Robert Conquest (b. 1917) |
There once was a man of Stoke Poges,all from my old college friend Jon:
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice....
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We did it in a bed and said "Oh, yes."I like these, but I'm disapponted by Oh, yes's and togas's failing to include a rhyme for "Stoke" and "poke," and, of course, the clever third line repeats the given first line.
And all that was required was togas.
Straight sex, rats, does not rhyme with Stoke Poges.
Jon's first two suggestions are easy to adjust:
Where he did it in bed and said [choke] "Oh, yes!"(I think togas came in men's and women's styles!)
Where they managed the deed in bloke togas.
I don't expect to find "the solution" later in Hitchens's book, but in reading on I found something even better, more about word games, of which, we have to admit, writing limericks is one:
I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead....[p. 130]There's probably another blog entry to come of this. I see that on p. 435, the index entry for "word games" also gives reference to pp. 264-266.
I boldly assert, in fact I think I know, that a lot of friendships and connections absolutely depend upon a sort of shared language, or slang. Not necessarily designed to exclude others, they can establish a certain comity and, even after a long absence, re-establish it in a second. Martin [Amis, son of Kingsley] was—is—a genius at this sort of thing. It arose—arises—from his willingness to devote real time to the pitiless search for the apt resonance....[p. 164]
Something of the same was true of the "Friday lunch" that has now become the potential stuff of a new "Bloomsbury" legend...There was never the intention or design that it become a "set" or a "circle," and of course if there had been any such intention, the thing would have been abortive. The Friday lunch began to simply "occur" in the mid-1970s, and persisted into the early 1980s, and is now cemented in place in several memoirs and biographies. Let me try and tell you something of how it was.
It began, largely at Martin's initiation, as a sort of end-of-the-week clearinghouse for gossip and jokes, based on the then-proximity of various literary magazines and newspapers. Reliable founding attendees included the Australian poets Clive James and Peter Porter, Craig Raine (T.S. Eliot's successor as poetry editor at Faber and Faber), the Observer's literary editor Terry Kilmartin (the re-translator of Scott Moncrieff's version of Marcel Proust, and the only man alive trusted by Gore Vidal to edit his copy without further permission), the cartoonist and rake and dandy Mark Boxer, whose illustrations then graced (for once the word is quite apt) all the best bookcovers as well as the Time's op-ed page. Among those bookcovers were the dozen volumes of Anthony Powell's masterwork [A Dance to the Music of Time] and among Mark's aesthetic and social verdicts the one I remember being delivered with the most authority was his decided and long-meditated conclusion that: "It's the height of bad manners to sleep with somebody less [sic] than three times."...The critic Russell Davies, the then-rising novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, James Fenton and Robert Conquest when they were in England, Kingsley when he wasn't otherwise engaged with yet more lavish and extensive lunches, and your humble servant help to complete this dramatis personae....[pp. 168-169]
...but Robert Conquest, the king of the limerick [emphasis mine]...always thought that if a job was worth doing it was worth doing well....
Simple "versified filth"—Amis senior's crushing condemnation of most popular limericks—was not allowed.
Indeed insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the "Seven Ages of Man" shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:
Seven Ages: first puking and mewlingThis is not the only example of Conquest's genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik "experiment" in five lines? Barely a problem:
Then very pissed-off with your schooling
Then fucks, and then fights
Next judging chaps' rights
Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.
There was an old bastard 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 old bastard Stalin did ten in. [pp. 173-174]
I used to think that my limerick, "No End in Sight" (November 26, 2006):
Religious war burns on and beleaguerswas pretty darn good, and maybe it isn't bad, but it compresses far less into itself than either of the examples from Conquest.
Iraq's Sunni and Shiite besiegers,
But it brings no relief
From dogmatic belief
But for stone-dead dogmatic believers.
Not quite a Eureka moment, as it's not quite right, but I wonder whether this is close enough for me to claim to have found the missing line for C Hitchens:-
ReplyDeleteThere once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice
But eschewed that bunch of old fogies.
Close enough to delight for sure! Wonderful line. Thanks, OldEP(?)
ReplyDeleteMight I offer -
ReplyDeleteThere once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice
And was hung for unwelcome approaches.
Excellent! Thanks much.
ReplyDelete