Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  The remainder of my golden Oxford years slid by in this way and, though I was oppressed at the time by a sense of waste—what my fellow Balliol-man Anthony Powell had called “the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition”[22]—I do not believe that they were entirely squandered, either. Let us say one quarter of the time allotted to political confrontations and dramas, another devoted to reading books on any subject except the ones I was supposed to be studying, another quarter on seeking out intellectual heavyweights who commanded artillery superior to my own, with the residual twenty-five percent being consumed by the polymorphous perverse. It could have been worse. I made a minor discovery which has been useful to me since in the analysis of some larger public figures like my contemporary Bill Clinton: if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone. I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity—a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect—with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then-segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady…

  There came also a day when the undergraduate weekly Cherwell asked me if I would like to help write the “John Evelyn” gossip column. This was a prestige spot, disapproved of by some of my grimmer and less hedonistic comrades, but a perfect finesse of that problem offered itself at once. I was to be co-author of the column with Patrick Cockburn, whose father, Claud, a Red veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had been one of the great guerrilla journalists of all time. Had been? In the London offices of the great satirical magazine Private Eye, he still was a figure of immense authority. His oldest son, Alexander, had left Oxford to become one of the editors of the New Left Review, and his middle son, Andrew, an arrestingly handsome boy with a look reminiscent of the young T.S. Eliot, was another of my contemporaries. Anybody who knows anything about the later history of radical journalism will recognize these names, as they will that of the great documentary maker Christo Hird, who became the third member of our “John Evelyn” team and helped us transform it from a mere chronicle of idle and gilded youth into something more mordant and investigative and Swiftian (or so we liked to think). Once again, that lure of printers’ ink and the word “pamphleteer.”

  I had better confess, before quitting this, to a “having it both ways” moment that gave me even at the time a twinge of remorse. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger circumvented Congress and the Constitution and the strategic majority of Nixon’s own cabinet in 1970 in order to conduct the invasion of Cambodia, I had already been invited to debate with the then–Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart at the Oxford Union on the morality of the war in Indochina. The obscene images of the conflict as they were extended to yet another country were so enraging that I banished all thoughts of scruple. I accepted the formal invitation to take part in the debate, and to attend the dinner beforehand with the foreign secretary. Meanwhile, I intrigued with friends to make sure that there was a large claque of hard-core protestors stationed in the main hall and in the gallery. I made my speech from the dispatch box in the approved manner—it wasn’t one of my best but it made a fairly fierce and detailed case against the imperial incursion—and then loudly insulted the government’s guest of honor, deserted the other guests, and went to sit with, and shout with, the mob. At a given signal when Stewart rose to speak, a phalanx also rose and simply and repetitively yelled the one word “murderer” in his face. It was horribly gratifying to see the way in which such a leading member of Her Majesty’s Government turned so pale under the assault. At another signal, a noose was uncurled from the gallery and fell dangling within inches of the wretched foreign secretary’s head. (It was dropped by James Long, later to be a distinguished economics editor at the BBC.) Nobody had ever attempted to abort a debate in these precincts before, and so the pitifully weak staff of the building was at a loss. We could have done almost anything we wanted, including at least roughing up if not lynching the foreign secretary. A sudden consciousness of exactly this ability—both intoxicating and nauseating—is probably what stalled us. We contented ourselves with further deafening insults and marched away. The official Minute Book of our little parliament still records that: “For the first time in the 147 years of the Society’s existence, the House voted to stand adjourned sine die on account of riot.”

  The publicity was astounding. An editorial in the Times opined that our movement of protest was “one of the nastiest political phenomena that Britain has experienced in this century,” which I thought—when one considered only a few of the other “phenomena”—was plainly absurd. We had, in our own opinion, not “silenced” Mr. Stewart, whose views were well known and could easily be broadcast, so much as we had voiced the outrage that should properly be felt at the destruction of Cambodian society. I remember arguing with dexterous casuistry that we had compelled the Establishment press to take notice and had thus, in a way, actually succeeded in enlarging the area of free speech. A nice try, I hope you will admit. But however one phrased the case, the only reason for mentioning free speech in the first place was that, however one looked at it, we had in fact shut down a public debate by force. I had a huge quarrel about it with Jack Straw, then the head of the National Union of Students and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, who insisted that the right of free expression trumped all other considerations. (It was years before we agreed on anything again, and by that time he was himself the foreign secretary—for Tony Blair—and arguing at the United Nations for the removal of the intolerable Saddam Hussein tyranny from Iraq.)

