Podcast • July 5, 2011

Harold Bloom: On the Playing Field of Poetry

Harold Bloom, in conversation about his famous Anxiety of Influence, slips so comfortably into baseball and jazz metaphors (“tropes,” in the lingo) that I’m wondering if it’s time for the wall chart version of his ...

Harold Bloom, in conversation about his famous Anxiety of Influence, slips so comfortably into baseball and jazz metaphors (“tropes,” in the lingo) that I’m wondering if it’s time for the wall chart version of his literary argument — something like David Marriott’s Periodic Table of Jazz Pianists. Or perhaps an interactive game, or Wiki, drawing on a poetic equivalent of Bill James‘ reinvention of baseball statistics. “A Sabremetrics of literature, you mean?” quoth Bloom. Yes, poetry’s answer to fantasy baseball, I say, with players named Shelley, Keats, Dickinson and Ashberry.

How different, I’m asking him, was Mickey Mantle’s relation in the Yankees’ centerfield to the myth of Joe DiMaggio on the same turf (or Johnny Damon’s relation more recently to the memory of Mickey Mantle) from the creative tension between American poets Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) and Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)? “No different,” judges Professor Bloom. Or Paul Gonsalves sitting in Ben Webster’s tenor saxophone chair in the Ellington band in the 1950s? “Absolutely no different.” Or Adele, the contemporary young British songstress with the Ella Fitzgerald intonation?

Influence, as the Sage of New Haven expounds it again in The Anatomy of Influence, is a process that begins in love and extends itself in a certain amount of narcissism and robust self-investment. It describes part of Milton’s link to Shakespeare, Nabokov’s to James Joyce, Charlie Parker’s to Johnny Hodges and Louis Armstrong, and Carl Yastrzemski’s to Ted Williams.

I am confessing that I preferred the original title for the new book: The Living Labyrinth, because it so elegantly represented not literature so much as the surging search-engine of Bloom’s overstocked head. Influence anxiety, as he likes to say, exists not between the artists but between their poems endlessly bumping into each other in readers’ memories, none vaster than his own. “Let’s face it, Harold,” I had said to him most of two years ago, “the living labyrinth is you!” He answered with a long laugh, and then: “A nice trope, my boy.”

There are more flashes of autobiography than usual in this our umpteenth conversation, on the eve of Bloom’s 81st birthday. It touches me somehow that baseball keeps popping up as a sort of alternative home of the Bloomian imagination. He’s remembering the Bronx in the summer of 1936 when Bloom’s uncle, “the splendid Sam Kaplan,” took the 6-year-old boy to Yankee Stadium, and the rookie Joseph Paul DiMaggio streaked like a gazelle onto the Bloom horizon. The inspiration is not forgotten. Bloom loves (who doesn’t?) the famous DiMaggio line when asked why he’d nearly killed himself chasing down a fly ball in a game that had already been decided: “because there might be a kid in those stands who hasn’t seen me play before.” Bloom will teach another ten years at Yale, he hopes — till he’s carried out, in any event; and he still takes speaking gigs at the New York Public Library, he explains, because there might be someone in New York “who has never seen Bloom talk before.”

I call the first section of this book literary love. I think that in order for later poets to be profoundly influenced by earlier poets, they have to begin by falling in love with the poems. But of course, like love of all kinds, if you’re fiercely enough in love, it carries its ambivalences. And those ambivalences constitute part of the phenomenon I call the anxiety of influence.

When I call the subtitle of this “Literature as a Way of Life,” I mean that. I think that there are people who love religion. I don’t. There are people who love history, I hate history. I agree with James Joyce that it’s a nightmare from which we should try to awake but we can’t. There are people who love science or philosophy. I don’t.

I think we are in a society now, for more than a century, and it will go on this way, I fear, where all our cognitive modes have failed us. My late friend Richard Rorty once said to me, “You know Harold, when the cognitive modes — philosophy, science, religion, history — fail a society, then willy-nilly, whether it wants to or not, it becomes a literary culture.” And I said, “Yes, Dick, and I’m not so sure this is good for literature, or good for society.” But I think this is what has happened.

Even now in the digital age, though we call it by different names and we adulterate the phenomenon, we live in a literary culture.

Harold Bloom with Chris Lydon in New Haven, June 2011.

Podcast • November 3, 2008

Thank you, Studs Terkel!

  Studs Terkel was the pioneering and now immortal celebrant of recorded sound, of inspired vernacular gab, of “that fabulous instrument,” as he called it, “Vox Humana.” Yes, he was a great listener, as the ...

 

Studs Terkel was the pioneering and now immortal celebrant of recorded sound, of inspired vernacular gab, of “that fabulous instrument,” as he called it, “Vox Humana.”

Yes, he was a great listener, as the obits said. But how that man loved to talk! In anecdotes, sermons and rants…

Our last encounter was three autumns ago, on a program marking the 150th anniversary of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Studs, at 93, was the second-oldest guy on the show; Stanley Kunitz was 100. We knew we were hearing the great poets of America, Studs among them:

We can learn from Whitman today that every human being is important… That the Iraqi War is obscene. Not just bad for America, it’s obscene. It would be obscene to Walt Whitman. What is the most nasty word you can think of? Obscene! It’s mindless, arrogant, the opposite of Whitman, who embraced the world.

He celebrates the non-celebrated… our appreciation of life itself… now, here, this place, this moment. You can talk of the hereafter all you want. But this moment, now, what you do, how you act, whom you hurt, or help, or don’t hurt, or don’t help. Of myself I sing. He embraces the world, you see? Of course I’d use profanity, where he’s a poet. He’s always pertinent and relevant, probably today moreso than ever. He’s embracing the world instead of ‘Bring ’em on!’ We speak of the neo-cons and neo-libs… They’re Neo-Neandertals at work. They are, you know… Our children’s children’s children will be like our fathers’ fathers’ fathers: they’ll be in caves. No more civilization as we know it. We are the most feared nation in the world. Whitman saw us as the most beloved nation in the world. If the worst comes to the worst, we can bomb the shit out of the world and destroy it, but we can be destroyed in the process, too — all of us, and our quote-unquote ‘enemies,’ who are everywhere. ‘Enemies’ are people who are not us, and it’s precisely the opposite of Whitman. Those others are us, is what Whitman is saying.

Imagine, then, a nightmare that is anti-Whitman, if the world blows up. Our children’s children’s children will come out of caves… with club in hand. And they’ll see this darkness, and they’ll be scared… From that tribal memory will emerge certain words: Sh.. Sh.. Shakespeare! Wha’ dat? O… O… Ode to a Grecian Urn. Wha? Leaves of Grass… Where? Who?

Whitman is the opposite of all that. He’s saying: it’s grand — the grandness of everyday life, of breathing, living, doing, the grandness of the ordinary things, and of work, and of pride in it, all that is there. So I especially am enamored of Whitman.

Studs Terkel on Open Soruce, celebrating “Walt Whitman, a Talk-Show Guy,” September 1, 2005

There’s a treasury of brilliant Studs Terkel on the Transom site. Don’t miss it.