The Organ

AdamSmith · January 16, 2020

2 hours ago, MsAnn said:

Fascinating...So much to absorb. "I should have stayed in school longer."

Again, simply: he taught me how to think.

’There is no method but oneself.’

AdamSmith · January 18, 2020

On 1/16/2020 at 6:43 AM, MsAnn said:

Interesting putting this speech into historical context...1991..."We just finished a war in the Middle East". What will we say about this moment in time?

All the best...

He was, again, an anthropology major at Wheaton College.

He knows the score.

AdamSmith · January 18, 2020

On 1/16/2020 at 6:03 AM, MsAnn said:

Fascinating...So much to absorb. "I should have stayed in school longer."

Are we not in school until when they send us to the funeral home?

RA1 · January 18, 2020

10 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Are we not in school until when they send us to the funeral home?

I have always thought so.

Best regards,

RA1

lookin · January 18, 2020

16 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Are we not in school until when they send us to the funeral home?

And perhaps with one more recess to look forward to. :rolleyes:

Edited January 18, 2020 by lookin

AdamSmith · January 19, 2020

6 hours ago, lookin said:

And perhaps with one more recess to look forward to.

Use of that key word shall be taken under advisement.

AdamSmith · January 20, 2020

On 1/18/2020 at 4:48 PM, lookin said:

And perhaps with one more recess to look forward to.

‘Earn’ -> ‘Urn.’

:rolleyes:

lookin · January 20, 2020

4 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

‘Earn’ -> ‘Urn.’

He entered the contest emboldened and proud

And he gave it no less than his best

Yet he earned the support of just half of the crowd

While he urned the support of the rest

AdamSmith · January 22, 2020

On 1/20/2020 at 3:00 PM, lookin said:

He entered the contest emboldened and proud

And he gave it no less than his best

Yet he earned the support of just half of the crowd

While he urned the support of the rest

Note relation between urn & urinal...

AdamSmith · January 25, 2020

Very oddly prescient...

AdamSmith · January 25, 2020

AdamSmith · January 26, 2020

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/159759/harold-bloom-peter-cole

AdamSmith · January 26, 2020

HAROLD BLOOM IS GOD

A conversation about literature, Judaism, and the Almighty with the great Yale literary critic

By David Mikics

January 2, 2013 • 7:00 AM

In the summer of 2002, the agile Dominican superstar Alfonso Soriano became the first New York Yankee in history to notch 30 home runs and 30 stolen bases in a single season. Soriano broke another record that year: He was the first Yankee to strike out 157 times in a season. Asked to explain his habitual wild swings, Soriano produced a great line: “You don’t get out of the Dominica by taking pitches.” In New Haven, the world’s most famous literary critic, Harold Bloom, murmured his approval of Soriano’s statement to friends. Bloom has been a Yankees fan since he was a kid growing up in the impoverished, heavily Jewish East Bronx of the 1930s, and so he applied Soriano’s adage to himself: “You don’t get out of the East Bronx by taking pitches.”

Indeed, Bloom has had his share of furious swings; at 82, he’s as much a firebrand as he ever was. A year ago, he attacked Mitt Romney in the New York Times as the standard-bearer of a money-hungry oligarchy known as the Mormon Church. Twenty years before, Bloom made many Mormon friends by praising Mormon founder Joseph Smith as a “religious genius” in his lively, remarkable book The American Religion—and Bloom had come now to defend the man against an institution that he believed had betrayed him. Romney, Bloom wrote, hoped to preside over his own planet after death, “separate from the earth and nation where he now dwells”: His faith promised him “a final ascension to godhead.”

Bloom was born in 1930, son of a Yiddish-speaking family that would lose dozens of relatives in the Holocaust. Yiddish was Bloom’s first language, and he had the usual Jewish education at the prompting of his observant mother, but he resisted traditional study from the beginning. “I haven’t got a Talmud at all,” he told me. “If there were such a thing as a Talmudic Orpheus, I might qualify as that, but otherwise, no; Kabbalah, rather.” Normative Judaism, Bloom continued, is “a peculiarly strong misreading of the Tanakh done in order to meet the needs of a Jewish people in Palestine under occupation by the Romans. What it has to do with 2012, search me … it’s a fossil.” Yet Bloom also disagrees with Irving Howe’s famous assessment that, with Yiddish largely dead, Jewishness now means either religion or Israel. “I didn’t believe that and I still don’t, not that I can tell you what [Jewishness] is—it’s undefinable.”

