In his view, Western literature reached its apogee in Shakespeare, and it has been downhill ever since. In his misery, he is magnificent.īloom is a prophet of decline. “But happiness seemed a trivial quality compared to whatever Harold was.” Bloom is not low so much as over the top. “He did not seem happy,” a former student says. Bloom, in his lyric sadness, his grandiloquent fatigue, and his messianic loneliness, is a great soul. And the second is to believe that miserable is a bad thing to be.
One is to suppose that mere history-a change of scene-can alter a spirit. And I think there is in him a lurking sense that when the true messiah comes he will be very like Harold.”īut to think this way is to make two mistakes. “There’s always a pack of people sitting around him to see if any bread or fishes are going to be handed out.
“He’s a wandering Jewish scholar from the first century,” Sir Frank Kermode, the English literary critic, says. One can picture him a feverish poet in nineteenth-century Russia, growing dotty and millennial like the elder Tolstoy. It is so easy, after all, to imagine him gleefully roistering through taverns like his Shakespearean hero, Falstaff, constructing a tottering folly of puns or denouncing Aristotelian aesthetics at some bacchanal in Rome (although the thought of Bloom in tights or a toga is alarming). It is tempting to say that Harold Bloom is a man marooned in the wrong place and time, and that living out his late years in twenty-first-century America is what’s making him miserable.
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