‘I admired his commitment but you have to remember why he needed to dedicate himself in this way. He was trying, in little more than a year, to absorb accounts, material, that he had previously treated mostly with indifference. He was entering a contest with historians and political theorists who had spent thirty to forty years dealing with this. His determination was commendable but, to put it bluntly, he would always be behind, an amateur. I don’t think he did enough work. In fact it was impossible for him to do enough work.’ In Hitchens’s view Martin’s polemic is undermined by his unfamiliarity with the topic, despite his Herculean efforts. ‘Yes, I feel he prejudged the project. His reading was thorough but not impartial in that he was looking for material to buttress his prejudices.’ Again and again Martin compares the levels of murderous brutality practised by the Nazis and Stalin’s Communist Party and finds them comparably abominable and irredeemable. And then he examines how each is graded implicitly and routinely within the post-war cultural fabric of the West, detecting indulgences for Stalinism in everything from acceptable jokes to the enlightened ideologies of the left-wing intelligentsia. His conclusions, or more accurately his findings, are that the latter cultivate and promote an intellectually respectable apologia for mass murder.
Martin gives sceptical attention to the image of Trotsky as the, relatively, blameless hero of the post-war left, the romantic dissenter, keeping the purist flame of the revolution alight until he was assassinated by Stalin’s thugs. This, too, he argues is part of the ghastly myth, that until his flight from the Soviet Union Trotsky was as politically inflexible and dismissive of human life as Stalin, though far less competent in his pursuit of ultimate power.
Trotsky was a murdering bastard and a fucking liar. And he did it with gusto. He was a nun-killer – they all were [. . .] ‘We must rid ourselves once and for all’, said Trotsky, ‘of the Quaker-Papist babble about the sanctity of human life’ [. . .] Trotsky’s other theory of permanent revolution (we should call it Permrev) consisted of the vain hope for a series of revolutions in foreign lands, the process concluding with global socialism. Some prominent comrade further remarked that only then, when Communism ruled the earth, would the really warm work of class struggle be ready to begin [. . .] And I instantly pictured a scorpion stinging itself to death.2
This last is a supplement to points made more laboriously in the body of the book. It is in an open letter at the conclusion, open but entitled ‘Letter to a Friend’ and addressed with wry premeditation to ‘Comrade Hitchens!’
The two of them had discussed the nature and direction of Martin’s book on several occasions during 2000–01, both over dinner when Hitchens was in London and in their regular transatlantic phone calls. Perhaps Hitchens had not quite grasped the extent and vigour of Martin’s argument because Martin’s letter is by no means an apology, more a reminder that their friendship would not cause him to pull his punches. After Hitchens received his review copy he sounded, says Martin, ‘slightly hurt and perplexed, as though I had turned something I didn’t properly understand into a personal accusation.’
The address to Comrade Hitchens was in truth prompted not by Hitchens himself but by a letter written to Martin on his behalf and without his prompting or knowledge by James Fenton, who was also well-informed of the nature of the book before its publication. Hitchens learned of it only later from Martin. ‘What you have to realize’, states Hitchens, ‘is that James is an extremely moral person, perhaps it is in his genes, son of the cloth and so on. Anything surreptitious or dishonest he cannot stand and that was how he perceived Martin’s presentation of me in particular, and the left-wing activists of the 1970s as a whole. He certainly did not dispute Martin’s right to disagree with, even deride, our beliefs and outlook, but he saw Martin’s portrayal of us as individuals as a betrayal of friendship, malicious misrepresentation disguised as patrician artistic licence. I have never seen the letter but I know that it upset Martin, very, very much, even more than his well-published quarrel with Julian [Barnes]. My fall-out with Martin was short-lived but he and James did not speak for quite a while.’
In his review3 Hitchens cites works and sources that raise questions about Martin’s thesis, but far more effective is his implicit and persistent querying of his suitability as a political writer. It is unlikely that most readers would be familiar with all the works referred to either in Martin’s book or the review, but the latter leaves us with a single overarching impression. As Hitchens puts it at one point: ‘Amis [is] exhibiting a tendency to flail.’ That is, the combination of rhetoric and intuition that serves him so well as a novelist is a poor substitute for a thorough grounding in twentieth century political history.
