POETS Day! Robert Conquest

Vijfde Sacharov-congres in Amsterdam; v.l.n.r. premier Lubbers , Vladimir Boekovski , prof. J.W. Bezemer en prof. Robert Conquest, 1987. Photo by Rob C. Croes (ANEFO), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Happy POETS Day one and all. The acronym being Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and it’s a call to freedom and all that’s great and good in the spirit of man, if you consider fibbing a bit to get out of work early a good and among goods great. Do it anyway. There’s a construct among at least one of the billionty billion philosophies of life that will justify your mid-afternoon work exit. Call yourself an anarcho-something or other. Solid ground.

This week I’m going to be circuitous, and that says something considering it’s me writing.

Two weeks ago, I featured the poet Ezra Pound as an example of a modernist movement in English language poetry that evoked a reaction from a group of poets who either boldly or boringly became known as The Movement. Last week’s featured poet, Kingsley Amis, was among the members of that movement, which is awkward to write considering that movement was called… you get it. I hate using the same non-article word twice in a paragraph.

Maybe chief among the members of The Movement was Robert Conquest. He surely recognized himself as a poet, but I doubt he did primarily so. He was a brilliant historian whose work was chronicling the atrocities of the Soviet Union, particularly under Stalin. He wrote about all manner of Soviet goings-on, but it was Stalin’s history that resonates horrifically. His most famous book is The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.

I said this would be circuitous, so grant me a moment. The son of last week’s featured poet, Kingsley Amis, turned out to be a brilliant novelist. He didn’t just write novels though. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million was a part-history, part-memoir focusing on how Koba, a nickname for Stalin (which was already a nickname,) fooled and entranced so many, including Amis’s father, until the crimes were undeniable.

The first two pages of Koba the Dread are among the most powerful I’ve ever read, but they are a tribute to a startling revelation of Conquest’s.

Quoting at length from Martin Amis:

“Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivism and the Terror-Famine:

‘We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.’

That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.

‘Horse manure was eaten, partly because it often contained whole grains of wheat’ (1,340 lives). ‘Oleska Voytrykhovsky saved his and his family’s … lives by consuming the meat of horses which had died in the collective of glanders and other diseases’ (2,480 lives). Conquest quotes Vasily Grossman’s essayistic-documentary novel Forever Flowing: ‘And the children’s faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads –- thin, wide lips – and some of them resembled fish, mouths open.’ (3,880 lives). Grossman goes on:

‘In one hut there would be something like a war. Everyone would keep close watch over everyone else… The wife turned against her husband and the husband against his wife. The mother hated the children. And in some other hut would be inviable to the very last. I knew one woman with four children. She would tell them fairy stories and legends so that they would forget their hunger. Her own tongue could hardly move, but she would take them into her arms even though she had hardly the strength to lift her arms when they were empty. Love lived within her. And people noticed that where there was hate people died off more swiftly. Yet love, for that matter, saved no one. The whole village perished, one and all. No life remained in it.’

Thus: 11,860 lives. Cannibalism was widely practiced – and widely punished. Not all these pitiable anthroporphagi received the supreme penalty. In the late 1930s, 325 cannibals from the Ukraine were still serving life sentences in Baltic slave camps.

The famine was an enforced famine: the peasants were stripped of their food. On June 11, 1933, the Ukraine paper Visto praised an ‘alert’ secret ploliceman for unmasking and arresting a ‘Fascist saboteur’ who had hidden some bread in a hole under a pile of clover.  That word fascist. One hundred and forty lives.

In these pages, guileless prepositions like at and to each represent the murder of six or seven large families. There is only one book on this subject: Robert Conquest’s. It is, I repeat, 411 pages long.”

I’ve read that passage many times and it never ceases to stun.

You’d think someone immersed in the horrors of the 20^th century would hold a lesser opinion of man and beauty and hope. But then Robert Conquest does this.

Humanities

Robert Conquest (1917 – 2015)

HYPNOTIZED and told they’re seeing red
When really looking at a yellow wall
The children speak of orange seen instead :
Split to such rainbow through that verbal lens
It takes a whole heart’s effort to see all
The human plenum as a single ens.

The word on the subjective breath must be
A wind to winnow the emotive out ;
Music can generalize the inner sea
In dark harmonics of a blended heart ;
But, hot with certainty and keen with doubt,
Verse sweats out heartfelt knowledge, clear eyed
art.

Is it, when paper roses make us sneeze,
A mental or physical event ?
The word can freeze us to such categories,
Yet verse can warm the mirrors of the word
And through their loose distortions represent
The scene, the heart, the life, as they occurred.

– In a dream’s blueness or a sunset’s bronze
Poets seek the image of love and wonder,
But absolutes of music, gold or swans
Are only froth unless they go to swell
That harmony of science pealing under
The poem’s waters like a sunken bell.

That poem is from New Lines, a collection of The Movement Poets edited by Robert Conquest himself. More quotes, I’m afraid, but from his introduction:

“In the 1940s the mistake was made of giving the Id, a sound player on the percussion side under a strict conductor, too much of a say in the doings of the orchestra as a whole. As it turned out, it could only manage the simpler part of melody and rhythm, and was completely out of its depth with harmony and orchestration. This led to a rapid collapse of public taste, from which we have not yet recovered.”

From that frustration with modern trends The Movement was born. I’m a moderate partisan in favor of the latter, but I’m happy that both exist and flourished.