Few people will mourn Harold Bloom who aren't dead already. It's amazing he made it past sixty, and for thirty years his physical appearance morphed into the embodiment of a desiccated, senile aesthetic.
Bloom was his own worst argument. Fifteen years ago he was metoo'd by Naomi Wolf (of all people...), and for the next month, the literary pages of every magazine (if they still exist) will probably fill entire back halves with dozens of other me-too stories about America's most powerful English teacher. He was the pope from which the church seceded - a living embodiment of the apolitical, aesthetic worship. The church had hardly any new saints, and most of the new saints were just modernist updates of the old saints. The profiles by former students who earned his favor were practically hagiographic, but as with all biographies of preacher-saints, they were vague on an essential question: what did he actually teach?
When he was a young man, Bloom clearly had ideas. Everybody who's dipped into literary theory knows The Anxiety of Influence, and the idea is a little ridiculous. Yet as Bloom never tired of saying in one of his many self-contradictions, literary theory is itself ridiculous. No one in their right mind would read the theory behind it when you can experience the work itself.
To be perfectly honest, I own more than a half-dozen of his books, I occasionally dip into them, mostly for suggestions for other books to read, because it's not like I understood much of the content. For a reader who could read thousands of books in his memory, Bloom was a shockingly bad writer.
In every two-sided quarrel, both sides inevitably perceive one another's flaws.
I had a kind of loving contempt for Bloom, but I dread his successors.
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