Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  Apart from renewing the interest in poetry that I had been in danger of letting lapse because of my political obsessions, and apart from getting me to smoke the deadly brand of Players Number Six (the “tokens” of which he collected in the hope perhaps of one day buying a gramophone or an electric kettle) as well as to imbibe Teacher’s Scotch whisky, Fenton changed my life in two other ways. We were walking along Turl Street one day when he stopped to speak to a small, slightly pouting yet rather stern-looking young blond man, who had on his arm an even more blonde girl. The girl I slightly knew. Her name was Alexandra Wells, known throughout the university as the enticing “Gully,” and she was the stepdaughter of Sir A.J. Ayer, also known as “Freddie,” whose book Language, Truth and Logic had brought the work of the Viennese philosophers to England. A tireless and justly celebrated fornicator, Freddie was the patron of our Labour Club and one of the few senior academics who could be counted on to sign petitions from the insurgent Left. (He’s brilliantly caricatured as Sir Roy Vandervane in Kingsley Amis’s neglected masterpiece novel Girl, 20.) I chatted to Gully, for whom I harbored a keen secret desire—she was later to say to me, on the sole occasion when I have heard the words used literally: “not if you were the last man on earth”[23]—and who was the only young woman on campus who had dared to try the latest fashion for wearing “hot pants.” James briefly made the introduction to her escort, whose hand I no less briefly took. As we passed on, I asked: “Did he say his name was Amis?” “Yes,” came the response. “He’s called Martin Amis.” I inquired slightly indifferently if he was any relation to the famous comic novelist, who had notoriously signed a letter to the Times, along with Simon Raven and Robert Conquest and others, supporting the American war on Vietnam.

  It sometimes makes me whistle to think about this near-miss. Martin had been born in the same year as Fenton and myself, but had arrived in Oxford a year later because of various disasters (later hilariously narrated in his memoir Experience) involving his poor schooling, his chaotic family, and his smoke-wreathed experiments with voyages of the imagination. So he was a year “below” me and—this is why he was lurking in “the Turl”—a member of Exeter College. Alma mater of Richard Burton and Tariq Ali as it may have been, this college was thought even by non-snobs to be a bit on the “minor” side: more for the boat club than the cognoscenti. Who knows how many blunders I might have made with Martin if we had chosen that as our moment of first acquaintance? At the very least I would probably have felt compelled to say something disobliging about Kingsley, and that might have been all that it took to cause a lifetime estrangement. At any rate the danger passed, and I was safely out of the university, having almost failed to get a degree of any kind when Martin stepped forward to get the best “First” in English of his year.

  Then one day—I can be sure it was in the fall of 1969—Fenton proposed a day off and a day out. The adventurous plan was to board the train to London, take a taxi to Chancery Lane, have a decent lunch with some interesting people, and then see what opportunities presented themselves for the evening. I was agog, but apprehensive. How, first of all, was this to be financed? James assured me that if I was willing to do a little carrying, all would be well. My role as bearer involved the toting of a big bag of books. Once arrived at Paddington Station, we indulged in the luxury of a cab which let us off at a bookshop named Gaston’s, on Chancery Lane between Holborn and Fleet Street. There and with a practiced air James traded the books for crisp currency notes. While still an undergraduate he had already become a reviewer for London papers and had learned a cardinal principle of the reviewer’s trade—which was that Gaston’s would give fifty percent of the cover price of a new volume, always assuming it to be in good condition. I was lost in wonder, both at the sophistication of this, and at the largesse.

