Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles:
The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death
by Harold Bloom.
Yale University Press, 2020. $35.

Harold Bloom died on October 14, 2019 at the age of 89, eight days shy of the date long ago predicted by three different gypsy fortune tellers for his departure into the Great Perhaps, as he liked to call it. He has been busier in his urn than most of us are in socks and shoes. Just a few weeks after he (seemed to have) left us, the Library of America published the retrospective collection, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon; and two brand new volumes appeared late in our year of stasis and pandemic — The Bright Book of Life: Novels to Read and Reread (Knopf), and Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of a Reader’s Mind Over a Universe of Death (Yale). It’s the latter I want to point readers toward with these notes, as Take Arms leads us to an aspect of the man and his writing that’s often lost in the howls and hollows of our culture wars.

Bloom is notorious for being the great Sorter, King of the Canon and its branching ranks, and that, granted, is largely his own doing. But I’ve been reading him since the late 70s, and Harold the Anointer was never my Bloom. His Romantic line of exemplars running from Shelley through Whitman and Stevens to Ashbery and beyond evinces — as he himself came to admit — just one way of coming at the tradition and its individual talents. It also represents only a small part of his genius and reach, and Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, the final book he wrote (though not the final published), brings us into the complex heart of a far more expansive and generous envisioner. That was the person I came to know well during the last twelve years or so of his life — the Bloom who relished engaged company, in person and on the page, who seemed to take everything and everyone in: around his and his wife Jeanne’s book-heaped dining room table, before students gathered for class, in the living room with Valentina the Gnostic Ostrich and his other stuffed philosophical animals on the couch, or in the kitchen watching a Yankees game. Toward the end, whether hospitalized while working on this book or strapped into a wheelchair at home, he found himself more and more alone with his prodigious memory of the poems that stayed with him by day and often through sleepless nights. Take Arms unfurls a surprisingly fierce, tender, and stirring chronicle of that companionship.

Reading it reminds me of what it was like to be with Harold. We hear the intuitive Bloom, the open and receptive reader, the brooder and fabulous conversation partner, talking and chuckling, searching and scowling; we see him rubbing his brow and thinking aloud (he dictated the entire book at that dining room table, and from a hospital bed, saving his dwindling energy almost exclusively for those sessions). Writing it was his way of sustaining that sense of companionship while “alive enough to have strength to die” (Hardy); but every bit as pressing, I suspect, was the desire to pass on to readers something of his own phenomenal hunger for “more life.”

The title Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles comes of course from Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, but throughout Bloom’s book it seems to be directed at a more insidious kind of self-destruction: “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…”. The subtitle lures us further into the book’s labyrinth. Deriving from something Frank Kermode wrote about Wallace Stevens and the “Idea of Order at Key West,” it guides Bloom back to Milton — who coins the phrase “universe of death” to describe the “dark and drearie vaile[s] … and many a Region dolorous” where the “harpy-footed furies” go in the Chaos of Paradise Lost, Book 2. From there Bloom wanders on to Coleridge’s response to having heard Wordsworth in 1807 “read aloud his … Prelude” — where the phrase bobs up again, transposed, as Dorothy’s brother warns of letting oneself be “shrunk with apprehensive jealousy / … to bow down the soul / Under a growing weight of vulgar sense / And substitute a universe of death / For that which moves with light and life informed” (Book XIV ll. 352-359). Coleridge’s response to that lifeline of a poem “on the Growth of a Poet’s Mind” includes this phosphorescence of ambivalence by one writer whose waning powers have been revived by the work of another —

Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestow’d…

— and it eerily accounts for what happens to Bloom as reader and to readers of Bloom.

At times in Take Arms he’ll slip into a reminiscence, and we find ourselves thinking he’s lost the thread. Several pages and associative leaps later, we’re suddenly back where we started, the scene of departure newly lit. It’s a very late style, and Bloom himself implicitly likens it to the pop-up (or -down) octogenarian midday naps he’d often fall into: “More than ever, in old age I nod off quite suddenly for a few seconds and start up again, wondering where I am back in my own past.” Having introduced his subtitle, he moves on to Nietzsche’s “perceptual and sensual world [as] the primordial poem of mankind.” Blake’s cosmos of the awakened imagination takes us further on and in, to José Saramago’s difficult Jewish God, more Milton — this time on Satan, Adam, and Eve — and to sharply drawn memories of William Empson (“You are the man who wrote that dotty book on influence. I like dotty books.”). Encounters with Jacob Burckhardt, William Tyndale, and Walter Pater ensue, and then, some fifteen pages on, we’re listening in on Hamlet’s ruminations, and it becomes clear that Bloom’s own inimitable gifts for mental fight have just woven a remarkably tensile web of all that writing and saying and remembering. As in the Anatomy of Influence, his most straightforward adjustment of the landmark Anxiety, Bloom is interested in the “hidden channels that flow” between poets. “It is not that my understanding of contingency is less ominous” than it was earlier, he allows, “but the anxiety of influence now seems to me literary love tempered by ambivalence, as all love is.” And just as Paradise Lost, he suggests, constitutes a “vast midrash on the Hebrew Bible,” Take Arms becomes a tale-studded, tentacled commentary on the English poetry he loved and lived with for much of a century.

