Harold Bloom was anything but a policymaker. The popular literary critic earned his renown for his erudition as a self-described “monster of reading” of literary texts. (Bloom was reputed to be able to consume hundreds of pages an hour and could purportedly recite the over 10,000 lines of John Milton’s Paradise Lost and untold volumes of British poetry.)

That erudition is now plentifully on offer in Heather Cass White’s painstakingly edited The Man Who Read Everything. The book compiles Bloom’s literary correspondence with Alvin Feinman (1954-1963), Northrop Frye (1959-1969), John Hollander (1965-1976), A.R. Ammons (1969-1971), John Ashbery (1971-2015), James Merrill (1976-1979), Henri Cole (1997-2012), and Ursula K. Le Guin (2017-2018). In White’s eight-chapter volume, we see the inimitable Bloom backstage, the man behind epic intellectual debates that engulfed teaching the academic humanities during the second half of the 20th century.

Here on full display is the kaleidoscopically sublime Bloom: vulnerable, tender, playful, grave, insecure, irritated, thrilled, enigmatic, sardonic, sympathetic, sorrowful. To read Bloom’s literary letters is still to hear the oracular tone and witness the mighty vigor of Bloom, the professional critic. But it is also to luxuriate in Bloom, the idiosyncratic, devoted, and joyful lover of literature and literary creation, in full bloom over an arc of six decades, from graduate student at Yale to professor late in life at the same school.

Yet Bloom’s letters will be of interest to more than students and scholars of criticism and literature. They might seem, at first, an odd place to draw inspiration for how to grapple with the world’s many political problems, at home and abroad. But Bloom’s correspondence bears an unmistakable political relevance, one centered on his distinct understanding, and cultivation, of friendship.

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The intimacy of friendship, to paraphrase French Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (one of Bloom’s friends and sometimes rival in the 1970s), lies in the recognition of oneself in the eyes of the other. Such was the case with Bloom, for whom his friendships blurred the lines between imagination and reality, self and other. His conversations made remote gods of prose and poetry into his closest friends, and his closest friends into those remote gods.

On June 6, 1972, Bloom wrote to John Ashbery, the most influential U.S. poet of his time, that his missive “is a kind of fan letter.” By June 25, 1972, Bloom, in another dispatch to Ashbery, wrote: “I move to first names, as after two weeks of doing little but read Ashbery and write about him, I feel close enough to venture upon friendship (if permitted).” Two days after poetry forged their friendship, Ashbery responded, addressing his letter to “Harold,” and explaining his various literary choices.

Bloom often also used nicknames to cultivate his friendships. These sobriquets showed Bloom’s affection for and bonds with his literary friends, fictional and real, dead or alive. “Like his living friends,” White writes, “‘Uncle Archie’ [Ammons], ‘the noble Ashbery,’ ‘young [Henri] Cole,’ Bloom’s literary favorites had nicknames. He wrote about ‘Hamlet,’ but only ever spoke about ‘Omelet.’ Freud was ‘Uncle Siggie,’ while Kafka was ‘Cousin Franz.’ In tribute to Falstaff’s unique greatness Bloom reversed the procedure and nicknamed himself ‘Bloomstaff.’”

Bloom’s nicknaming habit may seem similar to that of Donald Trump, but the U.S. president deploys nicknames as pure weapons, to dominate, criticize, or insult. By contrast, Bloom uses them to display playful, loving, and grave appreciation of others—and of himself from the perspective of those others. That gives us a model for how to understand our interconnectedness—for how to see the transcendent in our everyday life and our everyday life refracted back into the transcendent.

The wellspring of Bloom’s literary politics can, at first glance, appear hard to locate. In a 1963 letter to Jewish American poet Alvin Feinman, whom Bloom met in 1951 as a fellow graduate student, Bloom summarized his approach to literature: “I don’t really believe in truth—not even the truth of the imagination—just in the sound of a voice.” Not social, not political—a voice, by which Bloom meant: a commanding, authentic, and often agonized expression of consciousness.  

But, crucially, Bloom’s way of reading literature can be seen as comparable to the way he cared for his literary friends. The German word Stimmung, which means mood, atmosphere, or vibe, and has the root Stimme (voice), perhaps captures Bloom’s faith. In 1989, Bloom even began to advocate for seeing literature as “sacred.” In Ruin the Sacred Truth, for example, he suggested that literature had largely taken over the social function of religious belief. 

White’s introductory vignettes for each section devoted to Bloom’s lettered friendships speak to his faith in “the sound of a voice.” Bloom, we learn, cites Feinman’s poems “when unable to sleep.” Does it get more intimate? In summer 1954, Bloom writes to Feinman: “I am scribbling dissertation. … Am having still worse nightmares, in which you figure. May try sleeping pills.” Bloom, we also discover, was deeply hurt when his idol Northrop Frye dismissed Bloom’s core philosophy about the meaning of literature and its history. On Jan. 16 1969, Bloom admits to Frye that he “understand[s] why” Frye does “not see Poetic Influence as an anxiety or melancholy,” as Bloom does, because of what Frye calls “the myth of concern.” But the skepticism of his literary-critical hero clearly tore Bloom up.

