Читать книгу Unhitched - Richard Seymour - Страница 7

1 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

In the advanced capitalist world from the mid-1960s a generation of intellectuals was radicalized and won for Marxism. Many of them were disappointed in the hopes they formed – some of these wild but let that pass – and for a good while now we have been witnessing a procession of erstwhile Marxists, a sizeable portion of the generational current they shared in creating, in the business of finding their way ‘out’ and away. This exit is always presented, naturally, in the guise of an intellectual advance. Those of us unpersuaded of it cannot but remind its proponents of what they once knew but seem instantly to forget as they make their exit, namely, that the evolution of ideas has a social and material context.

– Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’

Marxism … had its intellectual and philosophical and ethical glories, but they were in the past … There are days when I miss my old convictions as if they were an amputated limb. But in general I feel better, and no less radical, and you will feel better too, I guarantee, once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.

– Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

PERMANENT CONTRADICTION

One vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.

– William Hazlitt, Sketches and Essays

The amazing, turbulent effect of the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic wars on a certain type of intellectual led William Hazlitt to write ‘On Consistency of Opinion’. His comportment was that of a suave and slightly aloof radical raising a disconcerted eyebrow at the ‘sudden and violent changes of principle’ that these intellectuals had displayed on such trifling matters as the absolute right of the Bourbons to possess France. Wordsworth’s passage from Paineite revolutionary politics to Burkean conservatism had been a case in point. Hazlitt observed that those most susceptible to such transformations were in general not those who seemed the most yielding in argument; on the contrary, they were ‘exclusive, bigoted and intolerant’. This was because, Hazlitt proposed, those who were least capable of sympathetic investment in the points of view of others were the most likely to be hit with ‘double force’ when the unexpected happened.

This is plausible: those who are not serious in the positions they occupy are more likely to abdicate them in sudden revulsion when events test their beliefs. We can readily think of political defectors from our own era whose account of the beliefs they once held is so fantastically crude as to make one wonder how they could have been so childish – and when, if ever, they stopped being so. Yet the early Hitchens was not always lacking in interpretive charity, and he does not seem to have wholly lacked sympathy with certain right-wing tropes before his seeming volte-face.

Hazlitt went on to submit that opinions may reasonably alter over time, but there was no need to ‘discard … the common dictates of reason’. A person whose opinion has changed

need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a living and ignominious satire on himself.

This is instantly applicable to any number of apostate leftists – Max Eastman, James Burnham, David Horowitz, André Glucksmann, and Paul Johnson, to name only a fractional sample.

But what of the late Christopher Hitchens? Did he not swear, even as he was waving adieu and bon débarras to his former comrades, that he had not and did not repudiate his past? Was he not notable for attempting to turn the left’s language – of internationalism, justice, and even revolution – against it in the war about the war? Yes, and again, yes. But even if he did not reject his past, he most certainly travestied his principles and poured execration on those who kept the faith. His attacks on Noam Chomsky, and particularly Edward Said, had a detectable element of Hitchens’s sacrificing his past affiliations ‘at the shrine of matured servility’.

Did Hitchens hew to his old ideas like a religion, so that, having lost his faith, he could be said to have found his reason? The author allowed that the socialist politics he once espoused had had elements of religious experience but assured readers that this was all very much in his past.¹ This was yet another fanciful lapse into cliché on Hitchens’s part – in this case the old anticommunist saw of The God That Failed. Not to deny that socialism has its credenda, but the beliefs that Hitchens held dearest in his postleft phase – opposition to dictatorship, support for Jeffersonian imperialism – were precisely of a sort one can assert only without proof and as articles of faith.² What Hitchens found when he lost the socialist faith was but a Nicene Creed of liberalism.

