The Political Truths of Literary Friendship

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. 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.

Key points

• 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.
• 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 ce…
• 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.