It was a look nicely suited to (artful) protestations of innocence, while in reality giving flesh to the phrase no whit abashed. It was the look of a boy who (despite a regime of cold showers, caning, and prayers – with nothing private, and everything either compulsory or forbidden): a boy who is putting together an articulate, subversive, and indomitable inner life.
Oh, keep that look on your face, Hitchens. And don’t ever take it off.
—————
‘Trent!’
‘Cadence!’
My bags were packed, my goodbyes were said, my bill was paid; and I was having a final jolt in the Lone Star Saloon before heading off to George H. W. Bush Intercontinental – while also hoping, I admit, to hear tell of Brent.
‘I talked with “Grant”,’ said Cadence, ‘who didn’t know squat. Well?’
‘With Brent? Okay. Now take a deep breath, Cadence. Ready?’
‘Ready. Catering Sales Coordinator? Under Chef?’
‘Neither…Banquets.’
‘Banquets,’ Cadence whispered. ‘Oh wow.’ She sighed, and blinked tensely, squeezing two teardrops out of the corners of her eyes. ‘I love to hear that.’
‘Yep. Executive Comptroller of Banquets…Now easy, Cadence.’
‘Oh I love to feel that. In this God-awful town. Oh I love to feel that. I just do.’
With my wheelie at my side I went into the fresh air. And for a moment I thought the hotel’s fire alarm was out of service, and in American accordance with American regulations all the guests had been evicted from their rooms and sent outside (to sleep like tramps on the subway vents). No. It was just a queue for cabs – multitudinous but fast-flowing; nor did this massed exodus fail to include the basketballer (with four or five of his equally extensile teammates), the wonderfully pretty dwarf, and the cuboid bodyguard, stylishly wiggling his leg as he ground out a butt with a twirl of his shoe.
Escape velocity
What was it Cadence loved to hear, what was it she loved to feel?
As I tightened the belt round a gutful of relief, pity, guilt, and hope (and more than hope: belief), I knew what Cadence meant – and I felt what Cadence felt. Grateful submission to the force that wakes you up in the morning, lifts you to your feet, and impels you outwards into the world; the return of time and motion; the shaking off of thwartedness. Cadence loved what Christopher loved – life, life, which so famously goes on…
The plane pushed back, made its stately two-point turn, cruised forward in search of the exit chute – then lowered its head and began its desperate sprint. Escape velocity, lift-off, climb.
There he was aimed – at the stripped house on Regent’s Park Road, where life, London life, was withering away. The work of resumption and renewal would need to be done here, in America.
And now the customers in their seats could gaze down from on high at the customers in their beds – fellow denizens of the strange land.
*1 Described by him, without much exaggeration, as ‘the toast of two continents’, this was familiarly known as ‘the pelt of the Hitch’. It insulated him so thoroughly that he seldom wore a sweater, let alone an overcoat, even in the cruellest winters.
*2 Before, during, and after my stay in Texas, 5 Regent’s Park Road continued to denude itself of furniture. The house seemed well aware that we were forsaking it; the rooms, the gap-toothed bookcases, the stairs, the passages (even the garden) looked increasingly hurt and strained…
*3 You feel like a crazy professor for saying so, but the US spends about a fifth of its GDP on healthcare, while Sweden spends about a twelfth; and in life expectancy America comes in just behind Costa Rica. Here, free healthcare is never called ‘free healthcare’; it is superstitiously known as ‘the single-payer system’ – where the single payer turns out to be the government. ‘Free healthcare’ doesn’t sit well on the native tongue. It would confuse the sleep of a fully monetised society; every American subliminally accepts that, in the land of the free, absolutely nothing at all should be free of charge.
*4 In the course of the (mainly literary) interview that followed I effusively praised ‘The City’, Updike’s long short story about a man falling very ill on a business trip. Years later it occurred to me that Updike on American health had affinities with Gogol on Russian serfdom: as citizens they might have seemed to accept it, but as artists they rejected it tout à fait. See Dead Souls; and see ‘The City’ and much else, including Rabbit’s lengthy hospitalisations…The theme of literary self-contradiction – meaning differences between the conscious and subconcious mind – cries out for a monograph. Dickens, in his ‘editorial’ voice, championed incarceration for bad language and flogging for bigamy, and approved the practice of strapping mutinous sepoys to the mouths of artillery pieces and firing cannonballs through them. All these positions are undermined by his fiction – and not just his fiction: in American Notes, Dickens (who elsewhere denounced black suffrage as ‘a melancholy absurdity’) writes hauntingly about passing from free territory into slave states, and declares that the ambient deformation is palpable in the very physiognomies of the whites…Updike, too, was capable of giving his inner hick access to the typewriter. In his memoir Self-Consciousness, the chapter called ‘On Not Being a Dove’ (i.e., on being a hawk on Vietnam) is unreconstructed – and self-pitying – Rabbit: ‘It was all very well for civilised little countries like Sweden and Canada to tut-tut in the shade of our nuclear umbrella and welcome our deserters and draft-evaders, but the US had nobody to hide behind.’ Updike continues this strophe by dully repeating, word for word, the number-one herd-think justification for prolonging the war: ‘Credibility must be maintained.’ Which is a dismal cliché even among bureaucrats.
*5 When I did some research into HIV/AIDS, in the early 1990s, an activist lawyer told me that many sufferers were advised to render themselves sufficiently indigent to qualify for federal assistance (Medicaid) – a process known as
