Hitch-22

1

Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock.”

2

The feminist school has often looked in a manner of marked disapproval at her husband, Ted Hughes. I find it difficult to imagine him actually maltreating Sylvia physically, but there’s no doubt that he could be quite stupendously wanting in sensitivity. I once went for some drinks with him at the apartment of my friend and editor Ben Sonnenberg, who was by then almost completely immobilized by multiple sclerosis. Hughes droned on for an agonizingly long time about the powers of a faith-healer in the (perhaps somewhat manic-depressive) Devonshire hamlet where he lived. This shaman, it seemed, was beyond praise for his ability with crippled people. On and on went the encomium. I could not meet Ben’s eye but from his wheelchair he eventually asked with commendable lightness: “How is he with sufferers from MS?” “Oh, not bad at all,” replied Hughes, before blithely resuming with an account of how this quack could cure disabled farm-animals as well.

3

At this diner we were served by a pimply and stringy-haired youth of appallingly dank demeanor. Bringing back Bill’s credit card he remarked that it bore a name that was almost the same as that of a famous writer. Bill said nothing. Tonelessly, the youth went on: “He’s called William Stryon.” I left this up to Bill, who again held off until the kid matter-of-factly said, “Anyway, that guy’s book saved my life.” At this point Styron invited him to sit down, and he was eventually persuaded that he was at the same table as the author of Darkness Visible. It was like a transformation scene: he told us brokenly of how he’d sought and found the needful help. “Does this happen to you a lot?” I later asked Styron. “Oh, all the time. I even get the police calling up to ask if I’ll come on the line and talk to the man who’s threatening to jump.”

4

Strangely, though, the matter of his age was also the only thing in which I ever caught him out in a petty dishonesty. He used to tell us that he had been born in 1912. My brother, Peter, and I were both amateur numismatists in boyhood, and these were the days when hoop-sized pennies from the Victorian and Edwardian era could still turn up in your small change. If we found a 1912 coin, we would show him, and then proudly hoard and sometimes even mount and display it. It was somehow deflating to discover—as he must have known we would—that he had been born in 1909. I still cannot be sure why he practiced this uncharacteristic deception: conceivably to attenuate the difference in years between himself and Yvonne. But she could not possibly have been fooled, as his sons pointlessly were.

5

The durability of this “Upstairs, Downstairs” ethos is remarkable in point of both time and place. I was to become very close to Jessica Mitford, who was almost a sorceress in her ability to use her upper-class skills for American leftist purposes. Told once by a white Southerner at a cocktail party that “it don’t seem possible” that school integration could work, she icily replied: “To me it do!” and turned on her heel leaving him wilted like a salted snail. During the McCarthy period, when her fellow Communists became very timorous, she discovered that the Oakland branch was advising its black members, when turning up for a meeting at the home of a well-to-do comrade, to avoid FBI attention by pretending to be house-servants and using the back door. “Well, I mean to say, I sailed right round and told them I thought that was an absolute stinker.”

6

I was to get over my speech impediment and now find that I can speak perfectly contentedly, often or preferably without interruption, for hours at a time. Let this be an inspiration to all those who contend with childhood disabilities.

7

In an excellent instance of the “revenge is sour” rule, I was to meet Smith again many years later. It was on the London underground one morning. He was an abject tramp, carrying two heavy bags of rotting old newspapers and declaiming aloud to the unheeding world around him. He chose to sit down just next to me. I pondered for a moment and couldn’t resist: “E.A.M. Smith!” I said into his ear. He jumped like a pea on a hot shovel. “How do you know my name?” Cruelly I replied: “We’ve had our eye on you for some time.” His face betrayed the animal fear of the hopeless paranoid, and so I couldn’t bear to continue. “It’s all right. I just remember you from school. It’s Hitchens here.” He said dully: “I remember you. You were a sinner. I used to pray for you.” That seemed about right.

8

This book, like the several movies that bear its name, has become a synonym for old-school-tie values and general mushy sentiment about the dear old days. In fact, Mr. Chipping’s lovely wife, Kathie, is a socialist and a feminist who wins all hearts; she forces him to be honest about homosexual play among the boys; he ends up sympathizing with railway strikers, opposing the British Empire in the Boer War and insisting on decent respect for Germans after 1914.

