Harold Bloom’s ‘Shakespeare’s Personalities’ and ‘Possessed by Memory’: Late in life, amid beloved poetry

Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air

By Harold Bloom

Scribner. 160 pp. $24

Falstaff: Give Me Life

By Harold Bloom

Scribner. 176 pp. $23

Iago: The Strategies of Evil

By Harold Bloom

Scribner. 160 pp. $24

Lear: The Great Image of Authority

By Harold Bloom

Scribner. 176 pp. $24

Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind

By Harold Bloom

Scribner. 160 pp. $24

Possessed by Memory

The Inward Light of Criticism

By Harold Bloom

Knopf. 544 pp. $35

The American Canon

Literary Genius from Emerson to Le Guin

By Harold Bloom

Library of America. 500 pp. $32 [Publication date: Oct. 15, 2019]

Reviewed by John Timpane

We’re in the midst of a Harold Bloom explosion. So many are the titles there’s hardly room to say anything, but the wave, about a year old and now cresting, is worthy of wonder. There’s even a book I can’t say much about, The American Canon, still three months away, gathering his writings about a cavalcade of U.S. writers. (I’ve peeked; it’s good.)

Bloom, who turns 89 on July 11, has had a glittering academic career, mostly at Yale, where he began as a faculty member in 1955. He has been famously cranky, pitting “strong” writers against less “strong” in metaphoric literary slugfests; that business seems a little beside the point as of 2019, as do his tableaux of writers sweatily seeking and always failing to kill their perceived fathers, indeed of any other writer. Bloom has had his blind spots (his insistence on the badness of Poe, for example), his irritating tics (treating Shakespeare as though he were a mid-1950s Northeast Corridor existentialist), and his enthusiasms (the word gnostic, sprayed like shotcrete all over literary history).

But good for him. The books before us stress what has always been there, if sometimes obscured by controversy or cantankerousness: his beautiful writing and sympathetic heart.

I am glad to report that professional tendentiousness is pretty much to the side in the five volumes of his “Shakespeare’s Personalities” series. Instead, they are full of love for Shakespeare and speak frequently of love, what Shakespeare loves, how his characters do or don’t make us love them (Falstaff does, Macbeth can’t, Cleopatra, well, Cleopatra … and Lear strikes us as unlovable until he endures heartbreaking suffering), and what Bloom himself loves. These five books and his Possessed by Memory are full of humane humanism at its best. Also on display are Bloom’s prodigious knowledge and memory; few critics are as authoritative on these counts.

Limpidly written, the “Shakespeare’s Personalities” books would be ideal for many advanced high school classes or college/university courses. Iago is so insightful, such a remarkable strategist, that we fear we don’t stand a chance against evil. Othello surely doesn’t. Macbeth is shut up in his “private apocalypse,” away from us, and though much about him inspires awe, we behold but cannot touch. Lear combines elements of king, god, and father, each evoked by his fearsome tragedy. Here Bloom injects himself: "I write the final sentences of this book, wondering if all of us, like Lear, should cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools.”

Falstaff is the greatest category-busting life force in literature, we’re told. The most mortal of mortals, he nevertheless conveys a merry sense of indestructibility: You can feel the smile on Bloom’s face at the life-celebration in this fat, decayed, somehow glorious knight. Yet within Shakespeare’s work, even this great comic character acts out a tragedy, one that draws from Bloom an echo of Acts: “Falstaff goes down so that Hamlet and his successors could live and move and enjoy their being.”

Each of these volumes makes us feel the ultimate elusiveness of these towering creations. You can know every word, as Bloom does, and not exhaust them. The Cleopatra book is different. Irresistible, witty, desirable and desiring, Cleopatra is elusiveness itself. Shakespeare invests plenty of ambivalence about female sexuality in her — and yet she draws us in and keeps us, down to her magnificent suicide, over which Bloom hovers lovingly.

Possessed by Memory purports to be a series of essays on poems and passages Bloom has memorized. He’s earned the right to be his own subject sometimes, and so he is here. Amid much else, this book is intent on old age. Constantly, Bloom returns to winter thoughts. “I lose old friends every month or so now,” he writes at the end of a chapter on Swinburne. “Consolation is difficult to find, but elegiac poetry helps.” Elsewhere, he echoes Browning: “I brood on women I loved who have departed forever and recall how beautifully they were attired on a particular day and the glory of their tresses. I too feel chilly and grown old.”

Yet much of Possessed is elevating. Among his beloved literature, Bloom feels redeemed and enlivened. Whether the focus falls on Milton or on A.R. Ammons (whom he rightly celebrates), you feel the pulse of life, what poetry can bring to us if we let it. He’s wonderful on Whitman (the section titled “The Imperfect Is Our Paradise” is a high point), although, as he usually does with mystically minded poets, Bloom pulls against what’s in the text. But then, he has always done this and always will. What’s spectacular is his sensitivity, always, his readiness to be delighted. On those two counts alone, he is a model for any critic.