  I remember how we arrived at a higher synthesis: a final justification of our breach of the rules of civility, debate, and hospitality. After all, we had—did we not?—a higher cause and nobler purpose. It was even possible, given the huge media fuss generated by our action, that the people of Indochina would get to hear of it and, as a result, take additional heart from the knowledge of our solidarity. As I write this, I realize that I then truly did believe it. After a mighty demonstration outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, Michael Rosen had written a haunting poem, published in the university’s literary magazine Isis, that hymned a then-famous poster of a Vietnamese woman in a paddy field, with a gun slung over her shoulder. Please let it be, the poem had urged, that some of the news and pictures of our revolt will reach you and put a smile on your face. Next to this imperative, we felt, all lesser reservations were merely pallid and insipid. So, quite hardened as I was to insisting on this point against those who were more tentative, why was it that I could not quite repress the sense of having done something shabby? “I have something to expiate,” as D.H. Lawrence put it in his poem “Snake.” “A pettiness.”

  The Fenton Factor

  The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

  Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.

  —Hamlet: Act I, Scene iii

  OF COURSE I knew about Fenton, too, when I took that first cocktail off him in the public bar of the King’s Arms. He had already demonstrated extreme precocity in winning the Newdigate poetry prize for a sonnet sequence titled Our Western Furniture, about Commodore Perry’s historic “opening” of the closed island society of Japan. It had a beauty and ominousness to it which I shall try to catch by this brief extract:

  I saw the salmon flash, caught in the net.

  It was the only light. It flicked the spray!

  An energy to spawn and procreate!

  The sudden poet’s cry—its silver grey

  Dagger-blade flash—a protest yet:

  “I saw the ships in Nagasaki Bay.”

  On the cover of the first published version was a paragraph from Commodore Perry’s report to Congress in 1856 (just one year before India rose in rebellion against the East India Company). “It seems to me,” opined the gallant
Commodore:

  that the people of America will, in some form or another, extend their dominion and their power, until they shall have placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia. I think too that eastward and southward will her great rival in future aggrandizement (Russia) stretch forth her power to the coasts of China and Siam and thus the Saxon and the Cossack will meet… Will it be in friendship? I fear not! The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breathless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend.

  This seemed quite redolent of the huge drama then playing itself out in Indochina (a comparison to which James himself drew attention), but it came at the subject in a very different and much less propagandistic way than I had been doing. I take down my first edition of this poem, very finely bound by the Sycamore Press (a hand-set-type operation run out of the garage of the poet and tutor of Magdalen College, John Fuller). “To Christopher Hitchens from James Fenton with much love,” it says on the flyleaf, the inscription dated “November 1969.” When James’s first collection of published poems, Terminal Moraine, came out in 1972, I have just noticed to my irritation, it was inscribed “To Chris, from the author, with lots of love.” I hadn’t before registered this qualitative degeneration. What I had noticed at the time was an observation by the great Roy Fuller, honored laureate of the 1930s and father of John, at a party at the latter’s house in Benson Place. “You’re a friend of young Fenton’s, then?” he said gruffly. I allowed as much. “I rather think that he writes as well now, if not better, than Wystan did at his age.” I knew this would please James, who had first been introduced to Auden and Kallman through some mutual friends in Florence, but I also knew it wouldn’t go to his head.

  Ah, that head! Redmond O’Hanlon was later to compare it to an owl’s egg. It certainly did have the most domed and sapient appearance. And under the arc and curve of that skull lay an extraordinary variety of elements and materials. The first of these was a sort of direct line to the tradition of English poetry, the second was a talent for burlesque and parody, often manifested with an almost manic glee, and the third was a buried seriousness that, as with his mentor Auden, derived from a sort of post-Christianity based on a form of English Protestantism. He also, broke as he was and as we all were, invariably had the price of a drink or a smoke about his person, and I am glad that I loved and love him so, because it was he who awakened my thus far buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine. Friends, somebody said, are “god’s apology for relations.” I was one of those who had tended to think of friends at school as comrades or acquaintances or co-conspirators or cronies or sex partners (or an occasional salad of all four). Monastic school and college traditions, I will plead, made this less freakish and grotesque than it may now look on the page. I did have a friend, Michael Prest, my former rescuer from bullying and the only man I still knew from school. And I had a comrade, James Pettifer, who was a playwright and polymath and internationalist. It was so that we could all three find a fourth person to share the expenses of a house in the wastes of Cowley Road that we were meeting Fenton in that pub. All of us, I am sure, would still date our future moments from the one in which this encounter occurred.

  It isn’t a matter of looking back and thinking: this was when I met the finest English poet of his generation. I already knew, or at any rate believed, that he was the finest poet of his generation writing in English. The pressing question was: Could he be induced to write a few stanzas that would be of immediate help to the cause of the socialist revolution? I knew that Auden had been inconvenienced by similar demands but I also believed that I was more persuasive and subtle and less dogmatic than those who had tried to induce him, too, into composing lines that could be employed as weaponry.

