Harold Bloom (Yale University Press)

The last email I got from Harold came in on October 8 at 4:08 P.M., eight days ago. It said:

Dear Lucas,

I am trying to cut the size of the book. This is the new table of contents.

Love,
Harold

Table of Contents 

Prelude: The Longing for Immortality
Chapter 1: Platonic and Neo-Platonic Immortality
Chapter 2: Esoteric Visions of Immortality: Orphism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah
Chapter 3: The Resurrection of the Body
Chapter 4: Indic and Iranian Redemption
Chapter 5: Redemption in Israel
Chapter 6: Christian Redemption

When I saw him over the summer, in late August, he started to tell me about a new book he wanted to write called Immortality, Resurrection, Redemption: A Study in Speculation. It was to be an exploration of the afterlife in the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman, and Islamic traditions, the way people have imagined and hoped for something more or different once this life ends. It moved me that an eighty-nine-year-old writer and former teacher would spend whatever time was left wrestling with the very thing that would take him.

I left that afternoon and wrote one of the many emails I’ve sent over the years thanking Harold for the time we had spent, then added a note about the book he’d described. And as I was writing the bit about the book, I realized I desperately wanted to publish it, which I then told him. He wrote back a few days later, saying he was open to working together as long as we could illustrate it with artworks that had helped capture the way humans have imagined the afterlife. I immediately agreed. Read More

Harold Bloom.(photo: Nancy Crampton)

Harold Bloom, one of the most popular and controversial critics in American literature, died Monday at age eighty-nine. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the author of more than forty books, including The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and, most recently, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism. His Art of Criticism interview, which appeared in the Spring 1991 issue, is stacked with opinions on writers and their place in the canon. In Bloom’s view, Alice Walker is “an extremely inadequate writer,” John Updike is “a minor novelist with a major style,” and Saul Bellow is “an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for himself or for us.”

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that fiction—or poetry for that matter—could ever die out?

BLOOM

I’m reminded of that great trope of Stevens’s in “The Auroras of Autumn,” when he speaks of a “great shadow’s last embellishment.” There’s always a further embellishment. It looks like a last embellishment and then it turns out not to be—yet once more, and yet once more. One is always saying farewell to it, it is always saying farewell to itself, and then it perpetuates itself. One is always astonished and delighted.

Read his Art of Criticism interview here.