HAROLD BLOOM'S CANON FIRE

Spotlight

At age 84, having written more than 40 books and taught literature at Yale for 59 years, Harold Bloom is pretty much entitled to make any pronouncements he (god)damn well feels like making. Would you care to go mono a mono with him on—say—the "Gnostic anarch-archon cleaving asunder of the cosmic androgyne"? Or on whether "Whitman's complex metric stems from Hebrew parallelism"? Go for it. Me, I'd sooner challenge Moses to a game of rock-paper-scissors on his way down Mount Sinai.

Oh, what a lovely, howling shitstorm Professor Bloom's latest slab of a tablet, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (Spiegel & Grau/Random House), is going to stir up in Litworld this spring. And oh what fun it's going to be to watch. Teeth will gnash. Garments will be rent. Loud will be the lamentations.

What's all the fuss? Brace yourself: Bloom has the cheek to enumerate America's 12 greatest writers. He's not so crass, simplistic, or obvious as to say "greatest." Rather, they are "the dozen creators of the American Sublime." And now that you've braced, strap yourself in tight, because they're all (a) dead, (b) white, and (c) Anglo-Christian, and 11 out of 12 are male.

We're talking: Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Hart Crane.

Before the Molotov cocktails start flying through dear old Mother Yale's stained glass, might we at least stipulate—if only en bref and en passant—that such a list ain't chopped liver? Some might even call it a pantheon. Might we also stipulate that Harold Bloom, though he demurely calls himself a "worn-out ancient exegete," is, lit-crit-wise, our resident Owl of Minerva?

Now that we've settled that, let the shouting begin. There's enough in here to outrage the votaries and vestals of every ism and sensibility under the American sun and moon. Feminists will shriek, multiculturalists will huff, and gay literati will ululate in despair despite Bloom's idolatry of their champion.

Why?

"Whitman learned ... that only an intransitive eros would accommodate his daemon, which celebrated contact but could not bear it. I am accustomed to being drubbed on this matter by a self-declared school of homosexual poeticians who generously attribute their achieved gay lives to Walt Whitman."

What could be more straightforward?

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY