The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, is set on the fringes of the film business in 1930s Hollywood. The story centres around two characters who are new to Tinseltown – a young artist starting work as a set designer, and a repressed hotel accountant taking an extended holiday on his doctor’s advice. Both are pulled into the febrile, chaotic circle of a young woman desperate to make it as an actress.

The Day of the Locust is a bleak read, suggesting that everything in Hollywood life is artificial. People are either pursuing delusional ambitions, or working in shambolic movie production. Scenes set on studio lots paint an unflattering picture of even the heady heights of the film business. At a recreation of the Battle of Waterloo, a huge army of extras charge up a hill before carpenters have finished building it.

As an extension of this caricature of Hollywood, I think we are meant to reflect on life in America generally, and see how much of it is driven by artificiality. In some ways, this seems a prescient observation. After all, movie stars and reality TV celebrities have become presidents of the United States; and America’s current reality-star president manufactures illusions on a daily basis.

However, even against the background of a reality TV presidency, I baulked at the book’s relentless negativity. My frustrations centred around a famous scene depicting a riot outside Kahn’s Persian Palace Theatre where an unnamed new film was premiering. I got the feeling that author Nathaniel West thought that cinema, with its huge audiences, must necessarily appeal to the worst, lowest common denominator instincts in people. This just doesn’t ring true when you start to wonder what the unnamed film might have been in reality. In contrast to West’s sour portrayal, the 1930s were in fact a golden era in Hollywood film making, with Alfred Hitchcock, Laurel and Hardy, Frank Capra, John Ford, the Marx Brothers, and Charlie Chaplin all hard at work. Creativity peaked, ironically, in 1939, the year that Nathaniel West published his book, with premieres for – amongst many other excellent movies – Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. So the movie showing at the Persian Palace Theatre, rather than pandering to mob tastes, could conceivably have been a classic. Actually, Gary Cooper is mentioned by one of the vile film goers; so this could have been the Hollywood premiere of Mr Deeds Goes to Town from 1936, directed by Frank Capra, for which Cooper was nominated for an Academy Award. Thinking about specific movies makes you see how unrealistic it is to dismiss Hollywood as nothing more than the home of tawdry mass entertainment and frustrated fantasists. Perhaps what we are seeing here is not so much a perceptive portrayal of the debasement of modern culture, more the snobbish outlook of a writer who doesn’t accept that cinema has produced masterpieces rivalling anything in literature.

In my view, for all the quality of its writing and it’s accurate depiction of important aspects of America’s situation, the cultural snobbery implicit in The Day of the Locust results in a book that has not aged well.

Holidays are odd things. They derive from exhausting pilgrimage where sedentary, medieval folk would up-sticks and walk hundreds of miles on muddy tracks, in unsuitable clothing, at the mercy of thieves, brigands and weather, to reach a distant shrine. Equally, holidays also derive from peaceful rest cures at spas and seaside towns, where instead of getting foot sore you’re more likely to get foot massage. This contradictory ancestry ends up combining a long physical ordeal in search of spiritual meaning with the beach resort experience, reclining on a lounger, watching waves lap on smooth sand, cool drink in hand.

Both the pilgrimage and sun lounger aspects of holidays are explored in Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome’s nineteenth century account of a Thames boating trip. The nineteenth century was the time when holidays came into being for people generally. You no longer had to be religiously earnest, or be wealthy enough to sit around drinking mineral water in Bath or Tunbridge Wells. People were earning better money, had more free time and, thanks to the railways, could travel more easily. The three men who take Jerome’s boat trip are regular chaps. George works as a bank clerk. It’s not clear exactly what Harris and Jerome do, but you don’t get the sense that they are government ministers, captains of industry, or deep-thinking academics. They are the new holiday makers, embarking on a journey of ancient contradictions.

In many ways this boat trip is a spiritual pilgrimage, an attempt to leave behind the humdrum and find something more profound. Against a background of arduous effort and spartan living conditions, there are reflections on life and extravagant descriptions of nature in all its comforting, uplifting beauty. But the attempted profundities are always punctured by various down-to-earth mishaps involving ill-behaved dogs, poor boatmanship, bad cooking, vengeful steam launches, forgotten tin openers. While this journey might be seen as a kind of physically demanding pilgrimage, it is also an indolent escape from stress and strain. Each man takes it in turn to pull tricks to get out of rowing. Jerome avoids tours of churchyards containing historically significant graves. There is much lounging around in riverside meadows, and laughter at the memory of conscientious old school fellows who threw themselves into French irregular verbs.

So where does this physically demanding, yet languid – profound yet commonplace – journey take us? Without giving anything away about the “denouement”, it takes us somewhere significant, while allowing us to escape heavy significance. It takes us somewhere new, while also taking us home again with a new appreciation of our daily lives.

That’s what the best holidays do for us.

Rules become more demanding in times of trouble. There is a clearer and more unforgiving sense of good guys and bad guys, right and wrong. Ironically, however, times of trouble can also see civilised rules of behaviour torn apart.

A Farewell to Arms tells a story set in World War One. An American named Frederick Henry joins the Italian army as an ambulance driver. Caught in a chaotic retreat, he witnesses summary and arbitrary justice meted out by military policemen. Realising his own side is as lethal as the enemy, Henry deserts. The story then follows Henry through his desperate escape bid.

The writing of Henry’s story mirrors the breaking of rules in his life. As a narrator, Frederick Henry ignores all the civilised writing rules drummed into the aspiring author – repeated words, frequent adverbs, passive voice, limited vocabulary, confusing sentences, liberal use of intensifiers such as “very”, which intensify weak adjectives such as “nice”.

And yet the rules of good writing lurk, the demanding sense that these words are shaped. This “bad” writing aspires to excellence. In the famous opening paragraph, Hemingway uses repeated words like “the” to give rhythm, as in a spoken conversation. The use of “the” also serves to conduct us into Henry’s world, where mountains he describes are “the” mountains which narrator and reader both seem to be looking at, rather than any old range of hills introduced to us at the beginning of a story.

From then on every untutored line has a hidden quality. Take, for example, the following exchange:

“I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina——” “You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli——”

A timetable might not seem like great writing, but there is undeniable beauty in simple place names. Place names, for example, are hugely influential in song writing, the music journalist Nick Coleman suggesting that apart from love, “pop is better on cities than anything else.”

The writing of A Farewell to Arms might have the literary quality of a timetable, but that doesn’t mean it can’t aspire to the sort of poetry informing thousands of songs.

A Farewell to Arms is a perfect combination of form and content, of what is said and how it is said. As in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, A Farewell to Arms is a remarkable writing achievement in the form of not very good writing