This is extremely long.
A Conversation wirth Christopher Hitchens
Here is the transcript from yesterday's interview with Christopher Hitchens, primarily about
HH: Special edition of the Hugh Hewitt Show, which I am going to spend entirely with Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair columnist, author of the bestseller, God Is Not Great, and a new extraordinary memoir, Hitch-22. And Christopher Hitchens, welcome back, it’s great to talk with you.
CH: Very nice of you to have me.
HH: Now Christopher, since we last spoke, your illness you disclosed on the web, and people will want to know off the bat how you are doing, and how your treatment is going.
CH: Oh well, I have, in case people are just tuning in, I have cancer in my esophagus, which has I think spread a little to my lymph nodes as well. And I’m two weeks into the chemotherapy course. So I feel pretty weak, and my voice isn’t what it was, but that’s supposed to be a good sign in that the amount of poison I’m taking is presumably working on the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. And this morning, I found that my hair was beginning to come out in the shower, which is a bit demoralizing, I have to say, even though it’s the least of it.
HH: Well, I know you’ve received many well wishes, and I know my audience has been among them, and I’m very glad you could make the time today to talk about this book.
CH: No, everyone’s been extremely generous, and including, well, preeminently, yourself. Thank you.
HH: Well, let’s turn to this amazing book, because we had this set up for when you were diagnosed, and I’m glad you’re back in the saddle and able to talk about it today. And I think you may be my first guest who has actually ever passed out anti-Soviet newspapers in the streets of Havana in 1968. And actually, before you were diagnosed, I had written down this question. I want to ask it, because it’s the way I was going to do the interview to begin with. You’ve shaken hands with Oswald Mosley, and General Videla of Argentina, and Abu Nidal, and a whole bunch of other people. Who’s the most evil person you’ve met, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn’t present always. I mean, often what you’re meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And if I’d tell you why he’s now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He’s in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone who’s done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that, if you know what I mean.
HH: Yeah, and in fact, on Page 194 of Hitch-22, you pose that as a question. It was both arresting to know the detail, but you also write, “Do you know why” to you reader. “Well, do you,” you wrote. And I didn’t. And I’m curious as to why you used that technique at that point, asking your reader a question.
CH: Yes, I, well, when I write, as often as I can, I try to write as if I’m talking to people. It doesn’t always work, and one shouldn’t always try it, but I try and write as if I am talking, and trying to engage the reader in conversation. And sometimes, I get letters from people saying they feel they’ve been personally addressed. And I always think of that as a success.
HH: Well, that’s what got me at that point.
CH: So in this case, I’m taking them, I’m actually doing, I’m overdoing it perhaps a little, but I thought it merited it. I’m sort of taking them by the lapels and saying I’m sure you know, you think you know that there were a lot of people, as they called it, were disappeared in Argentina. The word disappear became a positive. Well, what am I trying to say? You didn’t disappear. You were disappeared. It was something that happened to you. It was done to you. I’m sure you know all this, or so you think you know, but actually do you have any idea of how bad it was?
HH: Actually, I didn’t. I didn’t even know his name, Christopher Hitchens, I’m ashamed to say, until I read your memoir.
CH: Well, he’s one of Henry Kissinger’s best friends. Kissinger was his personal guest at the World Cup in Argentina. He was a highly protected figure in America foreign policy at the time, even under the Carter administration, which is when I think I was meeting him, as a matter of fact. And he was, in the original sense of the word, really, a fascist. I mean, he believed that there was an international Jewish conspiracy to take over Argentina. He admired Mussolini, Franco. He fully believed in the protocols of the elders of Zion. My great friend, the late Jacobo Timerman, who was also disappeared for a considerable time, a Jewish newspaper editor in Buenos Aires, said that when he was being tortured in another private prison, his interrogators kept asking him so don’t you understand who our enemies are? Our enemies are Sigmund Freud, because he destroyed the Christian concept of the family, Albert Einstein, because he destroyed the Christian concept of the cosmos, and Karl Marx, because he destroyed the Christian idea of the organic economy. And do you think it’s coincidence all these three people are Jews? It was a very intense revisiting of the Nazi agenda in the southern continent of the Americas.
HH: He also posed a question to you, which I made a note of, that he argues with you in your recollection of your interview. Terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Separating that statement from the evil man who said it, cannot that be true, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Yes, I daresay it can. I mean, I was asking, I knew he was going to say that there were various reasons why all this was going on. And I had ready with me an example I had been given by a human rights group in Argentina of a woman called Claudia Ines Grumberg, another Jewish woman. She was a quadriplegic. She’d last been seen being lifted into a police car with unmarked plates. And when I, he told about terrorism and bombing, and I mean, there were terrorists in Argentina at that time, I said well look, these allegations can’t be true in the case of this woman, because she wasn’t able even to move. He said, and without batting a lash, he said well in that case, she must have been guilty of some ideological offense. And I remember noticing a couple of his advisors blanching a bit as if they thought well, the supreme leader’s gone a bit far in saying that. He’s admitted too much. But…and I looked a bit surprised, too, and I think he mistook that, and repeated the answer as if for my benefit, in case I hadn’t understood. And clearly, what was important to him was getting rid of cosmopolitan, Jewish internationalists and people of this kind, because their mere existence in terms of ideas was a threat to his concept of the Argentine order.
HH: What’s interesting, though, to me…
CH: But yes, I mean, I’d have to answer you, I’m not dodging your question.
HH: Yeah.
CH: Yes, I mean, I think there is, if you like, a terrorism by incitement. I think it has to be very, very, very carefully isolated. But for example, the horrific pimp and runner of prostitutes in America, and later recruiter of bachelor virgin suicide killers, Sheik Awlaki, now in Yemen…
HH: That’s who I was going to ask you. It’s on my notes.
CH: Yeah, I mean, I agree with the president. I think he’s put himself in the crosshairs. He’s undoubtedly attempting, while not involving his own precious skin, as I say, he’s a pimp and a runner of hookers, and well known to be a very worldly guy, but he doesn’t mind signing up innocent frustrated, sexually thwarted kids for murder missions. I think he should be killed.
HH: Now I want to go to the other…
CH: In fact, if I had a wish, if what I’ve got turns out to be terminal, I wouldn’t mind my last act being an interview with him, followed by a nasty surprise. That would be, I’d feel then I was dying in a good cause.
HH: How much time are you spending on that thought, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: As little as I can, because it’s morbid and mock heroic.
HH: All right. I want to…
CH: But it avoids the boring thought that one is suffering, in effect, for no reason. I mean, I’m not suffering in a good cause, or witnessing for any, you know, great idea or anything or principle. It’s just boring.
HH: The number of people I’m sure who are praying for you, including people who come up to me and ask me to tell you that, people like Joseph Timothy Cook, how are you responding to them, given your famous atheism?
CH: Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts. It’s, I’m afraid to say it’s almost as well-founded an idea. I mean, I don’t, they don’t know whether prayer will work, and they don’t know whether I’ve come by this because I’m a sinner.
HH: Oh, I...has anyone actually said that to you?
CH: Yeah, oh yes.
HH: Oh, my gosh. Forgive them. Well…
CH: Well, I mean, I don’t mind. It doesn’t hurt me. But for the same reason, I wish it was more consoling. But I have to say there’s some extremely nice people, including people known to you, have said that I’m in their prayers, and I can only say that I’m touched by the thought.
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HH: Hitch-22 in bookstores now, and it references this song, Go Where You Want To Go by the Mamas And The Papas. In fact, there’s a lot of music in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens, but I didn’t expect you to be, you know, taken by the Mamas And Papas when you were a young man.
CH: Well, when I was about 18, I suppose, I was in university, I remember, the album California Dreaming came out.
HH: Yes.
CH: And you know, it was a bit sugary in some ways, but I loved the way it sounded even so. And that particular song happened to jive with something I was experiencing at the time, and had been for a little while, which was a very strong need to see the United States. I couldn’t quite explain it. I even had little dreams sometimes about what it would be like going to America. And when I heard that song, it always gave me this huge yearning to cross the Atlantic.
HH: Now before the break, I mentioned I was going to ask you about the best people you met. This is, in many respects, a memoir of friendship – Martin Amis and Edward Said, and others throughout your entire life. Were they the best people that you knew? Is that who you look back as being the best? Or is it some public figure?
CH: No, I think they were, I mean, for me, there’s a cynical remark made by an Englishman, I think he was Hesketh Pearson, actually, who was a friend of G.K. Chesterton’s, who said a friend is God’s apology for relations. And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home. And so when I was able to choose my own company, I felt that was a huge stage in my own sort of self-emancipation. And then so friends are family to me.
HH: It is…
CH: Sorry.
HH: There’s a story in here, about Page 399-400, when you are Martin go to see Saul Bellow.
CH: Yes.
HH: And Saul Bellow, I want to quote here, “Saul Bellow didn’t know that I,” Christopher Hitchens, “was a close friend of Edward Said’s. But Martin did, thus, even though I knew he wanted me to stay off anything controversial, I couldn’t allow Bellow, couldn’t allow Martin to see me sitting there complicit while an absent friend was being defamed. For all he knew, if the company were sufficiently illustrious, I might even let the cock crow for him. That would surely never do.” I kind of stopped, and I said at this point, friendship may be the most important thing in Hitchens’ life.
CH: Yes, well it is, I think. It’s a form of solidarity, for one thing. And then it’s a form of love. And it deserves respect for that, too, wouldn’t you say?
HH: Yes, and how…
CH: And it also does demand something of you. In particular, I thought well, you know, Martin wanted me very much to meet his father figure, really, in the absence, after the death of his own dad, Saul Bellow, whom, for whom he was a great admirer, and had become a close friend. I knew it was the best favor he could offer me. I mean, an introduction to Saul, a dinner with Saul Bellow in Vermont was the most he had it in him to bestow. And so I knew I wanted to be at my best. I didn’t want to spoil the evening. And he knew I had a tendency to get involved in argument. And he said try to hold it down, because you know, that’s not what we want to talk about. And I couldn’t have agreed more. I wanted to talk about literature and reminisce with Bellow, which we did a lot of the time. But Bellow wanted to vent at great length about an article in Commentary Magazine about my late friend, Edward Said. And that article, I had my own differences with Edward, and I describe what they were, but this article, I thought, was grossly unfair, and I, after sitting through it for a bit, Bellow didn’t know that I was a friend of the person concerned. I thought I was going to have to say something, and I’m sorry. And I know Martin will hate it. So this was paying the cost of friendship, if you like, twice.