No wonder, then, that the dominant conceit of Hitch-22, the author’s departing word on his life and his person, is that of keeping, without shame, ‘two sets of books’ – the tendency that won him the early cognomen ‘Hypocritchens’. Indeed, Hitchens delighted in inhabiting seemingly contradictory positions and defending them with distinction. Yet he simultaneously had a manifest urge to prove his consistency. It was not the complete correspondence of his earlier and later analyses that he wished to defend so much as the consistency of his rectitude. Even as he moved to the right, he remained insistently faithful to an idealised version of Orwell and Leon Trotsky, to the icons of the literary left, and to the paladins of twentieth-century resistance, from the Viet Minh to the African National Congress.

This has something to do with a familiar logic of apostasy I discussed in the prologue. Hitchens’s long-time friend James Fenton recalled the way this worked:

He had to change his mind. And in a way that for many people would be humiliating, because he was completely realigning himself. And so, a certain amount of what that was, was at a high decibel level, saying to the rest of us, ‘Well, you have changed, you’ve all changed, the Left has changed’, and so on … making it seem less obvious that his position had changed.³

That old line in effect says, ‘I didn’t leave the party; it left me.’ Throughout his career the accounts Hitchens gave of himself and his fealties conformed to this standard. Thus, for example, on leaving the International Socialists, he gave the reason that he disputed the organisation’s support for the more disreputable elements of the far left in the Portuguese Revolution and that it had embarked on a Leninist deviation from its Luxemburgist roots. Later, declaring that the era of socialism was concluded, he remarked that there was no progressive left wing worth allying with since it had sold its soul to Clintonism. At each point at which Hitchens felt compelled to move away from his former persuasions, he in some way emphasised his supposed fidelity to them.

This resulted in an accumulating mass of contradictions in Hitchens’s persona that were always managed either through solipsism – in effect, ‘I prefer my contradiction to yours’ – or by appeal to a petrified historical mandate. This makes it easy to quote Hitchens against himself – as his old friend D. D. Guttenplan put it, ‘Too easy to offer much sport’.⁴ Rather than sport, however, what we will look for is the contradictions amassing in Hitchens’s position, from his early revolutionism to his latter-day recusant-yet-observant posture.

THEY FUCK YOU UP: THE POLITICS OF ASPIRATION

‘If there is going to be an upper class in this country,’ Hitchens’s mother said forcefully, ‘then Christopher is going to be in it.’ By way of self-explanation he recounted this tale several times in his writing. It was his mother, Yvonne, to whom he was closer than anyone in the world, who had decided his path of advancement. Whether because of petty bourgeois ardour, or the desire of a Jewish woman to make her son ‘an Englishman’, she insisted that he be given an education otherwise preserved for ‘about one percent of the population’.⁵ A lower-middle-class Liverpudlian who was fond of wit, as well as booze and fags, a woman of liberal humanitarian politics, Yvonne Hitchens was ‘the laugh in the face of bores and purse-mouths and skinflints, the insurance against bigots and prudes’. ‘The one unforgivable sin’, she occasionally remarked with Wildean disdain, ‘is to be boring.’ She was also grief-stricken at the thought of anyone addressing ‘her firstborn son’ ‘as if he were a taxi driver or pothole-filler’.⁶

Commander Eric Hitchens bored Yvonne and seems to have been relatively forgettable to his children as well – at least for the duration of their childhood. A stoic commander in the British navy, he was a Tory with, his son suggested, nothing to be Tory about. This latter judgment rests on the idea that the Commander was ultimately a rather downtrodden victim of the class system. But it is difficult to credit. A commander in the Royal Navy is a senior officer and was always so. It is true that Hitchens describes his father as having progressed from the poorer areas of Portsmouth to the middle class via the navy. It is also true that the son tells a heartstring-plucking story of his father’s being involuntarily retired after Suez, just before the pay and pensions of new officers were increased. Yet this injustice would surely still leave Commander Hitchens with a great deal to be Tory about, and it would leave young Christopher able to attend public school and begin his ascension.⁷

Nonetheless, if Hitchens’s upbringing was not an impoverished one, it was insecure:

My mother in particular [urged] that the Hitchenses never sink one inch back down the social incline that we had so arduously ascended. That way led to public or ‘council’ housing, to the ‘rough boys’ who would hang around outside cinemas and railway stations, to people who went on strike and thus ‘held the country to ransom’, and to people who dropped the ‘H’ at the beginnings of words and used the word ‘toilet’ when they meant to refer to the ‘lavatory’.

