But Enough About You: Essays

by Christopher Buckley

  I got off lightly. When Martin Amis, his closest friend on earth, published a book in which he took Christopher to task for what he viewed as inappropriate laughter at the expense of Stalin’s victims, Christopher responded with a seven-thousand-word rebuttal in The Atlantic. But Christopher’s takedown of his chum must be viewed alongside thousands of warm and affectionate words he wrote about Martin, particularly in his memoir, Hitch-22, which was published with terrible irony almost simultaneously with the presentation of his mortal illness.

  The jacket of his next book, a collection of breathtaking essays titled Arguably, contains some glowing words of praise, including my own asseveration that he is—was—“the greatest living essayist in the English language.” One or two reviewers called my effusion “forgivable exaggeration.” To them I say: Okay, name me a better one. I would alter only one word in that blurb now.

  Over the course of his heroic eighteen-month battle with the cancer, I found myself rehearsing what I might say to an obituary writer, should one ring after the news of death. Something along the lines of: the air of Byron, the steel pen of Orwell, the wit of Wilde.

  A bit forced, perhaps. Still. Christopher did not write poetry, but he could recite staves, cantos, yards of it. As for Byronic aura, there were the curly locks, the unbuttoned shirt revealing a wealth of pectoral hair, and the roguish, raffish je ne sais quoi good looks. (Somewhere in Hitch-22, he writes that he had now reached the age when “only women wanted to go to bed with me.”) Like Byron, Christopher put himself in harm’s way in “contested territory,” again and again. Here’s another bit from Hitch-22, a chilling moment when he found himself alone in a remote and very scary town in Afghanistan,

  in a goons’ rodeo duel between two local homicidal potentates (the journalistic euphemism for this type is “warlord”; the image of the goons’ rodeo I have annexed from Saul Bellow). On me was not enough money, not enough food, not enough documentation, not enough medication, not enough bottled water to withstand even a two-day siege. I did not have a cell phone. Nobody in the world, I abruptly realized, knew where I was. I knew nobody in the town and nobody in the town knew (perhaps a good thing) who I was, either. As all this started to register with me, the square began to fill with those least alluring of all types: strident but illiterate young men with religious headgear, high-velocity weapons and modern jeeps.

  His journalism, in which he championed the victims of tyranny and stupidity and “Islamofascism,” takes its rightful place on the shelf along with that of his paradigm, Orwell.

  As for the wit: one day we were talking about Stalin. I observed that Stalin, murderer of twenty, thirty—forty?—million had trained as a priest. Not skipping a beat, Christopher remarked, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?”

  I thought—as I did a thousand times over the course of our thirty-year-long tutorial—Wow.

  A few days later at a dinner, Stalin came up. I said to my dinner partner, “Indeed, was he not among the more promising of the Tbilisi ordinands?”

  The lady to whom I proferred this thieved aperçu stopped chewing her salmon, repeated the line I had casually tossed off, and said with frank admiration, “That’s brilliant.” Oh, was I tempted, but I couldn’t quite bear to continue the imposture, and told her that the author of this nacreous witticism was in fact none other than Christopher Hitchens. She laughed and said, “Well, everything he says is brilliant.”

  Yes, it was. It was a feast of reason and a flow of soul.

  Two fragments come to mind, the first from Brideshead Revisited, a book Christopher loved and which he could practically quote in its entirety. Anthony Blanche, the exotic, outrageous aesthete, has been sent down from Oxford. Charles Ryder, the book’s narrator, laments: “Anthony Blanche had taken something away with him when he went; he had locked a door and hung the key on his chain; and all his friends, among whom he had been a stranger, needed him now.”

  Christopher was never a “stranger to his friends”—ça va sans dire, as he would say. Among his prodigal talents, his greatest of all may have been the gift of friendship. Christopher’s inner circle, Martin, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, comprise more or less the greatest writers in the English language. That’s some posse. But in leaving them—and the rest of us—for “the undiscovered country” (he could recite more or less all of Hamlet, too), Christopher has taken something away with him, and his friends, in whose company I am grateful to have been, will need him now. We are now, finally, without a Hitch.

