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Posted October 15, 2003
Apparently, everybody likes lists. At least, enthusiasts love lists. Most people who love reading, for instance, cherish their own list of favorite books, favorite poems, favorite short stories, favorite novels. They may not actually write them all down on paper, but they do have their list ever-ready to trot out at any appropriate (and even inappropriate) situation for the edification of family, friends, colleagues, and enemies.
I'm at one with the herd on this. I have my list of favorite novels, for instance. I will happily mention this or that favorite at a moment's notice, and will even try to defend some of them by using the word Great,
though I know how distressing it can be to actually make put sense into that word. It is not easy to justify one's loves and hates; it's a lot easier simply to make do with an ordering of our preferences. The making of all Greatest
lists is problematic.
The trouble can easily be seen by contemplating any one example. Consider the most recent, the one recently offered by The Observer, which Robert McCrum arranges approximately in the order in which the novels were published, not in (the usual) order of importance:
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I haven't counted how many (or, more accurately, how few) of these putatively great novels I've read; instead, I'll list just a few novels that impressed me more than quite a few on McCrum's list, in no particular order:
Quite an odd list, too, eh?
Of course the real flaw of The Observer list is indicated by the later books in my little addendum. Only one book per author! Why? The list concocter felt he had to choose between Pride and Prejudice and Emma, when surely both books are better than anything Hemingway wrote in the longer form. I prefer the novels of Huxley, Calvino, and Woolf that are on my list to those on The Observer's. Lists such as these, if they are to include only one masterpiece per master, should be titled 100 Great Novels by the 100 Greatest Novelists, or somesuch.
It is not only hard to make a greatest novels
list, it's hard to make a best of
list for one author. I listed four Iris Murdoch novels. Which one is best? Why not include The Black Prince? These five are very, very different, which is astounding because Murdoch's method is so very her own, and her novels often seem (like those of Nabokov and Cabell) to blur together in one's memory....
And Daniel Deronda???? OK, I haven't read it. Tried. Some day I will no doubt try again. But Middlemarch is the standard critical choice these days, and Silas Marner is the one that used to be prescribed to high school students, and for good reason: it is concise, at least by Victorian standards. And it is very, very good. It is very moving. In short, it's a classic. I'd put it on my Top 100 List, at least in priority over those books of George Eliot's that I've tried to read but couldn't stick with (like The Mill on the Floss, a title so appealing that I've given the book many a start; no finish so far).
Quite a few of the books on the current Observer list strike me as deeply flawed. Take The Picture of Dorian Gray. Yes, it is beautifully written. Yes, it is complex enough to inspire controversy. But I'm afraid I can name five novels by F. Marion Crawford — whom almost no one in the world would put on the list — as being much, much better: better conceived, better organized, more emotionally satisfying. Wilde's book did not move me in the least, other than to form many bemused smiles. I read the book recently, and judged it the construction of a deeply conflicted mind, but too politic a mind to allow his inner conflicts to improve the story. It reads, to me, like a lesser Nabokov novel: flashy, fun, brilliant, put-downable. Wilde, like Hemingway and James Joyce as well as most of the good science fiction writers (such as Thomas Disch) is really best in the short form. (The inclusion of a Hemingway short story collection on the list is risible, of course. Shorts stories are not novels; they are, as Ambrose Bierce argued, usually much better than novels, but that's for another list and another argument.) When I wish to read Wilde, I'll read the fairy tales, or the plays, or the delicious Critic as Artist.
And it would be fun to argue at great length about some of the earlier masterpieces. Robinson Crusoe does not hold up all that well, though I say this having read every single word of it. I simply don't want to read it again. You'd have to pay me to read that thing again, pay me a lot of money. I'd much rather read Smollett (who's not on the list).
Then there are the close calls
; I enjoyed Frankenstein, but really, there are dozens of novels by living authors better conceived, constructed, and written; surely it's here because of historical significance, not because it is truly a great novel. When constructing lists, the historian often trumps the aesthetician.
I'm certainly not the only critic of such lists. The editors of the list explain themselves, and try to justify what they've done, recognizing how easy it is to criticize their selections. Here's one argument from their strange apologia:
Time is a ruthless critic. Books that 50 years ago seemed essential have already dwindled in significance. Virtually nothing survives from 1903. After the Twenties, and after the watershed of Modernism, there are decades when many of the books we considered seemed to be scarcely more than footnotes to the works of Joyce and Woolf.
