A generation raised on Moore’s Law is unlikely to be impressed by even the most articulately cranky expression of anti-modernity, and those who can’t bother with logic and spelling are probably not the target audience for Evelyn Waugh and Vladimir Nabokov. I don’t know how they felt about one another’s work, though they seem unlikely mutual admirers. Within five years of each other both attributed similar curmudgeonly remarks to fictional characters – Waugh, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957); Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962). Here’s Waugh on his title character:
“His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz – everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion, sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the ‘30s: `It is later than you think,’ which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.”
Nabokov, without the putative tempering of faith, is even more withering. This comes from “Pale Fire,” the poem by John Shade that gives the novel its name:
“Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.”
In a 1962 interview with the BBC, Nabokov claimed Shade’s tastes as his own:
“It is also true that some of my more responsible characters are given some of my own ideas. There is John Shade in Pale Fire, the poet. He does borrow some of my own opinions. There is one passage in his poem, which is part of the book, where he says something I think I can endorse. [Nabokov then cites the passage quoted above.]”
I agree with the spirit of both passages while rejecting specifics. Both cite jazz, one of my joys. Both cite modernist art, if we can equate Picasso with “abstractist bric-a-brac.” Otherwise, both lists get my vote. Nabokov, with his abhorrence of poshlust, seems remarkably prescient. The vogue for Freud and Marx should have passed a long time ago but still persists. Not only music but videos assault us in supermarkets, and you can hardly walk down the street without tripping over a puffed-up poet, a fraud or a shark.
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3 comments:
Waugh had taken arms against it, if Guy Crouchback's reaction in Men at Arms to news of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is any indication:
"When Prague fell, he knew that war was inevitable. He expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."
JVS
The only thing I don´t agree with is swimming pools. Why swimming pools?
Then there's also another interview in which Nabokov lists some of his hates:
"...nightclubs, yachts, circuses, pornographic shows, the soulful eyes of naked men with lots of Guevara hair in lots of places."
And he goes on to say that
"It may seem odd that such a modest and unassuming person as I should not disapprove of the widespread practice of self-description. No doubt some literary interviews are pretty awful: trivial exchanges between sage and
stooge, or even worse, the French kind, starting "Jeanne Dupont, qui etes-vous?" (who indeed!) and sporting such intolerable vulgarisms as "insolite" and "ecriture" (French weeklies, please note!)."
I always loved that last bit about "ecriture". ;>)
Boy, I love Nabokov--worship him, in some limited sense--but he can really get on my nerves. As poetry, that bit from Pale Fire is mediocre (and not, I think, intentionally). His loathing of jazz is ignorant; his loathing of swimming pools is perverse. Sigh.
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