The other letter at the end of Koba the Dread is ‘. . . to my father’s Ghost’, in which Martin is far more candid than at any point in Experience, stating for the first time that they saw in each other versions of themselves: ‘If our birth dates had been transposed, then I might have written your novels and you might have written mine. Remember the rule (truer in our case than in most): you are your dad and your dad is you’ (p. 272). He qualifies this by pointing out that Kingsley had in his twenties courted Communism. ‘You were ideological and I am not.’ There were, he concedes, excuses for his father’s dalliance with authoritarianism – middle-class guilt or more fervently a desire to enrage his parents and many of his peers. In the end, at least as Martin sees it, Kingsley exchanged pro-Communism for anti-Communism as a creed while he, Martin, has remained constitutionally immune from it for all his adult life. A sceptic might treat this as Martin air-brushing out feckless indifference in favour of something more honourable and considered, but earlier in the book he does at least present his father as one of the few who thirty years earlier resisted the predominantly leftist consensus on recent history. ‘Even in 1975 [when Martin became full-time literary editor of the New Statesman] it was considered tasteless or mean-spirited to be too hard on the Soviet Union. No one wanted to be seen as a “red-baiter” – or no one except my father’ (p. 47). Martin might not have been a ‘red-baiter’ but during that period he recoiled from the enthusiasms of his two Trotskyist friends, Hitchens and Fenton. ‘It was’, points out Hitchens, ‘passages such as that which distressed James. Martin was buying a position of moral superiority from a history of [his] narcissistic apathy.’
Martin is indeed rewriting his past, but he is doing so while casting respectful glances towards a man whose views he had previously indulged as eccentricities. Hitchens in the closing paragraph of his article presents the ‘old Kingsley’ ‘as he declined into a sort of choleric, empurpled Blimpishness, culminating in his denunciation of Nelson Mandela as a practitioner of Red Terror. The lessons here ought to have been plain: Be very choosy about what kind of anti-communist you are, and be careful not to confuse the state of the world with that of your family . . .’
Colin Howard and Sargy Mann testify that during the period when Kingsley held court at Lemmons, ‘the New Statesman crowd treated him with a mixture of affection and respect. There was a good deal of role-playing on both sides, they amused each other with exaggerated caricatures, foam-flecked lefties versus the embattled Tory. It was largely a game’ (Colin Howard). Hitchens, in his anger at Martin, seems to have conveniently forgotten this aspect of Kingsley’s ‘Blimpishness’. The Old Devil would no doubt have been greatly amused.
By a bizarre coincidence Koba was sent to its publishers, Cape, the week after two hijacked passenger planes destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, on 11 September 2001. For the subsequent five years Martin rarely left that curious hinterland between creative writing and serious journalism which Hitchens had urged him to vacate. His first article on the massacre ‘The Second Plane’ appeared exactly a week afterwards in the Guardian. Like most others he had witnessed it on television but his article has a personal slant. Isabel’s sister had just taken her children to school and was on Fifth Avenue when the ‘glistening underbelly’ of a Boeing 767 passed see
mingly ‘only yards’ above her head before smashing into the first tower. In this piece Martin reaches no particular conclusions – it appears composed in a state of shock – aside from the assumption that the planners and perpetrators were beyond the realm of civilized conjecture in terms of their state of mind and motivation. But the opening sentence is memorable: ‘It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment.’ Connoisseurs of his work might have been reminded of the first sentence of Money.
As my cab pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head.
The transgressive idiom he and John Self had invented in 1980 as a threat to the reader’s sense of normality now seems to have become his comfort zone, somewhere to which he can retreat from a world horribly threatened and unsettled.
