Books: AND NOW, POSHLOST

PHONY, kitch and camp are examples of a useful phenomenon: every so often a word breezes into common usage meaning many things and weaving together previously unrelated objects into a new category. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov offers a new word, poshlost (pronounced push-lost). In Russian it means vulgarity or triteness, but in an interview with Author Herbert Gold in the current Paris Review, Nabokov so expands the definition that it makes one wonder how the English language ever got along without it.

Poshlost, says he, means "corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature, these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.

"Poshlost speaks in such concepts as 'America is no better than Russia' or 'We all share in Germany's guilt.' The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as 'the moment of truth,' 'charisma,' 'existential' (used seriously), 'dialogue' (as applied to political talks between nations) and 'vocabulary' (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Viet Nam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name, that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, that is simple, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet, and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouves in latrines, cannon balls, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall-patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges and Rorschach blots, all of it as corny in its own right as the academic 'September Morns' and 'Florentine Flowergirls' of half a century ago.

"Of course, everybody has his bate noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple, she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canape, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range."

Numerous contemporary writers obviously produce poshlost or are, for other reasons, Nabokov's black pets. "Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as 'great literature' by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes."

Gold: "What have you learned from Joyce?"

Nabokov: "Nothing."