  The other bit is from Housman, from a poem Christopher and I would recite back and forth at each other across the table at Café Milano. I hesitate to quote it here. I see him wincing at my deplorable propensity for “crowd-pleasing.” But I’m going to quote it anyway, doubting as I do that he would chafe at such consolation as I can manage over the loss of my beloved athlete, who died so young.

  Smart lad to slip betimes away

  From fields where glory does not stay,

  And early though the laurel grows

  It withers quicker than the rose.

  —The New Yorker, December 2011

  * * *

  I. The phrase was actually coined by Alexander Pope.

  Criticism

  * * *

  People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO A BOOK REVIEW WRITTEN BY ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  FIFTY MILLION FRENCHMEN CAN’T BE WRONG

  As Philip Larkin so indelibly put it,

  Sexual intercourse began

  In nineteen sixty-three

  (Which was rather late for me)—

  Between the end of the Chatterley ban

  And the Beatles’ first LP.

  But things didn’t really get going until 1972, when Dr. Alex Comfort published his groundbreaking and indeed earth-moving Joy of Sex. Since then it has sold in all its various editions eight million copies. If you were born after 1972, you may owe your very existence to Comfort. Now, on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, it has been revised and reissued by Comfort’s son, Nicholas, and lavishly—lasciviously—reillustrated.

  A lot has happened sexwise since 1972: Roe v. Wade; the herpes epidemic; AIDS; Attorney General Edwin Meese’s doomed Commission on Pornography; ubiquitous breast implants; the rise and fall of Penthouse magazine; X-rated videos; triple-X-rated videos; Larry Flynt; the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue industry; Victoria’s Secret; cyberporn; Boogie Nights; RU-486; Wilt Chamberlain’s 20,000th conquest; Courtney Love and her band, Hole; the Wonderbra; Monica and Bill; Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche; Viagra; Maxim; Manolo Blahnik; the Anna Nicole Smith television show. It would appear that more people are having sex than ever before.

  Whether “joy” has increased apace amid all this furious exertion is debatable, but anyone seeking either initiation or a refresher course on ars amatoria could do worse than to peruse these mauve, titillating pages. There are some delicious giggles to be had along the way. If these are not necessarily intentional, they are no less enjoyable.

  The young man featured in the illustrations in the 1972 ur-text has evolved. He is no longer hirsute and missing only a peace symbol, looking as if his day job were playing bongos with the Lovin’ Spoonful. His partner in bliss is a comely raven-haired lady who just can’t seem to stop smiling, and little wonder, though she’s surely going to have a crick in her neck after all this.

  In this 2002 edition, the emphasis on hair is—I’ll just quote Comfort, whose name remains on this book’s title page despite his son’s revisions: “Many women shave their armpit hair, conditioned as they are by the idea that hairlessness is sexy. Opinions are divided on this one—fashion dictates armpits should be bare, but in my opinion shaving is simply ignorant vandalism.” This aperçu will surely stimulate lively dinner party conversation in the months ahead.

  Comfort gets quite passionate on the general subject of the armpit. Under the heading “Armpit” w
e find: “Classical site for kisses. Should on no account be shaved (see Cassolette). Can be used instead of the palm to silence your partner at climax.” I know you’re in a hurry to find out about cassolette, but please first note that “if you use your palm, rub it over your own and your partner’s armpit area first.” At points as these, the text seems to intersect with the script of the movie A Fish Called Wanda, in which Otto, the mad ex-C.I.A. assassin played to hambone perfection by Kevin Kline, takes a deep snort of his own armpits before leaping onto Jamie Lee Curtis.

