One always had to forgive her, because whether it was the AIDS plague—the initial nightmare of which we have now chosen to forget—or politics, she could call upon both moral and physical courage. And she did not just defend AIDS victims as a “category,” but generously drew upon her own struggles with carcinoma to help and advise individuals. Nobody human is ever consistent, but Susan showed herself prepared to follow where logic might compel her to go. I don’t say that she did this in a straight line, but then it would be boring if it were otherwise. I now understand that my first confrontation with what was to be the rest of my political life came when I watched her address the celebrated meeting “Solidarity with Solidarity” in New York in early 1982. It was by then fairly easy for the “progressive” world to make the formally correct noises about a military coup in Poland, and several speakers duly did so while hurrying to add (as Susan must have guessed they would) that workers were also being repressed in El Salvador, not to mention the United States. I knew I was present for a real rather than a routine event when she got up and said: “I repeat; not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.” That last phrasing didn’t precisely “work,” or else it did work precisely because it was somewhat contradictory. Edmund White is once again wrong to say that she was “howled off the stage” in consequence: there was a sort of angry silence as the audience checked its reflexes. The comrades had already had to absorb her wounding suggestion—chosen as if on purpose to dissolve any illusions they retained—that the conservative lowbrow CIA-backed Reader’s Digest (its very name an insult to the well-read) would have been a better Everyman guide to Communist reality than The Nation or the New Statesman.
The usual duty of the “intellectual” is to argue for complexity and to insist that phenomena in the world of ideas should not be sloganized or reduced to easily repeated formulae. But there is another responsibility, to say that some things are simple and ought not to be obfuscated, and by 1982 Communism had long passed the point where it needed anything more than the old equation of history with the garbage can. Even Susan, though, felt that she might have gone a burned bridge too far. As someone who had spent much of his life writing for The Nation and the New Statesman, I presumed on our recent friendship to call round and ask if The Nation could have a copy of her (clearly prepared) speech, so as to put it in print and invite a symposium of comments. She agreed, but on the startling condition that the sentence about the superiority of the Reader’s Digest be cut out. Even then, I knew better than to pick a quarrel with her on a detail. We ran the speech as redacted by her, and I wrote an introductory passage describing the evening and therefore putting her excised sentence back in, as having been extensively reported.*
In the symposium that we eventually ran, a number of the Left intelligentsia made the abysmal mistake of saying, in effect, that while what Susan had said might be partly true or even plain true, she would still have been much better advised not to say it. I think she herself may have feared that she was somehow “objectively” helping Ronald Reagan. But whether her mind changed her, or she changed her mind, she manifested the older truth that all riveters of the mind-forged manacles most fear, and that I here repeat: One cannot be just a little bit heretical.
I add for emphasis that, within a decade, official Communism had imploded beyond all hope of repair, or else mutated into overt military dictatorship as in North Korea and Cuba—the last uniformed regime in Latin America—and that in Serbia the word “fascism,” or even “National Socialism,” would not have been much of an exaggeration. All that remained at that point was to stop temporizing, stop clinging to consoling hand-holds and dallying in halfway houses and call for NATO and the White House to abandon an ignoble neutrality and save the name of Europe. Which Susan loudly did, and today’s rescued Sarajevo has a street that bears her name.*
Hannah Arendt used to speak of “the lost treasure of revolution”: a protean phenomenon that eluded the capture of those who sought it the most. Like Hegel’s “cunning of history” and Marx’s “old mole” that surfaced in unpredictable and ironic places, this mercurial element did quicken my own short life in the magic, tragic years that are denoted as 1968, 1989, and 2001. In the course of all of them, even if not without convolutions and contradictions, it became evident that the only historical revolution with any verve left in it, or any example to offer others, was the American one. (Marx and Engels, who wrote so warmly about the United States and who were Lincoln’s strongest supporters in Europe, and who so much disliked the bloodiness and backwardness of Russia, might not have been either surprised or disconcerted to notice this outcome.)
To announce that one has painfully learned to think for oneself might seem an unexciting conclusion and anyway, I have only my own word for it that I have in fact taught myself to do so. The ways in which the conclusion is arrived at may be interesting, though, just as it is always how people think that counts for much more than what they think. I suspect that the hardest thing for the idealist to surrender is the teleological, or the sense that there is some feasible, lovelier future that can be brought nearer by exertions in the present, and for which “sacrifices” are justified. With some part of myself, I still “feel,” but no longer really think, that humanity would be the poorer without this fantastically potent illusion. “A map of the world that did not show Utopia,” said Oscar Wilde, “would not be worth consulting.” I used to adore that phrase, but now reflect more upon the shipwrecks and prison islands to which the quest has led.
