Hitch-22

by Christopher Hitchens

  This was the same tendency that Orwell thought he had noticed two decades earlier, with British comic papers being driven out by coarse American “mags”: tales of chivalry and derring-do replaced with sexual and even sadistic themes and the decent English boy-hero deposed in favor of the wised-up thug. Comic-books were certainly my own introduction to the Yank style: in spite of endless parental disapproval and discouragement I would sneak off to the corner shop and waste my pocket money on cheap Western and gangster stuff. It was easy to read, rather more “real” than Rupert Bear or Dan Dare or the other insipid English equivalents, and it made America seem huge and violent and coarse, and in places half-wild. The newspapers and TV made it seem like that, too. Presidents got shot. People got lynched. A man named Caryl Chessman—a bizarre enough name as it seemed to me—was put to death for rape after a long legal wrangle in California and (this being the detail that held my youthful attention) put to death in “a gas chamber.” I mean, I had had no idea… Mrs. Moss, the first American I ever consciously met, was one of my history teachers when I was about twelve, and she had a real flair for igniting interest in her subject. But she also wanted to stray into the awkward territory of “modern” history, which broke the usual bounds and challenged the idea that the past was a pageant—of one damn king after another—culminating in the map of the world (still displayed in my boyhood), which showed the British Empire in majestic red. This new American postwar atmosphere was a direct challenge to one’s sense of security.

  Such an impression wasn’t corrected even by reading Mark Twain, who was presented to us as a children’s writer only and who seemed to be depicting conditions of near-primeval backwardness, or by watching the input that made the early days of television so exciting: The Lone Ranger, or Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates in Rawhide. So many cattle, so much emptiness, so many displays of homicidal ill-temper. A little later I was captivated by West Side Story and wrote home from school giving my parents a detailed summary of the plot, but they chose to pretend that I hadn’t sent this, and on reflection I had to agree that the picture of New York wasn’t a very alluring one at that. America seemed either too modern, with no castles or cathedrals and no sense of history, or simply too premodern with too much wilderness and unpolished conduct.

  One also, in our milieu, simply didn’t meet enough Americans to form an opinion. And when one did—this was in the days of crew-cuts and short-legged pants—they, too, often really did sport crew-cuts and trousers that mysteriously ended several inches short of the instep. Why was that? It obviously wasn’t poverty. A colleague of my father’s had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came from a place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone…) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. There was a boy at my boarding school called Warren Powers Laird Myers, the son of an officer stationed at one of the many U.S. Air Force bases in Cambridgeshire. Trousers at The Leys School were uniform and regulation, but he still managed to show a bit of shin and to buzz-cut his hair. “I am not a Yankee,” he informed me (he was from Norfolk, Virginia). “I am a CON-federate.” From what I was then gleaning of the news from Dixie, this was unpromising. In our ranks we also had Jamie Auchincloss, a sprig of the Kennedy-Bouvier family that was then occupying the White House. His trousers managed to avoid covering his ankles also, though the fact that he shared a parent with Jackie Kennedy meant that anything he did was accepted as fashionable by definition. The pants of a man I’ll call Mr. “Miller,” a visiting American master who skillfully introduced me to J.D. Salinger, were also falling short of their mark. Mr. Miller’s great teacher-feature was that he saw sexual imagery absolutely everywhere and was slightly too fond of pointing it out (oversexed and over here: I suppose it figured). Meanwhile, and as I mentioned much earlier, the dominant images projected from the United States were of the attack-dog-and-firehose kind, with swag-bellied cops lying about themselves and the political succession changed as much by bullets as by ballots.

  Yet when I had been to hear W.H. Auden recite his poems at Great St. Mary’s Church in 1966, I had noticed that he closed with the words “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.” (I now believe that that evening I was privileged to hear the first public rendering of “On the Circuit,” of which that is the last line. It’s a poem I have come to adore as I go around the United States as an itinerant lecturer.) Come to think of it, hadn’t Auden actually chosen to live in America, even to become an American? As I went further into the question, and consulted my favorite authors, it kept recurring more and more insistently. Oscar Wilde had loved America and even believed it capable of settling the age-old Irish problem. P.G. Wodehouse had emigrated there and seemed happy as a clam. (Why a clam? one sometimes wanted to know.) One of my heroines, Jessica Mitford, had written a hilarious book about the floridly ghastly and exploitative American funeral industry—fully the nonfiction equivalent of Evelyn Waugh’s Loved One—but then again she had long domiciled herself in Oakland, California. American movies seemed much more vigorous and colorful and adventurous than their British counterparts. Groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones didn’t appear to have “made it” until they had been on American TV or been ratified by an appearance in a huge American stadium.

