MEMOIR:He is a sore thorn in the sides of ideologues and fundamentalists of many hues. We could do with a few more people like Christopher Hitchens, writes JOHN BANVILLE
Hitch-22, By Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Books, 435pp, £20
THE DRIFT, with the years, is from left to right. Who can think of an example of a prominent conservative gradually abandoning a lifetime’s commitment to authoritarian government and the free market and embracing socialist principles of collectivity and state control? Or as Christopher Hitchens more extremely and more colourfully has it, “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?’ ”
Hitchens goes on to remark that there are "good and sufficient reasons" for this phenomenon that he does not feel he needs to explain. This is a pity, since the reasons surely are not as obvious, and certainly not as "good", as he seems to think. He began his adult life as a committed and active leftist, an anti-Stalinist follower of Marx and Trotsky, and ever since has been progressing if not to the right then certainly away from the left. As a student at Oxford he became a member of the International Socialist "groupuscule", as he calls it – 1968 and the Paris événementswere imminent – and took part in many noisy and often violent protests against not only, for instance, the Vietnam War and the Colonels' coup in Greece but also the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and other Soviet-bloc outrages. Nor, not incidentally, was he much impressed by Castro's Cuba, after he spent an eye-opening working holiday there.
In contrast to one’s own recollections of the “Trots” and their antics, Hitchens presents them as a sound and sober lot. “We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t ‘do’ drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion . . . Rock and roll and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options.”
This version of left activism must have felt particularly congenial to a son of the middle classes, which Hitchens’s memoir clearly, and indeed proudly, shows him to be. His father was an officer in the Royal Navy who saw active service in the war. A diffident figure known in the family, with affectionate irony, as the Commander, he is, perhaps without the author’s full awareness, a central presence in the book. Hitchens’s mother was altogether more glamorous. “I didn’t call her by this name at the time, but ‘Yvonne’ is the echo with which I most piercingly and yearningly recall her memory to me.” Beautiful, stylish, adventurous, Yvonne was, her son assures us, “a touch or dash of garlic and olive and rosemary to sweeten the good old plain English loaf from which, the fact must be faced, I was also sliced”.
What he did not know until long after her death was that Yvonne was Jewish, something she kept hidden because, Hitchens loyally speculates, she did not want him and his brother "to be taxed with die Judenfrage– the Jewish question". Eventually she left the Commander for an ex-Church of England minister who was also a "poet and a dreamer" and, as it turned out, a manic depressive who took Yvonne with him into a suicide pact that ended in the death of both of them in a hotel room in Athens in 1973.
Hitchens is candid about these matters, and candid too about his capacity to endure and absorb personal distresses and losses. In Athens to deal with the aftermath of his mother's death, he seizes the opportunity to check out Greek resistance to the Colonels, holding clandestine meetings with the nascent underground movement and taking testimony from torture victims. "With Yvonne lying cold? You are quite right to ask. But it turns out, as I have found in other ways and in other places, that the separation between personal and public is not so neat." At Oxford Hitchens moved, smoothly if somewhat bashfully, between the worlds of a latter-day Brideshead Revisited, with its "gilded and witty reactionaries", such as Maurice Bowra and John Sparrow, and the old- and new-left radicalism of, respectively, the historian Christopher Hill and Stephen Lukes, author of Power: A Radical View. Lukes was Hitchens's main tutor, and a note on him gives a flavour of the time and place: "Thanks to his kind interest in me, I was taken to a private seminar in Nuffield College (yes, named after that fascist-sympathizing automobile tycoon) to talk with Noam Chomsky, who had come to deliver the John Locke Lectures. And I was also invited to a small cocktail party to meet Sir Isaiah Berlin." Who says the best of both worlds cannot be had? The double life implied in the surely ill-advised title Hitch-22was the author's aim from the start, and still is.
