Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles is the last word and testament of America’s last widely read literary critic, Harold Bloom. This final (posthumously published) volume in his enormous oeuvre is sprawling, maddening, charming, and unexpectedly intimate, having its origins in “a cavalcade of illnesses and accidents” and dictated to hospital assistants and anyone else generous enough to help. The circumstances of its writing contribute to its total confoundment of genres—the 672-page-long tome weaves back and forth between personal reminiscence, literary criticism, elegy and, of course, worship of Shakespeare. Readers expecting a carefully constructed argument for how to conquer the subtitular universe of death will be sorely disappointed because Bloom does not even attempt it—but should we expect coherence from a dying man’s lips? Unsurprisingly, Bloom’s final exhortation is to read:
What you read and how deeply you read matters almost as much as how you love, work, exercise, vote, practice charity, strive for social justice, cultivate kindness and courtesy, and worship if you are capable of worship. The mind is an activity and will decay into dark inertia if not sustained by the sustenance of reading.
Some may dispute the first sentence, but the latter is difficult to deny. Hence his call to action:
The great poems, plays, novels, and stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, and failures at otherness beat you down. Rise at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.
Summoning us to rise at dawn to do something as anticlimactic as opening a book is delightfully ironic, but utterly in character. As for what we ought to be reading at dawn, Bloom was bold enough (for some brash enough) to spend his career delimiting a Western canon on our behalf. He insisted that as mortals with finite lifespans we cannot waste our time reading anything but the very best of literature. Fair enough. So with whom did he spend his final days in this volume? The list is familiar: John Milton, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Robert Browning, Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, Dante, Shakespeare, and the outlier of this group, Sigmund Freud.
This group of luminaries are all poets with the one obvious exception; Bloom had covered novelists in another posthumous book, aptly titled The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread. In this poetry-centric book, Bloom expresses with an almost rhythmic cadence his gratitude for the poems and poets that have kept him company during long nights of octogenarian insomnia. Endlessly chanting stanzas of Romantic poetry, it seems, was his way of “taking arms” against long, smothering twilight hours.
Legendarily, Bloom had all of Shakespeare, Blake, and Milton’s Paradise Lost committed to memory, along with countless stanzas of other canonical poetry. Also according to legend, he had read everything ever written in the English language. At this point in his academic career he moreover assumes familiarity with his basic thesis of the “anxiety of influence,” which holds that creative minds are always negotiating the legacies of their vaunted forebears. Quoting reams of poems with sparse intervening commentary is for Bloom an intuitive exercise in literary psychoanalysis.
Needless to say, this can make it hard to keep up. He is not much concerned with signposting his writing nor holding the reader’s hand. He has been initiated into the mysteries for far too long. For these reasons, reading this book feels like listening in on a stream-of-consciousness lecture by a lone, gray-bearded gnostic sage sitting atop a great rock in the wilderness. Long time readers of Bloom are accustomed to his Kabbalistic flair that constantly puts them on their heels: is he mad or are we ignorant? Either way, the effort required of the reader is well-rewarded with gems of insight that could only come from three quarters of a century of brooding, such as: “Yet Ahab, like Melville, is Gnostic.”
Bloom is not the first to make this point, but after recently reading Moby Dick, this one-liner was a revelation to me. As one of Bloom’s own mentors, M.H. Abrams, once put it, “to read Bloom’s commentaries is like reading classic authors by flashes of lightning.”
Admittedly, my eyes glazed over as I plowed through some of chapters 4 through 14 and their extended quotations of partial poems and gnomic commentary. But the volume really shines at its edges, particularly when taking up Shakespeare, Dante, and Freud. Consider another gem of a one-liner: “The difference between Dante and Milton is Shakespeare.”
For Bloom, all writers after Shakespeare work in his impossibly large shadow and therefore cannot be entirely free, operating instead in a strained relationship with their titanic predecessor in an attempt to avoid creative contamination. That Dante preceded Shakespeare gives him the creative edge over the greatest English epicist who, in a stroke of tremendously bad luck, was born after The Bard. With characteristic allusiveness, Bloom calls Shakespeare the “covering Cherub who blocked Milton from the creation of voices not his own.” (One also suspects that Shakespeare prevented Bloom himself from ever penning poetry of his own.)
In The Daemon Knows, he confessed that “there is no God but God, and his name is William Shakespeare,” playing ironically on the Islamic turn of phrase. Born an Orthodox Jew but a lifelong convert to bardolatry, Bloom famously asserted that Shakespeare invented the modern human, putting himself, for neither the first nor last time, in the spotlight as a literary critic with the chutzpah to stake outlandish claims. Decades later on his deathbed, Bloom clings to his admiration for the superhuman dramatist who is “too large to be unique,” declaring: “Shakespeare’s protagonists are larger than I can apprehend, though I strive mightily to keep up with them.”
