Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  The second name is that of C.L.R. James, one of the moral titans of twentieth-century dissent. In the 1930s he had managed to combine two very attractive positions. He was the main spokesman for the independence of his native Trinidad and the chief cricket correspondent of the Guardian. His book on the latter subject, Beyond a Boundary, elucidates this recondite sport for the uninitiated and also suggests that in several ways it is not really a “sport” at all, but more of a classical art form that prepares young men for social grace as well as for chivalric heroism. James—whose early short stories, collected as Minty Alley, were plainly influential on the early writings of V.S. Naipaul—managed to do without Naipaul’s combination of rancor and racial/ethnic resentment. He was an internationalist to his core. His monumental work is Black Jacobins, a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slave insurrection in Haiti. This rebellion, taking the slogans of the French Revolution to be universal, ran up against the disagreeable fact that the France of Bonaparte regarded the noble words of 1789 as being, at best, for whites only. James’s book—exactly the sort of history that was left out of the school and university syllabus—had a lasting effect on me. So did its author, when I helped arrange a meeting for him at Ruskin College, Oxford, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. He chose to speak largely about Vietnam, putting it squarely in the context of imperialism and the resistance to it, and his wonderfully sonorous voice was as enthralling to me as his very striking carriage and appearance. He was getting on by then, but the nimbus of white hair only accentuated his hollow-cheeked, almost anthracite face. One had heard of his legendary success with women (all of it gallant and consensual, unlike that of some other masters of the platform) but for me a little crackle of current was provided by the reflection that here stood a man who had, in real time, publicly broken with Stalin and associated with Trotsky, actively taken part in an anti-colonial revolution, and been present (before being hastily deported) in the very early stirrings of the American civil rights movement.

  Another important thing about “CLR,” as he was known in our little movement, was his disdainful opposition to any Third World fetishism or half-baked negritude. He had schooled himself in classical literature and regarded the canon of English as something with which every literate person of any culture should become acquainted. He had a particular love for Thackeray, and it was said that he could recite chapters of Vanity Fair by heart. This commitment was important then and was to become much more so as the 1960s fashion turned against “Eurocentrism.”[14]

  The third name from the esoteric historical and cultural dimension with which I was becoming so enamored was that of Victor Serge. This Belgian-born proletarian rebel had graduated from embroilment in the politics of Barcelona and harsh experience of the inside of many European jails (episodes which were to help him produce two excellent books in the shape of Birth of Our Power and Men in Prison) to direct participation in the upheavals of the First World War and the Bolshevik seizure of power. During his work with the Third International he had the opportunity to see the monstrosity of Stalinism in detail, and as it was actually taking shape. It seems possible that he was the first person to use the word “totalitarianism”: in any event he was early in apprehending the whole implication of the concept. He had to get out of the Soviet Union in a big hurry, having backed the Left Opposition, and might well have died in the Gulag if it had not been for the intercession of a few of those European intellectuals who had not capitulated to the Red Tsar. His precious papers were all stolen from him by the secret police at the frontier; he was able to republish his poems from memory, and that capacious memory, too, was strong enough to enable him to produce a novel—The Case of Comrade Tulayev—which many good judges regard as the earliest and best fictional representation of the show trials and the Great Terror. Ending up in exile in Mexico like some others who had survived what we Luxemburgists and Trotskyists used to call “the midnight of the century”—the dire moment of explicit collusion between Stalin and Hitler—Serge died there but not before producing one of the finest autobiographies of that same century: Memoirs of a Revolutionary. As it happened, none other than Peter Sedgwick had, when I met him, just edited and introduced a fine edition of this book for Oxford University Press. My headmaster Alan Barker had produced a potted history of the American Civil War, and my English master Colin Wilcockson had edited Langland and Piers Plowman, and in my budding-bibliophile way I did possess signed copies of these volumes, but I’d never before had a friend who was in so many ways an actual author and critic, and of the books I’ve lost in the various moves and mess-ups of my life the one I regret most keenly is the one that Peter Sedgwick gave me. I shall not forget the inscription though. “To Chris,” it said, “in friendship and fraternity.”

