by Amis, Martin
This was new, and it was policy (even the captain observed it, going on about the comfort and safety of our customers); and it struck the occupant of 58F as a clear demotion…I remember to this day how left wing, how ascetic, how anticapitalist – or, if you prefer, how short of money – I felt on that trip (the ticket alone cost thousands of pounds), and as a point of self-respect I wanted to stop being a customer and go back to being a passenger.
You see, I was in the process – now far advanced – of moving house, from the Land of the Rose to the Land of the Free.*1 When I was just a regular visitor I always felt at home in America; now that I would soon be a resident, I felt like a visitor, and one from another planet. How very strange it was suddenly seeming – America.
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It was March 2011 – a full nine months after diagnosis. I had seen Christopher regularly meanwhile, sometimes in New York but almost always in the District of Columbia. I would board the train from Penn Station to Washington Union, take a cab to the Wyoming apartment block off Dupont Circle, ride the elevator to the sixth storey, and brace myself while waiting for the door to open and reveal the latest changes in my friend. There always were changes – and in addition there always were sorties to hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all waiting rooms…
We knew early on that the cancer had metastasised (secondary tumours had colonised ‘a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node’); the tumour on the collarbone was in addition ‘palpable’, to the touch and even to the eye. It took a little longer to determine the source and establish the verdict: Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four. ‘And’, as he was never slow to add, ‘there is no Stage Five.’ The chemo had done what it could, and now, taking a more advanced and aggressive approach, Christopher enrolled as an outpatient at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.
There I was aimed. On a flight marked by long interludes of riotous turbulence (with the plane’s rear end waggling like that of a muscular bulldog on the point of being unleashed for a romp). As an experience, then, sitting there strapped into 58F was both expensive and uncomfortable – but not nearly as expensive and uncomfortable as being strapped into a Proton Therapy Synchrotron, which was to be Christopher’s next recourse and ordeal.
First, the past, and the end of Yvonne
During that journey Martin had Hitch-22 on his lap, and he was looking again at the pages about the fate of Mrs Yvonne Hitchens.
Hilly had a soft departure; she died in her farmhouse in rural Andalusia, attended by two devoted daughters-in-law (one of them a professional nurse); and she was in her early eighties. By contrast, Yvonne died of unnatural causes in a Greek hotel, with a male cadaver in the adjoining room; and she was in her mid-forties. Hilly’s death was in the newspapers – among the obituaries; Yvonne’s death was on the front page.
As Christopher tells it, he was lying in bed one November morning ‘with a wonderful new girlfriend’ when he got a call from a (clearly quite wonderful) old girlfriend. She asked him if earlier that day he had listened to the BBC: there was a brief dispatch about a woman with his surname who had been found murdered in Athens. Having heard some particulars (clinchingly the full name of Yvonne’s travelling companion), the old girlfriend said, ‘Oh dear, then I’m very sorry but it probably is your mum.’*2
That corpse next door was the man she had eloped with – a scrawny transcendentalist (and ex-priest) called Timothy Bryan.
Some historical imagination is necessary if we are to see the size of the calamity for Christopher’s father, Eric, the stalwart naval officer. In one vital respect Commander Hitchens still lived in the culture of Trollope – the last of the great novelists to portray a world in which familial scandal led at once to social death. In his provincial and anxiously genteel milieu the commander had reconciled himself to the defection of ‘an adored wife’, but as Hitch-22 goes on,
[I]n the surrounding society of North Oxford, the two of them had a pact. If invited to a sherry party or a dinner, they would still show up together as if nothing had happened. Now, and on the front pages at that, everything was made known at once, and to everybody.
Eric Hitchens (also known as Hitch) was ‘a man who for a long time braved death for a living’; and yet ‘there was no question of his coming to Athens, and I myself, in any case, was already on my way…’
Already on his way. This will qualify as a theme: Christopher’s compulsion to stride into his fears. It was the late November of 1973.
On November 17 of that year the regime of the Greek junta – a dictatorship, writes Christopher, ‘of dark glasses and torturers and steel helmets’ – was overthrown: the fascist colonel, George Papadopoulos, was replaced by a fascist general, Dimitrios Ioannidis, and the new junta was a dictatorship of massacre. This was the setting for the last days of Yvonne Hitchens.
And so we picture the youthful Christopher going through the motions with Athenian officialdom (the compromised coroner, the villainous police captain), and at the same time covertly mingling with the underground opposition (survivors of beatings, friends with bullet wounds who dared not go to any hospital). At one point, in a shabby student flat, he joined his comrades in an almost whispered rendition of ‘The Internationale’…
At last Christopher was informed of the judicial verdict. It did not surprise him, and it must have consoled him. In London he had taken his mother and her lover out to dinner, and he had got a sense of Timothy Bryan: ‘wispy’, musical, an adherent of the Maharishi. No, not a murderer. And so not a murder-suicide. Yvonne had made a pact with her husband; she also made a pact with her lover – they used sleeping pills. In addition, Timothy, ‘whose need to die must have been very great’, had slit his wrists in the bath. And Christopher was obliged to absorb another fact (one destined to ramify for ever in his mind): according to the hotel telephonist’s log, Yvonne had repeatedly tried to reach him in London. That was the penultimate shock – there was one more to come.
