The Meaning of Recognition (8 page)

By that measure, the Republicans in the show sin against verisimilitude only by being insufficiently malevolent. A more substantial violation of the truth is the character of the
Washington
Post
reporter Danny Concannon, whose dedication to objectivity earns him many a searching kiss from Allison Janney. In reality, the
Post
was fully implicated in the Republican
National Committee’s long campaign to smear Clinton not just as a philanderer, which he was, but as an incompetent and a crook, either of which he wasn’t. The media fables encouraged by
the RNC linger to this day, impoverishing our view of recent history. One particularly damaging fable is that Clinton did nothing to prepare for the onslaught of terrorism. In fact he analysed the
threat with precision, but his proposals – roving phone taps and markers for explosives were only two of them – were all defeated in a Congress heavily influenced by Republican
lobbyists. The FBI, which was practically an instrument of the RNC at the time, had three hundred of its best agents chasing down the Whitewater phantom instead of checking oddball applications to
flight school. Democracy wasn’t working. Under the Bartlet administration it works with an unbelievable productivity – unbelievable because things are the way they are supposed to be,
and not as we know they actually are. But for all its dreams and distortions,
The West Wing
, regarded as a totality, is a tremendous achievement, if only for its plenitude of dialogue
scenes that give us the spoken language at an elliptical intensity seldom heard since Congreve. Not even the screwball comedies of old Hollywood had anything quite like Josh and Donna duking it out
about the proper use of the change from the lunch money, or Toby Ziegler growing even more aphoristically eloquent as he blows his top. Such talk might not make us feel much better about the
slovenly incoherence of Donald Rumsfeld’s latest press conference, but we can’t plausibly ignore the fact that it was produced in the same country.

Aaron Sorkin’s coke-bust, and the resulting collapse of Josh’s hairstyle in the fifth season, are subjects for another time. The first four seasons on DVD, with every episode watched
at least twice, have given me enough to go on for now. Why didn’t Toby’s ex-wife agree to marry him again? I would have. Why did Rob Lowe bail out? Did he really think that a starring
role in
The Lyons Den
would be a better bet? On the inexhaustibly enthralling topic of Allison Janney – I have never met a man whose eyes did not shine at the mere mention of her
name – it remains a nice question whether
The West Wing
makes us feel better or worse about the opportunities open to female talent. In
Drop Dead Gorgeous
, Janney plays a
low-rent maneater so well that she seems real. Would you have guessed that a lurching, chortling frump like that could transform herself into C.J. Cregg?
The West Wing
could offer her
truest talent a home, but couldn’t do the same for Emily Proctor, who sought refuge – no doubt for good financial reasons – in a long-term contract with
CSI: Miami
, where
she has ten lines per episode, plus a chance to raise one eyebrow in close-up when the markings on the bullets match. (She also spends a lot of time standing sideways. So does David Caruso, but
with less alluring results.) When the roles are missing, it’s no use complaining that the actresses aren’t there to play them. The real situation is far worse: the actresses are there,
but they are being wasted. Does anybody think that Helen Hunt
wants
to act opposite a tornado, or Tea Leoni opposite an asteroid colliding with the Earth? (They might say they do, but the
alternative is not to act at all.) Think of Anne Heche in
Wag the Dog
. On the strength of a performance like that, she could be Irene Dunne. All she needs is to live in a different era
– or in a different version of this one, with thoughtful scripts a commonplace instead of a rarity. But that’s one of the several deluding powers wielded by a show like
The West
Wing
: it makes you believe there’s a lot more where that came from. There is no more. What we see is all we will ever get, and we’re very lucky to be getting that much.

Pushkin was a stoat. There are less vulgar ways of putting it, but they wouldn’t fit a sex drive like his. In his earlier amatory career, which appears to have got under
way at about the same time as his chin grew its first whisker, he routinely referred to females, compliant or otherwise, as ‘cunt’. On the eve of his marriage, he described, in a letter
to a similarly priapic male friend, the blissful state of wedlock as ‘lawful cunt’, which he further defined as ‘a kind of warm cap with ear-flaps’. That was about as
reverent on the subject as he ever got in ordinary speech, and fastidious readers of Pushkin who find his ordinary speech hard to square with his extraordinary poetry are unlikely to thank T. J.
Binyon for separating ‘in all humility’ the man from the myth. They should, however.

