Long Live Hitch

  I know that I mocked and teased Peter on the subject, because I was much too prone to tease him in any case, but the day came when the unabridged version arrived, and we could both solemnly turn — with parental supervision, of course, but in our own minds to protect our parents from any shock or trauma — to the color plate from hell. It was one of those pull-out pages that needs to be unfolded from the volume itself, in a three-stage concertina. And it was anticlimax defined. For one thing — Powell’s summary above may have prepared you for this — it was absurdly overdone. A lizard-man or snake-man might have been represented creepily enough, but this non-artist had hugely overdone the number of possible mutations of leg, wing, and pinion and also given Apollyon a blazing furnace for a belly. The demon’s wicked and gloating expression, looked at from one angle, was merely silly and bilious. I don’t remember what the reaction of Yvonne and the Commander and Peter was to this long-awaited appointment with the forces of darkness, but on me it had the effect of reinforcing the growing opinion that all such images were strictly man-made, and indeed mainly designed like much of religion for the ignoble purpose of scaring children.

  That’s to one side. What I want to set down is the admiration I felt for Peter in taking things to their uttermost. He was already quite decided that he did not need any protection from unpleasantness, or from reality, and so it was immaterial that this particular exposure was to the unreal. “Facing it, Captain McWhirr,” as Conrad puts it in his Typhoon. “Always facing it. That’s the way to get through.” To hand is a letter from Yvonne’s dear friend Rosemary, in which she writes to me about the prep school Peter and I both attended and the gigantic and rather questionable chap who ran it:

  At Mount House Peter was called before Mr. Wortham for some misdemeanour and said to him: “You may be in command now but you will never quell the fires within me.” (You probably know this tale.) We have all dined out on it for years . . . Whenever I see or hear him on TV or radio I am aware that that passionate little boy was the father of the man.

  I did not in fact know “this tale,” but I am certainly impressed by it because it can only have been conveyed by the mountainous Mr. Wortham himself, who must have been sufficiently disconcerted by Peter’s mutinous backchat to report it to my parents. My younger brother has always since shown great steadiness under fire and in a variety of trying and testing circumstances at that, and it rather pleases me that his taunting enemies — just like the low, cheap crowd that would form around any conspicuous boy in the schoolyard — choose to mock him for being odd. He puts up with this handsomely enough, and he has lived to celebrate the total eclipse of a few politicians of the sad, ingratiating, crowd-pleasing sort, who were once nominated for certain glory by a mediocre press corps, yet had the air let out of them by Peter’s questioning in public and his contempt in print. I become rather wistful when I reflect that this demonstration of Hitchensian moral courage has come at the price of a brother who isn’t specially moved by our non-English ethnic heritage, and who is to outward appearances almost tragically right-wing.*

  In Peter’s most recent book, The Broken Compass, which contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic even while reading them, there is a highly thoughtful and well-written passage on how it comes about that people do, in fact, undergo significant changes of mind. Given the absolute certainty that this process will be undergone by any serious person at least once, it is rather surprising to find how much is made out of it, and how many critics try to confect a mystery where none exists. Illustrating the same point in a different way, Peter takes the more subtle tack of showing how certain individuals will in fact alter their opinions, while often pretending to themselves and others for quite a long time that they have not “really” done so.

  Analyzing the evolution of those, some of whom like myself were willing to make alliances of all kinds against Al Quaeda and its allies, he writes scornfully and — I must say — unsettlingly:

  This is a very interesting halting place, as well as a comfortable one. For the habitual Leftist, it has the virtue of making him look as if he can change his mind, even when he has not really done so. It licenses him to be strongly anti-clerical and anti-religious, but in a way that Christian conservatives can tolerate.

