Long Live Hitch

  I began this highly selective narrative by citing Auden on the unadvisability of being born in the first place — a view from which he quickly waltzed to Plan B: make the most of the dance (or, as Dorothy Parker elsewhere phrased it, “You might as well live”). In better moments I prefer the lyrical stoicism of my friend and ally Richard Dawkins, who never loses his sense of wonder at the sheer unlikelihood of having briefly “made it” on a planet where crude extinction has held such sway, and where the chance of being conceived, let alone safely delivered, is so infinitesimal.

  When my beloved friend James Fenton came back from Indochina, having witnessed the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh and the end, both tragic and ambiguous, of a war which so many of us had regarded as a test of sheer commitment, he was somewhat shaken. The closing words of one of his most exquisite poems from that period were: “I’m afraid that all my friends are dead.” But he knew that if there were any survivors they would know how to contact him, and when some of them did, and being the conscience-determined person he was and is, he went straight back to the frontiers and the camps to see how he could be of help. The resulting poems — collected as Children in Exile— comprise an essential complement to their predecessors in Memory of War. One of the latter is titled “Prison Island.” I happen to remember the genesis of this outwardly melancholy but diamond-hard poem particularly well: we had both just been verbally and aurally assailed by a braggart dogmatist who asserted of his own sect: “The possibility of defeat does not enter our calculations.”

  This honking, tyrannical self-regard so annoyed James, and I think so much put him in mind of the deadly certainties that had brought such havoc to his Asian friends, that he could not rest until he had caught its hubris in the net of his verses. I have a poignant memory of him reading the first draft aloud to me, in the attic room where he was then lodging. One stanza in particular caught and held me, too:

  My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?

  I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your mind

  As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,

  Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.

  Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.

  Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need . . . More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.

  It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them. After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism. Membership in the skeptical faction or tendency is not at all a soft option. The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time, and I feel absurdly honored to be grouped in the public mind with great teachers and scholars such as Richard Dawkins (a true Balliol man if ever there was one), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded.” It is, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that’s my Hitch-22. I have already described some of the rehearsals for this war, which the relativists so plaintively call “endless” — as if it were not indeed the latest chapter of an eternal struggle — and I find that for the remainder of my days I shall be happy enough to see if I can emulate the understatement of Commander Hitchens, and to say that at least I know what I am supposed to be doing.

  * My brother’s case, plus the late reflection this brings on John Bunyan, convinces me again that there may have been such a thing as the Protestant or even Puritan revolution. Christopher Hill’s attempt to Marxify the idea might not exactly work, but the concept of a time before kings and lords and bishops and popes is an ancient yearning. You can find it in Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and in poems like Macaulay’s magnificent pastiche Naseby, as well as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, where humble Smith’s struggle against “Newspeak” and the Inner Party is the moral equivalent of those of Wyclif and Tyndale and Coverdale to have the Bible translated out of arcane priestly language and into plain English. Orwell’s own favorite line—“By The Known Rules of Ancient Liberty”—was from John Milton. This might also go to support the satisfying idea of there being such a thing as a Protestant atheist. Much easier to imagine Peter Hitchens as an atheist than as a Muslim, let alone as a Jew or a Catholic. (When William Tyndale first went to school in medieval Oxford, I’m pleased to note, his family name was Hychyns.)

  * Her story is rather preferable to the one told me by Eric Hobsbawm, who at the time of his resignation from the Communist Party was probably the only member of any academic or intellectual or scholarly repute that it still possessed. Running into him shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I asked him if he’d retained his membership and was told “no.” What then had finally precipitated the separation? “They forgot to send me the form asking me for the annual renewal of my membership,” he said with perfect gravity, “and so I decided not to write to headquarters and remind them.” Just like that, then.

  * Julian, for example, was much quoted for saying that the whole battle over Iraq wasn’t worth the life of a single British soldier, which echoes what Otto von Bismarck said — “not worth the balls of a Pomeranian grenadier” — about the whole of the Balkans. Yet why is that sort of realpolitik considered to be “left” rather than conservative? Attacking me in one of the magazines of the American isolationist Right, Peter Hitchens denounced the war in Afghanistan as the sort of “stupid, left-wing war” that only people like his brother would endorse. That seemed to me nearer the mark than Julian.

  * This is why Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, which suggests that decent people should break the Mafia’s law of omerta, is still regarded as morally dubious by many on the American Left.

  * Some time later, I was invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu. I gave it the partly ironic title: “Can One Be a Neoconservative?” Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as “How I Became a Neoconservative.” Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: it was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought.

  * Chomsky has since said some things to suggest that he never thought I was any good anyway: I possess several inscribed books from him that prove the contrary. As it happens I don’t think it’s kosher to pay him back in the same coin. In the late 1970s he wrote to me praising something I’d written about the need to try and keep Encounter magazine from going under: his libertarianism (and his rare-on-the-Left admiration for Orwell) has been relatively consistent. If you look back at the essays that made his name — on the incipient stages of the Vietnam War, on B.F. Skinner, on the memoirs of Kissinger, on East Timor, and on the Kahane Commission on the Sabra/Shatila massacres—you will find a polemical talent well worth mourning, and a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.

