Long Live Hitch

  I did my best even so to get a hearing for Edward’s reservations, and at his request I even wrote an uninspired introduction to his little anti-Oslo book Peace and Its Discontents, but my heart was not quite in it. The second so-called Palestinian intifadah, organized or incited in response to one of Ariel Sharon’s staged provocations at the Al Aqsa mosque, reeked to me of racist and religious demagogy and of that dull, sinister “sacrificial” incantation that has since become so nauseating on a world scale.

  Worse than that, in retrospect it cheapened and degraded the previous Palestinian appeals for solidarity. If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it’s already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze’ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in “Judaea and Samaria,” let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it’s flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable “solution.” There’s that word again . . .*

  If a difference of principle goes undiscussed for any length of time, it will start to compromise and undermine the integrity of a friendship. I was aware by 2001 that some of our conversations had become just very slightly reserved, and that we were sticking to “safe” topics. The political distance between us had widened much faster than our personal relations would yet have shown: I had urged The Nation to publish Kanan Makiya’s work on the Saddam Hussein regime, and when Edward rang the editors to complain, he was at first quite unaware that it had been my idea. His immediate riposte was vulgar in the extreme, containing the innuendo that Kanan was a paid agent, even a traitor.** Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of “ending” the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.

  I resolutely refuse to believe that the state of Edward’s health had anything to do with this, and I don’t say this only because I was once later accused of attacking him “on his deathbed.” He was entirely lucid to the end, and the positions he took were easily recognizable by me as extensions or outgrowths of views he had expressed (and also declined to express) in the past. Alas, it is true that he was closer to the end than anybody knew when the thirtieth anniversary reissue of his Orientalism was published, but his long-precarious condition would hardly argue for giving him a lenient review, let alone denying him one altogether, which would have been the only alternatives. In the introduction he wrote for the new edition, he generally declined the opportunity to answer his scholarly critics, and instead gave the recent American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of “Orientalism” in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of United States vandalism, perpetrated in order to shear the Iraqi people of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. So when the Atlantic invited me to review Edward’s revised edition, I decided I’d suspect myself more if I declined than if I agreed, and I wrote what I felt I had to.

  Not long afterward, an Iraqi comrade sent me without comment an article Edward had contributed to a magazine in London that was published by a princeling of the Saudi royal family. In it, Edward quoted some sentences about the Iraq war that he off-handedly described as “racist.” The sentences in question had been written by me. I felt myself assailed by a reaction that was at once hot-eyed and frigidly cold. He had cited the words without naming their author, and this I briefly thought could be construed as a friendly hesitance. Or as cowardice . . . I can never quite act the stern role of Mr. Darcy with any conviction, but privately I sometimes resolve that that’s “it” as it were. I didn’t say anything to Edward but then, I never said anything to him again, either. I believe that one or two charges simply must retain their face value and not become debauched or devalued. “Racist” is one such. It is an accusation that must either be made good upon, or fully retracted. I would not have as a friend somebody whom I suspected of that prejudice, and I decided to presume that Edward was honest and serious enough to feel the same way. I feel misery stealing over me again as I set this down: I wrote the best tribute I could manage when he died not long afterward (and there was no strain in that, as I was relieved to find), but I didn’t go to, and wasn’t invited to, his funeral.

  Here is something of what I feel about friendship, and about the way in which it is a potent symbol of other things. In Martin Amis’s enviably written memoir Experience, in the pages of which I am proud to appear several times, there is an episode about which people still interrogate me. Martin offers a slightly oblique and esoteric account of a trip on which he took me in 1989, to visit Saul Bellow in Vermont. On our buddy-movie drive up there from Cape Cod — he’s almost word-perfect about this bit — he made it clear that I wasn’t to drag the conversation toward anything political, let alone left-wing, let alone anything to do with Israel. (“No sinister balls,” which was our colloquialism for a certain kind of too-easy leftism.) I knew I was being greatly honored by the invitation, not just because it was a huge distinction to meet Bellow but because, second only to an introduction to his father, it was the highest such gift that Martin could bestow. I needed no telling that I should seize the opportunity to do more listening than talking.

  And yet it’s true, as he reports, that by the end of dinner nobody could meet anyone else’s eye and his own foot had become lamed and tired by its under-the-table collisions with my shins. How could this be? Now comes the chance for my own version of Rashomon.

