‘…You lucky bastard. What was she like?’
‘It was a bloke, actually.’
I thought about this. ‘So then what?’
‘Well. I kicked him out halfway through. Dah. I’m never going near that again.’
‘You haven’t gone near it in ages. You must’ve been drunker than I thought.’
‘I was. I was as drunk as you’ve ever seen me.’
‘You hardly ever look drunk.’ And he hardly ever looked hungover; but he looked hungover now, pressing against his brow the little tumbler of Bell’s whisky with its two or three shreds of ice. ‘What class was this Young Conservative?’
‘Oh, the pits. Minor public-school with pretensions. He sounded the t in often.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Okay, he was a bloke and he can’t help that, but it’s certainly not a plus that he was a Young Conservative. Old Conservatives are bad enough, but young Conservatives…’
‘Agreed. The pits.’ Christopher assessed me with friendly exasperation. ‘But if the deputy treasurer of the Uxbridge Young Conservative Association had been a girl, then no doubt you’d’ve been proud to make her acquaintance.’
‘Uh, yeah. As long as she didn’t actually goose-step into the bedroom…Did you hear the Thatcher speech?’
‘I was there. Oh, she’s a jade and a wanton. The sexual power of her.’
‘But isn’t she insufficiently left wing?’*3
—————
Almost thirty years later he rang me from the Wyoming in Washington DC, and asked for ideas about the title for his imminent autobiography, saying,
‘I want it to point to the dual nature of the Hitch. You know, the business about the two sets of books. A socialist and, withal, a bit of a socialite.’
An hour later I rang him back and said, ‘I came up with fuck all, I’m afraid. Just some dull play on the divided self.’
‘What d’you think of this? Hitch-22.’
‘…I think that’s truly brilliant.’
‘My dear Mart…I’m going to clear it with Erica Heller, just in case.’
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said. ‘What’ve you done about the chicks?’
‘There’s nothing about the chicks, just a bit each about the wives. Nothing about the chicks. No Jeannie. No Bridget. No Anna.’
‘No Anna?’
‘No chicks.’
Anna was upper middle, yet her voice was as pleasingly accentless as that of the Hitch himself; her face brimmed with freshness and generosity of spirit; and, as if that wasn’t enough, she had a figure that belonged, not to the Olive Oyls of fashion, but to the shapely heroines of Hollywood. And don’t forget that under-celebrated ingredient of allure, which is cheerfulness – which is happiness.
…Happiness, as a source of beauty. This somewhat tragic theory came over me slowly and much later on, after I’d taken my younger daughters to and from school a few thousand times. In the first year the girlchildren were almost without exception magical to look at. In the third year there was a significant minority whose eyes had lost much of their light (prideful fathers, angry mothers?). And by the fifth year a kind of apartheid had taken hold: the division between the happy and the not so happy, I came to think – as well as between the appealing and the not so appealing…Oh, this subject is as fiendishly complex as death. Which comes first? Are they happy because they’re appealing or are they appealing because they’re happy? Or is it that you can’t be one without the other?
Luxury
People think they are seeing it in the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, Jeremy Corbyn; but they are only seeing its wraith. I mean the hard revolutionary left, which was Christopher’s proper home. To belong there you needed three characteristics: a) fire, b) dogmatism, and c) humourlessness. Corbyn had hardly any a), but he had b), and he had c) in sumptuous profusion. Hitchens, on the other hand, had plenty of a) and quite enough b), but no c) whatever. It was as well that he was a divided self.
He developed this commitment independently, at school, through thought and reading. And as a very young man he paid all his dues: demonstrations (often violent), fistfights and exchanges of concrete missiles with enemy cadres, multiple arrests, occasional imprisonments. During his time at Oxford an average day
might include leafleting or selling the Socialist Worker outside a car plant in the morning, then spray-painting pro-Vietcong graffiti on the walls, and arguing vehemently with Communists and Social Democrats or rival groups of Trotskyists long into the night.
And at Oxford he would continue to ‘hope and work for the downfall of capitalism’ – and the establishment of the socialist tomorrow.*4
This was in his Chris/Christopher period. In the daytime Chris might get himself roughed up by scabs on a picket line, but in the evening Christopher would slip into a dinner jacket (to address ‘the Oxford Union debating society under the rules of parliamentary order’), and then go on to All Souls College,*5 where he would teasingly enthral a coterie of reactionary old queens (A. L. Rowse, Maurice Bowra, John Sparrow, et al.). Hitch called this ‘keeping two sets of books’. In other words he was a romantic incendiary who also enjoyed the ambience of the beau monde.*6
In general, Christopher chose not to avail himself of the new carnal freedoms of his era. The promiscuity that most of us were going in for he found…somehow not serious enough. There was I think a further scruple, less paradoxical than it at first seems, because he was someone in whom many cultural and historical strands combined. And one of those strands had to do with religion – or its residue.
Among the best things in Hitch-22 is the description of the funeral of the author’s father, the laconically Conservative and low-church Eric Hitchens. It was a very English occasion: the hilltop, the extreme cold, the ‘misty churchyard’ overlooking Portsmouth Harbour and the sweep of the Channel, the ‘Navy Hymn’, the ‘gaunt Hampshire faces’ (‘these distant kinsmen gave a hasty clasp of the hand and faded back into the chalky landscape’): all of it was ‘stark enough to have pleased my father’, and notable for
