“Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds”, by Harold Bloom

814 pages, Warner Books, ISBN-13: 978-0446527170

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds is the culmination of Harold Bloom’s – American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University – more than 60 years of attentive reading of an exhaustive array of works. Such a broad and all-encompassing topic necessitates an author with the erudition of Bloom that very few people have had throughout history, let alone now when such vapid distractions are so readily available. Only someone that has read and reread the Western Cannon many times over could make some of the brilliant connections that Bloom makes in Genius; of course, it helps that he was a freakishly-fast reader: during his prime he could go through an impressive 1000 pages in one hour! While not being a fast as Bloom (damnit), I still went through these 800+ pages faster than I would have thought possible. Prof. Bloom makes his case for the genius of each of the individuals in Genius in such a compelling and seductive way that I couldn’t wait to finish reading it and get my hands on the masterpieces he recommends (although his choices and organization left me bewildered, as you’ll see below). Bloom’s views of genius are tied to different concepts:

• The idea of originality, a creative and unexplained spark shared by many authors in the book that can’t be easily explained or dismissed by social factors
• How the genius of the author affects its work and, most importantly, the reverse: how the work influences the life of the genius
• The struggle to surpass, transcend and continue the work of previous genius (and in some cases genius yet to come)

This last point is something that has been thoroughly covered by Bloom on his previous books, what he calls the “Anxiety of Influence”. The central thesis is that writers become hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintain with their precursors. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience, Bloom argues that one is inspired to write by reading the work of others and will tend to produce work that is in danger of being derivative and, therefore, weak. Thus, having established his game plan, Bloom can, as himself a strong precursor, offer judgments and interpretations that are intended to astonish his followers – or ephebes as he insists on calling them, which is a Greek word for adolescent males (careful, Prof.: those snowflakes you teach at Yale won’t like such a male-exclusive term). Genius is described as “a mosaic of genius” and consists of essays on 100 authors who in one way or another fit Bloom’s scheme of literary genius. While many of these essays have something to say, some are little more than confident, self-regarding chatter: a tendency to bombast coexists with a kind of benign naughtiness (for instance, the characters of Iris Murdoch “derive more from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan than from George Eliot’s Middlemarch”. That’s just what I thought!).

Good stuff, to be sure, but there were a few problems with this book. I find his explanation for why he would have chosen these one hundred authors to write about rather peculiar: he says that he didn’t choose these because they are the top one hundred in his or anyone else’s judgement, but that he wrote about them because he “…wanted to write about these”. Huh, well, okay then; what a brilliant explanation from someone who can write pages about what one character said to another on page 143 of a particular book. I also found the organization of the book to be…weird (now, bear with me here): these hundred unique figures are organized using the Sefirot as a guiding source. What in the hell is the Sefirot, you ask? Okay: it’s the 10 attributes or emanations in Kabbalah, through which Ein Sof (The Infinite) reveals Himself and continuously creates both the physical realm and the chain of higher metaphysical realms, these being: Keter (Crown), Chochmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed (Kindness), Gevurah (Severity), Tiferet (Beauty), Netzach (Eternity), Hod (Splendor), Yesod (Foundation), Malchut (Kingship); thus, the 10 geniuses to be found grouped within each of these categories possess qualities, according to Bloom, supposed to be reflected in the chapters so classed. Hold on now, there’s more: each of these 10 sections is further divided into two Lustres, each containing five authors; thus Keter, the first Sefirot, has Shakespeare, Cervantes, Montaigne, Milton and Tolstoy in its first Lustre, and Lucretius, Virgil, Augustine, Dante and Chaucer in its second: Chochmah, the second Sefirot, contains Jahvist, Socrates, Plato, Paul and Muhammad in the first group, and Johnson, Boswell, Goethe, Freud and Thomas Mann in the second. Most readers will presumably see that these divisions and groupings are little more than Bloom showing off, for they seem to serve no other purpose (I certainly did).

In order to make up for these quirks, I have invented a fun (if not humiliating) game to play with friends: open Genius to a random page and read one sentence out loud, and the first person to guess correctly whom the sentence is discussing gets a point, or a drink, or a gold star, or…whatever, all of which makes Bloom’s book sound rather comical and merely a toy to be used during party games. It is an intense book and you’ll find yourself following an endless and exhausting maze of leads, references, languages and whatnot, all in the hopes of learning just a bit more about some of the thinkers showcased here. You may not read it cover to cover, and that’s OK; it’s a book to be savored and slightly scared of at the same time.

“Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia”, by Hugo Mager

418 pages, Carroll & Graf, ISBN-13: 978-0786705092

So just who is the woman that Hugo Mager writes about in Elizabeth: Grand Duchess of Russia? I mean, just how many of these damn royals can there be, anyhow? Well, I’ll tell ya: she was Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine, later Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia (and still later canonized as Holy Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna), the daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, the wife of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, the fifth son of Emperor Alexander II of Russia and Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine (she was also a maternal great-aunt of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and the consort of Queen Elizabeth II). Right. Got it? I’ve been reading about the intertwining of 19^th Century royals for a long time, and was really happy to get this book, since it’s about a woman who has been dealt with only peripherally in other books about her famous relatives – alas, this book could have so much more than what it is, for it seems to be merely gleanings from other biographies and never really reveals much about the Grand Duchess. There is no detail here, no confirmations, only the author’s suspect suppositions. With the Grand Duchess Elizabeth being one of the more fascinating characters in the Romanov tragedy (in my humble opinion), one would hope to find a much more involved biography. Mager has an irritatingly smug writing style, no feel for his subject and a way of making sweeping generalizations about which he knows nothing (oh, and I was much irritated by the indifferent grammar and typos with which the book is littered). Sadly, even after reading a biography dedicated to her, the saintly princess keeps her secrets still.

