Harold Bloom was anything but a policymaker. The popular literary critic earned his renown for his erudition as a self-described “monster of reading” of literary texts. (Bloom was reputed to be able to consume hundreds of pages an hour and could purportedly recite the over 10,000 lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and untold volumes of British poetry.)
That erudition is now plentifully on offer in Heather Cass White’s painstakingly edited The Man Who Read Everything. The book compiles Bloom’s literary correspondence with Alvin Feinman (1954-1963), Northrop Frye (1959-1969), John Hollander (1965-1976), A.R. Ammons (1969-1971), John Ashbery (1971-2015), James Merrill (1976-1979), Henri Cole (1997-2012), and Ursula K. Le Guin (2017-2018). In White’s eight-chapter volume, we see the inimitable Bloom backstage, the man behind epic intellectual debates that engulfed teaching the academic humanities during the second half of the 20th century.
Here on full display is the kaleidoscopically sublime Bloom: vulnerable, tender, playful, grave, insecure, irritated, thrilled, enigmatic, sardonic, sympathetic, sorrowful. To read Bloom’s literary letters is still to hear the oracular tone and witness the mighty vigor of Bloom, the professional critic. But it is also to luxuriate in Bloom, the idiosyncratic, devoted, and joyful lover of literature and literary creation, in full bloom over an arc of six decades, from graduate student at Yale to professor late in life at the same school.
Yet Bloom’s letters will be of interest to more than students and scholars of criticism and literature. They might seem, at first, an odd place to draw inspiration for how to grapple with the world’s many political problems, at home and abroad. But Bloom’s correspondence bears an unmistakable political relevance, one centered on his distinct understanding, and cultivation, of friendship.
The intimacy of friendship, to paraphrase French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (one of Bloom’s friends and sometimes rival in the 1970s), lies in the recognition of oneself in the eyes of the other. Such was the case with Bloom, for whom his friendships blurred the lines between imagination and reality, self and other. His conversations made remote gods of prose and poetry into his closest friends, and his closest friends into those remote gods.
On June 6, 1972, Bloom wrote to John Ashbery, the most influential U.S. poet of his time, that his missive “is a kind of fan letter.” By June 25, 1972, Bloom, in another dispatch to Ashbery, wrote: “I move to first names, as after two weeks of doing little but read Ashbery and write about him, I feel close enough to venture upon friendship (if permitted).” Two days after poetry forged their friendship, Ashbery responded, addressing his letter to “Harold,” and explaining his various literary choices.
Bloom often also used nicknames to cultivate his friendships. These sobriquets showed Bloom’s affection for and bonds with his literary friends, fictional and real, dead or alive. “Like his living friends,” White writes, “‘Uncle Archie’ [Ammons], ‘the noble Ashbery,’ ‘young [Henri] Cole,’ Bloom’s literary favorites had nicknames. He wrote about ‘Hamlet,’ but only ever spoke about ‘Omelet.’ Freud was ‘Uncle Siggie,’ while Kafka was ‘Cousin Franz.’ In tribute to Falstaff’s unique greatness Bloom reversed the procedure and nicknamed himself ‘Bloomstaff.’”
Bloom’s nicknaming habit may seem similar to that of Donald Trump, but the U.S. president deploys nicknames as pure weapons, to dominate, criticize, or insult. By contrast, Bloom uses them to display playful, loving, and grave appreciation of others—and of himself from the perspective of those others. That gives us a model for how to understand our interconnectedness—for how to see the transcendent in our everyday life and our everyday life refracted back into the transcendent.
The wellspring of Bloom’s literary politics can, at first glance, appear hard to locate. In a 1963 letter to Jewish American poet Alvin Feinman, whom Bloom met in 1951 as a fellow graduate student, Bloom summarized his approach to literature: “I don’t really believe in truth—not even the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.” Not social, not political—a voice, by which Bloom meant: a commanding, authentic, and often agonized expression of consciousness.
But, crucially, Bloom’s way of reading literature can be seen as comparable to the way he cared for his literary friends. The German word Stimmung, which means mood, atmosphere, or vibe, and has the root Stimme (voice), perhaps captures Bloom’s faith. In 1989, Bloom even began to advocate for seeing literature as “sacred.” In Ruin the Sacred Truth, for example, he suggested that literature had largely taken over the social function of religious belief.
A pile of books at Bloom’s house in New Haven in 2011. Thomas Iannaccone/WWD/Penske Media via Getty Images
