Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

  But, on the other hand, James Bond did have a license to kill, and a thirst to employ it, whereas Flashman is a cowering impostor who prefers whoring and bullying to any risking of his skin on the thin red line. Thus, every novel must begin with a mise-en-scène that shows not just history as a chapter of screwups and screwings but also Flashman’s own participation as an unlucky accident. The anti-hero doesn’t begin by calling coolly on “M” to be briefed on his latest lethal assignment. He begins by running away in the wrong direction. So, to the drama of Bond, Fraser brilliantly adds the absurdity of Bertie Wooster. When Fraser first ushered his Homeric duffer onto the stage, P. G. Wodehouse was tempted into a rare comment, saying, “If ever there was a time when I felt that ‘watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet’ stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.”

  Well, just as Wodehouse could have quoted the whole of that Keats poem with ease, one imagines that Flashman (or his creator) knows better in the twelfth and latest novel, Flashman on the March, when he remarks that the British government is caught “between Scylla and t’other thing.” This is Wooster to the life, half remembering something from the schoolroom until corrected by Jeeves. As Bertie ruefully phrases it, never learning from his mistakes, it is just when you are stepping high and confident that Fate waits behind the door with a stuffed eelskin. And here goes old Flashy:

  My spirits were rising as we set off down the bank, the birds were carolling, there was a perfumed breeze blowing from the water, we were within a few miles of journey’s end, I was absolutely humming “Drink, Puppy, Drink,” the larks and snails were no doubt on their respective wings and thorns, God was in his heaven, and on the verge of the jungle, not twenty yards away, a white-robed helmeted lancer was sitting his horse, watching us.

  Or as Bertie inquires in The Code of the Woosters:

  “But the larks, Jeeves? The snails? I’m pretty sure larks and snails entered into it.”

  “I am coming to the larks and snails, sir. ‘The lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thorn—’ ”

  “Now you’re talking. And the tab line?”

  “ ‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.’ ”

  “That’s it in a nutshell. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  Instead of Aunt Agatha, Fraser has placed a sinister and armed horseman at the terminus of his idyll, but then, Raymond Chandler (an old schoolmate of Wodehouse’s at Dulwich College) made it a maxim that when action was flagging you could always have a man enter the room carrying a gun.

  To say that Fraser can so easily juggle Conan Doyle and Holmes, Fleming and Bond, Wodehouse and Wooster, and Chandler and Marlowe is, I hope, to offer reasonably high praise. But just to pile on the admiration for a bit, I know some eminent historians who have pored over Fraser’s footnotes and appreciated details about, say, the Charge of the Light Brigade that are known to few. The battle scene at Balaklava is meticulously done, and if his own mad charge is started by Flashman himself, who panics his horse by farting so loudly with sheer hangover and pure fear, why then it’s hardly less of a fiasco and a shambles than the real thing turned out to be.

  I am not looking for faults after all this drooling on my part, but there is one problem that needs to be faced squarely. In the earlier stories, Flashman is a sadist and a brute as well as a rascally coward and goof-off. He takes positive, gleeful pleasure in the misfortunes of others, especially if he can turn those misfortunes to his own account. In the very first book, he tells us, within months of joining his first regiment, “Myself, I liked a good flogging, and used to have bets with Bryant, my particular crony, on whether the man would cry out before the tenth stroke, or when he would faint. It was better sport than most, anyway.” Some volumes later, in Flash for Freedom!, he is on the Mississippi and running away with the beautiful slave girl Cassy, who has been his bedmate and his companion in adversity. The brutal slave-catchers corner them, and she is “quivering like a hunted beast.” Our hearts are in our mouths as he ponders what to do.

  “Cassy!” I snapped. “Can you use a gun?”

  She nodded. “Take this, then,” says I. “Cover them—and if one of them stirs a finger, shoot the swine in the stomach! There—catch hold. Good girl, good girl—I’ll be back in an instant!”

  “What is it?” Her eyes were wild. “Where are you—”

  “Don’t ask questions! Trust me!” And with that I slipped out of the door, pulled it to, and was off like a stung whippet. I’d make quarter of a mile, maybe more, before she would twig, or they overpowered her.

  This gave new significance to the old phrase “self-preservation.” All you needed, in order to anticipate old Flashy’s moves, was to guess at the lowest possible motive. And then, unaccountably, our hero started to go soft. In Flashman and the Dragon, he is the captive of the sinuous Chinese courtesan Yehonala:

  When two of her eunuchs caught some crows and released them with firecrackers tied to their legs so that the birds were blown to bits in mid-air, Yehonala had the culprits’ backsides cut to bloody pulp with bamboo whips, watching the infliction of the full hundred strokes with smiling enjoyment. You may say they deserved a drubbing, but you didn’t see it.

