Love and Strife (1965-2005)

by Zachary Leader

  Like Janis, Tarcov and his fellow students at Cornell were drawn to Bloom by his power as a teacher. Tarcov has several objections to Bellow’s portrait of Bloom in Ravelstein, but what he mentions first is its failure to portray Bloom as a teacher. According to Clifford Orwin, an exact contemporary of Tarcov’s at Cornell, and Bloom’s colleague later at Toronto, “In one year at Yale, teaching in Directed Studies where the best undergraduates were to be found, [Bloom] inspired two of them to transfer to Cornell immediately, and another four to resolve to attend graduate school there. These decisions to transfer were made within weeks of the students’ first meetings with Allan.”11 As undergraduates at Cornell, both Orwin and Tarcov won room-and-board scholarships to Telluride House, a residence hall described by Tarcov as “a designated hatchery for intellectuals.” Everyone there, Orwin remembers, was obsessed with Bloom, who had been a faculty resident the previous year. They either “loved or hated him. The two parties therefore fell to warring for the souls of us freshmen. The Bloom question raged unabated, inside the residence and on the campus generally, for my entire four years at Cornell.” For Orwin and his friends, “Allan was the foremost issue of the Sixties, with which all the others were hopelessly entangled.” When Orwin went to Harvard to do a Ph.D., he again found that “a great many people were obsessed with Allan. He remained throughout his life the consuming topic of discussion whenever his acquaintance gathered.”12

  Orwin, like Tarcov and Janis, stresses Bloom’s appeal as a teacher. “His presence…was astonishing”; “If nervous energy was radioactive his casualties would have dwarfed Chernobyl.” (In non-teaching contexts, Bellow captures this intensity in Ravelstein, along with many physical and other eccentricities, as all who knew Bloom, including friends who deplore the novel, agree.) Bloom made his students feel, in Orwin’s words, “that study was something exalted, one of the rarest human privileges….Through knowing him it suddenly became credible that a life devoted to a couple of dozen mostly old books was one of surpassing nobility and joyfulness.” Like his mentor, Leo Strauss, Bloom often structured his courses around single texts (the Republic, The Prince, Gulliver’s Travels, Madame Bovary), each read in its entirety. Mixing explication with jokes and provocative questions, he sought to show how current social, cultural, and political problems “upon examination always proved variants of age-old human problems.” For Bloom, Plato was not only, as Orwin puts it, “speaking to us,” but “had thought more deeply about the problems that most gripped us than we had ever been going to think about them ourselves.”

  Although Bloom is thought of as anti-liberal, when discussing politics, according to Orwin, he “was every bit as hard on ‘conservatism’ as on ‘liberalism.’ ” Orwin believes his reputation as anti-liberal owes something to the fact that “all of his best students began on the Left, even if few remained there.” The related view that Bloom was “elitist” applies in some respects but not others. Although no social snob (“he was committed to liberal education for everybody,” according to Nathan Tarcov), Bloom believed that some people were smarter than others, just as some books were more intelligent or valuable than others. In defending the Great Books tradition in his Harvard speech, he was, he teased, challenging “elite education,” which champions “a new ‘nonelitist,’ ‘nonexclusionary’ curriculum in the humanities and in parts of the social sciences….I have always been a supporter and a beneficiary of the movements toward practical equality.” These words come from the beginning of the speech, which opened with the words “Fellow elitists,” an acknowledged allusion to FDR’s salutation in an address to the Daughters of the American Revolution: “Fellow Immigrants.” Bloom goes on to declare, “Elite is not a word I care for very much—imprecise and smacking of sociological abstraction—but if any American institution of any kind merits it, it is Harvard, and it lends that tincture to everyone associated with it.”13

  The charge of elitism derives in part from Bloom’s association with Strauss’s method of reading and writing, an inheritance from those he wrote about, including Maimonides, Al-Farabi, and Socrates. According to Strauss, the teachings of these figures can be read in two ways: to most readers, what Strauss calls “exoteric” readers, they can be seen as suggesting the compatibility of religion and philosophy; to “esoteric” readers, more attentive readers, a different and truer meaning, dangerous and therefore disguised, suggests the incompatibility not only of philosophy and religion but, in religious societies, of philosophy and the state. This theory of esoteric and exoteric writing is most directly described by Strauss in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952): “Persecution, then, gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing, and therewith to a peculiar type of literature, in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines. That literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.”14 Strauss’s view has been controversial and widely challenged, by classicists, medievalists, and historians of modern thought. Among journalists and political commentators in the period leading up to the Iraq War, it spawned what the political theorist Mark Lilla calls “absurd” rumor and speculation about Straussian “duplicity,” and the influence it had on United States policy. In Lilla’s words, it was claimed that Strauss “never wrote what he thought, that his secret antidemocratic doctrines were passed on to adepts [like Bloom and his students] who subsequently infiltrated government. At its ideological fringes the term ‘cabal’ was occasionally employed, in ignorance (one hopes) of its anti-Semitic connotations.”15

