To Kill All Day

Frank Kermode

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million by Martin Amis
Cape, 306 pp, £16.99, September 2002, ISBN 0 224 06303 0

This book is primarily the product of some fiercely hard reading, a reaction to the shock of finding something out from books. It has some directly autobiographical elements – a letter to the author’s father, reminiscences of a dead sister, chats with Christopher Hitchens, tales of Oxford and the old New Statesman office, and so on. But fierce reading is what this book is about, and these other passages seem intrusive. It would have been enough to observe a good writer wrestling with material that clearly tested his nerve.

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Vol. 24 No. 20 · 17 October 2002 » Frank Kermode » To Kill All Day (print version)
Pages 21-22 | 2470 words

Letters

From Agnes Hodgson

Frank Kermode (LRB, 17 October) is surely right that we can't hear enough about Christopher Hitchens's political consciousness, and in Koba the Dread, we find out how his friend Martin Amis discovered one of his own. Whatever his merits as a memoirist, however, Amis should perhaps have left history to the historians. He claims to have read 'several yards of books about the Soviet experiment'. We can't check the yardage – he doesn't include a bibliography – but much of it seems to have made little impression in comparison with one particular book by another 'friend', Robert Conquest's The Great Terror, published in 1968. Amis calls it the 'only book on the subject'. Well, there are rather more than that, but perhaps we shouldn't get hung up on numbers. Amis isn't, after all – he's tempted by Solzhenitsyn's fifty million and more, but in the end seems to have settled on the 'twenty million' of the book's subtitle. Russians, he says, 'refer, totemically', to this figure, but as an estimate of the number of dead under Stalin, it most closely resembles a rounding-up of the figure that Conquest, in The Great Terror, estimated for the total of 'excess deaths' (deaths above the normal level, due to famine, executions and abnormal levels of disease) in the Soviet Union during the period 1930-39. In an exchange with R.W. Davies in the late 1990s, Conquest insisted that the figure he provided in The Great Terror was fourteen million, Davies that it was seventeen. (I don't see how any reliable estimate of the actual figure might be made when historians can't even ascertain what they themselves have already written.) Davies, building on data released from Soviet archives from 1987 onwards, thinks the actual figure nearer eleven million. This is strikingly close to Kermode's 'nine or ten million', which makes it all the more surprising, late in his review, to find him asserting that 'many or most (wrongly, of course)' thought Conquest's figures exaggerated. 'We badly need to know the number of the dead,' Amis claims at one point in Koba. It's not clear how his 'twenty million', euphonious though it is, serves that end.

Agnes Hodgson
London N19

From L.P. Glover

Frank Kermode declares that Auden's reading of Motley's Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic induced a deep depression in the poet as a result of 'the catalogue of tortures and massacres attributed to William the Silent'. Motley's book is steeped in admiration of the great founder of the Dutch state, who remains one of Europe's great humanitarian figures. The horrors mentioned by Kermode were the work of the Spanish Duke of Alva's Blood Council, William's enemies.

L.P. Glover
Litherland, Merseyside