9

At about this time I read Catch-22 and was thrilled when Yossarian, confronted by Major Danby’s version of the old official trick-question “Suppose everybody felt that way?” replied “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”

10

From King Lear: “Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore?… Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip’st her.” This is why, whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

11

It was Guy, now dead for some time but in his later years an amazingly successful seducer of girls, who first insisted that I read the Greek-classical novels of Mary Renault. If this was all he had done for me, I would still be hoarsely grateful to him. While other boys plowed their way across the puerile yet toilsome pages of Narnia, or sank themselves into the costive innards of Middle Earth, I was following the thread of Ariadne and the tracks of Alexander. The King Must Die; The Bull from the Sea: Athens has seldom trumped Jerusalem with greater style or panache.

12

“I think you are going finally to displace me as the most hated man in American life. And of course that position is bearable only if one is number one. To be the second most hated man in the picture will probably prove to be a little like working behind a mule for years…” Norman Mailer to William F. Buckley, 20 April 1965.

13

I can’t say that we didn’t have to deal with our own cognitive dissonance. The British working class was for the most part entirely unmoved by our exertions. I do remember a demonstration, assiduously prepared for by mass factory-gate leafleting, to which exactly no workers showed up. My theoretician friend David Rosenberg, confronting this daunting result, said to me: “It rather confirms our analysis that the union bureaucrats can no longer truly mobilize their rank and file.” True enough as far as it went: but also true that those who bang their heads against history’s wall had better be equipped with some kind of a theoretical crash helmet. It was to take me some time to doff my own.

14

I visited CLR on his deathbed in London—on the corner of Shakespeare Avenue and Railton Road—in the late 1980s. He was still quite lucid but hard of hearing. I asked him to inscribe a new edition of Black Jacobins and, when he inquired what I’d like him to put on the flyleaf, simply suggested that he use the old Left salutation and put “yours fraternally.” He fixed me with a piercing look. “I do not,” he said sternly, “believe in eternity.” For a moment I was confused and then thought how apt it was that, in mishearing me but repudiating the afterlife, CLR could get fraternity and eternity entangled with one another.

15

I was later to find that George Orwell, invited by Philip Larkin in 1941 to address a joint meeting of the Labour Club and the English Club, had been given an inedible dinner because Larkin had earlier splurged all the hospitality fund on an ill-advised blowout for Dylan Thomas.

16

His very name seemed to exude authority: Old Testament conjoined to the brilliant but haunted capital. The only rival in nomenclature I can call to mind is my friend Pascal Bruckner.

17

It’s sobering and depressing to reflect that McGuire, who had mainly been influenced by the war in the Middle East the preceding year, is now one of those bards who still likes to sing about the end of days because he is a millennialist and fundamentalist Christian. But by then, I had come to prefer even the hard-line militant verses of Phil Ochs to the more lenient Bob Dylan.

18

I would never have guessed at the time that conscription would be abolished by Richard Nixon, and still less that he would appoint Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan to the Presidential Commission on the subject. The two right-wing libertarians condemned the draft as “involuntary servitude.” Today, almost the only people who call for the return of the system are collectivists and liberals.

19

Not unlike the state of Kentucky, which subsists on bourbon, gambling, and tobacco, Cuba’s economy rested almost wholly on the manufacture of agreeable toxins like rum and cigars. But even then, its chief export was its own citizens. When I returned to Cuba some years later, there was no trace to be found of the coffee plantation and—in the era of Gorbachev’s perestroika, which Castro was resisting—about a fifty-fifty chance of getting a cup of actual coffee even in a Havana hotel.

20

While at Berkeley he had been handed a pamphlet that spoke of the contents of the university’s library system as so much “useless white knowledge”: this had somewhat put him off the New Left in its then–Bay Area form, where I assure you it can still be met with.

21

I was later to find that as a youth he had contracted tuberculosis of the bones.

22

Books Do Furnish a Room, 1971.

23

This declaration on her part was all the more striking for being pre-emptive, in view of the fact that I had never even dared to proposition her.

