Inside Story (9780593318300)

by Amis, Martin

  ‘He didn’t have any cherished memories. Where’s that bit?…Nothing will be worth looking back on, I know that for certain. For certain! There will be nothing but remorse and regret for opportunities missed. And he wrote that aged thirty-four.’

  ‘Terrifying. I like looking back on my lovelife, and I’m sure you do too. But not everyone does. Maybe most people don’t. The sexually unlucky, the sexually lonely. There’s infinite misery in that.’

  ‘How would you know? I mean, outside the crucible of your imagination. You’ve never been sexually lonely.’

  ‘Oh yes I have. And a little goes a long way. And it was a lot, not a little. There was a whole year just before we became friends when I couldn’t pull anyone. And you can feel all the yearning turn into bitterness. It’s so corrosive, and so fast-acting. Your balance, your whole equilibrium…Tina got me out of that. When she was nineteen Tina rode into town and rescued me from Larkinland. If she hadn’t I might still be there. Scowling at women and telling dirty jokes with a sick glint in my eye.’

  ‘And if Tina hadn’t intervened, you’d never have written about Stalin and Hitler.’

  I said, ‘Oi, that’s a leap, isn’t it? How d’you figure that?’

  ‘What’s that line in one of Julian’s early novels? How we are in the sack governs how we see the history of the world. Or words to that effect.’

  ‘I remember. Which sounds like a leap too, but there’s definitely a connection.’

  ‘And it might partly explain why Larkin never had a fucking word to say about the history of the world. His lovelife was a void, so he…’

  ‘So he didn’t know what the stakes were. Humanly. So he wasn’t moved to speak.’

  ‘Disgraceful, that. Or just pitifully stunted…You know what Trotsky called the Nazi–Soviet Pact? “The midnight of the twentieth century”. But that’s a good phrase for what followed – 1941 to ’45. The midnight of the twentieth century.’

  ‘…And we’re midnight’s children. But there’s no reason why a poet should have strong views about it, or any views about it.’

  ‘But you’d think they would.’

  ‘Mm. Remember what Sebald said about the Holocaust? He said, as a dry aside, that no serious person ever thinks about anything else.’

  ‘In that case, Little Keith,’ said Christopher, ‘we’re serious about the history of the world. And does that mean we’re serious in the sack?’

  *1 The news of Hilly’s death came on a Thursday (June 24, 2010), the news of Christopher’s cancer came on the following Tuesday, and on the following Monday Elena and I had (lesser) news of our own: we were moving from London to Brooklyn. It would take a year to bring this about, but meanwhile we were going back and forth…It was simple: Elena wanted to be near her mother, Betty (who was eighty-two, like Hilly), and I wanted to be near Hitch (who was sixty-one, like me).

  *2 I had an inkling of how this must have felt. In December 1974 my cousin Lucy Partington failed to return to her mother’s house in the Gloucestershire village of Gretton (where I had spent many a childhood summer). She had disappeared, and there would soon be posters of her everywhere. Privately, over time, I managed to half-persuade myself of the following: 21-year-old Lucy – highly intelligent, artistic, and religious – had disappeared on purpose (for inscrutable reasons of her own). Two decades later, in March 1994, her body was exhumed, along with several other bodies, from beneath the ‘house of horror’, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester; she was one of the victims of Fred West, the serial murderer (and the complete, the perfect, the finished modern trog). When I opened the tabloid and saw her photograph, I felt as though a shaggy beast had brushed my face with its breath. I was Lucy’s first cousin; Christopher was Yvonne’s first son.

  *3 A reasonable expectation, you might think. As it happens there were no fatalities on commercial US aircraft for almost ten years, beginning in 2009; but then in April 2018, on a flight from New York to Dallas, an engine exploded and a porthole window collapsed. Despite her fastened seatbelt, Mrs Jennifer Riordan (a youngish mother of two) was sucked out from the waist up and battered by debris before two men, a firefighter and ‘a guy in a cowboy hat’, managed to drag her back inside…A gruesome and freakish death, extraordinarily abrupt and arbitrary: a radical case of the instantaneous undeserved…‘This is a sad day,’ intoned the CEO of Southwest Airlines, ‘and our hearts go out to the family and loved ones of our deceased customer.’

  *4 For once I’d brought a notebook with me; it was the only time I ever made a written record in situ, and it was useful enough for the reconstruction of this particular exchange; but I’m glad I didn’t make a habit of it. Many times I had seen and heard him, in public and on stage, ‘opening up’ to reveal no ordinary powers of retentiveness and mental orchestration. To have heard him performing – in extremis, with an audience of one – now feels like a peculiarly grievous privilege.

  *5 Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. ‘I think that’s very unfair’, said Christopher, ‘to Ian Hamilton.’

  *6 From Mortality: ‘I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid that you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness.’ I wasn’t that especially close friend (I think it was Ian McEwan). You see, it didn’t occur to me that he would never see England again. Of course he would, when he was better.

  Chapter 3

  Politics and the Bedroom

  Not left wing enough

  Is there a connection between your erotic life and the way you see history? And if there is, which of the two has precedence?

