Hitch-22

instead of beer. After I’d made some successful sally or other in a Union debate, a group of these closed in on me as the proceedings were ending and more or less challenged me to come and have a cocktail. I couldn’t resist: anyway I didn’t want to. Here, I thought, might be the entree to that more gorgeous and seductive Oxford of which I’d read so much and (thus far) experienced so little.

Thereby, and perhaps not quite unlike poor, dowdy Charles Ryder in Waugh’s masterpiece, I found myself from time to time transported into the world of Christ Church and the Gridiron Club and invited to dine in restaurants which featured tasseled menus and wine lists. This was wholly new to me and potentially very embarrassing, too, since I had virtually no money. (The Commander, when I turned eighteen, had taken me to the bank, opened an account in my name with fifty pounds in it and told me, in effect, that that was my lot.) However, without a word actually being spoken, it was subtly conveyed to me by my new friends that I wasn’t expected to reciprocate. I was, instead, expected to sing for my supper. This could have been corrupting, but I justified it to myself by saying that I was learning from, and perhaps even teaching, the enemy camp. In the late Sixties, it wasn’t only we who thought there might be a revolution round the corner. Quite a good portion of the Establishment was fairly rattled and apprehensive also, and the Tory press was full of material which—because it tended to exaggerate our influence and numbers—made those of us on the hard Left feel that perhaps we weren’t wasting our time. (The university authorities at one time seriously considered paving over the cobblestones in some of Oxford’s older streets, lest they be dug up and employed as missiles as had occurred in Paris.)

In case I may seem too opportunistic, let me say that I genuinely came to like some of these gilded and witty reactionaries. One of them, the late David Levy, later quite a celebrated conservative intellectual, was certainly the first protofascist I had ever met, and I would often almost literally pinch myself as he burbled gaily on about Charles Maurras and Action Francaise, about the beauties of Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain, and sang the words of the Mussolini anthem “Giovinezza.” “Gaily” might chance to be the apt expression here, because there was a good deal of camp among these young men, and a certain amount of active bisexuality—though I don’t think David himself ever even looked at a woman. It makes me blush a bit to say so, but I was still prized for my looks in those days and, from experience at my own much less glamorous boarding school, could read the signs and knew the ropes. Every now and then, even though I was by then fixed on the pursuit of young women, a mild and mildly enjoyable relapse would occur and I suppose that I can “claim” this, if that’s the right word, of two young men who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

For this very reason I can’t really give any more names, but one oblique consequence was that I got myself invited to meet John Sparrow at All Souls. How to describe “The Warden,” as he was universally known? And how to describe his college, a florid antique shop that admitted no students and guarded only the exalted privileges of its “fellows”: a den of iniquity to every egalitarian and a place where silver candelabras and goblets adorned a nightly debauch of venison and port. Or so the tales ran. It was in this thick, rich atmosphere that the Munich agreement had partly been hatched: there was a whole book with the simple, damning title All Souls and Appeasement. I absolutely could not wait to see the place for myself.

It was by no means a disappointment. Sparrow was hosting a small lunch—“luncheon” might have been more the mot juste—and as he took my hand with both of his he summoned a butler named Lane to inquire what I might desire by way of a drink. I had never seen a butler before, and this one had the same name as Algy’s manservant in The Importance of Being Earnest. I had barely had time to adjust myself when lunch began and I was overwhelmed by the variety and deliciousness of the food and wine, and the splendor of the silver and glass. Sparrow exerted himself to live up to everything one had ever heard about him. He declared that homosexuality ought to be punishable—“gravely punishable,” as he put it with purring relish—even though he hoped to remain a member of a sophisticated minority that would be exempt from this very code. Since the law had only recently been changed, I recall myself guessing that there was an element of masochistic nostalgia in this. Sparrow had evidently done some hard thinking about buggery. He had contributed to the last great argument about literary censorship in England, arguing that in a very rugged passage of Lady Chatterley’s Lover D.H. Lawrence had plainly intended to suggest that the gamekeeper had sodomized his boss’s wife. (I must say that I agree with this analysis, though what struck me most about the novel when I last read it was the way in which gruff Nottinghamshire miners say “aks” for “ask,” in just the same manner that now marks off the speech of the black American ghetto. Some work here surely for a philologist, but not a project that would have especially amused Sparrow.)