  The chapter is called “A Comfortable Stop on the Road to Damascus.” The biblical cliché may seem inescapable but it actually retards understanding. There are people who attempt to demonstrate breadth of mind while only trying to have things both ways. (“Jews for Jesus” might be an example, or those “reform” Communists who tried and failed to cook a dish of “fried snowballs.”) I once interviewed one of the original Stalinists-turned-dissident, the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas, who, sitting in his tiny Belgrade apartment, said that he had come to admire the work of Friedrich August von Hayek, adding hastily that he did not really agree with him about property rights: a prince-free reading of Hamlet if ever I struck one. However the whole point of the Damascus legend is that it refuses the very idea of the mind’s evolution, replacing it with the deranged substitute of instant divine revelation.

  We are forcibly made familiar, usually from febrile tenth-hand accounts of religious visionaries and other probable epileptics and schizophrenics, of those blinding and indeed Damascene moments (or moments of un-blindness when scales supposedly fall from the eyes) that constitute such revelation. Yet one suspects, as with Archimedes and his eureka, that Pasteur was right and that in the case of sound minds at any rate, great apparent coincidences only occur to the intellect that has rehearsed and prepared for them. It may be the same with lesser convictions and allegiances. I once spoke with a hardened senior member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who was in the room with his leader David O’Connell when the news came that one of their bombs had “successfully” gone off. Among the casualties was a young woman who was pregnant. But it turned out that she was also Protestant. “Well, that’s two for one, then,” remarked O’Connell, light-heartedly clearing the air. In that instant, his deputy says, he himself internally defected from the IRA and began the second career as an informer for the British which would wreak the most terrible revenge on his former “associates.” But I believe that he had been getting ever more sickened as time went by, and that there came a “moment” that seemed dramatic and was certainly memorably disgusting, when any extra morsel would have been too much for him. (There is also such a thing as ex post facto rationalization, especially in the case of people who have repented of terrible crimes.) It could be as true to say, as some of my tutors in Oxford philosophy used to seem to argue, that it is your mind that changes you.

  The history of the twentieth-century Left is replete with such episodes, very often and very interestingly involving moments when somebody, hearing a statement of apparent agreement, experiences a violent sense of repulsion. The brilliant Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer, having publicly defended the Hitler-Stalin pact as a tactical imperative, had his composure destroyed not long afterward when some dumkopf Communist told him excitedly: “Have you heard the news? We’ve taken Paris!” The moron was referring to the march of the Wehrmacht up the Champs-Elysées. Fischer wanted to say that this was not at all what he had intended, but then, perhaps it had been . . . During the Moscow show-trials, Whittaker Chambers heard Alger Hiss say approvingly that “Old Joe Stalin certainly knows how to play for keeps,” and as an old Bolshevik he found himself experiencing a similar nausea. Incidentally, what single thing did Chambers and Hiss have in common? They both believed that the victory of Soviet Communism was inevitable. As a defector from that cause, Chambers believed that he had resignedly joined the losing side. As a lifelong opportunist, Hiss thought he had placed his own bet on the winning one. So it goes.

  I was once slightly friendly with Dorothy Healey, a veteran American Communist who could boast, among other things, of having recruited the nasty but pulchritudinous incendiary Angela Davis into “The Party.” Dorothy had be
en through a lot for her beliefs, ever since becoming a working-class Red during the Depression, and for those same beliefs she had also swallowed a good deal. She had managed to explain away the Soviet repressions and invasions and, on the radio show she hosted for the Pacifica channel, would often give air time to visiting officials from Moscow. Once, not long after the expulsion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from the USSR, she invited some Soviet cultural hack to respond to the “Cold War hysteria” that the incident had generated in the imperialist-dominated American press. The hack duly explained that Solzhenitsyn was a provocateur and a tool of reaction, and the author of a mendacious history of the Stalin era and . . . suddenly Dorothy asked him a question she had not planned. “You say it’s a terrible book full of lies?” “Yes,” replied the hack. “And just how,” she inquired, “do you know this?” “Because,” replied the hack, “I have read it.” Dorothy let a few beats go by before she said the next thing, and then she uttered — on air for all the comrades to hear — the response: “How come you have read it if it’s banned for everyone else in the Soviet Union?” At that instant, she told me, she understood that without any previous intention of doing so, she had resigned from the Communist Party. Yet again, though, I feel she had been keeping the lid on a stew of misgiving for some time, and reached the point where it might bubble over at any moment.*