  I had never seen or smelled Fleet Street or Bloomsbury before, and these totemic names took on life and shape as the luxurious day drew on and became a misty autumnal one. Lunch was with Anthony Thwaite, in a wine bar with sawdust on the floor and—to my fanciful thought—Dickensian and Johnsonian elements in its atmosphere. Thwaite, a diminutive figure with a big thatch of hair, was a poet who had formed part of the “Movement” that comprised such elevated names as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest. He was also the literary editor of the New Statesman, which at that time was certainly the most celebrated of London’s intellectual weeklies. I considered myself to be miles to the “left” of it, of course, but still in awe of the review on which I had cut my teeth as a schoolboy, and on whose stairway one might have met Bertrand Russell, say, or George Bernard Shaw. In one room was an old hatstand draped with an ancient raincoat said to have belonged to H.G. Wells. The lore had it that if you donned this totemic Macintosh and ventured out in it, you would make a conquest of the very first woman you met. To be invited back to this famous office in Great Turnstile after lunch and to climb that stairway to Thwaite’s aerie was an uncovenanted bonus. To exit the building onto Lincoln’s Inn Fields clutching a couple of review copies of my own—“We might like you to take a look at these for us”: Surely there had been a misunderstanding?—was to feel that one had drunk far more at that lunch than one actually had.

  I can’t be sure where we dined or where we slept that night, but I do remember taking James, by way of return as it were, to the Curzon cinema to see Costa-Gavras’s film Z. The effect of it on both of us was electric. I was trying to recruit James to the International Socialists at the time, and so when he murmured something about how eye-opening a movie it was, I readily and militantly challenged him with a “what are you doing about it?” that was, when I think about it, a slightly poor return for the marvelous day he had shown me. Quite taking me at my own face value, however (something that always makes me uneasy), he replied evenly enough: “Oh, I am going to do something about it.”

  By the end of that year I had been published in the New Statesman with my review of Eric Hobsbawm’s book on labor militancy in the Victorian epoch (“Hitchens in the New Statesman? Hitchens on Eric Hobsbawm? Who is this callow youth?” I can still hear these questions) and had been invited to the Christmas cocktail party given in the magazine’s boardroom, where the cartoons and caricatures of Bloomsbury were on the very walls. There, I mentally bid farewell to Oxford and to the provinces in general. If ever anyone was “hooked,” it was me. The network of streets and lanes and squares roughly between Blackfriars Bridge and Ludgate Circus and Theobalds Road and Covent Garden had me in thrall. So they do still, in their way. This was the district that stretched from the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green to the British Museum Reading Room where the old boy had done his best work. Extending itself a bit to the north and colonizing Charlotte Street up to Fitzroy Square, it became the area where Anthony Powell had located some of his more louche scenes of pre- and postwar literary interpenetration. Looping around on itself and doubling back via Shaftesbury Avenue, the neighborhood might be said to “take in” Soho, with its little grid of streets and alleys, containing the offices of Private Eye and New Left Review, and then Gerrard Street, now “Chinatown,” in which Dr. Johnson’s “Club” of Burke, Gibbon, Reynolds, and Garrick had met (and near the corner of which I was later to take my last glimpse of my mother). In these and other purlieus was manufactured the journalistic small-arms ammunition that was to be hurled against the gigantic (but inaccurate and poorly commanded) batteries of Fleet Street’s Tory newspaper establishment, located farther east as a sort of bulwark to the City of London.

  The problem, as usual, was how to be able to play a decent hand on both sides of this street. Peter De Vries, one of my favorite minor novelists (he could make you laugh out loud, as in Mackerel Plaza, as well as weep, as with Blood of the Lamb), was once asked to name his ambitions as a writer. He replied that he wanted a mass audience for his books, one that would be large enough for his more elite audience to look down upon. I suspect that many authors, if they were honest, would admit to something like the same. My desire at
that stage was to make a sufficient living at the business of Grub Street “hackery”—the refreshing term that the English use for the scribbling trade—so as to be able to toil more nobly in the evenings and weekends, both on my literary efforts and on my alliance with the working class.

