The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  And he really did think it was exciting. There is no point blaming him for it. If he had not been so enthralled by the radiant young beauties of the court, he would not have been able to show us Eugene Onegin being bored by them. On his first exposure to the official beauty parade, Pushkin scarcely had time to be bored himself. Experts in the Third Section having detected traces of incipient liberalism in his correspondence, he was sent south to cool off by personal order of the Tsar, Alexander I. He was lucky not to be sent east, to a far colder reception, but Pushkin already had highly placed admirers ready to speak for him. (Binyon is dauntingly good at quoting the official documents about Pushkin that Pushkin himself never saw.) Touring in the Caucasus, Pushkin was put up by, and was put up with by, a chain of consuls and highly placed officials who could contemplate, without challenging him to a duel, the spectacle of the visiting poet flashing his fingernails at their wives and daughters. He fell in love all over the map. There was thus no rust on his insinuating eloquence when he got back to St Petersburg. The duck was back in the water. A short period of banishment to his home estate at Mikhailovskoe amounted to no more than house-arrest, and, as Mr Binyon points out, it was a chance to get things actually written, instead of merely planned. Otherwise, apart from the odd sojourn in Moscow, St Petersburg was where he would live out the rest of his short life, in a succession of apartments he couldn’t afford because of the succession of card games he couldn’t avoid. And always waiting for him in the evenings were the gold-trimmed mirrors, the high plaster ceilings, the polished floors and the incandescent women: the million-candlepower milieu that we have been so determined to think unworthy of him. We can still think that, as long as we realize that he did not think the same. If he was broken by the life he chose to lead, he was also made by it. Our disappointment is inevitable but eventually absurd.

  *

  There were intelligent onlookers who were disappointed at the time. Some of them were among his censors. His liberal admirers were appalled by his dedication to frivolity. The facts say that he was never as liberal as they thought. Because his poetry breathed life, they thought it breathed liberty. They were right in one respect: raised as a future owner of the family serfs, and destined to traffic in souls because his debts outran by miles anything his work might earn, Pushkin could nevertheless see that there was something wrong with the system of bondage. In Eugene Onegin Tatyana’s nurse is the voice and picture of the eternal Russian slave. Nabokov tried to deny that, because under the Soviet Union the text was routinely adduced as proof of Pushkin’s proto-revolutionary credentials, and Nabokov was properly contemptuous of the regime’s determination to rewrite literary history along with every other kind. But there is no denying it. Uncannily alert to anything in front of his bug eyes, Pushkin probably had sympathy for everyone he met, even for the merchants he cheated by not paying his bills. But he had little sympathy for people he hadn’t met, especially if they were the inhabitants of strange lands that the inexorably expansionist Russia had designs on. His liberal critics were mistaken to suppose that he might take any strong exception to Russian hegemony. In The Captain’s Daughter, the icily clear portent of the mature prose masterpieces he might have written had he lived, he unforgettably evoked the cruelties inflicted by power but never suggested even by implication that power might be cruel in itself. The censorship wouldn’t have let him, of course: but there is no evidence that there was a secret text he couldn’t publish, or even a secret idea that he could not develop into a text. His view on Tsarist power was to have no view.