  If all my examples of sudden or gradual change of heart or mind are taken from the Left, I think this is for two good historical reasons. One is that we don’t seem to have any cases of Nazi and fascist workers and intellectuals undergoing crises of ideology and conscience and exclaiming: “Hitler has betrayed the revolution,” or flagellating themselves with the thought: “How could such frightful crimes be committed in the name of Nazism?” There are good and sufficient reasons for this that I don’t believe I need to explain: in his book Koba the Dread, which reproves me for my lenience in referring tenderly to old “comrades” on the Marxist Left, Martin Amis does say that of course one can’t imagine a hypothetical “Hitch” joshing in the same manner about his former blackshirt brothers and boozing partners, because in such a case he wouldn’t be the Hitch. No — and thanks to him for saying so — and nor by the way, in such a case, would Martin have consented for a single second to be my friend. (As the French say, if your aunt had wheels she still wouldn’t be a bus.) For this and related reasons I always mentally cross my fingers and keep a slight mental reservation whenever “left” and “right” crimes are too glibly mentioned in the same breath. Yet now, it is those on the Left who have come to offend and irritate me the most, and it is also their crimes and blunders that I feel myself more qualified, as well as more motivated, to point out.

  I mentioned a second historical reticence just a while ago, and here it is. Many people suspect even themselves for growing cold on a cause that once animated them. I began this book by mentioning Julian Barnes’s late-life and death-anticipating memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, and its role in my own dress rehearsal with the premature pomp of finding myself briefly posthumous. In one of his early chapters, Julian describes how that “Friday lunch” from our Bloomsbury boyhood still goes on, though now it’s held only once a year and takes the form of rather a stately dinner. Just to give you an idea of his tone:

  Thirty or more years ago, this Friday lunch was instituted: a shouty, argumentative, smoky, boozy gathering attended by journalists, novelists, poets and cartoonists at the end of another working week. Over the years the venue has shifted many times, and the personnel been diminished by relocation and death. Now there are seven of us left, the eldest in his mid-seventies, the youngest in his late — very late—fifties.

  I guessed the name of the oldest easily enough but it was with a twinge that I suddenly appreciated that that kid at the table is still Martin. I also paused at the disclosure that Julian himself now sits down while “thumbing in” his “deaf aids”: I don’t remember the old lunchtimes as being at all “shouty” but perhaps this auditory distortion, too, has deep roots. Anyway, here comes a small but unignorable jab:

  The talk follows familiar tracks; gossip, bookbiz, litcrit, music, films, politics (some have done the ritual shuffle to the Right).

  There is something in Julian’s implicit assumption here that makes me want to object. Is it true, as I might once have said myself, that a rejection of former allegiance can simply be read off from the graph of anni domini— mark the senile whistle and whinny and wheeze that is compressed into that damning word “shuffle” — and thus constitutes a cliché all of its own? “When people become older they become a little more tolerant,” snaps the case-hardened Komorovski to the hot young idealist Pasha Antipov in Dr. Zhivago. “Perhaps because they have more to ‘tolerate’ in themselves,” replies Antipov in what for many years I considered a very cutting return serve.*