24

“You’re fired” were the exact words as I remember them.

25

I appear in some obscure online dictionary of quotations for having said that I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.

26

This was perhaps not quite as true for my next confrontation with the old buzzard. In 1980 his wife, Lady Diana—estranged sister of my later friend Jessica Mitford—wrote a review of a book about the Goebbels family for the London sheet Books and Bookmen, an outlet to which I also occasionally contributed. Even had I not been appalled by her gushing praise for the delightful Josef and Magda, I would have drawn the line at the metaphor she employed for their murder of their four children. This she called “a Masada-like deed.” I thought that crossed a line, and said so in the New Statesman, adding an unkind play on the name of the publisher of Books and Bookmen, a man named Philip Dosse. Mr. Dosse that week committed suicide and Auberon Waugh accused me in the Spectator of having driven him to his death. I both liked and disliked—fortunately I disliked more—the notion that a polemic of mine could have anything like this effect. By the time it was revealed to my relief that Mr. Dosse had killed himself without having read my piece, and because of an impending collision with his creditors and the Inland Revenue, I had opened an envelope from the “Chateau de la Gloire,” the rather grotesque address outside Paris which I knew to be the lair of the Mosleys, and convenient for their friendship with their frightful neighbors, the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson. The enclosed letter was from Sir Oswald, complaining that while he was fair game, it wasn’t cricket to be attacking his dear wife. Since she had been a far more active Nazi than he and had invited Hitler to her wedding, I thought this was weak stuff. Later, opening that day’s London Times, I saw Sir Oswald’s obituary notice, which means that it’s quite thinkable that I was the recipient of the last missive he ever wrote. Lady Diana was to outlive him for some decades, never uttering a repentant remark about her Third Reich period. When I once asked Decca if she ever had any contact at all with her sister, she replied: “Certainly not! I think I did bow slightly to her at dear Nancy’s funeral, but otherwise it’s been absolutely non-speakers since Munich!”

27

The most witty and penetrating first-hand account of this morbid interlude is to be found in Kevin Myers’s memoir Watching the Door.

28

When Paul died, the organizer of his memorial meeting invited me to record a video tribute, which I gladly did. In a minor spasm of spite, the gargoyles who by then ran the Socialist Workers Party prevented it from being shown at the event.

29

It is characteristic of Martin to have pointed out that Dickens’s title Our Mutual Friend contains, or is, a solecism. One can have common friends but not mutual ones.

30

The crudest thing that comes to mind—because it is such a cliché element of male fantasy—was our word, annexed from something said by Clive James, for the possibility of enjoying two young ladies at the same time. The term for this remote but intriguing contingency, which I still think was at least partially redeemed by its inventiveness, was “a car-wash.” Think about it, or forget it if you can. Incidentally, Kingsley’s novel The Green Man contains the best-ever depiction of one of the many ways that this much-rehearsed ideal can go badly wrong in practice.

31

Picture my mixed emotions at appearing in his novel The Pregnant Widow in the character of his elder brother.

32

As I write this I have just read a “round-up” of authorial opinion printed by a London Sunday newspaper to coincide with Martin’s 60th birthday. It’s one of the most dispiriting things I have ever seen in print. With a few exceptions the contributors seem provincial and resentful and sunk in their own mediocrity. After all this time, they are obsessed with Martin’s supposed head start in having had a distinguished father, and with the question of whether or not he is a “misogynist.” On the first point he has answered quite well for himself—“Yes, it’s just like taking over the family pub”—and on the second I have to reconcile myself with much annoyance to the fact that most people never saw him with his sister, will never see him with his daughters, or his legion of female friends, not by any means all of whom are former “conquests.” So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift—enviable if potentially time consuming—of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it.

33

In 2008, when I finally had a best-seller hit of my own, it was from the pages of Bellow’s great book that Martin sent me a sort of return compliment for my Fitzgerald telegram of 1974:

This, too—the Sea Island gear and the musky women, for example—was quite imperfect as an analogy while still conveying an atmosphere.

