'To Be Made Out of Emotions, Colors, Life Itself'

“[Robert Conquest] and his two closest friends, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, proved their vocation by playing the games with language and perception that poets play, three Musketeers at a time when not much else was disturbing the quiet little cemetery of English literature.”

 

That’s David Pryce-Jones writing in Signatures: Literary Encounters of a Lifetime (Encounter Books, 2020), his collection of anecdotes of writers who gave him inscribed copies of their books. Pryce-Jones reflects on Conquest (1917-2015), the poet and historian who signed his 1968 history of Stalin’s purges, The Great Terror. He writes: 

 

“The question with Bob is whether he was a poet who happened to be a Sovietologist or a Sovietologist who happened to be a poet. I tend to think the former, because poetry answered to his view of making whatever there is to be made out of emotions, colors, life itself.” 

 

In 2009, already in his nineties, Conquest published Penultimata, a collection of new poems. Among them is “Last Hours,” nine stanzas of three lines each. Pryce Jones quotes the poem’s final stanza, which he says “best expresses the let’s-get-on-with-it Bob that I knew and liked”: 

 

“Dead in the water, the day is done

There’s nothing new under the sun,

 Still less when it’s gone down.” 

 

Has there ever been a less grim, more serious poet and historian? One reads Conquest and feels reassured that life is good, so let’s enjoy it. I feel the same way about Larkin and Amis – congenitally funny writers who are deeply serious. No sense in being gloomy or pretentious. I’ve been rereading some of Conquest’s books, including The Abomination of Moab (1979). The title essay is a demolition of the bad poetry translations that became fashionable in the twentieth century – Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Lowell and others. Of Zukofsky’s ridiculous Catullus translation, Conquest writes:

 

“Now, on its merits, Zukofsky's stuff is obviously not worth bothering about. We might pass on, merely hoping—and it is no more than a hope—that no one will find a way of being sillier still. But it is after all significant, in the mere fact that some allegedly expert voices have been raised in its favour. That this is the case about something so ostentatiously, so uncompromisingly awful, already tells us a good deal about the general standards now prevailing.” 

 

Conquest is reliably invigorating to read. Pryce-Jones tells us he knew Conquest from 1963. The latter was foreign editor of the Spectator, and he was its literary editor. He and Conquest shared a commonsensical moral sense:

  

“Communism was to the 20th century what sorcery had been to the Middle Ages. The claim of the foundational doctrine of Marxism to be a science was pure witchcraft. Something known as the dialectic was said to be the key to progress, but nobody could make sense of this figment. The state was supposed to wither away, leaving us all to look after ourselves as though back in the Garden of Eden, yet in the starkest of contradictions the Communist state granted itself ever more total power over the individual in every aspect of daily life. The organizing principle of class became a sentence of death, exile, or dispossession for tens of millions of men and women defined as bourgeois, capitalist, kulak, or whatever could be profitably exploited.”