The long-delayed Czech charter flight almost failed to clear the palm trees at the fringe of Havana Airport—something to do with a wrong guess about the weight of the luggage—but the expressions of the crew conveyed a generally listless attitude. They were returning to a country where the state-decreed slogan was that of postinvasion “normalization” (one of the most casually ugly phrases of the whole twentieth century). Once again we had a stopover in Canada and on the TV screens saw the Chicago police beating puddles of blood out of the demonstrators who were willing to pit themselves against a filthy war, a racist Democratic Party machine, and a fixed convention. Damn it, I remember thinking. I have missed Prague and now I am missing Chicago.
“Tourist of the Revolution” was a phrase that was later used to ridicule those who went in search of socialist fatherlands, but I truly did not think of myself as a tourist. I simply and exhaustingly and fervently wished I could be in many places at once, so as to lean the uttermost of my slight weight onto the fulcrum. It was years later that I read Thomas Paine saying that to have played a part in two revolutions was “to have lived to some purpose.” This was the sort of eloquence that I wish I could have commanded at the time.
However, I was still somewhat imprisoned within the jargon of Left sectarianism. By the time our plane had landed in London, with the Czechs continuing morosely homeward and I myself being subjected to yet another police scrutiny of my passport and my person, the new post-Chicago headline of Socialist Worker read like this: “East and West: Tanks and Cops Defend ‘Freedom.’” To a point, I approved this moral equivalence. It was at any rate better than those who only moaned painlessly about Prague (which the West had not defended) or those who were only moved to protest about Vietnam. The verbal crudeness of the headline’s phrasing bothered me less than it should have done. After all, as our plane had neared London, we had been told that one of our number might possibly be detained and even deported upon arrival. He was a South African exile. Nothing more needed to be said: we all knew that we would form a cluster around him, pile our luggage into the shape of a barricade, raise our fists and utter the most obvious chants of resistance until we could be sure that a proper left-wing lawyer had arrived. The risk of our own detention or blacklisting would have been nothing more than the payment of a duty. Had you then accused me of being “sloganistic” in my politics, I would have considered it no great insult.
As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
Back in Oxford I ran into “The Warden” in the High Street. He was very much his usual self, bustling and brimming and half-deferential, half-ironic. “My dear Christopher, just the man I wanted to tell. We have a new fellow coming to the college: a new recruit as you would probably say, but a hero, an absolute hero. Bit of a Marxist I’m afraid but it can’t be helped. You must meet him.” This was my introduction to Leszek Kolakowski, who was then not much known outside his native Poland. He had been one of the “reform Communist” intellectuals of the “Polish spring” of 1956, a moment that had inaugurated a period of relative openness under the Gomulka regime. The reactionary and anti-Jewish crackdown of 1968, presaged by the arrest and imprisonment of Kurón and Modzelewski, had put all this into reverse. Kolakowski had, like so many of the intellectual leadership of Eastern Europe, been partly deported and partly self-exiled. He had at first gone to teach philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley—a campus whose name was near-sacred to those of us who felt we were breathing the pure air of the Sixties—but had evidently tired of this already and was willing to come to All Souls.*
Kolakowski had missed his “formal” education because of the Nazi occupation of his country but had more than made up for it by the hungry ingestion of books during the wartime underground years, during which time he had also become a consecrated Communist. When we eventually met, I was first of all and perhaps rather foolishly impressed by how exactly he looked his part. Victor Laszlo in Casablanca simply seems too sleek and well-fed to have been a survivor of Nazi penal institutions (I still shudder when I think how nearly Ronald Reagan came to being cast as Rick in that movie) but Leszek had the ideally gaunt, austere appearance of the dissident who has known what it is to suffer material as well as intellectual deprivation.** His voice and manner, also, were appropriately ironic and sardonic. And he had, in effect, seen all the way through Communism. In my boyish way I thought I had done the same. But—and I cannot tell you how much this argument used to matter—I would not concede that Leninism and Stalinism were the same thing, or that the second logically followed from the first. After much wrestling and juggling, Kolakowski had simply given up on the whole idea of “reform” Communism, or was at any rate in the throes of doing so. I did not believe that Stalin’s system could be reformed, but I was quite convinced that it could and would only be overturned by, and from, the Left. Kolakowski was quite patient with me. At the time—and how embarrassing I now find it to say this—I thought that it was I who was being quite indulgent to him.