Bloomstaff and John Hollander, on the other hand, had the mundane and comical habit of calling each other, as White writes, “innumerable variations on the nickname ‘Foo Foo.’” Almost every letter of Bloom’s to Hollander (we don’t have Hollander’s half) is addressed to “Foo” and signed by “Foo.” There’s also, again in White’s words, the “intensity of the love between” Bloom and A.R. Ammons. In an October/November 1969 letter to Ammons, Bloom explains how much he adores Ammons’ poem “Bridge,” and that if he “had written it—rather than wasting my spirit (such as it is) in tiring seminars and exegeses we don’t need—I would feel blessed.” Bloom’s desire for poetic voice, for literary creation, is palpable.

The voices of the Bloom-Ashbery correspondence are in some ways the most robust; this is maybe because, as White reports, Bloom considered Ashbery “the greatest American poet of the second half of the twentieth century.” Meanwhile, the exchanges about Gnosticism between James Merrill and Bloom might, for the initiated, reveal esoteric influences. And there is Bloom’s admiration for and unexpected friendship with Henri Cole; we are provided with transcribed voicemails Bloom left for Cole, who shared them with White.

Lastly, we can immerse ourself in Bloom’s late and inspired conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin. On Nov. 26, 2017, Bloom, following an injury and two operations, wrote to “Mrs. Le Guin”: “I have survived this kind of thing a dozen times over the last fifteen years. I was very moved by your kind note. Most of my close friends in my generation, all poets and critics, are dead.” Le Guin, in her reply, asked: “May we use first names? I’d like that.” They had become friends in the autumn of their lives. (Although that is not the only way Le Guin stands out: For most of Bloom’s life, his literary champions were men, a bias reflected in Bloom’s letters, their recipients as much as his references.)

One can imagine Bloom, who invested so much in his friendships, was also often affronted. “[W]hat made him singular … was that he took everything personally,” White observes. But whether extraordinarily maddening and/or illuminating, Bloom’s responses to criticisms of the writers and characters he loved, as The Man Who Read Everything helps show, was most about protecting “the sound of a voice.” Nonetheless, he always retained a sense of humor about it all. In 2014, I asked him during an interview about the harsh criticism of his work, and he responded that he considered each of his writings “one layer of an onion. There is no center. Just another layer peeled off by another text.” He shrugged and moved on, ever toward a voice and its intertwining with his own.

Bloom’s way of caring for his literary friends, as displayed in his letters, is largely absent in contemporary Western male friendships. As Andrew McCarthy wrote in a March 19 article in the Atlantic, men seem to have lost the capacity for friendships with other men. This has reached a sort of apotheosis in the so-called manosphere. This collection of online forums, blogs, and social media communities promotes misogyny and hostility towards feminism as well as an aggressive definition of masculinity that claims to solve men’s supposed loss of status and power. In sharp contrast, Bloom’s letters are marked by an intense level of emotional and physical intimacy with his favored literary voices.

Take Bloom’s declaration to Ammons’ biographer, as noted by White, that, “speaking as a notorious heterosexual, [he] was deeply in love with Archie Ammons.” Moreover, Bloom’s letters are variously signed “Homage,” “With great affection,” “With love to all,” countless endings with “Love” and one “con affetto” from Le Guin. To be clear, Bloom was no feminist. In the 1990s and later, former students accused Bloom of inappropriate behavior, including unwanted sexual advances. Still, during a time when we sorely need a publicly lauded model of male companionship different from that of the manosphere, Bloom’s literary letters maybe offer such an example.

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The politics of literary friendship performed in The Man Who Read Everything includes hints at how one might grapple with other pressing crises. Consider AI’s effects on human potential, agency, and experience. Bloom’s correspondence is infused with the kind of deep intimacy—decades of reading, writing, and a unique voice and style—that AI lacks altogether.

Long ago, Bloom homed in on this issue. In a 1985 Vogue review of U.S. romance novelist Danielle Steel, Bloom writes: “[T]he prose is of a badness not to be believed. It is so bad that it becomes a kind of different medium, as though the TV screen had transmogrified and discharged pages rather than auditory images. Perhaps ‘Danielle Steel’ is not an actual person but a kind of self-originating word-processor, not yet refined enough to give us sentences that parse.” An essential difference, Bloom upheld, existed between a Shakespeare and a Danielle Steel.

Whether one agrees with Bloom or not, however, the very existence of Bloom’s letters serves as a compelling example of a real authorial presence engaging other real authorial presences. That’s something that a chatbot cannot replicate.

Steel was indeed a real person, but it’s not hard to imagine actual AI-generated novels infiltrating and expropriating bookshelves. Entire industries and education systems groan under the weight of AI-generated content, while attentions shrink and our faith in institutions wobbles. In the face of all this and more, Bloom’s correspondence stages, for us, an ideal. With his letters, though reflective of its own type of manosphere, we can witness Bloom at his best: deeply devoted to literary friendship, not simply following but building a literary way of life. In our era of polycrisis, Bloom, despite himself, was in this sense countercultural. Cling to what gives you more life, he counseled. Turn, he might say, to our new and old friends, to life as literature and literature as life, to help create an abundant existence for all. We would do well to heed his voice.