This seems to have been behind Hitchens’s urge to prove himself socially, the original source of a long-standing chip on his shoulder about the establishment and his exclusion from it.⁸

If the Commander was a Tory, he was still ‘a very good man and a worthy and honest and hard-working one’. He was also a powerful and recurring presence in Hitchens’s life. Hitchens never pursued a military life. And he was disappointed to discover that he was not cut out to be a soldier, partly because his physical courage had limits. As a result the matter of his fortitude – mental and physical – returned as a habitual concern, as did a certain Blimpishness and instinctive reaction that he imbibed from his father. Eric ‘helped me understand the Tory mentality, all the better to combat it and repudiate it’, Christopher insisted. But the repudiation was only partial. When the Falklands were invaded by the Argentinian dictatorship, the younger Hitchens found himself outraged at the offence to British power, only to be disappointed by his father’s lack of bloodlust. Like many who wished they had fought a war, Christopher Hitchens expended his military passion through verbal bravado; his wife, Carol Blue, summarised the posture: ‘I will take some of these people out before I die.’ But this background was also responsible for some of Hitchens’s insights. When he so sensitively diagnosed the ‘John Bullshit’ that he found in Larkin’s poems and detected at the base of Thatcherism, the diagnosis was based on acute, instinctive recognition.⁹

So there is, in Hitchens’s formation, the beginnings of that elemental contradiction he called keeping two sets of books and the beginnings of that urge towards social climbing, the constant search for the right entrée, that led him all the way to the Jefferson Memorial, where he was naturalised as an American citizen by no lesser an American than Michael Chertoff, then secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security.

LIVING TO SOME PURPOSE: HITCHENS AND THE REVOLUTION

Hitchens began his life as a socialist while at a private school in Cambridge. A supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and of the Labour Party, he was precociously articulate. He read avidly and widely but seems to have had a preference early on for literary fiction over, for example, the social sciences, for which it seems probable he had no aptitude. He arrived at university in 1966 near the beginnings of a dramatic expansion of tertiary education in Britain. The number of college students doubled, from 100,000 to 200,000, between 1960 and 1967. Today the student population of the UK is more than two million. The inevitable result was the inclusion of some working-class youth in the expanded system, and that led to a phenomenon evident in each of the advanced capitalist societies in which the trend was registered: an intellectual radicalisation and an increasing challenge to the university authorities, symbolised in the revolt at the Sorbonne in 1968.

Oxford was not quite Paris – more Bourbon than Sorbonne – but its radical students did partake of a sustained challenge to the university authorities, the proctors, whose control of student life and maintenance of a rigid hierarchy between teacher and student was such that students today would not recognise it. Hitchens, having been a supporter of the Labour left, was recruited to the International Socialists by a psychoanalyst named Peter Sedgwick, with whom Hitchens became close.

Hitchens always recalled this period with authentic warmth. And he seems to have been highly regarded as both personable and a tremendous debater. Alex Callinicos recalls that he had an ‘easy, accessible manner … but there was a slightly ironical quality about him. One assumed that he was a rascal.’¹⁰

Yet it would be a great mistake to treat his recollections of this period as gospel. Even if he was often candid about his feelings, Hitchens was certainly capable of redaction and revision. His representation of the IS ‘groupuscule’ and its politics tended to shade the past with his present opinions. Thus, for example, it is not quite true that he was ever on the brink of becoming a ‘full-time organiser’. Former comrades recall that he was involved in the party’s bodies, and it was true that younger members were being drafted into all sorts of organising positions in order to cope with the surfeit of strikes, social struggles and protests that characterised the period. But organising was not where his talents lay. If anything, he was notable for his louche indolence and a lack of integration with his student comrades. Likewise, his characterisation of the group as post-Trotskyist and Luxemburgist is not completely without foundation, but it does tend to overstate the case with the prefix post and omits to say anything of Leninism, which was an increasingly important aspect of the group’s perspective as it grew and adapted to its tentative implantation in the industrial working class.¹¹

