‘The time has come for you to change your ways,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’
‘What ways? This book’s good, you know, thoughtful, well written. But there’s no index. If it did have an index, one entry would go Hitchens, Christopher, page 204.’
She asked for the bill and said, ‘Why? What’s Hitch up to in France and the Nazis?’
‘It’s weird. He’s singled out for praise by an inhabitant of present-day Vichy, Robert Faurisson. The nation’s premier negationist – Holocaust denier.*11 He met Hitch at some dinner and says he admires his stuff. Probably just fancied him – fell for the velvet voice and the Oxford charm…Uh, is that what you mean, Elena? Has the time come to stop reading books like France and the Nazis?’
‘No, that’s not what I mean. I mean the thing in your other hand. The thing with smoke coming out of it…Do you want to stop?’
Years ago Christopher said to him, ‘I don’t want to be a non-smoker.’ And Martin said, ‘I couldn’t agree more’ or ‘Exactly’ or even ‘Hear hear’ (or even ‘Hear him, hear him!’). Their attitude to nicotine – and to benzene, formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, and all the other ingredients – seemed to be incurably adolescent.*12 They just couldn’t connect it to life and death.
‘You had one after breakfast,’ said Elena. ‘You had two after breakfast.’
‘Ah, but I was smoking for a worthy cause.’ He had managed to put it about that he needed a salutary cigarette or two after breakfast. To bring on the thing that Larkin called the daily ‘contact with nature’. With what nature? Human nature? Animal nature? ‘I was smoking in the furtherance of a noble dream.’
‘And how did it go?’
‘A disappointment. It was a crap shit, Elena, between you and me.’
‘What are you smoking for now?’
‘Uh, to steady my nerves. There’s your speech on Friday. And the Iraq War on Saturday. I’ll go on smoking for the duration, then quit when it’s over.’
‘I could be out of there in less than a month.’
‘We, you mean we. I’m going in there too.’
‘Yes, but I’m the one with all the power. I’m so powerful – why would I even bother to be anti-French?’
‘And that’s why you’re so loathed. Hating you was government policy in postwar France. And you know who made hating you respectable? Sartre. Terrible guy.’ In fact Martin had a soft spot for old Jean-Paul. Advised not very late in life that unless he gave up smoking he faced imminent quadriplegia, Sartre said he would need a while ‘to think it over’. ‘Him and Simone. They made hating you chic.’
‘Look,’ she said and nodded towards an owlish gentleman at the facing table, who was bent over a book (by Jean-François Revel) entitled L’obsession anti-américaine.
‘Well there you are. Come on. You’ve got Le Monde in ten minutes.’
The two of them stood and gathered their things. He said,
‘An American juive. Who comes over here and wins all their literary prizes…’
‘Not all their literary prizes. Only one.’
—————
He didn’t wake up happy in St-Malo – but very generally he resumed being happy in St-Malo. Why? He thought it might be the fact that he was never alone.
Very close to a hundred per cent of his working life was spent in unrelieved solitude: the room, the chair, the flat surface, the page. All day, every day (and especially Christmas Day)…And what was it he did for a living, in that annex at the back of the garden in NW1? A disembodied observer might conclude, after an hour or so, that all he did for a living was smoke. Oh yeah, and pick his nose and scratch his backside and stare into space. What he did was becoming more and more mysterious to him; and so was solitude. Larkin again (‘Vers de Société’):
Only the young can be alone freely.
The time is shorter now for company,
And sitting by a lamp more often brings
Not peace, but other things.
And for Martin this was existential. If he couldn’t be alone, if he couldn’t be alone freely…What was writing? Writing was a soliloquy: solus ‘alone’ + loqui ‘speak’. So what would happen if he couldn’t be alone?
‘Let’s go.’ She shouldered her bag. ‘Okay. Stop smoking. Stop reading so much about massacres. And stop brooding about Larkin and that hellhag Phoebe.’
‘Will do. Uh, remind me, Pulc,’ he said as he rose. ‘Why are we invading Iraq? I really can’t remember.’
‘Uh, weapons of mass destruction.’
‘Ah yes. Well we know for sure that Iraq hasn’t got any – otherwise we wouldn’t be invading it. WMDs make you unassailable…I suspect Bush is doing it just to get a second term. Americans never fail to reelect a president at war…You don’t have raison, Elena. And guess what a majority of your compatriots take to be their casus belli. I saw a poll. They think it’s vengeance.’
‘Vengeance for what?’
‘No one who knows anything about it thinks so. But most Americans believe it’s retaliation. Invading Iraq constitutes rightful payback for September 11.’
As it turned out, the levelling of the Twin Towers – together with the mauling of the Pentagon – did find a place in the strained rationale for the war in Iraq: raisons d’état demanded it, to assert American resolve and credibility. After September, Kissinger reportedly told George W. Bush in 2002, ‘Afghanistan is not enough’; and a second Islamic nation would have to be made to yield.
You’d have thought that March 2003 was perhaps rather late for a wild overreaction to September 2001. Most of us got our wild overractions to September 2001 out of the way in September 2001. And as mere civilians we did it with no investment of blood or treasure; we did it in seclusion, in the privacy of our hearts and minds.
*1 Although etymology is a notoriously poor guide to meaning, it makes its contribution to the weight, feel, and flavour of a word. ‘Cute’ is a
