THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, edited by Heather Cass White
Many writers who become critics aren’t sure how this happened to them. Lionel Trilling wrote in a 1948 letter that he didn’t like himself in his “critical and pedagogical role.” He longed to get back to fiction. Alfred Kazin, in a 1963 journal entry, expressed disbelief that he’d turned into a gatekeeper after standing so lonely and long outside literature’s gates.
It took time for Harold Bloom (1930-2019), the imperious, looming and convivial scholar and literary critic, to decipher his calling. “Lord knows what I am,” he wrote to the poet and Yale English department colleague John Hollander in 1975. (They addressed each other, in their merry letters, as “Foo” or “Foofy” or “Foofooismus.”) “Not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher or theosophist — but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.”
It’s hard to overstate the influence Bloom had on American letters in the latter half of the 20th century. Despite his detractors — his tastes leaned too heavily white and male for many — no literary critic since has matched his combination of range, productivity, commercial success, academic prestige and notoriety. His books, “The Western Canon” (1994) among them, became best sellers and ignited intellectual brush fires that still smolder today.
But the “worthless” Bloom liked to disparage himself. He was a depressive, and he used self-belittlements, as we all sometimes do, as lures to attract acclaim and reassurance. “Stint not thy praise,” he wrote to Hollander, “as I roll near the Black Waters.”
Bloom was a ravenous digester of literature from the beginning: He read “Moby-Dick” at 9. He could devour 400-page books in an hour. He had a photographic memory. As an after-dinner party game, he liked to recite “Paradise Lost,” starting from any line a tipsy guest chose.
A new book of Bloom’s letters, “The Man Who Read Everything,” is out now. It’s terrific from first to last, and is, as he liked to put it, quite up-cheering. While the letters that have been chosen are, intentionally, more about his work than his life, they put on display an earthier, less formal side of his intellect. A larger and more comprehensive volume of his letters is certain to someday appear, but this is a more-than-pleasant stopgap.
It is an ideally slim book. “The Man Who Read Everything” limits itself to eight of Bloom’s correspondents: Hollander, John Ashbery, A.R. Ammons, James Merrill, Henri Cole, Ursula K. Le Guin and Alvin Feinman, as well as the critic Northrop Frye. He first met many of these writers after he’d dropped them an ardent fan letter — usually when he was preparing to write about or teach their work.
He’d butter them up. To Ashbury: “If you are not a Poet Absolute, then none now exists.” To Cole: “There is no poet now writing in English under the age of 60 who is your equal.” To Ammons he wrote that he kept an upstairs and a downstairs copy of his “Selected Poems” because “every house should have two Ammonses.” Bloom would sometimes offer to send along his own work, appending a falsely modest line such as: “Will mail you a copy for your fireplace.”
He wasn’t a mere flatterer. For his favorites, he was part agent and part editor, part Vince Lombardi and part cheerleader. He helped them place their work. He pushed them in new directions. He lobbied them to put his favorite poems in their collections.
To Merrill, who Bloom felt included too much material in all caps in his book “Mirabell” — the speech of spirits and angels over a Ouija board — he wrote: “Yield to my urging!” To Ashbery: “Please leave no Bloomian favorites out of the ‘Selected,’ as I will teach from it through the years.”
Every so often, he’d request something in return for his attention. He asked both Ammons and Cole to dedicate poems to him. “I may not be remembered for anything I’ve written,” he told Cole, “but I’ll be remembered for a few of the poems that have been dedicated to me.”
The correspondence with Cole is vivid because it contains transcriptions of several fragrant messages that Bloom left on Cole’s answering machine. They tend to start with greetings like “Noble bard, it is Harold Bloom, calling from New Haven,” or “Oh, young Cole, it is old Bloom, your champion.” An editor’s note at the bottom of one of the longer ones reads: “[Machine cuts off message].”
It’s worth mentioning this book’s editor, Heather Cass White, a professor of English at the University of Alabama and a former student of Bloom’s. This book is well made, so much so that I ordered White’s own memoir about her reading.
You feel you are in good hands from the start. Her introduction is exemplary, brisk without being hurried: It’s packed with exactly the information a reader needs before entering. Her footnotes, too, are agile. White had to search for Bloom’s papers in his messy, book-strewn attic office. He tended to stick letters and other things inside books, so she had to shake many of them out.
There isn’t a lot of personal material in this volume, but there is some. He writes about reading in a fireside armchair in the late evenings, a glass of Fundador, the Spanish brandy, at hand. He sometimes describes health problems. Here is a snippet of a 1970 letter to Ammons, written when Bloom was approaching 40, about the woes of calorie counting:
My temper worsens as my diet continues. I’m trying to make it each 24 hours on a steak, three hard-boiled eggs, vitamin pills, water and cigars. The weight comes off, but miserable slow, perhaps (mystically) because it’s been there so long it feels a right to stay. I was so grotesque when I started (255) that being 232 now isn’t much comfort.
White prints Ammons’s wonderful response: “I mourn for and eulogize the 23 lost pounds of you. I wonder where they are, and whether they possess the tincture of Haroldness still.”
Many of the letters mention depressive episodes, what Bloom called “the old despairs, self-deceptions, self-indulgements.” To his list of reasons to be dispirited was added, late in his life, the presidency of Donald Trump. Bloom wrote to Le Guin in a 2017 email: “Our moment in time is so bad that I fall back on Lucretius rather than Virgil for comfort. Some cosmic demon is breaking through to our despoiled planet. Trump is pulp fiction breaking into life.”
Bloom’s letters to Le Guin are humane and moving. In one he recalls breaking a hip after a fall. His friends are dying, he writes; he’s forced to teach his classes over Skype. He asks her, in an email that stands for many of the missives here: “May I request a mailing address? If you permit it, I may write you from time to time. It will make me feel less lonely.”
THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom | Edited by Heather Cass White | Yale | 235 pp. | $30
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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