Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

by Christopher Hitchens

  A report in the mainstream newspaper Aftonbladet describes the findings of another anti-Nazi researcher, named Bosse Schön, who unraveled a plot to murder Stieg Larsson that included a Swedish SS veteran. Another scheme misfired because on the night in question, twenty years ago, he saw skinheads with bats waiting outside his office and left by the rear exit. Web sites are devoted to further speculation: One blog is preoccupied with the theory that Prime Minister Palme’s uncaught assassin was behind the death of Larsson too. Larsson’s name and other details were found when the Swedish police searched the apartment of a Fascist arrested for a political murder. Larsson’s address, telephone number, and photograph, along with threats to people identified as “enemies of the white race,” were published in a neo-Nazi magazine: The authorities took it seriously enough to prosecute the editor.

  But Larsson died of an apparent coronary thrombosis, not from any mayhem. So he would have had to be poisoned, say, or somehow medically murdered. Such a hypothesis would point to some involvement “high up,” and anyone who has read the novels will know that in Larsson’s world the forces of law and order in Sweden are fetidly complicit with organized crime. So did he wind up, in effect, a character in one of his own tales? The people who might have the most interest in keeping the speculation alive—his publishers and publicists—choose not to believe it. “Sixty cigarettes a day, plus tremendous amounts of junk food and coffee and an enormous workload,” said Christopher MacLehose, Larsson’s literary discoverer in English and by a nice coincidence a publisher of Flashman, “would be the culprit. I gather he’d even had a warning heart murmur. Still, I have attended demonstrations by these Swedish right-wing thugs, and they are truly frightening. I also know someone with excellent contacts in the Swedish police and security world who assures me that everything described in the ‘Millennium’ novels actually took place. And, apparently, Larsson planned to write as many as ten in all. So you can see how people could think that he might not have died but been ‘stopped.’ ”

  He left behind him enough manuscript pages for three books, the last of which—due out in Europe this fall and in the U.S. next summer—is titled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and the outlines and initial scribblings of a fourth. The market and appetite for them seems to be unappeasable, as does the demand for Henning Mankell’s “Detective Wallander” thrillers, the work of Peter (Smilla’s Sense of Snow) Høeg, and the stories of Arnaldur Indridason. These writers come from countries as diverse as Denmark and Iceland, but in Germany the genre already has a name: Schwedenkrimi, or “Swedish crime writing.” Christopher MacLehose told me that he knows of bookstores that now have special sections for the Scandinavian phenomenon. “When Roger Straus and I first published Peter Høeg,” he said, “we thought we were doing something of a favor for Danish literature, and then ‘Miss Smilla’ abruptly sold a million copies in both England and America. Look, in almost everyone there is a memory of the sagas and the Norse myths. A lot of our storytelling got started in those long, cold, dark nights.”

  Perhaps. But Larsson is very much of our own time, setting himself to confront questions such as immigration, “gender,” white-collar crime, and, above all, the Internet. The plot of his first volume does involve a sort of excursion into antiquity—into the book of Leviticus, to be exact—but this is only for the purpose of encrypting a “Bible code.” And he is quite deliberately unromantic, giving us shopping lists, street directions, menus, and other details—often with their Swedish names—in full. The villains are evil, all right, but very stupid and self-thwartingly prone to spend more time (this always irritates me) telling their victims what they will do to them than actually doing it. There is much sex but absolutely no love, a great deal of violence but zero heroism. Reciprocal gestures are generally indicated by cliché: If a Larsson character wants to show assent he or she will “nod”; if he or she wants to manifest distress, then it will usually be by biting the lower lip. The passionate world of the sagas and the myths is a very long way away. Bleakness is all. That could even be the secret—the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author’s demise. If Larsson had died as a brave martyr to a cause, it would have been strangely out of keeping; it’s actually more satisfying that he succumbed to the natural causes that are symptoms of modern life.

