Christopher Hitchens on Robert Conquest

From The Wall Street Journal:

Just as one can never imagine Mr. Conquest raising his voice or losing his temper, so one can never picture him using an obscenity for its own sake. A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was "a United Front against bulls--t."
For all that, his life has been lived among the ideological storms of the 20th century, of which he retains an acute and unique memory. He was himself a communist for a couple of years in the late 1930s, having been radicalized while studying in France and observing events in Spain. "I was even a left deviationist--my best friend was a Trotskyist and when King George V was crowned we decorated the college at Oxford with eight chamberpots painted in red, white and blue." He left the party after asking what the line would be if Chamberlain ever declared war on Hitler, and receiving the reply: "Comrade, it is impossible that the bourgeois Chamberlain would ever declare war on Hitler." This he found "oafish." "I didn't like the word 'impossible.' "

Wartime service in Bulgaria, which made him an eyewitness to Stalin's takeover of the country at the end, was proof positive. From then on, working as a researcher and later as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, he strove to propose a social-democratic resistance to communism. "I'd always been a Labour man and somewhat on the left until the 1970s, when I met Margaret Thatcher and she asked my advice." That advice--which translated into the now-famous "Iron Lady" speech--was to regard the Soviet system as something condemned by history and doomed to fail. If that sounds easy now, it wasn't then (though Mr. Conquest insists that it was George Orwell who first saw it coming).

Like many people with a natural gift for politics, Mr. Conquest finds that he distrusts those who can talk of nothing else. His affiliations are undogmatic and unfanatical (he preferred Tony Blair over Margaret Thatcher's successor John Major), and he does not bother to turn out at election times. "I'm a dual national who's a citizen of the U.S. and the U.K., so that voting in either place seems rather overdoing it." On the events of today he is always very judicious and reserved. "I have my own opinions about Iraq, but I haven't said a great deal about the subject because I don't know all that much about it."

How often do you hear anyone talking like that? If he had done nothing political, he would still have had a life, and would be remembered as the senior figure of that stellar collection of poets and writers--John Wain, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis--who became known in the Britain of the 1950s as "the Movement." Liddie Conquest happens to have written rather authoritatively about this group, though that's not how they met. "I was teaching at the University of Texas in El Paso and he came to give a poetry reading. But it wasn't until I met him later in California that something 'clicked,' as people like to say."

Mrs. Conquest might be described as a force of nature, and also as the wielder of a Texan skillet that yields brisket of a rare and strange tenderness; Anthony Powell in his "Journals" was again committed to understatement when he wrote of her engagement to "Bob" that "she is charming, and he a lucky man."

"I know you meet different lefties from the ones I know," he says, referring obliquely to some recent tussles between your humble servant and the Michael Moore faction. "But I've always been friends with what I call 'the good left.' " In the days of the old Soviet Union, he kept up a solid friendship with the radical Russian scholar Steve Cohen, author of a study of Nikolai Bukharin and husband of Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, and admired his objectivity. "I helped out Scoop Jackson against Kissinger on the Soviet Jewish question. Pat Moynihan helped me get a job at the Wilson Center in Washington in the 1970s."

I remind him that I once introduced him to that other great veteran of the Bay Area, Jessica "Decca" Mitford, and that in the course of a tremendous evening she was enchanted to find that this dreaded friend of Mrs. Thatcher was the only other person she'd ever met who knew all the words to the old Red songbooks, including the highly demanding ditty: "The Cloakmaker's Union Is a No-Good Union," anthem of the old communist garment district. At the close of that dinner I challenged him to write her a limerick on the spot, and he gallantly and spontaneously produced the following:

They don't find they're having to check a
Movement of homage to Decca.
It's no longer fair
To say Oakland's "not there" She's made it a regular Mecca.

The old girl was quite blown away by this tribute, and kept the inscribed napkin as a souvenir.