∗
At some point in 1976 he said, ‘Yes, but there’s a catch. A drawback.’
‘Now what?’ The girl Christopher was having his doubts about, this time, was a young sociologist who wrote for the New Statesman (and when she delivered her pieces she was always asked to join us in the wine bar or the pub). Her name was Molly Jones. ‘You won’t be needing to string up Molly Jones. Her dad’s a builder, so she’s a uh, a hereditary proletarian. She’s very nice and she looks very nice and she’s very articulate and very good fun.’
‘All true. And by the way she’s subtly made it clear that she finds the Hitch not entirely repulsive. Still, there’s an insufficiency in her.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘She’s not left wing enough…She’s not right wing, it goes without saying. How many chicks do we know who’re mad about flags and uniforms and squeaky black overcoats? She’s not right wing, just insufficiently left.’
‘So?…And I suppose you mean insufficiently Trotskyite.’
‘Trotskyist.’
‘Jesus. Trotskyist.’
‘Only a Stalinist would call me Trotskyite.’
‘What would a Stalinite call you? Anyway. I repeat my question. So?…She’s attractive but insufficiently left. So? What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Well, it’s pretty basic. In the last election Molly voted Liberal. How do you laugh that one off?’
‘That’s not basic. What’s basic about that?’
‘You, you can respect incompatibility when it’s physical. But every other kind of incompatibility, including political incompatibility, strikes you as footling.’
‘That’s right. Why drag all that stuff into the bedroom? Reaching the bedroom can be hard enough as it is. Why create another set of obstacles?’
‘It’s no use talking to you – you don’t care what girls’re like,’ he said, ‘as long as they’re girls. That’s dispositive. It settles it.’
‘Hang on. I don’t fancy every girl. Though they’re nearly all fanciable once you get them to open up about themselves…There may be something in what you say. I just think, Let’s get started and see how it goes.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you. Because you’ve got no social conscience. That’s the difference between us. I’m of that higher breed – those “to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest”. Keats, Little Keith.’
Inconceivable
In the late 1970s Christopher got started with Anna Wintour. The affair began with unrestrained elation (out together, they looked like the principals in the all-solving scene of a romantic comedy); so some friends and onlookers were powerfully surprised when things began to cool (when, it seemed, Christopher began to cool). I was not powerfully surprised – nor powerfully disappointed, I have to admit. Anna was the first Hitch girlfriend who aroused envy in me; and Envy is cruelly self-punitive, like the other Deadly Sins (very much including Anger, but with the admittedly unreliable exception of Lust).
So when they broke up I was relieved to be rid of it – of envy, and its skein of wasteful resentments. I also felt the pressure of an unsolved mystery. At the time, Anna told me not very much about the breakup, and Christopher told me nothing at all. But I thought I knew where the fault line lay. Not class: unlike Lady Mab, Anna wasn’t provocatively high-born (in the shorthand of the day she was upper-middle). I assumed, then, that it was politics, or the absence of politics – as with Molly Jones. Anna at that stage was simply innocent of politics.
In his autobiography, Interesting Times (2003), the brilliant – and in my experience entirely amiable – Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that, as a young man looking to settle down, marriage to a non-Communist was ‘inconceivable’. (Eric secured his CP bride when he was twenty-six, in 1943; and they divorced in 1951.) But I continued to wonder at that adjective: inconceivable (‘incapable of being imagined or grasped’). So they do exist: people for whom love is not blind; in their case, love is a keen-eyed commissar. Or maybe they are left wing in their very loins.
The young Hobsbawm (certainly), and the young Hitchens (arguably), would have been reluctant to get involved with the young Hilly, a mere Labour activist (who scandalised our Welsh neighbours in the 1950s not only by driving a car but by using it to ferry voters to the polls). Still, the taint was there: Hilly’s parents were moneyed provincial bohemians (folk dancing, Esperanto, madrigals), and she had a tiny but lifelong private income (and I myself, along with my siblings and my innumerable cousins, inherited £1,000 on my twenty-first birthday).
In Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958, Hilly said to me,
‘The thing is, the Republicans are…Is that warm enough? Or too hot?’
‘Mum, I’ll adjust it.’ I could bathe myself by then (I was nine), but this was a shower: the first shower of my life. Earlier that week we had disembarked from the Queen Mary in New York Harbor…‘The Republicans are what?’
‘In America, Mart, the Republicans are like the Tories. And the Democrats are like Labour. So we’re for the Democrats.’
‘…Yeah. We don’t want to be for the Tories.’
‘Definitely not.’
And her middle child never forgot that and, as it turned out, never strayed from it. I became a quietly constant ameliorative gradualist of the centre-left.*2
‘Did you have any luck last night?’ I asked Christopher in the noonday pub. ‘I mean sexually?’
‘Yes.’
It was 1978 and we were in Blackpool, attending a Party Conference. He was there as a representative of the Daily Express, and I was there, with James Fenton, as a representative of the New Statesman (to which Christopher would return in 1979). The night before, I had left him in the bar of his hotel, the Imperial, at around twelve-thirty and walked with James to our rude boarding house on the outskirts of town, with its gravy-dinner smells and ticking deathwatch beetles…
I said, ‘Who with?’
First breathing in, Christopher said grimly, ‘I got off with
