Hitch-22: A Memoir

by Christopher Hitchens

  It’s the professional deformation of many writers, and has ruined not a few. (I remember Kingsley Amis, himself no slouch, saying that he could tell on what page of the novel Paul Scott had reached for the bottle and thrown caution to the winds.) I work at home, where there is indeed a bar-room, and can suit myself. But I don’t. At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle of red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there.

  Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It’s not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today’s Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn’t particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human.

  At the wild Saturnalia that climaxes John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, the charismatic Danny manages to lay so many women that, afterward, even the females who didn’t receive his attentions prefer to claim, rather than appear to have been overlooked, that they were included, too. I can’t make any comparable boast but quite often I get second-hand reports about people who claim to have spent evenings in my company that belong to song, story, and legend when it comes to the Dionysian. I once paid a visit to the grotesque holding-pen that the United States government maintains at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. There wasn’t an unsupervised moment on the whole trip, and the main meal we ate—a heavily calorific affair that was supposed to demonstrate how well-nourished the detainees were—was made even more inedible by the way that water (with the option of a can of Sprite) flowed like wine. Yet a few days later I ran into a friend at the White House who told me half-admiringly: “Way to go at Guantánamo: they say you managed to get your own bottle and open it down on the beach and have a party.” This would have been utterly unfeasible in that bizarre Cuban enclave, half-madrassa and half-stockade, but it was still completely and willingly believed. Publicity means that actions are judged by reputations and not the other way about: I never wonder how it happens that mythical figures in religious history come to have fantastic rumors credited to their names.

  “Hitch: making rules about drinking can be the sign of an alcoholic,” as Martin Amis once teasingly said to me. (Adorno would have savored that, as well.) Of course, watching the clock for the start-time is probably a bad sign, but here are some simple pieces of advice for the young. Don’t drink on an empty stomach: the main point of the refreshment is the enhancement of food. Don’t drink if you have the blues: it’s a junk cure. Drink when you are in a good mood. Cheap booze is a false economy. It’s not true that you shouldn’t drink alone: these can be the happiest glasses you ever drain. Hangovers are another bad sign, and you should not expect to be believed if you take refuge in saying you can’t properly remember last night. (If you really don’t remember, that’s an even worse sign.) Avoid all narcotics: these make you more boring rather than less and are not designed—as are the grape and the grain—to enliven company. Be careful about up-grading too far to single malt Scotch: when you are voyaging in rough countries it won’t be easily available. Never even think about driving a car if you have taken a drop. It’s much worse to see a woman drunk than a man: I don’t know quite why this is true but it just is. Don’t ever be responsible for it.

  Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…

  The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.

  —Leo Strauss: “Why We Remain Jews” [1962]

  I think I may well be a Jew.

  —Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” [1962]

  In the early days of the December that my father was to die, my younger brother brought me the news that I was a Jew. I was then a transplanted Englishman in America, married, with one son, and, though unconsoled by any religion, a nonbelieving member of two Christian churches. On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find that I was pleased.

  Immediately above is the opening paragraph of my essay for Ben Sonnenberg’s quarterly Grand Street in the summer of 1988. It was reprinted quite a bit, and gave the eponymous title to my first collection of essays, Prepared for the Worst. It was my earliest and until now my only excursion into memoir, was largely positive and even upbeat if only because my semi-Semitism was on my mother’s side rather than, as with Sylvia Plath, a distraught paternal bequest, and it closed with the easily uttered words “To be continued…”

  For the first forty-odd years of my life I had thought of myself as English, latterly with ambitions to become an Anglo-American. This national self-definition underwent an interesting change as a consequence of my maternal grandmother’s outliving both of my parents. Yvonne took her own life at a distressingly young age. My father’s robust health began to fail him in his late seventies and he died in late 1987. My brother, Peter, in the meantime, had become engaged to a Jewish girl and had taken her to meet “Dodo”—old Mrs. Dorothy Hickman—our only surviving grandparent. Later, and after she’d congratulated him on his choice, she rather disconcerted Peter by saying: “She’s Jewish, isn’t she?” He had agreed that this was the case and then she’d disconcerted him even further by saying, “Well, I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.”

  How had this taken so long to emerge, and why was it still to be counted as a family secret? My mother had not wanted anyone to know, and indeed my father had been all his life unaware of the fact, and was to remain so to the end. I have now been back through all the possible recollections and am fairly sure that I can guess the reason, but here’s the trail I followed.