The Polish ambassador to London, a doltish apparatchik named Marian Dobrosielski, was invited to Oxford to give a talk. With the help of some Polish leftist friends to act as translators for the Polish press on file at St. Anthony’s College, I managed to draft and print a leaflet, in Polish and English, telling the Stalinist envoy that he was not welcome. I asked Kolakowski if he’d come to the event and help to swell our protest. He declined, saying rather drily that there was little point in such commonplace encounters. We went ahead anyway, and gave Ambassador Dobrosielski quite a bad time, and just as the evening was breaking up I saw a bony and quizzical visage peering from a dark corner at the very back of the hall. Leszek had not, after all, been able to resist showing up. At the time, I thought that this was a small triumph for Trotskyism over “mere” anti-Communism. In fact, Kolakowski was just beginning to erect the edifice of his astonishing trilogy Main Currents of Marxism. I was fabulously lucky in having met him so early, but much too callow and overconfident to take full advantage of the chance I’d been given. Still, for almost the next two decades of my life I carried on an argument with him, and others like him, about the nature of Communism. Yes, the germ of Stalinism had been in Leninism to begin with. But had there not been other germs as well? And what historical conditions led to the dominance of which germs? I suppose I still hope to show that not everything about this debate was a complete waste of time.
The remainder of my golden Oxford years slid by in this way and, though I was oppressed at the time by a sense of waste—what my fellow Balliol-man Anthony Powell had called “the crushing melancholy of the undergraduate condition”*—I do not believe that they were entirely squandered, either. Let us say one quarter of the time allotted to political confrontations and dramas, another devoted to reading books on any subject except the ones I was supposed to be studying, another quarter on seeking out intellectual heavyweights who commanded artillery superior to my
own, with the residual twenty-five percent being consumed by the polymorphous perverse. It could have been worse. I made a minor discovery which has been useful to me since in the analysis of some larger public figures like my contemporary Bill Clinton: if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone. I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity—a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect—with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then-segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady…
There came also a day when the undergraduate weekly Cherwell asked me if I would like to help write the “John Evelyn” gossip column. This was a prestige spot, disapproved of by some of my grimmer and less hedonistic comrades, but a perfect finesse of that problem offered itself at once. I was to be co-author of the column with Patrick Cockburn, whose father, Claud, a Red veteran of the Spanish Civil War, had been one of the great guerrilla journalists of all time. Had been? In the London offices of the great satirical magazine Private Eye, he still was a figure of immense authority. His oldest son, Alexander, had left Oxford to become one of the editors of the New Left Review, and his middle son, Andrew, an arrestingly handsome boy with a look reminiscent of the young T.S. Eliot, was another of my contemporaries. Anybody who knows anything about the later history of radical journalism will recognize these names, as they will that of the great documentary maker Christo Hird, who became the third member of our “John Evelyn” team and helped us transform it from a mere chronicle of idle and gilded youth into something more mordant and investigative and Swiftian (or so we liked to think). Once again, that lure of printers’ ink and the word “pamphleteer.”
I had better confess, before quitting this, to a “having it both ways” moment that gave me even at the time a twinge of remorse. When Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger circumvented Congress and the Constitution and the strategic majority of Nixon’s own cabinet in 1970 in order to conduct the invasion of Cambodia, I had already been invited to debate with the then–Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart at the Oxford Union on the morality of the war in Indochina. The obscene images of the conflict as they were extended to yet another country were so enraging that I banished all thoughts of scruple. I accepted the formal invitation to take part in the debate, and to attend the dinner beforehand with the foreign secretary. Meanwhile, I intrigued with friends to make sure that there was a large claque of hard-core protestors stationed in the main hall and in the gallery. I made my speech from the dispatch box in the approved manner—it wasn’t one of my best but it made a fairly fierce and detailed case against the imperial incursion—and then loudly insulted the government’s guest of honor, deserted the other guests, and went to sit with, and shout with, the mob. At a given signal when Stewart rose to speak, a phalanx also rose and simply and repetitively yelled the one word “murderer” in his face. It was horribly gratifying to see the way in which such a leading member of Her Majesty’s Government turned so pale under the assault. At another signal, a noose was uncurled from the gallery and fell dangling within inches of the wretched foreign secretary’s head. (It was dropped by James Long, later to be a distinguished economics editor at the BBC.) Nobody had ever attempted to abort a debate in these precincts before, and so the pitifully weak staff of the building was at a loss. We could have done almost anything we wanted, including at least roughing up if not lynching the foreign secretary. A sudden consciousness of exactly this ability—both intoxicating and nauseating—is probably what stalled us. We contented ourselves with further deafening insults and marched away. The official Minute Book of our little parliament still records that: “For the first time in the 147 years of the Society’s existence, the House voted to stand adjourned sine die on account of riot.”
The publicity was astounding. An editorial in the Times opined that our movement of protest was “one of the nastiest political phenomena that Britain has experienced in this century,” which I thought—when one considered only a few of the other “phenomena”—was plainly absurd. We had, in our own opinion, not “silenced” Mr. Stewart, whose views were well known and could easily be broadcast, so much as we had voiced the outrage that should properly be felt at the destruction of Cambodian society. I remember arguing with dexterous casuistry that we had compelled the Establishment press to take notice and had thus, in a way, actually succeeded in enlarging the area of free speech. A nice try, I hope you will admit. But however one phrased the case, the only reason for mentioning free speech in the first place was that, however one looked at it, we had in fact shut down a public debate by force. I had a huge quarrel about it with Jack Straw, then the head of the National Union of Students and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War, who insisted that the right of free expression trumped all other considerations. (It was years before we agreed on anything again, and by that time he was himself the foreign secretary—for Tony Blair—and arguing at the United Nations for the removal of the intolerable Saddam Hussein tyranny from Iraq.)