  Bellow had greeted us and given us drinks, and if I say so myself I had justified Martin’s confidence during the predinner stage. Our host made an inquiry about Angus Wilson to which I happened to know the answer, and also a question about his own past with Whittaker Chambers to which I could at least suggest a hypothetical solution.* Bellow in turn had read to us from some of his old writing about, and correspondence with, poor, mad, smashed John Berryman. Everything was shaping well enough. But right on the wicker table in the room where we were chatting, there lay something that was as potentially hackneyed in its menace as Anton Chekhov’s gun on the mantelpiece. If it’s there in the first act, in other words, the plain intention is that it will be fired before the curtain comes down. All you must do is wait. It was the only piece of printed matter in view, and it was the latest edition of Commentary magazine, and its bannered cover-story headline was: “Edward Said: Professor of Terror.”

  I hadn’t completely wasted my time in dubious battle at New York and Washington and Chicago dinner parties, and I thought I knew when to raise my weary old dukes and when to keep them in my lap, but it was slightly nerve-straining to have to wonder in advance when and how this loaded barrel would be discharged. Dinner was by turns genial and sparkling, but the point came where Bellow made a sudden observation about anti-Zionism and then got up to fetch the magazine and underline his point. Indeed, I think he’d previously underlined some passages of the article as well. It was, even when tested against the depraved standard of polemic that had been set by Norman Podhore
tz’s editorship, a very coarse attack on Edward. I sat through Bellow’s disgusted summary for a while until it calmly came to me that I couldn’t say nothing. Conceivably, if Martin had not been there, I might have held my peace. But then, if he hadn’t been there, neither would I have been. No, what I mean is that Bellow didn’t know that I was a close friend of Edward’s. But Martin did. Thus, even though I knew he wanted me to stay off anything controversial, I couldn’t allow him to see me sitting there complicitly while an absent friend was being defamed. For all he knew, if the company was sufficiently illustrious, I might even let the cock crow for him. That would surely never do. So I said what I felt I ought to say — it wasn’t that much, but it was more than enough — and the carefully planned and delightfully executed evening of my very dearest friend was straightaway ruined. He suffered more agony than he needed to, because Bellow as an old former Trotskyist and Chicago streetfighter was used to much warmer work and hardly took offense at all. He later sent me a warm letter about my introduction to a new edition of Augie March.

  I certainly didn’t concur with Edward on everything, but I was damned if I would hear him abused without saying a word. And I think this may be worth setting down, because there are other allegiances that can be stresstested in comparable ways. It used to be a slight hallmark of being English or British that one didn’t make a big thing out of patriotic allegiance, and was indeed brimful of sarcastic and critical remarks about the old country, but would pull oneself together and say a word or two if it was attacked or criticized in any nasty or stupid manner by anybody else. It’s family, in other words, and friends are family to me. I feel rather the same way about being an American, and also about being of partly Jewish descent. To be any one of these things is to be no better than anyone else, but no worse. When confronted by certain enemies, it is increasingly the “most definitely no worse” half of this unspoken agreement on which I tend to lay the emphasis. (As with Camus’s famous “neither victim nor executioner,” one hastens to assent but more and more to say “definitely not victim.”)

  On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline “Goldstein Fifteenth.”) However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small “races” have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things — no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much — and other small “races,” too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.

  So I close this long reflection on what I hope is a not-too-quaveringly semi-Semitic note. When I am at home, I will only enter a synagogue for the bar or bat mitzvah of a friend’s child, or in order to have a debate with the faithful. (When I was to be wed, I chose a rabbi named Robert Goldburg, an Einsteinian and a Shakespearean and a Spinozist, who had married Arthur Miller to Marilyn Monroe and had a copy of Marilyn’s conversion certificate. He conducted the ceremony in Victor and Annie Navasky’s front room, with David Rieff and Steve Wasserman as my best of men.) I wanted to do something to acknowledge, and to knit up, the broken continuity between me and my German-Polish forebears. When I am traveling, I will stop at the shul if it is in a country where Jews are under threat, or dying out, or were once persecuted. This has taken me down queer and sad little side streets in Morocco and Tunisia and Eritrea and India, and in Damascus and Budapest and Prague and Istanbul, more than once to temples that have recently been desecrated by the new breed of racist Islamic gangster. (I have also had quite serious discussions, with Iraqi Kurdish friends, about the possibility of Jews genuinely returning in friendship to the places in northern Iraq from which they were once expelled.) I hate the idea that the dispossession of one people should be held hostage to the victimhood of another, as it is in the Middle East and as it was in Eastern Europe. But I find myself somehow assuming that Jewishness and “normality” are in some profound way noncompatible. The most gracious thing said to me when I discovered my family secret was by Martin, who after a long evening of ironic reflection said quite simply: “Hitch, I find that I am a little envious of you.” I choose to think that this proved, once again, his appreciation for the nuances of risk, uncertainty, ambivalence, and ambiguity. These happen to be the very things that “security” and “normality,” rather like the fantasy of salvation, cannot purchase.

