We were recently dished the revelation that the ever-dignified Frank Kermode was capable of befriending you in public only to befoul you in private. This particular befouling happened in a letter he dashed off in 1976 to Robert Silvers, co-editor of the New York Review of Books, who had asked if Kermode might review Poetry and Repression, a new screed by Harold Bloom expounding on his notorious theory of the “anxiety of influence”.
“Bloom is a monster,” Kermode begins, and it doesn’t get much prettier from there:
“I’ve been struggling with this delusion-system of his, and there’s no other word for it… A single insight, of no very great importance, spawns these endless antitheses, tropes, schemes… The opening page of Poetry and Repression is a characteristic fraud – it would simply be dismissed as silly if B weren’t breathing so hard, and giving so much evidence of a mighty mind in travail… I can’t publicly say what I think of this dangerous fellow, this fountain of nonsense, because of a personal relationship which is of the kind that would make such an attack unbearably offensive.”
Kermode does not feature in The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom, recently put together by his former student Heather Cass White – on the evidence of which Bloom was much kinder than his ostensible friend in correspondence. But let us be fair to Kermode and admit that we all keep two sets of books, one for the daylight, when people are watching, and another for the dark, when people are not.
Kermode wasn’t alone in his contempt for bloviating Bloom and his One Big Idea. Both within and without the academy, Bloom gave just about every professional reader something to boil about; the boiling had as much to do with Bloom’s big personality as it did with his big theory. Once he glommed onto it he never could glom off. Christopher Ricks, savagely reviewing the book Kermode would not, floated a typically Ricksian chiasmus: “Bloom had an idea; now the idea has him.”
The anxiety of influence isn’t easy to reduce to talking points. The critic Alfred Kazin quipped that it seemed essential to Bloom not to be understood. But let’s give those talking points a shot. Bloom believed that through “poetic misprision”, a creative misreading, “strong” writers grapple with the strong writers who precede them, unconsciously fearing that they are “belated”, or inauthentic and unoriginal, and it is by that “agon”, by that grappling of substance and style, that writers “swerve” into their own strong authenticity and originality. Don’t mistake this for something Freudian, as many do, just because the agon is unconscious and seemingly Oedipal. It’s not Freudian because it’s not sexual, and because the new poem is a manifestation of the anxiety, not a sublimation of it.
Bloom died in 2019. But the brand of aesthetic criticism he championed had been on life support for decades, despite Bloom’s intransigent efforts. Yale had hired him immediately after his PhD in 1955, aged 25, and he remained there until his death 64 years later – despite fierce infighting which saw him abandon the English faculty and form his own “department of one”, as he never tired of pointing out. But he wasn’t the lone genius he made himself out to be. He occupied the hub of perhaps the greatest concentration of literary critics ever assembled at a single American university. Between roughly 1965 and 1985, Yale’s faculty included Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, J Hillis Miller and René Wellek, with Jacques Derrida periodically storming the hallways to help cause as much deconstruction as he could. This constellation, dubbed the Yale School of literary criticism, made New Haven, Connecticut – the university’s home – arguably the Athens of modern literary theory during those contentious decades. (It was with Yale in mind that Ricks asserted, in his 1976 review of Bloom, that “recent criticism has altitudinously aggrandised itself with lofty claims that are preposterous… and snug in its new haven it is all too at home not only with Kabbalah but also with cabal.”) Bloom was more personally linked to the critics who ushered in the fashion of Frenchified theory on US campuses than his contemporary acolytes realise.
Bloom’s first act, lasting until 1970, was as a scholar of the Romantic poets; his second act, circa 1970-90, saw him as the maddening theorist of influence anxiety. Then, beginning in 1994 with The Western Canon, Bloom entered his third and final act: as a bestselling, paradoxically elite populist adored by multitudes. He became a rhapsodiser for Great Books who had seemingly ingested the whole Western tradition and set out to persuade us that literature transcended politics.
Instead, Bloom argued, literature provides us consummate access to other minds and experiences, and as such gives us “more life”. This was in marked opposition to the “School of Resentment”, the moniker he coined for the ideological invasions into literary study. He saw all of these, from feminism to postcolonial theory, as a lunatic cacophony of social workers scrambling to undo the Canon. For Bloom, what counted was how well a text was made, not who made it, or under what social or political circumstances. Though present at the birth of modern literary theory – he co-authored, with Derrida and other theorists, the manifesto Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) – Bloom was really a Romantic aesthete. He emphasised literature’s imaginative might and sublimity; to ascribe political purposes to it was a kind of bodge job. His worship of genius was unrestrained (alongside Shakespeare, Americans such as Emerson and Whitman were top of the heap). This was derided as a kind of deranged fandom. But it was more a reverent humility spawned by awe of the sublime and the enlargement of the spirit that Shakespeare and company had bestowed on him and which “resentniks” were unable to muster.