HH: Yeah.
CH: And Bellow, in fact, didn’t mind so much, and Bellow’s an old street fighter. He was an ex-Trotskyist like me, been, took part in many political polemics. He used to live in Chicago, where you don’t mince words, you know. But it was agony much more for Martin than it was for Saul. And that cost me a bit, too.
HH: How has Martin reacted to news of your illness?
CH: Well, he’s coming to see me next week. He’s…I guess I don’t really know yet. I haven’t seen him in person.
HH: How about Salman Rushdie? Have you heard from him?
CH: Oh, I’ve heard from, I mean, it’s been embarrassing, actually, how many people have written to me, or in default of that, or as well as that, written about me, either on the web or in print. It’s, I feel you know, when Mark Twain was pronounced dead in the newspapers, he said rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated. I read so many nice things about myself now I begin to think that rumors of my life have been a bit exaggerated.
HH: (laughing)
CH: Apparently, some incredibly saintly person has got sick. Of course, I mean, I also realize with a twinge that you know, as time goes by, that’ll become background, too.
HH: Your memoir is soaked with names and stories of these memorable and significant contributors to fiction. But you wrote at Page 275, “I soon realized that I did not have the true stuff for fiction and poetry, and I was very fortunate indeed to have contemporaries, several practitioners of those arts who made it obvious to me, without unduly rubbing in the point, that I would be wasting my time if I tried.” How did they do that, Hitchens?
CH: Well, by their mere existence. I mean, they didn’t warn me off or anything. But when I was young, I knew I wanted to write. I knew it was all I wanted to do, and all that more or less I was able to do as it comes to that. But anyway, it was more it chose me than I chose it. And at university and later, I knew a lot of people who would, I mean, at that stage, I could have written poem or a short story. And I guess, even in current reduced state, I probably still could try something of the sort. But I was very lucky in meeting people who did it passionately and devotedly, and who just by osmosis, in other words, merely by reading their stuff and talking it over with them, and sometimes being shown it in early forms, I thought now wait a minute, they have a, there’s an X factor in what they can write that I don’t possess. And I have in my book a theory as to what that is, by the way. I don’t know if you remember it, but the distinction between people who can write prose and fiction and poetry, and those who can, should stay with the essay form, I think is this. All my friends who can do it have musical capacity.
HH: Oh, I remember now, yeah.
CH: In one form or another, they can either play, or they can appreciate, or they can describe a musical event in a fairly educated way. Since I was very young, in fact, the first thing I found that I really, really, really couldn’t do was play a musical instrument at any level, or understand musical theory or notation. It wasn’t that I was bad. No one ever says they’re good. It was I couldn’t do it. It was like being dyslexic.
HH: Well, you also say you have an incapacity for chess and mathematics.
CH: Yes, I’m deformed. I’m very short in all those departments. And those, I find, generally cluster, the ability at chess and math and music. So I thought okay, I’ve got, I’ve only got one side of the brain, I keep forgetting which one it is, that works. The other is sort of walnut-sized. I think I’d do better to stay with the essayistic form.
HH: Are you aware of anyone who lacks that musical ability who is also a great novelist?
CH: Well, I get any leisure, I’ve been encouraged to develop this theory, because it seems that there must be something to it. I mean, you know, Shakespeare is full of music, for example, so is Proust. Nabokov is a very strong test. He didn’t like music. He didn’t like having it played to him. But he knew quite a lot about it and appreciated it. The more one goes into it, the more it seems like quite a useful, possible theory. But I’ve only got to its very crude adumbration so far.
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HH: A little Robert Dylan in the background there, Christopher Hitchens, another of the musical people that you refer to throughout the book, obviously impacting the 60s and your years in university. Have you kept up the taste for Bob Dylan?
CH: Yes. I also think, I mean, as well as being…he’s no longer a great singer. His voice is shot. And not as badly as mine, but it’s gone. But he used to have a very beautiful voice. There’s a wonderful song, I wish I’d mentioned it to you earlier. We could have played Spanish Is The Loving Tongue, a very hauntingly, beautiful song. And he had a lovely voice, but he was also, I think, a great poet. And he was the background music to a lot of people of my age. I don’t take a lot of stock in generational thought, as you know. I think generational solidarity is the lowest form of solidarity there is. But I think that for every decade or so, every generational set, there is a special voice. And certainly for my lot, it was him. And I would have liked him if he’d only written about lost love and blues and so on. But he also had a few things to say about the war and the civil rights movement, and so on.
HH: You’ve got a lot of commentary on poetry and poets in Hitch-22 – James Fenton, Philip Larkin, Auden, Clive James. Do you think some people have the incapacity for poetry that you have for chess and mathematics? Because I think I might be among them.
CH: Oh, I’d be very sorry to think that. I mean, well, what do you think of the liturgy, for example? What do you think about the Book of Job?
HH: Well, yes, you’re right. I do love that poetry.
CH: If man is born to travel, does the sparks fly upward?
HH: Yeah.
CH: That’s poetry.
HH: It’s harder, though. And I’m curious as to…
CH: I actually, I say this to my students, because the art of poetry recitation, say, I mean, just to stand up or even sit down and be able to speak a Shakespeare sonnet seems to have gone, and it’s certainly no longer taught. And people, I can do it, and people look at me as if I was doing something almost supernatural. And I say well look, you all know the lyrics to several songs, and they all do. Even without knowing it, they know them. They know them almost just by acquaintance.
HH: That’s right.
CH: By attrition, perhaps, almost in some cases. But they think of poetry as something different, as a whole new reservation.
HH: So are poets more tragic than the fiction writers you’ve known? Or are they the same kind of character?
CH: I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets, the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.
HH: Okay. I’ve got to ask before we get to the break…
CH: Oh, that’s why we think so highly of Shakespeare, I think, is that he’s able to perform on both of those registers with such acuity.
HH: And his history as well. Let me ask you about Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley.
CH: Yes.
HH: Would you tell the audience why it had such an impact on you?
CH: Yes, when I was quite small, I suppose about ten or eleven, I came across a tattered paperback of a book that your older listeners may have heard of or read. The author was Richard Llewellyn, and the book is called How Green Was My Valley. It’s not a question. It’s a way of saying in Welsh how green my valley was, how green was my valley. And it’s a wonderful account of growing up as a young boy in a very self-enclosed community of Welsh-speaking coal miners in the valleys of the southern part of Wales. And I was living then on just the other side of the Bristol channel in southern England, in the rural part of the country, and only a few hundred miles away from this. And this book described to me the life of people almost on another planet, though they were very close kinned. But they worked underground like the people in H.G. Wells, the Morlocks. They spoke another language. They joined unions and went on strike. There was even a disobliging reference to Winston Churchill in this book. I’d never come across a disobliging reference to Winston Churchill before, because as home secretary in 1911, he’d sent the British army to put down the Welsh coal miners in a big strike in the Rhonda Valley. And it was just tremendously eye-opening to me to know the existence of this, not just of the people of another class, but in a way, almost another race and nation and language. And I got to the stage where I could almost have it memorized. It meant an enormous amount to me. It was also a very good bildungsroman, if you want, about this young boy, Hugh Morgan, and his growing up, and the best rites of passage that he underwent. It was an electrifying read. I read it again the other day. It’s still pretty good.
HH: You know, I think it’s going to spark, Hitch-22 is going to spark a revival in How Green Was My Valley.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, I’d like to talk to you about your mom and dad at this point. Do you still have your mother’s last letter to you?
CH: Yes.
HH: And where do you keep it? And how often do you read it?
CH: I have the same now-rather battered and flaking envelope of all her possessions and, such as they were, and all the relevant documents and the things that she left for me that was given to me by the British embassy in Athens after her funeral in 1973. I have it all in one place. And I look at it not very often these days.
HH: How often do you think of…
CH: But I know it, well, for one thing, I know it by heart.
HH: That’s…how often do you recollect it?
CH: For another, I am not a great one for relics or mementos. I’m not a great keeper of things. Actually, one of my big regrets in my life now is there are a lot of letters and things like that from people, interesting people, that I didn’t bother to keep, as I’ve often had to move in a hurry, and didn’t want to be burdened with carrying too much. So I’ve always resolved on the side of not being a packrat, even a sentimental one.
HH: Now you do not disclose the contents, I’m not going to ask you what they are, but I wonder, have you ever allowed anyone else to read it?
CH: No.
HH: And will you leave it for your children?
CH: Yes, I suppose I will. I don’t think it’ll be very meaningful to them. The problem with it is, actually, I think I must have shown it to my brother, come to think of it, some years ago, but not to my father. For him, it would have been too painful. I should perhaps explain why this is?
HH: Yes.
CH: My mother took her own life in Athens, in company with her lover when their affair just wasn’t working out, and it was a time when divorce and adultery was still very scandalous in the English middle class. And it wasn’t working out, and I think my mother couldn’t see things getting any better, and didn’t want to go on living. This was a very, obvious very awful for me to discover, but I had known about the boyfriend, which my father had not. And awful for my father to discover, because it meant he discovered it through the, the announcement came in the newspapers. It was actually reported she’d been murdered. I mean, he was a very private and reticent man, and it was, I think, terribly shocking to him to realize everyone now knew that his wife wasn’t living with him anymore. And he didn’t want to know, when I came back, he didn’t want to hear that I discovered that in fact it was a suicide act. It wasn’t a murder, so, and didn’t want to discuss it any further. And he was a very, very, very quiet man in that way. The second thing was that the note was written, I sort of wish she hadn’t done this, but she, in her extremity, she addressed it just to me, I think thinking that I was the one who’d be able to come to Athens.
