Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  The death of the father kicks the son upstairs. With the death of the mother, the son goes skyward too, clutching the banister, and more or less of his own volition – but he is seeking his childhood room and his childhood bed.

  * * *

  —————

  I went to my emails and there it was. From chitch9008, addressed to ian1mcewan and martin.amis: and in his note Christopher gave a quiet forewarning of what they would all read in the papers the following day.*16

  ‘It’s serious,’ said Ian. ‘I’ve talked to Ray.’ Ray was Ray Dolan (Ian’s very old friend and one of the most-cited neurobiologists in his field). ‘He gave me the figures.’

  I tried to listen. These figures or projections would fluctuate over time, but it seemed that our friend had a one-in-eight chance (or was it one-in-twelve) of living for another seven years. Or was it five?

  ‘Soon we’ll know more,’ said Ian. ‘So let’s…I think that’s very sad – I mean your mother. So let’s be in constant touch.’

  ‘Yes. Constant touch.’

  The problem of re-entry

  202 was the area code for Washington DC.

  My grey house phone looked overworked and hard done by as I reached for it, all smudged and clammy with its owner’s handprints, and it looked bilious, too, as if sick to its stomach of transmitting words about infirmity and ruin…I lifted the receiver, faltered (I was hopelessly unprepared), and laid it down again and tried to organise my thoughts.

  For a start, it was 11 a.m. in London, and so…My crude aide-memoire for transatlantic time (why did I still need one?) went as follows: the UK was much older than the US, so it was always later in England. And that meant, in turn, that the sun was only squinting at America’s east coast, and anyway Christopher seldom rose before ten. There were still five hours to go; and even after a long and necessary talk with Elena there were still four hours to go. I had nothing to do but sit there and smoke and wonder – What was Hitch going to say?

  * * *

  —————

  ‘The Hitch has landed,’ he used to announce every time he called from Heathrow. As we know, the habit of referring to yourself in the third person is not always a sign of cloudless mental health. Such a habit, perhaps, is to be warily expected of iconic household faces – and in 2010 Christopher couldn’t cross a city block anywhere in America without being recognised, greeted, praised, and buttonholed. And yet Christopher was the Hitch long, long before 2010.

  In fact he referred to himself as the Hitch right from the start – in the early 1970s, when he and I were becoming friends. At that stage he was quite unknown beyond an inextensive circle of young Marxists and sympathetic young journalists (one of whom, I remember, singled him out as ‘the meteoric Trotskyist’). In 1974, when we were both twenty-five, he came up to the literary department of the New Statesman in the late afternoon, and I said,

  ‘You look very chuffed.’

  ‘Yes, I had a rather “good” lunch with certain members of the board,’ said Christopher. ‘Tony’ – Anthony Howard, the editor in chief – ‘confirmed that they’re going to start sending me abroad more.’

  ‘How wonderful.’

  ‘Belfast, Lebanon, Buenos Aires.’ For a moment Christopher seemed to churn and sway with emotion, and then he said, ‘This will soon be axiomatic for the whole planet. Wherever there is injustice and oppression, wherever the strong prey on the weak – then the pen of the Hitch will flash from its scabbard…’

  ‘…Nor shall your sword sleep in your hand…’

  ‘Till I have built Jerusalem. In this green and pleasant land.’

  Everything he said was equivocal. Flippant and heartfelt, ironic and serious, whimsical and steely. Even his self-mythologising was also part of a project of self-deflation. ‘Flash from its scabbard’, for instance, is a decidedly high-style poeticism when applied to a drawn sword – but what is it when applied to a drawn pen?

  * * *

  —————

  A month or so later, on the stairs at the New Statesman, Christopher came out of the half-landing toilet and guiltily rocked to a halt. Some time ago, I should say, we had passed an edifying hour wondering what a bathroom would smell like after a visit from a dinosaur.

  ‘Exit,’ said Christopher, ‘pursued by a brontosaurus.’ He frowned. ‘That needs more work. We want a carnivore, beginning with b.’