  * The last time I heard an orthodox Marxist statement that was music to my ears was from a member of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, during the mass slaughter in the country. “The terms Hutu and Tutsi,” he said severely, “are merely ideological constructs, describing different relationships to the means and mode of production.” But of course!

  * The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West.

  * I am absurdly proud that James Fenton’s poem “The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah,” which first appeared in his collection Manila Envelope and which foreshadows some of these pregnant admonitions, is dedicated to me.

  * Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport “did more harm than good,” which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.

  ** In his attacks on fellow Arabs — Fouad Ajami being another recipient of his ire — Edward often became distressingly thuggish and ad hominem. Perhaps I was right to notice that softness on the USSR, which had been the special practitioner of such defamatory tactics.

  * Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he’d kept that job?

  Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?

  When the axe came into the woods, many of the trees said: “At least the handle is one of us.”

  — Turkish proverb

  If you desired to change the world, where would you start? With yourself or others?

  — Alexander Solzhenitsyn

  TOWARD THE CLOSE of Hearing Secret Harmonies, which is itself the close of his complex, majestic, rhythmical twelve-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time (and also by a nice chance the volume that happens to be dedicated to Robert Conquest), Anthony Powell’s narrator catches sight of a blue-clad person, crossing a playing field in his direction:

  Watching the approaching figure, I was reminded of a remark made by Moreland ages before. It related to one of those childhood memories we sometimes found in common. This particular recollection had referred to an incident in The Pilgrim’s Progress that had stuck in both our minds. Moreland said that, after his aunt read the book aloud to him as a child, he could never, even after he was grown-up, watch a lone figure draw nearer across a field, without thinking that this was Apollyon come to contend with him. From the moment of first hearing that passage read aloud —
assisted by a lively portrayal of the fiend in an illustration, realistically depicting his goat’s horns, bat’s wings, lion’s claws, lizard’s legs — the terror of that image, bursting out from an otherwise at moments prosy narrative, had embedded itself for all time in the imagination. I, too, as a child, had been riveted by the vividness of Apollyon’s advance across the quiet meadow.

  When I first read this passage of Powell, I put down the novel and was immediately back in the Crapstone of my Devonshire boyhood. The long-forgotten but evidently well-retained scene of my memory is as plain in my recollection as anything that happened to me yesterday. My younger brother, Peter—aged perhaps eight—has so strongly imbibed John Bunyan’s Puritan classic as almost to have memorized it. (The “slough of despond,” “the Giant Despair,” “Doubting Castle,” the fripperies of “Vanity’s fair,” “Oh death, where is thy sting?” Can you remember when all these used to be part of the equipment of everybody literate in English? They are as real to my brother and to me as the shaggy, wild ponies on the nearby moors.) But, coming to the very decisive page that should show Apollyon in all his horrid magnificence, Peter finds that the publishers have bowdlerized the text, and withheld this famous illustration from the version made available to the under-tens. He is not to be allowed to look The Evil One in the face.

  This is one of those moments that, I choose to think, shows the Hitchens family at its best. Under an absolutely unremitting pressure from Peter, my father writes to the local library, to the bookshop, and eventually to the publishers themselves. No objection they can make is met by anything but scornful impatience; with a whim of steel my younger brother insists that if there is such an image, then he was not born to be shielded from it. I may have imagined this, but I am not certain that some harassed representative of the publisher does not actually call at our modest terrace house on the edge of Dartmoor, perhaps to confirm that this turbulent boy is really dictating such stuff to Commander Hitchens rather than acting as — say—the innocent front kid in some devil-worshipping or Straw Dogs coven.