  This was my official induction into the comradely manners and addresses of the Left, but it also presented a problem which I didn’t particularly like to “raise”—as we invariably said when mounting an objection. The awkward fact was: I simply couldn’t bear or stand to be called “Chris.”

  Chris or Christopher?

  Perhaps I should add that when Christopher Hitchens was still a humble Chris, he and I were comrades in the same far-left political outfit. But he has gone on to higher things, discovering in the process a degree of political maturity as a naturalized citizen of Babylon, whereas I have remained stuck in the same old political groove, a case of arrested development if ever there was one.

  —Terry Eagleton, trying to be funny while describing himself accurately in Reason, Faith and Revolution [2009]

  THERE WAS A little more to this dislike, of having my name circumcised or otherwise amputated, than may at first appear. “Chris,” it seemed to me, was too matey and pseudo-friendly as an abbreviation, even had it gone with another kind of surname. Chris Price, an old comrade of mine and a Labour member of Parliament, almost preferred it. But then his second name began with a “P.” Whereas mine began with an “H,” and the next thing after “Chris Hitchens”—itself a dreary sound—would be, given this incentive to ditch the aspirate, “Chris ’itchens.” All other aesthetic considerations to one side, I knew that this would be more than Yvonne could bear. (What she wanted was to see me represent Balliol on the University Challenge team, where I did actually make my first-ever television appearance. I can still remember the name of the captain of St. David’s, Lampeter, a theological college in North Wales for heaven’s sake, which trounced us in the very first round and demolished the complacent Balliol myth of “effortless superiority.” He was called Jim Melican.) My mother had not nurtured her firstborn son in order to hear him addressed as if he were a taxi driver or pothole-filler. And yet, to that son’s chosen brothers and sisters of the Labour and socialist movement, it was a part of the warmth and fraternity—part of one’s very acceptance—that the informal version be adopted without any further permission or ado. Could I tell Yvonne that so many of my dearest associates were now called names like “Harry” or “Norm”? I couldn’t see it softening the blow. She swallowed a bit when someone did call me “Chris” in her presence, and shuddered when I myself used one of the movement’s favorite nouns and verbs—the keyword “concern”—with the accent on the first syllable. So help me, I can plead that I hadn’t quite known I was doing it.

  Oddly enough—as the English say on so many occasions where there is nothing in the least bit odd to relate, as in “I saw old Jorkins the other day, oddly enough”—I hadn’t ever had to face this problem before. At English boarding schools you are known by your last name, or by your initials if you are very lucky or extremely unlucky. (Yvonne had been vigilant about this too, understanding that one’s initials had often to be stenciled on luggage or briefcases, and deploring the thoughtless parents who had baptized their sons with life-threatening initials like “VD” or “BO.”) There were always nicknames, but these were mostly infantile, such as “Jumbo” for a fatso. If another boy was addressing you by your actual first name, it often her
alded some doomed or farcical romantic proposal. And the time when all my best friends would solve the problem by calling me “Hitch” lay well in the future. Meanwhile, this “Chris/Christopher” business was a torment and, as I say, it symbolized something about the double life that I was trying to lead at Oxford.

  I use the words “double life” without any shame. To be sure, I had hoped to re-make myself into a serious person and an ally of the working class and was educating myself with that in view. But I also wanted to see a bit of life and the world and to shed the carapace of a sexually inhibited schoolboy. There was the Oxford of A.D. Lindsay’s great anti-Munich and anti-Chamberlain and anti-Hitler election campaign in 1938—Lindsay having been head of my college—and then there was the Oxford of the great steaming and clanging car factories that had been founded by Lord Nuffield (one of the financiers of prewar British fascism). But somewhere there was also the Oxford of Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm and punts and strawberries and enticing young ladies. Occasionally the two aspects overlapped: in the Victorian buildings of the Oxford Union debating society, which I joined on my first day, there were some faded pre-Raphaelite frescoes executed by the aesthete—but the socialist aesthete—William Morris. In any case, I was determined as far as I could to have it both ways.