  (Vanity Fair, December 2009)

  As American as Apple Pie

  IS THERE ANYTHING more tragic than the last leave-taking between Humbert Humbert and Dolores Haze (his very own “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”)? They meet in the dreary shack where she has removed herself to become a ground-down baby machine for some prole. Not only does she tell Humbert that she will never see him again, but she also maddens him by describing the “weird, filthy, fancy things” to which she was exposed by his hated rival, Quilty. “What things exactly?” he asks, in a calm voice where the word “exactly” makes us hear his almost unutterably low growl of misery and rage: “Crazy things, filthy things. I said no, I’m just not going to (she used, in all insouciance really, a disgusting slang term which, in a literal French translation, would be souffler) your beastly boys …”

  Souffler is the verb “to blow.” In its past participle, it can describe a light but delicious dessert that, well, melts on the tongue. It has often been said, slightly suggestively, that “you cannot make a soufflé rise twice.” Vladimir Nabokov spoke perfect Russian and French before he became the unrivaled master of English prose, and his 1955 masterpiece, Lolita, was considered the most transgressive book ever published. (It may still be.) Why, then, could he not bring himself to write the words “blow” or “blowjob”?

  It’s not as if Nabokov was squeamish. Try this, for example, when Humbert’s stepdaughter is still within his power (and he is even more in hers):

  Knowing the magic and might of her own soft mouth, she managed—during one school year!—to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even four bucks. O Reader! Laugh not, as you imagine me, on the very rack of joy noisily emitting dimes and quarters, and great big silver dollars like some sonorous, jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches …

  “The magic and might of her own soft mouth …” Erotic poets have hymned it down the ages, though often substituting the word “his.” The menu of brothel offerings in ancient Pompeii, preserved through centuries of volcanic burial, features it in the frescoes. It was considered, as poor Humbert well knew, to be worth paying for. The temple carvings of India and the Kamasutra make rather a lavish point of it, and Sigmund Freud wondered if a passage in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks might not betray an early attachment to that “which in respectable society is considered a loathsome perversion.” Da Vinci may have chosen to write in “code” and Nabokov may have chosen to dissolve into French, as he usually did when touching on the risqué, but the well-known word “fellatio” comes from the Latin verb “to suck.”

  Well, which is it—blow or suck? (Old joke: “No, darling. Suck it. ‘Blow’ is a mere figure of speech.” Imagine the stress that gave rise to that gag.) Moreover, why has the blowjob had a dual existence for so long, sometimes subterranean and sometimes flaunted, before bursting into plain view as the specifically American sex act? My friend David Aaronovitch, a columnist in London, wrote of his embarrassment at being in the same room as his young daughter when the TV blared the news that the president of the United States had received oral sex in an Oval Office vestibule. He felt crucially better, but still shy, when the little girl asked him, “Daddy, what’s a vestibule?”

  Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.

  —From “Cocksucker Blues,” Part 4 of

  Underworld, by Don DeLillo

  I admire the capitalization there, don’t you? But I think Acey (who in the novel is also somewhat Deecey)
furnishes a clue. For a considerable time, the humble blowjob was considered something rather abject, especially as regards the donor but also as regards the recipient. Too passive, each way. Too grungy—especially in the time before dental and other kinds of hygiene. Too risky—what about the reminder of the dreaded vagina dentata (fully materialized by the rending bite-off scene in The World According to Garp)? And also too queer. Ancient Greeks and Romans knew what was going on, all right, but they are reported to have avoided the over-keen fellators for fear of their breath alone. And a man in search of this consolation might be suspected of being … unmanly. The crucial word “blowjob” doesn’t come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was (a) part of the gay underworld and (b) possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was “below-job” (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic “going down”). This term from London’s whoredom still has a faint whiff of contempt. On the other hand, it did have its advocates as the prototype of Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck”: at least in the sense of a quickie that need only involve the undoing of a few buttons. And then there’s that nagging word, “job,” which seems to hint at a play-for-pay task rather than a toothsome treat for all concerned.