Separating man from myth is the avowed aim of this sumptuous new biography. Mr Binyon has to be commended for having shirked nothing in achieving it. But the question remains of whether it was
the man we were wrong about, or the myth. Admirers of the poise, refinement and balance of
Eugene Onegin
can’t help thinking of its author as poised, refined and balanced too, a
paragon destined by his perfection to be rubbed out by a tyrant. The raw facts say that the man was less than that. He was a suicidal hothead, an indefatigable tail-chaser, a prolific spender of
other people’s money, a ranting imperialist, a gambler who could never rest until he lost, and altogether a prime candidate for perdition. But what if less than that means more than that?
When genius dies young, it attracts a sentimental sympathy: we tend to think of it as an intensified virtue. Here is the evidence that Pushkin’s genius was the intensification of everything,
including vice. In many respects he was as vicious as a cornered rattlesnake. But on his rattles he could play a whole cascade of lyrics in which every line rings true. No wonder we wave away the
smell of sulphur.

Mr Binyon has breathed it in. Luckily he has not suffered the common fate of biographers who dig up so much dirt on their subject that they feel compelled to heap some of it on his head.
Previous biographers of Pushkin have admired their artist. Binyon admires him no less. But he is undoubtedly disenchanted with his man, having thought it wise to be. From the marketing viewpoint,
he might have done better to put some of the enchantment back in. John Bayley’s studies of Pushkin – the monograph
Pushkin: A Comparative Commentary
and the introductory essay
to the Penguin edition of Charles Johnston’s unmatchable translation of
Eugene Onegin
– must remain the first things to read on the subject, with Edmund Wilson’s essays a
close second, although the accumulated commentary in Tatiana Wolff’s magnificent bran-tub
Pushkin on Literature
is still, after thirty years, the most engaging introduction of all
for any prospective student who doesn’t mind getting into the poet’s brain before getting into his poetry. Bayley and Wilson share the elementary merit of keeping the miracle of
Pushkin’s poetic expression in the foreground, from which we should never allow it to be dislodged for long. Binyon, designedly not writing a critical biography in the usual sense, has
declined to make a priority of crying up the poetry’s uniqueness. To that end he might have done well to take it for granted. Instead, he quotes it for purposes of biographical illustration,
but in translations done by himself. Scholars will probably find them faithful, but for an ordinary reader they are bound to seem a bit flat. Binyon gives us irregular, unrhymed extracts that might
as well be prose. They are more approachable prose than Nabokov’s bizarre rendition of
Eugene Onegin
, but they are still prose.

*

Nabokov, as one great writer serving another, wanted to give us an interlinear lexicon. Instead he gave us a pedigree dog’s breakfast, but at least there was no mistaking
it for anything uninspired. Binyon, providing samples not only of
Onegin
but of all the other major poetry as well, just wants to give us the sense: an aim less diffident than it sounds.
In a text otherwise packed with unpredictable information, the translated extracts stand out only for their lack of pressure. A reader making a start with Pushkin is unlikely to be astonished by
this material, and the book thus places itself automatically further down the track, as a tool to be employed after a first acquaintance is well established. This is an opportunity missed, because
the book could easily have done a double duty if the verse had been presented with something of the appropriate formal punch. If Johnston’s
Onegin
was not available for contractual
reasons, those of us who admired it so volubly when it came out were often inclined to underplay the substantial merits of the Walter Arndt translation it superseded. The Arndt version sometimes
dithers when it tries to dazzle, but falls less often than you might think into the usual trap of a strained sprightliness. Binyon avoids that trap by avoiding formal bravura altogether. As a
consequence he can only assert Pushkin’s first attraction without illustrating it. In Pushkin’s poetic forms, language assembled itself as if answering the requirements of the human
memory. Nabokov called the Onegin stanza ‘an acoustical paradise’, a term that applies just as well to every other form Pushkin employed from childhood onward. Right from the beginning,
people couldn’t take their ears off him. ‘The rascal will crush us all,’ said one of his seniors to another. Army officers otherwise unremarkable for their sensibility were
quoting him by heart when he was barely out of school. Had Mr Binyon given us a fair idea of that, he might have had a more convincing back-up for his further assertion – by its nature harder
to exemplify – that Pushkin was just as astonishing in real life. A twitching victim of the fidgets, he couldn’t keep still for five minutes, but people couldn’t stop listening
either. When Pushkin the socialite was on the case, even the dumber fashionable ladies thought they were in the living presence of poetry, and the brighter ones easily assumed that his
unprepossessing outer appearance might be a further guarantee of the flaming genius within.

