Let’s imagine them as two heavyweights, ready to slug it out (though one is an admittedly skinny heavyweight). Or let’s slap armor on them and set them up on horses and have them joust, though instead of lances they’d clutch the thin volumes they’re famous for. Or, better yet, let’s scrap the metaphors altogether and see them as who they are: Walter Jackson Bate and Harold Bloom, the two most influential twentieth-century writers on the subject of influence. Their books, Bate’s The Burden of the Past and the English Poet and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, are almost the exact same length (Bloom’s about 15 pages longer at 151 pages) and came out at almost the same time (Bate’s three years earlier, in 1971), and both tackle the same vital problem: how does a writer grapple with the great legacy of the past, that is, how do modern artists create original work when crushed under the weight of all that has come before? Both books distill a lifetime of thought about this dilemma. And both reach almost completely opposite conclusions.
Or so it seems at first. To vastly oversimplify, Bate’s might be called the healthy theory of influence, Bloom’s the sick. While I have never met Bloom, I knew Bate when I was his student and, briefly, his friend, and remember how he often spoke and wrote of the life of Keats as an example of how influence can be incorporated and overcome. Even at the beginning of his brief career, Keats had an awareness that poetry was a fallen art that might never again reach the heights of Shakespeare and Milton, but rather than being paralyzed by this fact, in the way his contemporary Coleridge was, Keats proceeded by briskly, and somewhat naively, tacking up a picture of Shakespeare on the wall and looking to the past greats for solace, guidance, and inspiration. According to Bate, it is by honestly facing up to great predecessors—“a direct and frank turning to the great”—and engaging in a dialogue with them that we overcome the burden of the past, and begin to create something new. Obviously it isn’t as simple as pinning a picture to the wall, but the hope is that by involving oneself in a discussion with writers who came before, a kind of talking to ghosts, one might eventually begin to establish one’s own identity, while simultaneously steeling oneself against the whims of the present. In Burden’s rousing conclusion Bate suggests that what is required is a deep honesty and a “personal rediscovery of the past,” as well as “boldness of spirit,” a boldness that “involves directly facing up to what we admire and then trying to be like it.” As simple as this might sound, it is also radical in a time when the concept of originality is overprized. Bate writes: “None of us, as Goethe says, is very ‘original’ anyway; one gets most of what he attains in his short life from others.” Why should literature be so different from any other human endeavor, sports, say, or carpentry, where we naturally learn from those who came before? Isn’t it always through others that we begin to define and become ourselves? Bate, who seemed to swallow Samuel Johnson whole while writing his great biography of the man, shared Johnson’s impatience with cant. He values common sense and clarity, while looking at literature with a refreshingly nonliterary briskness. At one point he even invokes that old-fashioned term free will, suggesting that artists, far from being deterministic puppets, can make their way consciously.
With Bloom things grow murkier. The word anxiety in the title seems understated, and the path to great originality is a troubled and sinuous one as the artist swerves, twists, and rebels against the past. For Bloom, in fact, the struggle with literary predecessors is oedipal, if not biblical, and the only way the artist emerges is bloody and wounded. Rather than an engagement in Bate’s open-air dialogue with past greats, what Keats called “immortal freemasonry,” the interaction with the past is semiconscious, almost primordial, and new ground is found only by misrepresenting those who came before. These predecessors must be cut down to size, misinterpreted, and used to define oneself against, so that the artist can have some air of his own to breathe and the necessary space to make something new and great. Overall, poetic influence is “more a blight than a blessing.” Bloom does acknowledge that “generosity of spirit” can be a part of influence, but then quickly adds: “But our easy idealism is out of place here. Where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker; the more generosity, and the more mutual it is, the poorer the poets involved.” And then he gets to the crux of it:
Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence . . . is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.
In other words, it isn’t enough to kill the father. You also need to make him look bad.
Of course one can’t help but wonder if Bloom himself, whose book after all followed Bate’s, didn’t write under the influence of anxiety. Bloom addresses Bate’s work directly in his book, but is quick to point out their differences, specifically the fact that while Bate’s own thinking was influenced by Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Bloom himself owes more to Nietzsche and Emerson. This is a neat little twist: Bate’s “healthy” criticism evolves from the work of the darker, more “anxious” thinkers while Bloom’s darker picture leans on the two great anxiety-denying idealists.
I’m aware that in this short space I’m at the point of caricaturing both men, reducing Bate’s subtle and nuanced thesis to a kind of self-help book for blocked poets, and turning Bloom into a critical Ayn Rand who portrays murderous überpoets emerging from the muck. But in one way at least the two men conform to these caricatures. There is an open-air clarity to Bate’s sentences, and as a writer he can take the most complex, and seemingly academic, thought and translate it into plain English. Of influence’s anxiety he writes: “To reduce that taboo to size, to get out of this self-created prison, to heal or overcome this needless self-division, has been the single greatest problem for modern art.” There it is: a large concept put simply. Meanwhile there are times when reading a Bloomian sentence is like being dropped into a dark thicket where, if you are lucky enough to emerge at all, you still have no idea where you are. The only thing you can be sure of is that this is the opaque language of the deep academy, and that if you are merely an intelligent layman you will have to read these twisting sentences at least two or three times to parse them.
My own last sentence may make it seem that I find Bloom insufferable and that if I were the referee of this theoretical heavyweight brawl, I would hold up Bate’s arm in victory. And it’s true that I need to admit to an obvious prejudice toward my old teacher, who died in 1999. But the fact is that while I sometimes find Bloom’s sentences hard to read, I also find them well worth reading. Though I’m hardly a Keats or Coleridge, I, like any writer, have some firsthand experience with the anxiety of influence. As a young essayist, perhaps more under the sway of Bate’s thinking than I cared to admit, I tacked up sketches of Thoreau and Montaigne over my desk. Corny, yes, but I believed then, and still believe now, that one of the greatest solaces and inspirations of a life of literature is the fact that we can talk to ghosts and that they, through their work, can talk back. As I have grown older, however, I can’t help but think that sometimes having all these ghosts around is downright creepy, and every once in a while I feel the need to take a broom and sweep them out like so many cobwebs. Bate, echoing Johnson, declared that honesty is the “first” virtue, without which other virtues are impossible, and if I am completely honest I need to admit that while Bloom’s take on influence may be less pleasant, it sometimes seems a truer mirror of my own experience. While I have enjoyed having a dialogue with writers from the past, sometimes that dialogue has included swearing and kicking, and even some blood, in an attempt to break free of the stultifying parental grasp of predecessors.
Fortunately, since this isn’t really a bout or joust or battle, no victor need be declared. Better that the two men, or rather their thinking, continue to represent two polestars as we try to orient ourselves within the always-confusing and never-clear subject of influence. The truth is that, wandering those paths old and new, we can use any help we can get. And as we try to find our way, it may pay to remember that we are always defining ourselves both by and against those who came before.
—David Gessner
Read more of his thoughts on writing at Cocktail Hour.
