Henry Eliot

Why today’s classic books may not be tomorrow’s

What makes for a classic book?

I used to think that you could spot a literary classic by identifying certain salient characteristics: the writing would need literary quality, for example; the book would have had some historical significance; it would have an enduring reputation among scholars and general readers. But each rule threw up exceptions. Darwin’s The Origin of Species is not an obviously ‘literary’ text. E.M. Forster’s Maurice was first published six decades after it was written. The Song of Kieu, the greatest work of Vietnamese literature, is virtually unknown outside Vietnam. And yet all of these books are classics. Over time I have come to agree with Ezra Pound’s warning at the start of his ABC of Reading (1934). ‘A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard),’ he writes. ‘It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.’ Pound rightly identified an internal rather than an external quality: the definition rests on an ineffable element of the reading experience.

Of course, it may take time for a classic to be recognised as such. The Great Gatsby was famously snubbed by several critics; Moby-Dick was widely panned in America; in Britain every copy of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was destroyed, with one critic saying, ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel’; Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms was burned by the Nazis; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was prohibited by the Catholic Church; Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is still forbidden in the detainee library at Guantánamo Bay.

Work on ‘The Waste Land’ begins

Perhaps time does have to pass — a book has to endure in order to qualify, and in the meantime we use ‘modern classics’ to identify promising candidates.

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