  Cassolette is—well, it’s right there on page 33 and I think I’ll just let you look it up. The book teems with French words, and why not, French being the lingua franca of love. Until now I had thought cassolette involved rabbit and white beans. Some of the terms are quite recherché, but I yearn to conjugate them, conjugally. There is, for instance, pattes d’araignée, literally “spider’s legs,” and it does sound like fun. On page 101: “The round-and-round and cinder-sifting motions of the woman’s hips—what the French call the Lyon mail-coach (la diligence de Lyon)—come easily with practice if you’ve got the right personality.” The word postillionage was also new to this reviewer, and you’re going to have to look that one up for yourselves, too. The section on la petite mort—“the little death”—is an alarming prospect and basis for an entire Woody Allen movie. And the word for one particular position is négresse. No comment.

  The other foreign terms here serve to validate French’s claim to be the proper vocabulary of love. Take saxonus, a word for—never you mind. German may be the language of philosophy, but it is not the vernacular of the pillow. Shall we do the coitus saxonus, Liebchen?

  Were you aware of srpski jeb? That is, we are told, “Serbian intercourse” or “mock rape.” Not tonight, Slobodan, I have a headache. Or hrvatski jeb? Croatian intercourse, “reputed by local wiseacres to be ‘exhausting.’ ” I’ll bet, what with all those NATO jets whooshing by overhead.

  The Chinese have, as does their cuisine, delicious names for such positions as Wailing Monkey Clasping a Tree and Wild Geese Flying on Their Backs. I’ll have both, please, and the hot-and-sour soup. But there are English terms here, too, such as Viennese Oyster, defined as “a woman who can cross her feet behind her head, lying on her back, of course.” (Love the “of course.”) And it is nice to hear a few good words on behalf of the old missionary position: “Name given by amused Polynesians, who preferred squatting intercourse, to the European matrimonial. Libel on one of the most rewarding sex positions.”

  Italian terms pop up here and there, but in the end it’s basically a Larousse Érotique. There’s flanquette, cuissade, croupade, ligottage, poire—not your grandfather’s pear, either—and you’ll very definitely want to know the meaning of pompoir, “the most sought-after feminine sexual response of all.” The nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, the Ernest Shackleton of sex, wrote that if a woman can perform this technique, ‘‘her husband will then value her above all women, nor would he exchange her for the most beautiful queen in the Three Worlds.” Or as Cosmopolitan magazine would put it: ONE SEX TRICK THAT WORKS!

  There are pages and pages of cautionary notes about AIDS. (Casual sex was sooo ’70s.) Some critics have taken Comfort to task for urging complete abstinence in the matter of using an orifice not specifically designed by nature for purposes to which it is sometimes put in, say, English public schools. Also, he notes that spermicide can sometimes increase the chance of transmitting HIV. There’s a useful-sounding section on something called “hair-trigger trouble,” otherwise known as premature ejaculation, that income stream of a thousand sex clinics. And gentlemen are enjoined from blowing air into a certain part of madam, since this can be extremely injurious, to say nothing of embarrassing to explain at four a.m. in the emergency room. Meanwhile, Spanish fly can be as poisonous “as mustard gas.”

  This is a manual, as it were, and manuals must employ the language of precision. Occasionally, however, you wonder if you’ve wandered into a game of Twister refereed by Casanova and the entire Académie Française, with video conferencing by the Marquis de Sade. If you thought the section on “frontal” would be fairly straightforward, parse this: “To unscramble a complicated posture for purposes of classification, turn the partners round mentally and see if they can finish up face-to-face in a matrimonial without crossing legs. If so, it’s frontal. If not, and they finish face-to-face astride one leg, it’s a flanquette; square from behind (croupade); or from behind, astride a leg (cuissade). It’s as simple as that.” What could be simpler? Honey, what are you doing on the floor?

