by Amis, Martin
might include leafleting or selling the Socialist Worker outside a car plant in the morning, then spray-painting pro-Vietcong graffiti on the walls, and arguing vehemently with Communists and Social Democrats or rival groups of Trotskyists long into the night.
And at Oxford he would continue to ‘hope and work for the downfall of capitalism’ – and the establishment of the socialist tomorrow.*4
This was in his Chris/Christopher period. In the daytime Chris might get himself roughed up by scabs on a picket line, but in the evening Christopher would slip into a dinner jacket (to address ‘the Oxford Union debating society under the rules of parliamentary order’), and then go on to All Souls College,*5 where he would teasingly enthral a coterie of reactionary old queens (A. L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, John Sparrow, et al.). Hitch called this ‘keeping two sets of books’. In other words he was a romantic incendiary who also enjoyed the ambience of the beau monde.*6
In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural and historical strands combined. And one of those strands had to do with religion – or its residue.
Among the best things in Hitch-22 is the description of the funeral of the author’s father, the laconically Conservative and low-church Eric Hitchens. It was a very English occasion: the hilltop, the extreme cold, the ‘misty churchyard’ overlooking Portsmouth Harbour and the sweep of the Channel, the ‘Navy Hymn’, the ‘gaunt Hampshire faces’ (‘these distant kinsmen gave a hasty clasp of the hand and faded back into the chalky landscape’): all of it was ‘stark enough to have pleased my father’, and notable for the ‘absence of fuss’. And then:
I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I had ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass […], he almost barked, ‘What is this? Luxury?’ That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood.
Hedonism was luxury. Anna in herself, in her physical person, was luxury. She was opulent, high church, sweet tooth.
* * *
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After the collapse of Communism (1989), Christopher conceded that politics and religion in the twentieth century had got themselves weirdly intertwined. In my opinion that date also marks the birth of the Hitch as a writer.*7
Utopianism is not the same thing as religion, but it is the same size, in the given individual. The two narratives are alike visionary, teleological (aimed at an end), and millenarian, and their followers have the same kind of temperament. Aggressively secular, the socialist utopians among them easily dispensed with the supernatural; but they certainly couldn’t do without faith.
With them, politics engaged all the most intimate energies. The struggle went without sleep, it was consuming and immanent. With them, it wasn’t a matter of letting politics into the bedroom. Politics was already there: wearing flannel pyjamas, and moodily recumbent on the faded patchwork quilt.
*1 ‘You’re upper class and you’ve got a very loud voice. Is it congenital?’ I once asked an upper-class friend. ‘Yes. It comes’, he blared, ‘from centuries of talking across very large rooms.’ If upper-class girls were in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution, which they were, it came from centuries of loudly asking for what they wanted and expecting to get it.
*2 So I never felt any correlation between politics and the bedroom. Come to think of it, though, my romantic CV was much more leftward than Christopher’s. Nearly all the girlfriends of my later teens and early twenties were blue collar, and I was an internationalist too, courting a Ceylonese, an Iranian, a Pakistani, three West Indians, and a mixed-race South African who could pass in Johannesburg but not in Cape Town (her name was Jasmine Fortune, and she was by my side for six months; her usual endearment, very endearingly, was not ‘honey’ or ‘sugar’ but ‘cookie’)…Only about half of these multicultural involvements were consummated. Perrin, originally from Karachi, was a soulmate and we were close, but it never went beyond a single kiss – her first. Melody, originally from Antigua, was the telephonist at the Statesman. We had three dates. One night, when we were canoodling on the sofa at my flat, she seemed to snap out of herself and then she said soberly (of her often-mentioned long-term Antiguan boyfriend, who was religious, as was Melody), ‘Joey’d never believe this. He wouldn’t – even if I told him…He’d have to see it.’