  I couldn’t quite square this at first with my revulsion from the America of drawling and snarling accents, and cheap fizzy softdrinks and turbocharged war and racism, but my two-track system must have begun churning away again, because not long after leaving Cambridge and arriving in Oxford I began to have a recurrent dream. There was nothing especially subtle about it from the imaging point of view. I simply found myself somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, looking up at the skyscrapers. But the illusion was always accompanied by a feeling of profound happiness, and a sensation of being free in a way I had never known before. American music and American culture were much more pervasive in England by then, and much more nonconformist than they had been in the early days of TV, so that I had an early exposure to the great conundrum that has occupied me since: How is the United States at once the most conservative and commercial AND the most revolutionary society on Earth? I may as well confess another thing: the Mamas and the Papas had produced an album called If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears. Many, many fans were ravished by “California Dreamin’ ” and “Monday, Monday,” and also by the bewitching sexuality of the female lead singer, Michelle Phillips, but there was a single track called “Go Where You Wanna Go,” which, when I played it alone in my Balliol garret quarters, would almost guarantee that I would have to go out and walk restlessly around the quad before I could sleep. And then I would be very liable to dream the dream again…

  By then I was getting to know a good number of Americans and it now seems odd and even sad to me that our engagement with one another was so purely politicized. I never asked them, for example, what life and culture were like in Ohio or Rhode Island or California, and they never seemed interested in saying. The war—the bloody war all the time—and the civil rights struggle were the beginning and end of all conversations. The most charming and eloquent of the black Americans was a loquacious Panther (who later became “head of protocol” for the city of Philadelphia). So, while I did my stuff in helping my American comrades discredit first President Johnson and then President Nixon, I quietly opened another front and applied for the Coolidge Atlantic Crossing or “Pathfinder” Scholarship, awarded by Balliol College every year so that about ten of us could be introduced to the American Way. The endowing patron of this award, Mr. William Appleton Coolidge, was a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson through the Randolph family of Massachusetts. He was an ancient, who had been at Balliol two generations previously. He had a sent
imental attitude toward the college and, if I may so phrase it, toward young Englishmen in particular. I was one of the winners of one of his scholarships. He crossed the seas, as he did every year, to run his eye over the new crop. A meeting was arranged in the Master’s lodgings. Coolidge was an imposing and craggy man whose trousers, mercifully, seemed equal to the task of shielding his shin and ankle from the vulgar gaze. I rather stupidly asked him if he was related to the president of the same name. “Why no,” replied Bill. “I believe that he was one of the working Coolidges.” Once again, one found oneself dealing with something, or someone, “so large, so friendly, and so rich.”

  A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism?

  At around this time I also met my first U.S. senator. Hugh Scott, the Republican from Pennsylvania, had been seconded to Balliol for some “special relationship” purpose and was occasionally wheeled out to put a respectable face on things. He’s rather forgotten now, but Norman Mailer had caught the tailor’s-dummy, all-things-to-all-men aspect of the senatorial mien in a thumbnail sketch from the fateful Nixon convention in Miami in 1968:

  Scott had modest but impeccable aplomb as he explained that since only 12 per cent of the delegates had been in San Francisco in 1964, he did not expect bitterness from old Goldwater followers to hurt Rockefeller’s chances now. A fine character actor had been lost when Hugh Scott went into politics: he could have played the spectrum from butler to count.

  Alarming though American politics and politicians seemed—especially as one devoured Mailer’s punchy and instant-paperbacked reporting from the street fights outside the Pentagon and the party conclaves—I didn’t fail to register the note of thwarted patriotism that he sometimes sounded when he was writing about himself in the third person:

  A profound part of him detested the thought of seeing his American society—evil, absurd, touching, pathetic, sickening, comic, full of novelistic marrow—disappear now in the nihilistic maw of a national disorder.

  In one way, this reeked of Mailer’s showbiz reluctance to lose a country that supplied him with such good copy. But I thought I could detect the pulse of patriotic sympathy in him, too, if only because I also felt it latently in myself. Experience with Communists and fellow travelers in Cuba and elsewhere had made me somewhat immune to the sort of propaganda that emphasized “Uncle Sam” or “the Yanqui,” let alone the sort that burned the American flag. This style, which usually warned one of the presence of the “peace-loving and progressive forces,” also reminded me of the snobbish and even chauvinistic anti-Americanism that I’d overheard on the British Right. Trying to keep all these reflections in balance, in late July 1970 I bought a bucket-shop ticket for a charter flight via Iceland to John F. Kennedy Airport.