A lengthy, measured assessment of what 9/11 meant appeared more than six months later, again in the Guardian, in an article entitled ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’. Trenchantly, he accepts the role in which the sneering Hitchens cast him, as the literary writer viewing the world through the prism of his technique and vocation, and begins by claiming that students of literature have over the past forty years been systematically misled. The Leavisites, still in the ascendancy when he was at Oxford, treated literature as moral palliative for the decay of religion; provided, of course, that one read books that were suitably energizing, such as the novels of D. H. Lawrence. More recently, and at the other end of the spectrum, matters such as evaluative judgement had been sidelined in favour of a model of ‘culture’ as all-inclusive and immune from such divisive concepts as merit. This, he concedes, might seem rather tangential to the matter of a terrorist atrocity witnessed live by millions, but his point is that the politically correct ‘dumbing-down’ of literary criticism is symptomatic of a pernicious state of atrophy among Western intellectuals (see also Foreword to WAC) Everyone, it seems, agreed that this was an atrocious act but few if any were willing to examine the system of beliefs that had prompted it. Suitably galvanized he takes up the challenge.
The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman haters; they are also misologists – haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations.4
The article is significant in its own right but it also triggered a series of murmurs which within the subsequent five years would become a crescendo of accusations, issuing mainly from the constituency of middle to leftist writers and journalists who had previously treated Martin as an acceptably capricious fellow traveller. The first response came from John Pilger – begun one assumes as soon as he read Martin’s Guardian article and published in the New Statesman exactly a week later. Pilger invokes, as a contrast to Martin’s embodiment of an angry Western writer, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I love life
On earth, among the pines and fig trees
But I can’t reach it, so I took aim
With the last thing that belonged to me
This ‘last thing’ is his body; the lines are spoken by a putative suicide bomber. Without explicitly stating that the oppression of the Palestinians was, justifiably, the cause of 9/11 Pilger makes use of Darwish’s poem as a subtext for his list of injustices and acts of mass murder visited upon the people of Gaza and Afghanistan by the alliance of the US – aka George Bush – and Israel.5
Martin’s political essays of 2001–07 are reprinted in The Second Plane (2008) and in each he ratchets up his conviction expressed in ‘The Voice of the Lonely Crowd’ that religious extremism – particularly but not exclusively Islamism – should be treated as an inflexible ideology, comparable with Nazism and Communism. He was, he knew, challenging the mantras of the intelligentsia, particularly those fuelled by post-colonial guilt. Not since Orwell has a literary writer made his presence felt so forcefully in the adjacent realms of politics, history and serious journalism, and Orwell was in truth a political writer by instinct and novelist by default. To properly appreciate Martin’s sense of commitment we should look at aspects of his life, pre-9/11, which after that found greater coherence and momentum.
Martin’s long-term relationship with Judaism can best be described as cordial and distracted. He reflects, ‘As long as I can recall having had opinions about anything I have been a philo-Semite. It goes back to the year before Oxford, 1967, when I was doing A-levels, in London, which I would largely fail. My first real girlfriend was Jewish. I refer to her in Experience as the model for Rachel, but her real name was Cynthia. She lost her virginity to me and two weeks later she was donating blood for the wounded from the Six Day War. I remember her mother’s house in Golders Green. Her grandmother offered me Maxwell House kosher blend. The coffee was indeed kosher; I’ve never come across it since.’ It was the evening at the Bellows’ house in 1988 which crystallized his sense of affiliation. It receives more attention in Experience than any other event yet Martin is curiously evasive about the true cause of the dispute between his closest friend and his adopted literary father. ‘It began’, he tells me, ‘with Edward Said, whom Hitchens idolized and of course, soon, the real subject surfaced, all of us knew it would, Israel.’ What fascinated Martin was the fact that Bellow and Hitchens were almost indistinguishable in their perception of Judaism as a faith. ‘This’, he explains, ‘was a matter for intellectual discernment and reason, but it was only, what, a year earlier, that Hitchens had discovered he was Jewish. Christopher was determined that ethnicity should play no part in his commitment to the pure secularism of political discourse. As I put it in Experience he would not “think with his blood”.’ This phrase, which resonates through Experience, recalls a moment from his teenage relationship with Cynthia. ‘In a sense. To be crude, she gave me her blood and almost immediately afterwards she gave it for Israel.’
