I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I had ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass […], he almost barked, ‘What is this? Luxury?’ That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood.
Hedonism was luxury. Anna in herself, in her physical person, was luxury. She was opulent, high church, sweet tooth.
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After the collapse of Communism (1989), Christopher conceded that politics and religion in the twentieth century had got themselves weirdly intertwined. In my opinion that date also marks the birth of the Hitch as a writer.*7
Utopianism is not the same thing as religion, but it is the same size, in the given individual. The two narratives are alike visionary, teleological (aimed at an end), and millenarian, and their followers have the same kind of temperament. Aggressively secular, the socialist utopians among them easily dispensed with the supernatural; but they certainly couldn’t do without faith.
With them, politics engaged all the most intimate energies. The struggle went without sleep, it was consuming and immanent. With them, it wasn’t a matter of letting politics into the bedroom. Politics was already there: wearing flannel pyjamas, and moodily recumbent on the faded patchwork quilt.
*1 ‘You’re upper class and you’ve got a very loud voice. Is it congenital?’ I once asked an upper-class friend. ‘Yes. It comes’, he blared, ‘from centuries of talking across very large rooms.’ If upper-class girls were in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution, which they were, it came from centuries of loudly asking for what they wanted and expecting to get it.
*2 So I never felt any correlation between politics and the bedroom. Come to think of it, though, my romantic CV was much more leftward than Christopher’s. Nearly all the girlfriends of my later teens and early twenties were blue collar, and I was an internationalist too, courting a Ceylonese, an Iranian, a Pakistani, three West Indians, and a mixed-race South African who could pass in Johannesburg but not in Cape Town (her name was Jasmine Fortune, and she was by my side for six months; her usual endearment, very endearingly, was not ‘honey’ or ‘sugar’ but ‘cookie’)…Only about half of these multicultural involvements were consummated. Perrin, originally from Karachi, was a soulmate and we were close, but it never went beyond a single kiss – her first. Melody, originally from Antigua, was the telephonist at the Statesman. We had three dates. One night, when we were canoodling on the sofa at my flat, she seemed to snap out of herself and then she said soberly (of her often-mentioned long-term Antiguan boyfriend, who was religious, as was Melody), ‘Joey’d never believe this. He wouldn’t – even if I told him…He’d have to see it.’
*3 ‘I was mad about him,’ Anna told me, when the two of us had a Christopher-themed dinner in 2018. ‘And he was mad about you,’ I told her, ‘and I never heard him say a less than reverent word about you – ever.’…Anna was inclined to pooh-pooh the notion that the cooling off had a political cause. She thought it had more to do with his general frenetic busyness (the fact that he was so in demand), and perhaps his sexual indeterminacies (which incidentally he never sought to hide; and as far as I could tell they were a thing of the past by 1980). Anna was not in the least resentful. She seemed on balance happy to have had her time with the Hitch, and she went down to spend more time with him, in Houston, just before he died.
*4 And doing so with such a will that he ‘neglected his studies’, as the saying goes. In fact he did no work at all. Having bluffed and blustered his way through Finals (nine three-hour exams in the same week), Christopher was summoned to a viva – a supplementary interview. This meant he was on the margin between one grade and another. ‘I thought the innate brilliance of the Hitch had somehow shone through,’ he later told me, ‘and I was being viva’d for a First. After a few minutes – “Mr Hitchens, does the year 1066 ring any kind of bell?” – I realised I was being viva’d for a degree.’ He was not on the margin between a First and a Second. He was on the margin between a Third and a Fail. Like Fenton (like Auden), he got a Third.
*5 All Souls – rich, venerable, studentless. I ate there once, as a guest of Philip Larkin, who stayed a couple of terms as a visiting fellow in 1970 when he was editing The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. ‘Today I read all of Alan Bold,’ he said as he greeted me, referring to one of the many poets he omitted. ‘And all of Alan Bold’s no good.’ The next year he would complete one of his greatest poems, ‘Livings: I, II, III’, which includes this evocation of All Souls (where the high-tabletalk is parodied with the technique of a light-verse maestro): ‘Tonight we dine without the Master / (Nocturnal vapours do not please); / The port goes round so much the faster, / Topics are raised with no less ease – / Which advowson looks the fairest, / What the wood from Snape will fetch, / Names for pudendum mulieris, / Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?’ (‘Livings’: III).
*6 So opening himself up to being called, among many alliterative variants (e.g., ‘a limousine leftie’), ‘a Bollinger Bolshevik’. Such were the phrases that wealthy right-wingers, between mouthfuls of Bollinger, used to think was enough to settle the hash of left-wingers who hypocritically failed to confine themselves to cheap drinks from the national cellar (Bristol Cream, barley wine, and room-temperature bitter). By this logic, your gustatory style had to conform to your politics – a remarkably undemanding task for a plutocrat.
*7 It was an opinion