HH: I see.
CH: And I wish she hadn’t done that, because it, you know, it rather left my other male Hitchens out in the cold.
HH: The portrait of your…
CH: And I had to, it took me a while to, I’d wanted to protect them from that thought, if you see what I mean.
HH: Yes, yes. The portrait of your mother is achingly tender, and a very powerfully loving portrait of your father as well. In fact, I knew I was caught by your book after that, because I knew you were going to be just breathtakingly honest in the course of this book. How difficult was it to write these portraits?
CH: Well, I knew I’d have to do it one day, and I knew if I was ever going to do a memoir, I’d have to confront it. And the one about my mother I wrote first off, when the publisher first asked me. And I did it in one night, in one go, and sent it off after I’d read it, and wept, which I did more than I thought I was going to do. But I thought also to myself, would it make anyone else cry? I don’t want it to do that. I don’t want it to be mawkish. I want to be better judged than that. So I said to the publisher, and my editor, a very trusted guy, if this works, then I think I can do the book. If you don’t think it does, I’m not sure I should go on. And that has taken me since 1973. I’d often thought of trying to write about it, but to put it off.
HH: Well, it’s not mawkish.
CH: Well, thank you for saying that. No one else, no one has said it is. It shouldn’t, I think, bring a tear to anyone else’s eye, but it should make people understand why it would to mind. And then the necessary counterpart, that was a bit harder to write, was about my father, and why his life was so, was such a sad one.
HH: You know, I know a lot of naval officers and Marine Corps officers who fought in the same war as your father did, and as reserved as he is. And I thought that was an amazing story as well. But I wanted to ask you about one note on Page 369 about the Commander.
CH: Yes.
HH: “Apart from the traditional stories of British daring, the only example of heroism and gallantry ever related to me by the Commander,” your father, “was of the Francoist General Jose Moscardo, who refused to surrender the besieged Alcazar, even when the Red forces threatened to execute his son, Luis.” What did you make of your father picking this one story to tell you, Christopher?
CH: Well, at the time, I didn’t know it. He just gave it me as an example of stoicism, courage in the face of the foe. And I would have been about eight, I suppose. But as I grew up and got to know him better, and also had discovered a bit more about what had been going on in the generation before I was born, I realized how right wing my father was. I mean, he was a very, very conservative person indeed, and I think, and I know from his letters, the very few that remain, that he was very strongly pro-Franco in the Spanish civil war. He had a slight sympathy for Mussolini as well. He wouldn’t have, I think, have had any truck at all with any sympathy for Hitler, but he was rather an authoritarian, or an admirer of people who were, rather.
HH: Your brother arrives…
CH: He would often come up with very alarming remarks. I mean, I remember when I asked him once about, or rather, he actually asked me when I had been reporting from Northern Ireland at a certain stage, he said oh, what do you think should happen there, and I was sort of moaning on about this and that, and power sharing, and civil rights and all this, and he said well, what I think is it needs a jolly good dose of martial law. That’s what he sounded like, as if, I think I say it in the book, as if the British had never tried the use of force in Ireland before.
HH: Yeah, you do say that in the book.
CH: And it was time to give it a workout.
HH: It’s a good laugh out loud line.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, your brother, Peter, arrives on the scene of Hitch-22 relatively late, though with some very sincere, respectful nods. And I’m curious, was he friends with any of your friends? Could he even pass a day with Martin Amis?
CH: Oh yeah, he could do that all right, but he’s just, there’s a crucial difference in age between us. I used not to notice things like birth order and age difference and so on until I became a parent myself. And I actually now think it may have some relevance. Then, I thought well, what does it mean for me, and realized that my brother was born about a year and a half after me, more like…in other words, near enough to be a rival, if you see what I mean, and not far enough down to be below, to be a baby brother in need of protection. And so we were, it’s a narrow, but deep difference between boys at that age. And it goes on for life, and you go to boarding school as we did eventually at different times, and were in different classes in the same school. It’s awkward, or can be. We weren’t very much alike in temperament. If I were to liken temperament at all, I was much more like my mother, and he very like my old man. And, well, as time went on, we grew up. We were very seldom in the same town, we didn’t go to the same university. We adopted the same career, interesting.
HH: Yes.
CH: I don’t think he did it at all to emulate me, and I’m sure he had the same feeling as I did, that it’s the only real, being a writer is the only real life for a gentleman. But he’s a very different kind of journalist from the one I am, I think, very good indeed at what he does.
HH: And has he reacted to Hitch-22 yet?
CH: We don’t have that many friends in common, but actually, none of my friends has any difficulty appreciating the point of him. It’s just that he can be rather abrupt.
HH: Has he read Hitch-22 yet? Has he given you his…
CH: Yeah, he was one of the first people to read it.
HH: And how did he react…
CH: Because I was finally going to have to deal as candidly as I could with my parents and my upbringing, our upbringing, therefore I thought he really had the right to see it. And he was very good about it. He even suggested a few changes. He’s a very good family archivist. He’s also got an exceptionally good memory. He was able to correct me on a couple of things as well.
HH: And generally, with 30 seconds, has it, has the extended Hitchens family, wives and children, reacted well to Hitch-22?
CH: They’ve, yes, I would say they had, yeah. I mean, there’s not much in it for them, if you like, because I try and make it more of a memoir than an autobiography. But yes, they’ve been rather sweet about it.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, throughout Hitch-22, and this is jarring, I think, particularly for an American, and maybe even for a Midwesterner more than others, there is this relentless awareness of your social standing, and the social standing of everyone around you. And the first question I wrote down in my notes is did that make you more generous to people that you knew were your intellectual lesser as a result of awareness of class?
CH: Would you mind running that last bit by me again, Hugh?
HH: Well, you run into people, you have to run into people every day who simply can’t compete with your knowledge and your learning, and your ability with words. But I’ve never seen you be cruel to anyone. I mean, I’ve seen you debate with abandon, but not necessarily cruel. And I’m wondering if that comes from your awareness of having been different social status from the people that you went to school from, and whether you felt sympathy for people who didn’t bring the same thing to the table.
CH: Oh, I see. No, I’ve got you now. It’s a very ingenious question. I mean, well, I can answer it in reverse order, perhaps. I certainly was brought up in a society very acutely conscious of all sorts of difference, and all the vulnerabilities that that brings. You know, you can make a small mistake in language or etiquette in Britain, or you could when I was younger, and really be made to feel it, and it’s the flick of a lash, but it would sting, and especially at school where there’s not much privacy, and so on. You could, yes, undoubtedly be made to feel crushed. By the way, it’s not such a bad training. You realize that there are worse things than hurt feelings.
HH: Right.
CH: And…but yes, you also learn that at the absolute height of bad manners is to be rude to someone who is, I don’t mean these words, but you know what one would call social inferiors. You mustn’t be rude to waiters or servants or anything like that, because it’s taking advantage of something that’s unfairly conferred on you.
HH: And did that carry over to intellectual life?
CH: Well, I’d like to think it did, but I have a feeling you may, may be slightly over-praising me, Hugh, because I can remember, for example, being extremely rude to the friends of Jerry Falwell, for example, when he died, and being accused of speaking hurtfully, and saying well you know, I don’t want it not to hurt, if you like. I mean, you know, I feel very strongly about this.
HH: There is one episode of cruelty in the memoir. It’s in a note. It’s buried on Page 68 – E.A.M. Smith…
CH: Yes.
HH: …a brainless and cruel lad that you somewhat torment, actually. You can tell the story, but I’m curious as to why you included it, and whether you regretted doing it.
CH: Well, because there’s a famous story by George Orwell called Revenge…and it’s not a story. It’s an account of an episode in post-war Germany called Revenge Is Sour. But when the boot is really on the other foot, actually, you get no satisfaction. You’ve often dreamed of what it would be like, but there’s no satisfaction in putting the leather in. And this boy had been a bully to me at school. He was a horrible, uneducated, resentful kid who tried to take it out on me when I was small. It wasn’t hell, but I mean I remembered it. I had to learn how to avoid him. And much later in life, I was going to work in London at my magazine on the subway, and he came into the subway car carrying, wearing a smelly, old overcoat and carrying bags of rubbish, and talking at the top of his voice, and looking around him wildly. And I thought good grief. And there was only one seat in the whole damned car, and he took it. It was next to me. And I thought shall I do nothing? I thought I can’t do nothing. So I lent over and said E.A.M. Smith, right? And he jumped like a pea on a hot shovel. And he said how did you know? And I said, I decided to be nasty, and I said well, we’ve had our eye on you for some time.
HH: (laughing) That’s so horrible.
CH: And he looked wildly around him, and said, begged me, and I said no, you know, and we don’t like what we see, either. You’re not getting good reports. And I rubbed it into him. It was getting to the point where I was going to get off, it was my stop to change, and I thought of just leaving him there babbling, and I realized I couldn’t do it. I actually was rather pleased to find I hadn’t got it in me quite to do that. So I said no, it’s all right, I remember you from school, and I gave him my name. And a flicker of recognition came in his face, and he said well, yes, that’s right, I remember you. I used to pray for you. And I said well, carry on.
HH: Now is that seed of cruelty the same thing that blossoms in other people unchecked into your General Videla, and into the tortures about whom we learn more when you get to Iraq? I mean, is it always the same thing, but it’s got to be nipped off? Is it in everyone?
CH: I don’t think many people are immune to it, especially those who’ve been…Auden says in his wonderful poem, 1st of September, 1939, the greatest poem every written in New York City, about the opening of the Second World War, he’s reflecting on what’s happened in Germany, and he says I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn – those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. It isn’t always true. I actually slightly stopped the cycle. I could have been much nastier to him than I was. In the end, I just gave him an unpleasant surprise, and then let him off with a warning. But I could have relished. I know I had it in me. And I admire people who can get over it. I say in my chapter on Iraq in the book that a horrible realization came to me one day after I’d been visiting the country for a while during the Saddam era that the Iraqi police are always hunting down misfits and psychopaths and child molesters, not in order to imprison them, but in order to employ them. And that’s one of the definitions of a fascist system. It gives privileges and rewards to people who are potentially or actual torturers and sadists, and then puts them in charge of things. Yeah, and it’s not, it’s depressingly easy, unfortunately, to recruit a force of that kind.