  One day in 1974 I said, ‘I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens. Nadia, Nadia Lancaster goes and makes a pass – and you turn her down. Christ! Just like you did with Arabella West – and Lady Mab! Lady Mab…’

  ‘I know. More lissom than any woman has the right to be. But that honking accent. She sounds as haughty, and inbred, as Princess Anne. It just puts me off.’

  Christopher didn’t make passes at girls; he waited for girls to make passes at him – and they did. The trouble was that they tended to be bluebloods.*1 He said,

  ‘I think on some level it suffuses me with guilt. Nadia, Arabella, Lady Mab. Because if the arc of history holds true, in a couple of years I’ll be stringing them all up.’

  Oh, yes: the other revolution. He was smiling and so was I. ‘Well then,’ I said. ‘Yet another reason to act now.’

  ‘Ah. So you think I should sleep with Lady Mab before stringing her up. Or very soon after. Quick, lads, while she’s warm…If I may say so, Mart, I find that typically uncouth.’

  * * *

  ∗

  At some point in 1976 he said, ‘Yes, but there’s a catch. A drawback.’

  ‘Now what?’ The girl Christopher was having his doubts about, this time, was a young sociologist who wrote for the New Statesman (and when she delivered her pieces she was always asked to join us in the wine bar or the pub). Her name was Molly Jones. ‘You won’t be needing to string up Molly Jones. Her dad’s a builder, so she’s a uh, a hereditary proletarian. She’s very nice and she looks very nice and she’s very articulate and very good fun.’

  ‘All true. And by the way she’s subtly made it clear that she finds the Hitch not entirely repulsive. Still, there’s an insufficiency in her.’

  ‘And what’s that?’r />
  ‘She’s not left wing enough…She’s not right wing, it goes without saying. How many chicks do we know who’re mad about flags and uniforms and squeaky black overcoats? She’s not right wing, just insufficiently left.’

  ‘So?…And I suppose you mean insufficiently Trotskyite.’

  ‘Trotskyist.’

  ‘Jesus. Trotskyist.’

  ‘Only a Stalinist would call me Trotskyite.’

  ‘What would a Stalinite call you? Anyway. I repeat my question. So?…She’s attractive but insufficiently left. So? What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty basic. In the last election Molly voted Liberal. How do you laugh that one off?’

  ‘That’s not basic. What’s basic about that?’

  ‘You, you can respect incompatibility when it’s physical. But every other kind of incompatibility, including political incompatibility, strikes you as footling.’

  ‘That’s right. Why drag all that stuff into the bedroom? Reaching the bedroom can be hard enough as it is. Why create another set of obstacles?’

  ‘It’s no use talking to you – you don’t care what girls’re like,’ he said, ‘as long as they’re girls. That’s dispositive. It settles it.’

  ‘Hang on. I don’t fancy every girl. Though they’re nearly all fanciable once you get them to open up about themselves…There may be something in what you say. I just think, Let’s get started and see how it goes.’

  ‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you. Because you’ve got no social conscience. That’s the difference between us. I’m of that higher breed – those “to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest”. Keats, Little Keith.’

  Inconceivable

  In the late 1970s Christopher got started with Anna Wintour. The affair began with unrestrained elation (out together, they looked like the principals in the all-solving scene of a romantic comedy); so some friends and onlookers were powerfully surprised when things began to cool (when, it seemed, Christopher began to cool). I was not powerfully surprised – nor powerfully disappointed, I have to admit. Anna was the first Hitch girlfriend who aroused envy in me; and Envy is cruelly self-punitive, like the other Deadly Sins (very much including Anger, but with the admittedly unreliable exception of Lust).

  So when they broke up I was relieved to be rid of it – of envy, and its skein of wasteful resentments. I also felt the pressure of an unsolved mystery. At the time, Anna told me not very much about the breakup, and Christopher told me nothing at all. But I thought I knew where the fault line lay. Not class: unlike Lady Mab, Anna wasn’t provocatively high-born (in the shorthand of the day she was upper-middle). I assumed, then, that it was politics, or the absence of politics – as with Molly Jones. Anna at that stage was simply innocent of politics.

  In his autobiography, Interesting Times (2003), the brilliant – and in my experience entirely amiable – Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that, as a young man looking to settle down, marriage to a non-Communist was ‘inconceivable’. (Eric secured his CP bride when he was twenty-six, in 1943; and they divorced in 1951.) But I continued to wonder at that adjective: inconceivable (‘incapable of being imagined or grasped’). So they do exist: people for whom love is not blind; in their case, love is a keen-eyed commissar. Or maybe they are left wing in their very loins.

  The young Hobsbawm (certainly), and the young Hitchens (arguably), would have been reluctant to get involved with the young Hilly, a mere Labour activist (who scandalised our Welsh neighbours in the 1950s not only by driving a car but by using it to ferry voters to the polls). Still, the taint was there: Hilly’s parents were moneyed provincial bohemians (folk dancing, Esperanto, madrigals), and she had a tiny but lifelong private income (and I myself, along with my siblings and my innumerable cousins, inherited £1,000 on my twenty-first birthday).

