Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom, a giant presence among literary critics, passed away this week at age 89. He was a beloved teacher to some of us in the ALSCW, superbly generous and sympathetic, a true encourager. To millions of people around the world, he was a guide to finding the books that give more life. He was himself full of life, and warmth, and wit, and the cause of wit in others, to cite his favorite, Falstaff. In his last years his writing became more personal than ever. He faces the reader and confides, familiar like Hazlitt, bracing like Dr. Johnson, ready for a new discovery every time he returns to a well-loved author.
Harold’s many friendships with the authors he admired testify to another central value of the ALSCW, reaching across the divide between critic and writer. When Harold ran across a book that he read and liked, he made a habit of sending an admiring letter to the author. Sometimes, as with Anne Carson, his out-of-the-blue fan letter that would lead to a whirlwind epistolary conversation lasting for years.
Earlier this year I saw Harold dictating a friendly, intensely good-humored reply to one of the many strangers who send him emails. “I like the sound of you,” he wrote. He relished openness and verve, and he had these traits himself, magnificently so. His endless energy in the realms of reading and writing was also directed to the people around him, the many friends he was eager to know, to connect with, to guide and console.
For me, Harold exemplified more than anyone what I see as the key aim of the ALSCW, valuing literature for the electrifying effect it has on us. Let’s focus on why we fell in love with reading in the first place, he insisted, and let ourselves be taken over by the imaginative visions we find on the page. Our life of reading is one with our most intimate desires, and there is no distance at all between what we call our personal lives and the books we read most deeply.
David Mikics is the author most recently of Bellow’s People (Norton) and Slow Reading in a Hurried Age (Harvard). He is the editor of Harold Bloom’s new collection of essays, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon (Library of America). His volume on Stanley Kubrick is forthcoming next year in the Yale Jewish Lives series. He is Moores Professor of English and Honors at the University of Houston, and a columnist for Salmagundi and for Tablet magazine (www.tabletmag.com).
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