Hitch-22: A Memoir
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With an extremely moderate Muslim in Malaysia.
With Sayeed Khomeini, courageous foe of his grandfather’s theocracy, in Qum, Iran, in 2006.
With Ugandan soldiers pursuing the Lord’s Resistance Army, 2007.
Getting to know the General: in Venezuela with Sean Penn, Douglas Brinkley, and the dictator, October 2008.
The Romanian Revolution, 1989.
In Nicaragua with Vice President Sergio Ramirez, a Sandinista and novelist.
In Paris with James Fenton and Martin Amis, 1979. (Angela Gorgas, © Angela Gorgas)
With Angela Gorgas, shot by Martin, Paris, 1979. (Martin Amis and Angela Gorgas, © Angela Gorgas)
With James Fenton and “The Skip.”
With Martin at the Soames house in Hampshire, taking a break from croquet, 1977.
Reviewing the situation with Martin in Cape Cod, 1985.
Passing on our genes: with Louis Amis and Alexander Hitchens, Cape Cod, 1985.
In Cyprus with Alexander.
Shoulder to shoulder with Salman during his time in hiding: (standing) Andrew Wylie, SR, David Rieff, Your Humble Servant, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth West; (foreground) Erica Wylie, Carol Blue, and Martin Amis. (© Elizabeth West)
On the beach with Salman, at an undisclosed location (somewhere near West Egg, c. 1992). (© Elizabeth West)
With Ian and Martin in Uruguay near Charles Darwin’s landfall. This is where I started writing god Is Not Great.
Famous at last: The New Yorker knows who I am. (© David Sipress/CondéNast Publications/www.cartoonbank.com)
Advising George Bush to leave Nicaragua alone and stop trading arms for hostages in Iran, at Christopher Buckley’s wedding in 1984. Lucy Buckley and Camilla Horne appear to be enthusing with this advice-not-taken.
With Nelson Mandela at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
On Firing Line with William F. Buckley, Harrison Salisbury, and Robert Conquest.
Taking the oath of citizenship from Michael Chertoff on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday, 2007. I am holding a copy of the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.
With Susan Sontag, Victor Navasky, and Carol. (Annie Leibovitz)
With the First Lady at Sidney Blumenthal’s birthday in 1994. This was before he disgraced my other family name, and well before he became Mrs. Clinton’s muckspreader against Barack Obama in the 2008 election.
Speaking up for the intifadah with Edward Said at Columbia University.
Making a documentary in Scotland.
At last, a party of positive non-belief to which I can be fully committed. With Professors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins and Dr. Sam Harris, at the inaugural meeting of the “Four Horsemen” faction at my home in Washington. I look and feel flattered by the implied parity. (Photo by Josh Timonen)
Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Caute
Epigraph
Preface
Prologue with Premonitions
Yvonne
The Commander
Fragments from an Education
Cambridge
The Sixties: Revolution in the Revolution
Chris or Christopher?
Havana versus Prague
The Fenton Factor
Martin
Portugal to Poland
A Second Identity: On Becoming an (Anglo) American
Changing Places
Salman
Mesopotamia from Both Sides
Something of Myself
Thinking Thrice about the Jewish Question…
Edward Said in Light and Shade (and Saul)
Decline, Mutation, or Metamorphosis?
Acknowledgments
Photo Insert
Also by Christopher Hitchens
Great Acclaim for HITCH-22
Copyright
ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Books
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class, and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Pamphlets
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
Collected Essays
Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
Collaborations
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kashi)
International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (edited)
Great Acclaim for
HITCH-22
“Mr. Hitchens embraces the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards. His book is also a lovely paean to the dearness of one’s friends… Mr. Hitchens’s personality can make him seem… among the most purely alive people on the planet.”
—New York Times
“One of the most engaging, exciting books I’ve read in years… The writing is lovely.”
—Boston Globe
“Riveting… as contemptuous, digressive, righteous, and riotously funny as the rest of the author’s incessant output… an affecting self-portrait.”
—The New Yorker
“Filled with a rare blend of elements: the buoyant and the serious, the streetwise and the learned, the crude joking of the pub and ‘the cut glass Oxford tones’ of civilized debate. There is not one ponderous or self-important passage in the book—and that’s saying something… He sums up what he stands for.”
—Commonweal
“This foreign correspondent, pundit, and bon vivant makes for an enlightening companion. Give HITCH-22 an 11 out of 10 for smarts, then double it for entertainment value.”
—People
“An absolute joy to read, regardless of one’s political persuasion.”