This doubling applied at more than the social and political levels. Like many English public schoolboys, Hitchens passed through a sexually ambiguous childhood and adolescence. As he cheerfully acknowledges, he was a pretty youth whose soft good looks appealed to both sexes. One of the more startling revelations in his memoir comes when he confesses that “every now and then, even though I was by then fixed on the pursuit of young women, a mild and mildly enjoyable relapse would occur and I suppose I can ‘claim’ this, if that’s the right word, of two young men who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government”. This will certainly add spice to many a dinner-party conversation, as guests speculate about the identity of this pair of frisky ephebes.
Hitchens was among the first, rare observers to admit the creepy sexual allure of Thatcher herself. Another moment in his book that is bound to become iconic is his account of a meeting with the Leaderene when the arc of her rise to power was still in its initial stages. At a Westminster party the two were introduced. Hitchens suspects Thatcher had heard that he had referred to her as sexy in the public prints, and so he felt obliged to get into a row with her straight off, arguing over her policy on what was then still called Rhodesia. He was right and she was wrong, he says, but she stuck so fiercely to her point that in the end he conceded and even made a small though no doubt ironic bow of submission. “Bend lower!” Mrs T commanded, then stepped around him and smacked him on the bottom with a rolled-up order paper. “As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptible slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: ‘Naughty boy!’ ” One imagines, not without a shiver of Schadenfreude, the apoplectic response this little anecdote will elicit from Hitchens’s former comrades of the left.
Worse is to come. Although earlier in the book he provided a ringing condemnation of Thatcher and her policies – “If the Commander had lived to see the full impact of Thatcherism, he would have felt that there was almost nothing left worth fighting for, or rather having fought for” – he is honest enough to admit how, even in those early days, there was a “rodent slowly stirring in my viscera: the uneasy but unbanishable feeling that on some essential matters she might be right”.
When the election came that put Thatcher into power, Hitchens did not vote, a fact that for years he could not bring himself to admit to anyone. In truth, he tells us, “I secretly knew quite well that I wasn’t merely registering an abstention. I was in effect voting for Mrs Thatcher. And I was secretly, guiltily glad to see her terminating the long reign of mediocrity and torpor”.
After Oxford Hitchens headed eagerly to London and the world of more or less engagé journalism, writing for the New Statesmanand other left-leaning journals. He also made a batch of friends who apart from his family have been, he assures us, the glory of his life. The warmth of his regard for Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and the poet James Fenton is everywhere palpable and always affecting, although his commitment to friendship sometimes blinds him to the quality of his friends' work, a trait that would matter more if he were a literary critic rather than a political journalist.
The later chapters of his book trace the deep shifts in his political viewpoint that occurred in the 1990s and early 2000s, roughly in the period between the first and second Iraq wars. His strong support for the invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein’s disgusting regime has made him a pariah among the anti-war left; no fury is fiercer than that directed by the faithful at a political apostate. Perhaps the fact that he is right in so many of his pronouncements on the Middle East in general and Islamic fundamentalism in particular – “the three now-distinctive elements of the new and grievance-privileged Islamist mentality [are] self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred” – threatens to fan into flame the glints of doubt flickering in the innermost hearts of his opponents. After he had testified to Congress against President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a colleague from the old days of left-radicalism left a message in his voicemail: “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.”
Yet for all that he is a contrarian, his commitment to Marxism – not socialism – remains intact. For him, he declares, the British labour movement, though “all gone now, or gone to pieces”, is still an enduring ideal and a source of hope, and he feels a “fierce pride” for having marched in the ranks of those men and women, “ ‘warriors of the working day’, who had survived mass unemployment and slum housing and bitter exploitation, stuck together to resist fascism at home and abroad, rebuilt the country after 1945, fought for independence for the colonies, and striven to remove the terrible fear – of illness and penury and a Dickensian old age – that had hagridden the British working class”.
Contentious, irksome, opinionated, vain and boastful, Christopher Hitchens is yet a wonderfully invigorating presence, a sore thorn indeed in the sides of ideologues and fundamentalists of many hues. Though he is probably unique, we could do with more of his kind.
John Banville's most recent novel is The Infinities