  In Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958, Hilly said to me,

  ‘The thing is, the Republicans are…Is that warm enough? Or too hot?’

  ‘Mum, I’ll adjust it.’ I could bathe myself by then (I was nine), but this was a shower: the first shower of my life. Earlier that week we had disembarked from the Queen Mary in New York Harbor…‘The Republicans are what?’

  ‘In America, Mart, the Republicans are like the Tories. And the Democrats are like Labour. So we’re for the Democrats.’

  ‘…Yeah. We don’t want to be for the Tories.’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  And her middle child never forgot that and, as it turned out, never strayed from it. I became a quietly constant ameliorative gradualist of the centre-left.*2

  ‘Did you have any luck last night?’ I asked Christopher in the noonday pub. ‘I mean sexually?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was 1978 and we were in Blackpool, attending a Party Conference. He was there as a representative of the Daily Express, and I was there, with James Fenton, as a representative of the New Statesman (to which Christopher would return in 1979). The night before, I had left him in the bar of his hotel, the Imperial, at around twelve-thirty and walked with James to our rude boarding house on the outskirts of town, with its gravy-dinner smells and ticking deathwatch beetles…

  I said, ‘Who with?’

  First breathing in, Christopher said grimly, ‘I got off with the deputy treasurer of the Uxbridge Young Conservative Association.’

  ‘…You lucky bastard. What was she like?’

  ‘It was a bloke, actually.’

  I thought about this. ‘So then what?’

  ‘Well. I kicked him out halfway through. Dah. I’m never going near that again.’

  ‘You haven’t gone near it in ages. You must’ve been drunker than I thought.’

  ‘I was. I was as drunk as you’ve ever seen me.’

  ‘You hardly ever look drunk.’ And he hardly ever looked hungover; but he looked hungover now, pressing against his brow the little tumbler of Bell’s whisky with its two or three shreds of ice. ‘What class was this Young Conservative?’

  ‘Oh, the pits. Minor public-school with pretensions. He sounded the t in often.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Okay, he was a bloke and he can’t help that, but it’s certainly not a plus that he was a Young Conservative. Old Conservatives are bad enough, but young Conservatives…’

  ‘Agreed. The pits.’ Christopher assessed me with friendly exasperation. ‘But if the deputy treasurer of the Uxbridge Young Conservative Association had been a girl, then no doubt you’d’ve been proud to make her acquaintance.’

  ‘Uh, yeah. As long as she didn’t actually goose-step into the bedroom…Did you hear the Thatcher speech?’

  ‘I was there. Oh, she’s a jade and a wanton. The sexual power of her.’

  ‘But isn’t she insufficiently left wing?’*3

  * * *

  —————

  Almost thirty years later he rang me from the Wyoming in Washington DC, and asked for ideas about the title for his imminent autobiography, saying,

  ‘I want it to point to the dual nature of the Hitch. You know, the business about the two sets of books. A socialist and, withal, a bit of a socialite.’

  An hour later I rang him back and said, ‘I came up with fuck all, I’m afraid. Just some dull play on the divided self.’

  ‘What d’you think of this? Hitch-22.’

  ‘…I think that’s truly brilliant.’

  ‘My dear Mart…I’m going to clear it with Erica Heller, just in case.’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said. ‘What’ve you done about the chicks?’

  ‘There’s nothing about the chicks, just a bit each about the wives. Nothing about the chicks. No Jeannie. No Bridget. No Anna.’

  ‘No Anna?’

  ‘No chicks.’

  Anna was upper middle, yet her voice was as pleasingly accentless as that of the Hi
tch himself; her face brimmed with freshness and generosity of spirit; and, as if that wasn’t enough, she had a figure that belonged, not to the Olive Oyls of fashion, but to the shapely heroines of Hollywood. And don’t forget that under-celebrated ingredient of allure, which is cheerfulness – which is happiness.

  …Happiness, as a source of beauty. This somewhat tragic theory came over me slowly and much later on, after I’d taken my younger daughters to and from school a few thousand times. In the first year the girlchildren were almost without exception magical to look at. In the third year there was a significant minority whose eyes had lost much of their light (prideful fathers, angry mothers?). And by the fifth year a kind of apartheid had taken hold: the division between the happy and the not so happy, I came to think – as well as between the appealing and the not so appealing…Oh, this subject is as fiendishly complex as death. Which comes first? Are they happy because they’re appealing or are they appealing because they’re happy? Or is it that you can’t be one without the other?

  Luxury

  People think they are seeing it in the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn; but they are only seeing its wraith. I mean the hard revolutionary left, which was Christopher’s proper home. To belong there you needed three characteristics: a) fire, b) dogmatism, and c) humourlessness. Corbyn had hardly any a), but he had b), and he had c) in sumptuous profusion. Hitchens, on the other hand, had plenty of a) and quite enough b), but no c) whatever. It was as well that he was a divided self.

  He developed this commitment independently, at school, through thought and reading. And as a very young man he paid all his dues: demonstrations (often violent), fistfights and exchanges of concrete missiles with enemy cadres, multiple arrests, occasional imprisonments. During his time at Oxford an average day