—Miami Herald
“It’s delicious writing, highly intelligent, and very provocative… If you’re going to disagree with someone, you want your adversary to be the best—he is.”
—New York Post
“There is far more in this engaging book than fury. Hitchens is a vain man, but he has much to be vain about: intelligence, wit, style, charm, a prodigious memory, and a fluency in debate that brings packed houses to wherever he expounds his views… This is no coward’s tale… It displays the best of his persuasive skills, the sharpness of his dismissive put-downs, and something else too: self-knowledge.”
—The Times (London)
“A fascinating memoir of a career in combat journalism (both literal and figurative)… touching, enraging, wonderfully crafted, and brimming with gossipy anecdotes… Hitchens is a deeply talented writer; his prose sparkles, his wit is wicked, and the reader will search his memoir in vain for a dead sentence.”
—Reason magazine
“A masterful debater… Hitchens provides an engaging and erudite account of his formative experiences.”
—International Jerusalem Post
“His sturdiest and maybe only real sparring partner turns out to be himself… He writes with characteristic brilliance… HITCH-22 [is] a deep and consistent pleasure.”
—Austin America-Statesman
“A boisterous self-portrait of a legendary journalist and polemicist who swings both ways politically—and always for the fences… Funny, provocative, and often ravishingly good.”
—Elle
“Like its author, HITCH-22 is entertaining, thought-provoking, and sometimes irritating, but with the depth to make up for the latter.”
—Seattle Times
“Eloquent, enlightening, and entertaining… At its heart, HITCH-22 is a celebration of literature and a denunciation of idleness. Hitchens is inarguably a man of action: He pursues history as it happens… HITCH-22’s main character is eminently likeable, funny, and humble. He might even convert a few of his detractors.”
—Onion, “AV Club”
“A fascinating, absorbing book: the rare contemporary memoir that is the record of a life of true accomplishment and authentic adventure.”
—New York Observer
“HITCH-22 is smart, funny, and unexpectedly touching. It’s the perfect place for the uninitiated to start. HITCH-22 is almost three memoirs in one—literary, political, and personal—but it’s smooth, cohesive, and relentlessly readable… It should cement Hitchens’s reputation as one of the best and most original writers of nonfiction around.”
—NPR.org
“An extraordinary memoir by a truly astonishing figure of our literary age… While it confounds, misleads, and exasperates, it also entertains to an almost shocking degree and illuminates almost as much. I laughed out loud—raucously and continuously—reading this book.”
—Buffalo News
“At times sentimental, even mawkish, and frequently infuriating, HITCH-22 is also hilarious, highly literate, and genuinely learned.”
—New York Sun
“Whether you love him or hate him, few can deny that indefatigable journalist, author, and lecturer Christopher Hitchens has become an intellectual lightning rod in today’s media… HITCH-22 is a sharp, rebellious, and sometimes bawdy account of the making of a modern mastermind.”
—Bookmarks
“HITCH-22 is in many ways a beautiful book, intensely passionate, and finely written.”
—Commentary
“Engrossing… revealing and riveting… In this frank, often wickedly funny account, Hitchens traces his evolution as a fiercely independent thinker.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Magnificent… delectable, sassy fun… This book is intelligent and humane… Hitchens takes no prisoners, not even himself.”
—New Haven Review
* Everything about Christianity is contained in the pathetic image of “the flock”
* The feminist school has often looked in a manner of marked disapproval at her husband, Ted Hughes. I find it difficult to imagine him actually maltreating Sylvia physically, but there’s no doubt that he could be quite stupendously wanting in sensitivity. I once went for some drinks with him at the apartment of my friend and editor Ben Sonnenberg, who was by then almost completely immobilized by multiple sclerosis. Hughes droned on for an agonizingly long time about the powers of a faith-healer in the (perhaps somewhat manic-depressive) Devonshire hamlet where he lived. This shaman, it seemed, was beyond praise for his ability with crippled people. On and on went the encomium. I could not meet Ben’s eye but from his wheelchair he eventually asked with commendable lightness: “How is he with sufferers from MS?” “Oh, not bad at all,” replied Hughes, before blithely resuming with an account of how this quack could cure disabled farm-animals as well.
* At this diner we were served by a pimply and stringy-haired youth of appallingly dank demeanor. Bringing back Bill’s credit card he remarked that it bore a name that was almost the same as that of a famous writer. Bill said nothing. Tonelessly, the youth went on: “He’s called William Stryon.” I left this up to Bill, who again held off until the kid matter-of-factly said, “Anyway, that guy’s book saved my life.” At this point Styron invited him to sit down, and he was eventually persuaded that he was at the same table as the author of Darkness Visible. It was like a transformation scene: he told us brokenly of how he’d sought and found the needful help. “Does this happen to you a lot?” I later asked Styron. “Oh, all the time. I even get the police calling up to ask if I’ll come on the line and talk to the man who’s threatening to jump.”