Though Bloom has always stressed the central fact of his Jewishness, it has always been blended with his deep sense of Romantic imagination. By the age of 10, Bloom says, he was already deserting the Talmud for Hart Crane. Since then, he has followed the radical leanings of British Romantics like Blake and Shelley, poets Bloom, more than anyone, helped return to the literary pantheon. Behind Blake and Shelley are the Hebrew prophets, who are determined to explode rotten conventions and pious hypocrisies. In his 40s, Bloom discovered Kabbalah and become close friends with Gershom Scholem; later on, he professed his belief in the ancient sect of Gnosticism, which has attracted many Jews. His love for the intimacy that occurs between a serious reader and a life-giving book comes from Romanticism but also, as he knows, from the Jewish insistence on clinging to every word, every nuance, of the Torah.

This summer, I had lunch with Bloom in his comfortable, book-cluttered New Haven home so we could talk about his long career as America’s most ardent reader of literature, the man who takes books more personally than anyone else. (I was Bloom’s student when I was in graduate school at Yale in the mid-1980s, for a course in post-Romantic Victorian prose.) We were soon interrupted by a phone call from a polite, slightly befuddled BBC reporter. The reporter asked Bloom for an on-air interview about Gore Vidal, who had died that day. Bloom swiftly agreed; Vidal was a dear friend. The voice of the BBC interviewer echoed on the other end of the line. “Something so sepulchral for such a lively fellow—a forked tongue,” Bloom muttered. Then Jonathan Spence, the eminent scholar of China and another longtime friend, called to thank Bloom for a birthday gift, a volume by the poet Keith Douglas, who was tragically killed in World War II. Spence agreed that Douglas’ poetry is just as affecting as Bloom had told him it was. (“I’m absolutely lost in these poems,” Spence told him.) Then a former student, the poet Martha Serpas, called from Oregon. Bloom had put in a request for Copper River salmon, but, Serpas said, it was “not available fresh in our area.” All around, the voices of friends enfolded Bloom.

***

The whirlwind character of Bloom’s everyday existence is the first thing a visitor notices; it’s hard to imagine how he produces his mountain of written prose, given the constant stream of visitors and phone calls. This is even more true in New York, where Bloom and his wife keep an apartment that they visit every month or so. Afternoons in New York are lively affairs, with friends constantly dropping in: writers, artists, musicians, old students. Bloom’s curiosity about everyone he meets, his sheer openness, testifies to the enormous value he places on personality. “You should hear him talk to a cabdriver,” one of Bloom’s ex-students told me. Bloom thrives on personal contact, and his conversation is full of affectionate verbal squeezes: His Yale colleague Geoffrey Hartman, like Bloom a pioneering critic of Romanticism, is the “Ayatollah Hartmeini”; John Ashbery, the poet, is always “the noble Ashbery.” Every male under 60 is addressed as “young man”; every woman, of whatever age, as “my dear.” “Kinderlach,” Bloom will say to a group of middle-aged friends, with genuine, surprised tenderness, “you astonish me always.”

As he warmed up for our interview, Bloom asked to try my frappuccino. “Give me a taste,” he asked playfully. “Perhaps it will do the old Bloom good.” Then he wanted a sip—just a sip—of Amontillado. Opera played in the background. (Bloom’s wife Jeanne is an opera buff.) Jeanne, at the other end of the table, scanning the news on her laptop, gruffly reported, “Republican compares birth control to Pearl Harbor.” (Bloom, a lifelong man of the left, said he voted for Norman Thomas.)