  Dr. Comfort died in 2000, having done more than most for the general pursuit of happiness. He was not a proselytizer, like those tiresome Esalen types who were always urging us to do it in the road. The phrase “free love” is mercifully absent. On the other hand, he didn’t see anything wrong with voyeurism or group sex. In fact, he quite enjoyed both, and the evidence suggests that he did enough research for a second Ph.D. But he doesn’t make you feel like a dweeb (or dweebette) if your idea of fun doesn’t include croupade and flanquette with the entire neighborhood block association. On the whole, the tone is warm, learned, and friendly, as if Marcus Welby, M.D., had disappeared to California for a few months and come back with a great big grin on his face and some nifty new ideas on stress reduction. The occasional refusal to admit irony—as when he advises wearing a hard hat during motorcycle sex—will cause guffaws, but that only shows, once again, the impotence of being earnest.

  —The New York Times, January 2003

  KISSINGER ON CHINA

  Ah, warm and fuzzy China. Torturing and jailing dissidents, hacking into Gmail, cozying up to the worst regimes on earth, refusing to float the renminbi, spewing fluorocarbons into the ozone, building up its navy, and stealing military secrets—all while enabling America’s fiscal incontinence by buying all our T-bills. The $1.1 trillion question at the start of what’s been called “The Chinese Century” is simple: Friend or enemy? Frenemy?

  While Henry Kissinger doesn’t quote Mario Puzo, Don Corleone’s maxim, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer,” echoes throughout his grand, sweeping tutorial, On China. Kissinger has been the go-to China wise man since his first secret meeting there in 1971. In the intervening decades, he’s made fifty-odd trips back, often carrying critical messages between leaders, defusing crises, or pleading with each side to understand the other’s position. His perennial ambassadorship-at-large puts readers right in the room with Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and Hu Jintao.

  It also overflows with a lifetime of privileged observations. Here’s a great one: Why did China invade Vietnam in 1979? To “teach it a lesson,” Kissinger writes, for its border clashes with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. But when the Soviet Union failed to come to Vietnam’s aid, China concluded it had “touched the Tiger’s buttocks” with impunity. “In retrospect,” Kissinger explains, “Moscow’s relative passivity . . . can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviets’ decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese.” As such, Kissinger concludes, the 1979 clash “can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time.” Of course. Just the proverbial game of dominoes—with the pieces very widely separated. As for the psychology behind China’s extraordinary death toll in Vietnam, more on that in a minute.

  While Kissinger can sometimes appear to be an apologist for—or explainer-away of—Chinese unwarm and unfuzzy behavior, he demonstrates a profound understanding of the impulses behind that behavior. And those impulses, he believes, go back many thousands of years. During a meeting in the 1990s, then President Jiang Zemin wryly remarked to Kissinger that seventy-eight generations had elapsed since Confucius died in 449 B.C. By my count, we in the United States have seen eight generations since the Declaration of Indep
endence. Rather puts things in perspective.

  According to Kissinger there are four key elements to understanding the Chinese mind: Confucianism (“a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion”); Sun Tzu (outsmarting: good; direct conflict: bad); an ancient board game called wei qi (which stresses “the protracted campaign”); and China’s “century of humiliation” in the 1800s (karma’s a bitch, ain’t it, you Imperialists?). Actually, make that five: Wei Yuan—a nineteenth-century mid-ranking Confucian mandarin—developed the Chinese concept of “barbarian management,” which was at the core of Mao’s diplomacy with the United States and the Soviet Union. How one wishes China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs would change its name to Office of Barbarian Management.

  No, sorry, make that six: overwhelming fear of internal disorder or chaos. The resulting gestalt is an absolute imperviousness to foreign pressure. Kissinger recounts a chilly moment when, in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng tells him that overreaction by the United States “could even lead to war.” He meant it. Even more chilling were Mao’s repeated, almost gleeful, musings about the prospect of nuclear war. “If the imperialists unleash war on us,” Kissinger recalls him saying, “we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.” Those grim and quite believable words sound as though they came from the last scene of Dr. Strangelove. But Kissinger reminds us that during the first Taiwan Strait confrontation in 1955, it was the United States that threatened to use nukes.