This book is reverie and not argument. My title is the book in a single phrase. What is it to be “possessed by memory”? How does possession differ in these: to possess dead or lost friends and lovers, or to possess poetry and heightened prose by memory?
Nearing ninety, legendary critic Harold Bloom has assembled in Possessed by Memory a sort of memoir out of his favourite poems (alongside passages from the Old Testament and Shakespeare), which, with his own thoughts interspersed, give proof to the wonderful epigraph by Oscar Wilde: “That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul”. Written over six years, we watch as Bloom's body inevitably declines, and more urgently, we watch as he “monthly” says goodbye to his friends and colleagues of many decades; he has, indeed, entered “the elegy season”. I must confess that much of Bloom's thoughts on writing are beyond my understanding, but I learned much from the still active professor; this is a dense yet rewarding read. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I am aware that some readers may turn away from Possessed by Memory because what they regard as heretical or at least esoteric distracts from the reading of poetry. I address not them but those who yearn for what I would term a Shakespearean reading of the best poetry made available to us, here in our Evening Land, of the tradition sparked by Homer and Isaiah. That tradition is dying. As a literary and religious critic, I wish to rally a saving remnant.I am enthralled by the image of the insomniac Bloom reciting long stretches of by-heart epics and poems to himself in the middle of the night: I remember having to memorise a handful of shortish poems while in school, and they are lost to me now. In a society that seems to be ever turning away from our cultural foundations, I can relate to Bloom's urge to “rally a saving fragment”. However, because my education was not steeped in poetry and psalms, I couldn't always make the intertextual or exegetical connections that Bloom seems to take for granted with his readers. I can only take it as given as Bloom relates one poem to another; links one poet to the next (as he so often does):
A lifelong brooder on the problems of poetic influence, I have learned that one ultimate canonical test for poetic magnitude is provided by the sublime progeny a poet engenders. By that test, Wordsworth, William Blake, Shelley, and John Keats can be awarded the palm over Byron. Each of them lived on in the cavalcade of Anglo-American poetry, from Tennyson and Browning through Whitman and Emily Dickinson on to Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Hart Crane. I can think only of early Auden as a poet who attempted to carry on Byron's legacy, with indifferent success.And I am even more lost when Bloom speaks in the jargon of poetry:
The transcendental impulse that powers Shelley's Pindaric flights is not alien to Keats, yet he turns away from it as Shakespeare did, choosing Ovidian flux and change over Platonic yearnings for a premature Eternity.And if I may be permitted a minor complaint on format: Possessed by Memory often reads like a collection of essays instead of one linked work. Not only could I not really see an overall theme (other than an aged Bloom sharing whatever poems/high prose he felt like writing about), but many definitive statements were repeated throughout the essays, each time as though for the first time: that Johnson had inherited from Pope a distrust of the Sublime; or that Blake, like Milton, was a sect of one; or that Tennyson knew the quantity of every English word except for scissors; or that Whitman writes as though he is ahead of us and waiting for the reader to catch up. But who am I to criticise the critic?
For the most part, this is a collection of other peoples' (mostly Western white males) writing; Bloom's own thoughts take up not much space at all. However, I will put here some of what I found most intriguing:
Since childhood, I have meditated upon this agon of Israel with the Angel of Death. I interpret it not only as an allegory of Jewish history – indeed, of universal history – but also as the story of my own life, and the lives of everyone I have known, loved, taught, and mourned. In the half-light of my incessant nocturnal wakefulness, I begin to conceive of it as the struggle of every solitary deep reader to find in the highest literature what will suffice.
From childhood through old age, I have been made uncomfortable by a God who demands sacrifices that are also thanksgivings. Post-Holocaust, this will not work for many among us, and I frequently retreat from the Psalms to the poetry of Paul Celan, which has a difficult rightness, and does not seek to praise what can no longer be praised.
My religion is the appreciation of high literature. Shakespeare is the summit. Revelation for me is Shakespearean or nothing.
The deepest lesson I have learned from Johnson is that any authority of criticism as a literary genre must depend on the human wisdom of the critic, and not upon the wrongness or rightness of either theory or praxis.
Now almost all of my friends among the poets and critics of my generation have departed. Mourning for so many men and women does not diffuse an individual grief yet makes it seem less urgent.I have no doubt that Possessed by Memory will be of most interest to those who better speak Bloom's language, but I found many points of connection here myself; most especially when Bloom was writing intimately of his decline and his losses. In its way, it's a perfectly fitting memoir; the capstone of a deep reader's life.
I was so enchanted by the Oscar Wilde epigraph - it seems to perfectly describe my own aspirations here - that I'm going to quote it in full:
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...
