The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  You could not shock her more than she shocks me;

  Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.

  It makes me most uncomfortable to see

  An English spinster of the middle-class

  Describe the amorous effects of “brass,”

  Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety

  The economic basis of society.

  We of the 1990s would most certainly shock Jane Austen, with our vast array of slovenly and unexamined freedoms. Nonetheless, there is a suspicion of cant in Auden’s elegant lines. “Brass”—money, security—made Charlotte Lucas accept Mr. Collins (“disgracing herself” with a prudential marriage), but it didn’t make her love him. Elizabeth turned down Mr. Collins; and, with so little endeavor at civility, she turned down Mr. Darcy, too, with his ten thousand a year.

  Writing about Gray’s “Elegy,” William Empson said that the poem presents the condition of provincial oblivion as pathetic without putting you in a mood in which you would want to change it. But “change” is the business of satire. Satire is militant irony. Irony is more long-suffering. It doesn’t incite you to transform society; it strengthens you to tolerate it. Jane Austen was indeed an English spinster of the middle class. She died in unrelieved pain at the age of forty-one (and with the greatest “last words” of all time: asked what she needed, she said, “Nothing but death”). On the other hand, she has now survived for nearly two hundred years. Her lovers are platonic lovers, but they form a multitude.

  The New Yorker 1997

  * Writing five decades later, Anthony Trollope has the latitude to make the point more roundly. In He Knew He Was Right, Jemima Stanbury, a moneyed but now fairly elderly old maid, finds herself increasingly stirred and awakened to regret by the companionship of her lovelorn (and impoverished) niece, Dorothy. One night, bearing a candle, Jemima comes into Dorothy’s bedroom, to rouse her with a magnanimous, life-solving promise. “But what is it, aunt?” says Dorothy. And Jemima begins with the words, “Kiss me, dearest.”

  More Personal 3

  Christopher Hitchens*

  “Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle,” confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973):

  My hemmings and hawings on the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French. At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts….Nobody should ask me to submit to an interview….It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance.

  We sympathize. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion somewhere or other on Nabokov’s sliding scale: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

  Mr. Hitchens isn’t like that. Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of Isherwood’s famous memoirs. And yet this Christopher doesn’t have a kind. Everyone is unique—but Christopher is preternatural. And it may even be that he exactly inverts the Nabokovian paradigm. He thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child’s eager apprehension of what feels just and true); he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius.

  As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying dialecticians that the world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his objective, in debate, was not rebuttal and then refutation: it was the “destruction” of his interlocutor. This isn’t Christopher’s policy—but it is his practice. Toward the very end of the last century, all our greatest chess players, including Garry Kasparov, began to succumb to a computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask two grand masters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said, “It’s like a wall coming at you.” In argument, Christopher is that wall. The prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there’s a case for calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of geohistorical references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but Google (with, say, its 10 million “results” in 0.7 seconds) is something of an idiot savant, and Christopher’s search engine is much more finely tuned. In debate, no matter what the motion, I would back him against Cicero, against Demosthenes.

  Whereas mere earthlings get by with a mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, and finely turned tautologies, Christopher talks not only in complete sentences but also in complete paragraphs. Similarly, although he mentions the phenomenon in these pages, he is an utter stranger to what Diderot called l’esprit de l’escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase is sometimes translated as “staircase wit”—far too limitingly, in my view, because l’esprit de l’escalier describes an entire subsection of one’s intellectual and emotional being. The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious drinks party, or indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory desire, has just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself on your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of persuasion, can haunt you for a lifetime—particularly, of course, when the staircase was the one that might have led to the bedroom.

  As a young man, Christopher was conspicuously unpredatory in the sexual sphere (while also being conspicuously pan-affectionate: “I’ll just make a brief pass at everyone,” he would typically and truthfully promise a mixed gathering of fourteen or fifteen people, “and then I’ll be on my way”). I can’t say how it went, earlier on, with the boys; with the girls, though, Christopher was the one who needed to be persuaded. And I do know that in this area, if in absolutely no other, he was sometimes inveigled into submission.

  The habit of saying the right thing at the right time tends to get relegated to the category of the pert riposte. But the put-down, the swift comeback, when quoted, gives a false sense of finality. So-and-so, as quick as a flash, said so-and-so—and that seems to be the end of it. Christopher’s most memorable rejoinders, I have found, linger, and reverberate, and eventually combine, as chess moves combine….One evening, close to forty years ago, I said, “I know you despise all sports—but how about a game of chess?” Looking mildly puzzled and amused, he joined me over the sixty-four squares. Two things soon emerged. First, he showed no combative will, he offered no resistance (because this was play, you see, and earnest is all that really matters). Second, he showed an endearing disregard for common sense. This prompts a paradoxical thought.