  He might have been prescient: in the long run it would not matter much what the intelligentsia thought about anything. Autocracy was a word that meant what it said: it would take Alexander II to free the serfs, his assassination to reinvigorate the spirit of absolutism, and Nicholas II’s supernatural stupidity – abetted by his cretinous wife – to deny the granting of a constitution in 1905, thereby making revolution certain. What would matter in Russia, all the way to 1917, was the absence of a political class. Belinsky and his fiery friends, rendered desperate by Pushkin’s conformism, were looking to a hero who had no intention of becoming a martyr. In retrospect he was right, but to those who nursed dreams of reform he looked wrong at the time, and some of his opinions would have seemed nasty at any time, even under the Roman empire. Over the question of Poland, he looked forward to the prospect of its intelligentsia being exterminated if they declined to submit: the dead claim no rights. Not much more than a hundred years later, the Soviet secret police would compete with the SS in fulfilling a vision not very different from the poet’s own. Our conclusion must be that Pushkin, while incomparable at providing a full imaginative equivalent of anything he could actually see, was not especially good at imaging anything he couldn’t see. He was friends with Mickiewicz, already hailed when young as Poland’s national poet. The friendship was generous on Pushkin’s part, because the handsome Mickiewicz, on his visits to St Petersburg, demonstrated powers of charm that were bound to overshadow even Pushkin’s own. Mickiewicz, improvising poetry in French, could wow the ladies with a recitation direct from the brain. Pushkin needed pen and paper. But he loved Mickiewicz’s company, and their boat-ride to Kronstadt – the playwright Griboyedov was along for the trip – is one of the occasions when you can’t help thinking: yes, this is it, this is the literary company you should make your life in: stay with it. But when Mickiewicz went into exile rather than return to his threatened country, for Pushkin it was a case of someone else’s fight. He loved the man and admired the poet, but had no comprehension of the patriot. Pushkin was an imperialist after the Tsar’s own heart.

  The Tsar by now was Nicholas I, who shared his predecessor’s estimation of Pushkin’s importance but with different results. Alexander had exiled him. Nicholas drafted him. Binyon is able to show that the draftee was willing enough. In a move meant to be flattering, Nicholas appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor. It meant that everything Pushkin proposed to publish was still read by everyone who counted in the Third Section, but a decision was not taken until the manuscript reached the very top, on the desk of the supreme serf-owner, the man who owned every soul in the country. The decisions were not as oppressive as we would like to think. We would like to think of the genius being driven to his death on a short rein. And indeed one of Pushkin’s masterpieces, The Bronze Horseman – Binyon rates it above even Eugene Onegin, a rare instance of an unnecessarily original judgement on the biographer’s part – was never published in its author’s lifetime. But the changes Nicholas had asked for were comparatively slight. Pushkin declined to make them because to do so would have been too much proof to himself that he was the Tsar’s property. There was ample proof already. Apart from the standard blanket ban on any foreign travel, and the frightening prospect of being barred from reading in the Voltaire library that Catherine II had bought and installed in the Hermitage, Pushkin’s greatest suffering under the Tsar was the low rank he had been awarded at court. He was a Gentleman of the Chamber: only a few steps up from a flunky. He particularly hated the unbecoming uniform that went with the grade. Sometimes he would rebel by wearing mufti instead, only to be carpeted by the Tsar and informed in front of everyone that the father of all the Russian people was not pleased with one of his favourite sons. But the miscreant had no objections to the compulsory attendance on the Tsar-blessed circuit of social events. It was where the women were.

  If there were debutantes today, the smart ones might dream of Daniel Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans: a man to bring danger into their dainty world. In imperial St Petersburg there were no movie stars. What the girls went for was poetry, and Pushkin was famous for it. (One of the myriad telling moments in Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia trilogy is when a noble daughter kisses her copy of Eugene Onegin as if it were the face of the man who wrote it.) He wrought havoc until it became obvious even to him that he had to settle down or fall exhausted. The girl of his choice was the loveliest in the room: Natalya Nikola
evna Goncharova. At this point the reader might care to supplement Binyon’s story of a lifetime with Serena Vitale’s story of a single year, Pushkin’s Button. The single year was Pushkin’s last, and the way she tells us why gives a better idea of the child bride Pushkin was crazy about, and just how crazy he went. Binyon is unbeatable on the hard details of debts and mortgages, but Vitale has a feel for the fabrics and the furniture, and it was Natalya’s passion for a luxurious ambience that would have sunk Pushkin even if he had not got himself shot. Whether she was a zombie or merely enigmatic is an eternal question. Either way, she was a star, and she was high maintenance. Her family was even closer to bankruptcy than his. Pushkin relished her stardom – the thought that the Tsar himself might be after her filled him with proud outrage – and he wanted her to have the best. The debts piled up like Pelion on Ossa. They would have buried him anyway. The bullet was just a quick way out.