I remember how we arrived at a higher synthesis: a final justification of our breach of the rules of civility, debate, and hospitality. After all, we had—did we not?—a higher cause and nobler purpose. It was even possible, given the huge media fuss generated by our action, that the people of Indochina would get to hear of it and, as a result, take additional heart from the knowledge of our solidarity. As I write this, I realize that I then truly did believe it. After a mighty demonstration outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, Michael Rosen had written a haunting poem, published in the university’s literary magazine Isis, that hymned a then-famous poster of a Vietnamese woman in a paddy field, with a gun slung over her shoulder. Please let it be, the poem had urged, that some of the news and pictures of our revolt will reach you and put a smile on your face. Next to this imperative, we felt, all lesser reservations were merely pallid and insipid. So, quite hardened as I was to insisting on this point against those who were more tentative, why was it that I could not quite repress the sense of having done something shabby? “I have something to expiate,” as D.H. Lawrence put it in his poem “Snake.” “A pettiness.”
The Fenton Factor
The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
—Hamlet: Act I, Scene iii
OF COURSE I knew about Fenton, too, when I took that first cocktail off him in the public bar of the King’s Arms. He had already demonstrated extreme precocity in winning the Newdigate poetry prize for a sonnet sequence titled Our Western Furniture, about Commodore Perry’s historic “opening” of the closed island society of Japan. It had a beauty and ominousness to it which I shall try to catch by this brief extract:
I saw the salmon flash, caught in the net.
It was the only light. It flicked the spray!
An energy to spawn and procreate!
The sudden poet’s cry—its silver grey
Dagger-blade flash—a protest yet:
“I saw the ships in Nagasaki Bay.”
On the cover of the first published version was a paragraph from Commodore Perry’s report to Congress in 1856 (just one year before India rose in rebellion against the East India Company). “It seems to me,” opined the gallant Commodore:
that the people of America will, in some form or another, extend their dominion and their power, until they shall have placed the Saxon race upon the eastern shores of Asia. I think too that eastward and southward will her great rival in future aggrandizement (Russia) stretch forth her power to the coasts of China and Siam and thus the Saxon and the Cossack will meet… Will it be in friendship? I fear not! The antagonistic exponents of freedom and absolutism must thus meet at last and then will be fought the mighty battle on which the world will look with breat
hless interest; for on its issue the freedom or the slavery of the world will depend.
This seemed quite redolent of the huge drama then playing itself out in Indochina (a comparison to which James himself drew attention), but it came at the subject in a very different and much less propagandistic way than I had been doing. I take down my first edition of this poem, very finely bound by the Sycamore Press (a hand-set-type operation run out of the garage of the poet and tutor of Magdalen College, John Fuller). “To Christopher Hitchens from James Fenton with much love,” it says on the flyleaf, the inscription dated “November 1969.” When James’s first collection of published poems, Terminal Moraine, came out in 1972, I have just noticed to my irritation, it was inscribed “To Chris, from the author, with lots of love.” I hadn’t before registered this qualitative degeneration. What I had noticed at the time was an observation by the great Roy Fuller, honored laureate of the 1930s and father of John, at a party at the latter’s house in Benson Place. “You’re a friend of young Fenton’s, then?” he said gruffly. I allowed as much. “I rather think that he writes as well now, if not better, than Wystan did at his age.” I knew this would please James, who had first been introduced to Auden and Kallman through some mutual friends in Florence, but I also knew it wouldn’t go to his head.
Ah, that head! Redmond O’Hanlon was later to compare it to an owl’s egg. It certainly did have the most domed and sapient appearance. And under the arc and curve of that skull lay an extraordinary variety of elements and materials. The first of these was a sort of direct line to the tradition of English poetry, the second was a talent for burlesque and parody, often manifested with an almost manic glee, and the third was a buried seriousness that, as with his mentor Auden, derived from a sort of post-Christianity based on a form of English Protestantism. He also, broke as he was and as we all were, invariably had the price of a drink or a smoke about his person, and I am glad that I loved and love him so, because it was he who awakened my thus far buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine. Friends, somebody said, are “god’s apology for relations.” I was one of those who had tended to think of friends at school as comrades or acquaintances or co-conspirators or cronies or sex partners (or an occasional salad of all four). Monastic school and college traditions, I will plead, made this less freakish and grotesque than it may now look on the page. I did have a friend, Michael Prest, my former rescuer from bullying and the only man I still knew from school. And I had a comrade, James Pettifer, who was a playwright and polymath and internationalist. It was so that we could all three find a fourth person to share the expenses of a house in the wastes of Cowley Road that we were meeting Fenton in that pub. All of us, I am sure, would still date our future moments from the one in which this encounter occurred.
Hitch-22: A Memoir Page 16
