Last month, in Stanford, California, I had lunch with Robert Conquest, poet, historian, literary editor of this paper in the early 1960s, exposer of Soviet totalitarianism. After Conquest’s book The Great Terror (1968), it became impossible for all but the most crazed fanatic or fool to deny that Stalin had arranged the greatest system of mass murder in history (Hitler being at least his equal in iniquity, but a bit lower on the numbers). Bob turned 98 a week after I saw him. He was born just before the Bolsheviks he exposed came to power. His writing, and his advice to Margaret Thatcher, helped bring about the collapse of their horrible regime. On Monday, Bob died, cared for to the end by his wonderful wife Liddie (his fourth, and the one who lasted). His historical work was dedicated to the theme ‘the main responsibility for the century’s disaster lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings, thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions’.
As I left, Bob gave me, inscribed in a shaky hand, a volume of his more ribald verse called Blokelore and Blokesongs, which centres on Old Fred, a character not completely unrelated to old Bob (‘Fred’s been to marriages before/ (Though mostly to his own)…’). Fred is a sexist, of course, but not a misogynist. In ‘Fred Puts the Clock Back’, Fred laments the era when ‘A woman would “confer / Her favours on” some lucky man/ And he would “pleasure” her./ “Have sex with”, “have it off with” — this/ Jargon gives no sense/ Of all those warm benignities,/ That sweet beneficence’. Bob was a serious poet too, and a man who claimed not to fear death:
Demons don’t
Die. Hence the astonishment
They feel when faced with a quite frequent
Wish, which if they could they’d gladly grant.
Immortality may be what humans want
But knowing what it’s like to live forever
Demons don’t.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes in this week’s issue of The Spectator. Subscribe here.
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