* Once, in a Boston restaurant, I brought up the subject of capital punishment. Karla Faye Tucker had just received the lethal injection, down in Texas. (Governor Bush had prayed for ‘guidance’ in the matter; his prayers had been answered by a lowered thumb.) After a short while I noticed that my lament for the Abolition movement was being greeted without noticeable sympathy. I was saying,
What is it with Americans and the death penalty? Instead of talking about Rickey Ray Rector, they were all talking about Gennifer Flowers. Instead of talking about Karla Faye Tucker, they’re all talking about Monica Lewinsky.
Saul remained silent. I said,
— Don’t tell me you’re not against it either.
— Well. Look at … Eichmann. What are you supposed to do with a son of a bitch like that?
— Christ, you’re really Old Testament, aren’t you!
And he shrugged, and gave a sideways nod.
* From Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection (1989) — published a couple of months before the visit to Vermont. Christopher, who had read it, was not like the kid in the book: a ‘low-grade cheap-shot’ nihilist. Christopher’s complications were far more human. When my crisis came I was reduced to a kind of inaudibility. With the Hitch it went the other way. During his stay in Cape Cod he spent the days writing a long, learned and supereloquent defence of another great (future) friend of mine, whose life, that year, was also suddenly changed, transformed utterly: Salman Rushdie.
† About half an hour into an informal lecture on the history of the kibbutz movement, I raised a hand and said: ‘There’s something I want to know about the kibbutz movement, and I know this is a question of deep concern also to my colleague Julian Barnes. Do you have a ping-pong table here?’ I felt (rightly) that this was sayable, in 1986. Would it feel sayable in 1999?
* Kingsley was sympathetic to Israel but he would not have liked it there. At one dinner party I was forcibly reminded of a line from Lucky Jim: I held in my hand the smallest drink I had ever been seriously offered.
* He was there as a reporter. The Six Day War (the Arabs call it the June War) ended, I see, on Saul’s fifty-second birthday.
† In the novel, I realise, I de-exoticised her. Rachel seems to be Jewish but turns out not to be. I don’t know what idiotic scruple possessed me. I did change her name. That I did transform, in the crucible, in the grappledrome, of my imagination.
* ‘Vermont: The Good Place’ (1990), collected in It All Adds Up. My father, typing out his home address in early letters to Larkin, would usually write not ‘Berkhamsted’ but ‘The Bad Town’. For him, and for different sorts of reasons, home was the bad place.
* That he didn’t know how to drive was a testimony to my friend’s poetlike (and pasha-like) qualities. Poets can’t, don’t, shouldn’t drive. (British poets can’t or don’t drive. American poets drive, but shouldn’t.) I wrote a piece about this, in the mid-1990s. Soon afterwards, at an event in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, as I signed books in the public square, a local poet stepped forward and, in droll repudiation, tossed on to the table a slim vol and a driver’s licence. This poet was lean, weathered, sandily handsome. He also wore a plaster support on his right arm. ‘What have you been up to?’ I said. ‘Out driving your car?’ Christopher Hitchens has since learnt how to drive. He looks endearingly bizarre behind the wheel — as if he were wearing a ballgown or a King Kong suit. The delight in his eyes is proof enough that he shouldn’t be sitting there. Larkin, after many travails, learnt how to drive, and learnt to rue his profligacy (see the later Letters). Fenton, the essential, the crystallised poet, made attempts to learn how to drive that bordered on the Sisyphean: ‘everlastingly laborious’ (COD).
* An ignorant solecism that Christopher not only forgave (I would expect forgiveness) but, much more generously, contrived to forget, leaving it unevoked, for ever unactivated. It doesn’t haunt him: it haunts me.
* A passing note. When Princess Diana died it took four or five days for the jokes to marinate. When John Kennedy Jr died the jokes were instantaneous, electronic, light-speed. The feeling, in other words, had no chance to exist; it was born dead. One wonders, too, about subsequent road kill on the information highway.
Letter from the Old Forge
The Old Forge
Shilton,
Oxon.
