http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/story.jsp?story=495933 Harold Bloom: A vortex of passions By John Walsh 28 February 2004
He was, wrote Naomi Wolf, "a vortex of power and intellectual charisma". The prospect of studying under him left her "sick with excitement". His worst critics still call him "overwhelmingly, destructively seductive" for lady undergraduates. It's quite something when, in a dispute about sexual harassment, the plaintiff emphasises the attractiveness of the defendant. It's even odder when the miscreant is Harold Bloom. For this dashing musketeer of the Yale English department, this Lord Flashheart of modern American letters, is scarcely a dream date: vastly corpulent, snow-haired, triple-chinned, phlegmatic as a Buddha and camp as a fly-sheet.
He is now 73, but 20 years ago, when he allegedly clamped his hand on Ms Wolf's innocent thigh in the kitchen of her student house after a dinner, he was much the same. The same sad eyes, straining trouser belt and Charles Laughton features peered from contemporary photographs. Lord Byron he wasn't.
Ms Wolf's accusations are the hottest campus gossip in years. What's astonishing, though, is not that Bloom should have made a pass at the celebrated feminist; it's that his move should have remained a potent memory, for which she still seeks redress, two decades later.
What was it he actually did to her? "He leaned towards me," she writes in this week's New York magazine, "and put his face inches from mine. 'You have the aura of election upon you,' he breathed. I hoped he was talking about my poetry. The next thing I knew, his heavy, boneless hand was hot on my thigh." When she rejected his advances (after being "sick with excitement" she was physically sick into the sink), Bloom retrieved the bottle of amontillado sherry he had brought, told her "You are a deeply troubled girl" and disappeared into the night.
Was it the parting shot that bothered her over the years? The implication that her grades might improve if she submitted to his sexual advances? Or has she chosen this moment to blow the whistle on Bloom because of what he came to represent?
Bloom is a colossal figure in American academic life, a monstre sacré, a combination of Dr Johnson and Falstaff. He is the best-read man in the US and the nation's top literary critic. His easy familiarity with the entire canon of Western literature is awe-inspiring. He can extemporise lectures on Proust, Kafka, Dostoyevsky and Cervantes and find a thousand potent interconnections between them. His memory is oceanic. His pronouncements are floor-shakingly portentous and proscriptive. In a period of academic relativism, he insists that Writer A is in the front rank while B is unfit to breathe the same air. Like a gargantuan bouncer, he stands before the nightclub called Literature, refusing entrance to the unworthy. Life, he says, is too short to be spent reading anything but first-rate work - and he, Bloom the Infallible, will tell you what that is.
Since the 1970s, he has been a huge one-man bulwark against the flood of academics who strove to re-contextualise literature as a branch of sociology, history, politics or "gender studies". Successive waves of structuralists, feminist critics, Marxists, deconstructionists and vapid promoters of "cultural studies" moved into the campuses of America, then Europe, demanding that, instead of studying the work of dead white European males (or Dwems), English students should be offered more relevant "texts" by writers outside the usual "canon" of accepted writers.
Bloom was having none of this. For 20 years he has fought against what he calls the school of Resentment. Shamelessly elitist, he issues fantastic broadsides against multiculturalism and feminism: "A university culture where the appreciation of Victorian women's underwear replaces the appreciation of Chas Dickens and Robert Browning sounds like the outrageousness of a new Nathaniel West, but is merely the norm. The poems of our climate have been replaced by the body-stockings of our culture."
Bloom is flamboyantly unworldly. He is proud to have owned no TV until he was 40. He distrusts the internet, for supplying knowledge without discrimination or wisdom. As a teacher and public performer, he is studiedly eccentric. He talks in a curiously twee delivery, full of explosions of rapture and excitement. He is big on endearments, calling strangers and students "My child" and "My dear" indiscriminately. As Naomi Wolf discovered, he is a shocking flirt. He is a man of tremendous passions, a kind that is not natural in an age like ours. The voraciousness of his reading puts him in the company of Macaulay and Coleridge, the last people in history to try to read everything worthwhile ever published. His acute critical gifts, unwedded to any theoretical orthodoxy, are in the tradition of Cyril Connolly and Edmund Wilson. But in the omnivorousness of his reading, the restless desire to know everything, the magisterial impulse and the faint whiff of charlatanry that hangs around him, he most resembles Anthony Burgess.
He was born in the east Bronx, New York, in 1930, the son of a tailor from Odessa and a carpenter's daughter from Brest-Litovsk. They were Orthodox Jewish immigrants, who never learned English. The infant Bloom taught himself to read Yiddish at three, Hebrew at four and English at five. By eight, he was haunting the New York Public Library. As a child, he took to memorising long passages from the prophetic books of William Blake, and selections from Milton and A E Housman. To this day he can recite tidal waves of prose and poetry, including passages from every Shakespeare play, and deplores the decline of learning poetry by rote in school.