But I hope and believe that my advancing age has not quite shamed my youth. I have actually seen more prisons broken open, more people and territory “liberated,” and more taboos broken and censors flouted, since I let go of the idea, or at any rate the plan, of a radiant future. Those “simple” ordinary propositions, of the open society, especially when contrasted with the lethal simplifications of that society’s sworn enemies, were all I required. This wasn’t a dreary shuffle to the Right, either. It used to be that the Right made tactical excuses for friendly dictatorships, whereas now most conservatives are frantic to avoid even the appearance of doing so, and at least some on the Left can take at least some of the credit for at least some of that. It is not so much that there are ironies of history, it is that history itself is ironic. It is not that there are no certainties, it is that it is an absolute certainty that there are no certainties. It is not only true that the test of knowledge is an acute and cultivated awareness of how little one knows (as Socrates knew so well), it is true that the unbounded areas and fields of one’s ignorance are now expanding in such a way, and at such a velocity, as to make the contemplation of them almost fantastically beautiful. One reason, then, that I would not relive my life is that one cannot be born knowing such things, but must find them out, even when they then seem bloody obvious, for oneself. If I had set out to put this on paper so as to spare you some or even any of the effort, I would be doing you an injustice.
I began this highly selective narrative by citing Auden on the unadvisability of being born in the first place—a view from which he quickly waltzed to Plan B: make the most of the dance (or, as Dorothy Parker elsewhere phrased it, “You might as well live”). In better moments I prefer the lyrical stoicism of my friend and ally Richard Dawkins, who never loses his sense of wonder at the sheer unlikelihood of having briefly “made it” on a planet where crude extinction has held such sway, and where the chance of being conceived, let alone safely delivered, is so infinitesimal.
When my beloved friend James Fenton came back from Indochina, having witnessed the fall of Saigon and Phnom Penh and the end, both tragic and ambiguous, of a war which so many of us had regarded as a test of sheer commitment, he was somewhat shaken. The closing words of one of his most exquisite poems from that period were: “I’m afraid that all my
friends are dead.” But he knew that if there were any survivors they would know how to contact him, and when some of them did, and being the conscience-determined person he was and is, he went straight back to the frontiers and the camps to see how he could be of help. The resulting poems—collected as Children in Exile—comprise an essential complement to their predecessors in Memory of War. One of the latter is titled “Prison Island.” I happen to remember the genesis of this outwardly melancholy but diamond-hard poem particularly well: we had both just been verbally and aurally assailed by a braggart dogmatist who asserted of his own sect: “The possibility of defeat does not enter our calculations.”
This honking, tyrannical self-regard so annoyed James, and I think so much put him in mind of the deadly certainties that had brought such havoc to his Asian friends, that he could not rest until he had caught its hubris in the net of his verses. I have a poignant memory of him reading the first draft aloud to me, in the attic room where he was then lodging. One stanza in particular caught and held me, too:
My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your mind
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.
Over the course of the last decade, I have become vividly aware of a literally lethal challenge from the sort of people who deal in absolute certainty and believe themselves to be actuated and justified by a supreme authority. To have spent so long learning so relatively little, and then to be menaced in every aspect of my life by people who already know everything, and who have all the information they need… More depressing still, to see that in the face of this vicious assault so many of the best lack all conviction, hesitating to defend the society that makes their existence possible, while the worst are full to the brim and boiling over with murderous exaltation.
It’s quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while also insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them. After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism. Membership in the skeptical faction or tendency is not at all a soft option. The defense of science and reason is the great imperative of our time, and I feel absurdly honored to be grouped in the public mind with great teachers and scholars such as Richard Dawkins (a true Balliol man if ever there was one), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. To be an unbeliever is not to be merely “open-minded.” It is, rather, a decisive admission of uncertainty that is dialectically connected to the repudiation of the totalitarian principle, in the mind as well as in politics. But that’s my Hitch-22. I have already described some of the rehearsals for this war, which the relativists so plaintively call “endless”—as if it were not indeed the latest chapter of an eternal struggle—and I find that for the remainder of my days I shall be happy enough to see if I can emulate the understatement of Commander Hitchens, and to say that at least I know what I am supposed to be doing.