[Autumn, 1971]
Dearest Wog,*
Thanks for the cheque + note. There have been such interminable dramas here: it all seems to be getting out of hand. As a result of the happily varied events of last weekend, Z, whom you know, is now at the local looney bin in Oxford. What happened was Friday: he beat up a girl whom he’s been unrealistically in love with for 6 mths, whom he’d asked for the w.end & found in bed with another guest.† Saturday: prolonged looney behaviour (stealing my car for the afternoon, spending all his money) followed by a suicide bid (some sleeping pills), us trying to make him sick and keep him awake, and then an 80 m.p.h. mercy dash to the Radcliffe with me at the wheel. He turned out to be O.K. and Sunday: he returned while only Gully and Y were here — a scuffle ensued (with Y) and after this becoming scene, she called the police saying she wasn’t ‘going to have him in the house’. I came back and sorted things out, temporarily. He went to the bin (where he’s since had a fit) and Y has gone to the London Clinic … The last weeks have been characterised by pretty well permanent hysteria and high volume rows between Y and X … Things like: ‘You don’t love me! If you loved me, you’d look after me!’ (Meaning, I suspect, you’d spend more time licking the kitchen floor). It’s novel-fodder,* but that’s about all. I’ve never seen people so intent on advertising their own vulgar and selfish emotionalism: and making themselves so horribly and flabbily vulnerable. Y’s new edicts, transmitted to us from the hospital, feature: no friends at the house, no pop records etc, because she simply just ‘can’t take it’. It also means my rent, because of the ejection of Z, has gone up to £6. My money’s come through & I can handle the difference & and I hope Gully can soon come and live here which would be better in every imaginable way.† But, on the other hand, and I shall certainly use this as a threat, this isn’t a good Finals Year atmosphere, combined with all the tiring and expensive driving in and out; so I’ll say if things don’t calm down I’m getting the hell out — Y’s not a student, and it’s not X’s Finals Year, so what’s it to her? She’s the landlady, as she screamed many times at Z, so she is in a position to throw him out. She’s therefore in a position to be left paying all the rent herself if she gets too unbearable.‡
As you see, I could use some advice and support. Jonathan [Wordsworth] says he’d love to be taken out on the 11th & I’m looking forward to seeing your sane faces. Could you drop a line saying what you’ve got in mind for Jonathan and to say what you think of all this? I’m perfectly O.K., but I’m getting increasingly angry about the whole set-up here as regards my work and so on. See you both soon & give all my love to Col (say Insurance is O.K.). Lots of love to you and Dad.
Love Mart X X X.
* This is the last letter in the Osric archive, and for the first time I have not censored or bowdlerised Jane’s nickname. I took against it after seeing William Boyd’s early TV play Good and Bad at Games. It is set in a public school and its main character is called Woggie. Woggie was born in the East. You used to feel that English people were going to get called Wog or Woggie if they had ever been north of the Trent or south of the Tweed. But Wog, I am reminded, was called Wog because of her hair: golliwog. I favour the nickname now because this is a goodbye of a kind and I want to thank her for her help. Osric had moved into a distant cottage — with a husband and wife (X and Y) and a further man (Z). It did not turn out well.
† Rob.
* Dead Babies (1975). I recently visited (10/99) the set of the film they have made of it. The actors and actresses were all astonishing but the Little Keith was astonishing. They fired the first Keith, the producer told me. He was a good actor, and widely liked, but they wanted a cruel
ler Keith. They found a crueller Keith. And all the other actors and actresses said with due regret that, in fact, they felt happier with a crueller Keith.
† There are many psychological transparencies in this letter. Anyway, soon after Gully moved in (and she was very sweet about this), I went up to our bedroom and said, ‘I’ve just taken a death pill and I’m going to have horrific hallucinations for the next seven hours.’ It was MDA and I was right.
‡ Gully and Osric made their escape in the small hours of the night, loading the Mini and driving off in second gear.
PART TWO
THE MAIN EVENTS
1: Delilah Seale
It was the late spring of 1995 and I had just returned from a three-week book tour of North America. On such tours, Ian McEwan once said, you feel like ‘the employee of a former self’, because the book is now out there to be championed and squired, while you have moved on. Well, my book, The Information (and all its impedimenta), was still with me, was too much with me, soon and late. But I won’t tender any further complaints about the book tour. Some writers find the role of the double more degrading/deracinating/boring/tiring and so on than others find it; some writers are not easily divisible, and must cloister themselves behind moats and barbed wire.* Once an outrageous novelty, the book tour is now accepted as a fact of life and a matter of professional routine. You arrive in each city and present yourself to its media; after that, in the evening, a mediated individual, you appear at the bookshop and perform. And now something salutary happens, as you are confronted by your most priceless asset: your readers. How badly you need them — because they know who you really are; they are the confidants of your unconscious mind. It does the author good to Meet the Reader. Sometimes, in the signing queue, I see a pair of eyes quietly telling me that communion has occurred, and I feel a proportional transfusion.
I had come in on the overnight, that spring morning. My plane, in addition, had peeled off for a rest-stop in the Arctic and arrived four or five hours late. The après-book-tour condition, I think, would be indistinguishable from extreme jet-lag, with or without the extreme jet-lag that usually accompanies it. All split and scoured, the author (that not particularly fragile being) must now shed his executive self and repossess his former shape. It was a Sunday. I and my ghost were alone in the studio apartment. We had coffee — or I made it and my ghost drank it. He had a bath, sluicing off all that jumbo, and I felt a little better. We passed round a cigarette as I went through my mail. One letter caused me to sit down suddenly when I was halfway through its first sentence. This, I might have murmured to my ghost, is probably for you …
That night, carrying the letter in my chest pocket, I escorted Isabel to the Coronet in Notting Hill Gate, where we saw An Awfully Big Adventure — the screen adaptation of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel. And I’m very sorry, Beryl, but I slept through most of it (a sleep both deep and fitful) and then walked out. We regrouped for dinner at that pizza/pasta place just down the street. Its menu featured a dish translatable as ‘from grandmother’s handbag’; on an earlier visit Isabel asked Kinch if he fancied a plate of hairgrips and DentuFix. I took the letter from my jacket and passed it across the table.