  To do otherwise, it seemed, would have been to miss the point of being there. As the head of my college we had Christopher Hill—nobody ever thought of calling him “Chris”—who was arguably the most distinguished Marxist historian of his day and certainly the man who had done the most to influence thinking about that English Civil War (or rather, “English Revolution”), which had ended by separating the head of King Charles I from his shoulders in 1649. One could have sherry with this amazing man (who had called his daughter “Fanny” at a time when he thought that eighteenth-century pornography was a rarefied pastime that would never catch up to him) and learn to negotiate his mild, disarming stutter. Or, down the road a bit in Wadham College, there was Sir Maurice Bowra, an inspired classicist around whom the aura of Brideshead still clung. (He always had the look, to me, of a near-extinct but still-smoldering volcano: on our first introduction he gave me one of the most frankly appraising “once-over/up-and-down” glances I have ever had. The joke about “Wadham and Gomorrah,” apparently, had been his own idea.)

  My main tutor was Dr. Steven Lukes, already famous for his study of Emile Durkheim and soon to be more celebrated still for his book Power: A Radical View. Thanks to his kind interest in me, I was taken to a private seminar at Nuffield College (yes, named after that fascist-sympathizing automobile tycoon) to talk with Noam Chomsky, who had come to deliver the John Locke lectures. And I was also invited to a small cocktail party to meet Sir Isaiah Berlin.

  I hope that by dropping these names I can convey something of the headiness of it. It might have been heady at any time, but in the ’68 atmosphere it chanced to coincide with other ferments and intoxications as well. It’s trite to say that each generation rebels, and I’d already had the chance to get bored with the late-’50s image of a “rebel without a cause.” But it so fell out that we, the so-called boomers or at least the ’68 portion of us, were rebels with a cause. Thus it happened that one evening in the Oxford Union dining room, when I was still not yet twenty and maybe not even nineteen, I acted as host to Isaiah Berlin, our guest as an invited speaker on the subject of his very first published book, the life and thought of Karl Marx. The sponsor was the Oxford University Labour Club, which had not yet irretrievably split between the Socialists and the Social Democrats, and I had been listed on the club’s card as “Secretary: Chris Hitchens (Ball).” This rankled twice: even the name of my ancient college had been pruned and cut back. Still, not much could spoil an evening where one was hosting an eyewitness of the Bolshevik revolution in St. Petersburg: still the only such person I have ever met.

  I have to say that the evening was two kinds of shock to me. In the first place, Berlin’s urbanity and magnetism were like nothing I had ever met before and vindicated, I remember thinking, the whole point of coming to Oxford in the first place. “Cured me for life, cured me for life,” he murmured authoritatively, about the experience of seeing a Communist revolution at first hand. Having had every opportunity to grow weary of undergraduate naïveté and/or enthusiasm, he betrayed no sign of it and managed to answer questions as if they were being put to him for the first time. This I understood as a great gift without being able to define it, just as I who knew nothing of food or wine somehow understood that the dinner we were offering him—a strain on our fiercely straitened socialist budget—was far inferior to the average he could have expected if dining at home or in college, or indeed alone.[15]

  The second shock came when we moved to the seminar room for the talk itself. Though he spoke with his customary plummy authority, and leavened this with a good deal of irony and wit, Berlin clearly didn’t know very much about either Marx or Marxism. He woodenly maintained that Marx was a historical “determinist.” It’s true that the old boy sometimes spoke of “history” itself as an actor, but he actually stressed human agency more than almost any other thinker. It came to me later as quite a confirmation to read, in Berlin’s biography, that he had been commissioned to write a “quickie” book on Marx, and had told the publishers how unqualified he felt to do it. (This was another aspect of his famous insecurity about his own golden reputation: a self-doubt that he could never get his many disciples to take seriously.) But at the time, I was marooned between two almost equally subversive and exciting thoughts. Was it possible that the class of celebrated “experts” were all like this, that there was an academic kingdom of Oz where it was only pretended that the authorities were absolute? Or was I putting on airs and presuming to judge my betters?[16]