Pushkin had black blood, but it didn’t make him Denzel Washington. It might have done had he had more of it. As things were, his vestigial negritude gave him a distinct edge in the area of
his mouth, traditionally one of the few physical points about a man that interest a woman at a first meeting, an occasion in which Pushkin’s mouth was likely to be saying fascinating things,
some of them unwarrantably familiar. From chin to eyebrows, here was a face designed to focus female attention. But the rest of him was miscast. A small man with a tall forehead and long arms, he
was convinced that his yellow fingernails would be more interesting if worn as long as possible. He was almost certainly wrong about that, yet if he did not always enslave the frequently altering
object of desire, he was never less than in with a chance. And the chance was there for the taking. Though the fashionable world was a marriage market in which there were few deals without a dowry,
it reeked of glamorous eroticism. Physical beauty was everywhere: even the young men were peacocks, and the women were birds of paradise. A peacock who married a bird of paradise would have been
disappointed if she lost her pulling power, whose continued efficacy was the warrant that he had chosen well. Like the Red Army’s female soldiers in the next century, the belles of St
Petersburg were back on duty within hours of giving birth: the ballroom was their front line. To look lovely was their reason for being. The susceptible Pushkin was faced with a multiple revelation
every night. He was meant to be. That was the way the system worked.

Pushkin got his first taste of the St Petersburg ballrooms in 1817, when he was eighteen years old. On the road to his stamping ground he had already had plenty of practice at going nuts over a
pretty skirt. It was standard operating procedure for young noblemen to get a servant girl in the family way and pay her off. Probably adding heartfelt, if temporary, words of love to the payment,
Pushkin did not fail to conform. Later on, with his school years barely out of the way, there were always actresses, ballerinas, the ticket girl at the Shrovetide fair. He proclaimed his
overwhelming love to all of them, which might even have helped more than it hindered: only good-looking men can afford to play it cool, and ugly poets do better to come on with a lyric in each
hand. When the girls of the footlights did not succumb, there were prostitutes to compensate, and clap as a consequence. We can thank the enforced periods of laying up for some of his best early
poems. When he was healthy, or thought he was healthy, he was out on the tiles. One of the many valuable aspects of Binyon’s book is how it shows us that we were wrong to suppose that there
was no Bohemian world Pushkin might have inhabited had he chosen to, and which might have kept him safe from the dangers of court society. The literary club that called itself the Green Lamp was
not entirely a knocking shop, although much of the surviving written correspondence of its members suggests it was. Poems were written and books discussed, even as the attendant women were passed
around the circle like kicking parcels. To that extent, a Bohemian world indeed existed, if in primitive form.

He might have helped make it less primitive had he continued to grace it. There was also the occasional literary salon with its resident
grande dame
, an aristocrat more interested in
the arts than in her noble connections. When Pushkin died in 1837, Liszt was already four years into his liaison with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, who put her position aside in order to share
his. I had always thought that Pushkin might have lived longer if the same possibility had been available in Russia. Here is proof that it was. Princess Evdokina Golitsyna, also known as the
Princess Nocturne because she was rarely seen in daylight, was twenty years Pushkin’s senior but held his love for months, although the negative evidence is strong that he never held her
body. (The negative evidence is that Pushkin didn’t claim the victory: usually his friends were informed by letter of any successful encounter immediately after it happened, if not while it
was actually happening.) There was not the range of high-born bluestockings that had kept Goethe comfortable throughout his long career, but there were some. Pushkin might, had he wanted to, have
found love and understanding in a life of renunciation and internal exile, although the Tsarist censorship would have had its own opinions if he had tried to publish the results. But the subject
never came up, because a more exciting world beckoned.