Free The Meaning of Recognition by Clive James Page A

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 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