Who's number one?

Who cares?

The Anglo-American literary establishment, apparently. Anis Shivani is happily compiling his list of the 15 most overrated writers (see below). Years ago, after the death of Frost, John Berryman asked: "Who is number one?" And Blake Morrison inquired the same in his Guardian review of Jonathan Franzen. Robert McCrum reports:

Morrison goes on to write that since the deaths of Bellow, Mailer and Updike, the "number one" question is one that "inevitably comes up in relation to American fiction . . .

. . . Currently, in poetry, Seamus Heaney, with a terrific new collection "Human Chain", must be a strong contender for "number one," though he might be publicly dismayed at the vulgarity of the idea.

The fact is, humans really like eating, sleeping, and making lists. Remember the sixties? It was all lists, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Morrison quotes a Graham Greene essay from, not coincidentally, 1968:

"After the death of Henry James a disaster overtook the English novel; indeed long before his death one can picture [him] as the last survivor on a raft, gazing out over a sea scattered with wreckage ... "

Hopefully the raft didn't list, even if Greene did.

Having made James his "number one", Greene goes on to elucidate his choice: "with the death of James the religious sense was lost to the English novel, and with the religious sense went the sense of the importance of the human act. It was as if the world of fiction had lost a dimension ... " He adds that without this sense, the characters in novels by Virginia Woolf and EM Forster become "like cardboard symbols."

Few would agree with this evaluation today, suggesting the number one take-away point from this blog post: Lists can't last.