HH: Yeah, because I think it’s a universal temptation. Now I’ve got to ask you a technical question about Hitch-22, which is your use of notes. And someone getting a degree in Hitchens will have to pick through these page notes and decide where and when you use them. Page 181, you write, “the synthesis for which one aimed was the Orwellian one of evolving a consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.” Now that’s a concise sort of life statement. On Page 136, you’re just being humorous. “’You’re fired,’ were the exact words I remember him using,” saying it was impossible to go on to work for someone. And then you’d put Mailer and Buckley in a different aisle. What was your theory of using a note as opposed to integrating it into the text?
CH: Well, partly because I had some second thoughts when I was going through. That happens to everyone. But also partly just to alleviate things a bit, to give people’s eye a rest, and just put an asterisk. And they can go, I would try and put in a little surprise, or perhaps a joke. It’s just a way of making it less of a trudge to read, I suppose.
HH: And so was it visual?
CH: I mean, so when I said, the example you just gave, I’d say well, I carried on in this job when I didn’t work well, and wasn’t doing, wasn’t really supposed to have the job, until the day came when the editor said something to me that made it impossible for me to go on working for him. And then I just put in a footnote, you’re fired were the exact words, as described.
HH: And it’s a good laugh.
CH: It’s all right, yeah.
HH: But not all of them are laughs.
CH: Yeah.
HH: Some of them are really quite serious, such as the Orwellian standard of consistent and integral anti-totalitarianism.
CH: That could probably have gone in the text. I agree.
HH: Oh, okay. I’m not editing. What did your editor work with you on this? Did he just give you free rein? Or was he in there in the trenches on a sentence by sentence basis?
CH: Both. But the advantage of having to write a memoir is that it’s very hard for anyone else to check. Only you really know the story, just as only I know what the real shortcomings of the book are. I’m the one who wakes up thinking damn, I should have put that in, or I should have cut that bit, or pruned it, or extended it out. I mean, it happens all the time. It’s absolutely terrible.
HH: And is there anything that you really regret not having put in this? Or did you launch it too early in anticipation, without allowing yourself, for example, the chance to write about illness and treatment and recovery?
CH: No, I’m very glad it doesn’t end that way. It does begin with a long meditation on death.
HH: Yup.
CH: Because I, like Mark Twain, happened to have the chance to read about my own death in print, or at least about myself in the past tense, just as I was finishing the book. And, sorry, excuse me, just as I was beginning the book. And so that gave me a very good mind concentrating way of curtain-raising my life. I didn’t realize, probably, that while I was writing that, I was probably already ill. It takes quite a while to develop these tumors. I probably was already mortally sick.
HH: Is your illness in any respect related to drinking, do you know, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: No. It’s not, if you drink, which I do, not as much as everyone thinks I do, but I’ve managed to do my share, or have done. No, I think it’s much more connected to having been a smoker.
HH: Okay, and when we come back from break, we’re going to talk about drinking. Christopher Hitchens is my guest. His memoir is Hitch-22. It is now in bookstores everywhere. It’s fascinating in its level of detail and its level of clarity, and in its transparency, so I strongly urge you. I’ll leave you with this message. “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. Avoid all narcotics. These will make you boring rather than less, and are not designed, as are the grape and the grain, to enliven company.” We’ll talk more about the grape and the grain when we return to the Hugh Hewitt Show with Christopher Hitchens.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, talking about drinking, you write that you earned a reputation for imbibing on Fleet Street, which is impressive, actually, and you note that Webster the Cat was a piker by you. But it did not in any way inhibit your ability to write.
CH: No, it didn’t. Well, of course, I can’t really be the judge of that, but there are two fatal mistakes with drinking. Some people think it helps them to write, and they, excuse me, my voice is slightly shredding, some people think it helps them to write, and can’t write without it, people like William Faulkner, I think, are celebrated examples of that. That’s pretty much death. First, your writing will go, and then so will you. I never used it as a means of writing, as an aid to writing. I found I could drink and write, however. And there, I would actually not just rely on my own word. I mean, many people have noticed that I can go from a dinner party, and write a perfectly decent column, whereas most other people would prefer to go to bed. I can make alcohol work for me, in other words. I use it to prolong a moment, to sort of enhance things, keep a bit of a spin and an edge. And of course, if you have one more, one or two more than that, you can just become a bore, and be unable to write at all, or write trash. But again, I’ve never, my worst enemies haven’t accused me of that.
HH: You mentioned that Clive James, one of your great friends and a poet, had a master/servant relationship with drink.
CH: Yes.
HH: Did you?
CH: Master/servant relationship with, as I say with Clive, as some of your listeners will remember the film, with the booze played by Dirk Bogarde. There’s a famous film called The Servant, where Bogarde is the sinister butler who dominates James Fox, his master, in Chelsea. Turbulent, yes, but I’ve never felt that I’m a slave to it.
HH: Okay. Bill Carter, your editor, once said I don’t think any newspaper is entitled to this level of loyalty when looking over your bar bill, a very funny line. Did it ever interfere with getting done something you wanted to get done?
CH: No.
HH: Okay.
CH: No, I mean, I would really reproach myself for that. I’ve never been late for an appointment, for giving a speech, say, or a class. Never. I’ve never skipped a deadline. I’ve never shown up drunk at work or anything like that. But in my leisure hours, I’ve sometimes become a little bit expansive, as I draw on my fund of anecdotes, limericks and so on. Yes, I’d admit to that.
HH: All right. Let’s talk about…
CH: And yes, I actually, there was a time when I used to drink gin martinis. I should confess it. I gave up drinking gin altogether, because there were times where, I mean, I ought not, I’m not trying to soften the blow. It made me quarrelsome, and I would become argumentative, and even a bit bellicose when there was really nothing really worth arguing for or about. And that was nasty, and that’s my big regret, I think.
HH: Now I do want to talk about your friends at some length, and we’ll get to the politics if your voice can hold out towards the end of the interview.
CH: Yes.
HH: But you write about that the most, and I treasured these portraits of your friendship, especially the big three – Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Edward Said. There’s full and fine, disappointed and destroyed here. Tell people about Martin Amis.
CH: Well, Martin is the most extraordinarily charming and witty and fluent person, and also the most charming, witty, fluent and deadly serious instrumentalists of the English language known to me, I mean, certainly of our generation, shall we say. One of his novels, a novel called Money, is undoubtedly the novel of the 80s for the Anglo-American sphere at any rate. He manages to yoke together, no, that’s much too heavy a way of putting it, he manages to synthesize very brilliantly what is extremely comic and farcical, even, with what’s tragic and what’s serious. He once made a wonderful remark against a critic of his, saying that the man had no sense of humor, and by saying that of him, he meant particularly to impugn his seriousness.
HH: Now you do not, and this is applicable to his works as well to everyone else you talk about here. You don’t give the reader a break. You’re just assuming they know these books like Money, and that they know these authors like Rushdie, and that they’re familiar with the great works of English literature for the last many hundred years. Did you just have to decide at the beginning you were just going to spare no quarter, and they’re just going to have to catch up?
CH: Yes, absolutely. And my reason for that is that’s how I know most of what I know, is reading a paragraph in a book, and realizing that I was expected to get a reference there, and I didn’t quite get it, and regarding that as a reproach to myself.
HH: Well, that’s like Adorno to me. I had no idea who this fellow was, and I had to read this with Wikipedia open.
CH: Well, aren’t you glad?
HH: Well, yes I am, but I’m wondering, isn’t that rare these days? Didn’t your editor say you can’t do that, Christopher? People won’t slog through with you?
CH: No, they didn’t. No, there was no, there was no dumbing down, because dumbing down in this case would not have been of me. I mean, I’d have had to find another way of saying what I already know?
HH: Yeah.
CH: It would have been much more boring.
HH: You’re right.
CH: But it would also be very condescending to the readers. I’d rather do anything than patronize people. I’d rather say look, I know this. There’s no reason you shouldn’t. And if you didn’t, don’t complain. I’ve just given you the opportunity to check it out.
HH: Yeah, go check it out.
CH: And I backed myself, saying I think there is a gold standard in writing, and in the world of ideas. And I know something about it, and I’d like to introduce you to it, too.
HH: There is a tough account here of Kingsley Amis, the test of a true reactionary becoming a sulfurous anti-American, one aside. Did Martin mind your treatment of his father?
CH: No, and he’s had to face it himself in his own memoirs, and in other recollections. I mean, the fact of the matter is that towards the end of his life, Kingsley, who’d been a wonderful win and raconteur and great literary critic, and just the best of all possible company, and a tremendous teacher, too, a great instructor, in a sense gave up. I mean, he, the face grew to fit the mask, instead of sort of the Falstaffian, large, jolly, rather drunk, overeating figure. He was Falstaff, but with a morose expression on his face, and a sort of grudge against life, and saying things that would once maybe have sounded funny because they would have been designed to outrage the liberals, but actually just sounded rather ugly, like, you know, all American writers are either Jews or hicks. There’s nothing outrageous to the progressive consensus there. It’s not tweaking liberals or anything. It’s just nasty and boring and untrue.
HH: Now Martin, also, note on Page 161, send you a note upon the publication of God Is Not Great being this bestseller. And do you, is that…did you keep the note, first of all?
CH: No.
HH: Okay. Is the esteem of a friend the greatest currency?
CH: Be very hard to think of a higher standard.
HH: And other than Martin’s, whose praise and whose esteem did you value the most? You quoted his, so I assume his is the most valuable.
CH: Well, his was the most, but remember, there’s a back story, in that when he had a, unlike me, he was very successful, both commercially and with the reviewers, very young. And so I sent him the telegram drawn from Scott Fitzgerald about early, called Historic Early Success. And he waited many years, and then he sent me a reciprocal one from Bellow.
