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I sent him a letter of condolence, in November 1973, on Times Literary Supplement notepaper; and he replied on the notepaper of the New Statesman. In his memoir he describes my letter as ‘brief, well-phrased, memorable’. Not so memorable for me, but it began with an assertion of friendship; and quite suddenly we were no longer warm acquaintances. We were friends. I was his friend, and he was mine.
Christopher was perfectly willing to talk about his father (whom I got to know a bit: he always wore the same typhoon-proof thick-knit white rollneck); but I can’t remember him saying anything about his mother, except this once…On a bright afternoon in early 1974 we were in his small chaotic office (the Hutch of the Hitch) gradually recovering from the midday meal; and for once the veins of our cigarette smoke were a beautiful, a Mediterranean blue, and I said, ‘In Greece, was it really rough?’
With his eyes on the floor he tipped his head from side to side.
‘No need to answer. I bet it was rough. I bet it wasn’t boring, though, Hitch. You could give it that.’
His gaze was still downward. ‘Let’s just say I felt very alive.’
It was 3 p.m. local time when the plane landed at George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport. The crew extended advice and courtesies to the passengers, who were hungry for a new kind of air, air they hadn’t breathed ten thousand times already – virginal air. At the end of the very long line to the final checkpoint there was a sniffer dog, a beautifully groomed but insanely zealous Alsatian, with its uniformed master; it clambered all over me – but I ducked away and then I was clear. In the steamy open-air basement of the pick-up bays, I had a smoke, found a cab, and rode through gusty suburbs, heading for downtown and the Lone Star Hotel.
The five-stage theory
Where I failed to raise the Hitchenses. They were out, and neither Christopher nor Blue were picking up their phones. I fleetingly considered a tragic nap, but I never take naps, because all my naps are tragic naps…
And I was thinking of the two of them in hospital rooms and consulting rooms and treatment rooms and above all in waiting rooms. Sickness is itself a waiting room…Many, many people have written with great penetration on sickness, on the estrangement from the world of will and action, the indignity, the onerousness, but not many have evoked the boredom, as Christopher has: how really incredibly boring it is. ‘It bores even me,’ he wrote…
It would freeze my blood, for instance, to see an appointment-book entry that promised morning with lawyers, afternoon with doctors; but in Washington, when all this began, that was Christopher’s daily routine. Now, later on, he was in Houston (that famous fortress on the medical frontier), and it was doctors all day long.
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Half a year earlier Christopher wrote about the ‘notorious’ five-stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – denial, rage, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and said that it ‘hasn’t so far had much application to my case’. ‘The bargaining stage, though,’ he went on. ‘Maybe there’s a loophole here.’ The oncology wager presents itself as follows:
You stick around for a bit, but in return we are going to need some things from you. These things may include your taste buds, your ability to concentrate, your ability to digest, and the hair on your head. This certainly appears to be a reasonable trade.
That bargain took effect, and quickly too.
‘It’s not just the rug,’ he said as he greeted me at the Wyoming in the autumn of 2010 – meaning his hair, already reduced to a few grey strands and clumps. ‘When I shave the razor glides down my chops and meets no resistance. Now that would be a grave affront to my virility – if I still had any. That went at once. Eros, Little Keith, goes immediately. Thanatos thinks, Mm, I’ll be having that.’
‘Christ. But it’ll return, O Hitch. Now you’re all lovely and slim.’
‘I’ve shed fourteen pounds – a whole stone. And I don’t feel any lighter.’
‘That’s weird. You used to say you felt lighter when you lost fourteen ounces.’
‘I know. It’s as if the tumour’s made of…What’s one down from a black hole? Or one up. When the collapse isn’t so catastrophic.’
‘A uh, a neutron star. A speck of a neutron star is heavier than a battleship.’
‘That’s the stuff. The tumour’s made of neutrons.’
‘Yeah, but you know, Hitch – this is iatrogenic. The result of medical treatment. It’s not the disease that’s doing it, it’s the fucking doctors.’
‘So far. Now – lunch. Where we’ll talk about something less fucking boring.’
And at his favourite nearby restaurant, La Tomate (just down the slope from the Hilton where Reagan was shot), Christopher would now ask for a cushion – ‘I haven’t got an ass any more,’ he’d explained. He was invariably feted in La Tomate, and the waiters had become almost rigidly attentive. And I realised that cancer sufferers, silently identified and singled out, wear a version of the Star. Singled out for respectful kindliness, and not for persecution; but they wear the Star. And hardly anyone recognised him in the street any more – or they did but they held back. Because he wore the Star…
Lunch with the Hitch was still lunch