  ‘Brachiosaurus. No, that’s another herbivore. Hitch, where’ve you been all week?’

  ‘Cyprus. Haven’t you got my postcard? They love me in Cyprus.’

  ‘Why, particularly?’

  ‘Because I’m a true friend of the Cypriot people. Whenever I go to Cyprus there’s a front-page headline in the Nicosia Times saying HITCH FLIES IN.’

  ‘And what does the headline say when you leave?’

  ‘HITCH FLIES OUT.’

  …I would come to detect a logistical difficulty here. Christopher might very well see HITCH FLIES IN (as, say, he enjoyed his first breakfast at the hotel). But how would he ever see HITCH FLIES OUT? No, he’d be gone. Still, I’d constructed a tactical fantasy: Christopher on Cyprus Air’s late flight to London, with a Scotch in one hand and a Rothmans in the other, looking forward to his dinner, and attending to an early edition of the Nicosia Times with the banner headline HITCH FLIES OUT.

  * * *

  —————

  It was now 3.45. What was Christopher going to say?

  How would he usher in the new reality? A great deal would depend on his opening sentence. After hours of circular thought it was beginning to feel to me like a novelistic challenge: the fundamental challenge, which meets you twenty times a day, of finding the right tone.*17 And Christopher, with his extravagant idiolect…

  The Hitch has landed; but now he was in mid-air, beginning another kind of journey, a ‘deportation’ (as he would soon write), ‘taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’.*18

  I was sure he wouldn’t be solemn, let alone lachrymose. He wouldn’t be spiritless. But what would he be?

  * * *

  —————

  Mrs Christopher Hitchens, or Carol Blue (or simply ‘Blue’), picked up.

  ‘He knew you’d call,’ she said. ‘He’s just getting out of the shower. I’ll go and…’

  For three or four minutes I sat with the silent mouthpiece in my hand. Then he came on.

  ‘Mart.’

  ‘Hitch.’

  ‘…Dah,’ he said. ‘It’s my fucking tits now.’

  *1 I ran into Joan Juliet (at one of Tina Brown’s summits at the Lincoln Center – ‘Women in the World’); I hadn’t seen her for at least thirty years, but I recognised her in an instant. This is another attribute of beauty: memorability. To adapt a coinage of Nabokov’s, beauty is mnemogenic…Joan Juliet was in perfect health.

  *2 The generosity was sincere, and lifelong. In Bellow’s posthumous Letters (2010) we frequently see him offering to subsidise old friends, and with the gentlest tact: if you need it, he would typically write, ‘I can spare it’…Gore Vidal was rich (‘I’m the richest,’ he said vis-à-vis his American peers). Philip Roth, it is safe to say, had a few bob (Portnoy’s Complaint outsold The Godfather)…Incidentally, Vidal and Roth had no one obvious to leave their money to (they died without issue). The extreme Norman Mailer was in this respect a more typical American writer: six wives and nine children. The figures for Saul Bellow are five and four.

  *3 I could never make this trip without a visit from the following memory. Back in the late 1970s, when we worked at the New Statesman, Julian and I set a Weekend Competition in which contestants were asked to dream up organisations whose initials, in acronym form, were self-undermining – as in the Barnaby Rudge and Oliver Twist Hostel for Elderly Women: BROTHEL. That was a winning entry by Robert Conquest, w
ho put inordinate energy into such things, and so was the Sailors’, Yachtsmen’s, and Pilots’ Health Institute for Long Island Sound.

  *4 Like Desirée Squadrino, Sorella Fonstein, the heroine of a late-period Bellow novel, is a girl from New Jersey; and she is fabulously fat: ‘She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock’…During the war Sorella stayed put in America, but her husband, club-footed Harry Fonstein, escaped only by a miracle from his appointment with Auschwitz, and crossed the Atlantic very comprehensively bereaved. The narrator respects and responds to Sorella’s intelligence and integrity. ‘I never lost sight of Fonstein’s history, or of what it meant to be the survivor of such destruction. Maybe Sorella was trying to incorporate in fatty tissue some portion of what he had lost.’ The Bellarosa Connection (1989).

