and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options. The general atmosphere of intellectual promiscuity and “Third World” romanticism didn’t grab us all that hard, either. If there were any two pseudo- intellectuals who really defined moral silliness in that period, they were Herbert Marcuse and R.D. Laing. The first had come up with the lazy concept of “repressive tolerance” to explain how liberalism was just another mask for tyranny, and the second was a would-be shrink who believed schizophrenia to be, rather than a nightmarish yet treatable malady, a social “construct” imposed by the ideology of the family. It so happened that the best critiques of both these frauds (as well as a stringent essay against the marijuana “culture” titled “Flowers of Decay”) had been written for the annual Socialist Register by my new comrade Peter Sedgwick, who was a qualified expert in mental health as well as in the difference between frantic Frankfurtian illusion and stubborn material reality. So how lucky I was to have been initiated, if that’s the word I want, by someone who was a trained and hardened skeptic about the worst of the Left as well as an advocate for the best of it.[13]
Three major names survive for me from this period (when, so solemnly and suddenly history-conscious, I had not yet ceased to be a teenager). The first is that of Jacek Kuron, who with his colleague Karel Modzelewski had newly written a “socialist manifesto” from within the forbidding walls of a prison in Poland. These two hardy intellectuals had been members of a “Trotskyist” group before being abruptly jailed for their work, and it was one of my jobs to see that their pamphlet got a wide circulation, and that “our” version of anti-Communism was heard as loudly as the commonplace “Cold War” variety. The Polish workers, said this argument, should understand that the Communist Party was their exploiter and not their representative. Did we know that in our tiny way we were assisting at the inception of Polish Solidarnosc?
The second name is that of C.L.R. James, one of the moral titans of twentieth-century dissent. In the 1930s he had managed to combine two very attractive positions. He was the main spokesman for the independence of his native Trinidad and the chief cricket correspondent of the Guardian. His book on the latter subject, Beyond a Boundary, elucidates this recondite sport for the uninitiated and also suggests that in several ways it is not really a “sport” at all, but more of a classical art form that prepares young men for social grace as well as for chivalric heroism. James—whose early short stories, collected as Minty Alley, were plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul—managed to do without Naipaul’s combination of rancor and racial/ethnic resentment. He was an internationalist to his core. His monumental work is Black Jacobins, a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slave insurrection in Haiti. This rebellion, taking the slogans of the French Revolution to be universal, ran up against the disagreeable fact that the France of Bonaparte regarded the noble words of 1789 as being, at best, for whites only. James’s book—exactly the sort of history that was left out of the school and university syllabus—had a lasting effect on me. So did its author, when I helped arrange a meeting for him at Ruskin College, Oxford, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He chose to speak largely about Vietnam, putting it squarely in the context of imperialism and the resistance to it, and his wonderfully sonorous voice was as enthralling to me as his very striking carriage and appearance. He was getting on by then, but the nimbus of white hair only accentuated his hollow- cheeked, almost anthracite face. One had heard of his legendary success with women (all of it gallant and consensual, unlike that of some other masters of the platform) but for me a little crackle of current was provided by the reflection that here stood a man who had, in real time, publicly broken with Stalin and associated with Trotsky, actively taken part in an anti-colonial revolution, and been present (before being hastily deported) in the very early stirrings of the American civil rights movement.
Another important thing about “CLR,” as he was known in our little movement, was his disdainful opposition to any Third World fetishism or half-baked negritude. He had schooled himself in classical literature and regarded the canon of English as something with which every literate person of any culture should become acquainted. He had a particular love for Thackeray, and it was said that he could recite chapters of Vanity Fair by heart. This commitment was important then and was to become much more so as the 1960s fashion turned against “Eurocentrism.”[14]
The third name from the esoteric historical and cultural dimension with which I was becoming so enamored was that of Victor Serge. This Belgian-born proletarian rebel had graduated from embroilment in the politics of Barcelona and harsh experience of the inside of many European jails (episodes which were to help him produce two excellent books in the shape of Birth of Our Power and Men in Prison) to direct participation in the upheavals of the First World War and the Bolshevik seizure of power. During his work with the Third International he had the opportunity to see the monstrosity of Stalinism in detail, and as it was actually taking shape. It seems possible that he was the first person to use the word “totalitarianism”: in any event he was early in apprehending the whole implication of the concept. He had to get out of the Soviet Union in a big hurry, having backed the Left Opposition, and might well have died in the Gulag if it had not been for the intercession of a few of those European intellectuals who had not capitulated to the Red Tsar. His precious papers were all stolen from him by the secret police at the frontier; he was able to republish his poems from memory, and that capacious memory, too, was strong enough to enable him to produce a novel— The Case of Comrade Tulayev—which many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials and the Great Terror. Ending up in exile in Mexico like some others who had survived what we Luxemburgists and Trotskyists used to call “the midnight of the century”—the dire moment of explicit collusion between Stalin and Hitler—Serge died there but not before producing one of the finest autobiographies of that same century: Memoirs of a Revolutionary. As it happened, none other than Peter Sedgwick had, when I met him, just edited and introduced a fine edition of this book for Oxford University Press. My headmaster Alan Barker had produced a potted history of the American Civil War, and my English master Colin Wilcockson had edited Langland and Piers Plowman, and in my budding-bibliophile way I did possess signed copies of these volumes, but I’d never before had a friend who was in so many ways an actual author and critic, and of the books I’ve lost in the various moves and mess-ups of my life the one I regret most keenly is the one that Peter Sedgwick gave me. I shall not forget the inscription though. “To Chris,” it said, “in friendship and fraternity.”
This was my official induction into the comradely manners and addresses of the Left, but it also presented a problem which I didn’t particularly like to “raise”—as we invariably said when mounting an objection. The awkward fact was: I simply couldn’t bear or stand to be called “Chris.”
Chris or Christopher?
Perhaps I should add that when Christopher Hitchens was still a humble Chris, he and I were comrades in the same far-left political outfit. But he has gone on to higher things, discovering in the process a degree of political maturity as a naturalized citizen of Babylon, whereas I have remained stuck in the same old political groove, a case of arrested development if ever there was one.
—Terry Eagleton, trying to be funny while describing himself accurately in Reason, Faith and Revolution [2009] THERE WAS A little more to this dislike, of having my name circumcised or otherwise amputated, than may at first appear. “Chris,” it seemed to me, was too matey and pseudo-friendly as an abbreviation, even had it gone with another kind of surname. Chris Price, an old comrade of mine and a Labour member of Parliament, almost preferred it. But then his second name began with a “P.” Whereas mine began with an “H,” and the next thing after “Chris Hitchens”—itself a dreary sound—would be, given this incentive to ditch the aspirate, “Chris ’itchens.” All other aesthetic considerations to one side, I knew that this would be more than Yvonne could bear. (What she wanted was to see me represent Balliol on the University Challenge team, where I did actually make my first-ever television appearance. I can still remember the name of the captain of St. David’s, Lampeter, a theological college in North Wales for heaven’s sake, which trounced us in the very first round and demolished the complacent Balliol myth of “effortless superiority.” He was called Jim Melican.) My mother had not nurtured her firstborn son in order to hear him addressed as if he were a
