One time at a dinner in Regent’s Park Road, in the earliest days of the Arab Spring, Michael caused our friend Roger Cohen (of the New York Times and one of nature’s true optimists) to say, with dignified indignation (‘dignant’ is how more than one novelist has described the familiar stiffening), ‘I find that offensive.’ What he found offensive was Michael’s remark: ‘I don’t think the Egyptians are ready for democracy.’ Optimism originally denoted a character trait (rather than a mood one might occasionally adopt); Roger is an optimist…
Another time, in the summer of 2014, Michael’s eldest girl stormed out of a noisy kitchen-cabinet debate on the Palestinian question with the words, ‘You’re a fucking racist!’ But there is a sheen of stoical irony in Michael C’s habitual half smile. And he and I enthusiastically went on, that evening, to compare notes on Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, a book riven by patriotic pride in tandem with patriotic distress…
Michael is aware that Israel’s situation is almost certainly finite in time. He suspects that global disfavour will assume more and more tangible forms; he suspects that America, as its influence retreats, will one day retreat from Israel (DJT’s recent sheath of blank cheques notwithstanding); but he knows for a fact that the projectiles of Hamas (and Hezbollah) will continue to evolve in their accuracy and range.
‘I’m waiting for a voice on the other side,’ says Michael. A voice that seems desirous – or more frankly capable – of negotiation (the Arab administrators, he says, ‘couldn’t run a shop’). For now, the Palestinian Authority is moribund with corruption; and what can you do with the wild and childish rejectionism of the Zealots of Gaza (‘Hamas’, remember, means zeal)? Their very charter solemnly and gullibly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,* and, in addition, lays claim to ‘every inch’ of historical Palestine, to be secured by means of jihad.
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Christopher said, ‘Mart, you try to be sympathetic to the Israelis, because they’re surrounded by about two billion mortal enemies. A tribute to the evenhandedness of Little Keith…I know, I know, but their location is hardly ideal, is it. I often idly imagine how things might be if they’d settled somewhere else.’
‘Yeah, me too. But where?’
‘I keep thinking – what if the Allies had forced a spacious Jewish homeland on the razed Germany of the later 1940s? A deindustrialised and ruralised and, I stress, an exhaustively humbled Germany. Serve it fucking well right. So. What’s wrong with Bavaria?’
This conversation took place on adjacent Greenwich Village barstools in the summer of 2010 (about three months after diagnosis). Christopher, tonight (all things considered), was at his ease. When you are ill in America you are also, and automatically, sick with worry about paying for it. Christopher was in New York to give an outlandishly well-paid speech; he would then have dinner with his wife and with me and my wife, sitting outside, at Graydon Carter’s restaurant in Bank Street, before going on to a party at Anna Wintour’s, where there would be many other friends and familiars…He was happy tonight, rediscovering how much he loved being in America, loved being with intimates, loved being the expositor and explicator, loved being himself, and loved being alive. He said,
‘As you recline in the Bavarian homeland, what would be the worst that could happen? An occasional Molotov cocktail lobbed in by some leather-shorted, feather-hatted Xerxes from the BLO?’
‘…But Germany. Germany might’ve gone nuts again.’
‘It was invaded and occupied. It couldn’t’ve gone nuts again. And it fears going nuts again. Germany fears itself. Could I have a Xerox of that,’ he said to the barman, and pointed at his double Johnnie Black. ‘I do see that the Bavaria solution, Zion in the Reich, was of course impossible for the Jews. It had to be the Holy Land.’
‘I suppose so. And at least it’s aesthetically right, don’t you think? If the whole thing was just dramaturgy, you know, a heroic poem or an opera, the artist wouldn’t even consider Bavaria. What about Bavaria? What about Madagascar? It had to be the Holy Land.’
‘Mm. But the Holy Land makes them messianic.’
‘The Six Day War made them incredibly messianic. But I’m told the Yom Kippur War gave them back the old fear.’
‘For a while. We Jews did do our atonement in 1973. Then what did we get? Likud, in 1977. That’s the durably significant date. Messianism is back and will never go away. They’ll be needing divine intervention – because the Islamist rockets will soon become cruise missiles. And the Fertile Crescent isn’t going to suddenly get over being anti-Semitic, now is it. Not in this millennium.’
‘…What the hell is anti-Semitism?’
‘Come on, Mart, you’ve read the books. The last time I saw you you finished The Oldest Hatred and picked up The Longest Hatred in the same afternoon.’
‘But I still don’t get it. You say it’s a neurosis, Saul said it’s a psychosis. Tony Judt – have you read him?’ I didn’t add that Tony Judt had died just a couple of weeks earlier, here in Manhattan, aged sixty-two. ‘Judt was talking about anti-Semitism in Russia and Eastern Europe, and he said the causes need no analysis, because in that part of the world anti-Semitism is its own reward. Maybe that’s what I can’t grasp.’
‘That anti-Semitism is enjoyable?’
‘Yeah. Like self-righteousness. Look at people when they’re being self-righteous, look at their eyes. They fucking love it. It’s like cocaine. Anti-Semitism – mmmm.’
‘Same with messianism. For them it’s like a wonderful wank. As you’ll see.’
‘…And there’s something in the air of the Holy Land – it makes you fragile against illusion.’
‘When are you going?’
‘Late September. Just a family holiday…Your eyelashes, Hitch. They remind me of Jett Travolta’s. They’re about an inch long.’
‘I know. It’s just some fool of a side effect from the chemo…Well, take your notebook with you. I’ll want a full report.’
So we ate our dinner at the Waverly Inn,
