by Amis, Martin
Blue was right: ‘His will to keep his existence intact, to remain engaged with his preternatural intensity, was spectacular.’ But there was also this, from a piece about Nietzsche’s dictum ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’, which he showed me that October:
…it seemed absurd to affect the idea that this bluffing on my part was making me stronger, or making other people perform more strongly or cheerfully either. Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.
‘Nietzsche was perhaps mistaken,’ added Hitch, ‘don’t you think? Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and kills you later on.’
‘I do want to die well…But how is it done?’
So says Guy Openshaw, a character in the Iris Murdoch novel Nuns and Soldiers (1980). Guy expires overleaf (and – for clear artistic reasons – offstage), but we are on page 100 by now, and the reader has had time to see what dying well, at least as an aspiration, might be supposed to mean. This is a novel by Iris Murdoch, so everyone is implausibly articulate, and ‘dying well’ is considered above all as a task for the intellect. Guy therefore involves himself in many testing dialogues with his closest male friend – about leavetaking, about non-existence – in an attempt, as Saul had put it in The Dean’s December, to make ‘sober, decent terms with death’ and so move on to ‘the completion of your reality’.
For a long time after it was all over I thought that this was the clearest flaw of my see-no-evil approach to a potentially fatal illness: death could not be talked about. But now I think, Talk about what, exactly? The famous aphorisms about death – Freud’s, Rochefoucauld’s – maintain the intrinsic impossibility of facing up to it. ‘Philosophy’ means ‘love of wisdom’, and philosophers have further defined it, more explicitly, as ‘learning how to die’; but the fruits of this learning have never been passed on to us…Noticing the first marks of age on an ex-lover’s face, Herzog identifies ‘death, the artist, very slow’. Death brims with artistic complexity, but its philosophical content is slight. Death is an artist, not an intellectual.
Death is nothingness. So talk about what, exactly? If you multiply a number, any number, by zero, the result is still zero; the answer is always zero. Christopher and I could have had long talks about nothingness. Would this have helped him? I still wonder. There is a particular photograph (which I’ll duly disclose) that makes me still wonder.
Torture in North Carolina
The historian Timothy Snyder has recently said that African Americans are all experiencing a form of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder (an ancient concept with many names). Snyder’s premise will no doubt be challenged, but to me it has the power of ‘a truth goose’ (the phrase is Tim O’Brien’s).
Christopher, in the autumn of 2011, came to think that he now qualified as a sufferer. His episode of traumatic stress didn’t last long and was self-inflicted (also self-regulated). It took place on ‘a gorgeous day’ in May 2008 in North Carolina.
‘You know, I still can’t believe you did that,’ I said at his bedside in Houston. ‘Why’d you let it happen? No, why’d you bring it about? Why’d you seek it?’
‘Curiosity. And there’s the pro bono aspect, Little Keith.’
‘Oh, sure. I fail to understand you, Christopher Hitchens. Jesus Christ, you must fucking love it.’
He couldn’t and wouldn’t claim that he didn’t know what he was getting into. The ‘agreement’ Christopher signed beforehand was quite specific, noting that the experience he was procuring for himself
is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional, and psychological) injuries and even death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.
The ‘due to’ clause in that sentence looks woolly and equivocal, but there is no mistaking a later warning: ‘safeguards’ would be in place during the ‘process’, but ‘these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing injury or death’.
To book himself in for this, Christopher made a number of calls. The first ‘specialist’ he talked to asked his age (fifty-nine), then ‘laughed out loud and told me to forget it’. Instead of forgetting it, though, instead of deciding not to risk experiencing death, Hitch persevered. Along the way he ‘had to produce a doctor’s certificate assuring them that I did not have asthma’ – ‘but I wondered if I should tell them’, he continues, ‘about the 15,000 cigarettes I had inhaled every year for the last several decades’ (which is more than forty a day). And then he got on a plane and betook himself to a remote dwelling or ‘facility’ at the end of a long and tapering country road in the hills of western North Carolina.
If you want to, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube…
We are in what looks like an orderly suburban garage (there is a fridge, and a mower or motorbike under tarps); orderly and ordinary, although it would serve perfectly well, cinematically, as the lab or rec room of some relatively unpretentious serial murderer. After a while heavyset men are purposefully busying themselves, while the viewer concentrates on a two-plank table of bare pine, supported by A-frames and tilting slightly downwards to the right, where a bucket lurks. The Hitch appears, under escort and black-hooded as if for execution (no eye-slits), and is helped into a seated position. Fade. Now he is strapped down on the sloping board so that his heart is higher than his head (and his loafers higher still). A hunched operative leans over him and says, with the plodding and patronising menace that marks the voice of American officialdom (do I make myself clear?),
‘All right, listen up. I’m going to give you some instructions…Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘We’re going to place metal objects in each of your hands. These objects are to be released if you experience unbearable stress…Do you understand?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You have a code word you can use for distress. That word is red. R-E-D. Say the word.’
‘Red.’
‘Again, what is the word?’
‘Red.’
‘That is correct.’