  James was absolutely ready to do anything he could in order to help the struggling people of Indochina (indeed, in a quieter way he was much more decided upon this than I was), but he thought there were other things in life as well. He liked long walks, and he loved the ancient buildings and antique trees and botany of Oxford. He liked to talk about Italy and Greece and all matters classical. He had a huge talent for rude songs and crude puns, rescued from vulgarity by a sort of innocence. He was tremendously impressed, as well as a bit put off, by the extreme seriousness of George Steiner, who had just published his imposing collection of essays Language and Silence. In rather the same way as I had felt a bit overawed by Isaiah Berlin, James was unable to forget the embarrassment of an undergraduate dinner with Steiner, in which he had overdone his own insouciance and had too languidly said that there were no great unifying causes left anymore: no grand subject of the sort that had sent Auden to Spain or China. Steiner had snapped at this Fentonian display of the blasé and told him to take a hard look at what seemed to be happening in Vietnam. And this had certainly worked with James, who was swift on the uptake and who cringed to remember how smug he must have sounded. However, before this full confession could be registered, there was some other business to be done, as we tramped across Magdalen Bridge: the polishing of the rude songs:

  I Am The King Of China

  And I Like A Tight Vagina:

  It Lets Me Show The Things I Know—

  Like The Prose Style Of George Steiner.

  James’s “King of China” series—which had to follow the scheme laid out above, where the first line could not be changed at all and the subsequent lines should be obscene and if possible (failing in the above case) mildly homosexual—was obviously a minor-key achievement for the times. However, I would defend it very strongly and believe it has its place in the history of Auden-inspired minor but useful obscenity. The model verse ran like this, and all others had to observe the rules:

  I Am The King of China

  And My Court Is Crammed With Sages.

  But When I Want A Bit Of Bum,

  I Ring Around My Yellow Pages.

  I cannot be sure if the Sycamore Press’s (very limited and hand-printed and elegant) edition of this collection of trivia yet survives, but if so, there is a sporting chance that my own contribution is still in print:

  I Am The King of China.

  I’m A Patron of the Prize-Ring.

  And Every Time My Man’s On Top—

  You Can Feel My Boxer Rising.

  I already knew in principle that word games, like limericks and acrostics and acronyms and crosswords, are good training in and of themselves. I could not then guess at the harvest of such marvels that lay ahead, but I did dimly appreciate that the Fenton factor was having the effect of making me somewhat less rigidly disapproving. In his copy of Steiner’s Language and Silence, though, I found a thumbed-over dog-eared page that fell open at an essay titled “Trotsky and the Tragic Imagination,” and realized that my new chum had suggested to me a possible relationship, which was that of politics to literature but this time beginning at the literary end and not at the ideological one.

  James was a son of the Church: his father was a leading Anglican divine, the principal of a theological training college in Durham and author of a standard commentary on the Gospel of Luke. James’s mother had died suddenly while he was at public school (Repton), and Canon Fenton had remarried, in a reverse-Murdstone-ish kind of way, a woman who could not bear to be reminded of his former life or former wife. This had led to an estrangement from the children—James had an older brother and younger sister—and to their being brought up by a pair of maiden aunts in Wales. This outwardly unlucky experience had made him rather a genius at handling personal relations and improvising surrogate families. (The two aunts, for example, were named Eileen and Noel: rather than have to call them either thing, or to have to address them as “Aunt,” James hit on the idea of naming them “E” and “N,” which worked brilliantly. In later years, E went back to her prewar work as a teacher in Jerusalem and helped out at the Anglican school at St. George’s Cathedral where Edward Said
had been a pupil. It used to satisfy me greatly when returning correspondents would tell me that they had “run into Aunt E at the American Colony Hotel.” Having a drink with her there myself one day, I heard her say wistfully that she wished she could have been called to the priesthood instead of being limited to being a glorified missionary. On principle I could not care less who took holy orders or who did not, but it did hit me with terrific force what a wonderful minister she would have made.)

  This talent of James’s for hitting it off with people was immediately evident when we all moved into our “digs.” There were in theory four rooms, but one of them gave directly onto the kitchen and it was obvious that whoever slept there would be effectively living in a corridor and at the mercy of the requirements of everyone else. “I’ll take that one,” said James at once, as if he’d pre-emptively “bagged” the best quarters for himself. I remember thinking that there was a sort of quasi-Christianity in this cheerful self-sacrifice: a thought that James would often give me cause to have again. It was additionally decent of him in that he was the only one of us who didn’t at the time have a female companion. (Incidentally, Pettifer’s girlfriend and wife-to-be was called Sue Comely. Michael Prest’s was named Liz Horn. Mine was named Teresa Sweet. Later, James was to have a walk-out with a Valkyrie look-alike named Elizabeth Whipp, and it was he who first noticed when we were all together that the firm of Comely, Horn, Whipp, and Sweet would make quite a sensational brothel-management team.)