*3 ‘I was mad about him,’ Anna told me, when the two of us had a Christopher-themed dinner in 2018. ‘And he was mad about you,’ I told her, ‘and I never heard him say a less than reverent word about you – ever.’…Anna was inclined to pooh-pooh the notion that the cooling off had a political cause. She thought it had more to do with his general frenetic busyness (the fact that he was so in demand), and perhaps his sexual indeterminacies (which incidentally he never sought to hide; and as far as I could tell they were a thing of the past by 1980). Anna was not in the least resentful. She seemed on balance happy to have had her time with the Hitch, and she went down to spend more time with him, in Houston, just before he died.
*4 And doing so with such a will that he ‘neglected his studies’, as the saying goes. In fact he did no work at all. Having bluffed and blustered his way through Finals (nine three-hour exams in the same week), Christopher was summoned to a viva – a supplementary interview. This meant he was on the margin between one grade and another. ‘I thought the innate brilliance of the Hitch had somehow shone through,’ he later told me, ‘and I was being viva’d for a First. After a few minutes – “Mr Hitchens, does the year 1066 ring any kind of bell?” – I realised I was being viva’d for a degree.’ He was not on the margin between a First and a Second. He was on the margin between a Third and a Fail. Like Fenton (like Auden), he got a Third.
*5 All Souls – rich, venerable, studentless. I ate there once, as a guest of Philip Larkin, who stayed a couple of terms as a visiting fellow in 1970 when he was editing The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. ‘Today I read all of Alan Bold,’ he said as he greeted me, referring to one of the many poets he omitted. ‘And all of Alan Bold’s no good.’ The next year he would complete one of his greatest poems, ‘Livings: I, II, III’, which includes this evocation of All Souls (where the high-tabletalk is parodied with the technique of a light-verse maestro): ‘Tonight we dine without the Master / (Nocturnal vapours do not please); / The port goes round so much the faster, / Topics are raised with no less ease – / Which advowson looks the fairest, / What the wood from Snape will fetch, / Names for pudendum mulieris, / Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?’ (‘Livings’: III).
*6 So opening himself up to being called, among many alliterative variants (e.g., ‘a limousine leftie’), ‘a Bollinger Bolshevik’. Such were the phrases that wealthy right-wingers, between mouthfuls of Bollinger, used to think was enough to settle the hash of left-wingers who hypocritically failed to confine themselves to cheap drinks from the national cellar (Bristol Cream, barley wine, and room-temperature bitter). By this logic, your gustatory style had to conform to your politics – a remarkably undemanding task for a plutocrat.
*7 It was an opinion that annoyed him, understandably, because it questioned everything he’d written before 1989. This much he conceded: ‘It’s a relief not to have to go on raising my scarred dukes to defend Trotsky’ (though he went on defending – championing – Trotsky, in private and in public, for a further twenty years). What he didn’t accept was my conviction that writing insists on freedom, absolute freedom, including freedom from all ideology.
Chapter 4
Hitchens Stays On in Houston
The synchrotron
The machine that was about to engulf him weighed nearly 200 tons.
&nb
sp; On Monday morning Christopher, Blue, and I went by cab to the MD Anderson Proton Therapy Center. With its sleek surfaces and its tubular atrium, the place felt like the future – or like the very slightly dated future of the cinematic crystal ball. You thought of Kubrick’s 2001; and the synchrotron itself shared the heavy curves of the Enforcement Droid (ED 209) in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop. This was also a future of padded footsteps and discreet whispers and inflexibly hopeful smiles…
‘Are you claustrophobic, Hitch? I suppose they must’ve asked you that.’
‘They did, and I’m not. Well, I was claustrophobic in North Carolina, but there I was trussed and hooded.’
‘Also smothered and drowned.’ In the spring of 2008 Christopher arranged to be waterboarded (by veterans of the Special Forces. See below). ‘And those geezers weren’t doing it for your health.’