  *5 She wasn’t still brooding about that disastrous dinner in 1989 (I drove Christopher to Vermont and we spent the night. He appeared at breakfast smoking a cigarette – but that was the least of it). What Rosamund was still brooding about was Christopher’s review of Ravelstein (2000). And so was I. Christopher would go on to ridicule late novels by Philip Roth and John Updike, but only in Saul’s case did he attribute the deficit to age and failing powers (‘tired’, ‘thin’, ‘quavering’)…‘You can’t do that, man,’ I told him. ‘It’s worse than insolent. It’s ungrateful. I’ve forgiven you for 1989. You were getting divorced, and divorcees are allowed to go nuts for a year or two. But I haven’t yet forgiven you for this.’ It came up again in 2007, when he wrote a long, respectful,

  and very interesting piece about Augie March. ‘Good piece,’ I said. ‘But Saul’s dead now, and you never thanked him for all the pleasure he gave you.’ Christopher was longsufferingly silent – the closest he ever came to admitting the possibility of fault. In my view he was not a literary critic so much as a political critic of literature. The attack on Ravelstein was in essence an attack on Saul’s turn to the right and on some of the positions of Saul’s best friend Allan Bloom (the model for Abe Ravelstein). It was an attack on neoconservatism. Ironically is a word often misused to mean no more than ‘oddly’ or even ‘by contrast’; but there would be irony in this for the Hitch – something to be revealed as contradictory.

  *6 Herzog (1964)…What, or when, is modernism? Auden: ‘At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say Greek or Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say every post-Classical author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the Thirties, the Forties, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be classifying them, like automobiles, by the year.’ I think it is quite easy to give a date for the arrival of ‘high’ or developed modernism. 1922 – Ulysses and The Waste Land.

  *7 By one calculation English comes top with 750,000 words, French second with 500,000, and Spanish third with 380,000. ‘You use so many words for the verb to walk,’ a Spanish translator once complained. ‘To stroll, to saunter, to shuffle…Why can you not just say andar?’

  *8 The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Its thesis: history was over in the sense that ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ was over. Conflicts would of course continue, and there would continue to be events, possibly titanic events; but the only viable state model was capitalist democracy…As it happened, a titanic event was only seven weeks away – one supposedly heralding a different state model: that of a (worldwide) caliphate which would enforce Islamic law.

  *9 Inez was horrified by Hitch in June, and was still capable of being horrified by me and by her brothers…Saul was undemonstratively sensitive to children and had a relaxing effect on them. I was always moved by the talent he had for it and the importance he attached to it. From a letter of June 1990: ‘We loved seeing you and Julia. She served

  us a dinner that made all the other dinners in Europe look sick. Also, Gus immediately recognised me as a friend which did much to restore my confidence in myself, none too firm these days.’ With favoured male adults, Gus sped up to them and seized both their hands and proceeded to climb up their legs; he would then execute a reasonably neat backwards somersault and land on his feet. ‘Just mind my dock,’ cautioned Saul.

  *10 The writer’s life is tripartite, divided between writing and reading and…oh yeah, living. Don’t forget living. That has to be got done too. If you can’t read then you clearly can’t write, so all you can do is live. And then stop living. There’s no avoiding that either. As James Last, the ailing hero of Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, puts it: ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’

  *11 ‘I just kept repeating myself,’ I said to Rosamund, ‘– about Nat and Gus.’ We were in the kitchen, where she was readying lunch. The radio was on, loud, and she was making as much noise as she could with blenders and gushing taps. ‘I just kept repeating myself. I was as bad as he was!’ All invention, all imagination, seemed to abandon me. ‘You were probably in shock,’ she said. ‘…That’s probably true. I should’ve just babbled about anything – Uruguay, Elena, London, the girls. Conrad.’ ‘Don’t feel bad about it. Maybe he wouldn’t’ve wanted that. Because it’s you.’ I said, ‘Rosamund, that’s the gentlest comfort you could possibly give me. But no. I should’ve just filled the silences. Christ!’ All the same, it was dumbfounding. Like being under the brow of an empty mountain – a mountain all hollowed out. So: fill the emptiness, fill the silence. It was the only thing you could do.