  In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland, there was a town called Kempen which had, for much of its existence, a Jewish majority. (It is now called Kempno and is about an hour’s drive from the Polish city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau.) A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, born in Kempen in 1844, decided to leave or was possibly taken by his parents, but at all events arrived in the English Midlands and, though he married “out,” became the father of thirteen Orthodox children. It appears that he had disembarked at Liverpool (the joke among English Jews is that some of the duller emigrants did that, imagining that they had already reached New York) and settled in Leicester by 1871. On later census forms he gives his occupation as “tailor.” In 1893, one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), and the British bureaucracy’s marriage certificates certify them as having been wed “according to the rites of the German and Polish Jews.” My mother’s mother, whose birth name was Dorothy Levin, was born three years later, in 1896.

  It doesn’t seem to have taken them long to decide on assimilation, in that by the time of the First World War the Blumenthal family name had become “Dale” and the Levins were called “Lynn
.” This might have had something to do with the general revulsion against German names at that epoch, when even the British Royal Family scrapped its Saxe-Coburg-Gotha titles and became the House of Windsor, conveniently metamorphosing other names like “Battenberg” into “Mountbatten.” But nominal assimilation didn’t quite extend to the religious kind. Dodo could recall drawing the curtains on Friday night and bringing out the menorah, and also fasting on Yom Kippur (“even if only for my figure, dear”), but she also remembered being discreet about this because in Oxford, where my great-grandparents had by then moved, there was a bit of low-level prejudice.

  My father had died very soon after Peter brought me the Jewish news, and I had flown over to England for the funeral (which Dodo was too frail to attend) and then gone at once to see her. What I wanted to understand was this: How had I been so incurious, and so easily deceived? She seemed determined to act the part of a soap-opera Jewish granny (“I could always see it in you and your brother: you both had the Jewish brains…”), and she certainly and rather abruptly looked Jewish to me, which she hadn’t while I was growing up. Or perhaps better to say, when I was a boy I wasn’t in any sense Jew-conscious: Dodo had dark ringletted hair and a complexion to match, and when I registered this at all, it was with the stray thought that she looked like a gypsy. But when you are young you take your relatives for granted, and even if you do ask childishly awkward questions you tend to accept the answer. “Hickman” wasn’t an especially exotic name—my mother used to laugh that she couldn’t wait to get rid of it and then wound up marrying a Hitchens—and when Peter and I asked what had happened to Dodo’s husband, we were hushed with the information that he had “died in the war.” Since all family stories of all kinds were always about “the war” we accepted this without question, as being overwhelmingly probable. It was years later when Peter discovered that Dodo had been married to a drunken and adulterous wife-beater, Lionel Hickman by name, who had continued our mischling tradition by converting to Judaism in order to marry her, given her an all-around vile time, and then been run over by a tram during the blackout that accompanied the Nazi blitzkrieg. Killed in the war, to be sure.

  As I sat with the old lady in her little suburban parlor in the south London suburbs, I kept asking myself if I had any memories that might amount to premonitions of, or other awarenesses of, this heritage. Once one starts looking for such things, I know, the chance of “discovering” them has a tendency to increase. There on the mantelpiece was a photograph of Yvonne, looking young and blonde and venturesome and obviously quite well equipped to “pass” as a Gentile. “She didn’t much want to be a Jew,” said Dodo, “and I didn’t think your father’s family would have liked the idea, either. So we just decided to keep it to ourselves.” This was becoming dispiriting. My father had been a reactionary and a pessimist—the Private Eye caricatures of Denis Thatcher had always reminded me of his insistently Eeyore-ish tone, sometimes taken up by my brother—but not at all a bigot. If anything about Yvonne’s ethnic background might have given him check or pause, it would have been the discovery that her ancestors had identified themselves as German. The Commander’s view, echoing that of the Morgenthau Plan, was that post-1945 Germany would have been better if totally depopulated… But this he would not have thought of as a prejudice.

