BOOKS THAT WOULDN'T GET MADE NOW

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Robert Rowland Smith, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and author of “Breakfast with Socrates” (Profile), and David Thomson, author of “The Biographical Dictionary of Film” (Little, Brown) continue our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

THE WASTE LAND

Published in 1922, “The Waste Land” soon became a landmark of Western literature. In its 434 lines, T.S. Eliot assembled Arthurian legend, Jacobean tragedy, Buddhist scripture, Roman lyric and street slang into a puzzle to be worked out by pale and interesting types the world over. Some interpreted it as the private jottings of a depressive polymath; others as the vision of a civilisation which God had forsaken. The poem asks the reader to work at it, refusing easy answers, and even Eliot’s own explanatory notes raised further questions. And that is precisely why it wouldn’t be published now. In becoming “consumers” of culture, we’re losing the ability to engage with it. ~ ROBERT ROWLAND SMITH

LOLITA

Yes, Nabokov’s great novel was notorious in its time, the mid-1950s, but it’s harder now to see an American nymphet having sex (or love!) with a European man of letters. In theory, we’re so protective of political tenderness that we can hardly condone the “rape” of Dolores Haze, let alone see the irony in this all-American girl pouncing on her altogether superior but hopelessly shy and literary lover. After all, Humbert Humbert sees romance as a verbal form, something that needs to be talked about. The real Lolitas have been made blunt and silent by practice and their increasing stoicism over the way love probably doesn’t exist any longer. Humbert longs to be in a novel, while Lo belongs in Las Vegas. ~ DAVID THOMSON