I asked Bloom whether the tussles of the Talmudic rabbis had any influence on him: whether their mazelike discussions presaged his idea of literary history as a fierce argument among authors. The answer was an unequivocal no. “I was a natural-born Gnostic and early on identified with a figure who is reviled in the Talmud, Elisha ben Abuya—the acher, the stranger.” Gnosticism, the age-old heresy that Bloom has embraced as his personal religion, takes to an extreme the prophetic protest against the injustice of the world. The Gnostic sees the divine as a spark within the self: a radiant imagination buried under the rock of everyday existence. This secret power rebels against the pitiless realm of fact that seems to rule our lives, the world of “schizophrenia and death camps,” as Bloom put it in Omens of Millennium. In it, he shows that Gnosticism doesn’t have to be a turning away from humanity; Bloom’s appetite for friendship certainly testifies to that.

In his youth, Bloom remembers, he felt out of place, the clumsy outsider. At the Bronx High School of Science, which he disliked (“horrible place”), Bloom finished near the bottom of his class. Then came Cornell, and his encounter with M.H. Abrams, the Romantics scholar who recently turned 100. “I was a freshman of 17. Mike was 35,” Bloom remembered. “I was very shy and awkward and tongue-tied; he made me feel at home, sweet man.” Abrams was one of the rare Jewish English professors in the Ivy League; he immediately recognized flashes of genius in Bloom. In a tribute written for Bloom’s 80th birthday, Abrams remembered that, “As a student, Harold was diffident, low-voiced … and prodigious. He read a book almost as fast as he could turn its pages, and seemed to have read everything.” Since that time, Abrams continued, Bloom has become not only “an endlessly exciting scholar and critic, but also a personage on the intellectual stage of the world,” with a resounding public voice.

Bloom went on from Cornell to graduate school at Yale, which at the time was home to a thread of anti-Semitism. “They were all down on their knees blessing the vicar of neo-Christianity, T.S. Eliot,” Bloom shuddered, as he recalled the Yale professors, “a sort of Eliotic nightmare. But you know, a young fellow, still a rough yiddishe boy from the Bronx, and a proletarian too, arriving at the Yale English Department in the autumn of 1951, was not exactly what they wanted, and I certainly didn’t want them.” But Bloom found a few outstanding teachers, especially Frederick Pottle, the brilliant Shelley scholar, who proved instrumental in Bloom’s hiring at Yale. “Pottle forced my appointment as a faculty instructor on his colleagues who didn’t want me, and they tried to get rid of me constantly, for the next seven years,” Bloom remembered. Bloom was finally tenured, in a reportedly very close vote; it was rumored that, during the deliberations, the charge of anti-Semitism was leveled against certain committee members.

In the mid-1960s, Bloom lived through a cataclysmic midlife crisis. For months, he was stricken with insomnia and unable to read. What saved him, when he could read again, was Emerson, the inescapable American Romantic thinker. Emerson is the apostle of the self that, no matter how severe the blows of fate it suffers, returns to its own light and recovers its strength. The pessimistic angel with whom Emerson competes for Bloom’s soul is Sigmund Freud, the 20th century’s far darker believer in fundamentally ironic lives: We do not—we cannot—know the truth about what we’re doing, Freud insists. Whether we are daring or cautious in our loves, these loves cannot sufficiently transform us. Every bout of eros leads us back to the parents whom we first struggled with, and who always win the battle. From this point on, Bloom became locked between Freud and Emerson in agonized, fruitful tension.

Bloom’s midlife crisis was followed by his most famous book, The Anxiety of Influence, which he wrote in a few days in the summer of 1967. The book is dense, dark, and rather infested with homemade jargon, but it shines with Bloom’s new discovery: that writers, when they create new work, always misread their precursors. In order to be original, to become who they are, they find themselves compelled to deny their literary ancestors’ true significance. The insight is a Freudian one, as Bloom knew: Earlier authors are like the parents that their children must falsify and rebel against.

The original parent, of course, is the Jewish God, who for Bloom is the strangest and most absolute literary character of them all. This God—turbulent, impatient, demanding—comes too close to the self, and such intimacy is dangerous. God nearly murders Moses and asks for the life of Abraham’s beloved Isaac as well. Later Jewish tradition retreated from the sublimely unpredictable God of Genesis and Exodus when it invented a law-abiding, compassionate deity, but the earlier vision, in its unrivaled potency, remains more memorable. The earliest strand of the Bible has at its center a God of uncanny strength, an astounding, and potentially lethal, personality, and Bloom remains magnetically drawn to this provoking, more-than-human figure.

