Everyone's A Critic (But there's only one Harold Bloom)
so immensely influential, even his detractors have been
affected by him. The Anxiety of Influence (1973), for ex-
ample, described poetry as an Oedipal struggle between
writers and their greatest stylistic predecessors.
The book's title has become such a catch-phrase, it is
not only cited in literary scholarship, but throughout pop-
ular magazines. His new book, Omens of Millennium,
continues his idiosyncratic Jewish odyssey, commenting
on current popular interests in angels, near-death ex-
periences and apocalypse, all from the perspective of
his own brand of Jewish Gnosticism. The new book, says
Mr. Bloom, "intends to look at the stigmata of this coun-
try: the so-called New Age phenomena and related stuff,
these angelic obsessions, all this madness about near-
death experiences, and a lot of this similar claptrap."
Perhaps what is most memorable about the new book
are the anecdotes: Mr. Bloom's own near-death experi-
ence at New Haven Medical Center, in which he discov-
ers an essential truth that he later forgets; his 10-year-old
encounters with the poetry of Hart Crane and William
Blake at the Bronx Public Library; his poignant thoughts
about his own incipient demise.
Now, at what he describes as "a tired 66," Mr. Bloom
has become a kinder, gentler version of his former self,
and one can only find traces of the wrath that challenged
an entire Ivy League department and scared the current
editor of the New York Times Book Review away from
graduate school. (In the New Yorker two years ago, Chip
McGrath confessed the anguish he felt when Mr. Bloom
helped him realize that he was a "weak reader.")
Mr. Bloom is not only working at an ever-furious pace
— currently on a huge study of all of Shakespeare's plays
— he is the only scholar in his field to hold two chairs at
two universities: as Sterling Professor of the Humanities
at Yale and Berg Professor of English at New York Uni-
versity, where he has moonlighted for the past seven
years.
At his graduate seminars, Mr. Bloom is visibly ex-
hausted: hunching over, clutching his shoulder, and melo-
dramatically rubbing his forehead. For a man who suffered
a heart attack two years ago, the demands of two acad-
emic appointments — not to mention a frenetic writing
schedule — are clearly taking their toll. While he sprin-
kles most of his comments with terms of endearment such
as "my dear," "my fellow" and "my child," he also is un-
sparing with irony and outrage.
Mr. Bloom likes to recount how he taught himself Eng-
lish in the Bronx library by reading the works of Crane
and Blake, with whose poetry he fell "violently" in love.
On his 10th birthday, Mr. Bloom's sister bought him a
Crane book, which he still cherishes. Crane and Blake
led the precocious young Mr. Bloom to the other poets
who eventually would make up his "visionary company":
Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron.
By the time Mr. Bloom entered Cornell University at
age 17, he had virtually all of the works of these poets
memorized. The Romantic critic M.H. Abrams, Mr.
Bloom's teacher at Cornell who is still on the faculty there,
likes to recount a story of losing his place in Paradise Lost,
only to have the undergraduate Bloom help him by spout-
ing the section from memory.
What could Mr. Bloom's immigrant parents possibly
have thought of this boy encountering worlds they nev-
er knew?
"Papa was born in Odessa," says Mr. Bloom. "His fa-
ther was a dock worker, and he was a garment worker
all his life in New York. Mama was born in Brest Litovsk,
and her father was a carpenter, and she was a housewife
all her life in New York City. Mama and Papa never spoke
anything in their whole life except for Yiddish. They had
no idea what a professor of literature was. I think they
were disappointed when I told them I would be a pro-
fessor of literature. They had no idea what I was talk-
ing about. They lived to see me achieve eminence, but
they had no idea what that was. I don't think they real-
ly cared one way or the other. They knew I was earning
an honest living, but that was about the heart of it."
Culture Shock
he author of The Western Canon confesses that
English is still an "acquired" language for him,
and his accent is so bizarrely affected (pro-
nouncing Walt Whitman's "lilac" as "lie-locks"),
it is as singular as his scholarship.
It was certainly a culture shock for Mr. Bloom to enter
an Ivy League still dominated by prep school-educated
WASPs.
The Eastern Bronx was worlds apart from the ivory
towers in Ithaca and New Haven. "There was a consid-
erable leap I had to take initially," Mr. Bloom recalls.
"When I was barely 17, I went to Cornell as an un-
dergraduate, and for the first time left the neighborhood
where Yiddish was the only thing spoken on the street,"
he says. "I found myself at Cornell, and then, four years
later, barely 21, I found myself at a Yale which was not
at all like it is today. ... At that point at Yale, like all the
other Ivy League schools, exactly 10 percent of the ad-
mitted students were Jewish. That, of course, is the pic-
ture of a gone world. It's long gone. I'm now the professor
who has taught longer at Yale than anyone else on the
faculty. I'm starting my 43rd consecutive year on the fac-
ulty there."
"I had a lot of trouble," Mr. Bloom says. "I think there
was a terrible fight between the New Critics on the one
side and my supporters on the other. I don't think it was
anti-Semitism on the part of some of them, but there cer-
tainly was an anti-Semitic element among a few of them.