Hitchens developed a particular fondness for the group’s founder, Tony Cliff – the nom de guerre of Ygael Gluckstein, a Palestinian Jewish polymath with a most captivating and excitable manner of speaking. This is recalled by those who knew him. Indeed, Hitchens himself chronicled this in a review article for the London Review of Books in 1994, expressing a tender contempt for the state of his old comrades and reminiscing about better days. But by the time Hitchens mined this article for Hitch-22, Cliff’s appearance was merely perfunctory.¹² This may or may not be related to another aspect of IS ideology that undoubtedly influenced Hitchens – its uncompromising anti-Zionism. Cliff had argued for this position within the British left well before the 1967 war had opened the first fissure over the issue and the 1982 invasion of Lebanon made anti-Zionists out of an appreciable minority of leftists. And while Hitchens continued to be critical at times of Zionism even after his change of allegiances, he tended to omit the issue in his recollections of the IS.¹³

His talent as an orator was spotted while he was studying for his degree at Balliol College, Oxford. He rapidly became, next to Michael Rosen, the ‘second most famous person’ in the university. Hitchens’s friendship with Rosen, in fact, was one of the subjects of his revisionism. In the first edition of Hitch-22, he described Rosen as a ‘Jewish Communist’ and later an ‘ex-Stalinist’ whose family was ‘fatally compromised’ by Stalinism. Hitchens added that Rosen had, in a production of Günter Grass’s play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, ‘been more or less compelled to go along with the play-within-the-play that satirized the ghastly East German regime and celebrated the workers’ revolt against it that had taken place in 1953’. In fact, Rosen had never been a member of any Communist Party. His parents had been but had walked out in 1957. Rosen’s politics were Labour left, and insofar as he gravitated to any other socialist formation, it was the groupuscule with which Hitchens was himself aligned.¹⁴ (Some of this was rewritten for the second edition, but Hitchens left in the claim that Rosen was an ex-Stalinist.)¹⁵

What accounts for such a petty, mean-spirited slander? Rosen believes it has to do with the way in which Hitchens wished to represent his own trajectory. Many from the generation of soixant-huitards that Hitchens knew and admired have died and thus can be idealised safely, constituting no threat to his current posture. But Rosen had known Hitchens and had publicly criticised him for supporting Bush’s wars. The smear served Hitchens by demonstrating that this criticism was merely the reflex of an old Stalinist and that he, Hitchens, had always been one step ahead of the fools.

In general, however, Hitchens tended to err on the side of heroically romanticising his past and the figures that peopled it. He recalled Peter Sedgwick, who recruited him to the post-Trotskyist IS, with genuine affection. The same is true of Hitchens’s reminiscences of C. L. R. James. Yet the individuals Hitchens described in his memoir, Hitch-22, were not exactly political animals but omnitalented gurus whose like has not been seen since. This slightly maudlin portrayal is the obverse of the later demonology, which found the left, and especially the far left, in league with ‘Islamic fascism’.

On other matters it may be that he was not distorting. Keeping two sets of books meant closeting his real feelings about certain matters, so that while Hitchens later recalled experiencing a certain displaced patriotism for the United States, even at the height of his sixties gauchisme, and real joy that the Stars and Stripes had been planted on the moon, it is most likely that he did not share this with any of his comrades.¹⁶ The nickname that Hitchens’s friends and comrades at Oxford gave him acknowledges this aspect of his personality. And certainly, for Hitchens, the double life that it alludes to, the keeping of two sets of books, is seen as a virtue, a creative, dialectical spark.

