How hard it must be to be a polyglot like Harold Bloom in an age as stupid as ours. His enemies hated him because, from their low perspective, he was nothing but a big bully, punching so far down at them that he had to get down on one knee. He was smarter than his harshest critics, but that didn't make him invulnerable to criticism. Polyglots - and Bloom was one of the best - simply cannot be experts at everything. His intellect was imposing and wide-ranging, and he followed it into areas like Talmudic scholarship that were presumably safely hermetic. He claimed, for example, that some of the first books of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, had been composed by a brilliant woman from the highest echelon of royal society. Of course, his claims are are entirely speculative and ultimately unprovable. Similarly, Samuel Butler claimed that Homer's Odyssey had been written by a woman.
Bloom's close textual analysis was best applied to literature, and it was as a literary scholar and critic that Bloom made his greatest impact. He only came up with such a short list of 26 literary works that he regarded as essential to any Western canon off the top of his head to satisfy his editor. It was a mistake that trivializes every great book on the list and further marginalizes all the ones he left out. But Bloom knew that it was a terrific conversation starter. As cranky as he seems in some of his interviews, I am not alone in noticing how he sometimes resembled Zero Mostel.
He lived through, fighting all the way, the steady decline of what is now known (mostly with contempt) as High Culture, i.e., not just the culture itself and its standards, but our understanding of what it is and of what it consists. Harold Bloom acknowledged that there are sometimes dramatic shifts in taste. But he held firm to his conviction that our culture's bedrock is made up of solid blocks of creative achievement that haven't shifted in centuries and that they are unmoved by modern political fashions. George Orwell saw the beginnings of a movement that tried to marginalize literary work that was at variance with certain contemporary radical tastes. Orwell saw the importance of aesthetic standards, whereby a literary work cannot be considered good one day and bad the next. But he also insisted on praising good work that presented a worldview or a political agenda that was markedly different from one's own. However, Orwell would've called Bloom's insistence on a strict avoidance of political partisanship as just another political position.
It wasn't that Bloom lived too long - though it may have looked that way to him. He went down fighting, which explains the coolness of so many of the eulogies. It has been sad, but also a little funny, to watch how so many of the people who wrote notices of his passing had to stand on their own necks trying not to seem to praise him. I can't see how not praising him is possible. He hurt people's feelings, people who were trying to forge new standards by smelting all the old ones. Some of them were so cheapjack that they didn't survive a single generation. But I doubt that Bloom took much satisfaction from watching them fall by the wayside. He called out the ignorance he saw all around him because no one else would. He didn't have to alert some of us about the poverty of popular fiction, but he would never have taken up the subject if some intellectuals who should've known better hadn't gone slumming. He only punctured overblown reputations because he wanted, above all, to be clear about what was good in the midst of everything that was plain bad.
Is it even possible for a wise old man to not come across to some as patronizing? I think that our feverish fidgeting for total equality may not have much room for teachers - people who know more than we do and who are appointed, even if only by nature, to help us up to their knowledge. The erosion of literature has a strong American streak of anti-intellectualism. Bloom deposited entire libraries in his own head and was free with the expression of his knowledge, solicited or otherwise. He was opinionated and he held firm to his opinions. Someone I knew in the Army paid me what I took to be a backhanded compliment - he told me that I had probably forgotten more than he'd ever know. Harold Bloom probably held in his memory, to the last, more than the rest of us will ever forget.
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