* Strangely, though, the matter of his age was also the only thing in which I ever caught him out in a petty dishonesty. He used to tell us that he had been born in 1912. My brother, Peter, and I were both amateur numismatists in boyhood, and these were the days when hoop-sized pennies from the Victorian and Edwardian era could still turn up in your small change. If we found a 1912 coin, we would show him, and then proudly hoard and sometimes even mount and display it. It was somehow deflating to discover—as he must have known we would—that he had been born in 1909. I still cannot be sure why he practiced this uncharacteristic deception: conceivably to attenuate the difference in years between himself and Yvonne. But she could not possibly have been fooled, as his sons pointlessly were.
* The durability of this “Upstairs, Downstairs” ethos is remarkable in point of both time and place. I was to become very close to Jessica Mitford, who was almost a sorceress in her ability to use her upper-class skills for American leftist purposes. Told once by a white Southerner at a cocktail party that “it don’t seem possible” that school integration could work, she icily replied: “To me it do!” and turned on her heel leaving him wilted like a salted snail. During the McCarthy period, when her fellow Communists became very timorous, she discovered that the Oakland branch was advising its black members, when turning up for a meeting at the home of a well-to-do comrade, to avoid FBI attention by pretending to be house-servants and using the back door. “Well, I mean to say, I sailed right round and told them I thought that was an absolute stinker.”
* I was to get over my speech impediment and now find that I can speak perfectly contentedly, often or preferably without interruption, for hours at a time. Let this be an inspiration to all those who contend with childhood disabilities.
* In an excellent instance of the “revenge is sour” rule, I was to meet Smith again many years later. It was on the London underground one morning. He was an abject tramp, carrying two heavy bags of rotting old newspapers and declaiming aloud to the unheeding world around him. He chose to sit down just next to me. I pondered for a moment and couldn’t resist: “E.A.M. Smith!” I said into his ear. He jumped like a pea on a hot shovel. “How do you know my name?” Cruelly I replied: “We’ve had our eye on you for some time.” His face betrayed the animal fear of the hopeless paranoid, and so I couldn’t bear to continue. “It’s all right. I just remember you from school. It’s Hitchens here.” He said dully: “I remember you. You were a sinner. I used to pray for you.” That seemed about right.
* This book, like the several movies that bear its name, has become a synonym for old-school-tie values and general mushy sentiment about the dear old days. In fact, Mr. Chipping’s lovely wife, Kathie, is a socialist and a feminist who wins all hearts; she forces him to be honest about homosexual play among the boys; he ends up sympathizing with railway strikers, opposing the British Empire in the Boer War and insisting on decent respect for Germans after 1914.
* At about this time I read Catch-22 and was thrilled when Yossarian, confronted by Major Danby’s version of the old official trick-question “Suppose everybody felt that way?” replied “Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”
* From King Lear: “Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore?… Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip’st her.” This is why, whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartl
and banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
** It was Guy, now dead for some time but in his later years an amazingly successful seducer of girls, who first insisted that I read the Greek-classical novels of Mary Renault. If this was all he had done for me, I would still be hoarsely grateful to him. While other boys plowed their way across the puerile yet toilsome pages of Narnia, or sank themselves into the costive innards of Middle Earth, I was following the thread of Ariadne and the tracks of Alexander. The King Must Die; The Bull from the Sea: Athens has seldom trumped Jerusalem with greater style or panache.
* “I think you are going finally to displace me as the most hated man in American life. And of course that position is bearable only if one is number one. To be the second most hated man in the picture will probably prove to be a little like working behind a mule for years…” Norman Mailer to William F. Buckley, 20 April 1965.
* I can’t say that we didn’t have to deal with our own cognitive dissonance. The British working class was for the most part entirely unmoved by our exertions. I do remember a demonstration, assiduously prepared for by mass factory-gate leafleting, to which exactly no workers showed up. My theoretician friend David Rosenberg, confronting this daunting result, said to me: “It rather confirms our analysis that the union bureaucrats can no longer truly mobilize their rank and file.” True enough as far as it went: but also true that those who bang their heads against history’s wall had better be equipped with some kind of a theoretical crash helmet. It was to take me some time to doff my own.