Like every other school child in the modern era, I learned in English class that Shakespeare was someone important, someone indelibly eloquent, whose plays were therefore required reading. While I scratched my head along with everyone else in class and covertly referred to the Cliffs Notes versions to follow along, I tremendously enjoyed reading Othello out loud after being selected by my class to play Iago (and that should tell you something about my junior high personality!). In college I spent an entire semester reading and rereading King Lear, and it was then that I discovered the morass of Shakespeare scholarship generated by English professors anxiously and tenaciously pursuing tenure. My class spent a week on an article that was supposed to serve as a paragon of scholarship but that was to me pure obscurantist gibberish. Nevertheless, I fell in love with King Lear and learned that whenever I prodded some aspect of the play it prodded me right back. There was a tensile strength and inexhaustible depth to it that I had never before sensed. Years later I finally picked up Hamlet to see why on earth Harold Bloom was so infatuated with the main character, as in this exuberant acclamation:
Shakespeare invented a hundred major personalities and a thousand minor ones. Amidst all these, Hamlet is unique. His consciousness seems to tear loose of all limits and breaks out of the revenge tragedy so hopelessly inadequate to his power of being and range of awareness.
What I sensed in this final book by Bloom was that he identified—whether consciously or unconsciously I do not know—with Hamlet: “I teach, read, and write to increase my sense of otherness and to fight against self-consciousness. But always there is the sadness of apprehension, a foreboding as to how much increased consciousness I can sustain.”
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, from which Bloom’s final book take takes its title, is often assumed to be a sort of suicidal ideation—asking the question of “to be or not to be” and leaning towards the latter. But Bloom, in disagreement with the conventional reading of his return to court, thinks Hamlet achieves a sublime apotheosis in death. Again, “Nietzsche is the authority for reminding us that Hamlet thinks much too well and so thinks himself into the truth, and so into the silent abyss of rest.”
Bloom seems to see himself in the mirror here. Though he confesses he does not believe in truth as such, he does not have any forebodings about the “silent abyss of rest” towards which he inches ever closer at age eighty-nine. One gets the sense in reading his words that he is bound by blood oath to his daemon to wring out the last of his revelations before being permitted to die. And, following Shakespeare, he has no aspirations for immortality: “The immortality of the soul is only a flickering illumination in Shakespeare. He does not want to instruct you in any overt manner, and he keenly apprehends that our problems are insoluble. If our little life is rounded with a sleep, there is not much to add, except to so expand consciousness beyond to yet another inwardness.” So when he speculated that unlike Dante, Shakespeare’s dying stance was a “negative capability finding an apotheosis in nihilism,” he is speaking of his own aspiration.
Bloom’s final word on Freud, the odd duck out in the venerable array of major poets, is one of the most insightful chapters in the book. How do we view Freud in the twenty-first century? Hot takes abound, but Bloom is a reasonable guide here:
If there is a consensus on Freud, it is that he was the major literary essayist since Montaigne. I reread him as I do Montaigne or Cervantes or Shakespeare. Freud’s great hope was that his work would make some contribution to biology. That was a delusion. His new science, psychoanalysis, or the talking cure, cured few if any. And yet the power of mind manifested in his essays is almost unmatchable. His inventiveness is Shakespearean. . . . Though frustrated crews of current resenters stigmatize Freud as a charlatan, they do him violence, he being so majestic. The sage of Vienna, who intended to become no less than a new Moses, replacing Judaism by psychoanalysis, became instead a new Prospero, but one who would not break his staff or drown his book.
Psychoanalytic sorcery aside, Bloom recognizes the tremendous myth-making power of Freud “who began anew on a tabula rasa of speculation” and “endeavored to retell all our stories of the self.” In the twenty-first century we have not escaped Freud in the least bit insofar as we inhabit his mythos of the self and its chthonic machinations. Any talk of “finding yourself” or “being authentic” owes itself to Freud more than Sartre.
Most interesting from a biographical angle is Bloom’s assertion that Freud’s “most profound Jewishness . . . was his consuming passion for interpretation.” Again, one wonders if Bloom is not also covertly projecting himself onto Freud—how Freudian! That many of the major literary critics of our era are Jewish has not gone unnoticed, such as in the fascinating study, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, which runs from Freud, Lacan, and Derrida to Bloom himself and his friend Geoffrey Hartman.
Bloom’s own Jewishness is on display in his agon with Christianity, as when he described his relationship with the New Testament with his usual candidness: “I have spent many weary hours reading the Greek New Testament and have had little aesthetic reward. Almost all of it is very badly written.” More bluntly, he admits that “the Incarnation is to me a bad poem.”
As a secular gnostic Jew, his other agon with Yahweh and the Covenant is also on display though muted relative to his Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. Put summarily, Bloom is in awe of Yahweh but does not trust in him or his Covenant. His final commentary on Shakespeare and Dante explains in part why he has taken Shakespeare to be his god over Yahweh—he is not “intrusive” like a god who “wishes to save us.” Now in his last days, he writes, “At ninety I feel a longing for the Orthodox Judaism of my childhood home. It is difficult to believe that I will find my way back to it,” but then confesses in the book’s most poignant moment that “in the moment of dying I doubtless will return to the Orthodox Judaism of my youth and will repeat the appropriate Hebrew prayers silently to myself if I can no longer speak.”
In the end, this is not Bloom’s best or most original book. Nor would I recommend it as a starting point for anyone inclined to take on his massive corpus of writing. Instead, it is an endpoint. Regardless, it will maintain a place of prominence on my bookshelf as a talismanic reminder of a man who wrestled with all of Western literature and, through that mighty struggle, obtained its blessing.
At the dawn of his ninth decade, Bloom had long taken arms against his sea of troubles, but the universe of death overtook him in the end, just eight days shy of the date predicted by three different gypsy fortune-tellers. This book reads finally like a plangent farewell sermon delivered in anticipation of his departure for what he so fondly and agnostically called the “Great Perhaps.”