Hitch-22

suddenly while he was at public school (Repton), and Canon Fenton had remarried, in a reverse-Murdstone-ish kind of way, a woman who could not bear to be reminded of his former life or former wife. This had led to an estrangement from the children—James had an older brother and younger sister—and to their being brought up by a pair of maiden aunts in Wales. This outwardly unlucky experience had made him rather a genius at handling personal relations and improvising surrogate families. (The two aunts, for example, were named Eileen and Noel: rather than have to call them either thing, or to have to address them as “Aunt,” James hit on the idea of naming them “E” and “N,” which worked brilliantly. In later years, E went back to her prewar work as a teacher in Jerusalem and helped out at the Anglican school at St. George’s Cathedral where Edward Said had been a pupil. It used to satisfy me greatly when returning correspondents would tell me that they had “run into Aunt E at the American Colony Hotel.” Having a drink with her there myself one day, I heard her say wistfully that she wished she could have been called to the priesthood instead of being limited to being a glorified missionary. On principle I could not care less who took holy orders or who did not, but it did hit me with terrific force what a wonderful minister she would have made.)

This talent of James’s for hitting it off with people was immediately evident when we all moved into our “digs.” There were in theory four rooms, but one of them gave directly onto the kitchen and it was obvious that whoever slept there would be effectively living in a corridor and at the mercy of the requirements of everyone else. “I’ll take that one,” said James at once, as if he’d pre-emptively “bagged” the best quarters for himself. I remember thinking that there was a sort of quasi-Christianity in this cheerful self-sacrifice: a thought that James would often give me cause to have again. It was additionally decent of him in that he was the only one of us who didn’t at the time have a female companion. (Incidentally, Pettifer’s girlfriend and wife-to-be was called Sue Comely. Michael Prest’s was named Liz Horn. Mine was named Teresa Sweet. Later, James was to have a walk-out with a Valkyrie look-alike named Elizabeth Whipp, and it was he who first noticed when we were all together that the firm of Comely, Horn, Whipp, and Sweet would make quite a sensational brothel-management team.)

Apart from renewing the interest in poetry that I had been in danger of letting lapse because of my political obsessions, and apart from getting me to smoke the deadly brand of Players Number Six (the “tokens” of which he collected in the hope perhaps of one day buying a gramophone or an electric kettle) as well as to imbibe Teacher’s Scotch whisky, Fenton changed my life in two other ways. We were walking along Turl Street one day when he stopped to speak to a small, slightly pouting yet rather stern-looking young blond man, who had on his arm an even more blonde girl. The girl I slightly knew. Her name was Alexandra Wells, known throughout the university as the enticing “Gully,” and she was the stepdaughter of Sir A.J. Ayer, also known as “Freddie,” whose book Language, Truth and Logic had brought the work of the Viennese philosophers to England. A tireless and justly celebrated fornicator, Freddie was the patron of our Labour Club and one of the few senior academics who could be counted on to sign petitions from the insurgent Left. (He’s brilliantly caricatured as Sir Roy Vandervane in Kingsley Amis’s neglected masterpiece novel Girl, 20.) I chatted to Gully, for whom I harbored a keen secret desire—she was later to say to me, on the sole occasion when I have heard the words used literally: “not if you were the last man on earth”[23]—and who was the only young woman on campus who had dared to try the latest fashion for wearing “hot pants.” James briefly made the introduction to her escort, whose hand I no less briefly took. As we passed on, I asked: “Did he say his name was Amis?” “Yes,” came the response. “He’s called Martin Amis.” I inquired slightly indifferently if he was any relation to the famous comic novelist, who had notoriously signed a letter to the Times, along with Simon Raven and Robert Conquest and others, supporting the American war on Vietnam.

It sometimes makes me whistle to think about this near-miss. Martin had been born in the same year as Fenton and myself, but had arrived in Oxford a year later because of various disasters (later hilariously narrated in his memoir Experience) involving his poor schooling, his chaotic family, and his smoke- wreathed experiments with voyages of the imagination. So he was a year “below” me and—this is why he was lurking in “the Turl”—a member of Exeter College. Alma mater of Richard Burton and Tariq Ali as it may have been, this college was thought even by non-snobs to be a bit on the “minor” side: more for the boat club than the cognoscenti. Who knows how many blunders I might have made with Martin if we had chosen that as our moment of first acquaintance? At the very least I would probably have felt compelled to say something disobliging about Kingsley, and that might have been all that it took to cause a lifetime estrangement. At any rate the danger passed, and I was safely out of the university, having almost failed to get a degree of any kind when Martin stepped forward to get the best “First” in English of his year.

