by Martin Amis
Here are some indecorous quotes from the The Quotable Hitchens. “Ronald Reagan is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his wife.” On the Chaucerian summoner-pardoner Jerry Falwell: “If you gave Falwell an enema, he’d be buried in a matchbox.” On the political entrepreneur George Galloway: “Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.” The critic D. W. Harding wrote a famous essay called “Regulated Hatred.” It was a study of Jane Austen. We grant that hatred is a stimulant; but it should not become an intoxicant.
The difficulty is seen at its starkest in Christopher’s baffling weakness for puns. This doesn’t much matter when the context is less than consequential (it merely grinds the reader to a temporary halt). But a pun can have no business in a serious proposition. Consider the following, from 2007: “In the very recent past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin form, ‘no child’s behind left.’ ” Thus the ending of the sentence visits a riotous indecorum on its beginning. The great grammarian and usage watcher Henry Fowler attacked the “assumption that puns are per se contemptible….Puns are good, bad, or indifferent.” Actually, Fowler is wrong. “Puns are the lowest form of verbal facility,” Christopher elsewhere concedes. But puns are the result of an antifacility: they offer disrespect to language, and all they manage to do is make words look stupid.
Now compare the above to the below—to the truly quotable Christopher. In his speech, it is the terse witticism that we remember; in his prose, what we thrill to is his magisterial expansiveness (the ideal anthology would run for several thousand pages, and would include whole chapters of his recent memoir, Hitch-22). The extracts that follow aren’t jokes or jibes. They are more like crystallizations—insights that lead the reader to a recurring question: if this is so obviously true, and it is, why did we have to wait for Christopher to point it out to us?
• “There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is better than no sincerity at all.”
• “One reason to be a decided antiracist is the plain fact that ‘race’ is a construct with no scientific validity. DNA can tell you who you are, but not what you are.”
• “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.”
• On gay marriage: “This is an argument about the socialization of homosexuality, not the homosexualization of society. It demonstrates the spread of conservatism, not radicalism, among gays.”
• On Philip Larkin: “The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock.”
• “In America, your internationalism can and should be your patriotism.”
• “It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, like the waste product of a failed experiment.”
• “This has always been the central absurdity of ‘moral,’ as opposed to ‘political,’ censorship: If the stuff does indeed have a tendency to deprave and corrupt, why then the most depraved and corrupt person must be the censor who keeps a vigilant eye on it.”
And one could go on. Christopher’s dictum “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence” has already entered the language. And so, I predict, will this (coined too recently for inclusion here): “A Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer.” What justice, what finality. Like all Christopher’s best things, it has the simultaneous force of a proof and a law.
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“Is nothing sacred?” he asks. “Of course not.” And no Westerner, as Ronald Dworkin pointed out, “has the right not to be offended.” We accept Christopher’s errancies, his recklessnesses, because they are inseparable from his courage; and true valor, axiomatically, fails to recognize discretion. As the world knows, Christopher has recently made the passage from the land of the well to the land of the ill. One can say that he has done so without a visible flinch; and he has written about the process with unparalleled honesty and eloquence, and with the highest decorum. His many friends, and his innumerable admirers, have come to dread the tone of the “living obituary.” But if the story has to end too early, then its coda will contain a triumph.
Christopher’s personal devil is God, or rather organized religion, or rather the human “desire to worship and obey.” He comprehensively understands that the desire to worship, and all the rest of it, is a direct reaction to the unmanageability of the idea of death. “Religion,” wrote Larkin:
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die…
And there are other, unaffiliated intimations that the secular mind has now outgrown. “Life is a great surprise,” observed Nabokov (b. 1899); “I don’t see why death should not be an even greater one.” Or Bellow (b. 1915), in the words of Artur Sammler:
Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more….But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge.
Such thoughts still haunt us; but they no longer have the power to dilute the black ink of oblivion.
My dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about your impending embrace of the divine and the supernatural. This is of course insane. But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of zealotry, to my own persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great, you put very little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and what divides you and me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any frog could straddle. “The measure of an education,” you write elsewhere, “is that you acquire some idea of the extent of your ignorance.” And that’s all that “agnosticism” really means: it is an acknowledgment of ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I know you won’t make it) would seem to me consonant with your character—with your acceptance of inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual romanticism, and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as superior to my own.
The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one would dream of applying to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I respectfully suggest, is a slightly more logical and decorous response to our situation—to the indecipherable grandeur of what is now being (hesitantly) called the “multiverse.” The science of cosmology is an awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete and approximate; and over the last thirty years it has garnered little but a series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself an atheist, I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while continuing to go about his tasks, declares himself an individualist. It cannot be altogether frivolous or wishful to talk of a “higher intelligence”—because the cosmos is itself a higher intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot understand it.
Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to everyone else who will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal existence, O Hitch, derives from the elements released by supernovae, by exploding stars. Stellar fire was your womb, and stellar fire will be your grave: a just course for one who has always blazed so very brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the sun, will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out to consume what is left of us, about 6 billion years from now.
