Those of us who didn’t care for Bloom’s ruminations on the decline and fall of western civilization were done a great favor by Bloom’s famous friend Saul Bellow, whose novella Ravelstein told us all the things about Bloom that Bloom’s admirers would prefer that we not know—particularly his fondness for young Asian lads. Ferguson, who definitely does admire Bloom, is honest enough to reproduce all the warts that Bellow so eagerly supplied.* Like so many academics,† Bloom was compulsively oral—constantly smoking, eating, drinking, and talking. Ferguson tells us—via Bellow, I guess—that hostesses used to spread newspapers under Bloom’s chair at dinner parties, to catch the debris. The topper, of course, is that Bloom died of AIDS, the scourge identified by so many right-wingers as the ultimate symbol of divine judgment on modern decadence.
It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for Bloom at Cornell in the plague years, when students basically demanded to be rewarded for smashing things, and in fact were rewarded. The willed helplessness of college administrators was pitiful and revolting to see. But twenty-five years later, are things so terrible? To the embarrassment of the right, American colleges and universities are easily the most prestigious in the world. I doubt if the pre-affirmative action classes at Cornell could compare with today’s fierce competitors. Today’s academy is full of nonsense—for example, the continuing bane of political correctness that is the academy’s consolation for its failure to control the real world—but students don’t seem to be much corrupted. If the humanities have been dethroned, it’s because they haven’t kept pace.
Afterwords
What I find particularly funny about Bloom is that he was a great admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, surely the godfather of all modernism, and one of the most condemned thinkers in history. Bloom translated Emile, Rousseau’s famous treatise on education, claiming that it had never been properly translated into English before and saying that it was the greatest treatise on education since Plato’s Republic. He did the same for the Republic as well, apparently on the grounds that previous translations weren’t gay enough.
*In James Atlas’ excellent biography of Bellow, which tells us as much about him as Bellow told us about Bloom, Atlas says that Bellow’s first draft was even more lurid than the published version. Bellow, who hated “the Sixties” as much as Bloom did, seemed to relish giving the left-wing prudes who dominated the academy an in-your-face portrait of unabashed elitist self-indulgence.
†Yes, it is wrong to generalize, but when it comes to academics, I don’t mind being unfair.