At some length it seems that Hitchens grew weary of the revolutionary left. The circumstances of his departure from the International Socialists are not wholly clear. Hitchens, explaining his decision to leave, cited the IS’s support for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ during the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75 and later added that he was uncomfortable with the Leninist direction of the party. In fact, though it is known that he was sympathetic to the position of the internal faction opposed to the growing emphasis on a democratic centralism, he never joined it. Most likely he did not think it worth the effort. He had never been especially doctrinal, was disinclined to get involved in heated internal disputes, and had brighter prospects before him. A former comrade of his, Chris Harman, recalled:

I don’t think there was any point at which Chris Hitchens broke publicly with the IS. My impression was that he went flat out to know the right people to make a career in journalism and began to find us a hindrance.¹⁷

Another, Alex Callinicos, recounts that Hitchens was increasingly distant from politics. In 1973, he met Hitchens during a row at Oxford over the university giving Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto an honorary degree. This was at the end of the bloody Bangladesh war, which the Pakistani army had prosecuted mercilessly. The dons and the students had censured the university over it. And Hitchens ‘appeared, looking slightly shady, as he was a friend of Benazir Bhutto … I spoke to him afterward, and he said “do you ever think the sun may suddenly burst and everything we do may be meaningless?” I replied that the reflection seemed to me entirely pointless. But it implied a degree of existential detachment.’¹⁸

Aside from weariness, Hitchens did have a substantive grievance with the direction of the International Socialists in their decision to support the far left in Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’. The revolution, beginning with the fall of the dictatorship of Marcello Caetano, was one of the most spectacular moments in European history.¹⁹ Notable for the flourishing of grassroots democracy predicated on workplace occupations, popular newspapers, and mass demonstrations, it was also notable for the role of the armed forces in its leadership. Initially, these were generals and junior officers disaffected by the failure of Portugal’s colonial policy, who desired to move towards a modern capitalist democracy with a mixed economy. But as the revolt radicalised, a movement of rank-and-file soldiers developed, with some basis in far-left parties such as the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat/Revolutionary Brigades (PRP). There were serious reservations in the international left about some of this. The PRP had an elitist, Guevarist streak, tending to rely on military action by an armed minority to bring about social transformation. While some feared that military adventurism would give the right an excuse to inflict a new Chile, the main worry was that it could be the germ of a new Stalinist dictatorship in itself.

Nonetheless, at a critical point, the IS set aside any such reservations and supported the PRP and the rank-and-file soldiers. The basis of this was that a strike wave and a series of mass demonstrations had created a crisis in the military, cleaving it between the officer corps who had overthrown the old dictatorship and the rank-and-file soldiery. The government, led by the Socialist Party, was desperate to contain the growing turbulence and particularly to assert its control of the state machinery. The IS urged the PRP to focus less on armed manoeuvres and more on encouraging the development of popular councils of workers and soldiers, which could be the basis for a new socialist democracy. In the end, the PRP participated in an abortive coup d’état, which gave the right wing the chance to go on the offensive and restore discipline in the military. Hitchens lamented the IS stance, and specifically criticised Callinicos for talking about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in this context.²⁰ Recollecting this period, Hitchens excoriated the party in characteristically bilious terms. It had

openly allied itself with semi-Baader Meinhof elements in that most open and hopeful of all revolutions: a revolution which can now be seen as the last spasm of 1968 enthusiasm. Not being very choosy politically, the aforesaid elements went in with a stupid and nasty attempted coup, mounted by the associates of the Portuguese Stalinists … Thus not only had the comrades moved from Luxemburg to the worst of Lenin, but in making this shift of principle they had also changed ships on a falling tide. Time to go. Still, I recollect the empty feeling I had when I quietly cancelled my membership and did a fade. I remember trying to tell myself that I was leaving for the same reasons I had joined. But the relief – at ceasing to hear about ‘rank and file’ and ‘building links’ – soon supplanted the guilt.²¹

At any rate, the picture Hitchens gave of fading into the background is accurate. Nor is there any sign that he fell out with his former comrades. Even when he publicly repudiated his old comrades for having inadvertently published an ‘anti-Zionist’ letter in the party newspaper, Socialist Worker, which was in fact written by a member of the National Front, Hitchens retained his sympathy for the organisation. In a letter to John Rose, who then worked on the organ, Hitchens expressed his respect for Tony Cliff.²² Hitchens continued to speak at the party’s meetings when it was known as the Socialist Workers’ Party.