  There are many excellent commentators, in the United States and the United Kingdom, who deploy far more rudimentary gumption than Christopher ever bothers with (we have a deservedly knighted columnist in London whom I always think of, with admiration, as Sir Common Sense). But it is hard to love common sense. And the salient fact about Christopher is that he is loved. What we love is fertile instability; what we love is the agitation of the unexpected. And Christopher always comes, as they say, from left field. He is not a plain speaker. He is not, I repeat, a plain man.

  * * *

  *

  Over the years Christopher has spontaneously delivered many dozens of unforgettable lines. Here are four of them.

  1. He was on TV for the second or third time in his life (if we exclude University Challenge), which takes us back to the mid-1970s and to Christopher’s mid-twenties. He and I were already close friends (and colleagues at the New Statesman); but I remember thinking that nobody so matinee-telegenic had the right to be so exceptionally quick-tongued on the screen. At a certain point in the exchange, Christopher came out with one of his political poeticisms, an ornate but intelligible definition of (I think) national sovereignty.

  His host—a fair old bruiser in his own right—paused, frowned, and said, with skepticism and with helpless sincerity:

  “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “I’m not in the lea
st surprised,” said Christopher, and moved on.

  The talk ran its course. But if this had been a frontier western, and not a chat show, the wounded man would have spent the rest of the segment leerily snapping the arrow in half and pushing its pointed end through his chest and out the other side.

  2. Every novelist of his acquaintance is riveted by Christopher, not just qua friend but also qua novelist. I considered the retort I am about to quote (all four words of it) so epiphanically devastating that I put it in a novel—indeed, I put Christopher in a novel. Mutatis mutandis (and it is the novel itself that dictates the changes), Christopher “is” Nicholas Shackleton in The Pregnant Widow—though it really does matter, in this case, what the meaning of “is” is….The year was 1981. We were in a tiny Italian restaurant in West London, where we would soon be joined by our future first wives. Two elegant young men in waisted suits were unignorably and interminably fussing with the staff about rearranging the tables, to accommodate the large party they expected. It was an intensely class-conscious era (because the class system was dying); Christopher and I were candidly lower-middle bohemian, and the two young men were raffishly minor gentry (they had the air of those who await, with epic stoicism, the deaths of elderly relatives). At length, one of them approached our table and sank smoothly to his haunches, seeming to pout out through the fine strands of his bangs. The crouch, the bangs, the pout: these had clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to his will. After a flirtatious pause he said:

  “You’re going to hate us for this.”

  And Christopher said, “We hate you already.”

  3. In the summer of 1986, in Cape Cod, and during subsequent summers, I used to play a set of tennis every other day with the historian Robert Jay Lifton. I was reading, and then rereading, his latest and most celebrated book, The Nazi Doctors; so, on Monday, during changeovers, we would talk about “Sterilization and the Nazi Medical Vision”; on Wednesday, “ ‘Wild Euthanasia’: The Doctors Take Over”; on Friday, “The Auschwitz Institution”; on Sunday, “Killing with Syringes: Phenol Injections”; and so on. One afternoon, Christopher, whose family was staying with mine on Horseleech Pond, was due to show up at the court, after a heavy lunch in nearby Wellfleet, to be introduced to Bob (and to be driven back to the pond-front house). He arrived, much gratified by having come so far on foot: three or four miles—one of the greatest physical feats of his adult life. It was set point. Bob served, approached the net, and wrongfootingly dispatched my attempted pass. Now Bob was and is twenty-three years my senior; and the score was 6–0. I could, I suppose, plead preoccupation: that summer I was wondering (with eerie detachment) whether I had it in me to write a novel that dealt with the Holocaust. Christopher knew about this, and he knew about my qualms.

  Elatedly toweling himself down, Bob said, “You know, there are so few areas of transcendence left to us. Sports. Sex. Art…”

  “Don’t forget the miseries of others,” said Christopher. “Don’t forget the languid contemplation of the miseries of others.”

  I did write that novel. And I still wonder whether Christopher’s black, three-ply irony somehow emboldened me. What remains true, to this day, to this hour, is that of all subjects (including sex and art), the one we most obsessively return to is the Shoah, and its victims—those whom the wind of death has scattered.

  4. In conclusion we move on to 1999, and by now Christopher and I have acquired new wives, and gained three additional children (making eight in all). It was midafternoon, on Long Island, and he and I hoped to indulge a dependable pleasure: we were in search of the most violent available film. In the end we approached a multiplex in Southampton (having been pitiably reduced to Wesley Snipes).

  I said, “No one’s recognized the Hitch for at least ten minutes.”

  “Ten? Twenty minutes. Twenty-five. And the longer it goes on, the more pissed off I get. I keep thinking: What’s the matter with them? What can they feel, what can they care, what can they know, if they fail to recognize the Hitch?”

