would be to end my career as the random victim of a ricochet. Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semirecumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. Graham Greene writes somewhere about John Buchan that his thrillers—The Thirty-Nine Steps being a salient example—achieve some of their effect by the imminence of death in otherwise normal situations, such as right beside the railings of Hyde Park. I wasn’t exactly in Hyde Park, but I was still in my own country and the telephone boxes were red and the police uniforms were blue, and the awareness that the distinction between “over here” and “over there,” or between “home” and “abroad” is often a false one has never left me.
So, here was how to get through the boring and constipated Seventies. First, adopt the profession of journalism that allowed one to become a version of John Bunyan’s “Mr. Facing-Both-Ways.” (Northern Ireland was near-perfect for polishing up this act, since in one day one might visit a Republican bar and a Unionist saloon before rounding off the night at an off-the-record dinner with a British intelligence officer.) Second, keep traveling to exotic places that seemed to preserve at least some of the waning promise of 1968. Third, maintain the double life in London as well. I would do my day jobs at various mainstream papers and magazines and TV stations, where my title was “Christopher Hitchens,” and then sneak down to the East End where I was variously features editor of Socialist Worker and book-review editor of the theoretical monthly International Socialism. (On the masthead of the latter, my name stubbornly continued to appear as “Chris,” whereas at the New Statesman I would always insist on it being rendered full-out, even though on the cover this sometimes meant that it was too long to be featured where I most wanted it.) Of the “agitational” rags with which I have been involved, Socialist Worker was one of the best. I managed to conscript James Fenton as its film critic; an achievement which turned out a bit too rich for the digestive system of some of the sterner comrades. He contributed an almost lyrically Marxist notice of Pontecorvo’s slave-revolt movie Queimada before attracting annoyed letters for his slightly camp praise of a then-recent “Carry On” production. Working to improve these dour pages brought me into proper contact with Paul Foot, the scion of one of England’s truly great radical families and perhaps the person with whom it was hardest to identify the difference between the way he thought and felt and the principled manner in which he lived and behaved. (When he later became gravely ill and was asked if he would like his hospital bed moved into a private room, he was incapable of speech but fully able to make an easy-to-recognize digital gesture.) He was somewhat older than me, but his reaction to any injustice was as outraged and appalled as that of any young person who has just discovered that life is unfair.[28] By this I do not at all want to make him sound naive: I resolved to try and resist in my own life the jaded reaction that makes one coarsened to the ugly habits of power. There were some giants on the Left in those days.
It was becoming reasonably obvious, however, that I wasn’t going to be one of them. I knew that with half of myself I was supposed to be building up the Labour movement and then with another half of myself subverting and infiltrating it from the ultra-Left, but then I came across that fatal phrase of Oscar Wilde’s that says the problem with socialism is that it wastes too many evenings on “meetings.” Boredom has always been my besetting vice in any case. Then, I still wanted some sort of a good time and that definition had to include a variety of acquaintances and a decent if not sumptuous menu. The Central line on the Underground could make the journey from the proletarian East End to the Oxford Circus/Regent Street quarter very smooth: I remember dashing from the grimy offices of the Worker to a job interview in the West End where I (rashly but successfully) tried to sell a freshly printed copy to John Birt, future boss of the BBC, member of the House of Lords, and character in the play and movie Frost-Nixon. (He hired me anyway.) The pages of the satirical review Private Eye record the early stages of this mutation. Early entries have me as “handsome Christopher ‘Robin’ Hitchens,” yet as the Seventies go by, these soon give way to another staple reference, this time to the “chubby Trotskyist defector.” Such photographs as survive tend to confirm the same story.
I mentioned that Fenton had introduced me at Oxford to some of the charms of alcohol and tobacco. This is to give you NO IDEA of how much I improved upon his initiation ceremonies. I dare say this might have happened to me anyway, but the discovery that so much of London journalistic life took place in pubs and bars, and that anything absorbed there could be charged to an expense account, caused me to resemble the cat Webster in the imperishable story by P.G. Wodehouse:
Webster sat crouched upon the floor beside the widening pool of whisky. But it was not horror and disgust that had caused him to crouch. He was crouched because, crouching, he could get nearer to the stuff and obtain crisper action. His tongue was moving in and out like a piston… And Webster winked, too—a wholehearted, roguish wink that said, as plainly as if he had spoken the words:
“How long has this been going on?”
Then with a slight hiccough he turned back to the task of getting his quick before it soaked into the floor.
I soon made that fine cat look like the mere beginner that it was. The Commander used to drink too much, and Yvonne was seldom without a lit cigarette (“I lit another cigarette,” says John Self in Martin Amis’s Money, adding “Unless I specifically inform you to the contrary, I am always lighting another cigarette.”) As a boy I had disliked the smell of both habits, which I suppose adds to the strong case that genetic predisposition plays a role in these addictions. But my tolerance for alcohol was very much greater than my father’s had been, greater indeed than anyone I seemed to run into. It wasn’t all that easy to get a reputation for boozing when you worked in and around old Fleet Street, where the hardened hands would spill more just getting the stuff to their lips than most people imbibe in a week, but I managed it. I still have somewhere the memo from Bill Cater at the accounts office of Harry Evans’s Sunday Times, for whom I had done a story that eventually led to the imprisonment of a corrupt Labour mayor. “I’ve passed your Dundee expenses,” he wrote, “but I couldn’t help noticing that almost half the bills were for cocktails. I don’t think any newspaper is entitled to this kind of loyalty.”
A figure from this period may illustrate how nearly I might have run completely to seed. Since redeemed from an unjust obscurity by Francis Wheen’s wonderful biography, Tom Driberg in the last years of his life was still a true legend on the journalistic and cultural Left. In youth, he had been an original member of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead set, while also maintaining good relations with the more radical forces clustered around W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He had, indeed, given the young Auden his first copy of The Waste Land, and joined him in reading it aloud. Adopted by Edith Sitwell as the coming poet of her own generation, nominated by Aleister Crowley as the successor to his own Satanic role as “The Beast 666,” friendly if not indeed intimate with Guy Burgess, the most calcified degenerate of those who had deserted British Intelligence for the embrace of Moscow and the KGB, Tom in his amoral and aloof elegance breathed all of the dubious enchantments of the 1930s and was redolent, too, of all the byways of Bohemia. I knew him by reputation as a leading member of the Left faction of the Labour Party in Parliament, and as the author of some sparkling collections of journalism. (Reporting from Vietnam in 1945, he may have been the first person to assert the extreme unwisdom of trying to restore French colonialism with British troops.) Anyway, he was sometimes invited to contribute the “Londoner’s Diary” to the New Statesman, and one week issued an appeal to readers to help him complete an indecent limerick the first line of which ran: “There once was a man of Stoke Poges.” This highly respectable town in Buckinghamshire seemed to cry out for the rhyme “poke Doges,” which in turn meant that the remainder of the limerick would have to be Venetian in flavor.
Fenton and I, assisted by our dear friend Anthony Holden, accepted the challenge and were duly invited to a lunch by old Tom held at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, above which Karl Marx had once kept his squalid lodgings. How we completed the task I don’t entirely remember (“entirely resolved to poke Doges. So this elderly menace / Took steamship to Venice…” But what was the last line?). At all events, by the time the restaurant had finally insisted on throwing us out—this in the days when the pubs in London were not allowed to stay open in the afternoon—Tom simply took me down the street and up a flight of dingy stairs and made me a member of the infamous “Colony Room Club,” an off-hours drinking establishment run by a tyrannical
