This old fogey is a yogi

This one’s for sumac:

I had gone out to California to profileBob Conquest for the Guardian. He should be famous for a lot of things, but one of his talents is an astonishing skill at filthy versification. I could not, when talking to Susan, remember the one about Brigid Brophy, but I have found it in Kingsley Amis’s memoirs on my return:

The first man to fuck Brigid Brophy

Was awarded the Kraft-Ebing Trophy

Plus ten thousand quid,

Which, for what the chap did,

Will be widely accounted a low fee.

The same source yields two fragments from Mexican Pete, the sequel to Eskimo Nell which he had composed with his Oxford chum John Blakeway (who ended his days as Her Majesty’s Consul General in Palermo). I’m afraid that these reduce me to weepy whoops of laughter every time.

It won't be a neuter you'll get as a tutor, but our oldest, randiest priest,
Who knows every appliance of sexual science and the mystic smut of the East,
For this old fogey is a Yogi, and often he will pass whole
Years in pursuit of the Absolute just gazing up his asshole.
...<br />
If you wish to read of each foul misdeed Pete performed on the way to college,
Just look up 'Mexican? in the Oxford Lexicon of Criminal Sexual Knowledge.
It will also mention his long detention in a sexual maniacs? home,
Where he did time for the nauseous crime of fucking the Pope of Rome.

No wonder that the author’s awards and honors include

“the Jefferson Lectureship in the Humanities, the federal government’s highest distinction in the field, in 1993; the Richard Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters in 1999; and the Alexis de Tocqueville Award, 1992.”