Acknowledgments
I HAVE TRIED TO DEFRAY some of my debts of acknowledgment in these very pages, but I must not omit those who made it possible for me to set down the work in the first place. Much nonsense is talked in our day about the decay of publishing, and it will remain nonsense while people like Jonathan Karp, Colin Shepherd, Bob Castillo, Cary Goldstein and Toby Mundy have the ordering of things at houses like Twelve and Atlantic. I have been especially fortunate in boasting a friend and comrade, Steve Wasserman, as, at different times, my editor for reviews, my editor for books, and last and perhaps best of all my agent. I have to thank Robin Blackburn of the New Left Review for effecting my introduction to Steve thirty years ago, and for much else besides.
Maciej Sikierski, the unsleeping archivist for Polish affairs at the library of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, went to uncommon trouble to assist me in tracing my families’ lineages in the arduous history and geography of his indomitable country.
I sometimes like to think that I could have been one of those I praise in this book, who, like Victor Serge, had the intestinal fortitude to write “for the bottom drawer, and for history.” But I know damn well that without certain editors and publishers I would have drooped like a wet sock. Undying and moist thanks, then, to Paul Barker, Anthony Howard, Harold Evans and Tina Brown, Charles Wintour, Alexander Chancellor, Charles Moore, Jeremy Treglown, Sally Emerson, Peter Stothard, Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman and Hamilton Fish and Betsy Pochoda, Barbara Epstein, Michael Kelly (RIP) and James Bennett and Cullen Murphy and Ben Schwarz, David Rieff, Jon Meacham and Mark Miller, Jacob Weisberg, David Plotz and June Thomas, Lewis Lapham and Gerry Marzorati, Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Inigo Thomas, Deirdre English, and Conor Hanna. All of them are heroes and heroines of the “first draft” and of the work in progress, and the readers of many other authors should not omit to thank them as warmly as I do.
Many thanks to Windsor Mann for help on archives and photographs.
To thank my adored father-in-law, Edwin Blue, and my delightful daughter for their expert assistance to a techno peasant would be to say the least of it.
Impossible, though, not to make the most special and snufflingly moist noises about Graydon Carter, Aimee Bell, Walter Owen, and David Friend. It’s quite something for a writer, whose promiscuous mandate is to be interested in everything, to know that he possesses friends and backers and colleagues who are determined to give him latitude while scrutinizing every line, providing every help in the field, noticing every weakness, and enhancing every paragraph. (One short passage in this book was originally written for them.) If it were not for their intensive care and meticulous attention, I would want to call them my luck.
Portrait of the author as a young man. The novel is called Soft Answers, and it proved to be second-rate.
With Yvonne.
The Commander.
Yvonne.
King and Country. The Commander (far right) welcomes the future King George to the HMS Ajax. The woman in the picture was to become the last Empress of India.
Without any previous qualifications, I became a member of the Church of England. Malta, 1949.
Another Hitchens against Hitler: Yvonne joins the Royal Navy.
Nathan Blumenthal, my great-great-grandfather.
Sarah Blumenthal.
Nathan and Sarah.
Great-Uncle Harry, posed as “Young England,” 1900.
School general election, 1964. Michael Prest stands guard, while my Communist opponent Bevis Sale dominates the foreground.
Rabble-rousing at Oxford.
Blockading a racist hairdresser, 1968. Arrest to follow.
My first television appearance. In this prestige quiz show, Balliol’s reputation as the college for “effortless superiority” received a near knock-out blow.
With friend and tutor.
Card carrying.
In Cuba, at a work camp for young revolutionaries, 1968.
Pursuing my studies at Oxford, 1968. (© Billett Potter, Oxford)
On the picket line at a non-union factory.
In Babylon, Iraq, 1975.
In Iraq with a Ba’athist banner, 1975.
Striking an attitude in Kurdistan with Saddam’s enemies during the first Gulf War.
With Jalal Talabani at his mountain HQ in 1991: then the leader of a murdered and dispossessed people, and now the first-ever elected president of Iraq.
Liberating Iraq.
In Iraq with Paul Wolfowitz, 2003.
Swallowing vomit while greeting General Videla of Argentina in Juan Peron’s old palace, 1977.
In Zimbabwe, 1977.
With the only priest I’ve ever liked, Archbishop Makarios, president of Cyprus.
In the Sahara
with Polisario guerrillas around a captured Moroccan tank, 1977.
Hitch-22: A Memoir Page 52
