*14 It seems curious – at least to me – that all the quotes in this chapter come from Herzog, a book that lies fairly low on the scale of my lecteurial love, coming in behind Augie March, the Collected Stories (with its five novellas), Mr Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, and Ravelstein. The only explanation I can come up with is that there must be a great deal of death awareness in its psychological cladding; and a fear of insanity, too, a fear much deeper than the crazily blithe first sentence allows: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’ It wasn’t all right with Saul Bellow in 2001, when he felt its advent (his darting, flickering eyes). He would have echoed King Lear: ‘O! Let me not be mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper: I would not be mad.’
*15 I found I seemed to do slightly better if I concentrated on specific memories (rather than simply weltering in woe). And it was this memory that gave the most dependable relief…I am seven, which makes Hilly twenty-eight, and we are walking along the seafront of a small town in South Wales. A man drives by – and on the instant mother and son are convulsed by laughter…The car was one thing (three-wheeled and roofless, and somehow entirely unserious, like an early and unaerodynamic attempt at a racer); and the man at the wheel, the lone occupant, in green tweeds and fawn scarf and porkpie hat, very round and red in the face with open mouth, the man at the wheel exactly resembled a prosperous pig smugly motoring through the pages of a children’s book…After a few minutes, when we’d straightened up and quietened down, my mother and I turned to one another gasping and wiping our eyes in gratitude and faint disbelief, as if saying, Well how could you possibly improve on that? Then I looked round about me; and all the people I could see, townies, builders, a policewoman, a grocer, were wearing their everyday faces…Ah, I thought, so it’s just the two of us – it’s just her and me.
*16 In this press release Christopher was officially curtailing a book tour (for his memoir Hitch-22). ‘I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at short notice.’
*17 Literary critics call it ‘decorum’. In colloquial English decorum means ‘in keeping with good taste and propriety’. Literary decorum means ‘the concurrence of style and content’, and is of course wholly inattentive to propriety and taste.
*18 All the relevant (i.e., ‘medical’) quotes in this chapter and the next derive from the series of columns Christopher wrote in Vanity Fair between September 2010 and October 2011; they were collected in a slim volume called Mortality (2012).
Chapter 2 Hitchens Goes to Houston
Tumortown, March 2011
The itinerary told me that my flight would take just over ten hours, and the boarding card told me that my seat was to be 58F, which was located just before – or even parallel with, or actually beyond – the Economy toilets. This was no cause for complaint. Far more conducive to puzzlement and unease was the fact that the PA system kept calling me a ‘customer’. Passengers – on American Airlines and, I suspected, on American airlines in general – were now known as customers. We are at full capacity so we do ask our customers to vacate the aisles as soon as…
This was new, and it was policy (even the captain observed it, going on about the comfort and safety of our customers); and it struck the occupant of 58F as a clear demotion…I remember to this day how left wing, how ascetic, how anticapitalist – or, if you prefer, how short of money – I felt on that trip (the ticket alone cost thousands of pounds), and as a point of self-respect I wanted to stop being a customer and go back to being a passenger.
You see, I was in the process – now far advanced – of moving house, from the Land of the Rose to the Land of the Free.*1 When I was just a regular visitor I always felt at home in America; now that I would soon be a resident, I felt like a visitor, and one from another planet. How very strange it was suddenly seeming – America.
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It was March 2011 – a full nine months after diagnosis. I had seen Christopher regularly meanwhile, sometimes in New York but almost always in the District of Columbia. I would board the train from Penn Station to Washington Union, take a cab to the Wyoming apartment block off Dupont Circle, ride the elevator to the sixth storey, and brace myself while waiting for the door to open and reveal the latest changes in my friend. There always were changes – and in addition there always were sorties to hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all waiting rooms…
We knew early on that the cancer had metastasised (secondary tumours had colonised ‘a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node’); the tumour on the collarbone was in addition ‘palpable’, to the touch and even to the