Now the Special Forces veterans go about their work with ominously practised movements of their gloved hands. One of them aligns and steadies the subject’s body while another folds a white towel over the subject’s mouth and nose, and produces…a plastic jug of Poland Spring. And then the towel – a white mask upon a black mask – is assiduously drenched.
Seventeen seconds later the metal objects (which look like steel batons) are dashed to the ground. The men at once desist, the straps are loosened, and the hood is whipped off to reveal a face both flushed and tumid, as if about to burst.
‘All right, are you breathing?’
The live footage soon fades. What we don’t see is Christopher asking ‘to try it one more time’…When he did, the specialists, after a by-the-book interval with repeated and elaborated warnings (‘racing pulse’, ‘adrenaline rush’), duly obliged.
The most difficult position
I glanced out of the window at the familiar towers of MD Anderson, as odiously changeless as the daily Tex-Mex blue. For I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens: this was more, now, than an often-used conversational flourish. I said,
‘You wanted another go to see if you could last longer.’
‘Of course. You know, family honour.’ He was sitting in his dressing gown on the padded chair beside the bed – the hospital bed, with his computer open on its detachable meal tray. ‘You seem to want me to spell it out. My ancestors, Little Keith, who faced peril on the sea. When they struggled in an alien element, their courage did not desert them.’
‘Mm.’ No one who knew him at all well would discount Christopher’s reverence for the ‘Navy Hymn’ and the no-nonsens
e fortitude of Commander Hitchens and all the rest. In his torture piece he talked of the ‘shame and misery’ he felt after his prompt capitulation in North Carolina (‘shame’ could be merely gestural, but ‘misery’ feels authentic, and peculiar – peculiar to him). ‘All right, you struck a blow for your ancient mariners. And as a result you’ve got PTSD.’
‘So it would seem,’ he said. ‘PTSD. Yes, I know, I used to sneer at those abbreviations and so did you. When the kindergarten shrinks were raring to drug Alexander, I’d think, Attention Deficit Disorder – these are just fancy names for the little sins of childhood. Messy Eater Syndrome. Won’t Sit Still Spectrum. But PTSD…I think it’s a real condition.’
‘So do I.*3 But the point is you went looking for it. You went cruising for a bruising, mate. Twice.’
‘Yes yes, Mart, but it was worth doing. Now we know that waterboarding’s not a “simulation” of torture. It’s an enactment.’
‘Someone had to do it – maybe – but not you. Your history ruled you out. On several counts.’ And I ticked them off: lifelong fear of drowning, waking up with air hunger (plus ‘acid reflux’), acute breathlessness after mild exertion…He said nothing. I said, ‘I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens.’
And it was true. I didn’t – and I don’t – understand him. And I reduced my thoughts, that night in Houston, to stupefied silence as I tried and failed to understand Christopher Hitchens.
…His attraction to perversity was familiar enough to everyone. In the journalistic narrative the adjective of first resort – ‘contrarian’ – was now something like Christopher’s middle name. And he did seem to covet the disapproval, even the ostracism, of his peers. Time and again I watched him do it, watched him seek the most difficult position, difficult anyway and quite exceptionally difficult for Christopher Hitchens.*4
This trait of his was always mysteriously self-punitive. Still, though – to go out of your way to volunteer for torture? In all other cases it was his intellectual reputation he put at risk, not his physical instrument – not his life.
He was obscurely compelled to embrace complication, to test his courage, to walk into his doubts and fears. And so it was that in 2008 he decided that the most difficult position, for him, was lying on his back (with his face under two layers of sopping cloth) on a narrow board that sloped downwards, so that his heart was higher than his head.
Courage
‘It is so very difficult for a sick man not to be a scoundrel,’ observed Dr Johnson, as he embarked on one of his most magisterial paragraphs:
It may be said that disease generally begins that equality which death completes. All distinctions which set one man apart from another are very little perceived in the gloom of the sick chamber, where it will be vain to expect entertainment from the gay, or instruction from the wise; where all human glory is obliterated, the wit is clouded, the reasoner perplexed, and the hero subdued…
Of all the literary genres, panegyric is easily the dullest. Yet I must now praise the Hitch. It was courage, and it was more than courage; it was honour, it was integrity, it was character. In any event, not one of the Johnsonian deficits was ever visible in him…And when you consider how swiftly even a routine illness – a potent flu, say – exhausts your reserves of patience, tolerance, civility, warmth, and imaginative sympathy, despite the tacit assurance that the miseries of the present will soon join the forgotten miseries of the past. Christopher knew no such assurance, and he had been immured in the land of the sick for seventeen months.
‘The blood squad’s due around now,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘is this for the catheter? Well I’ll go and get a coffee.’
‘No, Mart, you’ll need your book. Ten minutes, they claim. Or they used to. But it’ll take longer than that.’
Christopher was proud of his ‘very rare blood type’, and would often ‘give’, spontaneously, for the public weal (as he twice did in Vietnam, in 1967 and 2006). He used to find the process absurdly easy: the clasping squeeze of the tourniquet, the brisk little stab – and then the cup of tea and the ginger biscuit (in South East Asia he also got ‘a sustaining bowl of beef noodles’). It was different now.
