(Images provided by the Drifter)
“Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.”
– Oscar Wilde
LITERATURE, in its pure form, says The Drifter, is no longer taught in American universities.
What we have instead is economic grievance (usually from people who are already wealthy) and identity politics (also from wealthy people) masquerading as literary theory.
The pure spirit of Literature has been crucified, in the American academy. It was dead and bleeding on the cross. Now Joseph of Arimathea has disappeared with the body.
Charles Baudelaire, the first poet of the modern city, anywhere (his city was Paris) used to pray to the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, just like a Catholic prays to a saint. (Baudelaire was also Catholic, perhaps the most unique Catholic who ever lived, or one of them.)
If you told someone in American academia these days that you pray to a Literary Saint, the cynical crowd would suddenly rear its ugly head and laugh you right off campus immediately, from coast to coast and everywhere in between.
For me, the two greatest literary critics, ever (in the English language), are Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Dr. Harold Bloom. Johnson died in 1784, at the age of 75. Bloom died in 2019, aged 89.
Both of these titanic and gargantuan figures (and they were both gargantuan and titanic physically, as well as spiritually and mentally) have been wildly and consistently misrepresented in the popular press. Ideas they never had are attributed to them; stances they never took are assumed to have been their own; and their personalities, the most important thing about each of them, have been distorted beyond all recognition.
But the works and the good writings about each of these figures still remain, as well as the visual representations (from which you can learn entire worlds) and large collections of quotations about them by people who knew them well or just came into contact with them for brief periods.
One of my favorite works by Samuel Johnson is his first full-length book, the short biography The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, sometimes known as Life of Savage, and whose full title is An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (whether or whether not Savage was really the son of the Earl was one of the things about him that was always in dispute and a large contributor to his renown, or infamy, because he claimed he was, and the Earl claimed he wasn’t – loudly).
Savage was a famous minor poet, sometime actor, fulltime alcoholic conman, and all-around good guy who Johnson was friends with for a time. They roamed the London streets together at all hours, sometimes sleeping rough when they had to, starving and drinking and trying to make a living as Grub Street hacks (sometimes partially succeeding at the latter).
After Savage died, impoverished, alone, well-known, and alcoholic, Johnson wrote his life, thereby penning one of the first deeply psychological biographies ever committed to paper. One reason I love this book so much is because Savage reminds me so totally of a person I once knew, a very close friend, with whom I got into so much trouble at that time it has to be saved for another column.
Johnson also wrote a kind of nonfiction novella called Rasselas. This book was one of the very first Western explorations of Buddhism ever written, a fictionalized, Westernized account of the Buddha’s story almost as if filtered through the story of Muhammad.
Johnson himself, as a man, was such a strong and powerful abolitionist, before abolitionists even existed, that slaves in the New World ended up naming their children Rasselas after his great character. Johnson later adopted a black child as a single father after the death of his wife, raised the boy into manhood, and left him his money and name when he passed on. Such things were so unheard of in the 18th century that hardly anyone understood Johnson’s point of view at all. They didn’t know that he had moved beyond racism in an era when no one even knew what “racism” was.
Johnson was a multiculturalist (in the sense that he believed, like Jesus, that everyone should be included) not decades, but centuries, before such a thing existed with a name, and he didn’t just preach it, he lived it. And yet, the English Departments of the American academy now mostly accuse him of being an ultra-conservative “dead white male” who deserves to be ignored, forgotten, and even “canceled.”
Such thinking and behavior only give fuel to the rising and rabid fascist tide among us, a situation that is like a flood and a fire at once within human culture itself and thereby demands the mixed metaphors.
Harold Bloom has also, seemingly endlessly whenever he is discussed, been accused of being a so-called political conservative, even though he never was anything of the kind at all, and even was the exact opposite, more of an imaginative and creative, one-of-a-kind anarchist in his politics than anything else. (“Anarchist” in the sense of placing the highest possible value on human freedom, and human expression, itself; it has nothing to do with the practice of political violence, or rather believes the practice of violence should always be avoided because when you practice violence you’re not free.)
Born in 1930 in NYC, Bloom did his best work after the age of 50 (once Ronnie Rayguns took over), and perhaps his very best work after the age of 70, even though everything he did before 50 was the basis for all that came after, and led to it.
Five of my favorite books by Bloom are: How to Read and Why (2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003); Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011); and Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017).
This last book, a true and deep classic in Shakespeare studies, a brief book that takes the reader on a lasting tour of all things Jack Falstaff, was written and published just a few years before Bloom passed on at the age of 89. In its late 80s, one of the most powerful human minds of our times appeared to be getting stronger than it ever had been, not less so.
Harold Bloom was like Oscar Wilde in the way he took nonfiction writing about literature and raised it to the levels of the very highest and best imaginative literature itself. Bloom said that William Shakespeare was his ultimate model, as opposed to any critical writers he’d ever known or studied (except for Samuel Johnson). As a writer, Harold Bloom was much closer to someone like Bob Dylan or Ernest Hemingway than he was to what we usually think of when we think of a “literary critic.” And he was a real and true harbinger for many directions imaginative writing will take in the future and is now taking even as we speak, inevitably (says The Drifter).
Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter, MFA, PhD: The Drifter’s name, “The Drifter,” is not influenced by, but is rather stolen directly from (in a sense), two names that Dr. Samuel Johnson called himself, when he himself wrote columns: The Rambler; and later: The Idler.
A Few More Crucial Note/s: Samuel Johnson’s prose style can strike the modern reader as outdated at first, but a good reader can catch up with him within the hour, and the struggle to do so can only be beneficial, since this is Johnson, and since nothing too easy is any good. Johnson is far more modern than almost any other writer of English prose of his era, his pal Boswell rivaling him in this. And often enough, his prose sounds exactly as if it were written yesterday, or tomorrow (these are his best bits, and they’re scattered everywhere throughout his vast, massive work).
Harold Bloom wrote a lot (a vast understatement), and he has entire, five-hundred-page books (among his early work) that are composed almost entirely in a stilted, bloated, airy, windy, jargon-filled prose that is still, despite itself, brilliant and unique almost all the time.
After the age of 50, at his own admission, he started to write for a more general audience outside of academia, including the reader he called the “incredibly intelligent child of any age.”
He did this for two reasons. One: he wanted to reach more people while he was still alive. Two: his skills had improved.
THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: Reading good works or otherwise genuinely engaging with good art of any kind keeps your mind, heart, and soul in a good place, so that, the more you do it, the better your own inherent goodness becomes. The opposite of this, just as powerful, is rotting your brain (and heart and soul) with meaningless trash.
Addendum: Roger Ebert is the Harold Bloom of the movies; Lester Bangs is a Bloom of rock and roll.
Stay tuned this week as The Drifter attempts to practice literary criticism upon modern popular music, but in a late-Bloom kind of style, not an early-Bloom style, i.e. jargon free and written for the incredibly intelligent child within all of us no matter what age.
Saragun Springs 