Archaic.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever teach from notes? Or do you prefer to improvise?

BLOOM

I have never made a note in my life. How could I? I have internalized the text. I externalized it in different ways at different times. We cannot step even once in the same river. We cannot step even once in the same text.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of creative-writing workshops?

BLOOM

I suppose that they do more good than harm, and yet it baffles me. Writing seems to me so much an art of solitude. Criticism is a teachable art, but like every art it too finally depends upon an inherent or implicit gift. I remember remarking somewhere in something I wrote that I gave up going to the Modern Language Association some years ago because the idea of a convention of twenty-five or thirty thousand critics is every bit as hilarious as the idea of going to a convention of twenty-five thousand poets or novelists. There aren’t twenty-five thousand critics. I frequently wonder if there are five critics alive at any one time. The extent to which the art of fiction or the art of poetry is teachable is a more complex problem. Historically, we know how poets become poets and fiction writers become fiction writers—they read. They read their predecessors and they learn what is to be learned. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that the word processor has had or is having any effect on the study of literature?

BLOOM

There cannot be a human being who has fewer thoughts on the whole question of word processing than I do. I’ve never even seen a word processor. I am hopelessly archaic.

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps you see an effect on students’ papers then?

BLOOM

But for me the typewriter hasn’t even been invented yet, so how can I speak to this matter? I protest! A man who has never learned to type is not going to be able to add anything to this debate. As far as I’m concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they’re called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.

INTERVIEWER

And someone else edits?

BLOOM

No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise much?

BLOOM

Sometimes, but not often.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a particular time of day when you like to write?

BLOOM

There isn’t one for me. I write in desperation. I write because the pressures are so great, and I am simply so far past a deadline that I must turn out something.

INTERVIEWER

So you don’t espouse a particular work ethic on a daily basis?

BLOOM

No, no. I lead a disordered and hurried life.

INTERVIEWER

Are there days when you do not work at all?

BLOOM

Yes, alas, alas, alas. But one always thinks about literature. I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic. I’ve spent my life proclaiming that what is called “critical objectivity” is a farce. It is deep subjectivity which has to be achieved, which is difficult, whereas objectivity is cheap.

INTERVIEWER

What is it that you think keeps you from writing when you’re unable to write?

BLOOM
Despair, exhaustion. There are long periods when I cannot write at all. Long, long periods, sometimes lasting many years. Sometimes one just has to lie fallow. And also, you know, interests change. One goes into such different modes.

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