Time is a haphazard critic. The liquidation of early-20th-century reputations by the modernists is mainly a function of academic dynamics. Modernists are more fun to write about and teach to students than are better novelists, such as Bennett at his best. Not surprisingly, these pre-modernist writers now strike college graduates as curiously out of date. Well, think of the Academy as a huge sieve: some of the huge chunks they find and keep for eternal inspection are truly great, but a hundred human things slip through their critical mesh, like water. And thus literature becomes something different from what most people wish actually to read. Tough gristle has replaced the common nourishing soup.
OK, that's an overstatement, but the bad influence of academic traditions on the reading and writing of fiction is still with us. The biggest casualty are the good books prior to James Joyce. (I say this even though I admire and occasionally read snatches of the world's greatest nonsense prose poem, Finnegans Wake.) Or perhaps the biggest casualty is the mass of readers who abandon all literary standards and make do with any mystery or sf novel at hand. As Gore Vidal has astutely pointed out, there is a great chasm between the U novel (University novel, the kind preferred by college professors) and the P novel (the Public novel, the kind the public prefers generally to read). The average P novel might be better if the modal model U novel wasn't so relentlessly overpraised.
Of course, the few instances of children's and fantastic literature on The Observer list seem to belie this. Perhaps. But as delightful as Lewis Carroll may be, is his great little book really better than Titus Groan? Is it a better novel? (For that matter, is Tolkien's book better? I mean, really?)
A few years ago there was much brouhaha about The Daily Telegraph's 1899 Best Novel list. It's hard to find much evidence for this hubbub, now, on the Web (links have broken, lists have gone down, pages have vanished...) — but at least one page remains, and remains interesting. Of particular interest to me, the editor discusses the problem of the mannered stylists. He notes that some styles just don't last: Who reads Meredith now? (I do.) Who will, in the future, read Nabokov? (People like me.) Sometimes I tire of people who can happily include Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner on such lists and then blanch at elegant stylists like Cabell or Meredith or Nabokov. Or Nicholson Baker, today's best prose writer. (Let's place The Fermata on our list! Who could complain!)
On the other end of the spectrum are the novelists who deliberately romance us, without any extravagant stylistic flourishes or quirks. I mentioned F. Marion Crawford, above. One of my projects is to read everything he published. It is an enjoyable project, far more enjoyable than, say, a similar project with George Eliot or (egads) Sir Walter Scott. Crawford was a popular 19th century American-born novelist whose work used to be included on lists like the one The Observer published. The usual entry of his listed? Mr. Isaacs — as on The Daily Telegraph honor roll — his first book. I've often pondered the inclusion of that book, and the exclusion of the much better novels he wrote in the 20 years following. A Tale of a Lonely Parish, Khaled, Saracinesca, Sant' Ilario, Don Orsino, and even Marzio's Crucifix are each much, much better than his first novel. And lesser works, like The Three Fates and The Witch of Prague also please me more than do many of the classics listed by The Observer. I'd like to say that this is simply a result of the truth in the maxim de gustibus non est disputandum, but there's something else at work here.
It's the economics of list-concoction. How do you choose representative
works by writers you want to include? You have a scarce means (100 placements) and a huge wealth of books and authors to cram into the list. Well, Crawford dazzled a lot of readers with his first book. And he dazzled even more with the books that followed. But there were so many of them! How to decide, when you can only in good conscience
give one novel to this particular novelist? Let's pick the first one! We all liked it, didn't we?
Goofy reasoning, but of such reasoning lists are made. Frankly, in making my lists, I usually go with the one I've read the most times, or most want to read again. In Crawford's case that would be A Tale of a Lonely Parish or the Saracinesca trilogy. But if I feel impish, I might just list the one that would most annoy other list-makers. I'd then choose The Witch of Prague and let the sparks fly. What a weird book! (Besides, each list needs at least one oddball choice, just to stir up the readers.) But whatever I'd choose, it would not be Mr. Isaacs, which is poorly organized and is marred by a silly ending.
Or perhaps the book is just dated.
Time, whether ruthless or merely haphazard, affects the judgments of every critic, every reader. And not always for the best.
And if all critics and readers are in thrall to fashion, then here's the real lesson of these lists: aesthetics does not provide the sure standards that science or even sports has for making good lists. And so the best lists are the personal ones.
Mr. McCrum's Observer list doesn't seem quite personal enough to be praiseworthy. It looks more like a weird set of compromises with different philosophies. And I'm sure I echo many a reader's sentiment when confronted with such lists: Very interesting, but I'm not in school any longer, and I'll read what I want.
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