  An elderly American was sitting opposite the doors to the cinema, dressed in candy colors and awkwardly perched on a hydrant. With his trembling hands raised in an Italianate gesture, he said weakly, “Do you love us? Or do you hate us?”

  This old party was not referring to humanity, or to the West. He meant America and Americans.

  Christopher said, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Do you love us, or do you hate us?”

  As Christopher pushed on through to the foyer, he said, not warmly, not coldly, but with perfect evenness, “It depends on how you behave.”

  * * *

  *

  Does it depend on how others behave? Or does it depend, at least in part, on the loves and hates of the Hitch?

  Christopher is bored by the epithet contrarian, which has been trailing him around for a quarter of a century. What he is, in any case, is an autocontrarian: he seeks not just the most difficult position but the most difficult position for Christopher Hitchens. Hardly anyone agrees with him on Iraq (yet hardly anyone is keen to debate him on it). We think also of his support for Ralph Nader, his collusion with the impeachment process of the loathed Bill Clinton (who, in The Quotable Hitchens, occupies more space than any other subject), and his support for Bush-Cheney in 2004. Christopher often suffers for his isolations; this is widely sensed, and strongly contributes to his magnetism. He is in his own person the drama, as we watch the lithe contortions of a self-shackling Houdini. Could this be the crux of his charisma—that Christopher, ultimately, is locked in argument with the Hitch? Still, “contrarian” is looking shopworn. And if there must be an epithet, or what the press likes to call a “narrative,” then I can suggest a refinement: Christopher is one of nature’s rebels. By which I mean that he has no automatic respect for anybody or anything.

  The rebel is in fact a very rare type. In my whole life I have known only two others, both of them novelists (my father, up until the age of about forty-five; and my friend Will Self). This is the way to spot a rebel: they give no deference or even civility to their supposed superiors (that goes without saying); they also give no deference or even civility to their demonstrable inferiors. Thus Christopher, if need be, will be merciless to the prince, the president, and the pontiff; and, if need be, he will be merciless to the cabdriver (“Oh, you’re not going our way. Well turn your light off, all right? Because it’s fucking sickening how you guys ply for trade”), to the publican (“You don’t give change for the phone? Okay. I’m going to report you to the Camden Consumer Council”), and to the waiter (“Service is included, I see. But you’re saying it’s optional. Which?…What? Listen. If you’re so smart, why are you dealing them off the arm in a dump like this?”). Christopher’s everyday manners are beautiful (and wholly democratic); of course they are—because he knows that in manners begins morality. But each case is dealt with exclusively on its merits. This is the rebel’s way.

  It is for the most part an invigorating and even a beguiling disposition, and makes Mr. Average, or even Mr. Above Average (whom we had better start calling Joe Laptop), seem underevolved. Most of us shakily preside over a chaos of vestigial prejudices and pieties, of semisubliminal inhibitions, taboos, and herd instincts, some of them ancient, some of them spryly contemporary (like moral relativism and the ardent xenophilia which, in Europe at least, always excludes Israelis). To speak and write without fear or favor (to hear no internal drumbeat): such voices are invaluable. On the other hand, as the rebel is well aware, compulsive insubordination risks the punishment of self-inflicted wounds.

  * * *

  *

  Let us take an example from Christopher’s essays on literature (which are underrepresented here, and impressive enough to deserve an appreciation of their own). In the last decade Christopher has written three raucously hostile reviews—of Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein (2000), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006), and Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007). When I read them, I found myself muttering
the piece of schoolmarm advice I have given Christopher in person, more than once: Don’t cheek your elders. The point being that, in these cases, respect is mandatory, because it has been earned, over many books and many years. Does anyone think that Saul Bellow, then aged eighty-five, needed Christopher’s three or four insistences that the Bellovian powers were on the wane (and in fact, read with respect, Ravelstein is an exquisite swansong, full of integrity, beauty, and dignity)? If you are a writer, then all the writers who have given you joy—as Christopher was given joy by Augie March and Humboldt’s Gift, for example, and by The Coup, and by Portnoy’s Complaint—are among your honorary parents; and Christopher’s attacks were coldly unfilial. Here, disrespect becomes the vice that so insistently exercised Shakespeare: that of ingratitude. And all novelists know, with King Lear (who was thinking of his daughters), how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless reader.

  Art is freedom; and in art, as in life, there is no freedom without law. The foundational literary principle is decorum, which means something like the opposite of its dictionary definition: “behavior in keeping with good taste and propriety” (i.e., submission to an ovine consensus). In literature, decorum means the concurrence of style and content—together with a third element which I can only vaguely express as earning the right weight. It doesn’t matter what the style is, and it doesn’t matter what the content is; but the two must concur. If the essay is something of a literary art, which it clearly is, then the same law obtains.