Isabel finished reading it and said,
— … Good.
— There isn’t any reason, is there, why this shouldn’t be a great thing.
— None.
I rang my mother in the morning and sent her mind back almost twenty years. She said immediately,
— I’ve still got the photograph.
— Do you think you could dig it out, Mum?
— It’s here on the dressing-table, she said.
And now it’s on the shelf in the study, within arm’s reach of my desk.
I felt it was important to tell the story in the simplest possible terms. My interlocutors, after all, were aged eleven and ten: number-one son, Louis, and number-two son, Jacob. For the occasion I had taken the boys to a Chinese restaurant called the Spice Market, prized by them at the time for its serve-yourself and all-you-can-eat facilities plus its powerfully sizzling Mongolian Grill. What I was about to reveal to them was a family matter, a private matter, but I knew it couldn’t remain private. There was a feeling among my intimates that I should wait, that ‘the boys weren’t ready’ for the news. But it seemed to me that I didn’t have a choice. To give the emphasis: my free will was being compromised. The Fourth Estate wasn’t going to care whether or not the boys were ready.* Over and above this, though, I thought that the boys were ready, had always been ready. I trusted the morality of my sons.
— There was once a little girl, I said.
I said, I’m going to tell a story. There was once a little girl called Delilah. She had a brother and a mother and a father. When she was two years old her mother died. Her mother killed herself. She hanged herself. Delilah grew up with her brother, raised by her father, who remarried. Then when she was eighteen it was revealed that her father wasn’t her real father. And so suddenly it seemed that she had no parents at all.
Louis and Jacob spoke in one voice. They had a habit, that night, of speaking in one voice.
— Poor her, they said.
— Well, boys, the real father … is me.
— Good, they said. And we talked on.
Good, good — it seemed good.
The meeting was set for seven o’clock in the bar of a Knightsbridge hotel called the Rembrandt. A potent name and a challenging spirit, for students of the human face; and very soon two human faces would be opposed, as in a mirror, each addressing the other with unprecedented curiosity. I arrived twenty minutes early, accompanied by an indispensable Isabel. My hands were shaking. They always shake, my hands, but that evening they felt quite disconnected from me. A cup and saucer would sound like a pair of castanets in my grip; an iced drink would become a maraca. We sat on a sofa among lamps and low tables, doilies, antimacassars. I watched the door. She knew what I looked like. And I knew that she was nineteen and would arrive on the very stroke of the hour.
This time the day before, in the same bar of the same hotel, I had had a long conversation with Delilah’s father, or co-father, Patrick Seale (a figure of well-established versatility: literary agent, art-dealer, foreign correspondent and Middle East specialist). He was the author of several books; he was also the author of the letter in my jacket pocket. On this occasion his manner, like his letter, was impeccably straightforward. Patrick told me that his original plan had been to tell Delilah everything when she turned twenty-one. Family politics had intervened (there was the stepmother, and two further children), and now Delilah knew. She had known for some months. And how had she reacted? Patrick described a process that began in grief and had since moved on towards something more resilient. In his super-evolved fashion he had given Delilah a box of my books (a kind of kit) plus a video cassette of an hour-long interview. I would be coming at her partly as a mediated being, mediated by myself — and others: Delilah would presumably be aware that I had abandoned my sons to go and live with an heiress in New York, the better to squander my advances on a Liberace smile … But this was a secondary or tertiary matter. At the moment of revelation she must have been wholly indifferent to my identity (and never mind its carapace). When I tried to imagine it I saw her aswim in a panic of lost connection. The connection — with her father, her brother — seemed lost, but it wasn’t. And here was another connection waiting to be made. I thought, too, of the courage she would need on this summer evening as she mounted the steps and opened the door.
She entered.
— It’s you, said Isabel.
Then hugs and kisses for the girl with my face.
On the telephone the next day Patrick and I had a conversation of surrealistic urbanity. It felt likely that these sentences had never been heard before. I congratulated him on his daughter. And he congratulated me on mine.
‘Poor her,’ said the boys, in one voice, when they heard her story. ‘Good,’ they said, when I told them who the fat
her was. ‘I’m very pleased and proud that you’ve taken it this way.’ And very relieved, I might have added — but I don’t think I felt any relief, because I don’t think I felt any doubt. And again the eerie unison, with the frowning duo saying, ‘Why would we not?’ Yes, exactly. Why would you not. And when a day or two afterwards Delilah came to dinner for the first time, the boys leapt to the sound of the buzzer and ran upstairs to open the door and let her in.