That same month he described it in writing:
The phlebotomist would sit down, take my hand or wrist in his or her hand, and sigh. The welts of reddish and purple could already be seen, giving the arm a definite ‘junkie’ look. The veins themselves lay sunken in their beds, either hollow or crushed…I was recently scheduled for the inserion of a ‘PIC’ line, by means of which a permanent blood catheter is inserted in the upper arm…It can’t have been much less than two hours until, having tried and failed with both arms, I was lying between two bed-pads that were liberally laced with dried or clotting blood. The upset of the nurses was palpable.
When it was over, when the ‘life-giving thread’ had begun ‘to unspool in the syringe’ (‘Twelve times is the charm!’ cries a medic), and the smeared bed-pads had been cleared away, that’s what the half-conscious patient felt moved to think about: the upset of the nurses.
Susceptibility to emotion is not encouraged in a hospital dedicated to profit. In Britain we have the famous NHS; and despite its wartime feel (as everyone somehow bootstraps along with what they’ve got), you are always seeing the kind of vocational ardour that silently declares, This is my talent – the alleviation of suffering is what I’m good at. In America the ardour has been selected out. Hence that frostily elfin politeness that envelops you all the way from the reception desk to the intensive care unit…Invariably and effortlessly Christopher moved past the robotic spryness that surrounded him, and developed relationships that included sensitivity and humour and trust – with the oncologists, the blood-extraction teams, the caterers, and the cleaners, even as he took up the most difficult position of all.
So let me praise him, let us praise the Hitch: contra Dr Johnson, he seemed to find it the easiest thing in the world to be the very opposite of a scoundrel. In the gloom of the sick chamber, all the distinctions that set one man apart from another were unforgettably perceived; he kept hold of his gaiety and his sagacity, his wit was unclouded, his reason unperplexed. His human glory was not obliterated, and the hero was unsubdued.
I do so want to die well…But how is it done?
That is how it is done.
The occasion of sin – 1
But of course we didn’t accept that that was what he was doing – dying.
And I myself was no doubt exorbitantly encouraged by a fresh development. During the last month or so, in our hours together, Christopher wanted to talk about – and to hear about – sex. And this was new; indeed, the subject had gone unmentioned for over a year…Very early on in his medical exile (it comes on page 8 of Mortality), Christopher owned up to a sudden and sweeping indifference to feminine allure. ‘If Penelope Cruz had been one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even have noticed. In the war against Thanatos, the immediate loss of Eros is a huge initial sacrifice.’ And now here it was again, eros, nature’s strongest – and most ineffable – force: the one that peoples the earth.
‘I’ve got a good one for you, Hitch,’ I began. ‘And one you’ve never heard before. When Phoebe stripteased my cock plum off in the bathroom at the flat…Actually she didn’t tease it off, not this time. She tempted it off. Gaw, she –’
A knock, then a nurse. Who acknowledged my presence, and indulgently withdrew.
‘Late summer 1981. Thirty years ago to the month, and you were packing your bags for America. I was too ashamed to tell you at the time.’
‘Too ashamed? You? This sounds very promising. So in your prenuptial period.’
‘Exactly. And you were giving me those pep talks about monogamy. You were very serious and very impressive.’
‘Well it’s vitally important, monogamy, when you’re squaring up to wedlock. Or else you lose the moral glow. Christ. I
mean, is this or is this not an exception?’
‘Perfectly true, Hitch. And I needed to hear it.’
‘You did. Steeped in promiscuity as you were. You were a right little slag, Mart, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. And now you had before you a shining prize. Julia.’
‘Yes, and I was grateful, and I listened. You said a lot of good things. Avoid the occasion of sin, Little Keith…What’s that from?’
‘It’s a Catholic teaching, strange to say. Insultingly obvious, really, but nicely phrased. Avoid the things you know will tempt you. Avoid being alone with ex-girlfriends – that’s what it comes down to. Avoid being alone with canny and talented ex-girlfriends with a point to prove.’
‘And avoid it is exactly what I didn’t do. Oh, and I can tell you now why it always is ex-girlfriends. I mean, you wouldn’t go after someone new, would you. You don’t want any surprises. But with an ex, a long-serving ex, whose body you know as well as you know your own…It’s weird. The familiarity, the snugness, the sameyness – it flips. It goes all heady and hot.’
‘And there’s no fear of failure…Well Mart, you listened, but you didn’t learn. What were you doing in the bathroom with Phoebe Phelps?’
‘I know. That’s what I was ashamed of. You cautioned me, and the very next day I…I embraced an occasion of sin – of blazing crime.’ I said, ‘The trouble was I found the prospect of being tempted tempting in itself. I was irresistibly tempted by temptation. Because I felt sure I could deal with it. How was I to know she’d come on so, so Grand Guignol?’
‘How was I to know. See? That’s precisely the wrong attitude. Okay. I want the long version. Concentrate. It’s amazing the persistence of sexual memories, don’t you find? And the clarity of contour. I suppose, I suppose the memory’s so sharp because those are the times when you’re most alive. Begin.’