Harold Bloom was anything but a policymaker. The popular literary critic earned his renown for his erudition as a self-described \u201cmonster of reading\u201d 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\u2019s Paradise Lost<\/em> and untold volumes of British poetry.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, ed. Heather Cass White, Yale University Press, 248 pp., May 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That erudition is now plentifully on offer in Heather Cass White\u2019s painstakingly edited The Man Who Read Everything<\/em><\/a>. The book compiles Bloom\u2019s 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. Le Guin (2017-2018). In White\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Here on full display is the kaleidoscopically sublime Bloom: vulnerable, tender, playful, grave, insecure, irritated, thrilled, enigmatic, sardonic, sympathetic, sorrowful. To read Bloom\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Yet Bloom\u2019s 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\u2019s many political problems, at home and abroad. But Bloom\u2019s correspondence bears an unmistakable political relevance, one centered on his distinct understanding, and cultivation, of friendship.<\/p>\n The intimacy of friendship, to paraphrase French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (one of Bloom\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n On June 6, 1972, Bloom wrote to John Ashbery, the most influential U.S. poet of his time, that his missive \u201cis a kind of fan letter.\u201d By June 25, 1972, Bloom, in another dispatch to Ashbery, wrote: \u201cI move to first names, as after two weeks of doing little but read Ashbery and write about him, I feel close enough to venture upon friendship (if permitted).\u201d Two days after poetry forged their friendship, Ashbery responded, addressing his letter to \u201cHarold,\u201d and explaining his various literary choices.<\/p>\n Bloom often also used nicknames to cultivate his friendships. These sobriquets showed Bloom\u2019s affection for and bonds with his literary friends, fictional and real, dead or alive. \u201cLike his living friends,\u201d White writes, \u201c\u2018Uncle Archie\u2019 [Ammons], \u2018the noble Ashbery,\u2019 \u2018young [Henri] Cole,\u2019 Bloom\u2019s literary favorites had nicknames. He wrote about \u2018Hamlet,\u2019 but only ever spoke about \u2018Omelet.\u2019 Freud was \u2018Uncle Siggie,\u2019 while Kafka was \u2018Cousin Franz.\u2019 In tribute to Falstaff\u2019s unique greatness Bloom reversed the procedure and nicknamed himself \u2018Bloomstaff.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bloom\u2019s nicknaming habit may seem similar to that of Donald Trump, but the U.S. president deploys nicknames as pure weapons, to dominate, criticize, or insult. By contrast, Bloom uses them to display playful, loving, and grave appreciation of others\u2014and of himself from the perspective of those others. That gives us a model for how to understand our interconnectedness\u2014for how to see the transcendent in our everyday life and our everyday life refracted back into the transcendent.<\/strong><\/p>\n The wellspring of Bloom\u2019s literary politics can, at first glance, appear hard to locate. In a 1963 letter to Jewish American poet Alvin Feinman, whom Bloom met in 1951 as a fellow graduate student, Bloom summarized his approach to literature: \u201cI don\u2019t really believe in truth\u2014not even the truth of the imagination\u2014just in the sound of a voice.\u201d Not social, not political\u2014a<\/em> voice, by which Bloom meant: a commanding, authentic, and often agonized expression of consciousness. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n But, crucially, Bloom\u2019s way of reading literature can be seen as comparable to the way he cared for his literary friends. The German word Stimmung<\/em>, which means mood, atmosphere, or vibe, and has the root Stimme<\/em> (voice), perhaps captures Bloom\u2019s faith. In 1989, Bloom even began to advocate for seeing literature as \u201csacred.\u201d In Ruin the Sacred Truth<\/em>, for example, he suggested that literature had largely taken over the social function of religious belief.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n A pile of books at Bloom\u2019s house in New Haven in 2011. Thomas Iannaccone\/WWD\/Penske Media via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n White\u2019s introductory vignettes for each section devoted to Bloom\u2019s lettered friendships speak to his faith in \u201cthe sound of a voice.\u201d Bloom, we learn, cites Feinman\u2019s poems \u201cwhen unable to sleep.\u201d Does it get more intimate? In summer 1954, Bloom writes to Feinman: \u201cI am scribbling dissertation. \u2026 Am having still worse nightmares, in which you figure. May try sleeping pills.\u201d Bloom, we also discover, was deeply hurt when his idol Northrop Frye dismissed Bloom\u2019s core philosophy about the meaning of literature and its history. On Jan. 16 1969, Bloom admits to Frye that he \u201cunderstand[s] why\u201d Frye does \u201cnot see Poetic Influence as an anxiety or melancholy,\u201d as Bloom does, because of what Frye calls \u201cthe myth of concern.\u201d But the skepticism of his literary-critical hero clearly tore Bloom up.<\/p>\n Bloomstaff and John Hollander, on the other hand, had the mundane and comical habit of calling each other, as White writes, \u201cinnumerable variations on the nickname \u2018Foo Foo.\u2019\u201d Almost every letter of Bloom\u2019s to Hollander (we don\u2019t have Hollander\u2019s half) is addressed to \u201cFoo\u201d and signed by \u201cFoo.\u201d There\u2019s also, again in White\u2019s words, the \u201cintensity of the love between\u201d Bloom and A.R. Ammons. In an October\/November 1969 letter to Ammons, Bloom explains how much he adores Ammons\u2019 poem \u201cBridge,\u201d and that if he \u201chad written it\u2014rather than wasting my spirit (such as it is) in tiring seminars and exegeses we don\u2019t need<\/em>\u2014I would feel blessed.\u201d Bloom\u2019s desire for poetic voice, for literary creation, is palpable.<\/p>\n The voices of the Bloom-Ashbery correspondence are in some ways the most robust; this is maybe because, as White reports, Bloom considered Ashbery \u201cthe greatest American poet of the second half of the twentieth century.\u201d Meanwhile, the exchanges about Gnosticism between James Merrill and Bloom might, for the initiated, reveal esoteric influences. And there is Bloom\u2019s admiration for and unexpected friendship with Henri Cole; we are provided with transcribed voicemails Bloom left for Cole, who shared them with White.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Lastly, we can immerse ourself in Bloom\u2019s late and inspired conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. On Nov. 26, 2017, Bloom, following an injury and two operations, wrote to \u201cMrs. Le Guin\u201d: \u201cI have survived this kind of thing a dozen times over the last fifteen years. I was very moved by your kind note. Most of my close friends in my generation, all poets and critics, are dead.\u201d Le Guin, in her reply, asked: \u201cMay we use first names? I\u2019d like that.\u201d They had become friends in the autumn of their lives. (Although that is not the only way Le Guin stands out: For most of Bloom\u2019s life, his literary champions were men, a bias reflected in Bloom\u2019s letters, their recipients as much as his references.)<\/p>\n One can imagine Bloom, who invested so much in his friendships, was also often affronted. \u201c[W]hat made him singular \u2026 was that he took everything personally,\u201d White observes. But whether extraordinarily maddening and\/or illuminating, Bloom\u2019s responses to criticisms of the writers and characters he loved, as The Man Who Read Everything<\/em> helps show, was most about protecting \u201cthe sound of a voice.\u201d Nonetheless, he always retained a sense of humor about it all. In 2014, I asked him during an interview about the harsh criticism of his work, and he responded that he considered each of his writings \u201cone layer of an onion. There is no center. Just another layer peeled off by another text.\u201d He shrugged and moved on, ever toward a voice and its intertwining with his own.<\/p>\n
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