Reading for life
Harold Bloom celebrated his 10th birthday, in July 1940, with a first reading of the formidable poet Hart Crane. That precocious 10-year-old, perhaps unsurprisingly, went on to become one of the dominant literary scholars of his time and the author of books on Shakespeare, Shelley, Wallace Stevens, “The American Religion” and “The Anxiety of Influence,” among many others.
In his latest volume, “The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime,” Bloom, 84, returns once again to Crane: “Today I commence writing what will have to be farewell to my personal favorite among all poets, ancient and modern.” With that, he launches into 60-plus pages of energetic and comprehensive tribute to the “fiercely subtle” Crane that brings the book to a close.
At once valedictory and oracular, expansive and confessional, “The Daemon Knows” is an eccentrically compelling work. Rooted in the author’s deep knowledge of the Western canon and buttressed by abundant quotations from the works under discussion, it sets out to explore its oscillating themes through six pairings of American writers: Melville and Whitman, Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Hawthorne and Henry James, Twain and Frost, Stevens and T.S. Eliot, Faulkner and Crane. In its voice and temperament, authority and occasional thickets, this study could only have been written by Bloom.
Some of his dyads are more illuminating than others. Melville and Whitman, in the long opening section, bask in each other’s ecstatic, incantatory light. Several other connections, as the author acknowl- edges, are more or less arbitrary. Of Frost and Twin, he writes, “Their only common element was the common reader, who found in them what could suffice.” Faulkner, whom Bloom dispatches with appreciations of “As I Lay Dying,” “Light in August” and “Sanctuary,” registers as a something of perfunctory preamble to the fervent section on Crane.
More scaffold than structure, the pairings support Bloom’s wide-ranging spec- ulations on these dozen writers’ “incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” The “daemon” of the book’s title is a mythic, shape-shifting concept of the poets and prose writers’ dark materials and motivic forces, the primal grains of sand that are somehow transmuted into art.
For Melville it was the Joblike patience of “Moby-Dick’s” Ahab that yielded “a wicked book, the American marriage of heaven and hell.” Whitman and Crane were both driven by turbulent homosexuality. (Bloom argues that Whitman’s carnal life was “intransitive” and never fulfilled with another man, a view he concedes is controversial.) For James and Eliot, both of whom spent great portions of their lives in England, America itself was the daemon. In Dickinson, Bloom finds a “radical nihilist” whose “truth is annihilation.”
Much as the creation of great literature is seen as an almost mystically transformative act, so, for Bloom, is reading. Through the textual readings, professorial pronouncements and academic arguments with colleagues past and present, a kind of autobiography of the mind emerges. Referencing Oscar Wilde on the subject, Bloom writes that “true criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.”
At various junctures, in seemingly spontaneous moments, Bloom creates a selfportrait of an intense child who “tended to need more affection from my parents and sisters than they could ever sustain,” a devoted husband and teacher, a man who turned to Freud and then away from him when a “middle-of-the-journey” crisis arrived in his mid-30s and an octogenarian pained by the deaths of old friends.
Many of the pleasures to be had from “The Daemon Knows” come in the rich weave of associations and connections, both literary and person- al, the author fashions. Shakespeare and Stevens seem as present to him as his Yale students, whose views he often cites, or his friend and fellow critic Angus Fletcher. While he admits to a certain narrowing and fixity of vision in old age, he also has the depth of field to deplore the anti-Semitism of Eliot’s criticism while praising the “vividness” of his best poems.
Bloom is wonderfully alive to the “great rank graveyard growths” of Whitman’s great poems and “the American heretical scripture” of “MobyDick.” He finds both connection and contrasts between feminine might of “The Scarlet Letter’s” Hester Prynne and the “beautiful evasiveness” James used for Isabel Archer in “The Portrait of a Lady.” Bloom makes an intriguing issue of writers’ marital contentment and offers passing but provocative observations on Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Tony Kushner and other contemporary writers.
There is, to be sure, some heavy sledding. Passages like this one seem determined to put off the fainthearted: “Shamanistic praxis frequently involves metempsychosis, which in American literary terms manifests as a transformation of precursors into agnostic versions of the authorial self.”
Patience and an acceptance of repetition and the long quoted extracts are rewarded. Bloom’s wide range and attentive self-knowledge at 84 keep delivering fresh insights and wisdom. “The Daemon Knows” doesn’t only reanimate a reader’s appreciation of these American classics. It reminds us how literature can summon us to become our own better selves.