  The bullet was fired by Baron Georges Charles d’Anthès, a standard-issue Eurotrash lounge lizard who looked snazzy in uniform: always a sore point with Pushkin. The poet had no good reason to be jealous. Like all the other husbands he placed a high value on his wife’s flirting abilities, and flirting was as far as she went. The notorious anonymous letter that some pest sent all over St Petersburg suggesting the contrary had the same substance as the handkerchief in Othello. Unfortunately it also had the same effect. Lucky to be expelled instead of executed – duelling was forbidden by royal decree, and Nicholas had been foolish to believe that Pushkin had listened when told not to even think of it – d’Anthès lived to a rancid old age, still peddling his well-worn line to the well-born ladies and never expressing a single regret that he had killed one of the greatest poetic talents the world had ever known. But our anger is wasted, because Pushkin killed himself. He had always behaved suicidally. The duel that finished him was not his first. Why, when he had so much to live for, was he like that?

  The clue is in the brilliant caricatures scattered throughout Binyon’s book, many of which were scattered through Pushkin’s original manuscripts. Pushkin’s visual faculty was without the inbuilt dark glasses of abstraction: he never saw a type, he always saw individuals, and it is a safe bet that when he saw a beautiful woman he was looking at the Creation through an open furnace door. Binyon accepts too quickly Pushkin’s written opinion that women were mentally inferior. The man who invented Tatyana could have thought anything but that. His denigration was a defence mechanism, and it is probable that his coarse language was the same. A pose of raw carnality staved off the unrelentingly repeated impact of the sublime. He was in love every time he lusted, and he was in love not because he saw less than other men but because he saw more. He could see everything, and he probably got sick of it.

  TLS, 27 September 2002

  Postscript

  The Soviet Union’s machinery of pseudo-scholarship did such a thorough job of turning Pushkin into a harbinger of proletarian consciousness that Nabokov felt bound to turn him into a reactionary. The truth, perhaps tediously, lay somewhere in the middle. Pushkin knew that there was something wrong with serfdom. On the other hand he saw nothing wrong with running up the sort of debts that only selling serfs could pay off. The life of high society called itself the svyet: the Light. Asking Pushkin to stay out of it would have been like locking Maria Callas in a broom cupboard. What mattered was that when he struck a liberal note he sounded as if he had a choir of angels backing him up. That was what Belinsky admired, and lamented the loss of. When this piece was first published, T. J. Binyon, a justly valued mainstay of the TLS, was still alive. He is dead now, so it is perhaps permissible to state a harsh truth. If his book on Pushkin had carried excerpts from Charles Johnson’s translation of Eugene Onegin, beginners would have had the essence of a great, true story in one volume: and now they are still stuck with shopping around. I find it hard to believe that Binyon could not have done a deal. But like many a translator of Pushkin, he had convinced himself that he alone had the secret access to the central purity. Pushkin can drive people coocoo that way. Under the Soviet Union, nearly all the Pushkin operatives in the scholarly apparat were as mad about him as Akhmatova was: they just lacked her talent. (For readers of Russian, Akhmatova’s long essay about Pushkin datelined 1947, when Stalin was still alive, is a daunting example of what great poetry can mean to another great poet who has an implacable state holding a gun to her head.) In the English-speaking scholarship, the three voices that continue to matter belong to Tatiana Wolff, Edmund Wilson and John Bayley, and especially to Bayley. When young, Bayley was a poet with all of Wilson’s formal skills plus a lyrical element of his own – the ideal equipment for a critic who wants to get somewhere near Pushkin. I don’t see how any critic without inside knowledge of the requirements of assembling a tight poetic structure can get within rocket range, but that might be a prejudice. And anyway, such a prejudice is dangerous, by encouraging the false notion that Pushkin might shut out the ordinary reader. The opposite is true. His music can draw anybody in. Tchaikovsky, in the opera of Eugene Onegin, was careful to leave Pushkin’s music virtually intact in the Letter Scene, thus to accompany his own music in one of the work’s most immediately effective passages. Sing along and you’re reciting Pushkin, as all the young people did at the time, without having a clue about how his stanzas were put together.