  * Reflecting on this now, I think perhaps that she wanted to be sure, and also for me and others to be on notice, that she wasn’t to be taken for granted and that there was always to be some demarcation between friendship and agreement. Quite probably a good thing. Many truths or useful remarks go unspoken for fear of rupturing intimacy, and after all, the
re never was a Sontag “circle,” or clique. This is the point that Edmund White rather fails to apprehend about her in City Boy, his free-hand memoir of the higher naughtiness in New York.

  * You really cannot win with everybody at once: the CIA’s historically more highbrow offspring Encounter ran a piece by Melvin Lasky accusing me of having removed the relevant words on purpose from her own text.

  * In spite of the general nullity of the Left on this question, Susan was only the best known of several, including Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Schneider, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Adam Michnik, and others, who in their way traced a line from 1968 through 1989 to future combats with the totalitarian.

  Acknowledgments

  I HAVE TRIED TO DEFRAY some of my debts of acknowledgment in these very pages, but I must not omit those who made it possible for me to set down the work in the first place. Much nonsense is talked in our day about the decay of publishing, and it will remain nonsense while people like Jonathan Karp, Colin Shepherd, Bob Castillo, Cary Goldstein and Toby Mundy have the ordering of things at houses like Twelve and Atlantic. I have been especially fortunate in boasting a friend and comrade, Steve Wasserman, as, at different times, my editor for reviews, my editor for books, and last and perhaps best of all my agent. I have to thank Robin Blackburn of the New Left Review for effecting my introduction to Steve thirty years ago, and for much else besides.

  Maciej Sikierski, the unsleeping archivist for Polish affairs at the library of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, went to uncommon trouble to assist me in tracing my families’ lineages in the arduous history and geography of his indomitable country.

  I sometimes like to think that I could have been one of those I praise in this book, who, like Victor Serge, had the intestinal fortitude to write “for the bottom drawer, and for history.” But I know damn well that without certain editors and publishers I would have drooped like a wet sock. Undying and moist thanks, then, to Paul Barker, Anthony Howard, Harold Evans and Tina Brown, Charles Wintour, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Moore, Jeremy Treglown, Sally Emerson, Peter Stothard, Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman and Hamilton Fish and Betsy Pochoda, Barbara Epstein, Michael Kelly (RIP) and James Bennett and Cullen Murphy and Ben Schwarz, David Rieff, Jon Meacham and Mark Miller, Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz and June Thomas, Lewis Lapham and Gerry Marzorati, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Inigo Thomas, Deirdre English, and Conor Hanna. All of them are heroes and heroines of the “first draft” and of the work in progress, and the readers of many other authors should not omit to thank them as warmly as I do.

  Many thanks to Windsor Mann for help on archives and photographs.

  To thank my adored father-in-law, Edwin Blue, and my delightful daughter for their expert assistance to a techno peasant would be to say the least of it.

  Impossible, though, not to make the most special and snufflingly moist noises about Graydon Carter, Aimee Bell, Walter Owen, and David Friend. It’s quite something for a writer, whose promiscuous mandate is to be interested in everything, to know that he possesses friends and backers and colleagues who are determined to give him latitude while scrutinizing every line, providing every help in the field, noticing every weakness, and enhancing every paragraph. (One short passage in this book was originally written for them.) If it were not for their intensive care and meticulous attention, I would want to call them my luck.

