lière, from Freud to Neruda, from Chaucer to Beckett, the 26 writ-
ers he considered central, and at the back the 3,000 or so books that
everyone should read. His list of writers was all-white and almost
all male—inevitably, as he refused to be strong-armed into picking
“rudimentary” African-Americans or “sadly inadequate” women.
He was now in hot water indeed, especially with those female stu-
dents he had tried to seduce, Falstaff-clumsily, with Amontillado
sherry; but he ignored it. As a lower-class Jew, the son of a garment-
worker, decidedly rare on the faculty at Yale, he needed no lessons
in minority-sensitivity. That was beside the point.
The list of books caused a furious row too, as to what was on it
and what not. His method had been simple: if a book survived a
second serious reading, he included it. (He could read 400 pages in
an hour; it was not so difficult.) People carped about contemporary
relevance; but great literature, from Homer on, was always rele-
vant. It reflected eternal verities of human life. A truly great book
was not only an aesthetic pleasure; it also expanded cognitive
power. It allowed an experience of otherness, and the lives of oth-
ers, that was impossible otherwise. From this the self could take
what it found most useful, and grow. As Emerson said—Emerson,
with the transcendental Gnostics, being his sage, and “Self-Reli-
ance” the creed he most approved of—some words could even
strike the reader as sublime truth that he had known before. Thus
“God in you...responds to God without”.
This had happened to him for the first time when he was swept
away by Hart Crane’s poetry in the Bronx Public Library. He was
eight, and already perplexing his Yiddish-speaking family by recit-
ing Blake’s “Prophecies” around the place. Now, as he read “O Thou
steeled Cognizance whose leap commits/The agile precincts of the
lark’s return”, the strange words burned. Eight years later it hap-
pened again, when he saw Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” and first met
Falstaff in the round flesh, crying out his vitality (“Give me life!”)
and his pathos. The writer who could create both Sir John and
Hamlet, that quintessential ironist torn between thought and ac-
tion, could be treated only with awe. He was God. Shakespeare, he
wrote in 1998, had invented the modern concept of personality, the
first characters who overheard their inner selves and were changed
by it. It mattered little what sort of man Shakespeare was, whom
the Sonnets were addressed to, what his politics were. His infinite
art contained everyone. To the question “Why Shakespeare?” Pro-
fessor Bloom’s answer was: “My dear, what else is there?”
In that thought, the sense of a colossus whose work would nev-
er be bettered, lay the impulse for the whole enterprise of litera-
ture: for all the books stacked in his study, his shingle house in
New Haven and his apartment in Greenwich Village, and laid up in
layers in his brain. Each writer, he wrote in 1973, especially each
poet, was engaged in an Oedipal agon, or struggle, against the in-
fluence of masterly precursors. Shelley had fought against Milton,
Whitman against Emerson, Mailer againt Hemingway. Inner anxi-
eties, not outside factors, drove them. Each needed to let their own
lustre shine. Only the strongest could manage that clinamen, that
Lucretian swerve of the atoms which achieved change. Those were
the men and women whose works had to be read.
And where was he on this battlefield? At the forefront in some
ways, with his books bestsellers and his name glorious or notori-
ous in the celebrity realm of buzz. He was leading the charge to
keep great literature alive: to ensure it was both read and, above all,
taught in the universities, where he fretted that syllabuses might
soon consist of Harry Potter and Batman comics. The Western
canon was still his chief care, a tradition accrued over 3,000 years;
let others add on, if they wanted, the Asians and the Africans. He
worried, too, about the squandering of short and precious time. In-
timations of mortality added to his Johnsonian bouts of sadness.
He had great precursors; his successor was not obvious.
Still, another hero, Rabbi Tarphon, provided a motto. “You do
not need to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist
from it.” He was busy teaching at Yale on October 10th. 7Harold Bloom, literary critic, died on October 14th, aged 89Falstaff Agonistes
Obituary Harold Bloom