Like Lord Marchmain in Brideshead, Sparrow was “everything that the Socialists would have me be.” His reactionary style was almost, if not in fact, a self-parody. He had engaged a photographer to walk around Oxford and take discreet photographs, not of the most beautiful and epicene young men, but of the most scrofulous and surly ones. This might have betrayed an interest in “rough trade” and was perhaps not unconnected to it, but when he showed me the resulting album (which contained snatched studies of quite a few of my more disaffected friends), he accompanied my turning of the pages with a reading of Walter Pater on the ephemerality and fragility of youth. I was by then a dinner guest, and even an after-dinner guest over the candles and decanters as they reflected each other in the high polish of the table. One evening I was placed next to that great Cornish queen A.L. Rowse, who had only recently unburdened himself of a new gay theory of the origin and dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but mainly wanted to tell me what I already knew, that Hitchens was a Cornish name, and positively demanded to be told whether the Mrs. Hitchens who kept sending him such fervent and unwanted love letters was by any chance my mother. He was so lost in conceit that he did not, I remember thinking, completely trust my denial.

For all who try to lead a double life there will eventually be “a small but interesting revenge” as James Fenton later phrased it to me. Mine came when I was addressing a crowd of infuriated students from the steps of the Clarendon Building and denouncing some official infraction of our rights to free sex and free association and free speech. Over the heads of the audience, as I was hitting my peroration, I saw the silvered and saturnine features of “The Warden,” who must by then have been the most execrated figure on the Oxford Left. A twitch at the corner of his lip betrayed his design, which I detected almost at the same instant. Making a discreet but determined path through the astonished protestors, he arrived just as I was concluding and said: “My dear Christopher, I am so sorry to have missed most of your speech. I have no doubt it was admirable. But I do hope you haven’t forgotten that you promised to look in after dinner tonight.” It was a moment of cock-crow. I could have pretended not to understand, but I replied instead that I was looking forward to it and—as he glided away with a sleek air of “game, set, and match” clinging to him—faced the slightly baffled faces of my comrades. I could have taken refuge in some “know your enemy” formulation, but something in me said that this would be ignoble. I didn’t want a one-dimensional politicized life.

I sympathized, all the same, with those who were effectively forced to live one. Again to cite James Fenton, who first pointed it out to me, you were compelled to notice something different about the American students. As the rest of us poured out of “hall” after dinner and had a smoke and a drink in the quad, they tended to draw aside and form a huddle, as if hashing over some private matter or specific grief. We all knew what this was. Having been lucky enough to become Rhodes Scholars or in other ways be chosen as envoys of their country, they found themselves overseas at a time when the United States was conducting an imperialist war in Indochina and a holding action against the insistent demands of its own long-oppressed black minority at home. Those things would have been bad enough by themselves, but in addition it was entirely possible that these young Americans could be compelled to take part in a war they mostly regarded as criminal. Hence those tight little circles on the lawn as the Oxford dusk came on: Should they defy the draft and become outlaws, with the choice of prison or exile, or submit and become obedient and get on with their careers? It’s been often said since that it was only the military draft that stoked anti-war feeling among the relatively privileged American students, and that once the system of conscription was abolished, the feeling of outrage about Vietnam was diminished in proportion. I was there and I remember clearly, and I feel it a point of honor to give the lie to this sneer. The young Americans I knew were not afraid of being killed, or rather, they were very much more afraid that they would be forced to kill.[18]

I remember the address—46 Leckford Road—where many of them shared a house. Frank Aller, for example, a brilliant and conscience-ridden young man, eventually took his own life because he could not bear the conflict between his love of his country and his hatred of the war. Another young man lodging at the same address was Bill Clinton. I don’t recollect him so well though my friend and contemporary Martin Walker, later to be one of Clinton’s best biographers, swears that he remembers us being in the same room. The occasion was to become a famous one, since it was the very time when the habitual and professional liar Clinton later claimed that he “didn’t inhale.”