On this, the tenth anniversary of poet-historian Robert Conquest’s death at ninety-eight, let’s recall the sonnet he wrote about the treachery of biographers, “Second Death”:
“A ten-pound Life will
give you every fact
-- Facts that he’d hoped
his friends would not rehearse
To a condign posterity
which lacked
Nothing of moment, since
it had his verse.
Or so he thought. But now
we come to read
What his more honest
prudence had held in:
Tasteless compulsion into
trivial deed,
A squalor more outrageous
than the sin,
“Piss on that grave where
lies the weakly carnal? . . .
– Hopeless repentance had
washed clean his name,
His virtue’s strength
insistent on a shame
Past all the brief
bravados full and final.
Without excuses now, to
the Eternal,
He makes the small, true
offering of his fame.”
According to his widow,
Elizabeth “Liddie” Conquest, her husband wrote the poem after reading Charles
Osborne’s W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1979), which he found disgraceful.
I read it when first published and remember it being a workmanlike assemblage
of facts with no revelations of character and little understanding of the
poetry and prose. Osborne reported on Auden’s homosexuality, which wasn’t
exactly news to attentive readers. The book reminded me of Joseph Blotner’s
two-volume biography of William Faulkner, published five years earlier – a transcription
of isolated facts, a practice that has become predictable in recent decades.
The biographer becomes an indiscriminate vacuum cleaner. Liddie, who reports
her husband modeled his sonnet on Auden’s own “Who’s Who,” is presently
collecting and editing a large collection of Conquest’s letters.
[Thank you, Cynthia Haven.
Find “Second Death” in New and Collected Poems (1988) and Collected
Poems (2020). Conquest died on August 3, 2015.]
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