We had arrived the night before and the next morning I went to Harold's room to collect him for breakfast. Harold and I were once teaching at Santa Cruz. 'there are so many groupies it's unbelievable. 'He has an enormous appeal to the young,' says Kermode. He sometimes joyfully refers to himself as 'Bloomstaff'.Д¬orrespondingly, readers and students either find him deeply addictive or deeply resistible. His heroes are similarly proportioned - Falstaff, Dr Johnson, Chesterton - and like those men he prefers his own battered truths to other people's preferred errors. It will be a large bag: his physical and temperamental presence is outsized. I taught most of them.' But he loves teaching, and has told the current president of Yale that he intends to be carried out of his last class in a bodybag. They are what he has called 'the School of Resentment. In interviews, and in his books, he wages war against nearly all other American academic critics, accusing them of being Marxists, deconstructionists, feminists, and haters of literature.

'The vitality is quite natural and unaffected, and thus has a kind of self-deprecating self-confidence.' He has taught at Yale University continuously since 1955, where he is celebrated and adored (though he likes to complain that he is envied and despised). 'What makes Harold seem at times absurd is also the secret of his great talents,' says Sir Frank kermode, a friend and occasional colleague. That is the cost of combustion, and it is always combustion that interests us. But his weak books seem just the gases emitted by a natural and overwhelming energy. The Book Of J asserted, for instance, and with no evidence at all, that much of Genesis, Exodus and Numbers was written by a woman. Undoubtedly, this busyness has produced some hurried, repetitive, speculative and even facile work. There is a voracity, here: it is as if Bloom has kidnapped the whole of English literature and released his hostages one by one, over a lifetime, on his own spirited terms. In addition, he has edited and written separate introductions for over 500 books in the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views series, which cover novelists and poets over the span of English literature. Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human (Fourth Estate) his marvellous new book, is his 23rd, an output that began in 1959 with Shelley's Mythmaking, and has included works on Blake, on Yeats, on the early book of the Hebrew Bible (The Book Of J), on American millennial religions (Omens Of Millennium) and indeed the whole of Western literature (The Western Canon). That personality blows itself through his criticism, and its velocity can be felt on every page he writes. Some of Bloom's reputation, which is larger in America than in Britain, has to do with his extraordinary pedagogic personality, and a myth of genius that engulfs him in a golden cloud. Like Derrida, he is Jewish, and was born four days before him on July 11, 1930. Like Derrida, whom he resembles more than he would like, he has an indexical intelligence, a deep-seated if complicated Freudianism, and is the formulator of a critical concept that has passed into the language, 'the anxiety of influence'. Harold Bloom is the leading literary critic of our time and the only one in English whose influence and originality can rival that of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher.

Harold bloom henry iv part 1