  Index

  Aberbach, David, 373

  Abrahams, Harold, 375

  Abu Bakr, Ahmad Hassan, 281–82

  Abu Ghraib, 310, 316, 328

  Abu Nidal (Sabri Khalil al-Banna), 284–85, 287, 318

  Ackroyd, Peter, 154–55

  Adams, Richard, 360–61

  Addison, Joseph, 254

  Adorno, Theodor, 340, 349, 350, 352

  Afghanistan, 170, 244, 249–50, 345–46

  Ahina, Rajim, 285, 286, 288

  AIDS, 417

  Ajami, Fouad, 396n

  Alea, Tomás Guitiérrez, 116

  Algeria, 38, 116

  Al-Hilla, 315–16

  Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 257

  Ali, Rashid, 283–84

  Ali, Tariq, 109, 133, 245

  Allende, Salvador, 154, 245

  Aller, Frank, 106

  All Souls College, 64–65, 83, 103–5, 122, 136, 262, 269, 313–14

  al-Majid, Ali Hassan, 289

  Al Quaeda, 244–45, 250, 258, 397, 405–6

  Alvarez, Al, 28, 30, 31

  Alvarez, Santiago, 116–17

  al-Zahawi, Mazen, 283–86, 288

  Alzheimer, Alois, 363–64

  America, 204–20, 225–38

  American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 223

  Americanism, 205–7

  American passport, 259–60

  American women, 224–25

  Amin, Idi, 141, 291

  Amis, Kingsley, 3, 7, 132, 133, 153, 156, 161–64, 174–75, 351

  Amis, Martin, 140, 154–75, 375, 408–9

  drinking and, 352

  Edward Said and, 387–88

  father Kingsley and, 161–64, 174–75

  female company and, 157–59, 165–67

  first meetings with, 132–33, 155–56

  Friday lunches, 168–75

  Gore Vidal and, 237

  Money, 150, 165–68, 197

  9/11 and, 249

  Norman Mailer and, 279n

  Paris photos of, 1–2, 5

  The Rachel Papers, 156, 159–60

  Saul Bellow and, 161, 165, 398–99

  word games of, 164–65, 167–68, 170–72

  Amis, Sally, 156–57

  Anderson, Perry, 168, 202–3

  Anfal, 294

  “Anglo-American,” 227–28

  “anhedonia,” 28

  Annan, Kofi, 302, 311

  anthrax, 243

  anti-Americanism, 236–38

  Antich, Salvador Puig, 180

  anti-Semitism, 190, 223, 237, 313–14, 353, 358, 379, 383–84, 393

  Apollo mission, 210–11

  Applebaum, Anne, 373n

  Aquinas, Thomas, 107–8, 110

  Aquino, Cory, 305

  Arafat, Yasser, 287, 290–91, 391–92, 395–96

  Arendt, Hannah, 414, 419

  Argentina, 42, 193–202, 230–33

  Ascoli, Max, 204

  Ashcroft, John, 250

  Athens, 21–25

  Atlantic, 323, 397

  Auchincloss, Jamie, 208

  Auden, W.H., 6, 24, 48–49, 51, 151, 153, 154, 209, 228–29, 245–47, 420–21

  Auschwitz, 367–70

  Austen, Jane, 163n, 360, 362

  Ayer, A.J., 132

  Aziz, Tariq, 301

  Ba’ath Party, 281–89, 291, 296, 307, 310–11, 393

  Bagehot, Walter, 170

  Baghdad Observer, 288

  Balaskas, Nicholas, 23

  Baldwin, James, 256

  Ballard, J.G., 67, 69

  Balliol College, 14, 16, 17, 80–109, 121–24, 210, 213

  Baltzell, E. Digby, 226–27

  Baluka, Edmund, 191

  Barker, Alan, 63, 79–80, 92

  Barnes, Julian, 2, 3, 169, 409–10, 410n

  Battle of Algiers (movie), 116

  Begin, Menachem, 233, 382, 386–87

  Beirut, 347–49

  Belcher, Muriel, 152

  Bell, Gertrude, 284, 312, 314

  Bellow, Saul, 31, 161, 161n, 165, 345, 398–400, 399n

  Benn, Tony, 270

  Bennett, Alan, 230

  Berger, John, 85, 172, 263, 269

  Berlin, Isaiah, 95–97, 376

  Berlin Wall, 203

  Bernstein, Carl, 234n

  Bhutto, Benazir, 300

  Bill of Rights, 252–53

  Bingham, Joan, 236

  bin Laden, Osama, 245, 249, 287

  Binyon, Lawrence, 72

  Bird, Kai, 200, 234

  Birnbaum, Norman, 258–59

  Birt, John, 150

  Bishara, Azmi, 394
/>
  Bismarck, Otto von, 410n

  Black Panthers, 215, 216, 224

  Blair, Tony, 126, 200

  Blake, William, 60

  Blix, Hans, 310

  Bloomsbury Group, 168–69, 303

  Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von, 362

  Blue, Carol, 5, 241–42, 273, 337, 388–89, 401

  Blumenthal, Nathan, 354–55, 362, 364, 366–67

  Blunden, Edmund, 73, 198

  Blunkett, David, 308

  boarding school, 13–14, 35, 48–62, 63, 66, 404–5

  Bobinski, Christopher, 189

  Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 363

  Borges, Jorge Luis, 194, 198–200, 340n

  Born, Max, 363

  Bosnia, 277, 345, 377–78, 394, 412–13, 415–16

  Bowra, Maurice, 95

  Boxer, Mark, 6, 169, 170

  Brazil, 182–83

  Brecht, Bertolt, 84

  Breslau/Wrocùaw, 361–67, 371–72

  Brewster, Kingman, 224

  Brezhnev, Leonid, 172

  Brooke, Rupert, 72

  Brooks, Henderson, 85

  Brown, Tina, 346

  Bruckner, Pascal, 97n

  Bryan, Timothy, 18–26, 30

  Buber, Martin, 70, 387

  Buchan, John, 53, 57, 148

  Buckley, Christopher, 343

  Buckley, James, 212

  Buckley, William F., 84n, 227, 228, 343

  Budeiri, Musa, 393

  Buenos Aires Herald, 197, 200

  Bukovsky, Vladimir, 189

  bullies, 53–54, 67–68

  Bunyan, John, 148, 403, 405n

  Burgess, Guy, 151

  Burns, John, 345, 413

  Burns, Robert, 330

  Bush, George H.W., 268, 274, 289–95

  Bush, George W., 245, 248, 249, 254, 311, 323

  Butterfield, Herbert, 80

  Caetano, Marcello, 182

  Callaghan, James, 356

  Cambodia, 124–25

  Cambridge.

  See also Leys School

  Oxford vs., 64–65

  Camp David, 386–87

  Camus, Albert, 30, 181, 373, 400