  Like many Straussians, Bloom did not write much, partly because of his devotion to teaching. Much of what he did write grew out of this teaching and was intended to serve it, as in his translations of the Republic and Rousseau’s Émile, with their detailed introductions. The advice he gave to Ph.D. students was to find one great writer and stick to him; over his lifetime, he stuck to four great writers: Plato, Shakespeare, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. Bloom differed from Strauss not only in how little he wrote but in the audience he addressed: Strauss wrote for scholars, Bloom for students, albeit advanced students, and the general public. Like Bellow, but unlike Strauss, Bloom had ambivalent feelings about popular or material culture, about which he knew more than one might suppose from his writings. Nathan Tarcov thinks Bellow and Bloom only selectively acknowledged these feelings. “My view is that both of them sort of took an official policy of contempt for American vulgarity and materialism, and loved American vulgarity and materialism, in different ways.” In The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom writes dismissively of rock music, but at Telluride House, which had only a single hi-fi in the early 1960s, Tarcov remembers being told that “he actually sided with those who liked rock over classical music.”16 Tarcov also remembers “the strong sympathy Bloom had for African Americans, which somehow doesn’t come out in much of the official statements. He really liked the vitality of democratic American life, and so does Saul….They both subscribe to an official position that is more elitist and more anti-American than their real feeling.”

  Not everyone found Bloom compelling. Maggie Staats Simmons thought that he fawned over Bellow, and when, for a moment, it seemed possible that she and Bellow might get together again, in the period between their respective fourth and fifth marriages, she was put off partly by the realization that life with Bellow would mean lots of time with Bloom. To Joseph Epstein, a Shils partisan, Bloom was “pushy,” “forward,” “clownish” (“He looked like Jackie Mason’s agent”). Harriet Wasserman thought he looked “like Milton Berle before a nose job.”17 As Clifford Orwin admits, Bloom “had vices,” and “because his personality was so forceful, these were obtrusive. His nervousness and intensity put people off. He could be abrasive and overbearing, and sometimes argued unfairly. He loved attention, and he insisted on it. He dominated social situations so thoroughly as to drive hostesses to despair.” Epstein recalls Shils saying to Bloom, “Allan, it is true you haven’t read many books,
but you have read twenty-five or thirty books intensely, and they should tell you that it doesn’t matter a shit that Reagan fell a point and a half in the opinion polls.” Shils and Epstein had personal rather than political objections to Bloom; James Redfield, who had little time for Bloom politically, got on well with him personally, liking the very qualities that put others off, “his good energy,” “wild energy.”

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  JANIS, WHO ATTENDED ALL THE SEMINARS taught jointly by Bloom and Bellow, was struck by the easy familiarity between the two men and their shared sense of humor. In addition, they seemed to her to be “learning from each other.” Bloom kept drawing Bellow out about the literary aspects of the works discussed, while Bellow sought from Bloom their philosophical implications or underpinnings. When Nathan Tarcov attended a seminar the two men taught on The Red and the Black, he had a similar impression, though in terms that may help to explain Maggie Staats Simmons’s sense of Bloom as fawning. “One of Allan’s personas was as a kind of talk show host or MC, which was quite different from his charismatic, theatrical persona….My sense is that much but not all of the time he would play that role in the classes with Saul. He would try to get Saul to say things. Saul being Saul, it would sometimes be hard to get Saul to come out and pronounce on things. And there was this weird dynamism, that very often it seemed that Allan wanted to talk about literature, to get Saul to talk about literary questions, and Saul would want to talk about philosophy, to get Allan to talk about philosophical issues.” Bloom once asked Harriet Wasserman if she knew a place where he could stay on Martha’s Vineyard before a summer visit with Bellow in Vermont. “I need to be in shape to spend some time in the Green Mountains with Saul. I want to go and relax, and he wants to talk about Nietzsche, Rousseau, etc. I’ve got to be on my toes the whole time.”18

  Like Shils, whose position as friend and intellectual crony he supplanted, Bloom offered Bellow a theoretical frame for his intuitions, which is not to say he offered him a system. As Leon Kass, a colleague at the Committee, puts it, Bloom “had at his fingertips most of the important human philosophical questions, questions of personal psychology, questions of politics, and he knew what the great arguments were about these things.” Bloom’s sense of these arguments owed much to Strauss. That he was a “Straussian” all agree, though what this means is as much a matter of dispute as the charge of “elitism.” In America, a number of Bloom’s students became involved in Republican and neoconservative politics. For Mark Blitz, one such student, who served as director of the United States Information Agency under Ronald Reagan and is now a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna, “The elements in Strauss that prepared and allowed an affinity with conservatives” were “anti-communism (and not amelioration), the virtue of individual responsibility (and not excessive social welfare), individual rights (and not affirmative action or feminism), market competition (and not excessive regulation or quasi-oligarchy), and educational and artistic excellence (and not ‘politicization’ or self-indulgence).” Strauss was certainly anti-communist and pro-virtue (as well as pro-excellence in education), but as Mark Lilla points out, “There is not a word in his works about such topics as welfare, affirmative action, feminism and the like.”19

  One point of connection between Strauss and his American followers, Bloom included, was historical or experiential rather than theoretical. Strauss had been a student of Heidegger. When, in his Rector’s Address at the University of Freiburg in 1933, Heidegger hailed Hitler and the rise of Nazism, Strauss felt betrayed not only by his mentor but by the German liberals who had capitulated to Nazi threats and intimidation. To Bloom and others, Bellow included, the disturbances at Cornell and other American universities recalled Weimar Germany, with liberal faculty and administrators repeating the mistakes of German liberals. As Bloom puts it: “The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties” (p. 313). James Redfield remembers both Shils and Bellow making similar comparisons at the time of the student uprisings in Chicago.