In The Book of J, Bloom’s first foray into biblical criticism, published in 1990, he dropped a bombshell. He speculated—no, he asserted—that the first author of the Hebrew Bible, known by scholars as the J writer, was a learned woman at the court of King Solomon. It was a spectacular, and utterly ungrounded, fantasy, but it propelled Bloom’s Book of J onto the best-seller list.

Behind the strict superego that Moses called down on his stiff-necked Israelites is a far weirder deity, Bloom suggested, less a reality principle than a fantastic imaginative power. In The Book of J, the biblical scholar and critic Herbert Marks told me, Bloom sees the Jewish God as “a willful urchin,” in a way that is “at once demystified and magically compelling. No previous interpreter, religious or secular, ever caught that note. It took Bloom’s unique combination of sensitivity and chutzpah,” Marks concluded, to remake our sense of the Bible in this daring, cheeky manner. Bloom may not be the most scholarly reader of the Tanakh, but he is one of the most deeply, even shockingly, intuitive.

***

Bloom approaches all books the way he approaches the Bible: He likes to burrow rapidly through the words on the page, because he needs to find the stance of the soul that speaks the words. David Bromwich, who studied with Bloom in the 1970s and is now a vital critic in his own right, remembered that when Bloom taught a poem, he liked to get inside it the way an actor gets inside a role. (I remembered him this way, too.) Bloom would arrive to class 10 or 20 minutes early and then sit chatting with students and feverishly turning the pages of whatever book they were to discuss that day, Ruskin or Ashbery or Oscar Wilde. He reminded one friend of Paddington Bear; others noticed a resemblance to Zero Mostel or Alastair Sim. When Bloom taught, he rhapsodized; when we interrupted his touching and often funny monologues, he always knew right away what we meant and never broke his verbal stride. In his well-worn longshoreman’s sweater, clutching his chest with one hand, sparse hair flying, he found hidden places in the text, imaginative secrets he had been brooding over, it seemed, for years. Emerson instructs us to “read for the lustres,” and Bloom did just that.

Being a Jew becomes for Bloom an emblem of the lone self, brooding powerfully over its status as wanderer and outcast.

Bloom has taught in Israel, though not for many years. He told me that, when he lectured in Jerusalem in 1960, he kicked a 44-year-old Moshe Dayan out of his class. (Dayan, instead of paying attention, was flirting with a girl.) He esteems Israeli writers, especially David Grossman. But his truer love is for Yiddish rather than Hebrew literature. “The first literature I really appreciated was Yiddish literature,” Bloom said. “The first secular poets I really cared for were Moishe Leib Halpern, Yankev Glatshteyn, Mani Leib, H. Leivick.” Halpern, he said, was “the best of them; the Yiddish Baudelaire, as he was called.” As Yiddish culture waned, Bloom came to praise the works of Jews writing in English, especially Philip Roth, whom he has called our greatest living novelist. He seems particularly moved by Roth’s rebellious creativity, so passionate in its scorn for all that is wholesome and acceptable, including mainstream Judaism. Yet Roth, too, is unalterably Jewish. Being a Jew, a fact so hard to describe, so hidden and so crucial, becomes for Bloom an emblem of the lone self, brooding powerfully over its status as wanderer and outcast—and warring against all conventions, all the false promises that society makes.

Some of Bloom’s finest reflections have been on the loneliness of literary heroes, who he believes have something to tell us about our own loneliness. It is solitary reading alone that can save us; so Bloom announces. Solitude isolates us, but it also opens us up. In a recent book, The Anatomy of Influence, Bloom turns to a series of texts about remarkable loners: the gospel of Mark (with its Jewish hero); Don Quixote; Hamlet. Bloom invokes “Mark’s amazingly enigmatic Jesus, who is unsure who he is and keeps asking his thick-headed disciples, ‘But who or what do people say I am?’ Don Quixote in contrast says he knows exactly who and what he is and who he may be if he chooses.” Bloom adds that Hamlet doesn’t want to know who he is (does he fear he might be Claudius’ son?) and knows what he doesn’t want to be (a stage avenger drenched in blood).