34

There was also a time when he might have adopted Vladimir Nabokov, posthumously as it were, as a proxy parent. He made himself master of the subject matter, got to know surviving members of the family, wrote an essay on Lolita that was frighteningly exact, did everything except take up Lepidoptera. But the more Martin absorbed himself in the man’s work, the more it was borne in on him that the recurrent twelve-year-old-girl theme in Nabokov’s writing was something more alarming and disturbing than a daring literary one-off. See, for his stern register of this disquieting business, the Guardian 14 November 2009.

35

I am aware at all times, gentle reader, of the “perhaps you had to be there” element in a memoir. I strive to keep it permanently in mind. In the case of Kingsley, you don’t absolutely have to have been there. Try this, from one of his many wonderful letters to Philip Larkin. Amis is imitating the ingratiating announcer of the BBC’s condescending weekly program Jazz Record Requests: “…Archie Shepp at his most exhilarating. Now to remind us of jazz’s almost infinite variety, back almost fifty years to Nogood Deaf Poxy Sam and One-Titted Woman Blues: ‘Wawawawa wawawaa wawa wawa wa wa Oh ah gawooma shony gawon tia waah, wawa wa yeh ah gawooma shony gawon tia wawawwa waah wa boyf she ganutha she wouno where to put ia.’ ” I was reading this late one night, several years after Kingsley’s death, and once I’d tried it out loud a couple of times I felt, through my hot tears of astonished laughter, that it was as if he were in the room. And he went to all this trouble for a private letter!

36

I write this in a week where I have been re-reading Northanger Abbey, and reflecting once again on the sheer justice of Kingsley’s verdict on Miss Austen’s “inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major.”

37

I was later rather startled, not to say impressed, when I learned that he had “cleared” all this “research” with his then-wife, the fragrant and lofty Antonia. He telephoned her in London and, rather than temporize, informed her right away that: “I’m going to a handjob parlor with the Hitch.”

38

The only time that he ever seemed at all literal to me was in his absorption with soccer games. He would even buy tabloid newspapers on the following day, “to read accounts of previously played football matches” as I tried discouragingly to put it. From him I learned to accept, as I have since learned to accept from my son and my godson Jacob Amis and their friends, that there are men to whom the outcome of such sporting engagements is emotionally important. This is a test of masculinity, like some straight men’s fascination with lesbianism, which I simply cannot seem to pass.

39

Indeed, insistence upon the capacious subtleties of the limerick was something of a hallmark. Once again Conquest takes the palm: his condensation of the “Seven Ages of Man” shows how much force can be packed into the deceptively slight five-line frame. Thus:

Seven Ages: first puking and mewling

Then very pissed-off with your schooling

Then fucks, and then fights

Next judging chaps’ rights

Then sitting in slippers: then drooling.

This is not the only example of Conquest’s genius for compression. The history of the Bolshevik “experiment” in five lines? Barely a problem:

There was an old bastard named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in.

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

40

A comparable if not equivalent consideration sometimes applied in the “other” case: for all his indomitable moral courage Solzhenitsyn had already begun to show signs of being an extreme Russian nationalist and partisan of religious orthodoxy. The synthesis for which one aimed was the Orwellian one of evolving a consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.

41

Colin, who went on to become a distinguished author of books on James Joyce and Jean-Luc Godard, years later called me from China where Deng Xiaoping had just announced that his reforms would mean that all would get richer but some would get richer than others. “So it looks as if your pal Orwell was on to something after all.” I thought that was a handsome enough concession. It was rather a poor return, when his friend the grim and fraudulent Stalinist philosopher Louis Althusser was convicted of murdering his wife, for me to say, “I see Comrade Althusser has been awarded the electric chair of philosophy at the Ecole Abnormale.”

42

O’Brien’s definition of liberalism as a position “that made the rich world yawn and the poor world sick” is a phrasing that older readers may remember if only because of Phil Ochs’s bitingly satirical song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Arrested once in Oxford for disrupting a cricket match with an apartheid South African team, I was able to get myself acquitted of the police frame-up because a bystander came forward and offered himself as an impartial witness. He was a highly respectable citizen and cricket-watcher and the treasurer of the local Liberal Party. Attending the trial and after giving his testimony, he saw me refuse to take my oath on the Bible and heard me tell the bench as my reason that I was “an atheist and a Marxist.” After the hearing was over, he came up to me and said that if he had known that I was that kind of person, he would never have volunteered to testify. For many years, this well-meaning but invertebrate figure was my ideal type of the “liberal” mentality, and he still comes back to me at odd moments.