  Sometimes an expectation or a wish does come true. I have no faith in precognitive dreams or any patience for “dream” rhetoric in general, yet Manhattan was exactly as I had hoped it would be. I had to survive some very discouraging first impressions: the airport café where I ate my first breakfast was a nothingness of plastic and formica and the “English muffin” was a travesty of both Englishness and muffindom. Outside stood a paunchy cop with, on his heavy belt, an accoutrement of gun and club and handcuff of a sort that I had never seen in real life and had believed exaggerated in the movies. The bus into the city was sweaty and the Port Authority Terminal is probably the worst possible place from which to take your original bearings on Midtown. The next thing I actually saw in the city was a flag-bedecked campaign headquarters for the ultraright candidacy of James Buckley (brother of William F.) for the Senate. “Join The March For America!” it yelled. But I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. Buying myself a drink in the smaller warrens below, in all their ethnic variety (and willingness to keep odd and late hours, and provide plentiful ice cubes, and free matchbooks in contrast to English parsimony in these matters), I felt the same thing in a different way. The balance between the macro and the micro, the heroic scale and the human scale, has never since ceased to fascinate and charm me. Evelyn Waugh was in error when he said that in New York there was a neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistook for energy. There was, rather, a tensile excitement in that air which made one think—made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. Whether this thought has lengthened or shortened my life I shall never know, but it has certainly colored it.

  In the streets and avenues of this amazing city, there was barely a crew-cut to be seen, and everybody’s trousers—if they wore any trousers—seemed equal to the task of covering the ankle if not indeed the entire shoe. (Bell-bottoms may have been involved.) With skirts, though, the reverse process applied. In some manner, the whole place was redolent of sex, but in a natural rather than a leering way. Three big differences between this culture and the English one began to disclose themselves at once.

  The first was the extraordinary hospitality. Balliol College had equipped me with a list of former alumni who were willing to “put me up” and this comprised some fairly solid citizens all across the USA. But Americans to whom one had barely been introduced would also insist that one came for a weekend “on the shore,” or “upstate,” and would actually mean it. On the way to any destination, if you put out your thumb on the roadside you would almost immediately get a lift or a “ride” (to set this down now makes me bite my lip as I mourn the lapse of time and the passing of hitchhiking) and very often the driver would go out of his or her way to drop you where you wanted to go. Music on the radio would be loud and various as the trip progressed, and if there was any song more evocative of those days than “Go Where You Wanna Go” it was the schmaltzy, haunting “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Should you happen to be in need of a jet plane, you could go to the airport and try your luck. It cost nothing to acquire a standby “YouthFare” card and, once equipped with this proof of mere youthfulness, you could wait in the boarding area and snap up any unbought seat for a few dollars. I first flew across the Great Lakes from New York to Chicago in this manner, in brilliant sunshine, on a plane where I was the sole passenger and the tawny, lissome American Airlines hostesses treated me as if I had paid for First Class. In Britain, “inter-city” travel meant crummy station platforms and delayed and dirty trains run by resentful oldsters. To really feel the connection between youth and freedom (and somehow, nothing did this for me more than the experience of flight), I had also had to flee.

  My trip to Chicago, where I was rather chilled to see the egotistic, minatory signs on the airport road welcoming me in the name of “Richard J. Daley, Mayor,” also happened to coincide with the first celebration of International Women’s Day. All through the downtown “Loop,” one sun-drenched lunchtime, a great avalanche of pulchritude filled the plazas just as music and fighting speeches moved the air. I felt the stirrings and yearnings of another civil rights movement, triggered by an earlier one that still had some distance to run. (In a distant undertone, I also felt the premonition of “identity politics” but believe me, to see the womanhood of Chicago en fête in all its bird-of-paradise variety that day was not something to give you any pinched or narrow conception of things.)

  Hospitality, easy riding, and easy flying: Could it get any better? Mr. Coolidge had decreed that all those accepting his scholarship money should be unaccompanied by females. After voyaging up to stay with him in his magnificent home in Topsfield, Massachusetts, and putting in my time lying on his pool-
patio and being discreetly growled and purred at, I felt somewhat released from this obligation. (He threw an all-male lunch which included the then-president of Harvard, a man with the near-perfect New England name of Nathan Pusey and perhaps a hint of austere attenuation in his gray pants-leggings.) My girlfriend was coming to the United States anyway, and in those days if you bought the ticket outside the country you could travel on the Greyhound bus system for ninety-nine days for ninety-nine dollars. This was even better than YouthFare. I told her to buy and bring two tickets. Seeing America by road turned out to be even finer than gazing at it from the sky.

  For all the indifference I felt toward the shallow concept of a “Woodstock Nation,” there was in those days a sort of “underground” vernacular for people under the age of twenty-one. A brisk flash of the “peace” sign would get you a roadside lift even more quickly than the showing of a mere thumb, and if you needed to borrow a floor or a bunk there was a similar idiom, often to do with the verses of Bob Dylan. (It comes back to me that on one of those big smooth rocks on the edge of Central Park, someone had painted in giant letters: “He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying,” and underneath it the deranged Weatherman flash of a “W” with a superimposed lightning bolt and then the subtitle: “Make The Pigs Pay!”[45])