HH: It’s a wonder…
CH: The note, I had to keep. It was just he said look up this bit of Bellow, and you’ll see what I mean. And he said this is payback.
HH: Yeah, it’s a wonderful story.
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HH: It’s Hugh Hewitt with Christopher Hitchens, playing Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, the line just like the rain in Juarez, another song that you reference in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens.
CH: Yes, when I first came to the U.S. in 1970, I traveled around the country on a Greyhound bus. And one of the places I visited was El Paso, and I made my first cross into Mexico to Juarez. It was a lot, a bit easier and a lot nicer then than it is now. And that, and the song, the Simon And Garfunkel song about counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike, and others, when I came back to England, would hear these songs again. I could now see the places. I could feel them in a way I hadn’t been able to before. It’s sort of got in my yearning to come to the U.S., had been to do with the music at the time.
HH: We’re going to get to that journey in a little bit…
CH: And various places, Manhattan, notably, and San Francisco, and so on. And now, I’d seen them, and I felt, I felt as if I had really come to a new world.
HH: Let me skip ahead, then, to America, since we’re talking about this. You said you went out to San Francisco, but by the time you’ve heard of a scene, it is almost invariably moved on or decayed.
CH: Yes.
HH: And that was the case with San Francisco?
CH: Yes, and I think it’s Larry McMurtry in one of his novels, I think it may be Lonesome Dove, one of the cowboys sees a sign in a saloon advertising a wild west show, and goes and sits down and thinks at a table, and takes a while to work it out, because once it’s on a poster in a saloon advertising a show, it means it no longer exists. That’s roughly it, and I think that’s a general axiom. If you set your compass to San Francisco in ’69-’70, because you want to see the summer of love, it won’t be going on when you get there. You’ll get the rip-off version. I learned that quite early.
HH: Here’s your description of America. “Here was a country that could engage in a frightening and debilitating and unjust war, and undergo a simultaneous convulsion of its cities on the question of justice for its oldest and largest minority, and start a national conversation on the rights of women, and turn its most respectable campuses into agitated seminars on right and wrong, and have a show trial of confessed saboteurs in Chicago, where the incredibly guilty defendants actually got off, and put quite a lot of this onto its television and movie screens in real time. This seemed like a state of affairs worth fighting for, at least fighting over.” Is that when the hook was in, Christopher Hitchens?
CH: Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely, yes. I was so impressed by the, by how much chaos and apparent disorder and color and violence, even, the society could absorb while still being very self-critical, very reflective, very humorous, and very welcoming to strangers, including strangers who were mainly interested in its woes and its difficulties.
HH: That’s what you…you write the extraordinary hospitality of America is one of the big three differences between the U.K. and the U.S.A. Is that still true, do you think?
CH: I sure hope so. I mean, I won’t…yes, I mean, I think I can say that it is, because young people from my old college in Oxford still come over on a scholarship, the same one that brought me. And I sometimes run into them, and they, they’re always very impressed by how willing Americans are to say well, come and stay, and they mean it. They don’t just mean come for dinner. They mean come and stay at our place, and we’ll show you around. Yes, I think there is still that extraordinary welcoming character to the country.
HH: One of the interesting things I wrote down when you decided to move to America, you had to have been making a conscious decision you were not going to see your friends who are obviously so close and dear to you, like James Fenton, who’s sort of the runner-up in the friendship Olympics with you. And how much did that hold you back? Or is it just something you said oh, it’s modern, we can travel, we can talk?
CH: Well, it’s not like going to Brazil or Australia or Indian if you live in England. I mean, and especially if I was going to live as I did, and tended to on the East Coast, that’s the first thing. And it’s as near as possible to fly back, letters take three days. There’s a five hour telephone difference. It’s not that much of an alienation in some ways. And in fact in many ways, I wish I’d settled somewhere a bit less imprinted with Englishness than the East Coast. It might have been more of an adventure for me. But I had a certain idea of New York and Washington, and what I wanted to do there. And that’s the first thing. The second thing is most of the friends I have are the sort of people who have the same, roughly the same attitude to America, and come often. And in the case of James Fenton, he now teaches poetry at New York University, for example.
HH: Is he a Christian?
CH: No.
HH: Because…
CH: He’s the son of a famous Anglican theologian in England. He’s not a believer in the supernatural, no. But I think, I’ve always felt that a lot of his ethics are formed by a certain kind of Anglicanism in the same, rather the same way as W.H. Auden’s were.
HH: It would be a wonderful thing to have a friend write a portrait of you the way you wrote about Fenton. It’s really quite a tribute to him.
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HH: That’s the America song that my guest, Christopher Hitchens referred to in the last segment. Hitchens’ new memoir, Hitch-22 in bookstores now, it’s linked at Hughhewitt.com today. Christopher Hitchens, just a note on Ulster. My, the Hewitts are from Ulster. I was in Saintfield last summer, in fact, because that’s where my great-grandfather departed from in the last hundred forty years ago. Do you think after the portrait, and you write this arresting portrait, you almost get Fenton killed over there, that Ulster is now healed? Is it going to last?
CH: Well, I do think that the likelihood that there’ll ever be another republican, excuse me, attempt to unify Ireland by violence, the likelihood of that is somewhere near nil now. They gave it what one must not call their best shot. They gave it their worst shot. A lot of people were needlessly killed as a result.
HH: And do you…
CH: And it was discovered what they could have been told, or could have known from the very beginning, that it’s not possible to move, just to take an example, a million and a half staunch Ulster Protestants into another state by force. You can’t do that. Amazing to think that they had any other impression. I think what they hoped would happen was that the attitude of people on the United Kingdom mainland would change, and they’d say the Ulster Protestants are more trouble than they’re worth. And there was a risk of that, I think, at one point, because of the extreme unattractiveness of Ian Paisley and his sectarian leadership, and also of the terrible behavior of the Protestant Unionist loyalist paramilitary groups.
HH: Does what has happened in Northern Ireland give you hope for places like Iraq and other war-torn places, that eventually civil society can emerge even from the chaos of a long civil war like that?
CH: Well, I’ve seen it happen in other places, too. I mean, actually, a great book for someone to write would be not on how societies melt down, countries like Uganda, say, or Ulster for a while, or Lebanon for a long time, but how it is they come back. I mean, Uganda now has all kinds of trouble, but it’s a really quite thriving and prosperous and interesting country. And I’ve been there recently. And I know you remember what it was like in the Amin years. It looked as if it had lost its pulse completely. There was nothing left worth fighting over. There wasn’t one brick piled on another. It nearly got like that in Sarajevo and other parts of the Balkans, too. What I think happens is that people realize, they get either to the edge and have a good look over it and see what’s coming, or they actually go over, and it doesn’t stop until there’s nothing worth fighting over. But in the end, people do recover their senses, yes. And then, there’s a point I make that’s not so optimistic, not that that last point was very optimistic, but it’s this. I noticed in Belfast first, I’ve noticed it since, it’s certainly very true in places like Baghdad and Beirut. A lot of the so-called local warlord leaders and so on don’t actually want there to be a solution. They want the pot to keep boiling, because that’s how they can keep control of the drug rackets, the smuggling, the weapons trades, the shakedowns…
HH: Their status.
CH: And also, it also means the people will bring camera crews to their houses and treat them with respect, and they’ll be invited to summits and consulted by the U.N. And so the people who are just basically pimps and thugs can be treated as if they are statesmen. And they don’t want this to stop.
HH: Yeah.
CH: And that, unfortunately, is a very powerful feature in human nature.
HH: I want to move to Salman Rushdie. Valentine’s Day, 1989, a fatwa issues against him. You write on Page 268 of Hitch-22, “I felt it once. Here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved.” And there is an undeniable note of disappointment with Rushdie in Hitch-22, however, because in the end, would you say he compromised with the ayatollahs?
CH: Oh, no. I mean, he made a good faith attempt that he himself now wishes he had not, under a great deal of pressure from the British Foreign Office, who claimed to be worried about the fate of the British hostages in Lebanon, and was trying to give him the phony thought that his novel was making the predicament of the hostages worse. They attempted to broker a deal with the leaders of the Regents Park Mosque in London, whereby if Salman would make a full apology and announce that he’d returned to the fold of Islam in which he’d been born, and so on, they would drop any attempt to kill him. And he did write a piece saying why he’d embraced Islam, which he’s since repudiated. And I described the repudiation in some detail in my book. And I thought when I read it, I thought that was very sad that he felt he’d had to do that. But I was also very sure that the other side wouldn’t keep its bargain, which of course, it did not. They never meant to. They’re very shady and dishonest, and have no concept of telling the truth.
HH: Did you ever discuss the…
CH: But I thought it was worth his while putting them to the test. Let’s say that. Even though it was a bit of a wince-making event at the time.
HH: Did you discuss the fatwa with Edward Said, about whom you have this amazing falling out at the end, which we’ll talk. But did you ever discuss that particular episode with him?
CH: Oh, very much so. In fact, I think I say in the book I was having dinner at Edward’s house near Columbia University one evening when an advance copy of the Satanic Verses was brought up from the office of Salman’s agent, Andrew Wylie, with a note saying, “Dear Edward, I’d like you to take a look at this, because I know that there’ll probably be some complaints from the faithful.” In other words, Salman perfectly well understood that he was going to use verses from the Koran for literary purposes. There would be people who said that was blasphemy by definition. And he wanted Edward’s opinion, not that Edward is a Muslim. Edward was from a famously Christian family of Palestinians in Jerusalem. But Edward was involved from the very early stages, and he and I spoke at the very first protest meeting downtown after the Ayatollah had issued his death threat backed by money.
HH: Because where I got confused is you wrote about…
CH: And Edward also, I should add, I mean, defended Salman and attacked the fatwa. We did it in downtown New York where that week, there was indeed maximum security, and quite a lot of alarm. But Edward did it at al-Azhar University in Cairo, and also at Birzeit University on the West Bank. He was very brave about it.
HH: You write, though, that, “The cloud that overshadowed our conversation was then no bigger than a man’s hand.” But it was the cloud of the Ayatollah, and his unwillingness to go after Islam in the full-throated way, wasn’t it?