43

The British Foreign Office may be an exception here. Its bureaucrats continued to spout the lie, born of the wartime alliance with Stalin, until the Soviet Union beat them to it under Mikhail Gorbachev and officially accepted responsibility for Katyn in 1990.

44

In justice to Borges it has to be added that a few years later he came to realize that he had been duped by the junta, and did sign a rather courageous petition about the desaparecidos. Men like him often, and in spite of their inclinations, have a natural “gold standard” when it comes to questions of principle.

45

I still know someone who was at the very, very far-out meeting that founded the “Weatherman” faction. He too was strongly for a Bob Dylan sloganography but held out for the sect to be named “The Vandals,” because in another and equally telling “underground” line of Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” is it not truly said: “The pump don’t work ’cos the vandals took the handle”? Get sick, get well… my friend’s recovered now.

46

An old joke has an Oxford professor meeting an American former graduate student and asking him what he’s working on these days. “My thesis is on the survival of the class system in the United States.” “Oh really, that’s interesting: one didn’t think there was a class system in the United States.” “Nobody does. That’s how it survives.”

47

In my first months of living in Washington, D.C., I went to a Ku Klux Klan rally where the sheeted marchers were protected from furious counterdemonstrators by phalanxes of imperturbable black policemen who saw to it that the constitutional rights of those who detested them were duly and good-humoredly upheld.

48

I was to learn this earlier than most people by a piece of induction of which I am still faintly proud. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had both sworn that they would never reveal Deep Throat’s identity until he died, or until he gave them further notice. But Carl Bernstein had been married to the tempestuous Nora Ephron, and I believed from knowing both of them slightly that it was impossible for Nora not to have asked, and even more impossible for Carl not to have told her. Nora’s best friend was Annie Navasky, adorable wife of Victor. I therefore evolved the plan of asking Annie. She said—this, by the way, was at a dinner for Alger Hiss—that she had been told the name but that it didn’t ring a bell and wasn’t exciting and that she’d forgotten it. Overcoming my discouragement at this, I adopted the more direct approach of asking Nora straight out. She also said that it wasn’t sensational—this was in the days when crazy people thought Deep Throat might have been Henry Kissinger—but told me that to the best of her recollection it was an FBI man called Felt. For quite a while I myself could not believe that it was the same one, so I missed yet another chance for a scoop.

49

I am sometimes asked about the concept or definition of a “public intellectual,” and though I find the whole idea faintly silly, I believe it should ideally mean that the person so identified is self-sustaining and autonomously financed. Susan was pre-eminently one such.

50

I was once seated in a television studio with Newt Gingrich, waiting for the debate between us to get going, when the presenter made an off-air remark that was highly disobliging to Gore. The former Republican Speaker abruptly became very prim and disapproving, and said that he would prefer not to listen to any abuse of the author of Lincoln: a novel that he regarded as being above reproach. I conveyed this news to the author himself, who took the tribute as he takes all tributes: as being overdue and well deserved.

51

In fact Jefferson was born under the old calendar, on 2 April 1743, and had to change his birthday to the thirteenth when the historic Gregorian calendar date-shift was ordained. Both dates appear on his memorial obelisk at Charlottesville. I have often wondered what the racketeers of astrology and the zodiac did when everybody had to change birthdays and many people had to change their “sign.” No doubt they managed to adjust suavely enough.

52

There is flag-waving and flag-waving. When the giant statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down from its plinth in Baghdad in April 2003, I was annoyed to see an American soldier step forward and drape a Stars and Stripes flag over the fallen visage of the dictator. This clearly disobeyed a standing order prohibiting display of the American colors. But then I learned that the overenthusiastic soldier was Marine Corporal Edward Chin, an ethnic Chinese volunteer both of whose parents had escaped the hell of Burma and begun a new life in Brooklyn. The offense might have been worse.