So the mind races: We suddenly compare Mark’s Jesus to Quixote to Hamlet. Bloom’s rapid-fire illuminations take us from Romanticism to religion and back again. The critic has rescued us from drab, conventional existence. The fame- and money-centered dreams we think will satisfy us; the complacent trust in worldly status; the institutional solidarity of trend-spotting professors: All this finds its antidote in Bloom’s restless, abundant habits of reading. Bloom’s continued relevance is that he is still our most inspirational critic, still the man who can enlighten us by telling us to read as if our lives depended on it: Because, he insists, they do.

***

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/120455/harold-bloom-is-god

AdamSmith · January 26, 2020

The swan songs of Harold Bloom

The great Jewish thinkers, poets, novelists, and critics of the second half of the 20th century are—at least they tell us so—dying, and if we are loath to believe them, it must have something to do with how many last rounds these guys manage to put on the Reaper’s tab. Turning last last acts into marathons, they write as though, by drawing it all out, one might, in the end, foil the End.

When Tony Judt—NYU eminence, mordant historian of 20th-century Europe, essayist, polemicist, and bête noire of Bibi-lovers—died earlier this year, and died young at only 62, those readers anticipating the next installment of Judt’s swan song in the New York Review of Books had a right to feel a correction was in order. The Lou Gehrig’s disease that was so terribly locking Judt’s body down had also loosed from his pen the tender story of an East End Augie March, a young south London teenager whose travels though socialist Zionism and Oxbridge anti-Semitism kept unearthing ever newer and fresher troves of insight until, suddenly, they, stopped. It was an especially gutsy game of chicken with death Judt played, as he marshalled the power of his own writing to condense and sustain his life. By immersing himself, and us, in this great river of final words, Judt the polemicist and sophisticate seemed to rinse himself down to his own immaculate soul, to present himself as he really was: boy, pupil, mensch, Jew, as if the urbane New York Review of Books was his own makeshift mikveh.

There is a pattern in the way our 20th-century lions are doing their last acts, some getting a jump on death, beginning early; some doing it often, replaying death again and again. Who ever imagined when Philip Roth began killing off his alter egos around 25 years ago that he’d still be at it today? Who’d have thought Nathan Zuckerman and his compeers would still be dying in so many interesting works, and not just dying but emerging from each death refreshed and more classic of mien?

This spring at YIVO, at the Center for Jewish History in New York, I heard Roth read what he described as his favorite section from his last book, Nemesis. This is the section in which Bucky Cantor, playground cynosure and diving-board god, teaches his young admiring charges to throw the javelin. In this passage, and in the book overall, the narrative voice is cleaned of all experience, all knowingness, all irony. Bucky’s beautiful quintessentially American vitality is instead delivered through the voice of one who—even though he’s actually seen the hero brought down, shamed, crippled, and embittered—still tells Bucky’s story as if it might come out differently. In his muscled youthful beauty, in his earnestness, in his civic probity and sweet, gentlemanly sexuality, Bucky stands for that American innocence and pluck that thinks—and for no good reason—that it can beat its nemesis. The gee-whiz 1950s ingenuousness of the narrator’s voice is only, Roth demonstrates, a more extreme version of every reader’s own. An author may begin, as Roth did, as far back as the 1980s, to drop the curtain on our striving, horny, earnest Buckys and Zuckys; he may tell us in titles, in book jackets, 10 miles high and in primary colors, year after year, of the nemesis that visits every man. We are dying animals, Roth shouts: All our complaints, all our indignations are, in the end, so much diddling puppetry. Yet no matter how many times it happens, death is always a surprise ending. Whether that nemesis comes on a Korea battlefield or in a pool swimming with polio, whether it comes via heart disease or long-gone Mr. Portnoy’s crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, the only thing more immortal than death is our denial of it. Which also happens to be the grounding of all art.