Hitchens’s recollection of the evening, the day, differs significantly from Martin’s account to me and the version in Experience. On the latter, ‘Martin is quite brilliantly misleading. Nothing he states is wrong, but he remoulds the events superbly. A testament to his immense skill as a novelist. My so-called “cerebral stampede”, the image of me “compacting the little gold box of Benson and Hedges” as my peroration reaches its crescendo and finally my apologia “Edward is a friend of mine. And if I hadn’t defended him – I would have felt bad.” Followed by Bellow’s “How do you feel now?” Well he did not make up the dialogue, but let’s say he selected parts of it that suited his version from a much broader fabric. There was a great deal he left out that would provide a more truthful portrait of what occurred. For example, after we’d finished dinner and moved to a coffee table there was, in front of us, a copy of Commentary magazine, carrying the headline “Said, the Professor of Terror”. It sat there like the revolver in the Chekhov play. I hadn’t met Bellow before but from reputation, and from immediate evidence, he was not the sort who regarded an argument as a personal slight. We knew Edward Said – with whom later by the way I lost patience – would have to be talked about and talk we did, energetically. Martin’s presentation of himself as embarrassed moderator trying to hold me in check is nonsense. Well it is a version of the truth. He was appalled that his hero and his friend came from different camps on the Middle East but the image he presents of a night ruined by my inflexible belligerence is actually a picture of his own sense of unease, panic. He was out of his depth so he dramatises an exchange that was conducted in a civilised manner. Those final two lines, when he gives Bellow the punchline “How do you feel now?”, a form of moral victory against an ideological bully, me . . . Wonderfully contrived, but a lie. Both lines were s
poken, but convivially, self-mockingly. We’d stopped arguing. For some reason Janis [Bellow’s wife] always spoke ill of me after that, but I didn’t like her. Bellow himself was amused, not offended. Next day, when we got back to Wellfleet, to Antonia’s place, she was there and Martin must have bottled it up on the journey because he tore into me. Antonia seemed stunned. It was our worst argument.’
Bellow’s own account of the evening appeared in a 1989 letter to Cynthia Ozick. It is worth quoting at length not least because of Heller’s shrewd and coolly detached reading of the events, especially his remark, ‘Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand.’ Despite the mood of weariness in Heller’s description he and Hitchens later went on to become friends.
And now, as a preface to business, I have something to relate to you: My young friend Martin Amis, whom I love and admire, came to see me last week. He was brought here from Cape Cod by a chum whom I had never met, not even heard of. They stayed overnight. When we sat down to dinner the friend identified himself as a journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation. I last looked into the Nation when Gore Vidal wrote his piece about the disloyalty of Jews to the USA and their blood-preference for Israel. During the long years of our acquaintance, a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things Gore says. He has a score to settle with the USA. Anywhere else, he might have been both a homosexual and a patrician. Here he had to mix with rough trade and also with Negros and Jews; democracy has made it impossible to be a gentleman invert and wit. Also the very source of his grief has made him famous and rich. But never mind Gore, we can skip him. Let’s go on to our dinner guest, Martin’s companion. His name is Christopher Hitchens. During dinner he mentioned that he was a great friend of Edward Said. Leon Wieseltier and Noam Chomsky were also great buddies of his. At the mention of Said’s name, Janis grumbled. I doubt that this was unexpected, for Hitchens almost certainly thinks of me as a terrible reactionary – the Jewish Right. Brought up to respect and to reject politeness at the same time, the guest wrestled briefly and silently with the louche journalist and finally [the latter] spoke up. He said that Said was a great friend and that he must apologize for differing with Janis but loyalty to a friend demanded that he set the record straight. Everybody remained polite. For Amis’s sake I didn’t want a scene. Fortunately (or not) I had within reach several excerpts from Said’s Critical Inquiry piece, which I offered in evidence. Jews were (more or less) Nazis. But of course, said Hitchens, it was well known that [Yitzhak] Shamir had approached Hitler during the war to make deals. I objected that Shamir was Shamir, he wasn’t the Jews. Besides I didn’t trust the evidence. The argument seesawed. Amis took the Said selections to read for himself. He could find nothing to say at the moment but next morning he tried to bring the matter up, and to avoid further embarrassment I said it had all been much ado about nothing. Hitchens appeals to Amis. This is a temptation I understand. But the sort of people you like to write about aren’t always fit company, especially at the dinner table.
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