53

Very well captured by Colin McInnes in his contemporary novels City of Spades and Absolute Beginners.

54

It can and should be remembered that many religious texts, not least the sacred hadith of Islam, prescribe horrible penalties for those who apostasize from religion, even if they were only born into it without their own consent. This does somewhat qualify the “voluntary” principle and it, too, had its part in the campaign to murder Salman. Nonetheless, I insist on my distinction between this man-made phenomenon and that of “race.”

55

Later on, the working staff of these bookstores passed a resolution saying that they were not selling bananas or condoms, and would honor the professional duty to provide any customer with any book. And they were the ones standing by the plate-glass windows. I wish this example were better remembered, and more emulated, than it is.

56

“Salmanovitch,” I have since learned, was Koestler’s rendition into Russian of “Solomonovitch,” the surname of an Israeli-Jewish editor he had known, and a great foe of the Jabotinsky-Begin ultranationalists. Staying with nomenclature for a bit, “Rushdie” itself was derived as a family name by Salman’s father, who annexed it from Averroes ibn-Rushd, the great medieval scholar of the Jewish-Christian-Muslim synthesis that flourished in Andalusia before the zealots and dogmatists extinguished that brief candle.

57

Since I speak and write about this a good deal, I am often asked at public meetings, in what sometimes seems to me a rather prurient way, whether I myself or my family have “ever been threatened” by jihadists. My answer is that yes, I have, and so has everyone else in the audience, if they have paid enough attention to the relevant bin-Ladenist broadcasts to notice the fact.

58

I had thought I might never see Norman Mailer again after I had asked him, on a TV show with Germaine Greer, whether he’d ever wondered about his apparent obsession with sodomy and its male occasions (the barracks, the prison, the boxing gym, even in Harlot’s Ghost the interstices of the “intelligence community”) as well as its more notorious female ones. In the “green room” afterward, he reacted extremely badly, seizing a copy of Tough Guys Don’t Dance and inscribing it to me with a minatory sentence that told me to beware of his next interview. When that was eventually published, in a London magazine called The Face, it contained his accusation that the London literary scene had been rigged against him by a homosexual coterie dominated by Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton, and myself. Martin and I dallied briefly with the idea of writing in to say that this was very unfair—at least to Ian Hamilton. After the fatwah, though, Mailer became more friendly. Never to be outdone when the electricity of violence was in the air, he initially had to be talked out of a hypermacho scheme to raise money for a retaliatory “hit” against the Ayatollah but renewed contact with me because, I suppose, my own position made me look a bit less like a faggot.

59

Including one favorite of mine, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which is almost written to music.

60

Recently declassified papers show the British embassy in Baghdad reporting back to London in these terms: Saddam’s accession to office was “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958” and, though “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.”

61

I used to make a point, later on in Washington, of arguing that no operations in Iraq should ever again be given the stupid code-name prefix of “Desert.” Mesopotamia is not a desert.

62

Today, in an echo of the Latin American vernacular about those who were, rather than had, “disappeared,” Kurdish people describe certain towns or groups as having been “Anfalled.”

63

Kanan got his museum, and the Memory Foundation is now an archive for victims and survivors whose narrative would otherwise never have been set down. This remarkable achievement remains a continual cause of spite and resentment.

64

I had of course heard that Ahmad had once been indicted—by a military court in Jordan when it was Saddam’s ally—for being a shady businessman. I have also read persuasive evidence that this was a frame-up, as were many other charges—“puppet of the CIA,” for one absurd example—that were made against him. My main difference with him is, and remains, his alignment with a confessional bloc in the Iraqi parliament. But without him, there might well not be an Iraqi parliament.

65

See, for the best account of this upheaval in real time, James Fenton’s book The Snap Revolution.

66

To be fair, Ian McEwan’s highly acute novel Saturday, which is easily the best evocation of this street-theater event, does capture the anguish of many “liberals” who did turn out. His work was also the first to isolate the unstinting self-regard that underlies the terribly OK-seeming mantra of “Not In Our Name.”

