A week during which the last surviving Dambuster pilot died also saw the death, at 98, of another anti-totalitarian figurehead, the poet and historian Robert Conquest. Born earlier than the Movement generation of writers he helped promote with his 1956 anthology New Lines (Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, DJ Enright, Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings among them), Conquest outlived his proteges by some distance, in the case of Larkin by 30 years. He also outwrote them, in numbers of pages produced, publishing more than 20 books on Soviet history.
When the most famous of these, The Great Terror, came out in 1968, no one of liberal or leftist persuasion wanted to believe its claims about the millions killed by Stalin. An ex-communist, Conquest had already shown his colours by pledging support for the US war in Vietnam. But history has mostly vindicated his research on Stalin (Amis suggested the book be reissued under the title I Told You So, You Fucking Fools). In the US, where he lived for many years and was awarded the presidential medal of freedom, he is revered for his part in the cold war.
A sillier side of him deserves recognition here: his talent for limericks. He revelled in their succinctness: “There was a great Marxist named 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.” Another effort revises Shakespeare’s seven ages of man: “First puking and mewling, / Then very pissed off with your schooling, / Then fucks and fights, / Then judging chaps’ rights, / Then sitting in slippers, then drooling.” Others are donnishly witty, albeit obscene: “When a man’s too old even to toss off, he / Can sometimes be consoled by philosophy. / One frequently shows a / Strong taste for Spinoza / When one’s balls are beginning to ossify.” Or again: “There was a young fellow called Shit, / A name he disliked quite a bit, / So he changed it to Shite, / A step in the right / Direction, one has to admit.”
Gentler in person than his robust masculinist pose would suggest, his voice reduced to a whisper in later years, Conquest attracted several younger admirers, including Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis. But it’s in the work of Larkin and Amis Senior that his presence is most strongly felt. There’s a book to be written about his influence on them. Meanwhile someone ought to publish a definitive book of the limericks.