... It was a neo-Christian department, you know, Eliotic
neo-Christianity. T.S. Eliot had become the vicar of all
Western culture. I obviously did not like that idea. I did
not like anti-Semitism, I did not like anything about Eliot,
and I still don't. I was not the mild, good-natured, sweet
man I am now at a tired 66. I was a very aggressive fel-
low, and I wasted no time, even as a graduate student,
at denouncing Eliot and denouncing New Criticism, the
whole kit and caboodle. There were four guys in my year
who got tenure: three of them received letters [of rec-
ommendation], and I didn't."
When Mr. Bloom was up for tenure, he surpassed the
normal criteria by publishing not simply the obligatory
book and handful of articles, but three books of poetry
criticism, one of which, The Visionary Company, is still
in print and considered a classic, tracing poetic influence
in Romantic poets.
However much the New Critics violently disagreed with
Mr. Bloom's admiration for Blake and distaste for Eliot,
their reluctance to recognize his prodigious output seemed
strange. "I wondered what was going on, and I started
to get phone calls and notes from four people — Walter
Jackson Bate, Northrop Frye, Myer Abrams and David
Erdman — and they all said something was rotten.
" ... Then, one of my former teachers bluntly accused
many of his colleagues in the department of anti-Semi-
tism. Eventually, the appointment went through. But
those are pictures of a gone world. The academy, in a
strange way now, is Jewish."
Such a domination cannot last forever: Mr. Bloom at-
knowledges that the Jewish hegemony in the academy
is already passing. "You look at all the major humanistic
and scientific fields at all the major American universi-
ties, and a large amount of the professors are Jewish," he
says. "But I think this is passing away, not because of
prejudice, but because I think this was, as they say, a so-
T
ciological phenomenon. I have noticed for some time now
in the last 10 years that I can no longer tell my Jewish
and gentile undergraduates at Yale, male and female,
apart from one another, even with a scorecard. I don't
know how often I'm sitting in my office talking to a Yale
undergraduate, and there is a young lady with a Jew-
ish name wearing a big cross, or a young man with an
Irish name wearing a star of David. I mean, everybody's
intermarried, almost hopelessly. It's all snarled up.
Whether that's good, bad, or indifferent, I will let the
sociologists figure out. Today, the guys and girls who are
my best students for the past 10 years are the Asian-
Americans. In short, what the Jews were in my genera-
tion, the Asian-Americans are in your generation."
Although the times changed, and Jews of Mr. Bloom's
generation dominated the academy, his tenure scare was
not his last brush with anti-Semitism at Yale. In the '70s,
Yale was on the cutting edge of literature depar tdnents,
with a group of critics practicing deconstructionism, a
school of French thought largely influenced by Martin
Heidegger.
Among the prominent deconstructionists was the schol-
ar Paul de Man who, four years after his death in 1983,
was revealed to have written collaborationist articles
while in his 20s (Heidegger's Nazism is also now well-
documented). The event sent shock waves throughout
academia that continue to reverberate, and gave Mr.
Bloom pause about a colleague who, despite intellectual
differences, he considered a good friend.
"I was close to Paul personally, although not intellec-
tually or critically," recalls Mr. Bloom, with a mix of wist-
fulness and anger. "I simply cannot understand what he
must have been like as a young man. All of us have cer-
tain elements of expediency in us, and I suppose he was
being expedient, although I don't excuse him for it. I don't
think he comes out that well at all. It doesn't much al-
ter my feelings about him because we spent so much time
together and he was such good company. He was such a
nice fellow. He was certainly not personally anti-Semit-
ic, though I have to assume that those things he wrote
were self-serving and had to do with the expediency of
being in a Nazi-occupied country. This does not justify it.
In fact, it makes him look even worse.
"Nothing I can do about that. But I have nothing to do
with deconstruction and I never did. ... [Friedrich] Niet-
zsche I'm more interested in. Nietzsche is a great writer.
I never thought Paul and I were reading the same Niet-
zsche. Nietzsche was a remarkable critic of Shakespeare.
I think he strongly affected the way I read Shakespeare."
Reflections
On The Bard
I
t was fitting that a few hours later, Mr. Bloom gave
a lecture on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice at
NYU. The equivocal Shylock was the perfect vehi-
cle for Mr. Bloom to illustrate the tension between
the writer whom he has put at the center of his lit-
erary canon, and the issue ofJewisimess, which presents
enormous difficulties for any Shakespearean critic or Jew-
ish thinker.
"As I understand it, I don't think Shakespeare gave
any thought to the Jews whatsoever," says Mr. Bloom,
reclining on an easy chair. "There were a hundred, more
or less, Jews living in Shakespeare's London. Doubtless,
he had met four or five of them at one time or another.
They were almost all of them conversos, that is to say, os-
tensible Christians. We know almost nothing about these
people. They were mostly merchants, some of them were
artisans, some of them were physicians. The standard
story is that Jews had been expelled after the York mas-