by Clive James
We are left with the consideration that America has got the writers, whereas nobody else has. Television impresarios like Sorkin and Steven Bochco might have taken the initiative away from the Hollywood film studios, but this cultural civil war is all taking place in Los Angeles. The implications for the rest of us are daunting, if not dire. When it comes to actually speaking English, America is now incontestably the centre of the English-speaking world. Britain, in particular, did itself suicidal damage when its broadcasting system was allowed to promote yob-speak as some kind of regional accent. Already there is a generation of British actors who couldn’t pronounce The West Wing dialogue if they tried. The Australians would have a better chance: we might murder the vowels, but at least we put the consonants in. American military imperialism is a phantom. There are severe limitations to what it can do with weapons: it can’t shoot John Pilger for example, although many of the regimes that he considers less lethal would not hesitate. But American cultural imperialism is a fact. Working by assent, it was hard enough to resist when it was exporting junk: American junk was always better than anybody else’s. Exporting quality, it looks and sounds unstoppable. Our best hope of fighting back is to make literacy fashionable. The enemy is doing its best to help us. When I was young, American movies like Rebel Without a Cause were full of alienated teenagers with flick knives. The youngsters in The West Wing flaunt their grades and hone their rhetoric. For the example to be effective however, our yoof would have to see the show, for which Channel 4 hasn’t run out of hiding places yet. The pre-breakfast slot on any Friday with an odd-numbered date is still open.
TLS, 4 April 2003
Postscript
After two more seasons, further conclusions. In the long run, The West Wing will probably be seen as a product of the Clinton era. President Bartlet is not a George W. Bush who can talk – as unlikely a notion as a platypus that can fly – but a Bill Clinton whose sexual requirements are fully satisfied by marriage to Stockard Channing. Aaron Sorkin could have made Bartlet promiscuous as well as clever and there would have been no great injury to his mental distinction, but the network would not have worn it. The important point is that Bartlet’s intelligence, though plainly an idealized exaggeration, is not impossibly out of scale with Clinton’s. As Sidney Blumenthal’s bulky but civilized book The Clinton Years reveals, Clinton’s real-life West Wing was alive with social concern and productive argument, and the man who energized the troops was Clinton himself. On the whole, the troops were up to it. There was no C. J. Cregg, alas, and a Josh–Donna combo might have been hard to find, but there was an enviably creative buzz. There might have been even more of that if so much time had not been consumed by the Whitewater investigation, which went on longer the more it became obvious that there was nothing to discover. On that theme, the malevolent Republican vigilantes in the show add up to a study in simple realism. Sorkin is careful to offset them with the adorable presence of Ainsley Hayes, the Republican angel, but on the whole the sworn enemies of Bartlet are a lot like the sworn enemies of the Clintons in real life: untiring promoters of manufactured scandals. That Clinton presented them with a real scandal remains one of the sad moments in recent political history, although it should never be forgotten that Clinton’s private life, and Monica Lewinsky’s, would have remained private if it had not been for Linda Tripp, who was activated (‘empowered’) by Kenneth Starr, the Special Prosecutor working on the Swiftian assumption that the President must be guilty of something or there would never have been a committee to investigate him.
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’S DEADLY GIFT
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 sq
uare 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 exten
t, 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.