Friendship yields bounty for St. Michael's College; a 30-year friendship brings a small Catholic college in Vermont the library of literary maven Harold Bloom

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 31, 2003 by Claire Schaeffer-Duffy

Shortly after this heavenly appeal, Reiss was accepted to the Yale seminar. His attendance marked the beginning of a nearly 30-year friendship, maintained primarily through correspondence, with Bloom answering one out of every two or three letters received.

"I would write about the books he was publishing or about family life or argue about something he wrote," Reiss said. "Montaigne, Cervantes, Chaucer, I believe they are more Catholic than Harold likes to think." The two argued often about religion, a quarrel both described as amicable.

"I am not Catholic," Bloom said. "I am Jewish and John Reiss and I don't see eye to eye on spiritual matters, but we agree to disagree in a friendly kind of way,"

He stayed with the Reiss family twice when he came up to lecture at St. Michael's. In 1998, the college gave him an honorary degree.

Reiss described the Yale professor as a "sad and weary" man who immediately became enlivened once he began teaching. He seemed particularly sensitive to the Reiss children and after one visit wrote the following in a letter to the family: "I take away a vision of strength, since to have held on to each other, and to all the children, and to good will, kindness, dignity and intellect is to have accomplished prodigies."

Bloom's own children, David and Daniel, suffer from mental illnesses. In a letter to Reiss dated February 1999 in which he first broached the subject of giving his library to St. Michael's, he wrote of his worsening health and his concerns for his son: "Our major sorrow is David whose profound depression only begins to lighten under prolonged treatment." Attorneys advised Bloom to give his collection to an institution of higher learning to avoid encumbering his sons with a hefty estate tax.

Yale and Cornell, Bloom's alma mater, expressed interest in his rare books but considered much of his collection to be redundant to their enormous libraries.

Bloom said he realized that what he needed was a small college, an institution where his collection "would make a real difference to graduate education." He thought of St. Michael's because of his friendship with Reiss and Nathaniel Lewis, an English professor at the college and son of Bloom's close friend, the late W.R.B. Lewis.

"St. Michael's is a very good liberal arts college which happens to be Catholic," Bloom said. "It hasn't yielded to any of the commodity fetishes that have marred so much of so-called higher education in the English speaking world. They still teach the great writers there. They teach Milton; they teach Chaucer; they teach Walt Whitman."

But Bloom's generous offer languished for several years because St. Michael's lacked the funds for a new library to accommodate the immense collection. Last spring, an anonymous donor gave the college $5 million in honor of its former president, Edmundite Fr. Gerald E. Dupont, and all members of the Society of St. Edmund. The monetary gift is enough to begin construction on the Dupont Library, which will stand adjacent to the Durick library. The new building is designed to be a box within a box--in the interior, a rectangular climate-controlled facility for the Bloom archives, surrounded by the Bloom Reading Room and office space for visiting scholars. The college hopes to eventually build a corridor between Dupont and Durick to house Bloom's art collection.