Harold Bloom and his poet-correspondents

It was easy to admire Harold Bloom. One of the most distinguished American literary critics, he always gave the impression of having read anything and everything by the great and the good. Over the course of a 60-year writing career, he produced a steady stream of books that showcased the scope of his reading and illustrated the merits of a range of novelists, poets, playwrights, and thinkers. The best of his books revolved around grandiose claims that were followed by cogent, convincing arguments. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), he examined literary inheritance, asserting that writers wrote under the shadow of predecessors. In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), he explored how the Bard created the modern sense of selfhood.

By the same token, it was just as easy to be irked by Bloom. He judged each literary work on purely aesthetic terms, giving little or no consideration to social, political, or historical contexts. He acted as a strict gatekeeper of the “Western canon” and dogmatically refused to admit new writers. He constantly denounced the feminists, Marxists, and literary theorists who made up what he called “the school of resentment.” In his later, more mainstream books, an output which smacked of quantity over quality, he bloviated and pontificated. Bloom’s last published book appeared in 2020, a year after his death at 89.

A different, posthumous Bloom offering now sees the light of day. The Man Who Read Everything is a collection of Bloom’s literary letters. The title is silly: those who remember Bloom’s scathing takedowns of Stephen King (“immensely inadequate”) and the first Harry Potter book (“slop”) will know he didn’t waste his time reading more than he had to of what he considered inferior literature. However, the contents are fascinating, for they allow us a valuable glimpse into how this true one-off worked, thought, and communicated with those whose writing he held in high esteem.

The book’s first section comprises letters to the American poet Alvin Feinman, whom Bloom met in 1951 when both were graduate students at Yale. These letters begin four years after that. Bloom was then living in England as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Cambridge, but even at this early stage, we find elements that crop up in later exchanges to other correspondents, particularly poets. Bloom praises Feinman’s poems and lauds him as “the only poet writing in English now who really matters.” He gives advice on how Feinman can secure a publisher. (Bloom would later be instrumental in getting Feinman’s first and only collection published by Oxford University Press.) He also offers words of encouragement when Feinman is disheartened: “Defy this age, and you will finally convert it to your greatness; Deprecate yourself, and you will achieve nothing.”

The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom; Edited by Heather Cass White; Yale University Press; 248 pp.; $30.00

Bloom was unafraid to reveal his own state of mind. Life is relaxing, he writes from London in 1958, “there are only the old despairs, self-deceptions, self-indulgements.” Especially illuminating are Bloom’s closing words, here and throughout. His letters often end beseechingly and affectionately, with instructions to write another letter and send more poems. His sign-offs range from “Love” to “With Love” to “I love you.”

Bloom’s letters to another poet, John Hollander, are just as heartfelt. They are also more playful. This book’s editor, Heather Cass White, explains in her introductory note that, for some strange reason, the men referred to each other by variations on the nickname “Foo Foo.” Sifting through each Foofy, Foofy-Foof, and Foofooismus becomes tedious, and we increasingly feel we are simultaneously listening to, and being locked out of, a conversation between two old friends with a specific history and an exclusive jargon. When Bloom tones down the frivolity, though, it is hard not to be riveted, particularly when he is pointing out how Hollander and others work their magic with words. “Poets move me because uniquely they remember being in love, not whom they loved,” he declares.

The book’s two longest sections are devoted to correspondence with the poets A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery. Bloom once said of the former, “speaking as a notorious heterosexual, I was deeply in love with Archie Ammons.” Bloom regarded the latter as the greatest American poet of the second half of the 20th century. In these sets of letters, Bloom continues to give feedback on poems in progress or in print, but also goes one step further and tells the poets that he not only teaches their work but also writes about it. In a letter to Ashbery, dated July 1972, Bloom encloses “my essay on Ashbery.” The next month, Ashbery replies: “Reading it was a moving, exciting and even fearsome experience, rather like seeing one’s portrait by Ingres.”

Not all the letters here are to poets. Bloom wrote for years to the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye, whom he revered, to such an extent that he was always addressed as “Mr. Frye.” Bloom’s awe often manifests itself in obsequiousness. “Let me thank you again,” he gushes, “not just for reading and commenting on my essay but for teaching me (however maladroit the pupil) how to read poetry.” That awe faded in the late 1960s, when Bloom felt Frye slighted his theory of poetic influence. But readers hoping for a literary spat will be disappointed: there is no noticeable deterioration in relations, much less a war of words. Still, it is refreshing to view a different kind of Bloom in these letters, a more humble figure seeking the help, as well as the approbation, of his intellectual idol.

This isn’t the only time we see a more subdued Bloom. At one point, he apologizes to Ammons for his late reply, attributing his tardiness to “continuous depression, my normal mode through most of my life.” At another low ebb, he vents to Hollander: “Lord knows what I am, not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist, but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.” And in one of his early emails to Ursula K. Le Guin, from 2017, he asks if he can write her from time to time: “It will make me feel less lonely.” In these instances, we wish that the letters went beyond the literary and encroached upon the personal to reveal Bloom’s inner darkness.

A FULSOME PORTRAIT OF AN UNTAMABLE SPIRIT

This aside, there is much to enjoy. We trace the trajectory of Bloom’s career with interest. We confront his many sweeping statements and lofty pronouncements about literature: Wordsworth “seems more and more the only possible poet, the poet proper”; “The late [Sylvia] Plath and current [Adrienne] Rich are over-rated ladies.” Bloom comes across as a faithful friend, one whose critiques spur his grateful poet-correspondents on. “Your words are a priceless fuel,” remarks James Merrill. “You may not be a muse,” writes Ammons, “but you are an inspiration.” As Bloom extols these poets, his enthusiasm becomes infectious.

A letter to Feinman opens with a display of self-deprecation: “As for my letter-writing, it is always crabbed and not very revelatory.” Bloom’s first point may have been true, but on the evidence of this collection, his second is demonstrably false, proof that, for all his erudition and bluster, he didn’t always get it right.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.