Yet, Hitchens was evidently exhausted by both the revolutionary and reformist left in Britain. Having left the IS, he had briefly joined the Labour Party.²³ But he came to resent the ‘tax-funded statism’ of the old consensus as much as the union bureaucracy and the Labour right. Hitchens later confessed to being physically unable to vote for Labour in 1979 and to having realised that this was because he wanted Thatcher to win. He admired her determination to take on the stale postwar arrangements and was relieved that she could at last do so.²⁴

At any rate, he was on the brink of abandoning the small, wet, defeated islands of the United Kingdom and making off for the United States – a surrogate patria, so far as Hitchens was concerned, and a more promising prospect for a talented writer.

A COMPOUND IDENTITY: AMERICAN AND JEWISH QUESTIONS

Hitchens had been, before he joined the International Socialists, what he called a ‘Left Social Democrat (or “LSD” in the jargon of the movement)’.²⁵ This, roughly speaking, is the position to which he reverted after leaving amid the backwash of the revolutionary upsurge of 1968. But the state of social democracy was dire, its left was weaker than ever, and Hitchens had a troubling feeling that Thatcher might have a point. Yet if he did not have much faith in the British left, he was increasingly interested in two other, larger political canvases: Third World revolutionary movements, and the United States, to which he emigrated. Hitchens’s brief fondness for Saddam – ‘the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser’ – was of a piece with the former but so was his far more enduring interest in the issue of Cyprus.²⁶

In his early years in America, Hitchens seemed to have moved slightly to the left, barring the brief expostulation of patriotic bullishness over the Falklands/Malvinas. Partly, this may reflect the milieu upon which he was initially dependent – friends such as Alexander Cockburn provided Hitchens’s entrées to the New York scene, while his colleagues at the Nation were unlikely to be susceptible to any pleading for Mrs Thatcher. But his focus on international struggles also gave him a strong position from which to assail the Reaganites, even if he had no enthusiasm for the Democrats.

D. D. Guttenplan, a correspondent at the Nation who knew Hitchens well through the 1980s, recalls that when Hitchens migrated to the United States and began working at the Nation, he ‘came across as a left internationalist, someone for whom liberation movements were much more important than the internal politics of any country, certainly the US, where he was deeply uninterested in American politics’. Mike Davis had a similar recollection of Hitchens in the 1990s, as ‘a charming and bighearted guy’ who ‘had a tendency to develop profound emotional attachments to third world groups, particularly the Cypriots and the Kurds, and I think that eventually blinded him to the reality of American wars’.²⁷

Yet, if Hitchens’s interest in domestic politics was limited, his early writing on US foreign policy did not substantially deviate from an anti-imperialist position. Indeed, he consistently drew a direct relationship between the US invasion of Vietnam and the proxy wars in Central America. But ascending the steep career slope in US media circles also encouraged Hitchens’s propensity for ingratiating himself with the chattering class. Guttenplan recalls:

I remember in ’88, I was writing a media column for New York Newsday, and there was a fake award which Christopher organised for journalists in Washington called the Osric Award, for the most suck-up journalists. It was a roll-call of shame. They had an awards dinner, and I was invited to report on it … And it was a kind of Washington snark-fest. Most of the people there were vaguely liberal, left-of-centre, but it was much more about attitude than politics. And Christopher was really in his element. You could tell that all these people looked up to him, and thought he was just a swell fellow. I remember thinking, ‘This is very clever self- promotion.’ If you get publicity for being the person who denounces other people, then you get a kind of power.²⁸

In the summer of 1988 Hitchens brought the tidings to his reading public that he was Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.