  Strauss’s most influential book, Natural Right and History (1953), argues against a view of truth as historical or evolutionary, positing instead a tradition of “classical natural right” in which, for example, Socrates and Thomas Aquinas shared not only a sense of the difference between nature and convention but also a conviction that justice is what accords with nature. This conviction is expressed in terms such as “We hold these truths to be self-evident” from the Declaration of Independence (one of two epigraphs to Natural Right and History, the other being from 2 Samuel 12, a parable of “self-evident” injustice). It was Machiavelli who inaugurated the most influential attack on these views, according to Strauss, leading, in Lilla’s summary, “after intermediate stops at Locke’s liberalism and Rousseau’s Romanticism…[to] historicism and nihilism.”20 Lilla quotes from the introduction to Natural Right and History, where, with Heidegger in mind, but also Max Weber, Strauss declares, “The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism, nay, it is identical with nihilism.”21 Within a university context, by which is meant an undergraduate context, it is the Great Books, repositories of natural or universal truths, that are rejected or at least marginalized. Students are drawn away from the actual words of the Great Books to the contexts out of which they grew, as elaborated by historicist and other critics, or the Great Books themselves are replaced by Not-So-Great Books, the sort assigned, according to their Straussian detractors (if not Strauss himself), in black or feminist or other “identity” programs of study.

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  “I DON’T THINK I READ a single work of criticism the whole time I was there,” recalls Janis of her years at the Committee. She read Plato with Nathan Tarcov, Maimonides and Spinoza with Ralph Lerner, Homer with David Grene, and, in the joint seminars of Bloom and Bellow, she read Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Proust, Stendhal, Rousseau, and Joyce. To these were added language courses: French, Greek (“the hardest thing I ever studied”), Russian (“easy compared to the Greek”). Presumably, there were secondary or critical reading lists for these courses (Tarcov’s list of secondary reading for a course on Leo Strauss runs to several pages), but Janis prospered at the Committee without them, gaining a distinction on her fundamentals examination. The texts she chose to be examined on were War and Peace, the Republic, Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, Ulysses, Antigone, and Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War.

  To be a favored student of Bloom’s at the Committee could bring financial as well as intellectual benefits. Nathan Tarcov explains the source of these benefits. In 1983, Bloom found himself seated on an airplane next to Michael S. Joyce, executive vice-president of the Olin Foundation, a conservative philanthropic organization that had been established in 1953 by John M. Olin, president of Olin Industries, a chemical-and-munitions manufacturing business.22 The Olin Foundation had remained largely inactive until 1969, when Olin, at the age of eighty, reacted with outrage to the disturbances at Cornell, his alma mater. Through grants to conservative think tanks, media outlets, law schools, and graduate programs at influential universities, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Duke, Pennsylvania, and the University of Chicago, Olin set out to counter radicalism in all its forms. To prevent any softening of will over time, he directed that the entirety of the foundation’s assets be spent within a generation of his death. Between 1969 and 2005, when the foundation was disbanded (twenty-three years after Olin’s death in 1982), $370 million of its assets had been distributed to conservative projects and venues.

  Michael S. Joyce was impressed with Bloom during their conversation on the airplane, and before parting suggested that he come up with a program that the foundation might fund. Bloom immediately set out to devise such a program, conferring with Nathan Tarcov, now teaching in the University of Chicago’s
Department of Political Science (he did not join the Committee until 1990). Tarcov remembers sitting with Bloom on a bench in the Midway and devising what came to be called the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. The aims of the center, which opened in 1984, are set out on its Web site: “to provide a forum for the reconsideration and analysis of the fundamental principles and current practices of American politics and society, along with a thoughtful examination of classic philosophical, theological, and literary texts.”23 These aims were to be realized in several ways: by developing “scholars and practical men and women who will make a lasting contribution to the future of our society”; by running conferences and lecture series for advanced students and scholars; and by financing publications, some growing out of the center’s conferences, others the work of center faculty, or their allies and influences (among them, Leo Strauss, transcripts of whose classes were word-processed and published by the University of Chicago Press). The Olin Junior Fellows scheme, largely controlled by Bloom and Tarcov, awarded full-tuition grants to graduate students drawn mainly from the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Political Science. Janis Freedman was one of ten Committee students in her year to become Olin Junior Fellows.