Hitch-22

recollection as anything that happened to me yesterday. My younger brother, Peter—aged perhaps eight—has so strongly imbibed John Bunyan’s Puritan classic as almost to have memorized it. (The “slough of despond,” “the Giant Despair,” “Doubting Castle,” the fripperies of “Vanity’s fair,” “Oh death, where is thy sting?” Can you remember when all these used to be part of the equipment of everybody literate in English? They are as real to my brother and to me as the shaggy, wild ponies on the nearby moors.) But, coming to the very decisive page that should show Apollyon in all his horrid magnificence, Peter finds that the publishers have bowdlerized the text, and withheld this famous illustration from the version made available to the under-tens. He is not to be allowed to look The Evil One in the face.

This is one of those moments that, I choose to think, shows the Hitchens family at its best. Under an absolutely unremitting pressure from Peter, my father writes to the local library, to the bookshop, and eventually to the publishers themselves. No objection they can make is met by anything but scornful impatience; with a whim of steel my younger brother insists that if there is such an image, then he was not born to be shielded from it. I may have imagined this, but I am not certain that some harassed representative of the publisher does not actually call at our modest terrace house on the edge of Dartmoor, perhaps to confirm that this turbulent boy is really dictating such stuff to Commander Hitchens rather than acting as—say—the innocent front kid in some devil-worshipping or Straw Dogs coven.

I know that I mocked and teased Peter on the subject, because I was much too prone to tease him in any case, but the day came when the unabridged version arrived, and we could both solemnly turn—with parental supervision, of course, but in our own minds to protect our parents from any shock or trauma—to the color plate from hell. It was one of those pull-out pages that needs to be unfolded from the volume itself, in a three-stage concertina. And it was anticlimax defined. For one thing—Powell’s summary above may have prepared you for this —it was absurdly overdone. A lizard-man or snake-man might have been represented creepily enough, but this non-artist had hugely overdone the number of possible mutations of leg, wing, and pinion and also given Apollyon a blazing furnace for a belly. The demon’s wicked and gloating expression, looked at from one angle, was merely silly and bilious. I don’t remember what the reaction of Yvonne and the Commander and Peter was to this long-awaited appointment with the forces of darkness, but on me it had the effect of reinforcing the growing opinion that all such images were strictly man-made, and indeed mainly designed like much of religion for the ignoble purpose of scaring children.

That’s to one side. What I want to set down is the admiration I felt for Peter in taking things to their uttermost. He was already quite decided that he did not need any protection from unpleasantness, or from reality, and so it was immaterial that this particular exposure was to the unreal. “Facing it, Captain McWhirr,” as Conrad puts it in his Typhoon. “Always facing it. That’s the way to get through.” To hand is a letter from Yvonne’s dear friend Rosemary, in which she writes to me about the prep school Peter and I both attended and the gigantic and rather questionable chap who ran it:

At Mount House Peter was called before Mr. Wortham for some misdemeanour and said to him: “You may be in command now but you will never quell the fires within me.” (You probably know this tale.) We have all dined out on it for years… Whenever I see or hear him on TV or radio I am aware that that passionate little boy was the father of the man.

I did not in fact know “this tale,” but I am certainly impressed by it because it can only have been conveyed by the mountainous Mr. Wortham himself, who must have been sufficiently disconcerted by Peter’s mutinous backchat to report it to my parents. My younger brother has always since shown great steadiness under fire and in a variety of trying and testing circumstances at that, and it rather pleases me that his taunting enemies—just like the low, cheap crowd that would form around any conspicuous boy in the schoolyard—choose to mock him for being odd. He puts up with this handsomely enough, and he has lived to celebrate the total eclipse of a few politicians of the sad, ingratiating, crowd-pleasing sort, who were once nominated for certain glory by a mediocre press corps, yet had the air let out of them by Peter’s questioning in public and his contempt in print. I become rather wistful when I reflect that this demonstration of Hitchensian moral courage has come at the price of a brother who isn’t specially moved by our non-English ethnic heritage, and who is to outward appearances almost tragically right- wing.[86]