  *12 Keith was a veteran literary maverick and boho; and his air of rakish irresponsibility had always fascinated Saul. For instance, Keith ‘appears’ in Humboldt’s Gift (under the name of Pierre Thaxter), where he comes across as a flamboyant fantasist (with his debts, his wives, his innumerable children) and as something of ‘a purple genius of the Baron Corvo type’. Recasting actual contemporaries in literature has consequences which some (including me) find uncomfortably worldly. I heard that Keith was asked to sign a libel waiver in the weeks before Humboldt appeared; he cheerfully obliged.

  *13 Real life is almost always complicated, but it is hardly ever complex. When Freud called death ‘the complex symbol’, he meant that it contained many levels and many themes, all very hard to reconcile and combine. I’m now fairly sure that my singular mental state that day at BU was the result of a memento mori; it had been brought home to me that my mind, too, was mortal, and open to erasure…The Freud family (I feel moved to say) has left us with a complex symbol of the Holocaust. Sigmund died in London in 1939, aged eighty-three. His four younger sisters died differently: Pauline (aged eighty) and Marie (eighty-two) were murdered in Treblinka, Adolfine (eighty-one) in Theresienstadt, and Rosa (eighty-four) in Auschwitz.

  *14 It seems curious – at least to me – that all the quotes in this chapter come from Herzog, a book that lies fairly low on the scale of my lecteurial love, coming in behind Augie March, the Collected Stories (with its five novellas), Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein. The only explanation I can come up with is that there must be a great deal of death awareness in its psychological cladding; and a fear of insanity, too, a fear much deeper than the crazily blithe first sentence allows: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’ It wasn’t all right with Saul Bellow in 2001, when he felt its advent (his darting, flickering eyes). He would have echoed King Lear: ‘O! Let me not be mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.’

  *15 I found I seemed to do slightly better if I concentrated on specific memories (rather than simply weltering in woe). And it was this memory that gave the most dependable relief…I am seven, which makes Hilly twenty-eight, and we are walking along the seafront of a small town in South Wales. A man drives by – and on the instant mother and son are convulsed by laughter…The car was one thing (three-wheeled and roofless, and somehow entirely unserious, like an early and unaerodynamic attempt at a racer); and the man at the
wheel, the lone occupant, in green tweeds and fawn scarf and porkpie hat, very round and red in the face with open mouth, the man at the wheel exactly resembled a prosperous pig smugly motoring through the pages of a children’s book…After a few minutes, when we’d straightened up and quietened down, my mother and I turned to one another gasping and wiping our eyes in gratitude and faint disbelief, as if saying, Well how could you possibly improve on that? Then I looked round about me; and all the people I could see, townies, builders, a policewoman, a grocer, were wearing their everyday faces…Ah, I thought, so it’s just the two of us – it’s just her and me.

  *16 In this press release Christopher was officially curtailing a book tour (for his memoir Hitch-22). ‘I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at short notice.’

  *17 Literary critics call it ‘decorum’. In colloquial English decorum means ‘in keeping with good taste and propriety’. Literary decorum means ‘the concurrence of style and content’, and is of course wholly inattentive to propriety and taste.

  *18 All the relevant (i.e., ‘medical’) quotes in this chapter and the next derive from the series of columns Christopher wrote in Vanity Fair between September 2010 and October 2011; they were collected in a slim volume called Mortality (2012).

  Chapter 2

  Hitchens Goes to Houston

  Tumortown, March 2011

  The itinerary told me that my flight would take just over ten hours, and the boarding card told me that my seat was to be 58F, which was located just before – or even parallel with, or actually beyond – the Economy toilets. This was no cause for complaint. Far more conducive to puzzlement and unease was the fact that the PA system kept calling me a ‘customer’. Passengers – on American Airlines and, I suspected, on American airlines in general – were now known as customers. We are at full capacity so we do ask our customers to vacate the aisles as soon as…