Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  After Moe finished presenting Kor applauded and said they were tabling on the absence of table the DCent for later. For now Moe had to focus on this thing called a Sapp.

  Rather, he had to turn it into a STrapp. To make it searchcapable. That was the agenda in its entirety. In this, Kor was the decider.

  Moe was speechless initially.

  The rationale was revenue, Keiner said. An outcampus server could wait, but a tetrating storage device could not. It was y2K sensitive. And y2K was sensitive.

  Waiting, Dustin said, is what servers do.

  The decision, not as like the commissioned product, made itself.

  Moe yelled in Hindi, and if you recall your Mahabharata or Ramayana, how the bowstring is said to snap and the arrow is said to wail through the air as like the god Rama slays the king of the monkeys, that was the yell with which Moe fled the meeting.

  Joshua Cohen has taught us how to distinguish between Moe and Kor, yet the fun of this transcends the distinction. The novelist’s accumulative ear has absorbed the soul-killing jargon of how we live now. Where are the poems of our climate? Where is Emersonian freedom? Why did Walt Whitman sing and chant the things that are part of him, the worlds that were and will be, death and day? Is this all that is left of the Oral Tradition? Is Silicon Valley the Valley of the Shadow of Death?

  AFTERWORD

  The Changeling

  IN LAST NIGHT’S DREAM, I sat alone at a long table. There was no one else in the room, but a voice rather harshly kept questioning me.

  Do you believe in the resurrection of the dead?

  I wondered which part of the “you” ought to reply. As a child I was an Orthodox Ashkenazi Jew raised by an intensely religious mother and a father indifferent to such “foolishness.” My four older siblings remained Orthodox, but by the age of fourteen I venerated Elisha ben Abuya, who was regarded as a villain by the men who taught me Talmud:

  The oldest and most striking reference to the views of Elisha is found in the following baraita (Ḥag. 14b; Yer. ii. 1):

  “Four [sages] entered paradise—Ben ‘Azzai, Ben Zoma, Aḥer, and Akiba. Ben ‘Azzai looked and died; Ben Zoma went mad; Aḥer destroyed the plants; Akiba alone came out unhurt.”

  (The Four Who Entered Paradise)

  There can be no doubt that the journey of the “four” to paradise, like the ascension of Enoch (in the pre-Christian books of Enoch) and of so many other pious men, is to be taken literally and not allegorically. This conception of the baraita is supported by the use of the phrase (“entered paradise”), since נכנס לג״ע (“entered the Garden of Eden” = paradise) was a common expression (Derek Ereẓ Zuṭa i.; Ab. R. N. xxv.). It means that Elisha, like Paul, in a moment of ecstasy beheld the interior of heaven—in the former’s case, however, with the effect that he destroyed the plants of the heavenly garden.

  I have quoted this from The Jewish Encyclopedia, which is careful not to endorse any single judgment of Elisha ben Abuya. Aḥer means “the Other” or “the Stranger,” one of the minim or Gnostic heretics. He was slandered by the disciples of Rabbi Akiva, who denounced him, quite falsely, as a Roman collaborator. His true offense was that in a vision he entered the Heavenly Court and found two Gods sitting on thrones, Yahweh and Metatron, an angel who had been Enoch:

  And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

  (Genesis 5:24, KJV)

  Even as a boy I admired Aḥer for the way in which he had “torn up the young shoots,” an endeavor I have followed in my two-thirds of a century as a teacher.

  Like Elisha ben Abuya, I believe in what became a Kabbalist version of the resurrection of the dead. Those of us who have failed to realize all of our potential will be reborn in others who will try to do better. Who among us has become everything she or he ought to have been?

  When you are dying you will recite Shakespeare and the other poets you have loved best: Milton, Blake, Shelley, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and many more. Why at eighty-eight are you writing a book about novels to reread ere you vanish?

  As a child, I read novels and short stories incessantly but in a very different spirit from reading poetry or drama. What early sophistication I had went into the apprehension of poetry. I was and remain a naïve reader of prose fiction. At ten or so, I fell in love with Marty South in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders. When she cuts off her long and beautiful hair, I was moved to tears. When I read The Return of the Native, I was captivated by Eustacia Vye, Thomas Hardy’s Queen of the Night. In that way, I have scarcely changed in extreme old age.

  My closest friends have all died. I desperately need new ones. My students are remarkable people but very young. Ursula Le Guin, to whom this book is dedicated, became a dear friend without our ever meeting, since we exchanged a multitude of e-mails in the last two months of her life. But she, too, is gone. I go back to reread novels to find old friends still living and to make new ones.

  Is that not merely another illusion? When Charles Dickens died at fifty-eight, do you think in his final stroke he somehow felt the presence of all the people he had created?

  Peter Ackroyd, in his marvelous biography, charms me with that surmise. But, then, Ackroyd is himself a good novelist. I have always believed in Vico’s adage: “You only know what you yourself have made.” I cannot know Wallace Stevens’s “The Course of a Particular” as its creator knew it, and I will never know Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend as Dickens must have known it, from the inside out. As a teacher of Shakespeare and the poets, I endeavor to get as far inside King Lear or The Auroras of Autumn as I can, yet I cannot get as far inward as I desire. With prose fiction, my hope is more modest. Never fond of plot or of social history, I attempt to place myself within the characters, a vain drive yet for me inescapable.