‘True, Little Keith,’ he said, and without hesitation he readied himself for bombardment, removing the top half of his hospital smock. Christopher was always a rejectionist when it came to the beach or the swimming pool, and I realised that I hadn’t seen him stripped to the waist for over thirty years – that time he danced topless, rather solemnly, at an incredibly drunken party in about 1975. Slimmed down by illness, his torso looked quite unchanged. The flesh was pale and marked by target crosses, true, but it touched me to see that the great tree-shaped thatch of shag on his chest*1 had largely survived the assault on his body hair, though parts of it had been ‘shaved off for various hospital incisions’. He climbed on to the shelf or platform and the technician slid him in like someone closing a kitchen drawer…This technician would remain in touch (through a video link), but Christopher would otherwise be incommunicado for around an hour. I turned to Blue.
‘Well?’ I said as I reached for my Golden Virginia.
She hesitated, she frowned, she shrugged, she stood.
On our way out we paused in an alcove near the main entrance: this was the relatively sepulchral area reserved for framed photos and thankyou letters, plus engravings and plaques, sent by the Chosen – i.e., ex-patients. Without you we, every morning when I, each time my husband smiles he. This was meant to be encouraging: here were the sweepstake winners, the survivors, the saved, and in the MD Anderson promotional videos you could see them jogging and mountaineering and windsurfing and of course euphorically gambolling and snuggling with their families. I reviewed these beaming faces and their rapt descriptions of family treats and feasts with, I realised, an impatience that was moving slowly towards animus. Was there a quantity theory of cure – as the statistics certainly led you to believe? If so, then here were the spoilers, here were the roadhogs and me-firsters who squandered the good luck that so rightfully belonged to my friend.
The two of us went outside and lit up. Indifferent to alcohol, Blue was still passionately interested in tobacco. Old smoking campaigners, we stared in silence at the ups and downs of the Tumortown roofscape…
In the twenty-first century the average metropolitan hospital already does an excellent imitation of an airport, the signposted access roads, the medium-rise car parks (SHORT STAY, LONG STAY), the configured terminals and the buses shuttling between them. In Houston you very soon submit to the notion that the hospital was imitating not an airport but a city – and with equally startling success. The hospital is the size of Houston, no, it actually is Houston, with its administrative centres, its gardens and malls, all the way out to the rest homes and recuperation dorms in its infinitely proliferating windblown suburbs.
…Escorted by Blue, Christopher smirkingly emerged. I asked him, ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Did what hurt? I couldn’t even feel it,’ he said. ‘So I just had a restorative doze and then it was over.’
With some panache Christopher presented his care team with a bottle of champagne, and ‘hopped’, as he would later write, ‘almost nimbly into a taxi’.
‘The pain comes later. Or so we’re told,’ said Blue as we drove on to our next appointment.
In another district, another ward of the city, staked out on another flat surface, Christopher was being introduced to another oncologist.
‘Forgive me if I don’t stand up.’
‘Oh, don’t worry!…Our idea, now, is to catch the tumour off its guard. We suspect it’s getting complacent. We’ve held off with the chemo for a while, so if we…’
As the three of us got ready to move on, Hitch said,
‘More chemo. Fuck. You know, doctors take these things personally, so they personalise the tumours.’
And there was at least some solace in the fact that Christopher’s tumour was considered both slow-witted and self-satisfied. But why personalise it, I thought – this thing of death, why grant it life?
‘I wonder’, he said, ‘if they give the tumours names – you know, nicknames, pet names. Like Flip or Rover.’
…Much, much later the same day (long after dusk), in a shadowy warren of curtained cubicles, Christopher settled himself down on yet another flat white surface while a compassionate Filipina, breathing her soft breath, hooked him up to the two sacs of transparent fluid that ponderously dangled overhead – one containing nutrients, the other containing poisons…I had claimed the last watch: Blue, I hoped, was already asleep at the Lone Star, and her husband, too, was half curling up and murmuring about aches and pains – gut, shoulder…
All day I’d been casting about for a handful of parting words. Keeping my voice low but light (looking for the tone of a bedtime story or a prose lullaby), I said, ‘You love what you call “the imagery of struggle”, Hitch, but you don’t feel you’re in a fight, you don’t feel you’re “battling” anything. You feel “swamped with passivity, dissolving like a” – what was it? – “like a sugar lump in water”. Now think how you’ve spent the last fifteen hours. That’s a fight, by Christ. And you’re still the Hitch, still utterly yourself, and that’s a struggle, and it isn’t just imagery. You’re doing it. And it looks and feels like a battle to me…Now rest. Rest, O rest, perturbèd spirit.’
