Bloom, Allan. Love and Friendship (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1993) 590 pp.
“Souls Without Longing” was Allan Bloom’s own title for his Closing of the American Mind. “Souls Without Eros,” eros of any kind, he might have titled it, for in it Bloom described vividly the unerotic students at of the elite schools to which his teaching was limited, their equally unerotic mentors whose specialized activity and general indifference set American Academe adrift, and the spirited Nietzsche, whose thoughts, first inevitably degraded by lesser men and now abused by celebrity nihilists, have rendered both students and teachers unerotic. The current book is the positive to that negative. It could have been titled Souls With Longing, and it could have been subtitled: Me Too.
As he lay dying, Allan Bloom dictated this fruit of his many years teaching, some together with Saul Bellow. Its style is more the man than any of his other books: the man who loved talking, who loved to stick it to a fat opinion, who was filled with cackles, and the cause of many in others. Off this jester, this living cafe, this American Egon Friedell, this excitable Montaigne, with no tower and only a small arriérre boutique, with a lust for cities, especially Paris, and in touch-tone with a world of students and friends, ATT made a monthly fortune. “Hell is not other people, it is not being able to get in touch with them by phone,” Bloom might have quipped. By discovering where students are really at and by getting in touch with their parents in the Closing, Bloom fell into a counter-fortune, enough to pay off his debts and keep his desires from ever slimming.
Bloom was a poetic man. He enjoyed anecdotes, tales, stories, especially comic ones; he could tell them; and they happened to him. After his Closing, he went on the lecture circuit, met a lot of flack, and did a lot of bombing, not always in return. He made his theme, “How I have been treated since the book,” significant and funny. One evening, after dinner with the local professors, descending from the Rockies, suddenly in the fading sunlight, three intrepid deer appeared beside the road. Peering at them, the urbane Bloom ventured “Do you think, if I got out, they would attack me?” This provided an opening. Leaning forward, patting Allan on the shoulder, his fellow guest, Stanley Rosen, stage-whispered, “No, no, Allan, they haven’t read your book.” Bloom was a Falstaff who could make any one, willing or unwilling, his partner, either giving them the best line, or making them his straight man. During his life Bloom appeared in four novels. In how many countries yet unborn will he be acted over?
That Bloom was an erotic man comes out best in this his last book. He loved to teach, to be the human cause of a young soul discovering the activity for which it is most made, and then to keep in touch. Love and Friendship will make no fortune; itis for students; in it his students will meet him once again; it will strengthen the bonds among them; and it will add new ones to their fraternity. Still, although Bloom was an erotic man, one wonders if he was one in the highest sense he knew, a philosopher, which he did not claim to be. (Of course, while so many profess to, a real one wouldn’t.). Bloom was surely an advocate of eros, and also a student of it. In this book Bloom presents three accounts of it that we must make our own in order to understand ourselves: Rousseau’s, Shakespeare’s, and Plato’s.
According to Bloom, Rousseau is the source of our dearest opinions and thus our passions, in part through the novelists he taught and Bloom studies (Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy). All, even contented Austen and discontented Flaubert, encourage the extravagant hope of romantic love. Shakespeare, who was not taught by Rousseau, is superior. Not seeking to edify (like Rousseau), he does. And here Bloom discovers new ground. What he found in his earlier studies of Shakespeare was pretty much what he thought he had already found in Machiavelli, and approved of, especially anti-theological ire. Thus in Shakespeare’s Politics (1964) that penetrating despiser of opinion and hater of the good, Iago, came out smelling more like a rose than frail Desdemona. Not so here. In confronting Shakespeare’s comedies and hailing in them the witty, chaste lasses who lead men to marriage and the intelligent women (such as Paulina) who reform them, Bloom casts aside his old opinions. Here as never before he recognizes Shakespeare’s elevated and yet prudent understanding of marriage, acknowledges the Christian basis of Shakespeare’s account of love, and declares the aweful superiority of Shakespeare himself. “The result of this latest reading of Shakespeare for me is the renewed conviction that there is nothing I think or feel, whether high or low, that he has not thought or felt, as well as expressed, better than I have. This is a personal affront because one likes to think that one possesses a uniqueness and special worth that no one else can grasp.” (p. 397) Despite the inextinguishable amour-propre, or maybe because it is surmounted in being acknowledged, there is no other such looking up, except perhaps to Leo Strauss, in all Bloom’s writing. To look up is, however, not to follow. Shakespeare in interpreting Christianity had to study it, had to read the Bible, confront Christ, and consider how human things looked to the Creator. This Shakespeare, Bloom does not follow. Nor, perhaps the love in his own title. Friendship seems to him the obstacle. Does the love Christ speaks of, for example to the reading group at Emmaus, really cast out friendship? Any more than Aristotle does at the end of the Ethics? Montaigne, on friendship and on his friend La Boétie, whom Bloom passes to after Shakespeare, seems to say so, and to advocate an exalted union of equal minds and same bodies. “Because it was he, because it was I.” The final portion of Bloom’s book is devoted to Plato, to the Symposium, to the accounts of eros those ancient sippers give, and to the embracing, elevating, and self-knowing eros Diotima taught Socrates, of which he is the ever shining, ever elusive example.
Upon first reading Bloom’s book, one is filled with questions. What should one think of erotic unions, of marriage, of friendship, and of philosophy? And what does Bloom think? Is there a coherent understanding of love, or even eros, here? Or is the book just parts seeking a whole: part Rousseau, part Shakespeare, part Montaigne, and part Plato? (Did the man cohere? Or was he like a martini, a layer from Kojève, a layer from Strauss, and an olive floating up from a Midwest youth?)
One thing is clear on first reading: the book is very much worth rereading. It would be hard to find a better thing for a group of friends to read together than the books Bloom studies, with him as a witty participant, also with his remarkable student, David Bolotin, on the Lysis, with C. S. Lewis on the Four Loves, Gilbert Meilaender on Friendship, and Denis de Rougement on Love in the Western World, which Bloom, to his credit, recognizes as a worthy rival. Among the several differences between these rivals and Bloom is that he is more aware of the connection between such reading groups and friendship, indeed presciently aware of the possibility, should present sophisticated barbarism continue, that such things as love and reading, will pass from the human scene without a sigh. Against that cold interment Bloom beams protests hot enough to knock the shovels from the grave diggers’ hands, and, if such protests fail, here are songs to resurrect the dead. Really, the book is Bloom’s Symposium, with all his parts praising the various eroses he felt, and above all the eros he felt for Socrates, his Diotima. This book, Bloom’s Symposium, was also his Phaedo.—
Dr. Michael Platt University of Wyoming
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