The Observer 2010
* This piece was the foreword to The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism—The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens, edited by Windsor Mann (2010).
Politics 3
On Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition
When I was a ten-year-old resident of Princeton, New Jersey, I used to crouch by the radio on Saturda
y mornings to hear the children’s songs, and I was always anxiously hoping for “Carbon the Copy Cat.” You can find an intriguing rendition of “Carbon” on YouTube by Tex Ritter, a vocalist who could impart a touch of gravitas and woe to the simplest chant or lullaby. The version I thrilled to, in 1959, was much smoother and jollier; whereas Tex was a Texan, the “cover” was the work of an unnamed midwesterner, who pronounced Carbon “Carbin” (“Wimbledin,” “commitmint,” “pregnint”). Is it any wonder, then, that I have been going around the place this summer singing “Corbyn the Copy Cat”?
The comparison is far from airtight, I admit, but the example of the Copy Cat still has much to teach us. In the song, Carbon is a bloody fool of a feline who wants to join, or at least to imitate, animals from other species.
Like a sheep he tried to baa (baa, baa)
Like a bird he tried to chirp (chirp, chirp)
Like a dog he tried to bark (bark, bark).
He tried and tried the best he knew how.
It always came out meow, meow, meow.
Jeremy Corbyn learnt to say meow early on in life (coached, at several removes, by a certain German economist); and it has never even occurred to him to try saying anything else.
We are exact contemporaries (born 1949, along with NATO); and for the lion’s share of my twenties I found myself close to the epicenter of the Corbyn milieu. For I was on the staff of the New Statesman—attending party conferences, drinking with parliamentary correspondents, and playing regular games of cricket and football against Tribune and other loose confederations of the left. There were Identikit Corbyns everywhere—right down to the ginger beard, the plump fountain pen in the top pocket, and the visible undervest, slightly discolored in the family wash.
Weedy, nervy, and thrifty (you often saw a little folded purse full of humid small change), with an awkward-squad look about them (as if nursing a well-informed grievance), the Corbyns were in fact honest and good-hearted. Politically, they were the salt of the earth—“those to whom,” at some stage and on some level, “the miseries of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest” (John Keats). What the exponents of the old left were like humanly depended—with mathematical precision—on how doctrinaire they were. You sought the company of Alan Watkins and Mary Holland, among many others; you avoided the company of Corin Redgrave and Kika Markham (as well as the more driven Corbyns).
All this was during the later 1970s—the apogee and swansong of the old left. Harold Wilson’s short third term after the interregnum of Ted Heath; James Callaghan (1976–1979), and work-to-rule, the miners’ strike (Arthur Scargill), the three-day week, plus a class war whose tremors you felt a dozen times a day; then came Margaret Thatcher (1979–1990). Everyone was old left. It was generally felt at the Statesman that the proletariat deserved to win, this time: now there would at last be moral redress.
My closest office colleagues were old left too, with variations. I agreed with James Fenton, pretty much, when he calmly stated: “I want a government that is weak against the trade unions.” Julian Barnes clashed with a certain Statesman hard-liner when he revealed that he had once voted Liberal. That hard-liner was Christopher Hitchens. Throughout his polemical career Christopher maintained his peculiar blend of irony and granite. When he came up to the books and arts department, there would always be an exchange of taunts and teases. “You want rule by yobs,” I used to tell him: “Not just rule in their interests and in their name—but rule by yobs.” “That’s it,” he’d answer, with his equivocating smile: “I live for the day when the berks are finally in the saddle.”
It is one of the most saliently endearing facts about Christopher—that he never, ever, stopped loving Trotsky. Everyone else was old left, too, though by then largely shorn of utopian romance. And everyone who looked in on the weekly editorial meetings, who dropped by with pieces entitled “An End to Growth” and “Whither the Closed Shop?,” was Jeremy Corbyn. Or were they? Corbyn himself wouldn’t have joined us, as all the others did, in the pub or in the Bung Hole wine bar (he’s tee-total), nor in the Italian café where we all lunched on the full English breakfast (he’s vegetarian). Then, too, the bods who came to Great Turnstile were, once you got to know them, congenial types who, in addition, could put an argument together on paper, often with some panache. And Jeremy? After thirty-odd years as a safe-seat backbencher (Islington North), Corbyn is the fluky beneficiary of a drastic elevation. So it is time to take a serious look at his flaws.
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First, he is undereducated. Which is one way of putting it. His schooling dried up when he was eighteen, at which point he had two E-grade A-levels to his name; he started a course at North London Polytechnic, true, where he immersed himself in trade-union studies, but dropped out after a year. And that was that. Corbyn says he enjoys “reading and writing” (listing them, I thought, as if they were hobbies, like potholing and trainspotting); to my eyes, he doesn’t have the eager aura of an autodidact. It is a fair guess that his briefcase, or his satchel, contains nothing but manifestos and position papers. In general, his intellectual CV gives an impression of slow-minded rigidity; and he seems essentially incurious about anything beyond his immediate sphere.