The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom might be too slim to be called an event, but it arrives with a reminder: if Bloom’s acerbic critics are correct that he was an absurd self-styled Falstaff, he was also – like Falstaff – loving and supportive. Bloom was such a public pugilist, you could forget he was capable of common, heart-warm friendship. In fact, he excelled at it.
There are only eight recipients here – critic Northrop Frye, novelist Ursula K Le Guin, and poets Alvin Feinman, John Hollander, AR Ammons, John Ashbery, Henri Cole and James Merrill – but they show Bloom at his affectionate best. He flat-out begs them to post him more work, so engaged is he with it. His preferred salutation was “Dearest”. To Hollander, it could be the German “mein Treu Lieb”. To Feinman, his signature could be preceded by not only “Love”, but “I love you”, or to Hollander, “I love you madly.”
The effusive affection for his friends is joined by equally effusive applause for their work, and as all writers at all stages of their career know well, applause from lofty sources cannot come often enough. To Ashbery in 1975: “You are weary of my proclaiming your greatness, but I am overcome by these new poems – your true splendour (in language) only just begins.” In a 2017 email to Le Guin, his near-exact contemporary: “I know you are also in the High Eighties. But your genius is undiminished,” and about her poetry, which he implores her multiple times to send him: “I need to read and reread as much of it as I can get hold of.”
Bloom’s applause can sometimes underscore his strict critical programme. In a 1977 letter to Merrill, he confesses the poet’s new collection, Mirabell: Books of Number, “speaks to the divination or pneumatic self in me quite as much as Gnosis and Kabbalah speak”. Bloom, who called himself a “Gnostic”, adds: “And that, for me, is the truest test – you are writing an antithetical Scripture, and writing it greatly.” Gnostic traditions divvied up humanity into different categories; in particular, the “pneumatic individual” (from the Greek pneuma: breath, spirit) has a divine spark that keeps its true origin alight beyond the material realm. Bloom had been entranced by Gnosticism since the late 1960s. By the time he wrote Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), he’d come to understand that the Great Books function as a species of secular gnosis, “an antithetical Scripture”. They awaken readers to deeper, inward-dwelling selves that cannot be reduced to identity or circumstance. The “anxiety of influence” is its own antithetical Scripture, one we’re still learning to interpret.
If Bloom’s scant letters to Northrop Frye lack both love and applause it’s because the influential author of Anatomy of Criticism (1957) had no need for either from the devotee. But in one letter to Frye, in 1968, we see something unexpected from Bloom: vulnerability. In it, he admits that he sent an earlier one because he was “moving towards breakdown, asking really for spiritual help”. This was when he began to formulate his theory of influence anxiety and was unknowingly locked in his own agon with Frye. Frye disowned his disciple’s theory of influence anxiety, preferring his own romantic “myth”: that literature was one poem with many authors.
Bloom’s vulnerability is visible elsewhere too. To Hollander in 1976, he writes: “Sometimes I wonder why I write such odd things.” And to Le Guin in 2017 he admits: “Many years ago I thought of writing to you, but was too shy.” For the colossus who once told an interviewer “I refuse to be edited” and who refused to admit he could err in judgement, the vulnerability on display here humanises him. Bloom, too, kept two sets of books.
Bloom occupies a unique position in 20th-century Anglo American criticism: neither New Critic nor deconstructionist, neither academic technician nor journalistic reviewer. He was the last Romantic critic, the heir to Ruskin and Pater, who believed that great books alter consciousness, that genius exists, and that reading can be a form of self-creation. To Le Guin, at the age of 87, Bloom is still speaking of “aesthetic dignity”, “extraordinary eloquence”, and the “pleasure” they offer the reader – notions, once taken for granted, which may be going the way of the plesiosaur.
Critical eminences such as Kermode and Ricks will be instructing us as long as serious reading endures, but their works will never have the apostolic readership Bloom earned, the numberless who consider him teacher, mentor, sage. Unlike Lionel Trilling, FR Leavis and other public critics, late-phase Bloom let ordinary readers feel recognised, giving them permission to trust their own exaltation, and reminding them why they had fallen in love with literature to begin with. He restored a kind of heroism to the critical sensibility, offering certainty to a cynical, sceptical age: he ranked, judged, excluded, declared. Like his hero Samuel Johnson, he spoke and wrote in verdicts; he showed how and why literature matters. Bloom endures because his message was direct and true: the encounter between a solitary reader and a great book remains one of the highest experiences available to the spirit and mind. Few critics have believed that more intensely – fewer still have made others believe it too.
William Giraldi is a novelist and lecturer at Boston University
The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom
Edited by Heather Cass White
Yale University Press, 248pp, £25
[Further reading: Kevin Keegan’s mighty life]