'One of the Literary Vices of the Time'

Nothing is easier than ranking literary works according to some unstated and entirely subjective set of standards. This accounts for the profusion of book lists. Let’s be clear: such lists sometimes have merit and often are entertaining. I read them not so much because the list-maker carries authority with me, but because I hope to learn of a previously unknown title worth reading. Often, however, one suspects book lists are fraudulent, assembled by people who haven’t read the books in question but wish to appear formidably (or fashionably) bookish. A similar motive drives politicians when reporters ask them to name their favorite books. It’s reassuring to know that in some quarters a reputation for reading books still carries snobbish cachet.

My late friend David Myers was fond of making lists. Occasionally I even helped him. It was a lark, a way to share enthusiasms, not an exercise in canon-building. David and I bickered over some titles. At my urging he removed something by Philip K. Dick, who couldn’t write an interesting sentence with a pistol to his head. David also posted a list he was cocky enough to title “Greatest Novel Ever.” Among the fifty books on the list are four I still haven’t read even after they received David’s imprimatur. A list is not a mandate. David makes that clear when formulating his criteria: “These are my favorites—the best-written, the most provoking and memorable, the titles I am likeliest to reread when stuck between books.”

These thoughts came while I was looking up something in C.H. Sisson’s English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971). Sisson quotes from a letter Thomas Hardy sent in 1914 to an editor at the New York Times:

“In answer to your question of which is the best short poem I have read in the English language I can only say that I fail to see how there can be a ‘best’ poem, long or short; that is, one best in all circumstances. This attempt to appraise by comparison is, if you will allow me to say so, one of the literary vices of the time, only a little above the inquiry who is the biggest poet, novelist or prizefighter, although not quite so low down as that deepest deep of literary valuation, ‘who is the biggest seller.’”

Sisson describes Hardy’s pithy refusal as a “short critical masterpiece.”