  GREAT SOPRANOS OF OUR TIME

  My four seasons of The Sopranos come in four neat boxes of DVDs. If I confine myself to a couple of episodes per evening, I can get through the whole disgusting saga in less than a month, and so leave a decent interval before I start again. The challenge, however, as with The West Wing or NYPD Blue, is to keep to the ration. Under the spell of such a rich, multi-plotted, invisibly directed narrative drive, there is a constant temptation to watch a third and fourth episode straight away, stretching the supposedly repellent experience deep into the night. The night, after all, is where the action is taking place, even when set in daylight. In the dark night of the soul it is often three o’clock in the afternoon on the pool terrace of a mobster’s house in New Jersey. The rule of law exists only to be flouted; power to be flaunted; any scruple to be parodied. It’s appalling. I love it.

  Love it more, in fact, than the Godfather movies, which are supposedly the superior cinematic achievement, the fons et origo from which the mere television serial draws and dilutes its inspiration. (There is also a likelihood that it got some of its brio from GoodFellas, but Scorsese, in his turn, was almost certainly inspired to his hectic story by the urge to rebel against the stately progress of a common ancestor.) David Chase, the writer-producer who can be thought of as the man who made The Sopranos in the same way that Aaron Sorkin made The West Wing, was not personally involved in the Godfather project. Chase did his apprenticeship as a writer for The Rockford Files and later as a writer-producer for Northern Exposure. His idea of a big movie was Fellini’s Otto e mezzo; of a crime movie, Cul de Sac; superior European stuff. There is no doubt, however, that the Godfather trilogy was on his mind, because it is on the minds of all the male characters in The Sopranos. Only two of its main actors were ever directed by Francis Ford Coppola: Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) and Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) both played minor roles in Godfather II. But every Soprano-related male character has a frame of reference drenched with Godfather minutiae. Whether sitting out front at the Pork Store (their idea of the outdoor life) or lurking dimly in the depths of the Bada-Bing combined bar and strip-joint, they conduct long symposia in which Corleone family scenes are alluded to by the line and sometimes recreated almost in full, with sound effects. This is the kind of mediacultural fallout that gives respectable Italian community leaders the hump: Italo-Americans defining themselves as the heirs of gangsterism.

  But these characters are gangsters, so why shouldn’t they? What other kind of movie memories would they have on the tips of their thick tongues? The Horse Whisperer? The Bridges of Madison County? And the truth is that every American, of Italian extraction or
not, knows the Godfather films by heart; and most of the rest of us do too. The real question here is whether the Godfather trilogy really is the armature of the spin-off, or whether the spin-off is bigger and better than the armature. Surely the latter is the case. We shouldn’t let the size of the picture fool us. In the little picture, a lot more is going on, and it’s a lot more true. Most of its many directors would probably like to make movies, because movies will make their names: one of the several ways in which the celebrity culture distorts culture. They will never work better than under Chase’s guiding hand. Chase hated working in network television, but he hated it for the way it was sanitized. He has rebelled by seizing the opportunity HBO uniquely offers and making another kind of television, a kind that tells fewer comforting lies. If he had rebelled by making movies, his would probably have been better than most, but the pressure would have been on to do what the Godfather movies did: clean up the act.

  When I first saw The Sopranos, my immediate candidate for an epic predecessor was I, Claudius, now available as yet another set of DVDs begging to be watched one after the other. If Chase had ever mentioned I, Claudius in an interview, I hadn’t seen it. (Among the extra material in the first box of DVDs is an interview with Sorkin which reveals that he did, indeed, have I, Claudius in mind.) My only evidence for a direct borrowing was the name of Tony’s dreadful and deadly mother, Livia. But I would have been surprised to learn that Chase hadn’t taken I, Claudius on board. If the resemblance was a fluke, it could only be because, should you set out to draw a picture of unfettered violence shaping the destiny of an extended family, you would necessarily end up with something like the Roman empire after Tiberius consolidated the dubious achievement of Augustus in subordinating all law to the leader’s will. Mussolini thought of Fascism as Rome’s glory born again, but he had a debilitating habit of letting potential enemies continue breathing. The emperors were living in a bloodbath and so are this bunch.