  I wasn’t by any means the first person to have thought of this scheme, nor to have run into some of its more immediate obstacles. In order to get a job in “the media” in those days, you had to be a member of a labor union. I thought that that was fair enough, and indeed favored the closed shop, and was anxious to join a union if only so that I could start agitating as a union member, but then there was the difficulty that I couldn’t join such a union unless I already had a job. This was a bar to entry, itself based on a double standard, that made one unashamed to play things both ways in one’s own turn. One had somehow to get from being the second most famous person at Oxford to being a completely obscure but perhaps “promising” person in the metropolis. Once again, it was a lunch at All Souls that supplied the answer. The London Times was starting a new supplement, to be devoted to higher education. It needed a newly created staff, which in turn meant that a job could be awarded without a union ticket being required as a precondition. Thus did I become a “Social Science Correspondent” on a paper that had yet to be printed: a Gogol-like ghost job which I held for about six months before its editor said something to me that made it impossible to go on working for him.[24] I sometimes wonder what might have become of me if I had been good enough at that job to keep it: the paper could well have become my winding-sheet. Still, I had at least managed to move myself to London and I had become a member of the journalists’ union.

  I had also managed to negotiate the slight but unmistakable political invigilation that used to be part of the scenery in those days. When applying for a trainee job at the BBC, I had been asked by one member of the interviewing panel: “Do you feel strongly about things? Strongly enough for example to sit down in Trafalgar Square?” I wasn’t stupid enough not to realize that he wouldn’t have asked that question if he didn’t already know the answer to it. I didn’t get the job, either—another defeat for which I am eternally grateful. (And this now makes me old enough to remember a time when the BBC tried to exclude subversive and resentful types.) A later interview, for that Times job, was more typical of British Establishment reserve and understatement at its deadliest. “Just a formality… won’t take a second. Need to ask you a few things before we have you on the strength.” The interlocutor was a Mr. Grant, a slightly red-faced and portly chap with no special title. This was in the days when the offices of the Times were in the magnificently named Printing House Square, just opposite the old Blackfriars Station where on the portico were still incised the names of ancient steam-railway destinations like Darmstadt and St. Petersburg. It was redolent of the time when the young Graham Greene had been a subeditor down the corridor. Mr. Grant asked me a few questions of such apparent innocuousness that I became suitably lulled. Then: “Interested in politics at all?” I decided there could only be one answer to that. “Good, good. Would you describe yourself as having any special affiliation?” Again on the assumption that he knew the answer, as well as on the conviction that it would be shameful to conceal my stance, I replied: “I am a socialist.” “Fine, fine, my dear boy: don’t look so defensive. More socialists on the Times than you would probably guess. Some of our best people too…” I was just relaxing when he leaned forward slightly and asked, looking me directly in the eye: “By the way, would the Labour Party allow you to join it?”

  This, as he must have known, was the very question that I might have hoped to avoid. I was “in” the Labour movement all right, but not at all “of” it.

  Let us go then, you and I, to a meeting in a rather dingy and poorly lit union hall in Haringay, North London. The time: the mid-1970s. The place: a run-down but resilient district, with a high level of Irish and other immigrant population. I am the invited speaker and the subject is Cyprus, the former British colony in the Mediterranean which has recently been attacked and invaded by both Greek and Turkish NATO armies. Many refugees from this cruel bombardment and occupation have arrived in London to join the staunchly working-class and left-wing Cypriot community that has been here since the 1930s. My articles on the ongoing imperial crime have won me a certain audience. The brothers and sisters in Haringay aren’t easily impressed by visiting talent, and it’s unlikely that I’ll even get the taciturn treasurer of the local branch to refund my “tube” fare from downtown, but I’m used to this no-nonsense style and have even trained myself to approve of it. Before being exposed to my scintillating rhetoric, the audience will be subjected to a steady series of quotidian preliminaries. There will be an appeal for the strike fund at a neighboring engineering factory, whose workforce has been “out” on the picket line for over a month. There will be an announcement about a regional meeting to discuss resolutions for the forthcoming annual Labour Party conference, scheduled for a distant and dismal seaside resort sometime in the fall. The lady who helps run social services for needy immigrants will make an appeal, couched in that amazing warmth in which some Labour matriarchs specialize, urging Cypriots (who generally prize family values above all else and are leery of charity) to claim their entitlements as Commonwealth citizens. It is stressed that no distinction is to be made between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, none of whom have ever raised so much as a voice or a hand to each other in this old and fraternal borough. A veteran of the bus drivers’ union gets to his feet to make a sturdy, ringing call for British workers to take their holidays in democratic and struggling Cyprus, instead of on the so-called touristic Costa Brava that is part of the disgrace that is (still, after all those years and in spite of all our efforts) General Franco’s Spain. These are people who shun the gaudy display of supermarkets and spend their hard-earned wages at the Co-Op, with which many of them also bank their small savings.

