We got back from MDA round about midnight and sat untalkatively in the kitchen and on the patio of the guest house (untalkatively joined by Michael Z). Although my mental state was obscure to me, my body, after its saturnalia of chemicals (now reinforced by Chardonnay), felt familiar: the comedown would soon be followed by the hangover, and a hangover of the spiritual category, strongly featuring remorse and regret. Christopher wrote that regret was for things you did and remorse was for things you didn’t do – sins of commission as against sins of omission…Everyone stayed up, trying to de-coagulate. And around noon the next day most of us went in groups to the airport, and defeatedly boarded flights to San Francisco, Washington DC, New York, and perhaps other cities.
…Christopher’s last words, unlike James’s (and unlike Larkin’s), were unrehearsed. Also inadvertent, because he lost consciousness in mid-thought: his last words – there were only two of them – were simply the words he said last. They were rhetorically primitive, barely more than a slogan or a chant. Yet anyone who knew him is sure to find them full of meaning and affective force. It was Alexander who described the scene to me, over a paper cupful of coffee a few hours before the death; and we both smiled and closed our eyes and nodded.
Yesterday Christopher was lying there alive but unstirring, with his mind in that region between deep sleep and light coma, and he softly articulated something. Alexander (and Steve Wasserman, also in attendance) drew closer and urged him to repeat it. He did so: ‘Capitalism.’ When Alexander asked him if he had anything to add, he said faintly, ‘…Downfall.’ That was the Hitch, comprehensively unconverted – except when it came to socialism, and utopia, and the earthly paradise. Crossing the floor to death: and yet he never changed.
‘Alexander, your father’s not dying at sixty-two. He’s about seventy-five, I’d say – because he never, ever went to sleep.’ We sat there with our paper cups. ‘Christ, it’s so radical of him to die,’ I said. ‘It’s so left wing of him to die.’
…There it lurks before me, under the angle lamp, Mortality – droll, steadfast, and desperately and startlingly short. Usually I pick it up and put it down with the greatest care, to avoid seeing the photo that fills the back cover; but sometimes, as now, I make myself flip it over and I stare. We never talked about death, he and I, we never talked about the probably imminent death of the Hitch. But one glance at this portrait convinces me that he exhaustively discussed it – with himself. Those are the eyes of a man in hourly communion with the distinguished thing; they hold a great concentration of grief and waste, but they are clear, the pupils blue, the whites white. Christopher, long before the fact, mounted his own death watch. Prepared for the Worst was the title of his earliest collection of essays (1988), and it was his lifelong stance and slogan. He felt the compulsion to go looking for the most difficult position, and here he is, in the most difficult position of all – the most difficult position for him, and for everyone else on earth.
On the day D. H. Lawrence stopped living (at the age of forty-four) he said three interesting things. His antepenultimate sentence was ‘Don’t cry’ (addressed to Frieda); his penultimate sentence was ‘Look at him in the bed there!’; his ultimate sentence was ‘I feel better now’ (the last words of many a waning murmurer). Lawrence got the order wrong: he should’ve signed off with Don’t cry…
Don’t cry. They weren’t Christopher’s last words – but they were his legacy, and in the strangest way. He himself was very open to emotion, he was quickly and strongly moved by poetry (literary and political), and he was unalarmed by the sentimental and even the spiritual; but he wouldn’t have anything whatever to do with the supernatural. And so I now say to his ghost,
‘After you died, Hitch, something very surprising happened…It wasn’t supernatural, obviously. Nothing ever is. It only felt supernatural.’
‘How supernatural?’
‘Mildly supernatural. Only a bit supernatural.’
‘And are you suggesting that I brought this about from beyond the grave? Or from beyond the incinerator, because as you know my grave is in the sky.’
‘True – the mass grave of so many of your blood brothers and your blood sisters. No I’m not saying that. It was all your own work – but the work was done when you were alive.’
‘Explain.’
‘I will explain, and I’ll try to make you understand.’
* ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’ has strong claims to being the greatest line of war poetry ever written. And incidentally it could have been ‘I am the enemy you killed, my love’. See ‘Shadwell Stair’, which opens, ‘I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair’, and closes, ‘I walk till the stars of London wane / And dawn creeps up the Shadwell Stair. / But when the crowing sirens blare / I with another ghost am lain.’
Postludial
Christopher once wrote of ‘the light, continuous English rain’ that was part of his ‘birthright’. I know that rain, I know that island rain, which hardly has the weight to fall and comes on tiptoe, as if trying to pose as the silent element; and it is not the silent element.
Snow is the silent element. It is also the informative element: silently snow tells you, at great length and with great precision, how old you are, how old in body, how old in mind. And how does snow communicate this?
When I was a boy in winter I used to go to sleep tearfully praying
