The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

I AGE, I feel increasingly under the influence of the great philologist Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956). I had hoped to meet him in Rome in 1955, but the timing did not work. We talked on the phone and may have exchanged letters. His extraordinary book, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948, translated 1953 by Willard Trask), has been reread by me so often that I have worn out three copies.

Curtius demonstrates that European literature is a continuous tradition from Homer to Goethe, and then becomes something else. For Curtius, the true touchstones are Dante and Shakespeare. One could argue that Wordsworth ended a tradition and inaugurated another, which is still very much with us. Thomas Mann (1875–1955), despite his endless (and sometimes wearisome) ironies, attempted to get back to Goethe. His agon with Goethe was loving though ambivalent. From his essay "Goethe and Tolstoy" (1922) through his remarkable triad of Goethe essays in the 1930s (on the man of letters, the "representative of the Bourgeois Age," and Faust) on to the "Fantasy on Goethe" of the 1950s, Mann never wearied of reimagining his great original. The finest of these reimaginings, the novel Lotte in Weimar, was published in Stockholm in 1939. We know it in English as The Beloved Returns, and it is surely the most neglected of Mann's major fictions. Mann is renowned as the author of The Magic Mountain, the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers,