Happy Birthday

We know Robert Conquest best as the great scholarly dissector of Stalinism. In The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine and other books he meticulously dismantles lingering Western shibboleths about Communism. No longer can Soviet apologists claim ignorance.

Conquest celebrates his 89th birthday today (why has Elton John been knighted but not Conquest?), an appropriate occasion to remind ourselves he is also a considerable poet, best known for limericks and other light verse, and was a friend of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. With Conquest’s gift for limericks in mind, Philip Larkin, the great Pound/Eliot hater, inscribed historian’s copy of High Windows like this: "For Bob Il Miglior Fabbro (or whatever it was) - at least over 5 lines Philip." Here’s one of his limericks:

“There was a great Marxist called Lenin
Who did two or three million men in
That's a lot to have done in
But where he did one in,
that grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”

I have a copy of Between Mars and Venus, a slender volume of Conquest’s poems published by Hutchinson of London in 1962. The rhymes and metrics are traditional and readers will be reminded of Hardy and Auden, especially by way of Larkin, and perhaps a touch of Empson. The sensibility is spiky and skeptical and there’s a surprising amount of sex for its time and place. Here is “The Virtues of Poetry”:

“I read in passing, or with killing thirst.
I take a draught of freedom or a sip.
The stiff dichotomies may slur and slip,
The faulty neural currents be reversed.

“The tongue could be too salty or the tang:
It all dissolved beneath an actual sweetness.
Teaching no law and claiming no completeness,
It opened what we said to what we sang.

“For it disbands all false habituation
That carves life up with language; it will not
Disrupt one brilliance into think and feel.

“Body-and-mind's a fracture it can heal
In such a rush of luck and liberation
As grips a gambler when the dice are hot.”

Conquest’s poems are a tonic. One feels like a grown-up while reading them and they tend to linger. I often think about that line: “It opened what we said to what we sang.” In the December 2004 issue of The New Criterion, Conquest published an essay, “The Whys of Art,” that also respects us enough to treat us like adults. Here’s a sample:

“One of the ways to give the impression of an aesthetic performance to those lacking the organ of taste is indeed to put into a work of art the political, religious, or other extraneous satisfactions popular with one or another audience. Particularly, of course, if strongly held. As Paul Valéry wrote, `Enthusiasm is not an artist’s state of mind.’

“Few poets have had much experience of the political. They have generous impulses, no doubt, and concern for humanity. These can be expressed in various ways and are not sufficient for a poem involving facts. On political issues, it is extremely rare for the facts to be so clear, and the human involvement so direct and simple, as to approach the immediacy and undeniability of experience. Still, there can be few comments as inept as that of William Carlos Williams, in his introduction to Allen Ginsberg, that this Beat poet had gone `into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war.’”

Because of his vigorous respect for truth, Conquest, bless him, is no respecter of soft-headed pieties.