Sunday, August 03, 2025

'A Ten-pound Life Will Give You Every Fact'

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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