On Harold Bloom Poetry, Psyche, God, Mortality David Rosenberg The abundant ironies and critiques of literary fashion that enrich the unique writing style of Harold Bloom are glossed over by Zachary Leader in a recent Times Literary Supplement review of a suddenly posthumous book. The occasion is Bloom’s ‘last book’ at age eighty-nine  – though Bloom attested to a multitude of last books, starting at seventy-four, with his premonitions of health problems and mortality that were typical for his age. Of these last books, The American Canon, thoughtfully edited by David Mikics, is probably not the best. Yet it shouldn’t take long before Bloom’s historical competition rises into view; Leopardi, Samuel Johnson and the literary Freud among them.

In his review, Leader glosses over the substantive Bloomian texts which the title of the posthumous book encodes: The American Religion (1992) and The Western Canon (1995).  Bloom himself, in this last ‘last book’, laments the lack of literary attention to the former, and the scarce consideration of the spiritual dimension to the latter. Both dimensions are first addressed in unison in The Book of J (1990), though the seeds were planted in Bloom’s early studies of Milton, Blake and Yeats.

Leader writes that Bloom’s ‘appetite for words, coupled with a prodigious memory, lucrative book deals and his own eventual enthronement in the critical canon, made Bloom a central literary figure for the age’. This sounds generous at first, but look more closely: Bloom’s critical acumen, built upon a complex aesthetic of psychological as well as historical perspective, is hardly recognized by an ‘appetite for words’. His ‘lucrative book deals’ were the result of a startling transformation of ... read more

Vahni Capildeo I. Words, take wing
Words, take wing, fly commonly among all people
who have power of health and employment over us;
go like the sparrows rife on summer streets of a holy
island; unlearn any fear; flitting, bring to mind
light, and how quickly light fades; bring to mind life,
comfort in houses, fragile as windows onto space.
Words, take wing, as if lawyers were angels, as if death
were a paper doll in a set of identical
paper dolls, an infinite set of paper doll kings
... read more

David Herman Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life (Allen Lane), £30

Susan Sontag always managed to find a ringside seat at the key moments of her time. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, she always seemed to be where the action was. In the late 1950s she was in Paris during the heyday of the new cinema of Godard and Truffaut. She was back in New York in the early 1960s, writing about Happenings, Merce Cunningham and John Cage. In the late Sixties, at the highpoint of the New Left, she travelled to Hanoi and Cuba. In the Seventies she debated Feminism with Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer. In the Reagan years she denounced communism and in the new eighties’ celebrity culture, she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair. During the siege of Sarajevo, she was there directing Waiting for Godot and she responded ... read more