  Stay with me. I’ve been doing the hard thinking for you. The three-letter “job,” with its can-do implications, also makes the term especially American. Perhaps forgotten as the London of Jack the Ripper receded into the past, the idea of an oral swiftie was re-exported to Europe and far beyond by a massive arrival of American soldiers. For these hearty guys, as many a French and English and German and Italian madam has testified, the blowjob was the beau ideal. It was a good and simple idea in itself. It was valued—not always correctly—as an insurance against the pox. And—this is my speculation—it put the occupied and the allied populations in their place. “You do some work for a change, sister. I’ve had a hard time getting here.” Certainly by the time of the war in Vietnam, the war-correspondent David Leitch recorded reporters swapping notes: “When you get to Da Nang ask for Mickey Mouth—she does the best blow job in South-East Asia.”

  At some point, though, there must have been a crossover in which a largely forbidden act of slightly gay character was imported into the heterosexual mainstream. If I have been correct up until now, this is not too difficult to explain (and it fits with the dates, as well). The queer monopoly on blowjobs was the result of male anatomy, obviously, and also of the wish of many gays to have sex with heterosexual men. It was widely believed that only men really knew how to get the “job” done, since they were tormented hostages of the very same organ on a round-the-clock basis. (W. H. Auden’s New York underground poem titled “The Platonic Blow”—even though there is absolutely nothing platonic about it, and it lovingly deploys the word “job”—is the classic example here.) This was therefore an inducement the gay man could offer to the straight, who could in turn accept it without feeling that he had done anything too faggoty. For many a straight man, life’s long tragedy is first disclosed in early youth, when he discovers that he cannot perform this simple suction on himself. (In his stand-up routines, Bill Hicks used to speak often and movingly of this dilemma.) Cursing god, the boy then falls to the hectic abuse of any viscous surface within reach. One day, he dreams, someone else will be on hand to help take care of this. When drafted into the army and sent overseas, according to numberless witnesses from Gore Vidal to Kingsley Amis, he may even find that oral sex is available in the next hammock. And then the word is out. There might come a day, he slowly but inexorably reasons, when even women might be induced to do this.

  Through the 1950s, then, the burgeoning secret of the blowjob was still contained, like a spark of Promethean fire, inside a secret reed. (In France and Greece, to my certain knowledge, the slang term used to involve “pipe smoking” or “cigar action.” I don’t mind the association with incandescence, but for Christ’s sake, sweetie, don’t be smoking it. I would even rather that you just blew.) If you got hold of Henry Miller’s Sexus or Pauline Reage’s Story of O (both published by Maurice Girodias, the same Parisian daredevil who printed Lolita), you could read about oral and other engagements, but that was France for you.

  The comics of R. Crumb used to have fellatio in many graphic frames, but then, this was the counterculture. No, the big breakthrough occurs in the great year of nineteen soixante-neuf, when Mario Puzo publishes The Godfather and Philip Roth brings out Portnoy’s Complaint. Puzo’s book was a smash not just because of the horse’s head and the Sicilian fish-wrap technique and the offer that couldn’t be refused. It achieved a huge word-of-mouth success because of a famous scene about vagina-enhancing plastic surgery that became widely known as “the Godfather tuck” (sorry to stray from my subject) and because of passages like this, featuring the Mobbed-up crooner “Johnny Fontane”:

  And the other guys were always talking about blow jobs, this and other variations, and he really didn’t enjoy that stuff so much. He never liked a girl that much after they tried it that way, it just didn’t satisfy him right. He and his second wife had finally not got along, because she preferred the old sixty-nine too much to a point where she didn’t want anything else and he had to fight to stick it in. She began making fun of him and calling him a square and the word got around that he made love like a kid.