  At the somewhat later cocktail party in Beaumont Street, Berlin again lived up to his billing by, first, remembering my name and the circumstances under which we had met, and, second, remembering that I’d said that his talk had made my own Marxism a little more self-confident, and, third, ignoring much more distinguished figures who wanted his company, and telling me quite a long story about Henry James and Winston Churchill. Having told you that much, how can I avoid re-telling it to you? It seems that in the early days of the First World War, both James and Churchill had been invited to a lunch party near one of the Channel ports, James presumably because he lived at Rye and Churchill because he was running the Admiralty. James was all enthusiasm, having applied to become a British citizen and flushed with the zeal of the convert. Churchill, however, had no time for the old man’s eager questions about the progress of the war, and rather snubbed him. When the coming statesman had left in his chauffeur-driven car to go back to London, the rest of the company turned to Henry James to see if he could be cheered up after being so crushed. But he brightened on his own account and said: “It is strange with how uneven a hand nature chooses to distribute her richest favors,” going on to add “but it rather bucks one up.” In that way that was so characteristic of him, Berlin went on to repeat “rather bucks one up” a couple of times.

  I had had a frisson of another sort when seated in a small Nuffield seminar room with Noam Chomsky. Having attended those John Locke lectures, in which he had galvanized the university by insisting on delivering one of the series solely on the question of Vietnam, I knew that he was a highly potent scholar and speaker. (A large number of leftists in those days suddenly discovered a consuming interest in linguistics and the deep structure of “generative grammar.”) But up close I realized there was something toneless about him: something indeed almost mechanical, as if he were afraid to show any engagement with the emotions. He wasted, I remember, a huge amount of time on a banal question about the American Maoist sect “Progressive Labor.” Through this and other experiences I began to discern one of the elements of an education: get as near to the supposed masters and commanders as you can and see what stuff they are really made of. As I watched famous scholars and professo
rs flounder here and there, I also, in my career as a speaker at the Oxford Union, had a chance to meet senior ministers and parliamentarians “up close” and dine with them before as well as drink with them afterward, and be amazed once again at how ignorant and sometimes plain stupid were the people who claimed to run the country. This was an essential stage of my formation and one for which I am hugely grateful, though I fear it must have made me much more insufferably cocky and sure of myself than I deserved to be. A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn’t just think that I was right: I thought that “we” (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn well proved right. If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.

  In the early spring of 1968 we saw the valiant guerrillas of the Vietcong carrying their fight to the very doorstep of the American embassy in Saigon. Not long after came the never-to-be-forgotten shots of the Capitol in Washington shrouded in plumes of smoke and flame, as black America refused to sit still for the murder of the gentle Martin Luther King. In Poland, a so-called anti-Zionist purge proved that the Stalinist gerontocrats would stoop even to Hitlerite tactics to repress dissent and prolong their sterile and boring hold on power. The year began to gather pace and acquire a rhythm: in late April (on Hitler’s birthday to be precise) Enoch Powell appeared to insult the memory of Dr. King by making a speech warning that “colored” immigration to Britain would eventuate in bloodshed. He succeeded at any rate in igniting a bonfire of rubbishy racism among many elements of the British working class. A few weeks later, the French working class appeared to make a completely different point by joining a revolt against ten years of Gaullism that had originally begun among Parisian students, and by not merely going on strike but occupying the factories that warehoused them for the working day. Many of the Paris ’68 slogans struck my cohort as absurd or quixotic or narcissistic (“Take Your Desires For Reality” was one especially silly one), but I shall never forget how the workers at the Berliet factory rearranged the big letters of the company’s name to read “Liberte” right over the factory gate. Suddenly, it did truly seem possible that the revolutionary tradition of Europe was being revived. How was I to know that I was watching the end of a tradition rather than the resurrection of one?