The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

By Harold Bloom

(Yale University Press, 357 pp., $32.50)

With The Anatomy of Influence, Harold Bloom has promised us his “swan song” as a critic. Fat chance. After some thirty original books and hundreds of edited volumes; after more than fifty years of brilliance, boldness, bombast, bathos, and bullshit; after Shelley, Blake, Yeats, and Stevens; anxiety, misreading, repression, and revision; Orphism, gnosis, Lucretius, and the Kabbalah; Shakespeare, genius, the canon, and the Book of J; after evidence of a logorrhea so Niagaran even death will be hard-put to shut it off, there is little possibility that Bloom has given us his “final reflection upon the influence process”—which in Bloomspeak means his final reflection full stop, since everything he writes is wrapped around that fixed idea. The Anatomy of Influence is not only not his last book, it’s not even his last one this year. Already in September came an appreciation of the King James Bible, billed, inevitably, as the book that Bloom had been writing “all my long life” (or at least since his agents noticed that 2011 marks the translation’s four-hundredth anniversary). “The culmination of a life’s work”: is that the last one or the latest one? Neither: it’s the one he published thirteen years ago. The Harold Bloom Show, we can rest assured, is good for many seasons yet.

Before we get into this any further, I should mention that Bloom and I were once employed by the same academic department. I hasten to add, lest there be a question of bias, that my decade at Yale left me feeling little toward him one way or the other. I never even met the man. Having fulfilled the dream of academics everywhere by renouncing as many obligations toward his home department as practicably possible—meetings, committee assignments, duties in the graduate program, every responsibility except undergraduate teaching—Bloom had long since become, as he likes to put it, “a department of one.” I think I only saw him about three times.

Which is not to say he wasn’t sometimes on my mind. At a certain point during my sojourn at the institution, I started to develop the Heart of Darkness theory of the Yale English department. Conrad’s novel is about colonialism and racism and the shadowed reaches of the human heart, but it is also a dissection of bureaucracy. My first clue came when I realized that my chairman was a perfect double for the manager of the Central Station, that creepy functionary who has “no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even,” who “could keep the routine going—that’s all.” But what clinched it was the recognition of the role that Bloom played in the paradigm. Bloom was Mr. Kurtz. (Marlow, broken by his African ordeal, was any number of my senior colleagues, their souls crushed by the tenure process. The “pilgrims”—that pack of hopeful fools who set off into the jungle in pursuit of a chimerical fortune—were the graduate students.)

I mean this in the best possible way. Remember that Conrad prefers Kurtz immeasurably to the rest of the Company lot. Bloom, like Kurtz, disturbed the hell out of his colleagues, all the people who were trying to clamber up the greasy pole by playing by the rules. Bloom, like Kurtz, ignored the rules and was strong enough to impose his own. Bloom, like Kurtz, was the shadowy genius who had sequestered himself in his private domain and was managing to produce, by methods however “unsound,” more material than all his colleagues put together. (This was after the days of the Chelsea House series of critical collections, when Bloom and his “factory” of full-time assistants and freelance graduate students were cranking out as many as fifteen volumes a month.) Bloom, like Kurtz, was a legend, a rumor, a vaguely malevolent presence (or absence) to be spoken of in awed and envious tones. What was not to like?