Harold Bloom Quests for Truth

With over twenty-five books to his name, as well as fellowships, honorary degrees and innumerable articles, Harold Bloom is arguably the nation’s premier literary thinker today.

But he’s not afraid to veer from the literary, either, as anyone in First Parish Church learned on Monday. There to promote his new book—Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?—Bloom also waxed on a number of topics, including religion and “our current American political debacle.”

Although Bloom insisted in an interview prior to the reading that he would not pack the capacious old church, he managed to come close and filled the puritan hall with his slow, methodical voice as he read from his latest book and spoke eagerly about literature and his life.

Bloom, 74, was the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard from 1987-88, during which time he lived in Adams house. He has otherwise taught at Yale for the past 51 years. “I long ago began referring to myself as Bloom Brontosaurus,” he joked, “but I intend to go on teaching as long as I feel I’m capable.”

Bloom published his first work—Shelley’s Mythmaking—in 1959 and has continued to write and think seriously about literature ever since. His 1973 work The Anxiety of Influence earned him international acclaim for its novel contention that authors are constantly aware of their predecessors’ achievements and “misread” them in order to achieve originality. “Influence,” Bloom wrote, “is influenza—an astral disease.”

Much of Bloom’s scholarship is quite unorthodox in its claims. For example, his 1998 work, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, argued that Shakespeare “essentially invented human personality as we continue to know and value it.”

That’s a big claim, and Bloom writes about it as he does virtually every other literary subject—with eagerness, erudition, and a tinge of comic self-awareness.

In the years following Shakespeare, Bloom sought to write books for a more popular audience, specifically on the importance of literature in informing our lives. His 2000 publication, How to Read and Why, was an assessment of literature’s importance on life throughout the ages.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? exists in this vein of informed literary analysis for (quasi) popular consumption. Bloom wrote much of an original draft, but later discarded it and started anew. A life-threatening health crisis—when he was, as he said, “sliced up as so many people”—made him re-examine the work and the importance of literature to himself. After “being at the gates of death,” Bloom said, “I took one look at the book and simply wrote an entirely new one.”

Bloom writes in his introduction that the book “rises out of personal need, reflecting a quest for sagacity that might solace and clarify the traumas of aging, of recovery from grave illness, and of grief for the loss of beloved friends.”

The book is dedicated to examining wisdom writing throughout the ages, beginning with Job and Ecclesiastes and moving through canonical Western literature until the 20th century, ending with Freud and Proust. Each section is dedicated to a pair of writers and thinkers, with intensely close and sometimes confusedly compacted analysis that is characteristic of Bloom’s writing.

Although ostensibly for a general audience, a reader must know a great deal about literature to understand all of Bloom’s points. Yet it is still possible to appreciate his analyses with only a fraction of the breadth of his knowledge, especially since Bloom ties many of the crucial ideas to more observable historical phenomena, including American history.

Though these references are sometimes vastly generalized and mispronounced (“Fundamentally, America in 1860 and America now are little different.”), more often than not they serve to allow access to less knowledgeable readers. Even the above case can be found to contain a kernel of cross-historical truth, when it is followed by the explanation, “much of the opposition we can muster [to America’s leadership past and present] is ‘sniveling.’”

Bloom did not hesitate to refer to current political events at times throughout his reading, at one point spontaneously including “our current president” into a part of the introduction he read from which mentioned those who “reject what they know of Marx, Darwin, and Freud.”

Referring to the Bush administration specifically in the interview, Bloom lamented, “that may be the administration for the rest of my life, [or] if not him it’ll be his brother, or someone like him.” He made sure to focus mostly on ideas surrounding literature, though, dismissing his personal political views as “another story.”

In the past, Bloom has been labeled a conservative by some for his defense of canonical Western writers against postmodern and deconstructionist critics in recent years. (For the record, he calls himself a “left-wing Democrat, whatever that means these days.”)

Bloom went so far as to resign from the English department of Yale in 1976 for this growing schism in English studies, as well as the Modern Language Association and the English Institute “with a letter blasting them” for adherence to this trend.

Although his opinions have made Bloom, in his words, “the pariah of [his] profession for the last thirty years,” he sticks by his beliefs. He maintains that using gender, race, or any other personal characteristics of authors in evaluating the artistic merit or validity of their work is “a blasphemy against the arts…a horrible absurdity.”

Noting that he has “limped off too many canonical battlefields,” Bloom insists that he has only three criteria for what he reads and teaches: “aesthetic splendor, intellectual power, wisdom.” At this point in literary scholarship he suspects “the profession is pretty much split down the middle” between aestheticists like himself and more postmodern theorists.

When asked what undergraduates should be reading, he listed his quintessential canonical authors—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope and Samuel Richardson, among them—“the great authors of the language.”

In terms of more contemporary authors, Bloom said “there’s no question about it, we have four first-class novelists writing at the moment,” Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormack McCarthy, whose Blood Meridian he said was “so savage and splendid there’s been nothing as good since Faulkner.”

Bloom affably deflected references to his esteemed reputation. “Obviously I am not unique,” he said, “there are in every generation remarkable people who are teaching English and other literatures all over the world.”

Shrugging and joking throughout the interview, Bloom bantered with others in the room in a self-effacing and familiar manner, and seemed to enjoy himself, laughing regularly. At one point, when I affirmed that I didn’t disagree with him about his political views, he wryly concurred, “we have very few arguments, Joe.”

After the reading, Bloom did not hold a question and answer session, which is unusual for a Harvard Book Store author event. In explaining his reasoning he said that in spite of his “palpable amiability,” some people have taken “the entire audience—not to mention my sad self—captive with an oration rather than a question.” He added that he would be happy to answer individual questions as he signed books, and complied with a line that stretched to the back of the church.

—Staff writer Joe DiMento can be reached at dimento@fas.harvard.edu.