This rabbinic aspect of Bloom’s thought comes to its plainest and strangest expression in the chapter called — citing the name Freud’s father recorded in the family Bible — “Sigismund Schlomo Freud: Speculation and Wisdom.” It’s the only chapter in the book that isn’t about a poet, and so in a sense Freud becomes one here, as Romantic inwardness gives way to what Bloom considers the deeper penetration of Freudian inquiry. Bloom’s trap-doored descent begins with the mysterious phenomenon of Freud’s attachment to his Jewishness — “few questions of spiritual or intellectual history are as vexed” — winds through a dense and technical discussion of masochism, the bodily ego, the ambiguous status of the Freudian drive, and “frontier speculation” between the outward and inward, then drops precipitously into an exploration of Jewish dualism (“the ceaseless agon within the self not only against all outward injustice but also against what might be called the injustice of outwardness, or, more simply, the way things are”). The prophets, Bloom notes, not only “inherit the Torah’s skeptical inwardness” — including the second commandment’s “rejection of all outward appearances” — they exalt it “as the true mode of preparing to receive the Godword.” Givenness, it would seem, never suffices — and words, in one form or another, continually call and are called to reconstruct the world. 

The meditation on Freud and his “consuming passion for interpretation” brings Bloom back to his own Jewishness, and to key considerations involving Jewish memory, which are largely absent from the rest of this book but central to his work from early on. Long lapsed in his childhood Yiddish-speaking household’s normative religious practice, though dreaming of it in this Book of the End, Bloom was indelibly Jewish in his literary-gnostic-heretical way; he wrote of biblical and kabbalistic subjects with a nuclear luminosity, biases and the occasional error notwithstanding. At once vaudevillian (about his own psychoanalysis) and specialized (with its forest of analytic terms), this chapter seems at first glance to come from another literary universe than the rest of the book. But as it welcomes the master of interpretation and erotic reconfiguration, Sigismund Schlomo, into the society of poets of consciousness, a comparable path is paved for his Bronx-born heir of Odessan descent.

The chapter comes close to venturing, in other words, an equation — or at least essential confluence — of poetry and commentary; and it leaves us with this startling confession: “Returning to Freud, after years of avoidance, troubles me deeply. I have learned to accept that my own work on influence, both literary and religious, is hopelessly misunderstood. I have also learned that this does not matter at all. Only time allows judiciousness. Comprehension will come when I myself am gone. What does trouble me is my increasing realization that, unknowingly, I have been using Milton, and some other great poets, as a screen for Freud.” What Freud endeavored to do, says Bloom, was “to retell all our stories of the self,” and he should, therefore, be counted among the “major imaginative writers of the twentieth century.” Dismissing psychoanalysis with Karl Kraus’s Moebius quip that it’s the “disease of which it purports to be the cure,” Bloom concludes: “What continues to matter is the persistence of Freud’s vision of the predicament of being human” (“unsolved puzzles of being,” Bloom calls it elsewhere). From there, perhaps because he is unable to resolve the tension between the interpretive and poetical impulses, along which he’d strung his Johnsonian sentences in book after book for some fifty years, he moves on to Shakespeare as the well from which Freud incessantly drew. That Bloom chose to insert this most unresolved of chapters in the penultimate position of his ultimate book is testament to the Gaon of Vienna’s abiding power for him, and to the importance of Jewishness in his work as well.

Not everyone will agree with Bloom’s judgments, but that shouldn’t keep anyone from entering into their singular force fields. About a third of the way into the book, Bloom takes up a discussion of Shelley and his best-known biographer, Richard Holmes, admitting that he, Bloom, “frequently disagree[s] with Holmes as to his evaluation of particular poems by Shelley, but that scarcely matters. He gives us the astonishing man: swift, remorseless, capable of surprising cruelty, skeptical yet idealistic, erotically irresponsible, preternaturally gifted yet given to hallucinatory episodes and strange visitations by the night-world.” That has often been my own response to Bloom and his books — that they give us the astonishing man, and “the light reflected, as a light bestow’d.” 

Further on in the volume we find ourselves lifted onto the drafts of one of the more moving passages in all of Bloom. Unable to sleep and well aware that he’s nearing the end, he thinks of Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus”:

It is a child that sings itself to sleep,
The mind, among the creatures that it makes,
The people, those by which it lives and dies.

He writes: “Stevens comforts me now. Child, mind, and people at their best sing themselves to sleep. Our minds make images of all the people we cared for, departed or still here. By them we live and by them we shall die…”.

Then, summoning Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” — 

… with the knowledge of death as walking one side
of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side
of me
And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding
the hands of companions…

he spirals out to a remembrance of John Hollander, “the closest friend I ever had,” and thinks of what he calls his “finest poem” from his “Shadow of a Great Rock in a Weary Land”: “The crux of Hollander’s lament is one poignant line: ‘What can we still do well?’ I ask myself that every day, and since I begin teaching the academic year 2019-2020 tomorrow, the question will be a touch more urgent. A worn-out voice at eighty-nine, I will do as well as I can. I wasted time denouncing what I called the School of Resentment, and now time wastes me.”

What’s most valuable here, and most vulnerable, isn’t the canonizing, the who’s inning-and-outing, but the mind finding its way into the “relational events” that sustain — the mediating poems that augment us through “enhancement by knowledge or by the kind of love that is a form of knowledge.” Like the book as a whole, this passage traces the visionary company of Bloom’s poets and, by structural extension, it leads us to our own. “The great poems, plays, novels, and stories,” he writes, “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 up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”

Which is to say, Take Arms. //