  Earthquake! Sensation! Telephones trilled all over the English-speaking world. Never mind if Johnny Fontane likes it or not, what is that? And why on earth is it called a “blow job”? (The words were for some reason separate in those days: I like the way in which they have since eased more cozily together.) Most of all, notice that it is regular sex that has become obvious and childish, while oral sex is suddenly for real men. And here’s Puzo again, describing the scene where the lady in need of a newly refreshed and elastic interior isn’t quite ready to sleep with her persuasive doctor, and isn’t quite inclined to gratify him any other way, either:

  “Oh that” she said.

  “Oh that” he mimicked her. “Nice girls don’t do that, manly men don’t do that. Even in the year 1948. Well, baby, I can take you to the house of a little old lady right here in Las Vegas who was the youngest madam of the most popular whorehouse in the wild west days. You know what she told me? That those gunslingers, those manly, virile, straight-shooting cowboys would always ask the girls for a ‘French,’ what we doctors call fellatio, what you call ‘oh that.’ ”

  Notice the date. Note also the cowboys, likewise deprived of female company for long stretches. Now that we know about Blowjob Mountain, or whatever the hell it’s called, I think I can score one for my original theory.

  Philip Roth took the same ball and ran with it, though he served up his guilt and angst with different seasonings. Imperishably associated with handjobs as his name will always be, his Alexander Portnoy fights like a wounded puma, throughout his boyhood, to find a girl, however hideous, who will get her laughing-tackle around his thing. When he finally persuades the woman he calls “The Monkey” (“a girl with a passion for The Banana”) to do it right, his whole system explodes into a symphony of praise. “What cock know-how!” he yells to himself (thus rather confirming the nature and essence of the word “job”). On the other hand, his blonde WASP chick won’t do it at any price, partly from disgust but also from a lively fear of asphyxiation. Portnoy resentfully ponders the social unfairness of this: She kills ducks in rustic settings but she won’t fellate him. “To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her.” He also visualizes the awful headline if he presses things too far: JEW STRANGLES DEB WITH COCK … MOCKY LAWYER HELD.

  Thus the sixties—the sixties!—ended with the blowjob still partly hyphenated and the whole subject still wreathed and muffled in husky whispers. The cast of Hair sang of “fellatio” under the list of things like “sodomy” that “sound so nasty,” and oral sex was legally defined as sodomy by many states of the union until the Supreme Court struck dow
n those laws only three years ago—Clarence Thomas dissenting. The colloquial expression in those intermediate days was in my opinion the crudest of all: “giving head.” You can hear it in Leonard Cohen’s droning paean to Janis Joplin in “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and also in the lyrics of Lou Reed and David Bowie. It was a “knowing” and smirking term, but it managed somehow to fuse the mindless with the joyless. This state of affairs obviously could not last long, and the entire lid blew off in 1972, when some amateurs pulled together $25,000 for a movie that eventually posted grosses of $600 million. Is this a great country or what? This film, with performances by Harry Reems and Linda Lovelace, was one of the tawdriest and most unsatisfying screen gems ever made, but it changed the world and the culture for good, or at any rate forever. Interesting, too, that Deep Throat was financed and distributed by members of New York’s Colombo crime family, who kept the exorbitant bulk of the dough. Mario Puzo, then, had been prescient after all, and without his deep insight the Sopranos might still be sucking only their own thumbs.

  The recent and highly amusing documentary Inside Deep Throat shows—by re-creating the paradoxically Nixonian times that re-baptized Deep Throat to mean source rather than donor—how America grabbed the Olympic scepter of the blowjob and held on tight. In the film, there is the preserved figure of Helen Gurley Brown, den mother of Cosmo-style journalism for young ladies and author of Sex and the Single Girl, demonstrating her application technique as she tells us how she evolved from knowing nothing about oral sex to the realization that semen could be a terrific facial cream. (“It’s full of babies,” she squeals, unclear on the concept to the very last.) In closing, Dick Cavett declares that we have gone from looking at a marquee that read DEEP THROAT, and hoping it didn’t mean what we thought it did, to “kids who don’t even consider it sex.” This would leave us with only one problem. Why do we still say, of something boring or obnoxious, that “it sucks”? Ought that not be a compliment?