The Power of 1
When I signed on to this after years of silence, I was presented with what seemed an endless list of books to rate. I gave a number of what I suppose are standards a 1 for what turn out to be different reasons. I've already talked about GWTW; the others I can remember - Huckleberry Finn, The Old Man and the Sea - were given so low a rating because of their authors' betrayal of their craft. This is difficult territory: I also would give Wagner a 1 because of his anti-Semitism, which makes little critical sense because he didn't write anti-Semitic music - did he? (Many people find the Ring cycle anti-Semitic; Wagner himself wrote that Mendelsohn wrote "Jewish music," which is certainly anti-Semitic and certainly nonsense.)
The rating of 1 makes possible the rating of 5, which I also sprinkled fairly widely through the list (George Eliot, twice; Jane Austen two or three times). No bottom, no top.
I think that Huckleberry Finn is three-quarters of a masterpiece - two great characters, the myth of the journey, the river, those sharp and sometimes shocking pictures of towns and people, above all the courage of Jim and of Huck's helping of Jim. But for whatever reason (his wife's horror is the usual culprit) Twain chickened out and put that stupid Tom Sawyer ending on the book, reducing what had come before to mush and making what had come before something to be apologized for. So, for a great writer, a 1 for lacking faith in his own work.
The Old Man and the Sea got its 1 for a different reason. I revere Hemingway's early work: he revolutionized American prose style; he gave new form and possibility to the novel; he wrote stories that were so clean and concise that they were almost poems. Then he got famous and rich and, after about 1932, more and more a (by implication) large ego who loved himself in his writing. The difference between the author and his heroes blurred; his writing got flaccid and lost the concision of the earlier work. By the end of WW 2, he wrote one of the worst books ever to see print, Across the River and into the Woods, full of self-pity and self-praise and obese prose that was a parody of his early style. Some years later, he published The Old Man and the Sea (first in Life magazine, as I remember, with a glamorous portrait of Hemingway on the cover). In his best years, this novel would have been a brilliant, spare short story; now it was a novel in which the action is slim, the spinning-out long, the content almost relentlessly symbolic (great old author writes masterpiece, critics tear and devour it but he brings the thing home courageously). As with Twain, a great writer with a great record should do better: the better you get, the higher the bar.
So, a 1.
No 1, no 5.
The rating of 1 makes possible the rating of 5, which I also sprinkled fairly widely through the list (George Eliot, twice; Jane Austen two or three times). No bottom, no top.
I think that Huckleberry Finn is three-quarters of a masterpiece - two great characters, the myth of the journey, the river, those sharp and sometimes shocking pictures of towns and people, above all the courage of Jim and of Huck's helping of Jim. But for whatever reason (his wife's horror is the usual culprit) Twain chickened out and put that stupid Tom Sawyer ending on the book, reducing what had come before to mush and making what had come before something to be apologized for. So, for a great writer, a 1 for lacking faith in his own work.
The Old Man and the Sea got its 1 for a different reason. I revere Hemingway's early work: he revolutionized American prose style; he gave new form and possibility to the novel; he wrote stories that were so clean and concise that they were almost poems. Then he got famous and rich and, after about 1932, more and more a (by implication) large ego who loved himself in his writing. The difference between the author and his heroes blurred; his writing got flaccid and lost the concision of the earlier work. By the end of WW 2, he wrote one of the worst books ever to see print, Across the River and into the Woods, full of self-pity and self-praise and obese prose that was a parody of his early style. Some years later, he published The Old Man and the Sea (first in Life magazine, as I remember, with a glamorous portrait of Hemingway on the cover). In his best years, this novel would have been a brilliant, spare short story; now it was a novel in which the action is slim, the spinning-out long, the content almost relentlessly symbolic (great old author writes masterpiece, critics tear and devour it but he brings the thing home courageously). As with Twain, a great writer with a great record should do better: the better you get, the higher the bar.
So, a 1.
No 1, no 5.
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