Harold Bloom is an old trooper in the culture wars. He has skirmished with literary theorists of all hues - structuralists (remember them?), deconstructionists, feminists, the political correctors - and in the heat of battle has delivered many a sword-cut, and taken a few slashes himself. He is an unreconstructed humanist, firmly in the line of his heroes Johnson and Hazlitt; as such, he is one of the last, if not, indeed, the last, of his kind. How to Read and Why is his Big Red Book, a primer for all those potential readers who in his judgment have been betrayed by contemporary arbiters of culture, including the universities. It is also a barricade thrown up against the seemingly unstoppable advance of the new academic Levellers who firmly reject the Western Canon and whose aim appears to be, in the formulation of his namesake, Allan Bloom, the closing of the American mind - and the minds of the rest of us, too.
Bloom - Harold, that is - in his preface quotes approvingly Virginia Woolf's remark about Hazlitt, that "He is one of those rare critics who have thought so much that they can dispense with reading." The same may not be said of Bloom, not because he has not thought a very great deal, over the nearly 50 years of his career as critic and teacher, but because he would never dream of dispensing with reading. He is stoutly and intentionally unfashionable in the answers he adduces to the question with which the book opens, "Why Read?" Readers must read, he declares, "for and in their own interest". Books will not make us better in our dealings with the world, or not directly, anyway - as Auden said, poetry makes nothing happen - but they will help to refine and expand the self.
"I turn to reading as a solitary praxis," Bloom writes, "rather than as an educational enterprise." This is a more radical statement than it may seem at first sight, especially from the pen of a man who surely must be one of the great educators of our time. He is Professor of Humanities at Yale, and Professor of English at New York University. Although he declares, contra Auden, perhaps, that "poetry is the only `self-help' that works, because . . . strengthens my own spirit," his expectations from reading are sensibly limited. Of Chekhov's work he observes that "while he doesn't make me simple, more truthful, more myself, I do wish I could be better (though I can't be). My wish seems to me an aesthetic rather than a moral phenomenon . . . "
The key word there, surely, is "aesthetic". There is a pseudo-liberal notion abroad in these times that art, the doing and the receiving of it, is good for you, because it both "takes you out of yourself" and out of a violent and stressful world ("prevents wrinkles", as the Lyric FM advertisement has it), and at the same time allows you to express yourself, and aids you in achieving the highest aspirations of your soul. Sadly, this is nonsense, as any serious artist, if he is honest, will tell you. It is also pernicious, in that it is a clandestine, or perhaps just unconscious, assault on real art, which does not aim to help or assuage or vindicate, is not directed at the public good, will not cure your Angst or mend your broken heart, but nevertheless is a moral force, an inert moral force, if only because it represents the closest to perfection that the artist, a frail, flawed human being like the rest of us, could manage to get. Whatever it is we expect from art, "we must not," as Bloom warns, "impose upon fiction [or art in general] the burden of improving society".
Bloom recognises, and acknowledges, that there is far less of quotidian reality in literature, even in fiction, than we like to think. "Only literature can be made into literature," he points out, "though life must get into the mix, almost always as provender rather than as form." Although Bloom is, to say it again, a great humanist, unshakeable in his insistence that the organic life of a great work of art will resist and survive any theoretical onslaught, whether from extreme deconstructionists, "cultural studies" gauleiters, or the proponents of "art for everyone" - which really means "art for no one" - he will not allow us for a moment to lose sight of the fact that literature is made out of words and thoughts, not flesh and blood, which is as true of the novel as it is of poetry, no matter how high a level of verisimilitude the novelist may achieve. Anthony Burgess, a wise commentator as well as a good novelist, whose wisdom and work alike seem for the moment forgotten, put it simply and truly when he bade us to keep in mind that "art is a game, life is not". Wallace Stevens, one of Bloom's heroes, expresses something of the same, but more gnomically, when in his great poem The Man with the Blue Guitar he writes that "Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar".
In its organisation, How to Read and Why is as awkward as its title. It begins with a splendidly two-fisted preface - "The poems of our climate [Stevens again] have been replaced by the body stockings of our culture" - which, after an initial promise that there will be "no polemics here", plunges straight into attacks upon "our new Materialists" who "assert that they work in the name of the Reality Principle. The life of the mind must yield to the death of the body, yet that hardly requires the cheerleading of an academic sect." Next comes a long section devoted, lovingly, to the short story, then one on poems, then "Novels Part I", followed by "Plays", "Novels Part II", and a faintly transcendental Epilogue. Poets, novels, novelists, plays and playwrights, are considered in short, two- or three-page sections that have the flourish and urgency of mini-tutorials. Bloom's choice of authors and works is eclectic: Housman sits beside Blake, Henry James rubs shoulders with Thomas Pynchon, Shakespeare's sonnets come hard on the heels of "Sir Patrick Spence".
Favourites are apparent: Shakespeare, of course - Bloom's most recent book claimed the Bard to be "The Inventor of the Human" - Blake, Emily Dickinson, Proust, Melville; but he is also accommodating to writers whose presence here may surprise: for instance, Toni Morrison - wisely, he chooses an early work, Song of Solomon - Nathanael West, Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian) and the versatile Anon., whose "Tom O'Bedlam" he ranks with the best of Shakespeare's songs.
One might argue with Bloom's sometimes overly commonsensical, Johnsonian stone-kicking. Not all Theory is deplorable: fierce reality-instructors such as Paul de Man and Jean Baudrillard do manage to expose much of the pietistic cant that lesser critics than Harold Bloom indulge in. What is deplorable, however, is the Tyranny of Theory, driven by mediocrities and academic time-servers and what Bloom witheringly refers to as "our current campus Puritans", in other words, by those with a case to prove or an axe to grind or an inadequacy to compensate for at our expense. Also, Bloom chooses not to engage the question of the possible implication of High Culture in the political catastrophes of the last century; for instance, surely there is a connection, however tenuous, between the fascist tendencies of many of the great Modernists - with the glorious exception of James Joyce - and the political and cultural collapse of the 1930s. But this is to yearn for the book that Bloom did not write, instead of celebrating the wonderful one that he did.
Bloom, who is touching 70, appeals to the reader in us - perhaps, in many of us, the lost reader - with the desperate urgency of a man who towards the close of his professional life has been forced to contemplate the coming of a cultural darkness into which many of the beautiful, lofty things that make life worth living may disappear. He is pessimistic on the future of the novel, in our image-obsessed age; although he does not say so, he is probably fearful that the finest poetry, too, may be drowned in the rising tide of popular culture, most of which is not culture in any sense, but a means for a few shrewd individuals and multi-national corporations to make a very great deal of money by deceiving the young. Bloom writes with passion of those writers whom he loves, and whose work for him affirms life, but throughout his book there persists an apprehensive, sorrowing note.
Despite Proust's healing power, I cannot read a novel in quite the way I did half a century ago, when I lost myself in what I read. I fell in love (if I remember accurately) not with an actual girl but with Mary South in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, and I grieved dreadfully when she cut off her beautiful hair in order to sell it. Few other experiences quite touch the reality of falling in love with a heroine, and with her book. One measures oncoming old age by its deepening of Proust, and its deepening by Proust. How to read a novel? Lovingly, if it shows itself capable of accommodating one's love; and jealously, because it can become the image of one's limitation in time and space, and yet give the Proustian blessing of more life.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times