Christopher begins the two filial chapters of Hitch-22 with a description of his first memory. In Athens he was twenty-four; and here he has just turned three. The scene is the Grand Harbour at Valletta (the capital of Malta, a British possession with a naval base where the commander serves). And Christopher is aboard a ferry, intoxicated by ‘the discrepant yet melding blues’ of the Mediterranean. His mother is with him, and although he is free to run around and explore she is always present and ready to take his hand.
The year is 1952. That is how it begins. And twenty-one years later,
…[T]his is how it ends. I am eventually escorted to the hotel suite where it all happened. The two bodies had had to be removed, and their coffins sealed, before I could get there. This was for the dismally sordid reason that the dead couple had taken a while to be discovered. The pain of this is so piercing and exquisite, and the scenery of the two rooms so nasty and so tawdry, that I hide my tears and my nausea by pretending to seek some air at the window. And there, for the first time, I receive a shattering, full-on view of the Acropolis. For a moment, and like the Berlin Wall and other celebrated vistas when glimpsed for the first time, it almost resembles some remembered postcard of itself. But then it becomes utterly authentic and unique. That temple really must be the Parthenon, and almost near enough to stretch out and touch. The room behind me is full of death and darkness and depression, but suddenly here again and fully present is the flash and dazzle of the life-giving Mediterranean air and light that lent me my first hope and confidence. I only wish I could have been clutching my mother’s hand for this, too.
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I sent him a letter of condolence, in November 1973, on Times Literary Supplement notepaper; and he replied on the notepaper of the New Statesman. In his memoir he describes my letter as ‘brief, well-phrased, memorable’. Not so memorable for me, but it began with an asserti
on of friendship; and quite suddenly we were no longer warm acquaintances. We were friends. I was his friend, and he was mine.
Christopher was perfectly willing to talk about his father (whom I got to know a bit: he always wore the same typhoon-proof thick-knit white rollneck); but I can’t remember him saying anything about his mother, except this once…On a bright afternoon in early 1974 we were in his small chaotic office (the Hutch of the Hitch) gradually recovering from the midday meal; and for once the veins of our cigarette smoke were a beautiful, a Mediterranean blue, and I said, ‘In Greece, was it really rough?’
With his eyes on the floor he tipped his head from side to side.
‘No need to answer. I bet it was rough. I bet it wasn’t boring, though, Hitch. You could give it that.’
His gaze was still downward. ‘Let’s just say I felt very alive.’
It was 3 p.m. local time when the plane landed at George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport. The crew extended advice and courtesies to the passengers, who were hungry for a new kind of air, air they hadn’t breathed ten thousand times already – virginal air. At the end of the very long line to the final checkpoint there was a sniffer dog, a beautifully groomed but insanely zealous Alsatian, with its uniformed master; it clambered all over me – but I ducked away and then I was clear. In the steamy open-air basement of the pick-up bays, I had a smoke, found a cab, and rode through gusty suburbs, heading for downtown and the Lone Star Hotel.
The five-stage theory
Where I failed to raise the Hitchenses. They were out, and neither Christopher nor Blue were picking up their phones. I fleetingly considered a tragic nap, but I never take naps, because all my naps are tragic naps…
And I was thinking of the two of them in hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all in waiting rooms. Sickness is itself a waiting room…Many, many people have written with great penetration on sickness, on the estrangement from the world of will and action, the indignity, the onerousness, but not many have evoked the boredom, as Christopher has: how really incredibly boring it is. ‘It bores even me,’ he wrote…
It would freeze my blood, for instance, to see an appointment-book entry that promised morning with lawyers, afternoon with doctors; but in Washington, when all this began, that was Christopher’s daily routine. Now, later on, he was in Houston (that famous fortress on the medical frontier), and it was doctors all day long.
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Half a year earlier Christopher wrote about the ‘notorious’ five-stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – denial, rage, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and said that it ‘hasn’t so far had much application to my case’. ‘The bargaining stage, though,’ he went on. ‘Maybe there’s a loophole here.’ The oncology wager presents itself as follows:
You stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade.
That bargain took effect, and quickly too.
‘It’s not just the rug,’ he said as he greeted me at the Wyoming in the autumn of 2010 – meaning his hair, already reduced to a few grey strands and clumps. ‘When I shave the razor glides down my chops and meets no resistance. Now that would be a grave affront to my virility – if I still had any. That went at once. Eros, Little Keith, goes immediately. Thanatos thinks, Mm, I’ll be having that.’
‘Christ. But it’ll return, O Hitch. Now you’re all lovely and slim.’
‘I’ve shed fourteen pounds – a whole stone. And I don’t feel any lighter.’
‘That’s weird. You used to say you felt lighter when you lost fourteen ounces.’
‘I know. It’s as if the tumour’s made of…What’s one down from a black hole? Or one up. When the collapse isn’t so catastrophic.’
