‘I remember. Which sounds like a leap too, but there’s definitely a connection.’
‘And it might partly explain why Larkin never had a fucking word to say about the history of the world. His lovelife was a void, so he…’
‘So he didn’t know what the stakes were. Humanly. So he wasn’t moved to speak.’
‘Disgraceful, that. Or just pitifully stunted…You know what Trotsky called the Nazi–Soviet Pact? “The midnight of the twentieth century”. But that’s a good phrase for what followed – 1941 to ’45. The midnight of the twentieth century.’
‘…And we’re midnight’s children. But there’s no reason why a poet should have strong views about it, or any views about it.’
‘But you’d think they would.’
‘Mm. Remember what Sebald said about the Holocaust? He said, as a dry aside, that no serious person ever thinks about anything else.’
‘In that case, Little Keith,’ said Christopher, ‘we’re serious about the history of the world. And does that mean we’re serious in the sack?’
*1 The news of Hilly’s death came on a Thursday (June 24, 2010), the news of Christopher’s cancer came on the following Tuesday, and on the following Monday Elena and I had (lesser) news of our own: we were moving from London to Brooklyn. It would take a year to bring this about, but meanwhile we were going back and forth…It was simple: Elena wanted to be near her mother, Betty (who was eighty-two, like Hilly), and I wanted to be near Hitch (who was sixty-one, like me).
*2 I had an inkling of how this must have felt. In December 1974 my cousin Lucy Partington failed to return to her mother’s house in the Gloucestershire village of Gretton (where I had spent many a childhood summer). She had disappeared, and there would soon be posters of her everywhere. Privately, over time, I managed to half-persuade myself of the following: 21-year-old Lucy – highly intelligent, artistic, and religious – had disappeared on purpose (for inscrutable reasons of her own). Two decades later, in March 1994, her body was exhumed, along with several other bodies, from beneath the ‘house of horror’, 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester; she was one of the victims of Fred West, the serial murderer (and the complete, the perfect, the finished modern trog). When I opened the tabloid and saw her photograph, I felt as though a shaggy beast had brushed my face with its breath. I was Lucy’s first cousin; Christopher was Yvonne’s first son.
*3 A reasonable expectation, you might think. As it happens there were no fatalities on commercial US aircraft for almost ten years, beginning in 2009; but then in April 2018, on a flight from New York to Dallas, an engine exploded and a porthole window collapsed. Despite her fastened seatbelt, Mrs Jennifer Riordan (a youngish mother of two) was sucked out from the waist up and battered by debris before two men, a firefighter and ‘a guy in a cowboy hat’, managed to drag her back inside…A gruesome and freakish death, extraordinarily abrupt and arbitrary: a radical case of the instantaneous undeserved…‘This is a sad day,’ intoned the CEO of Southwest Airlines, ‘and our hearts go out to the family and loved ones of our deceased customer.’
*4 For once I’d brought a notebook with me; it was the only time I ever made a written record in situ, and it was useful enough for the reconstruction of this particular exchange; but I’m glad I didn’t make a habit of it. Many times I had seen and heard him, in public and on stage, ‘opening up’ to reveal no ordinary powers of retentiveness and mental orchestration. To have heard him performing – in extremis, with an audience of one – now feels like a peculiarly grievous privilege.
*5 Norman’s answer was that his heterosexuality was so intense and impregnable that he was ideally placed to interpret its obverse. The story doesn’t end there, of course, and Norman would strike back, saying in an interview that literary England was controlled by a gay cabal headed by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and Ian Hamilton. ‘I think that’s very unfair’, said Christopher, ‘to Ian Hamilton.’
*6 From Mortality: ‘I recently had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to attend my niece’s wedding, in my old hometown and former university in Oxford. This depressed me for more than one reason, and an especially close friend inquired, “Is it that you’re afraid that you’ll never see England again?” As it happens he was exactly right to ask, and it had been precisely that which had been bothering me, but I was unreasonably shocked by his bluntness.’ I wasn’t that especially close friend (I think it was Ian McEwan). You see, it didn’t occur to me that he would never see England again. Of course he would, when he was better.
Chapter 3 Politics and the Bedroom
Not left wing enough
Is there a connection between your erotic life and the way you see history? And if there is, which of the two has precedence?
One day in 1974 I said, ‘I don’t understand you, Christopher Hitchens. Nadia, Nadia Lancaster goes and makes a pass – and you turn her down. Christ! Just like you did with Arabella West – and Lady Mab! Lady Mab…’
‘I know. More lissom than any woman has the right to be. But that honking accent. She sounds as haughty, and inbred, as Princess Anne. It just puts me off.’
Christopher didn’t make passes at girls; he waited for girls to make passes at him – and they did. The trouble was that they tended to be bluebloods.*1 He said,
‘I think on some level it suffuses me with guilt. Nadia, Arabella, Lady Mab. Because if the arc of history holds true, in a couple of years I’ll be stringing them all up.’
Oh, yes: the other revolution. He was smiling and so was I. ‘Well then,’ I said. ‘Yet another reason to act now.’
‘Ah. So you
