In fact he referred to himself as the Hitch right from the start – in the early 1970s, when he and I were becoming friends. At that stage he was quite unknown beyond an inextensive circle of young Marxists and sympathetic young journalists (one of whom, I remember, singled him out as ‘the meteoric Trotskyist’). In 1974, when we were both twenty-five, he came up to the literary department of the New Statesman in the late afternoon, and I said,
‘You look very chuffed.’
‘Yes, I had a rather “good” lunch with certain members of the board,’ said Christopher. ‘Tony’ – Anthony Howard, the editor in chief – ‘confirmed that they’re going to start sending me abroad more.’
‘How wonderful.’
‘Belfast, Lebanon, Buenos Aires.’ For a moment Christopher seemed to churn and sway with emotion, and then he said, ‘This will soon be axiomatic for the whole planet. Wherever there is injustice and oppression, wherever the strong prey on the weak – then the pen of the Hitch will flash from its scabbard…’
‘…Nor shall your sword sleep in your hand…’
‘Till I have built Jerusalem. In this green and pleasant land.’
Everything he said was equivocal. Flippant and heartfelt, ironic and serious, whimsical and steely. Even his self-mythologising was also part of a project of self-deflation. ‘Flash from its scabbard’, for instance, is a decidedly high-style poeticism when applied to a drawn sword – but what is it when applied to a drawn pen?
—————
A month or so later, on the stairs at the New Statesman, Christopher came out of the half-landing toilet and guiltily rocked to a halt. Some time ago, I should say, we had passed an edifying hour wondering what a bathroom would smell like after a visit from a dinosaur.
‘Exit,’ said Christopher, ‘pursued by a brontosaurus.’ He frowned. ‘That needs more work. We want a carnivore, beginning with b.’
‘Brachiosaurus. No, that’s another herbivore. Hitch, where’ve you been all week?’
‘Cyprus. Haven’t you got my postcard? They love me in Cyprus.’
‘Why, particularly?’
‘Because I’m a true friend of the Cypriot people. Whenever I go to Cyprus there’s a front-page headline in the Nicosia Times saying HITCH FLIES IN.’
‘And what does the headline say when you leave?’
‘HITCH FLIES OUT.’
…I would come to detect a logistical difficulty here. Christopher might very well see HITCH FLIES IN (as, say, he enjoyed his first breakfast at the hotel). But how would he ever see HITCH FLIES OUT? No, he’d be gone. Still, I’d constructed a tactical fantasy: Christopher on Cyprus Air’s late flight to London, with a Scotch in one hand and a Rothmans in the other, looking forward to his dinner, and attending to an early edition of the Nicosia Times with the banner headline HITCH FLIES OUT.
—————
It was now 3.45. What was Christopher going to say?
How would he usher in the new reality? A great deal would depend on his opening sentence. After hours of circular thought it was beginning to feel to me like a novelistic challenge: the fundamental challenge, which meets you twenty times a day, of finding the right tone.*17 And Christopher, with his extravagant idiolect…
The Hitch has landed; but now he was in mid-air, beginning another kind of journey, a ‘deportation’ (as he would soon write), ‘taking me from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’.*18
I was sure he wouldn’t be solemn, let alone lachrymose. He wouldn’t be spiritless. But what would he be?
—————
Mrs Christopher Hitchens, or Carol Blue (or simply ‘Blue’), picked up.
‘He knew you’d call,’ she said. ‘He’s just getting out of the shower. I’ll go and…’
For three or four minutes I sat with the silent mouthpiece in my hand. Then he came on.
‘Mart.’
‘Hitch.’
‘…Dah,’ he said. ‘It’s my fucking tits now.’
*1 I ran into Joan Juliet (at one of Tina Brown’s summits at the Lincoln Center – ‘Women in the World’); I hadn’t seen her for at least thirty years, but I recognised her in an instant. This is another attribute of beauty: memorability. To adapt a coinage of Nabokov’s, beauty is mnemogenic…Joan Juliet was in perfect health.
*2 The generosity was sincere, and lifelong. In Bellow’s posthumous Letters (2010) we frequently see him offering to subsidise old friends, and with the gentlest tact: if you need it, he would typically write, ‘I can spare it’…Gore Vidal was rich (‘I’m the richest,’ he said vis-à-vis his American peers). Philip Roth, it is safe to say, had a few bob (Portnoy’s Complaint outsold The Godfather)…Incidentally, Vidal and Roth had no one obvious to leave their money to (they died without issue). The extreme Norman Mailer was in this respect a more typical American writer: six wives and nine children. The figures for Saul Bellow are five and four.
*3 I could never make this trip without a visit from the following memory. Back in the late 1970s, when we worked at the New Statesman, Julian and I set a Weekend Competition in which contestants were asked to dream up organisations whose initials, in acronym form, were self-undermining – as in the Barnaby Rudge and Oliver Twist Hostel for Elderly Women: BROTHEL. That was a winning entry by Robert Conquest, who put inordinate energy into such things, and so was the Sailors’, Yachtsmen’s, and Pilots’ Health Institute for Long Island Sound.
*4 Like Desirée Squadrino, Sorella Fonstein, the heroine of a late-period Bellow novel, is a girl from New Jersey; and she is fabulously fat: ‘She made you look twice at a doorway. When she came to it, she filled the space like a freighter in a canal lock’…During the war Sorella stayed put in America, but her husband, club-footed Harry Fonstein, escaped only by a miracle from his appointment with Auschwitz, and crossed the Atlantic very comprehensively bereaved. The narrator respects and responds to Sorella’s intelligence and integrity. ‘I never