Whatever one thinks of Harold Bloom’s latest book as a work of literary criticism, it is one of our most robust examples of the swan song as victory lap, high fives all around. Bloom may call The Anatomy of Influence his summa, may regard this book as his capstone address to the “loneliness, fear and dying” that comprise our human condition. But in fact, Bloom’s final address to the abyss is, like Roth’s many Zuckerman tales, the very same one he began in 1973. The Anatomy of Influence is the Anxiety of Influence—minus the anxiety part, and with all the edge filed off the old fear. Not even Bloom could be expected to muster much mortal angst amid so teeming a visionary company as his Anatomy convenes.

Back in the day, of course, the fire-eating critic of the Yale School’s heyday had been finality’s champion. Never one to settle for Keats’ easeful death, Bloom had preferred his deaths more dialectical and their results more zero sum. Bloom’s heroes were Oedipally girded literati who scorched earth, superseding forebears with their great originality and proving themselves in feats of Agon. In Bloom’s earlier work, a poet really had to fall upon the thorns of life and bleed for his immortality. And his critic too, had better come armed for bear.

Bloom’s literary training explains at least some of his extremism. Given his grounding in English and then American Romanticism, given his lifelong wanderings through some of the more glimmering corridors of Jewish mystical thought, and—not least—given his lifelong passion for Shakespearean tragedy, it is natural he should have offered a theory of poetic achievement rife with titanic clashes, with sundry struggles to the death and magnificent wrestling matches. Jacob and Yahweh! Sophocles and Freud! In this corner, the biblical author, J; in that corner, the Elohist! Is Stevens strong as Emerson? Will Blake vanquish Milton? Such were the questions settled on Bloom’s dynamic, glorious battlefield of literary inheritance.

All the more interesting, then, that Bloom’s most recently issued version of his theory not only excises the “anxiety” from his own earlier title and also the “melancholy” from Burton’s (whose Anatomy of Melancholy he names an inspiration), but in this late work Bloom clearly lets the more equable and latitudinarian influence of his own teacher Northrop Frye (author of The Anatomy of Criticism) influence him. The process of poetic transmission that once resembled gladiatorial combat works in Bloom’s writing, as it once worked in Frye’s, by a much more forgiving and even golden set of rules.

Frye had allowed that the highest, the deepest, the biggest forms might have been tragic drama and Christian allegory: forms in which death called the shots. But one could have been forgiven for not thinking of these too much, distracted by the vast and idiosyncratic literary history Frye elaborated: his great garrulous city of themes and types and modes and myths, of genres and theories and legends and lore, of comedies and tragedies, of biology and teleology and anthropology and of mimesis high and mimesis low and every flavor of mimesis between. Every chapter of Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism was dotted with new coinages in italics, and, in theory anyway (and this was Theory, after all, that Frye ushered in), the pieces were all interlockable, assemblable and reassemblable, like Lego. One never knew whether Frye was right, but he was very fun to play.

Harold Bloom was not fun to play, and now he is, despite the fact that it’s still the same “death, fear and loneliness” on the board. Under Frye’s influence, in the Anatomy of Influence, the once ferocious scene of Agon, or intense intellectual and psychic struggle, now has much more the feel of a meet-and-greet, a great big party with an open bar, more alumni mixer or Reform bar mitzvah than cosmic contest. Imagine, say, that the once severe and exclusive canon had been thrown open to the full list of 761 (and counting) writers Bloom has, over the last 25 years, treated in the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views and Modern Critical Interpretations series he edits. And thrown open too—why not?—to their wives and partners, old students and old friends, dead poets and living poets and to the strangers too. Everyone is there milling around with their drinks, winning friends and—well, we might say, influencing people.