He slept. After a while I smoothed him and kissed him and, as instructed, left behind me on the bedside table a skeleton staff of cigarettes.
All the medical facilities in Houston have their own cab ranks, waiting for the next malignancy to come staggering out of the shadows. The lead driver inched forward and gave a conspiratorial wink of his lights. I held up a hand with fingers splayed. Five minutes would be needed – for a smoke, naturally, and also for the assimilation of pity, or sorrow, or sheer emptiness, which was how it took me, comparable, perhaps, to the sudden loss of faith in God or in Utopia, leaving you on a hopelessly soiled planet in a hopelessly soiled cosmos. My body remembered the times when late at night I used to leave my younger boy in the Peter Pan Ward of St Mary’s in West London, fighting his breathlessness, when he was three.
I stepped towards the taxi while behind my back, behind the closed curtain, Christopher, like Gus, dreamed and drowsed. Lay your sleeping head, my love.
Rabbitism
The day before, on that placid Sunday afternoon, I sat reading in the Hitchenses’ suite while Christopher applied himself to his desktop and his scattered mail. I wonder, he said, leaning back, I wonder when I’ll run out of money…
You are, let us say, a citizen of the United Kingdom. And in your late forties you notice, with some sourness, how much of your social time is spent listening – or remaining silent – while your elders talk about health and its maintenance, about diet advisories and exercise regimes, about diagnoses and prognoses, about treatments, about surgical interventions, et cetera, et cetera. All this goes on for year after year after year until at a certain point – in your mid-fifties – you find that the health chat no longer sounds like a snore in another room. Is this mere habituation? No. The ugly truth is that you’ve started to find it all rather interesting. Mortality, when it’s close enough to reveal its lineaments, turns out t
o be rather interesting…
Then, aged sixty-two (let us say), you emigrate from the United Kingdom to the United States. The conversation continues, but its terms have changed, and not subtly. Act V is what they’re talking about in Great Britain (attitudes to it, mental strategies for it). In America they’re talking about income-pegged tax credits, prefunded savings accounts, variable caps and ceilings for employer-provided ‘plans’, co-pay options, higher or lower deductibles, and out-of-pocket additionals…In the old country they seldom talk about the healthcare system – because it is free; in the new country they talk incessantly about the healthcare system – because it plays a part in about two-thirds of all individual bankruptcies.
While we were moving from Camden Town, London, to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, there was much to do:*2 and Elena did almost all of it. At the outset she made it clear that by far the greatest obstacle we would face – the most time-consuming and labour-intensive, the most tediously labyrinthine, and the most extortionate – had to do with American healthcare. One afternoon I gingerly looked into it; and after an hour or two I thought, Well at least there’ll be no ambiguity in our case: if any Amis gets so much as a headache or a nosebleed, it will be far simpler and thriftier for the four of us to fly first class to London, take a limousine each to the Savoy, and then, the next day, wander into one or another outlet of the NHS.
Stateside – and you learn all this by anecdote, atmosphere, and osmosis – adults of all ages imagine and anticipate illness or injury with a two-tier queasiness wholly unknown in Britain (and in all the other developed democracies except South Africa). On the question of healthcare, as on the question of guns, facts and figures lose their normal powers of suasion. It is no cause for embarrassment when the World Health Organization ranks America thirty-seventh in quality of service; and it may even be a point of pride that America comes a clear first, besting all rivals, in cost per capita.*3 On this question America will go on failing to put two and two together, and for a little clutch of very American reasons.