“The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle”, by Anthony Read

984 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393048001

As the Götterdämmerung for Hitler’s Germany approached in April 1945, the surviving members of Der Führer’s inner circle of bureaucrats and lickspittles were still competing for his favor and conspiring, each in his own furtive way, to succeed him – although why anyone aspired to preside over the ruins he had wrought is less a mystery after reading Anthony Read’s The Devil’s Disciples: Hitler’s Inner Circle. From the unpromising beginnings of Nazism in the 1920s, ambitious misfits gathered around Hitler, whose demagogic genius in exploiting the humiliation of WWI’s defeat seemed likely to propel him to power. Each was, in Read’s words, “totally besotted” with Hitler and “bitterly jealous” of his attention to others. Not all survived the Darwinian struggle for favor and succession: Ernst Röhm was murdered by fellow Nazis; Rudolf Hess took a solo flight to captivity; Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated. But three of the original disciples – Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler – all remained to the end, competing for power even when, with defeat imminent, the prize had lost all possible value. Four latecomers also hung on for dubious glory: foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; chief architect and war production genius Albert Speer; Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann; and Admiral Karl Dönitz, whom no one expected to be anointed Hitler’s successor. That the internecine rivalries persisted beyond the end suggests the warped minds of Hitler’s crew of bureaucratic criminals. Despite his penchant for cliché – ahem: “the ripest of plums suddenly dropped into the Nazis’ laps, completely out of the blue” – Read tells the story of two decades of assiduous jockeying for power in luridly absorbing if overwhelming detail.

As somebody once pointed out – okay, you got me, it was Bertolt Brecht – the prominent figures in the Nazi elite were like the members of a street gang whose leader was Hitler. No one was allowed to get in his way and, by and large, the members accepted this, with anyone who rebelled being thrown into the gutter. The most notable of these was the head of the Sturmabteilung, Ernst Röhm, who aspired to put himself and the SA in the engine-house of the German military apparatus. For Hitler, this was one radical move too far, and in 1934 he ordered the Nacht der langen Messer (Röhm was offered the chance to commit suicide, but when he refused, he was shot). While Read gathers much information about these hopped-up hooligans together between covers, there really is nothing new here; it has all been written about before. There were parts of the book – portions regarding the Battle of Stalingrad, for example – where it felt as if I had read it all, exactly as is, before. Also, I question how thoroughly Read investigated the secondary sources he relies so heavily upon, as there is a lot of hearsay in the book and the retelling of anecdotes that may or not be true, such as the story of Himmler’s attic with no mention that some of these conversations and incidents have been questioned by historians. Yet, Read presents them all as unquestioned fact (I understand that this is essentially a popular history and perhaps not the place for that sort of debate). Not a bad book, really, just not an original one, but well worth the read if you are new to the Nazi upper echelons.

“There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II”, by Geoffrey Perret

623 pages, Random House, ISBN-13: 978-0394578316

There’s a War to Be Won: The United States Army in World War II was one fun book to read; author Geoffrey Perret’s wit shines throughout and makes his work entertaining as well as informative. Perret’s purpose is to give a broad overview of the development and growth of the United States Army during the 30’s and 40’s, as well as its remarkable combat performance during the war. It is an amazing story, considering that in the late 1930’s the army consisted of 100,000 poorly equipped soldiers led by superannuated generals and junior officers who had little hope of promotion past the rank of captain during a normal army career. As well as entertaining and informative, it is also well-written. The structure is conceptual, although this works out to being accidently chronological. The parts of the book that are not stories of the battles but instead tell the behind-the-scenes of Army practice are the best: in these we get to see the Army develop under the watchful farsighted eye of Marshall, the book’s true hero. Perret does the best job I have ever read on how the Army stepped back and looked at war as a whole, and when you see just how much innovation took place in the inter-war period, you see how easily we could have lost WWII without it.

The book is run on biography, like all good history. We get to see the personalities behind the events and, in spite of himself, Perret surely has his favorites: Marshall, Truscott, Frederick, Bradley and Ridgway can do no wrong, while MacArthur, Montgomery and Brooke can do no right, and Eisenhower, Patton, Churchill and Roosevelt come in the middle (can’t say as I disagree with his pronouncements, though). The biographies are the first inkling of the big flaw in this book, as Perret is too much a cheerleader for the Army. Compare how he writes about the replacement depot and how Stephen Ambrose writes about them in Citizen Soldiers. The difference is night and day: Perret glosses over flaws, Ambrose is honest about them. It is so blatantly obvious that Perret wants to say that the Army did most everything right, and only when it’s impossible to hide the flaws will he grudgingly admit to them. For all of that, There’s a War to Be Won has instantly become one of my favorite works of history: it takes a fresh approach to the American history history and, instead of repeating the same tired old facts over and over again, explores new areas of behind-the-scenes history and the key decision-making that made the American Army the war-winning machine it eventually became. This work is more about how to design and build a winning army than the war itself, and fills many previous gaps in my knowledge of the war, which is all you can ask for in a history.