After reading English literature at Cornell University, he finished his PhD at Yale in 1951 and, four years later, aged 25, joined the English department, remaining there for 22 years, before acquiring the grand title of Sterling Professor of Humanities which he retains today.
He has lived in the same modest house in New Haven, Connecticut (full of stuffed animals, a harpsichord and 30,000 books), for more than 40 years and has been married to the same woman, a former school psychologist called Jeanne, whom he calls Jeanie Bear, for just as long. It's been a long, slow, unchanging life of reading and contemplation, which has freed his mind to become a vast echo chamber of literary allusion.
His books sometimes read like guided tours of Mount Olympus, with Bloom as the lordly, magisterial guide to the upper slopes. He began, conventionally enough, as a scholar of the Romantic period. His debut was Shelley's Mythmaking (1959). Blake's Apocalypse (1963) drew an admiring review from Edith Sitwell, a year before she died. His critical work on Yeats (1970) penetrated, with blithe confidence, the Irish poet's impossible jungle of symbolic visions. But the work that made his name was The Anxiety of Influence, published in 1973. In it he argued that literary history is a constant Freudian struggle (which he calls agon) between "strong" writers driven by a passion to shake off the influence of their illustrious predecessors by rewriting their work - as if all literature were a form of creative plagiarism.
It was a bold thesis whose sophistication did not conceal its author's old-fashioned admiration for Great Writers and concepts such as "genius" and "inspiration" - then as outdated as the belief that history was a narrative of monarchs and revolutions. Bloom stood revealed as a behemoth of literary tradition, an upholder of rigorous standards, a romantic who wanted the world to study Milton, Shelley and Shakespeare because they would be transformed by them, and not bother their heads with third-rate writers from Patagonia, Harlem, the Virago backlist or the English Home Counties. With one bound he became the unofficial, self-appointed minder of the Western canon of literature.
In 1994, he showed the world precisely what he was defending. Before, readers had only a hazy idea of precisely which texts made up "the canon". Bloom supplied the deficiency in The Western Canon, which offered 26 chapters about the A-team of great writers and - sensationally - an appendix listing the top 800 writers and 3,000 key texts. His selection of favourite writers was capricious (who the hell was Fernando Pessoa? Why was Emily Dickinson on the A-team but not Henry James or T S Eliot?) and rudely dismissive. "I have resisted the backward reach of the current canonical crusades," he wrote pompously, "which attempt to elevate a number of sadly inadequate women writers of the 19th century, as well as some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans."
The literary-academic world went into a howling eisteddfod of execration at Bloom's listing of the Best and the Rest. In the past 10 years he has published several refinements on the Canon book. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human (1999) suggested that we behave the way we do because Shakespeare offered us "convincing modes of being" to live by. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002) divided the Hot 100 (Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, Plato et al) into 10 classes derived from the Kabbalah. How to Read and Why ((2000) was abused by many critics, notably Terry Eagleton, the Marxist Oxford don. Quoting Bloom's words, "The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself", he remarked, sourly, "There are those malicious souls for whom Bloom is quite enough himself without there being even more of him." Bloom hit back with childish venom: "The wretched Eagleton - the man cannot read or write. He is nothing but a pom-pom. He is wretched, he is not even to be pitied. He is to be held in total contempt."
Bloom is now in failing health, but his influence and power have never been greater. He towers over the critical brotherhood of America, a Rabelaisian fighter for the primacy of the creative imagination in a world of postmodernist theorising. But perhaps what traumatised Naomi Wolf 20 years ago was neither his grandeur nor his physical grossness, but his flattery. For Bloom was a critic who became the Pope and Recording Angel of academe, the one man qualified to adjudicate on literary greatness.
Naomi invited him round to discuss her poetry. And what did he breathe in her ear? "You have the aura of election upon you" - you could, in other words, be It. You could be one of the chosen, the elect. It was the most exciting compliment a young writer could possibly hear. Then he made a pass at her, which was rejected. Can it be that she has spent 20 years hating him for not meaning what he said?
A Life in Brief
Born: 11 July 1930 in New York City, to William Bloom, a tailor, and Paula Levy.
Family: Married to Jeanne Gould, 1958. Two sons.
Education: Cornell and Yale Universities.
Career: Yale University from 1955: Professor of English, 1965-77; Sterling Professor of Humanities from 1983. Berg Professor of English, New York University from 1988.
Books: Include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1999), The Western Canon (1994), The Anxiety of Influence (1973).
He says...: "One glories in the name of elitist. If elitism means that Shakespeare is of an entirely different order than a pair of old boots, then I am an elitist. What else is there to be?"
They say...: "His shambling, campy, endearing performance as a cultural dinosaur, a man who knows history is against him." - Blake Morrison