Love and Friendship.

Platt, Michael

Bloom, Allan. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 590 pp. Cloth, $25.00; paper, $15.00--"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 typical 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 more spirited than erotic Nietzsche, whose thoughts, first inevitably degraded by lesser men and now abused by celebrity nihilists, have contributed to both unerotic students and unerotic teachers. The current book is the positive to that negative. It could have been entitled Souls With Longing. And it could have been subtitled: Me Too.

As he lay dying, Allan Bloom dictated this book, the 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 some fat opinion, who was filled with cackles, and the cause of many in others. Off this American Egon Friedell, off this excitable Montaigne, with no tower and only an arriere boutique, with a lust for cities, especially Paris, and in touch-tone with the world, 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 so his desires would never starve. 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. One evening, after dinner with the local professors, descending from the mountains, 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, Stanley Rosen stage-whispered, "No, no, Allan, they haven't read your book." Bloom was a Falstaff who could make everyone into a straight Hal. During his life Bloom appeared in four novels. Who knows in how many states and tongues yet unborn he will be acted over.

Bloom was an erotic man, and it comes out best in this his last book. He loved to teach; he loved to be the cause of a young soul discovering the activity for which it is most made, and then to keep in touch. Love and Friendship is for students; it will strengthen the bonds among them; it will make no fortune. Still, although Bloom was an erotic man, one wonders if he was one in the highest sense he knew, a philosopher. Then again he did not claim to be. (Of course, when so many profess to, a real one wouldn't.) Bloom was surely an advocate of ergs, and also a student of it. In this book Bloom presents three accounts of it that we must make our own, so that we may understand ourselves: Rousseau's, Shakespeare's, and Plato's.

According to Bloom, Rousseau is our teacher, the source of our opinions and thus our passions, and also the teacher of the novelists Bloom studies (Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy). All, even happy Austen and bitter Flaubert, encourage romantic love to hope extravagantly. Shakespeare, who was not taught by Rousseau, is superior. Not seeking to edify, he does. Here Bloom discovers new ground. What he found in his earlier studies of Shakespeare, in Shakespeare's Politics, was pretty much what he thought he had already found in Machiavelli, and approved of, especially anti-theological ire. Thus that penetrating despiser of opinion and hater of the good, Iago, came out, in Bloom's reading, smelling more like a rose than frail Desdemona. Not so here. In confronting Shakespeare's comedies and hailing in them the witty, intelligent, chaste lasses and women who lead the men to marriage, Bloom casts aside his received opinions. Here as never before he also acknowledges the Christian basis of Shakespeare's account of love, the elevated and yet prudent understanding of marriage, and also the awful 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. That Shakespeare in interpreting Christianity had to study it, had to read the Bible and think about Christ, Bloom knows, but he does not, in this book, go so far as to do so himself, although love in his title calls for it. This is a disappointment. Does the love Christ speaks of, for example to the reading group at Emmaus, cast out friendship? Montaigne, on friendship and on his friend La Boetie, whom Bloom passes to after Shakespeare, seems to say so, and to advocate an exalted union of equal minds and same bodies. The final portion of the 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 this 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 ergs, 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 Kojeve, a layer from Strauss, and an olive floating up from a youth in the Midwest.?) It is hard to say on first reading.

One thing is clear: the book is very much worth rereading, indeed study. 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 David Bolotin on the Lysis, C. S. Lewis on the Four Loves, Meilaender's Friendship, and Denis de Rougement and the books he studies in his 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 of such reading groups and friendship, and 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 digger's 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, above all for Socrates, his Diotima. This, his Symposium, was also his Phaedo.