CH: In the end, the dispute between Edward and myself did also involve attitudes to the Ayatollah. Yeah, he didn’t like the Ayatollah, but he thought that the Iranian Revolution was all the fault of the United States, and I thought that was hopelessly simplistic.
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HH: In this short segment, Christopher Hitchens, you did not attend the funeral of Edward Said, for he had called you a racist. Why…
CH: Yeah, well, yes, that’s putting it rather bluntly, but I suppose it’s true, yeah.
HH: So explain to the audience what happened, because it was…
CH: He made, he gave a, he wrote an article or gave an interview, I now forget exactly which, to a magazine run by some Saudi princeling in London, in which he quoted an opinion of the Iraq war, without giving its author, and said this was typical of the kind of racist talk you got in the United States. And I read, an Iraqi friend sent me the translation, and with a chill, I realized that the words complained of were mine. He did not go so far as to say my name, for which I wasn’t sure whether I respected him or didn’t, because I thought, I should say it or not, with a charge like that. Anyway, my view about that is if someone thinks they’re racist, they’re saying they don’t want you for a friend. You have to take it seriously. It’s not like saying you’re a dunderhead. The word shouldn’t lose its toxicity, as it’s in some danger of doing. So I sort of made it the occasion for a slight froideur. And when he died, I didn’t hear from his family. I decided that I hadn’t really got the right to go to the funeral. I wasn’t disinvited. I think I could have gone.
HH: Do you regret that that friendship ended that way?
CH: Terribly regret it, yes. I mean, well, among other things, I very much regret that Edward was taken from us so young by leukemia. But I’m afraid that had he lived longer, or had he recovered his health, our disagreement would have been correspondingly fierce. It would have, the differences between us would have become a lot more emphatic.
HH: And a last question for this hour, which is uncategorizable. Your contempt for sports is, not contempt, but your distaste for sports is throughout, even though Amis is a soccer lover. But you recommend C.L.R. James’ Beyond A Boundary, a cricket book. And I think you’re honest in suggesting that the reader actually read a book about cricket.
CH: Yes. Well, I’m not sure that cricket really counts as a sport. I think of it more as an art form. I mean, a proper cricket match is supposed to last three days, with everyone playing a series of roles. It’s a bit more like a ballet if it’s properly done. And C.L.R. James, the great Trinidadian Marxist, thought that it was a great training for character, and a great introduction to English literature, and to the Greek classics as well. He thought it contained all the virtues.
HH: You also write his history…
CH: I mean, it’s a wonderful book in that way, a wonderful post-colonial book.
HH: You also write his history of the Haitian revolution had a lasting effect on you. We only have 30-40 seconds. How?
CH: It’s called The Black Jacobins. It’s about how under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitians decided to take seriously the French slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity, and were taught very cruely by an invasion that that was supposed to be for white French people only.
HH: On that note, stay tuned, America. One more hour with Christopher Hitchens.
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HH: Christopher Hitchens, on Page 362, there’s a paragraph. I’ll just read it. “I used to love the detail that Hampshire’s New Forest is so called, because it was only planted for the hunt in the late 11th Century. I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stansted House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still again.” Now I bring that up, because it’s about memory in a memoir. What is the purpose of a memoir for the reader, since it’s a life uniquely lived full of unique memories like that? Why do it?
CH: It’s a tougher question than it sounds. I think that the refuge I’ll take, which isn’t just a refuge, is a lot of people wanted to know if I was going to do one. I didn’t get pushed into exactly, or talked into it, but I got to an age first, I was 61 in April, and I just turned 60 when I started writing it, I think. I got to an age where you are increasingly looking over your shoulder. That was when I was still, as far as I knew, healthy. That’s the first thing. The second was, as I think I told you, reading about my own death was a great concentrator of the mind, or reading about myself in the past tense. And then the third was there were a lot of people that asked me if I wanted to try one. And I essentially, it was more of a question of why not than why. I edged into it. I backed into it. I didn’t do it frontally in the way I’ve taken on other books, thinking this is what I really must do now.
HH: But you didn’t just write the political memoir that I was expecting. This paragraph about Hampshire’s New Forest is, it didn’t have to be in there. Why include details like that, late in the book, by the way. It’s an aside. It’s a grasp at something that didn’t really fit in the narrative. Why…
CH: Well, no, it’s intended to be part of a contrast. I mean, I think it’s in a section called Landscapes Of Memory…
HH: Yes.
CH: …within the very, very tranquil and orderly and traditional and long-cultivated downlands of southern England, the scene of most, much of my boyhood. With only a few hundred miles away across the Channel, the appalling landscape of the German-Polish frontier, and the awful churnings and hells that have occurred there in the last several decades, which is where my mother’s family came from. So it was an attempt to sort of draw a contrast between the assumptions of tranquility that you can make if you’re English, and the ones that you can’t make if you come from the German-Polish border. And then, if I’m not wrong, I move on from discussing that wonderful carpet of grazing rabbits to one of the most successful novels ever written about southern England, which is Watership Down…
HH: Yes.
CH: …which in fact does describe a genocide…
HH: Yes.
CH: …and a mass extermination campaign, but only against floppy-eared inhabitants. That’s the worst it could get, you’re always meant to feel in Britain. But it’s there for a reason. It’s not just there to be evocative or bucolic.
HH: I thought it was an exercise…it’s beautiful, so I thought it was an exercise in just occasionally letting go with your pen.
CH: Well, it’s also, it helps, I think, to understand what formed my father and my grandfather, real southern English peasantry.
HH: Your mother’s side…
CH: It’s important to know about that, that the Saxon flint Churches in a little fold of the Downs, and all of this stuff, it’s very, very hard to express, but it goes to make up a very long marinated identity.
HH: And it combines with this other identity, and the short form is Blumenthal of Kempen migrates to Liverpool and has thirteen children, of whom one marries Lionel Levin, births your grandmother, Dorothy Levin in 1896. The Blumenthals become Dales, and the Levins, Lynns, and your mom meets your dad in the War. How did you discover, for the benefit of the audience, your Jewish history?
CH: Well, my mother, as we were discussing, died young, and at her own hand. And my father died, he made it fairly good innings, he died of what I’ve now got, of cancer of the esophagus, at the age of 79, a thought that gives me some pause, of course, now. But neither of them succeeded in outliving my mother’s mother, Mrs. Levin, Dodo, who you’ve just been talking about. And she had therefore no further need to keep the family secret, you see. My mother hadn’t wanted anyone to know, including her husband.
HH: So the commander did not know?
CH: He did not know, nor did his father, nor did anyone except a few of my mother’s chosen, very carefully chosen friends. I think there were two reasons for keeping it quiet. One, my father would not at all have minded having a Jewish wife. I’m certain of that. But his father, I think, would have minded. And I used to hear a lot of rather second-rate anti-Jewish banter from him. He was an old Calvanist fundamentalist. That wouldn’t have gone over well. And then I think that my grandmother suffered a little bit from minor low-level persecution in the 30s, and my mother just didn’t want any of this to happen to my brother and myself. She wanted us to pass as English as she could, and to be brought up as English gentlemen. You can be the judge of how well that worked out. So just by coincidence around this time, my brother, Peter, had gotten engaged to a Jewish girl, and taken her to see Granny, Dodo. And so Dodo just basically decided to come right out with it.
HH: Would it have changed how you would have fared at Oxford?
CH: Not at Oxford. No, I don’t think it would. In looking back on my earlier school days, I would have been the only Jew at my boys prep school between the ages of 8 and 13. I mean, the concept of being Jewish didn’t exist there as far as I remember. I was at a rather broad-minded and open boys boarding school in Cambridge after that, where there were quite a few Jewish boys. And they were occasionally mocked a bit and put upon, but nothing horrible. They were able to hold their own.
HH: Did it change your view of Israel after you came to understand you were Jewish?
CH: No, not really.
HH: There’s a long chapter here on Israel, and your discussion with Jeffrey Goldberg about a man falling out of a burning building. It’s fascinating. But you had always been a huge critic of the state of Israel.
CH: Yes, well I still am in some ways. My…what’s mostly changed in the recent past with me is my attitude towards Israel’s enemies.
HH: Yes.
CH: I mean, most notably, well, any…take any example you like – the Turkish aggression against Israel recently, or against Gaza recently, and the intervention on the side of Hamas, I mean, would be a very good example. But I’ve been to rallies of Hezbollah in southern Beirut where they flaunt their party flag, which is a nuclear mushroom cloud, a nice campaign symbol, which is adorned with warnings to the Jews and so forth. I couldn’t be neutral about that whether I was Jewish or not, I’d like to think.
HH: And what if it proves only, the only bulwark?
CH: Sorry?
HH: If Israel turns out to be the only bulwark we’ve really got against Islamist fascism and the Khomeinists, isn’t it going to, aren’t you going to regret your opposition to them in the earlier years?
CH: Well, I say it in most recent column. And in order for Israel to become part of the alliance against whatever we want to call it, religious barbarism, theocratic, possibly thermonuclear theocratic or nuclear theocratic aggression, it can’t, it’ll have to dispense with the occupation. It’s as simple as that. It can be, you can think of it as a kind of European style, Western style country if you want, but it can’t govern other people against their will. It can’t continue to steal their land in the way that it does every day. And it’s unbelievably irresponsible of Israelis, knowing the position of the United States and its allies are in around the world, to continue to behave in this unconscionable way. And I’m afraid I know too much about the history of the conflict to think of Israel as just a tiny, little island surrounded by a sea of ravening wolves and so on. I mean, I know quite a lot about how that state was founded, and the amount of violence and dispossession that involved. And I’m a prisoner of that knowledge. I can’t un-know it.
HH: Even if we, you see clearly, obviously, you’ve been to Beirut, you see clearly what they’re up against now.
CH: Sure.
HH: This is, you know, it’s a suicide nation.