  The earlier Flashman would (a) not have thought the cruel eunuchs “deserved a drubbing” for their ingenuity, and (b) not have given a damn about their punishment. He would have relished both scenes. Deplorable signs of weakness were already evident in Flashman’s Lady, where he burdened himself with a white woman while trying to escape the horrifying soldiers of Queen Ranavalona. On that occasion the inconvenient lady was also his wife, so conceivably an exception can be made. But by the time of Flashman and the Tiger the plain fact had to be faced: The old boy had gone positively mushy with emotion and was prepared to risk his own skin—his own skin, mark you—to save his granddaughter’s honor. There was some muttering in the ranks of the fan base. One blushed to see the pitiful wreck of what had once been such an ignoble man. It is therefore a real pleasure to be able to record a corking return to form in the latest book. Flashman has been chivied all over Abyssinia and saved repeatedly by the exquisite Uliba, an African princess who has acted as his guide, protector, and lover. There comes the moment, however, when their canoe has been swamped, the deadly waterfall is just ahead, Flashman has contrived to catch hold of an overhanging bough, and she has managed to seize one of his legs. As he reflects,

  There was only one thing to be done, so I did it, drawing up my free leg and driving my foot down with all my force at Uliba’s face staring up at me open-mouthed, half-submerged as she clung to my other knee. I missed, but caught her full on the shoulder, jarring her grip free, and away she went, canoe and all, the gunwale rasping against my legs as it was whirled downstream. One glimpse I had of the white water foaming over those long beautiful legs, and then she was gone.

  Now, that, you will have to admit, is a damn sight more like it. “Yes,” sighs Fraser, “a lot of readers thought he was going soft, or even getting braver. In fact, he can only display the courage of a cornered rat. And my daughter Caro—she’s also a novelist—told me how delighted she was that this time he’d definitely turned nasty again.”

  Historians and critics will never stop arguing about the worthwhileness of it all: that amazing conquest and settlement of the known globe by the aristocrats and peasants of a rain-sodden archipelago in the North Sea. Fraser makes Flashman face it in all its squalor and grandeur: the British-owned slave ships, and the British vessels that put down the slave trade; the destruction of dens of tyranny in India and Abyssinia, and the hideous vandalizing of the Summer Palace in Peking; the serf armies and pirate navies that needed crushing, and the magnificent peoples—Zulus, Sikhs, Afghans—who the British had finally to admit were unconquerable. The empire on which the sun never set was also the empire on which the gore never dried. Only a few decades ago, when the Flashman papers were first unwrapped from their oilskin, all this seemed to have vanished like blood off a bayonet. But now Briti
sh and American soldiers are back in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, and George MacDonald Fraser, who is known as a curmudgeonly Tory war veteran and staunch hater of Tony Blair, is not best pleased. “Tony Blair,” he snorts down the phone, “is not just the worst prime minister we’ve ever had, but by far the worst prime minister we’ve ever had. It makes my blood boil to think of the British soldiers who’ve died for that little liar.” Even so, in Flashman on the March, he ends his footnotes on the Abyssinian campaign ambiguously by noting that, although the British overthrew a crazed despot and then withdrew, “if Britain had stayed, revisionist historians would certainly have condemned it as another act of selfish imperialism.”

  This is the morally fraught terrain, between the first sound of the bugle and the news of triumph or disgrace, which it takes a serious man to cover, whether saddled on a mettlesome charger or flourishing only a pen. And, since history is often recounted by the victors, why not have it related for once by one who is something worse than a loser? Imagine if King Hal had kept Falstaff on hand as his bosom chum until the eve of Agincourt and you have a sense of Flashy’s imperishable achievement.

  (Vanity Fair, March 2006)

  Fleet Street’s Finest:

  From Waugh to Frayn

  JAMES BOND DOES NOT MAKE an appearance until Part Two of what is perhaps his most polished adventure, From Russia with Love. And when he has been briefed by “M” and outfitted by “Q,” and told what is expected of him, he suffers a mild mid-life crisis. What, he asks as the plane takes him toward the Golden Horn, would his younger self think of the man now so “tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear,” sent off “to pimp for England”? Eventually dismissing this as an idle or feeble mood, he reflects further:

  What-might-have-been was a waste of time. Follow your fate and be satisfied with it, and be glad not to be a second-hand motor salesman, or a yellow-press journalist, pickled in gin and nicotine, or a cripple—or dead.

  Yes, well, that seems to put the profession nicely in its place, and indeed in its context. I read those words when I was a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early 1960s and had already decided that only journalism would do.

  Not long afterward, I was strolling along Tenison Road and saw, I swear, a wheezing second- or even third-hand motor belching toward me. Behind its wheel sat a man of impossibly fly-blown and lugubrious appearance; his skin sallow and wrinkled, an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth; his eyes like piss-holes in the snow. Only one detail was required to complete the scene, and at first my disordered senses almost refused to register it. Stuck in the corner of his windscreen was a faint and tattered card that read “PRESS.” It was yellow all right. It might as well have been stuck in the band of his hat. Christ knows where he had been—perhaps to a bad day at the Newmarket races—but it took little imagination to see where he was bound. And this was not a Giles cartoon but a glimpse of the future I thought I wanted. I cheered up immensely. Clichés and caricatures are there to be overcome, after all. And I had my Orwell books to go back to.