67

It impressed me very much to see my Kurdish friends, including Iraq’s first-ever democratically chosen president, Jalal Talabani, publicly voice their opposition to the death penalty for Saddam Hussein and the other convicted war criminals. This appeal to clemency arose partly from their adherence to the Socialist International and also from their wish to begin Iraq again without a blood reckoning. After what they had endured, their forebearance was something extraordinary. In Kurdistan itself, where tribal retributionism was not so much in evidence, Barham Salih personally declined to sign death-warrants for the Islamist gangsters who had murdered his guards and very nearly slain him on his own doorstep.

68

This document was originally published by my old friend Patrick Cockburn, perhaps the best chronicler of the war and certainly its most fervent and intelligent critic.

69

This verifiable account is often confused with a bungled attempt to sell some forged documents from the embassy of Niger in Rome: a false trail that, whether out of cupidity or design, wasted the time of several already time-wasting “inquiries.”

70

In the report of our arrest in the Prague Communist paper Rude Pravo, another production that if read aloud could cause flying creatures to fall stunned from the sky, it was rightly reported that some of the suspicious foreigners detained were thought to be sympathizers with Leon Trotsky. As a sort of editorial nudge to keep the prejudices of the readers awake, as well as the readers themselves, there followed a parenthesis explaining that Trotsky was a pseudonym for “Bronstein.” Every little bit helps, or so the crack editorial team must have thought.

71

The sequel, which I cannot not tell, was this. We received an invitation to come down to Baghdad, which was in those awful days considered to be lethally unsafe even in the “Green Zone.” I told Alexander that it was his decision to make, and that nobody would think any the less of him for declining. He very coolly replied “But let’s go,” and so we did. I tried not to show how proud I was, which I now think was a mistake.

72

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one’s own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says “you’re next.” Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. That changed only when one of these, my friend Chaim Tannenbaum, invited me home to view his own first son, Moses. “You haven’t met the kaddish,” was his unforgettable way of phrasing the invitation. This was also when I appreciated the entire implication of the poem that Jorge Luis Borges had given me—see here.

73

Our Friday lunch vernacular, that used to distinguish between “plain fools” and “damn fools,” upgrading or downgrading as necessary to “bloody fool” and “fucking fool,” might have classified me as the latter, also.

74

I should say in fairness that my brother, Peter, firmly believes that the latter explanation—ordinary xenophobia rather than Jew-hatred in other words—is the likelier explanation.

75

All right, even the word “transported” has its nasty modern ring of deportation. Indeed, the early martyrs of the British Labour movement were peasants from the Dorset village so bewitchingly named Tolpuddle who were transported to Australia for the offense of forming a union.

76

The intention had been to arouse the world’s conscience by initially showing these to the Vatican. This appeal did not work.

77

I pause to mention that, with my sister-in-law’s uncle Ernest Halperin, this makes three widely dispersed ancestral relations of mine who fought for the Spanish Republic: something to tell my own descendants, some of whom carry their blood, if they will only hold still and listen to my tales. This is also probably the largest difference between the two sides of my family: apart from the traditional stories of British daring, the only example of heroism and gallantry ever related to me by the Commander was that of the Francoist General Jose Moscardo who refused to surrender the besieged Alcazar even when the Red forces threatened to execute his son Luis.

78

My brave friend Anne Applebaum is about to confront this neglected aspect of the hidden history of the region in her study of the imposition of Communism after 1945. Of course it goes without saying that once Stalin had consolidated his power, he began to eliminate local rivals, many of whom like Artur London and Lazslo Rajk were also Jews. Interestingly, there was never such a show trial in Poland.

79

Born in the extremely depressed hamlet of Chrzanow, a few miles north of Auschwitz, he was later to be expelled from the Polish Communist Party for “exaggerating the dangers of Nazism.” The year was 1932.

80

The last time I heard an orthodox Marxist statement that was music to my ears was from a member of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, during the mass slaughter in the country. “The terms Hutu and Tutsi,” he said severely, “are merely ideological constructs, describing different relationships to the means and mode of production.” But of course!

81

The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West.

82

I am absurdly proud that James Fenton’s poem “The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah,” which first appeared in his collection Manila Envelope and which foreshadows some of these pregnant admonitions, is dedicated to me.

