Let Us Now Praise Famous Men…(But not Adrienne Rich)

Harold Bloom holds a special place in my heart. He introduced me to the notion that a scholar of literature could have profound and comprehensive things to say about the human condition: he was the one who cemented in me just how profound had been Shakespeare’s genius; it was in reading Bloom that I first learned that everything that had ever been done with the novel had already been done by Cervantes in the Quixote; and it was because of Harold Bloom that, when a college class called on me to read some Portuguese lyric poetry by Camões, I already knew it would be phenomenal. My cultural education was supplemented at nearly every turn by the man, and as long as his purview was the past, I was never disappointed.

It’s harder to talk with authority about what’s important as there comes to be more and more of it around. So, as the centuries he writes about grow closer to our own, his vision grows more and more myopic, until the current day where he is just one among many arbiters of taste. It’s a position he seems loathe to tolerate. He’s railed against popular literature publicly several times, notably against Harry Potter and his creator J.K. Rowling (“Can 35 Million Book Buyers Be Wrong? Yes”) and Stephen King’s win of the National Book Foundation’s award for a “distinguished contribution” to letters (“Dumbing down American Readers”). But while some snobbery on his part is understandable, the more of his contemporary criticism I read, the more I was forced to see his blindness.

Charged with editing a “Best of the Best American Poetry” volume in 1997, he had ten volumes to choose from, 1988-1997. He neglected to select any from the 1996 volume. In his introduction (published first as an essay in the Boston Review), he railed against the state of America’s universities and critical community in the late 1990′s, Bloom described the situation as a critical “Thermopylae,” where “the multiculturalists, the hordes of camp- followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commissars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists,” were arrayed below, about to seize the height from the true appreciators of the “aesthetic”. It’s an old argument, and a tired one: don’t be so P.C. that you lose sight of the great masters. As Bloom pessimistically observed when thinking of how mediocrity was seeping into the canon, “I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead.” He was wrong.

Who was the editor of that 1996 Best American Poetry anthology, you might ask? The answer: Adrienne Rich, one of the seminal poets of the women’s movement in the 1960′s. Bloom observed in 1997 that “what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet,” not there actual abilities. Maybe those things were in fact getting some more play, but you only have to look at Rich’s own critical work to see how insightful a mind she has, how much she understands the issue Bloom would claim she fails to see. In her current piece in the Boston Review, “What Country is This: Rereading LeRoi Jones’s The Dead Lecturer” she presents the kind of insightful, but unexpected reading that Bloom doesn’t give her credit for being capable of.

Despite it all, I can’t but help admire “Bloom Brontosaurus,” the “amiable dinosaur,” as he dubs himself in the midst of his anti-multicultural polemic. He has masterfully handled some of the great problems of human expression in the past ten centuries. Maybe so much looking backwards has made it hard for him to focus on the present. For that, I think, he can be forgiven.

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Here’s Bloom talking to Charlie Rose about his book The Western Cannon. He is at his best, both sweepingly brilliant, and infuriating. Has his field been so marginalized? I think he’s very wrong.