  It’s all gone now, or gone to pieces, but this was what we used to call “the Labour movement.” Sometimes in elevated May Day rhetoric it was TIGMOO (This Great Movement Of Ours) and sometimes it was TMAAW (The Movement As A Whole) but even as we mocked this stock speech, we felt a fierce pride at belonging to the ranks that it described. Men and women, “warriors for the working day,” who had survived mass unemployment and slum housing and bitter exploitation, stuck together to resist fascism at home and abroad, rebuilt the country after 1945, fought for independence for the colonies, and striven to remove the terrible fear—of illness and penury and a Dickensian old age—that had hagridden the British working class. In 1939, when it had once again become necessary to summon those workers back to the colors and the flag and the defense of the nation (mainly in consequence of the abysmal and shameful capitulations of the ruling class in the face of Nazism), the recruiting officers had been appalled at the human material that was presented to them. Men with crumbled teeth, failing eyesight, wheezing pigeon-like chests, bow-legged and balding; exhibiting symptoms of deficiency diseases like rickets and pellagra that would have shocked some of Britain’s Indian and African subjects. As a child born after the war and in the first years of the National Health Service (itself always semireverently capitalized by the people as “the NHS”) I was a beneficiary of all this, despite my father’s Toryism. Free blackcurrant juice for Vitamin C—making me pee purple—was available at school, as was free milk, from which I first made the nauseating discovery of what is now called “lactose intolerance.” A “district nurse” called as a matter of course on any household that had registered the birth of a new baby. If I developed a squint or a toothache, my parents need not fear bankruptcy, but could take me to be fitted with spectacles or healed with a filling. The resulting work is not beautiful (I winced with recognition when I first read the expression “British teeth” in Gore Vidal’s Judgment of Paris) but it is nonetheless real and tangible and available as a kind of right, and a hard-won right at that. Everybody in the hall is proud of the fact that t
he most elemental thing of all—human blood—is freely donated to the National Health Service, which never runs out of it and never pays a penny to those who line up to give it and expect nothing in return but a strong brown cup of serious proletarian tea.

  For me, this “movement” is everything. It contains within itself the germinal hope of a better future where a thinking working class can acquire the faculties of a serious party of government, and can extend these small early “reformist” gains into something more comprehensive—all the while uniting with similar movements in other countries to repudiate the narrow nationalisms and chauvinisms that lead to wars and partitions. To be enrolled in its ranks is to be a part of an alternative history as well as an alternative present and future. Official Britain may have its Valhalla of heroes and statesmen and conquerors and empire-builders, but we know that the highest point ever reached by European civilization was in the city of Basel in 1912, when the leaders of the socialist parties of all countries met to coordinate an opposition to the coming World War. The names of real heroes like Jean Jaures and Karl Liebknecht make the figures of Asquith and Churchill and Lloyd George seem like pygmies. The violence and disruption of a socialist transformation in those years would have been infinitely less than the insane sacrifice of culture to barbarism, and the Nazism and Stalinism that ensued from it. This feeling seemed absolutely authentic to me at the time. (As a matter of fact it still does.) The only two immediate difficulties with this idealism are that, first, this same movement is, at least for the time being, expressed politically by a very boring and compromised party known as the Labour Party; and, second, that in the industry where I actually happen to work, the unions are the most hidebound and conservative force of all, which in the newspaper business is saying quite a good deal.