83

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport “did more harm than good,” which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.

84

In his attacks on fellow Arabs—Fouad Ajami being another recipient of his ire—Edward often became distressingly thuggish and ad hominem. Perhaps I was right to notice that softness on the USSR, which had been the special practitioner of such defamatory tactics.

85

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he’d kept that job?

86

My brother’s case, plus the late reflection this brings on John Bunyan, convinces me again that there may have been such a thing as the Protestant or even Puritan revolution. Christopher Hill’s attempt to Marxify the idea might not exactly work, but the concept of a time before kings and lords and bishops and popes is an ancient yearning. You can find it in Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and in poems like Macaulay’s magnificent pastiche Naseby, as well as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, where humble Smith’s struggle against “Newspeak” and the Inner Party is the moral equivalent of those of Wyclif and Tyndale and Coverdale to have the Bible translated out of arcane priestly language and into plain English. Orwell’s own favorite line—“By The Known Rules of Ancient Liberty”—was from John Milton. This might also go to support the satisfying idea of there being such a thing as a Protestant atheist. Much easier to imagine Peter Hitchens as an atheist than as a Muslim, let alone as a Jew or a Catholic. (When William Tyndale first went to school in medieval Oxford, I’m pleased to note, his family name was Hychyns.)

87

Her story is rather preferable to the one told me by Eric Hobsbawm, who at the time of his resignation from the Communist Party was probably the only member of any academic or intellectual or scholarly repute that it still possessed. Running into him shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I asked him if he’d retained his membership and was told “no.” What then had finally precipitated the separation? “They forgot to send me the form asking me for the annual renewal of my membership,” he said with perfect gravity, “and so I decided not to write to headquarters and remind them.” Just like that, then.

88

Julian, for example, was much quoted for saying that the whole battle over Iraq wasn’t worth the life of a single British soldier, which echoes what Otto von Bismarck said—“not worth the balls of a Pomeranian grenadier”—about the whole of the Balkans. Yet why is that sort of realpolitik considered to be “left” rather than conservative? Attacking me in one of the magazines of the American isolationist Right, Peter Hitchens denounced the war in Afghanistan as the sort of “stupid, left-wing war” that only people like his brother would endorse. That seemed to me nearer the mark than Julian.

89

This is why Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront, which suggests that decent people should break the Mafia’s law of omerta, is still regarded as morally dubious by many on the American Left.

90

Some time later, I was invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine La Regle du Jeu. I gave it the partly ironic title: “Can One Be a Neoconservative?” Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as “How I Became a Neoconservative.” Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: it was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought.

91

Chomsky has since said some things to suggest that he never thought I was any good anyway: I possess several inscribed books from him that prove the contrary. As it happens I don’t think it’s kosher to pay him back in the same coin. In the late 1970s he wrote to me praising something I’d written about the need to try and keep Encounter magazine from going under: his libertarianism (and his rare-on-the-Left admiration for Orwell) has been relatively consistent. If you look back at the essays that made his name—on the incipient stages of the Vietnam War, on B.F. Skinner, on the memoirs of Kissinger, on East Timor, and on the Kahane Commission on the Sabra/Shatila massacres—you will find a polemical talent well worth mourning, and a feeling for justice that ought not to have gone rancid and resentful.

92

Reflecting on this now, I think perhaps that she wanted to be sure, and also for me and others to be on notice, that she wasn’t to be taken for granted and that there was always to be some demarcation between friendship and agreement. Quite probably a good thing. Many truths or useful remarks go unspoken for fear of rupturing intimacy, and after all, there never was a Sontag “circle,” or clique. This is the point that Edmund White rather fails to apprehend about her in City Boy, his free-hand memoir of the higher naughtiness in New York.

93

You really cannot win with everybody at once: the CIA’s historically more highbrow offspring Encounter ran a piece by Melvin Lasky accusing me of having removed the relevant words on purpose from her own text.

94

In spite of the general nullity of the Left on this question, Susan was only the best known of several, including Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Schneider, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Adam Michnik, and others, who in their way traced a line from 1968 through 1989 to future combats with the totalitarian.