Then one day—I can be sure it was in the fall of 1969—Fenton proposed a day off and a day out. The adventurous plan was to board the train to London, take a taxi to Chancery Lane, have a decent lunch with some interesting people, and then see what opportunities presented themselves for the evening. I was agog, but apprehensive. How, first of all, was this to be financed? James assured me that if I was willing to do a little carrying, all would be well. My role as bearer involved the toting of a big bag of books. Once arrived at Paddington Station, we indulged in the luxury of a cab which let us off at a bookshop named Gaston’s, on Chancery Lane between Holborn and Fleet Street. There and with a practiced air James traded the books for crisp currency notes. While still an undergraduate he had already become a reviewer for London papers and had learned a cardinal principle of the reviewer’s trade—which was that Gaston’s would give fifty percent of the cover price of a new volume, always assuming it to be in good condition. I was lost in wonder, both at the sophistication of this, and at the largesse.

I had never seen or smelled Fleet Street or Bloomsbury before, and these totemic names took on life and shape as the luxurious day drew on and became a misty autumnal one. Lunch was with Anthony Thwaite, in a wine bar with sawdust on the floor and—to my fanciful thought—Dickensian and Johnsonian elements in its atmosphere. Thwaite, a diminutive figure with a big thatch of hair, was a poet who had formed part of the “Movement” that comprised such elevated names as Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest. He was also the literary editor of the New Statesman, which at that time was certainly the most celebrated of London’s intellectual weeklies. I considered myself to be miles to the “left” of it, of course, but still in awe of the review on which I had cut my teeth as a schoolboy, and on whose stairway one might have met Bertrand Russell, say, or George Bernard Shaw. In one room was an old hatstand draped with an ancient raincoat said to have belonged to H.G. Wells. The lore had it that if you donned this totemic Macintosh and ventured out in it, you would make a conquest of the very first woman you met. To be invited back to this famous office in Great Turnstile after lunch and to climb that stairway to Thwaite’s aerie was an uncovenanted bonus. To exit the building onto Lincoln’s Inn Fields clutching a couple of review copies of my own—“We might like you to take a look at these for us”: Surely there had been a misunderstanding?—was to feel that one had drunk far more at that lunch than one actually had.

I can’t be sure where we dined or where we slept that night, but I do remember taking James, by way of return as it were, to the Curzon cinema to see Costa-Gavras’s film Z. The effect of it on both of us was electric. I was trying to recruit James to the International Socialists at the time, and so when he murmured something about how eye-opening a movie it was, I readily and militantly challenged him with a “what are you doing about it?” that was, when I think about it, a slightly poor return for the marvelous day he had shown me. Quite taking me at my own face value, however (something that always makes me uneasy), he replied evenly enough: “Oh, I am going to do something about it.”

By the end of that year I had been published in the New Statesman with my review of Eric Hobsbawm’s book on labor militancy in the Victorian epoch (“Hitchens in the New Statesman? Hitchens on Eric Hobsbawm? Who is this callow youth?” I can still hear these questions) and had been invited to the Christmas cocktail party given in the magazine’s boardroom, where the cartoons and caricatures of Bloomsbury were on the very walls. There, I mentally bid farewell to Oxford and to the provinces in general. If ever anyone was “hooked,” it was me. The network of streets and lanes and squares roughly between Blackfriars Bridge and Ludgate Circus and Theobalds Road and Covent Garden had me in thrall. So they do still, in their way. This was the district that stretched from the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green to the British Museum Reading Room where the old boy had done his best work. Extending itself a bit to the north and colonizing Charlotte Street up to Fitzroy Square, it became the area where Anthony Powell had located some of his more louche scenes of pre- and postwar literary interpenetration. Looping around on itself and doubling back via Shaftesbury Avenue, the neighborhood might be said to “take in” Soho, with its little grid of streets and alleys, containing the offices of Private Eye and New Left Review, and then Gerrard Street, now “Chinatown,” in which Dr. Johnson’s “Club” of Burke, Gibbon,