What a scene! Subtract Agon, make mortality your E-ZPass and not your punishment, and something magical happens. Artists once extolled for being fiercely singular and individual can show their softer side, exposing affinities and swapping resemblances no one ever recognized. Yes, Hart Crane, that poet of “memorable pain,” may once have contended mightily with Shelley, “a Lucretian poet of pleasures so difficult they seem painful to most humans.” And yes, D.H. Lawrence may at this late date look to be “fighting free” of Whitman. But in the same way that Gershom Scholem had handily settled the latter contretemps by pronouncing Whitman a “Lawrentian kabbalist” (freeing Bloom himself to pronounce Lawrence’s “New Heaven and Earth” the “best Whitman Walt never composed”); and in the same way that Isaac Babel, and Kafka, have shown us how much better off we’d have been with a “Yiddisher Satan”: In just this fashion, why shouldn’t Shelley and Browning, and, for that matter, the “fiercely extreme” Emerson and Coleridge, split their differences too? Not only Bloom, but his great friend David Bromwich, and even Bart Giammatti (“late friend, president of Yale and commissioner of baseball”), think Emerson and Coleridge should, at this point, take one for the team. After all, no one, not even Shakespeare, is above learning something new from a strong precursor.

In the end, the atmosphere of the Anatomy of Influence is so chill that you’ll find Amy Clampitt angling to get a few words in with Shakespeare. No reason to think she wouldn’t succeed but for how the Bard’s a bit busy, having been tapped to help Harold with retirement planning, a matter that, broached in the introduction to the Anatomy sets the book on a warm, life-affirming course. One might want to ask whether strong poets, agonists, really do retirement planning? The answer is, it turns out, that when given the chance, yes they do. And as for rigor: whatever. One has to like it when talents monumental and less monumental, James Joyce and Anthony Burgess, for instance, join forces in one volume to weigh in on the implicit question of what they’d have done with lifetime tenure at Yale (great students, great dental).

To all such questions let us say: Ad Meah V’Esrim! May you prove, Harold Bloom, like Bucky on his diving board, like Tony in his column, deathless, encore after encore. May your last act last and last.

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/82707/last-acts

Elisa New is the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard.

AdamSmith · January 28, 2020

AdamSmith · January 28, 2020

AdamSmith · January 28, 2020

AdamSmith · January 29, 2020

Dark Shadows: "The Old House"
TARRYTOWN, NY

Postcard: " 'Veruselle' Residence of Russell Hopkins, Irvington, N.Y."

This house should be familiar to fans of the 1960s vampire soap opera Dark Shadows, for it appeared in the television series as "The Old House." The mansion, which had been vacant for about seven or eight years by the late 1960s TV shoots, was used for exterior photography (although several images of Jonathan Frid, in his role as Barnabas Collins, inside the mansion are known to exist as well, but were not used on the show). This mansion likely came to the attention of the casting crew owing to the fact that a more famous house, Lyndhurst, stood next door (Lyndhurst served as Collinwood for both movie versions of Dark Shadows).

The South End of Tarrytown, by virtue of its location 25 miles north of Manhattan, contained one of the greatest concentrations of estates along the Hudson River. Washington Irving, who penned "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and other famous tales, settled here in 1835. Irving remodeled a colonial stone tenant farmhouse into his Romanticized version of an early Dutch mansion. His neighborhood became quite crowded after 1850, when the Hudson River Rail Road enabled merchant millionaires to commute from home to New York City in under an hour; mansions sprouted seemingly overnight on the shore overlooking the Tappan Zee. A great number of homes were built in the 1850s and 1860s, but by he 1880s many homes fell into disuse owing to high maintenance costs or because their owners chose newly fashionable locales such as Newport, RI, for the summer retreats. The area went through a bit of a revival in the early 1900s, as more modern mansions replaced the older stone or brick houses.

"Duchess de Talleyrand, Lyndhurst, residence in Irvington, New York. Cottage, river facade." 1943 Oct. 9.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Reproduction Number LC-G613-T-44127 DLC.

One of the first merchants to build here around 1850 was Moses Hicks Grinnell, a one-time United States representative, real estate developer, merchant, and financier. His high society connections extended beyond business; in 1836 Grinnell married Julia Irving, niece of the famous author Washington Irving. It was immediately north of Irving's "Sunnyisde" that Grinnell settled in the early 1850s. For himself, he built a mansion known as "Wolfert's Dell;" about the same time or shortly thereafter, he built a second mansion, similar in appearance to his own, on the northern portion of his 38-acre estate. In the 1850s, Grinnell's niece, Mary Russell Grinnell, resided in the northerly mansion with her husband Henry Holdredge.