‘I was pleased’, he said, ‘to find that I was pleased.’ Perhaps Lesley Hazleton erred on an uncharitable interpretation of this by suggesting that he obviously expected another response. But let us recall what he had said about his mother. She was the daughter of Dorothy Levin, who in turn was the daughter of Lionel Levin, who had married the daughter of a Mr Nathaniel Blumenthal, a nineteenth–century Jewish refugee from Poland who had ‘married out’ but nonetheless raised all his children in the Orthodox manner. This was the basis for Hitchens’s claim to Jewish descent. But according to Hitchens, his mother had attempted ‘to “pass” as English’ in order to avoid being the subject of anti-Semitism. The invocation of the concept of racial passing in this context is odd. By implication his mother was not English, because she was Jewish; thus to be English was to be white and Christian. Ironically, Hitchens, in describing his mother’s dilemma, performed the racialising gesture that had victimised his grandparents and forced his mother to disavow her lineage.²⁹

Moreover, Hitchens had a tendency, particularly in his later writing, to speak of the ‘Jewish people’ as if they were all implicated in the state of Israel. For example, in the context of a fairly standard argument against Zionism, he added: ‘A sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning.’³⁰ Of course, this is not anti-Semitism in its most toxic sense. But it does remind one that philo-Semitism is a not-too-distant cousin of anti-Semitism (particularly in England). And, when read in conjunction with his critique of Said (see Chapter 2), it does suggest that the latter had a point when he said that Orientalism and anti-Semitism are joined at the hip.³¹ Further, an unavoidable aspect of this discovery must be Hitchens’s sense of how it would affect his career.

‘When I read that piece in Grand Street’, Guttenplan recalled,

I remember calling Christopher up and saying, ‘Welcome to the club.’ But I also remember thinking, when it came out, two things. One was ‘Oh, that’s useful because Christopher has always been very pro- Palestinian, and much more forthrightly pro-Palestinian than any other non-Palestinian in the US.’ And he had edited that collection with Edward Said. And I thought, ‘This will make it harder to accuse him of being an anti-Semite.’

I must say I never thought of him as being an anti-Semite, he always struck me as being very scrupulous in his politics. On the other hand, I knew he was friends with a lot of the New Republic people. And I thought, ‘Well, this is convenient, because it will help him with the New Republic people, because a certain amount of eccentricity is tolerated among Jews. That will help him with people like Michael Kinsley and Leon Wieseltier.’ And I think to a certain extent that happened. I don’t think it happened just because he discovered he was Jewish, but he was taken up by the New Republic for a time. Christopher wrote for the New Republic and went to their parties.³²

In a sense, then, the Brit abroad had just acquired a new dimension to his identity, one that may have slightly taken the edge off his anti- Zionism. And it may have made his provocations over the Holocaust slightly less toxic for his audience. One of Hitchens’s brief passions in the late 1990s was the defence of the pro-Nazi historian David Irving and, increasingly, Hitchens’s sympathy with Irving’s view that the numbers of those murdered in the Holocaust have been grossly inflated. Hitchens told anyone who would listen that it would be wrong to dismiss Irving’s work, for there was a real issue at stake. To Tariq Ali and quite a few others, Hitchens divulged an interest in making a film about the subject.

He came to me and said, ‘Tariq, do you think six million Jews were killed in the Judeocide?’ I said to him, ‘What difference does it make?’ And he said, ‘You’re wrong to poo-poo this – the figures don’t add up. If it was 4.3 million Jews who were killed, we should use that figure.’³³

It was not only the figures that Hitchens found dubious but, following Irving, the details of what the Nazis are alleged to have done. Dennis Perrin says Hitchens dismissed ‘the concept of lamp shades [made of human skin] and human soap in the Nazi camps as Stalinist propaganda’.³⁴

