'A Good Unpretentious Work of Art'

Many readers could readily compile an anthology devoted to literary depictions of war-ravaged Europe, circa 1945. Think of passages in the work of Vasily Grossman, Thomas Berger, Curzio Malaparte, Elizabeth Bowen, Tadeusz Borowski, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Thomas Pynchon, among hundreds of others. Here is a less well-known entry for a collection that will never be published, Robert Conquest’s “Budapest in 1945”: 

“Looking through dusk and a very light mist

Over the luminous grey Danube and the lamps beginning,

From that hill of broken palaces the ruins

Assumed an ageless beauty, hiding the terribly

Slashed city, one of the very rawest

 

“Zones in which Europe’s hatred went

Absolutely to the bloody whirlpool’s centre,

Struck a cold thunder over

Every usual noise and thought, and carved

Granite to a formless monument.

 

“Gold light shivered warmly from the water through the vague

Evening. For even there, among all that

Debris of brick, flesh and steel, the eye selected

Blindly its focus. And so no verse can ever

Express the essence of the deadly plague.”

Conquest was commissioned in the British Army in 1940 and four years later was posted to Sofia as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting the Germans under Soviet command. I’m unable to determine if Conquest visited Hungary, which had allied itself with the Axis powers before the war. Early in 1944, Budapest, birthplace of Imre Kertész and Paul Erdős, had already been partially destroyed by British and American air raids. The city was under siege by Soviet and Romanian forces from October 1944 to February 1945. An estimated 80,000 Hungarian civilians, including those executed or who subsequently died in labor camps, were killed by the Soviets during the offensive. Thus, “the essence of the deadly plague.”

 

Conquest first published the Budapest poem in the February 1955 issue of Encounter. At the time, his reputation as a Soviet scholar – author of The Great Terror (1968) and The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) – was still evolving but he had been publishing poems since the nineteen-forties. He was one of those indecently shameless writers who thrived in multiple forms and genres. He was, as John O’Sullivan puts it, “a historian, a poet, a novelist, a satirist, a critic, a diplomat, a strategist, a soldier, a social and political theorist, a limerickist, and of course a scholar – and I have almost certainly left out some of Bob’s other professional identities.” Conquest was a wide-ranging essayist and literary journalist. Here he is in 1969, reviewing Power in the Kremlin by the French historian Michel Tatu:

 

“If one had to point to one central fault in modern academic attitudes, it is surely the attempt to import into areas where they are not suitable the discipline of the physical sciences, or the abstract generality of philosophy. As a result, we are beset with pretentious pseudo-sciences, or at best premature sciences (in the fields of sociology, psychology and literary criticism in particular), where a more modest and tentative approach might provide real insights.”

 

On occasion, Conquest writes prophetically. The critique just quoted succinctly sums up much of the debased academic world of the twenty-first century. And here he is in a 1964 essay prompted by Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove:

 

“It is one of the marks of our culture, not only in film production, that the man who has the skill to produce a good unpretentious work of art instead inflates it with notions and gimmicks pointless in themselves and in any case outside his scope. The potential lyricist or novelist can get more attention by stuffing his pages with grandiose and pointless symbolisms, and kitsch originalities. The dramatist substitutes verbalised screams for the spoken word; or puts characters into dustbins; or claims significance through third-hand and misunderstood social messages. All such people could have wrought better, even if they could not have attracted attention better. There is often a bit of misused talent somewhere at the bottom of the ambitious nonsense.”

 

Conquest – tart, commonsensical, deeply learned, free of pretention --  is always a pleasure to read, in any form he chose. He was born on this date, July 15, in 1917, in Great Malvern, Worcestershire. His father was an American who served in the American Ambulance Field Service with the French Army during World War I, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star. His mother was English. Conquest died August 3, 2015 at age ninety-eight.