The historical path of the two houses diverged and converged in the later part of the 1800s. at times, they were part of one estate, at others separated. On occasion, the northerly house was part of the Lyndhurst estate. In 1907, both houses came into ownership of Russell Hopkins, son of a prominent Atlanta banker, and his wife Vera Siegrist, granddaughter of Dr. Joseph J. Lawrence, along with Jordan Wheat Lambert, invented Listerine in 1879. The now famous mouthwash, originally intended as a disinfectant for surgical procedures, was named after English physician Sir Joseph Lister who, according to this website, performed the first ever antiseptic surgery in 1865.

"Duchess de Talleyrand, Lyndhurst, residence in Irvington, New York. Cottage entrance, view II." 1943 Oct. 9.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection. Reproduction NumberLC-G612-T-44126 DLC.

    The earliest known good depictions of the "Old House" are postcards and newspaper articles from the Hopkins-era. The columned porch was likely added to the house by the Hopkinses or the owners just before them. It was fashionable at this time to remodel the older dark Victorian homes then seen as out of taste. Large columned porches became a trendy ideal on some of the old Hudson River homes in this area. The Hopkinses renamed the estate Veruselle (Vera + Russell) while giving the name "The Colonnades" to the northerly mansion and "The Arcades" to Wolfert's Dell, the former Grinnell mansion. The Hopkinses are best remembered in this area for the large menagerie they kept on the estate.

    An article in the Atlanta Constitution from August 8, 1908 stated that "Mr. and Mrs. Russell Hopkins and Mrs. J. R. Hopkins are at home this summer at 'The Arcades.'" Who the n lived in the Colonnades? Another family member? Or was it rented to a friend? Or did the Hopkinses enjoy both homes?

    Russell Hopkins died in 1919 and Vera passed away in 1928. Their children seemed disinterested in the property and the southerly portion fell into receivership in the early 1940s. The abandoned Wolfert's Dell/Arcades mansion burned in 1963 and its ruins were demolished in 1978. The Colonnades fared better for a little while longer however. In the 1930s, the property belonged to stockbroker William R. Spratt; often times the northerly mansion has been referred to as "The Spratt House." Eventually Anna Gould, Duchess de Tallyrand, owner of Lyndhurst and daughter of robber baron Jay Gould, acquired the Colonnades portion of what had been the Hopkins estate. Her bodyguard, famous detective Raymond C. Schindler, lived in the columned mansion until his death in 1959. Two years later Anna Gould died; Lyndhurst eventually became a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is now a historic house museum. The Colonnades/Old House sat vacant in the 1960s while the land was eyed for residential development (ultimately not ever constructed). The mansion burned in 1969 and only remnants of its foundation remain.

    Westchester County now owns the land upon which once stood "the Old House." In due time, the landscape may be restored and opened to the public as a passive-recreation park linking Sunnyside, a property of Historic Hudson Valley, on the south, and Lyndhurst, on the north. The grounds of "The Old House" are not yet open to the public.

    *(For those not familiar with the area, the location of the house indeed is within the limits of the village of Tarrytown. Many early twentieth-century postcards of Lyndhurst, Sunnyside, and other homes in the area identify the locale as "Irvington," the next village to the south, but this neighborhood was included in the Village of Tarrytown upon its incorporation in 1870.)

"Duchess de Talleyrand, Lyndhurst, residence in Irvington, New York. Cottage entrance, view I." 1943 Oct. 9.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Reproduction Number LC-G612-T-44125 DLC.
(This view shows the east facade of the house.)

The Colonnades, as it appeared in the 1960s when it was abandoned.

Wolfert's Dell, the Grinnell Mansion (later known as The Arcades.) Circa 1850-1852.
Sketch by Edwin Whitefield from "The Hudson River and Rail road illustrated."
This illustration depicts the way "The Old House / Colonnades" may originally have appeared.

Real estate advertisement, 1927.

Mansion, south facade and south fountain. Another early 1900s postcard.

View from similar perspective as above postcard; photograph taken December 31, 2006.

Inside the basement of the garage.

Inscribed in the basement floor of the garage.

Large tree near the Hudson River, possibly over two-hundred years old.