Second, he is humorless. Many journalists have remarked on this, usually in a tone of wry indulgence. In fact it is an extremely grave accusation, imputing as it does a want of elementary nous. To put it crassly, the humorless man is a joke—and a joke he will never get. When he was collared by a TV team and asked to say something about Tony Blair’s wearily witty attacks on him, Corbyn straightened up and said he would respond only to “substantive” questions. In his face there was not the slightest glint of amusement or defiance or spirit. And Blair’s criticisms contained plenty that was “substantive,” including the charge that everything Corbyn says, without exception, is pallidly thirdhand—his championship, for instance, of Clause 4 (on public ownership), which was first formulated in 1918. “I don’t do personal,” Corbyn has explained, shoring up one’s surmise that he is “modern” only in the up-to-date vulgarity of his syntax. When he found himself arguing for a United Kingdom where every house has a garden, Corbyn elaborated as follows: “Anyone who wants to be a beekeeper should be a beekeeper.” Nobody with a sense of humor could possibly have said that.
Third, he has no grasp of the national character—an abysmal deficit for any politician, let alone a torchbearer. The idea of dismantling Trident looks set to gain a clear plurality on practical grounds; but his proposal to leave NATO (“a Cold War organization”), and so paralyze the special relationship, causes only exasperated tedium in London and suspicious dismay in Washington. As for his proposal to scrap the army, last articulated in 2012: this would be a veritable spear through the British soul. It shows an indifference to both the past and the future. Philip Larkin spoke for the country, as he often did (it is both a strength and a weakness), in “Homage to a Government” (1969):
Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
The national character contains nationalism, naturally; and the British temper is above all gradualist. Enormous powers of suasion are needed to induce an electorate to waive what it values most, which is continuity.
Turning to Corbyn’s foreign policies—well, here I’ll deal only with the thing they call IT (international terrorism). When at last he managed to make himself clear about what he hoped would happen in the Middle East, Corbyn’s vaunted “friendship” with Hamas and Hezbollah became roughly intelligible. Far more damningly and tellingly, he often implied that July 7, 2005, was an act of revenge, a calibrated tit for tat, for the invasion of Iraq. We see here the dismally reflexive mental habit of seeking moral “equivalence” at every opportunity; thus the glitteringly murder
ous theists of ISIS are indistinguishable from the coalition troops in Fallujah. And heed his Churchillian call for “political compromise” with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his genocidaires in Raqqa and Mosul.
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Lavishly equipped with the demerits—the encysted dogmas—of the old left, Corbyn nonetheless gawkily embodies one of its noblest themes: the search for something a little bit better than what exists today: more equal, more gentle, more just.
If, as every commentator seems to agree, the current Corbyn is obviously unelectable, then in what direction will he be obliged to move? The recruitment of Seumas Milne (a far-left intellectual) as media manager changes nothing, though it does defer the prospect of a slicked-up, business-friendly Corbyn with a new suit and a new smile. That was always close to inconceivable. It is far easier to imagine a Labour party that devolves for now into a leftist equivalent of the American GOP: hopelessly retrograde, self-absorbed, self-pitying, and self-righteous, quite unembarrassed by its (years-long) tantrum, necessarily and increasingly hostile to democracy, and in any sane view undeserving of a single vote. Under him, the Labour Party is no longer Her Majesty’s Opposition. There is no opposition; Labour is out of the game.
For all his charming insecurities, Carbon the Copy Cat boldly roamed the rural farmsteads, and showed an ardent interest in the exotic, the other—the mooing cows, the clucking hens, the quacking ducks. In contrast to the coal-black Carbon, Corbyn is a marmalade cat, homebound, perched like a tea cozy on the kitchen radiator, and contentedly wedded to the things he already knows.
The Sunday Times 2015
Postscript, August 2017. The penultimate paragraph above is something like a festival of false prophecies (these days Corbyn is even wearing a suit and tie). In the June 2017 general election, Corbyn successfully enlisted the angry millennials, who were in effect disinherited by their Brexiteer parents and grandparents; he also mobilized the nation’s hatred of the politics of austerity. The result was the biggest lurch to Labour since Churchill vs. Attlee in 1945; and the opposition is now back in the game. Nevertheless, Corbyn’s limitations persist: he has to some extent de-Marxified himself, but he is still intellectually narrow, still humorless, and still largely insensitive to the native character (and still tainted by anti-Semitism and softness on Islamism). In any case, can one ever fully forgive his weak-voiced torpor during the Brexit referendum (when he took a holiday in mid-campaign)?…An exponent of realpolitik, a cynical genius with a De Gaullean sense of historical pacing, might have played lukewarm on Europe in order to garner “buyer’s remorse” for the next electoral round. Partly to his credit, though, Corbyn is straighter than that; Europe is gone now anyway, and the pendulum of power seems to owe us a swing to the left.