In Peter’s most recent book, The Broken Compass, which contains several assertions and affirmations that make me desire to be wearing a necklace of the purest garlic even while reading them, there is a highly thoughtful and well-written passage on how it comes about that people do, in fact, undergo significant changes of mind. Given the absolute certainty that this process will be undergone by any serious person at least once, it is rather surprising to find how much is made out of it, and how many critics try to confect a mystery where none exists. Illustrating the same point in a different way, Peter takes the more subtle tack of showing how certain individuals will in fact alter their opinions, while often pretending to themselves and others for quite a long time that they have not “really” done so.

Analyzing the evolution of those, some of whom like myself were willing to make alliances of all kinds against Al Quaeda and its allies, he writes scornfully and—I must say—unsettlingly:

This is a very interesting halting place, as well as a comfortable one. For the habitual Leftist, it has the virtue of making him look as if he can change his mind, even when he has not really done so. It licenses him to be strongly anti-clerical and anti-religious, but in a way that Christian conservatives can tolerate.

The chapter is called “A Comfortable Stop on the Road to Damascus.” The biblical cliche may seem inescapable but it actually retards understanding. There are people who attempt to demonstrate breadth of mind while only trying to have things both ways. (“Jews for Jesus” might be an example, or those “reform” Communists who tried and failed to cook a dish of “fried snowballs.”) I once interviewed one of the original Stalinists-turned- dissident, the Yugoslav Milovan Djilas, who, sitting in his tiny Belgrade apartment, said that he had come to admire the work of Friedrich August von Hayek, adding hastily that he did not really agree with him about property rights: a prince-free reading of Hamlet if ever I struck one. However the whole point of the Damascus legend is that it refuses the very idea of the mind’s evolution, replacing it with the deranged substitute of instant divine revelation.

We are forcibly made familiar, usually from febrile tenth-hand accounts of religious visionaries and other probable epileptics and schizophrenics, of those blinding and indeed Damascene moments (or moments of un- blindness when scales supposedly fall from the eyes) that constitute such revelation. Yet one suspects, as with Archimedes and his eureka, that Pasteur was right and that in the case of sound minds at any rate, great apparent coincidences only occur to the intellect that has rehearsed and prepared for them. It may be the same with lesser convictions and allegiances. I once spoke with a hardened senior member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, who was in the room with his leader David O’Connell when the news came that one of their bombs had “successfully” gone off. Among the casualties was a young woman who was pregnant. But it turned out that she was also Protestant. “Well, that’s two for one, then,” remarked O’Connell, light-heartedly clearing the air. In that instant, his deputy says, he himself internally defected from the IRA and began the second career as an informer for the British which would wreak the most terrible revenge on his former “associates.” But I believe that he had been getting ever more sickened as time went by, and that there came a “moment” that seemed dramatic and was certainly memorably disgusting, when any extra morsel would have been too much for him. (There is also such a thing as ex post facto rationalization, especially in the case of people who have repented of terrible crimes.) It could be as true to say, as some of my tutors in Oxford philosophy used to seem to argue, that it is your mind that changes you.

The history of the twentieth-century Left is replete with such episodes, very often and very interestingly involving moments when somebody, hearing a statement of apparent agreement, experiences a violent sense of repulsion. The brilliant Austrian Marxist Ernst Fischer, having publicly defended the Hitler-Stalin pact as a tactical imperative, had his composure destroyed not long afterward when some dumkopf Communist told him excitedly: “Have you heard the news? We’ve taken Paris!” The moron was referring to the march of the Wehrmacht up the Champs-Elysees. Fischer wanted to say that this was not at all what he had intended, but then, perhaps it had been… During the Moscow show-trials, Whittaker Chambers heard Alger Hiss say approvingly that “Old Joe Stalin certainly knows how to play for keeps,” and as an old Bolshevik he found himself