‘A uh, a neutron star. A speck of a neutron star is heavier than a battleship.’
‘That’s the stuff. The tumour’s made of neutrons.’
‘Yeah, but you know, Hitch – this is iatrogenic. The result of medical treatment. It’s not the disease that’s doing it, it’s the fucking doctors.’
‘So far. Now – lunch. Where we’ll talk about something less fucking boring.’
And at his favourite nearby restaurant, La Tomate (just down the slope from the Hilton where Reagan was shot), Christopher would now ask for a cushion – ‘I haven’t got an ass any more,’ he’d explained. He was invariably feted in La Tomate, and the waiters had become almost rigidly attentive. And I realised that cancer sufferers, silently identified and singled out, wear a version of the Star. Singled out for respectful kindliness, and not for persecution; but they wear the Star. And hardly anyone recognised him in the street any more – or they did but they held back. Because he wore the Star…
Lunch with the Hitch was still lunch with the Hitch, in the sense that you got there around one, and left there while the place was filling up for dinner. His interest in food, never great, had now declined into indifference, but he drank his one or two Johnnie Blacks and his half a bottle of red wine (‘sometimes more, never less’ was his rule), and he talked with undiminished fluency and humour for six or seven hours – to such effect that it would be a sin, he said, not to round it off with some cognac.
Although I made no attempt whatever to match him in the daylight, it seems that I easily outdrank him after dusk. Pretty well every time I went to Union Station to get the train back to New York I was awed by the sheer desperation of my (compound) hangover. My hands would shake so violently that I often simply threw away the cigarette I was trying to roll and went within to buy a pack of Marlboros…For a few hours, then (and no longer), I would emulate my friend in gangrenousness. But my struggle would pass – but so would his, I truly and steadfastly believed.
Now, here in Texas, the neutrons that weighed him down were about to be attacked: powered by 250 million electron volts, a high dose of protons would be fired into his body at two-thirds of the speed of light, well over 100,000 miles per second. The protons would neutralise the neutrons and the patient would…
Make a full recovery. Denial, rage, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Looking back, it sometimes seems to me that I got off at the first stop and at once found satisfactory lodgings in Denial – and stayed there till the early afternoon of the very last day. Blind Denial, which wouldn’t be at all out of character; but it proved to be slightly more complex than that.
Cadence, Trent, Brent, and the origins of the First World War
No word from anyone, so for an hour I strolled around among the billboards and parking lots of downtown Houston. And it had to be faced: I was an undocumented alien, like so many others down there, and very recently arrived. I was a stranger in a strange land.
As I was heading back into the hotel I paused in the forecourt for the usual ten-minute reason. Three discrete figures were warily converging at the taxi stand: a beautiful woman of about thirty, who was under four feet tall; a basketball player (a team of them had just checked in), inordinately long-limbed in navy-blue sweatshirt and sweatpants; and a man as four-cornered as a packing case, in a bouncer’s charcoal suit, smoking, and then stretching out a burnished toecap and wiggling his leg with the fluidity of a dancer as he crushed the butt under his sole.
It was six-thirty. Time, I thought, to see what the hell was going on in the Lone Star Saloon. I stepped forward and paused as a stretch limousine streamed slowly by.
‘Can I bum a cigarette?’ said a voice from the street.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But it’s loose tobacco. Here, I’ll roll one for you.’
‘Thanks. But don’t lick it,’ he stipulated. ‘Don’t lick it. I’ll lick it.’
In the Lone Star Saloon the lady said, ‘So tell! Come on. Tell about Trent!’
/> The guy behind the teak counter said, ‘I’m Trent. You mean Brent. That’s okay. People’re always mixing us up.’
‘So sorry, Trent. I meant Brent…I’m Cadence.’ And she offered her hand.
‘Cadence! An honour. Brent’s told me all about you.’
‘And Brent’s told me all about you.’
Trent finished polishing a wine glass and slipped it into its slot. ‘Brent? Well, Brent doesn’t want to get his hopes up too much. But the signs are it’s going to happen. You sense it, Cadence. You can sense when promotion’s in the air.’
‘Touch wood. So say!’
Cadence was a comfortably downy middle-aged blonde, softly swathed in fawn cashmere. She was one of those generous-hearted beings who, when staying in hotels and looking in on their cocktail lounges, develops a passionate interest in the welfare of certain members of the staff. Her interlocutor, Trent, cut a courtly figure in bow tie and ochre waistcoat. Two stools down from Cadence, and facing Trent, I sat slumped over a Coors Light; occasionally I stared without profit at my mobile phone…Swirling her rum–tonic in its ice, Cadence said, ‘Trent. Don’t keep me in suspenders! What’s it going to be with Brent?’
‘No one knows.’ Trent added coyly, ‘But possibly they’re thinking Under Chef?’
‘Under Chef?’ Cadence frowned. ‘Brent’s a bartender. Can he cook?’
‘Actually, Cadence, Under Chefs don’t do a lot of cooking. They play more of an organisational role. On the other hand, he could make Catering Sales Coordinator?’