  I was suddenly visited by a long-ago memory of my father’s father, breaking into a harangue when it became generally known in family circles that his elder grandson had declared for the Labour Party and for socialism. This must therefore have been about 1964 or perhaps, given the glacial pace at which news was delivered on his side of the family, as late as 1965 or ’66. He favored me, I remember, in his rather grinding and harsh Portsmouth tones, with a sort of bestiary of sinister surnames, all tending to show the unsoundness of Labour’s then-parliamentary Left. I can remember it now: “Look at them: Sidney Silverman, John Mendelson, Tom Driberg, Ian Mikardo” (this last a Portsmouth lad into whom, along with the fat-headed future Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, my schoolmaster grandpa had attempted to wallop the rudiments of an education). At the time I hadn’t any idea what he meant to convey by all this, unless it was to identify unpatriotically German names—my later pal Tom Driberg had suffered cognomen-persecution all his life without being in the least Jewish—but I was later able to guess by a sort of reverse-engineering.* The old man was very forbidding in manner at the best of times: I can’t imagine what it would have been like for my mother, let alone her mother, to be introduced to the patriarch in 1945, when her marriage to the Commander was first mooted. One of the Commander’s very few surviving letters makes my point for me: it’s to his brother Ray and is dated 28 March 1945, from HMS Jamaica, which means that the warship must have been lying at anchor in the nearby Portsmouth harbor:

  Dear Ray,

  Many thanks for your letter of felicitation. Yes I quite agree that it does need a sense of proportion to enter the homestead and emerge unscathed and I thought it as well to put Yvonne through this acid test before enquiring whether she was further interested…

  I don’t think it would or could have taken Yvonne very long to decide against embarking upon some easy chat with her prospective father-in-law, about the long line of milliners, tailors, kosher butchers, and (to be fair) dentists from which I now know she had sprung. Looking back, I can’t see my grandpa ever having had much use for any of the above professions. What he liked, or what I remember him liking, was lavishly illustrated histories of Protestant missionaries in Africa. On this topic, she could have been of little comfort or joy to him.

  Sitting now with Dodo and recalling all this, I had to ask myself what Jewishness had meant to me, if anything, when I was a boy. I was completely sure that it meant nothing at all until I was thirteen, except as a sort of subtext to the Christian Bible stories with which I had been regaled at prep school. In some odd fashion the Nazarene Jesus had been a sort of rabbi, and horribly executed under the mocking title of “King of the Jews,” but it had also been the Jews who most thirsted for his torture and death. Very, very occasionally some boy would make a mean or meaning or even demeaning remark about this, but in my early life there were no actual Jewish targets at which to direct such stuff. Moreover, the Nuremberg trials were a recent memory and, though most of our TV and movie fare still made it seem as if the Second World War had been a personal matter between Hitler and the better sort of English or British person, there were moments of documentary footage which showed the barely conceivable human detritus of the Final Solution, being bulldozed into mass graves. My mother in my hearing, when I was very small, had once used the expression “anti-Semitism” and I remember feeling with a sort of qualm that without having it fully explained, I somehow knew what it meant.

  In Cambridge later on, there were Jewish boys at the school, and I suppose I noticed that they tended to have curlier hair and fleshier noses, rather as I had been led to expect. They also had names which were different—Perutz, the son of the Nobel Prize winner; Kissin, the clever boy who recommended that everyone read the New Statesman; Wertheimer, who wore a big lapel-button saying that “Hanging Is Murder.” They were among the few supporters of my failed Labour campaign of 1964 and I suppose that, subliminally, they confirmed my grandfather’s view that there was something almost axiomatically subversive about Jewishness. In history classes I read about the Dreyfus case and in English class wrote a defense of Shylock against his Venetian tormentors. There was mild, occasional anti-Jewish vulgarity to be heard among some of the more dense boys—always a version of the same cliché about the Jews being over-sharp in business—but one almost never saw or heard it directed at an actual Jew.

  In the summer of 1967, between my leaving my boarding school and going to Oxford, and while I was undergoing my long-distance postal mentorship with Peter Sedgwick, the various Arab “republics” and feudal monarchies made common cause, it seemed, in a war to extinguish the State of Israel. It seemed to me obvious that here was a tiny state, clinging t
o the seaboard of the Eastern Mediterranean, and faced not with defeat but with existential obliteration. Like many leftists of the time, I sympathized by instinct with the Jewish state. I didn’t do so completely without misgivings: I had heard so many foam-flecked Tories raving on about the hated “Nasser” ever since the Suez war of 1956 that I was on my guard at hearing the same rhetoric again. And I sent off in the mail for a pamphlet that was co-produced by the “Israeli Socialist Organization” and the “Palestine Democratic Front,” a screed which purported to offer a nonsectarian solution but also proved to be written in a jargon that was based on no known language. Events anyway outpaced the pamphlet. Israel’s paratroopers were soon at the Wailing Wall and at Sharm el-Sheikh, and all the braggadocio of Nasserism rhetoric was shown as both rather empty and rather hateful. In those days I still thought, as most people did, of the struggle between Israel and “the Arabs” and not Israel and the Palestinians.