  When I was a Cornell freshman, I walked out of Vladimir Nabokov’s initial lecture in a course on the European novel. At that time, I had read only The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), which had just come out in English. My adviser M. H. Abrams, a permanent influence on my life and work, was a friend of Nabokov and urged me to take the course. I recall that Nabokov began by unfavorably comparing Gogol and Jane Austen. He added that women just could not write. At seventeen, I was brash enough to walk out. This was observed by Nabokov and by his wife, Vera. That evening, I received a phone call from Mrs. Nabokov, inviting me to tea at their house at 957 East State Street, Ithaca, the next afternoon and gently telling me that her husband was displeased and intended to destroy me in a chess match after tea.

  I was only an amateur chess player and knew Nabokov’s reputation as a composer of chess problems. In some terror, I went over to the Cornell library and took out José Capablanca’s Chess Fundamentals. Relying on memory, I ingested five or six sample games. After tea the next afternoon, which was outdoors on a balmy September day, during which Nabokov did not speak at all, Mrs. Nabokov cleared everything away and the novelist led me over to a very ornate and large chessboard, placed in the shade of a tree. I had never seen such beautiful chessmen, and I was awed. Silently, Nabokov graciously indicated I had the first move, and I commenced one of Capablanca’s favorite games. I held my host off for about eight moves, during which he looked perplexed. Suddenly his face cleared and he cried out, “You young rascal, you have memorized Capablanca!” With great relish he said, “Now I will destroy you in just four moves.” He did exactly that. Without a word, he walked back into his house. I walked home.

  In later years, I edited two volumes of essays on Nabokov, which I do not remember at all. I had a mixed reaction to Lolita but greatly enjoyed Pale Fire and one short story called “The Vane Sisters.” Sometimes I still find him unreadable. His preciosity, linguistic exhibitionism, vanity shine through everywhere. Nabokov had a passion for Gogol, which I share, but Gogol’s authentic daemonism could only be parodied by the author
of Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). One of my closest friends, who had been my tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Matthew J. C. Hodgart (1916–96), wrote a sparkling essay on Ada in The New York Review of Books. In 1967–68, we and our families spent a year together at the Cornell Society for the Humanities. Matthew gave me his review copy, and I read it with considerable discomfort. We argued the book, but Matthew, while granting excesses, was delighted by its ingenuity and mad allusiveness. Himself an enthusiastic scholar of Finnegans Wake, which I tried to be in his wake, Hodgart yielded to Nabokov’s disciplined outrageousness.

  W. G. Sebald cultivated Nabokov amid his other creative obsessions. All through The Emigrants, the figure of Nabokov flits with a butterfly net, endearingly bestowing a touch of cheer to the four dismal narratives. Speak, Memory (1951), Nabokov’s memoir, fuses with Ada, or Ardor, in Sebald’s capacious reflections.

  Throughout my teaching career, I have suggested to my students that a literary work can be an aesthetic triumph and yet not very likable. Sebald is a writer likable in every way, even when he saddens me. I cannot abide Nabokov. That is a judgment upon me and not on him. I would have thought that no one of sensibility could dislike Jane Austen, but my hero Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed her in his journal from 1861:

  I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow….All that interests in any character [is this]: has he (or she) the money to marry with…?…Suicide is more respectable.

  Emerson did not much like novels: in his journal from 1842, he dismissed those by his walking companion Nathaniel Hawthorne:

  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact, because his writing is not good for anything, and this is a tribute to the man.

  It should never be forgotten that Emerson, in an extraordinary act of immediate critical perception, received in the mail from Walt Whitman the first Leaves of Grass (1855) and responded magnificently:

  DEAR SIR—

  I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “LEAVES OF GRASS.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in the temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean.

  I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

  I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

  I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

  R. W. EMERSON.

  I love Walt Whitman with a passion beyond bounds, and yet I wonder how I would have reacted to a first reading of Leaves of Grass. When I reread, teach, write about Shakespeare or Milton, I build, sometimes involuntarily, on immense traditions of commentary. To read is to encounter ghosts of all the forerunners in literature or life. Almost every night I dream about departed friends, sometimes mixing them up with fictive characters.

  A few nights ago, on the eve of my eighty-eighth birthday, I dreamed about changelings. In my friend John Crowley’s Little, Big, the fairies kidnap Lilac, Sophie’s daughter, and carry the child off to Mrs. Underhill, the grande dame of the faerie folk. A false Lilac replaces the human child, and in time it explodes. I cannot recall ever dreaming about John Crowley, but I do about some of his characters, like Lilac, Mrs. Underhill, and Grandfather Trout. As I was writing these sentences, a charmingly wild young man burst in, and we discoursed about Jarry’s ’Pataphysics, or the science of imaginary solutions. I was introduced to Jarry by my friend Roger Shattuck, who charmed me by uttering Jarry’s credo: “ ’Pataphysics is a science which we have only just invented and for which there is a crying need.” The young man had attended classes by me about a decade ago, one on The Tempest and the other on Hart Crane. He wanted to talk about my ancient treatise The Anxiety of Influence (1973), which I intended as a contribution to ’Pataphysics and, if possible, to the tradition of Jewish antithetical vitalism that goes back to Tanakh and its exegetes. I was glad to listen to him, because I have not looked at the book for some decades and fear I would no longer totally agree with it.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harold Bloom lived in New Haven and was a Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. Before that, he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than forty books include Possessed by Memory, The Anxiety of Influence, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The American Religion, and The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime. He was a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, the Catalonia International Prize, and Mexico’s Alfonso Reyes International Prize. He lived in New Haven until his death on October 14, 2019, at the age of eighty-nine.

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