Outside the classroom, to call Harold Bloom polarising would be a bit like calling the Schleswig-Holstein question tricky. To cultural conservatives, he was the last academic defender of the Western Canon, a man unashamed to preach that poems should be beautiful, rather than merely worthy. To the academic left, with its interrogation of power and privilege, he was the ultimate Old White Bogeyman, firmly on the wrong side of history and of the #MeToo movement (of which more below.)
It didn’t help that Harold relished academic conflict and nurtured his feuds like delicate houseplants, feeding them eagerly at the slightest hint of diminishment. The President of Yale University, with whose administration Harold had fought a decades-long war of attrition, threw him a party for his 80th birthday party. When I visited him soon after, he crowed about his own speech. “It’s wonderful to see so many people here”, he’d reportedly said. “And some of you are even my friends.”
By then, he was already out of fashion. Bloom was derided by younger academics for fetishising Shakespeare’s genius and for his 1994 book, The Western Canon, which celebrated 26 key authors. Feminists pointed out that only four of the 26 were women; he notoriously dismissed them, along with scholars of race and class, as “the School of Resentment”.
But if he was a gatekeeper of a literary elitism, it was an elitism he wanted anyone to be able to access. Bloom didn’t speak a word of English until the age of six, growing up in a poor Yiddish-speaking household in the Bronx. (His father was a garment worker, born in Odessa.)
In an interview published a few weeks before his death, Bloom recalled watching, as an eight-year old child, the great Yiddish theatre actor Maurice Schwartz perform as a farbesert — "improved" — Shylock at New York’s Second Avenue Theatre.
He discovered English poetry in the Melrose-Bronx section of the New York Public Library and injected it straight into the veins of his memory. The English language sat formally in his mouth like a decorous foreign language and yet no one else could recite its highest poetry at such length.
Bloom arrived at Yale for graduate school, a working class Jew in 1951, via an undergraduate scholarship to Cornell. It was a time when the university’s motto — an abbreviated Urim and Thummim — was regularly translated by jokers as, “If you can read this, you don’t belong here.” Clashing with Yale’s Anglo-Catholic faculty of ‘New Critics’ and their preference for the metaphysical poets, he sought instead to introduce Jewish interpretive traditions, notably Kabbalah, into mainstream literary criticism.
There too he met his wife Jeanne, with whom he had two sons, one of whom would develop schizophrenia. His personal faith, he told me, died then. A ‘Jewish Gnostic’, not strictly an atheist, he could not reconcile himself to a personal God who had permitted schizophrenia to ravage his son.
Bloom’s fame among the general public rests on his infectious enthusiasm for Shakespeare’s genius — his notorious attempt to found a cult of ‘bardolatry’.
His early breakthroughs, however, were on the Romantic poets. From Bloom’s frustration with their internal contradictions came his most important theory, on the ‘anxiety of influence’. Heavily inspired by Freud, Bloom argued that all great poets must go through an Oedipal experience of adoring and then rejecting their precursors. As love turns to antagonism, "strong poets" creatively "misread" the greats of previous literary history in order to assert points of difference.
Bloom’s own clear precursor as a theorist of the canon was T. S. Eliot, whom he in turn wrestled with and rejected, later denouncing the profound Englishness of Eliot’s “polite hatred of the Jewish people”. After those first experiences with Yale’s New Critics, Bloom would forever associate England and Anglicanism with antisemitism.
Harold loved beauty, whether in literature or in people. He liked to be surrounded by young men and women and he complimented us in ways that many women would have every right to find uncomfortable. By the time I knew him, he was too old and frail to seem anything but vulnerable. (I should look on him as the Jewish grandfather I’d never known, he told me but I discovered he said that to all the girls.)
Did he, as Naomi Wolf alleged in 2002, touch her inappropriately while in a position of influence over her career? Only she can know — and as someone who has made a similar complaint about another man, I believe in taking these things seriously. But I also believe in examining evidence, and Wolf’s record of credibility in other areas is not solid. Nor was groping people, rather than merely quoting Romantic poetry at them, Harold’s modus operandi.
Yet Wolf’s story did tap into long-standing rumours about his relationships with female graduate students. It also clearly resonated with many female alumni frustrated by failures elsewhere at Yale to tackle sexual harassment — and by the university’s long exclusion of women from its inner circles. (Women were only admitted as undergraduates in 1979, more than a quarter of a century after Bloom arrived.)
It is more than possible that Wolf’s Harold and my Harold were both real. To me, he was a gentle, considerate teacher who with Jeanne, the real centre of his life, fed me tea and cake with poetry when I was young and a continent away from home. He had scant love for feminism but as a feminist I had no problem loving him. To those of us who have been grieving for the best in our teacher, the outpouring of bile from some academics in the immediate aftermath of his death has aptly demonstrated the intolerance of our age for humanity’s complexities.
He was wrong, of course, to dismiss so crassly the social concerns of New Historicism and his personal attacks on New Historicist scholars could be vicious when he felt threatened.
But his approach to Shakespeare, finding himself in every character, jumping for joy at the sheer genius of it, comes closer than most scholarship to how ordinary men and women around the world relate to Shakespeare. On poetry more broadly, he wrote in one of his last books, “I am wary of method. There is no method but yourself, once you have read widely and deeply, opening yourself to the sounds and silences of the best poetry.”
It is in those sounds and silences, that Bloomian yen for beauty, that most readers come to love literature. Today’s academics forget this at their cost.
Kate Maltby is a writer and broadcaster