  Not much later, I came across Orwell’s essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer.” It opens thus, in case you may have forgotten:

  In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter among the piles of dusty papers that surround it. He cannot throw the papers away because the wastepaper basket is already overflowing, and besides, somewhere among the unanswered letters and unpaid bills it is possible that there is a cheque for two guineas which he is nearly certain he forgot to pay into the bank … He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.

  Orwell of course could be discouragingly pessimistic at times. But for light relief there was always Evelyn Waugh, who in his Decline and Fall had taught me that even original sin could have its lighter side. What could be funnier than the school sports-day at Dr. Fagan’s awful Molesworth-like establishment at Llanabba? The arrangements are being made:

  Admirable! And then there is the Press. We must ring up the Flint and Denbigh Herald and get them to send a photographer. That means whisky. Will you see to that, Philbrick? I remember at one of our sports I omitted to offer whisky to the Press, and the result was a most unfortunate photograph. Boys do get into such indelicate positions during the obstacle race, don’t they?

  A picture appeared to be emerging here. In the opening pages of Scoop, as William Boot is still in the train from Somerset to London and as yet has no idea what awaits him at the offices of the Daily Beast, he recalls that:

  He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor.

  Could this squalor ever be redeemed? Perhaps not by one of my other favorite standbys, Graham Greene, who sent Hale of the Daily Messenger down to Brighton for the day, there to pass his time in hucksterism and fatuity, “drinking gins and tonics wherever his programme allowed”:

  For he had to stick closely to a programme: from ten till eleven Queen’s Road and Castle Square, from eleven till twelve the Aquarium and Palace Pier, twelve till one the front between the Old Ship and West Pier, back for lunch between one and two in any restaurant he chose round the Castle Square, and after that he had to make his way all down the parade to the West Pier and then to the station by the Hove streets. These were the limits of his absurd and well-advertised sentry-go.

  (And so much of journalism is the “sentry go”: the stake-out, the hand-out, the lobby correspondents attending on their “source” who knows as well as they do when the deadline is coming. Hale and the Daily Messenger are doomed to miss the only real story of the day, which is Hale murdered in broad daylight by having a stick of hard rock jammed down his throat: an apposite revenge upon the idle and the spoon-fed.)

  Enough, perhaps, of the Catholic school of fiction. I graduated to the cool and elegant universe of Anthony Powell, in whose world the influence of the newspapers is relatively minimal. In fact, as it now seems to me, the absence of this influence is a limitation on his claim to have been describing English social reality. Surely Sir Magnus Donners, that tycoon of 1930s tycoons, should have been the ambitious and manipulative proprietor of at least one Fleet Street title? When Powell gets round to it, though, as he does in the tenth of his twelve-novel cycle, he does not stint. Here is the port-soaked “Books” Bagshaw, in Books Do Furnish a Room:

  He possessed that opportune facility for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatever at the shortest possible notice: politics: sport: books: finance: science: art: fashion—as he himself said, “War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse.” All were equal when it came to Bagshaw’s typewriter. He would take on anything, and—to be fair—what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than what was to be read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever managed to be printed.

  Bagshaw’s gift for non-specialization is further emphasized a little later on, when he hears a saloon-bar criticism of the Woman’s Page from an irate X Trapnel:

  Don’t breathe a word against the Woman’s Page, Trappy. Many a time I’ve proffered advice on it myself under a female pseudonym.

  And this only sent me back to Evelyn Waugh and The Loved One, in which the repulsive Jake Slump, wreathed in the fumes of a bar-fly and chain-smoker, is a veteran of the agony advice column “Aunt Lydia’s Post Bag.”

  A few themes seem to be emerging from the way in which our novelists have treated our journalists: copious gin (or whisky, or port, or what you will), mediocrity, cynicism, sloth, and meanness of spirit. This is
to say nothing of the greatest of all les deformations professionelles: shameless and indeed boastful fabrication. And I entirely forgot to mention the fiddling of expenses. All professions are deformed by this, of course, but only journalism has made a code out of it:

  Mr. Salter saw he was not making his point clear. “Take a single example,” he said. “Supposing you want to have dinner. Well, you go to a restaurant and do yourself proud, best of everything. Bill perhaps may be two pounds. Well, you put down five pounds for entertainment on your expenses. You’ve had a slap-up dinner, you’re three pounds to the good, and everyone is satisfied.

  (Evelyn Waugh: Scoop)

  Various members of the staff emerged from Hand and Ball Passage during the last dark hour of the morning, walked with an air of sober responsibility toward the main entrance, greeted the commissionaire and vanished upstairs in the lift to telephone their friends and draw their expenses before going out again to have lunch.

  (Michael Frayn: Towards the End of the Morning)

  An absolutely brilliant deadpan account of the expenses racket is also given in Philip Norman’s marvelous novel of the Sunday Times in the late sixties: Everyone’s Gone to the Moon. This is the only rival to Frayn since Waugh.