CH: No, but for me, I say in my article, in my book, that there’s a qualitative degeneration. There was a time when unfortunately, we didn’t recognize the PLO at this stage. We refused to out of our own stupidity. But where there was a roughly speaking secular nationalist opposition to the Israelis, it was very badly, call it badly led by Arafat would be euphemizing it. You know what I mean, terribly badly led. But still, you could have an intelligent conversation with the Palestinian leadership in those days, and I often did, both under occupation and in exile. And you still can with some of the ones on the West Bank, who are striving against terrible odds to build up still the sinews of statehood in places like Ramallah. But the turn by the Palestinians, or by some of them, to parties like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and to the state patrons of those parties, the Iranian theocracy and the Syrian sectarian dictatorship, the two most retrograde regimes in the region, is a moral disaster.
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HH: He mentions Barry McGuire’s Eve Of Destruction. That’s why I’m playing it, and his disappointment that Mr. McGuire’s become an Evangelical Christian, I might add. But it’s a marvelous…
CH: Well, I think, I have a feeling he was then, and we didn’t realize it, because everything at the time seemed so apocalyptic. That was one of the songs that was the background to the late 60s.
HH: And you go off to Cuba in the late 60s, and I want to tie this back to our conversation about Israel and the Palestinians. And you ask the Cuban director, you’re in this work camp. Honestly, I think that’s the most bizarre part of this whole book, is that somehow, you got talked into going to cut down sugar cane in Cuba in the 60s.
CH: (laughing) Oh, no, no, no. Wait a minute.
HH: (laughing)
CH: No one who’s ever seen me or met me would ever imagine me with a machete in my hand, bent double under the hot sun. I was not up for that. I was planting coffee seedlings…
HH: Okay.
CH: …in the shade. And not just because it’s lighter work, but because the whole plan was to help diversify the Cuban economy so it would no longer be dependent on the old colonial products like sugar and tobacco. We had a scientific approach to the matter, at least I want you to credit that.
HH: But you upset your comrades, because you asked this director, you know, why can’t we criticize Castro, and you write, “if the most salient figure in this state was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. Ah, never forget how useful the obvious can be.” And so, when I was reading your part about the Palestinians, no one could ever criticize Arafat. The same obvious detail about these societies has always been there.
CH: Sure. The obvious is very handy. I mean, there was a very famous movie director called Santiago Alvarez. He’s internationally well known. He was brought to this sort of seminar camp that we were partly work, partly propaganda, partly Marxist debate. And I asked him well, what’s it like working in the arts in Cuba, and he said you know, we have very untrammeled, it’s not like the Soviet Union, you know, there’s great artistic freedom here. And there was indeed in those days quite a lot of burgeoning of magazines and movies and so on in Cuba, and cultural writing. It was brief, but it was real. But then, and I said well, would this, for example, would this extend so far as to criticism of the leader, Fidel Castro? And he said well no, obviously not. We wouldn’t expect to be able to say anything critical or rude about the supreme leader. And I thought well, that’s not an exception, is it? I mean, it’s not, with the exception of that, everything’s okay? He’s the most important person on the island. So I made this remark, repast, and a terrible coldness descended on the meeting. And I was later told the people would, started to view me as a potential counterrevolutionary, which people really were talking like that. It was as if one had been called a capitalist running dog, or I forget how it goes now, lackey of the bourgeoisie, or hyena or something. But people actually do talk in this way. It was very educational.
HH: And it’s also the one question throughout the whole book, that you can always say about the regime that’s under your looking glass. If you’re living under the regime and you can take a shot at the leader, you’re in a pretty decent place. But if you can’t, you’re not.
CH: I would say that’s an axiom. And the other thing that struck me very forcefully on arrival in Cuba was that we were greeted by these lovely, young Cubans, and given frozen daiquiris at the airport, and there was lots of sort of color. It was quite sexy. It wasn’t at all like going to East Berlin. But then, there was passport, please. Hand it over. Then, there’s a bit of an interval. Then I said okay, are you done with my passport? No. We hold onto that. What do you mean you hold onto it? We give it back to you when you leave. And I immediately felt bad. I don’t want to be separated from my passport. I mean, it also underlined the fact, I mean, say what you could about Cuba. You were allowed to leave. You still are. But you couldn’t take anything with you, and you couldn’t come back. Now again, however much I like somewhere, if I was told I had to stay, a bit like Heaven, and that it was going on forever, I’d hate it right away.
HH: A couple of digressions. I don’t much understand John Sparrow, the warden of all souls. But I liked the fact that he was giving you a hard time as an undergraduate. What was his job? What was his role in your life?
CH: Well, his role in the life of the university of Oxford was to act the part of the most comic, antediluvian reactionary that it was possible to pick, a man who lived in a college that was full of vast riches of endowment that was famous mainly for its dining and its port, almost a parody of Oxford as the home of lost causes, and of extreme monarchical and Anglican conservatism. I mean, we could hardly believe there was someone as amusing as that still around in the 60s. So he was very useful for dialectical purposes.
HH: (laughing) Page 219, though, you write when you get to America, “At all cost, I didn’t wish to seem superior. I hadn’t read The Loved One for nothing.” But it seems as though your entire university training is designed to make you be superior when you get to America.
CH: Well, the slogan of my old college, very old, was that of you can tell a very old man by his effortless superiority. But if it’s effortless, of course, then it shouldn’t be something that you inflict on other people.
HH: Well, the feuds…
CH: No, there has been, and there still is sometimes, a certain kind of English person quite well-described by Tom Wolfe, actually, in the Bonfire Of The Vanities, and brilliantly described by Evelyn Waugh in his novel, The Loved One, who come to the United States basically to exploit the generosity and na?vet? of the Americans. It’s a Henry James trope – European experience and American innocence.
HH: It’s interesting you bring up Tom Wolfe. You’ve got the feud detailed in the book. Were you Peter Fallow?
CH: No.
HH: Okay.
CH: I was not. I mean, I couldn’t have been, because Peter Fallow was a sort of haunter of the apartments of Park Avenue and the relevant salons, and no one’s ever suggested I was anything like that.
HH: So is the Wolfe feud just a…
CH: No, I mean, it’s actually pretty well known who the model for Peter Fallow is.
HH: Oh, I don’t know that. Who is it?
CH: Oh, I don’t think he’d mind my saying, but it’s a man called Anthony Haden-Guest.
HH: Okay, I didn’t know that.
CH: And well, I was, he was an old friend of Wolfe’s, and Wolfe, I think, I was the cause of a quarrel between the two of them, because I got Anthony to introduce us when I was writing a profile of Wolfe that turned out to be very critical. And I’m afraid that Wolfe rather blamed Anthony for the introduction. And I think as a result, harshened the description of Peter Fallow in the novel.
HH: All right. Are there other memoirs out there, whether classics like Rousseau’s, or Augustine’s Confessions, or more modern ones that you look to, that you hold up as an example of a memoir well done?
CH: One that I found myself referring to as well as recurring to quite a lot is the memoirs of Arthur Koestler, who was the great, great model of the sort of deracinated, multi-competent, European intellectual of the age of the dictators, of the age of totalitarianism, and famously the author of Darkness At Noon. He had, his memoir is one of the best in describing the agony of having to change your mind, and change your allegiances under the pressure of events, and under the pressure of allegiance to principles.
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HH: I already have told you I knew that Hitch-22 was almost achingly transparent when he wrote about his parents, but as soon as he confessed to a love of Peter, Paul and Mary, I knew it had to be true all the way through. Christopher Hitchens, that surprised me a little bit on your musical playlist.
CH: No, I wouldn’t, I didn’t say that. I think I said that song you just played…
HH: Yes.
CH: …was another of those generational background ditties, and it meant a particular thing to me, because coming to America, it was astounding how easy it was to fly if you were a kid. I mean, flying to my parents was an almost unheard of luxury, to more of my parents’ friends, too. Very, very rare thing, undertaken very seriously. And if you wanted to move around Britain, you went on some train, or if there were any roads worth the name, you’d have to negotiate those. One of the great feelings of freedom I had coming to the States in 1970, when you could go to the airport with a Youth Fair card, and get on any plane that had a spare seat for pennies, and take wing, and fly over the Great Lakes, or go to California, it really was like spreading the wings.
HH: Right.
CH: And so that song did that for me, sickly and saccharine, in fact, in many ways it is.
HH: Let me ask about the two great political episodes in Hitch-22 – the Balkans and Iraq.
CH: Yes.
HH: When you write about the Balkans, and especially Sarajevo, that it really meant the left was collapsing. And I think it’s persuasively argued. Would you summarize it for the audience what that meant for the left when Europe exploded, and the left was silent?
CH: Yes. What it meant was that after the collapse of official communism in 1989, there was only one nominally communist/socialist regime left in Europe that hadn’t been part of the Warsaw Pact for some time, or of the Moscow orbit, and that was Yugoslavia, which were, I’ll condense it a bit, there was a mutation from state socialism into state national socialism. In other words, the assets of former Yugoslavia were taken over by Slobodan Milosevic and a gang around him in the Serbian Socialist party so as to create out of a slowly dissolving federation a greater Serbia by force, and to get that by means of ethnic cleansing. It was a pretty classic, fascistic recipe. They took over the Yugoslav National Army, which had been the army of the whole country, and took over a lot of the assets of the country. And they embarked on a campaign of, effectually, genocide against Bosnians – Bosnian Muslims, Croatian Catholics and others in the name of Serbo nationalism, also of Serbian orthodoxy, Serbian Christian eastern orthodoxy, which had its own appeal to the Russian right wing and other nasty recrudescent groups at the time. And I thought well, good God, surely NATO can’t stand by, or Europe can’t stand by and see fascism come back and massacre civilians, bombardment of civilian cities right on its border just after the end of the Cold War. But no one, no one in Europe was able to do anything about it. Most of the European countries backed the same climb they would have done in 1914, you know, the Austrian state with the Slovenians, that the Germans tended to back the Croats. The French and the British were pro-Serbian. It was pathetic. And as you remember, it went on for years. We had to just watch it happening.
HH: Yes.