  I sometimes feel that I should carry around some sort of rectal thermometer, with which to test the rate at which I am becoming an old fart. There is no point in pretending that the process doesn’t occur: it happens to me when near-beardless uniformed officials or bureaucrats, one third of my age, adopt a soothing tone while telling me, “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to . . .” It also happens when I hear some younger “wannabe” radicals employing hectoring arguments to which I have almost forgotten the answer. But that at least is because the arguments themselves are so old that they almost make me feel young again. From this kind of leathery awareness, nature itself protects the young, and a good thing, too, otherwise they would be old before their time and be taking no chances. Meanwhile, all of my children have negotiated the shoals of up-growing with a great deal more maturity than I did, and most of my moments of feeling that the world is not as bad as it might be have come from my students, especially the ones who decided in college that they wanted to join the armed forces and guard me while I sleep. (Meeting some of them later, after they have done a tour or two, has been particularly uplifting.) No, when I check the thermometer I find that it is the fucking old fools who get me down the worst, and the attainment of that level of idiocy can often require a lifetime.

  Here is the voice of the above-mentioned Dorothy Healey on my voice-mail the day after I volunteered to testify to Congress that Clinton and his aides were lying when they said they had not been slandering and defaming Monica Lewinsky. “You stinking little rat, I always knew you were no good. You are a stoolpigeon and a fink. I hope you rot in scab and blackleg hell . . .” There was more. I used to replay it often. Two things about it struck me. The first and most obvious was the absolutely genuine and double-distilled malice: this was from a former not-that-close friend who would happily have got up early to see me tortured. The second was exactly that whistling and senile undertone. She didn’t have long to go and had been forced to admit that much if not most of her political life had been a waste of time, but here at least was something — a case of a one-time comrade turning state’s evidence, so to say — that allowed her all the unalloyed energy and joy of being a young Communist again. (As it happens I was testifying against the most powerful man in the world and in favor of a much-derided victim: in her mind any congressional committee was still run by Joe McCarthy.)*

  Alteration of mind can creep up on you: for a good many years I maintained that I was a socialist if only to distinguish myself from the weak American term “liberal,” which I considered evasive. Brian Lamb, the host of C-Span cable television, bears some of the responsibility for this. Having got me to proudly announce my socialism once, on the air, he never again had me as a guest without asking me to reaffirm the statement. It became the moral equivalent of a test of masculinity: I wouldn’t give him or his audience the satisfaction of a denial. Then I sat down to write my Letters to a Young Contrarian, and made up my mind to address the letters to real students whose faces and names and questions I had to keep in mind. What was I to say when they asked my advice about “commitment”? They all wanted to do something to better the human condition. Well, was there an authentic soc
ialist movement for them to join, as I would once have said there was? Not really, or not anymore, or only in forms of populism and nationalism à la Hugo Chavez that seemed to me repellent. Could a real internationalist “Left” be expected to revive? It didn’t seem probable. I abruptly realized that I had no right to bluff or to bullshit the young. (Late evenings with old comrades retelling tales of old campaigns weren’t exactly dishonest, but then they didn’t really count, either.) So I didn’t so much repudiate a former loyalty, like some attention-grabbing defector, as feel it falling away from me. On some days, this is like the phantom pain of a missing limb. On others, it’s more like the sensation of having taken off a needlessly heavy overcoat.*

  I can write about this now in a relaxed manner, but for a long time I felt I had to phrase any disagreement with actual or former comrades in terms that were themselves “Left.” It was quite easy, for example, to argue that Bill Clinton was an acquiescent front man for all manner of corporate special interests. My book denouncing him for this, and for his disgusting crimes against women, and his “Wag-the-Dog” missile attack on Sudan, and his cruel use of the death penalty as a racist political weapon for his advancement in Arkansas, was brought out by the publishing arm of the New Left Review, which continued as my publisher for some time afterward. I became quite adept at the relevant dialectic. From Bosnia during the siege of Sarajevo, for instance, I could write that the old spirit of the Yugoslav socialist “partisans” was much more to be found in the anti-fascist posters and slogans of the Bosnian resistance than in the fiery yet lugubrious, defiant yet self-pitying, race-and-blood obsessed effusions of the Serbs, “socialist” though their nominal leader Slobodan Miloševi might claim to be. The old slogans still sometimes strike me as the best ones, and “Death to Fascism” requires no improvement.