The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IT SEEMS STRANGE TO ME to be writing about Blood Meridian on July 17, 2018. I speak to Cormac McCarthy on the phone; we have exchanged a few letters and sent each other books. In three days McCarthy will turn eighty-five, just a few days after I touched eighty-eight. I know little about his personal life, except that three marriages ended in divorce and he has two sons, born thirty-six years apart. He does his writing at the Santa Fe Institute, surrounded by scientists, whom he finds more congenial than literary folk.

I last wrote about Blood Meridian in 2000, about a decade after I first got to the end of it. Robert Penn Warren and Ralph Ellison had recommended it to me, but my early attempts to read it found me flinching at its incredible and incessant violence. It took a while, but I learned to read it by rereading. McCarthy accurately says, "Books are made out of books," and Blood Meridian is quarried from many masterpieces in the Western tradition: the King James Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, in particular. There are many others, including the mystics Jacob Boehme and Meister Eckhart.