CH: …how pulverizing of this society. And rape camps, scenes of people being stuffed onto trains for deportation, amazing stuff, until finally, the United States decided to intervene. And I thought now if the left can’t take a lesson from that, when will it? What would it take? And when the United States decided to intervene, and it put a stop to it, too. It not just put a stop to the mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Sarajevo and elsewhere, but it got rid, in the end, got rid of the Milosevic regime and restored Serbia to some form of democracy. If the left had had its way, Milosevic would have conquered and annexed Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia. And there would have been a greater Serbia built on the mass graves of the populations. All of them were against the intervention. I thought well now, this is not a difference of emphasis.
HH: And has that, did they regret that? Have you…
CH: And the United States, furthermore, had to be talked into it. I mean, the Clinton administration didn’t want to do it. The Blair administration was fortunately elected halfway through. The Tories had been terrible under John Major about Serbia. They’d been effectively pro-Serb. The Labour party was much better. Blair had to sort of almost push Clinton into it. Well, we know not almost. I mean, he really had to apply pressure. But it did work. Now the United States had no real interest in the region. There was no oil in it that we know about in the Balkans. The state interest of, you know, the U.S. aren’t economic, aren’t really involved at all. It was just a question of saying we can’t really have ethnic cleansing and fascism in Europe, and okay, we’re willing to lend our armed forces to that enterprise, a very noble thing to have done, totally underappreciated, and opposed in such a way as that the ghastly other outcome would have been the likelier one.
HH: And the left largely quiet.
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HH: Before we go to Iraq, Christopher Hitchens, there are two places in Hitch-22 where you write about remembering a face. After you had been mugged, you said I could unhesitatingly have shot him dead, and you could recall his face through the glass. And then in Beirut many years later, when the Hezbollah thugs, or the pro-Assad thugs are, it was like seeing the enraptured gaze of the torturer staring down the gun barrel of a twisted psychopath. Do you think all psychopaths kind of look the same?
CH: No, no. Unfortunately, they don’t. Just before we answer that, you…we, before the break, we were criticizing the general abstentionism, at best, of the left.
HH: Yes.
CH: …over Bosnia. There were some very good exceptions to that, I have to say, the best of whom was Susan Sontag.
HH: Oh yes, you mention here quite extensively.
CH: And there were many others. There was a left in Europe and in the United States that decided that we couldn’t stand by and have the third genocide of the 20th Century take place on our watch. But the majority of what became the anti-war movement took the opposite view, that we should stay out of it. And we were to see those faces and those names and organizations again later in with Iraq. No, psychos don’t look the same. I wish they did. I mean, sometimes, that’s not to say you can’t tell a psycho, but the little guy who grabbed me, wiry, little thug, in Beirut, he was a member of the Syrian national Socialist party, speed dialing for backup from others, he had a very feral look on his face, but he also just looked like a punk at first.
HH: Okay, so better, varieties of evil. I want to get to Iraq. Last week, I had Peter Beinart on talking about his new book, The Icarus Syndrome. And in that, you’re identified as one of the left hawks who’s unrepentant about your left hawkism. And in fact, I told him he had to go read Hitch-22, which he had not yet read, because of your argument about Iraq, and your argument about why it was necessary, and why, in retrospect, it remains necessary still.
CH: Yes.
HH: But tell the audience, are there any other people left who came from the left to do, as you did, stand on the side of the invasion of Iraq, who are still there? Or are they all runaway?
CH: No, I don’t think they’ve all run away. I mean, there was a quite creditable book produced of people making, an anthology. I don’t, just don’t have its name in my head just right now. But people from various spots in Europe and the rest of the world, and America, too, saying that we have to finish with this Saddam Hussein regime. There’s no alternative. But the fact has to be faced, that this is considered to be an almost bizarrely eccentric position now, even though, you know, Iraq now has elections, has a constitution…
HH: A free press.
CH: …has a free press, it has bad political parties behaving in selfish ways. It has a wonderfully functioning autonomous zone in the northeast of the country for its Kurdish minority, the first time in their history they’ve ever had anywhere to call their own. These are people who have been turned into refuse, and raw material for mass graves within very recent memory. None of this is credited…furthermore, not a small thing, by the way, we can actually certify Iraq as having been properly inspected and disarmed, which we couldn’t before, unless we took the word of Saddam Hussein. That’s not a small thing, and it’s had a good knock on effect on politics in Iran next door, and in Lebanon, and elsewhere, too. The fall of Saddam Hussein was generally very positively experienced. And I think it will be remembered as a great thing to have done. But unfortunately, the overlay of incompetence and mismanagement and bungling that followed the liberation is never going to be forgiven or forgotten. And by the way, I don’t think it should be.
HH: Do you believe on weapons of mass destruction that we know the story completely, or that we ever will?
CH: I think there’s more to be found, and more people haven’t testified yet. But I think we know enough to say from books like the memoir of Saddam’s chief nuclear scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, the famous book called The Bomb In My Garden, and others, that there was only one presumption on which to operate in any sentence that contain the words weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein, and that was on the presumption of guilt. It had to be assumed, it would be very unwise to assume that he wasn’t either harboring the means of reconstituting, or keeping some of the sinews of WMD, even if he’d been substantially degraded. And then of course, if he had been substantially degraded, I argued then and argue now that’s the time to hit him, when he doesn’t really, when he doesn’t really have…in other words, there’s a window of impotence. Take that now, because you won’t have another chance.
HH: Are we in the same window…
CH: Don’t we wish we had one of those with the North Koreans, for instance?
HH: I was just going to ask you. Don’t you think we’re in the same window vis-?-vis the Islamic Republic of Iran right now?
CH: Yes, I do.
HH: Do you think we ought to act in the same way we did vis-?-vis Iraq?
CH: Did you see Jeff Goldberg’s interview with the ambassador of the United Arab Emirates last week?
HH: No, I haven’t.
CH: Well, you should see what that guy says, and we know he speaks for a huge number of Sunni Arab regimes in the Gulf. He said stop them now. Stop then while you can, the Iranians. He said it’s all, we live, wake, sleep, eat, breathe nothing but the Iranian threat. No one’s safe if this regime, this illegal, torturing, fascistic theocracy…if this is allowed while we’re watching to become a nuclear state, we’ll never forgive ourselves, and nor will anyone in the region. We’ll be cursed for generations if we’re that lucky, if we live that long.
HH: And do you believe there’s a prayer that the Obama administration will act, either alone or in concert with Israel to do that?
CH: I’m not sure prayer is the word.
HH: Hope?
CH: Let’s say that they’re giving the strategy of exhausting, publicly and obviously exhausting all other options, a very, very, very leisurely try. I mean, they’re letting a lot of the clock run out, trying everything else. The logical end of that has to be the announcement well, we have tried everything else and it didn’t work. They carried on cheating, they carried on laughing at us. They carried on flaunting the possibility, their cadet party in Lebanon now has a nuclear weapon as its party symbol, et cetera. How are we going to look back on this and say we weren’t warned?
HH: I’ve got so much to ask, but with so little time, I’ve tasked you. So I’m just going to ask you about Obama. Has he disappointed you greatly, a little bit, or not at all?
CH: Quite a bit. He just seems to believe, it was same watching him with Netanyahu this week, as if all this can be resolved, you know, man to man, these are just misunderstandings that can be ironed out by people of goodwill. He doesn’t seem to have the concept of radical conflicts of interest at all.
HH: And so you expect him to fail in a reelection campaign?
CH: I don’t know how I’d make myself a strong case for his being reelected.
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HH: First off, Hitchens, thank you so much for doing this. I owe you dinner when I’m next in Washington, D.C., and I hope you’ll let me take out on that.
CH: Please.
HH: And the audience would love to know, what are you going to work on next during your treatment, and how are you going to conduct yourself in the course of a long sort of chemotherapy?
CH: Well, I’m just hoping I won’t be as exhausted in the next phase as I am now. It’s been very nice talking to you. I hope I haven’t sounded too weary, and, by the way, it’s been less of an effort than I feared, but it’s quite an effort now even for me to read anything very demanding. So I’m going to have to husband what I’ve got for a bit, and perhaps not make any too grand claims about what I intend to do.
HH: Are you happy with the reception of Hitch-22, because now you don’t get to promote it as aggressively as I’m sure you would have been able to do on the lecture circuit.
CH: I was a bit depressed by some of the reviews, because everyone’s so much in love with this idea of, I suppose it’s a script that writes itself, oh, here’s a chap who used to be quite left wing, and then he saw the error of his ways, and became right wing and so on. And what I would hope that the book shows is that I have tried at least to be, to some degree, intellectually and morally, consistent in the positions I have taken, and it isn’t as simple as a switch of allegiance and so forth. You’d be a better judge of whether I…
HH: Oh, it’s the anti-totalitarian…I think it’s completely consistent. I just think it’s going to present challenges to the American reader who need to meet those challenges, because we don’t read the way you have read, and that was…you made me work, and I’m glad you made me work. I just…I knew you could sell that if you were out there doing that. But I wonder if the press is going to give you the chance to sell it now.
CH: I do find it’s better doing it one on one. It’s much better to engage with people, well not one on one, but if I’m in a bookstore, or a lecture hall, and talking to people afterwards when I can sign books and hang around. Yeah, then people will say well, should I read this book, and it’s very encouraging. There’s an enormous amount of inquisitiveness and curiosity out there. People, I think, are aware of the fact that if they just rely on the everyday media for information or for depth or instruction, they’re not going to get it.
HH: Have you ever written about the citizenship process and your Jefferson Memorial citizenship ceremony before?
CH: No, I saved it for the book.
HH: It’s really remarkable, and Michael Chertoff did you a great favor, but you did it, you repaid it in kind by the loving detail with which you wrote about that. Hats off on that.
CH: It was a great moment in my life to go to the Jefferson Memorial that day. It really was.
HH: Oh, it’s remarkable. Christopher Hitchens, thanks you so much, feel better.
CH: Thank you.
HH: I look forward to seeing you soon in Washington, D.C.
CH: Take it easy. Thanks so much for having me back.
HH: Thank you. |