All three issues have a margin of legitimate historical controversy. At the very least, there is disagreement about precisely how many Jews the Nazis murdered and certainly doubt about the extent of human soap-making. But what is suggestive is that Hitchens seems to have believed that he could not engage with the questions from within mainstream historical scholarship and thus needed to hear them from a scholar with a weak spot for Hitlerism. This was, to be fair to Hitchens, before the conclusion of the trial in which Irving was taken to pieces over his fabrications – a libel case he had brought against the historian Deborah Lipstadt because of her characterisation of him as a ‘Holocaust denier’. It was also therefore before the publication of the historian Richard J. Evans’s Telling Lies for Hitler, a crushing demolition of Irving’s propaganda.³⁵

But even this concession to ‘fairness’ is an insult to Hitchens, since it implies that he was taken in by Irving. Hitchens had justly criticised H. L. Mencken for his sanguinity in the face of fascism – a ‘literary failure’ and not just political decrepitude. In the figure of Hitler was a target, a quack, a charlatan, ‘a crank to end all quacks’, Hitchens declared. ‘Such a target! And from the pen that had flayed and punctured the “booboisie”, there came little or nothing.’³⁶ It would be nonsensical to compare to Hitler a petty, duplicitous fraud like Irving, to say nothing of comparing Hitchens to Mencken. But at least we can say that Hitchens knew what a flunk it was to be remiss on the issue of fascist quackery. To make himself an ally of Irving just when the latter’s worth as an historian was being mercilessly divested surely immolated Hitchens’s probity at the shrine of opportunism. As was often the case with Hitchens, however, rather than recant or express contrition, he rationalised and revised, such that he painted himself mainly as a defender of free speech rather than someone hoping to stir controversy about the Holocaust.³⁷

But what to make of this episode, given Hitchens’s own statement that ‘a Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer’?³⁸ It might be true, if finger-wagging, to suggest that the author of the ‘Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs’ was trivial about his recently acquired Jewishness, that it meant as much to him as it can mean to someone who is capable of making a week’s reputation out of the paradoxical assertion that a Holocaust affirmer is actually on to something. More prosaically, it suggests that Hitchens was capable of rationalising any absurdity without its affecting his amour propre, provided there were indeed the requisite reputation miles to be earned in the process.

There would be far worse, far more wholesale quackery on Hitchens’s part, in the years to come. As I mentioned, quite often in those years he would find himself standing up for the ‘Jewish people’, whether their foe was real or imaginary. On these occasions Hitchens would freely dispense the trivialising innuendo, implying anti-Semitism on the part of his opponents, an accusation to which he had himself once been subject, and from which the discovery of his Jewishness only partially screened him. Hitchens’s Jewish descent thus formed first a protective carapace, then a weapon, but it also arguably formed part of a compound Anglo-American-Jewish identity that distinguished him among his peers.

HATING CLINTON, LOVING BUSH

Hitchens could be unforgiving of slights. When his friend Guttenplan tried to get Hitchens to work at Vanity Fair, he was rebuffed by the editor. Guttenplan dealt with this by treating Hitchens to an expensive lunch on the expense account each time he was in town. Hitchens, before eating, routinely checked: ‘This is on Fuckface, right?’³⁹ Similarly, his long-standing hatred for the Clintons may have owed at least in part to a rebuff by Hillary Clinton. Soon after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Hitchens approached his friend Tariq Ali with some news. ‘I need to discuss something with you,’ Hitchens said.

I’ve got Jessica Mitford and her husband coming round to dinner in a few weeks’ time. You know that Hillary Clinton worked in his law practice as an intern and then as a young lawyer? Well, I’ve invited Hillary along to my dinner, and this will be a big test for her, whether she comes or not.

How might it have been had the Clintons decided to entertain Hitchens and taken him into their confidence? Ali’s answer: ‘He would have been completely playing ball with them.’⁴⁰

If that had happened, Hitchens would not have been the only one to be charmed by the Clintons. ‘Clinton did have this capacity to seduce journalists who had until then seemed like outsiders and happy with it,’ Guttenplan recalled.

There was a way in which Clinton seemed, I think mistakenly, to be ‘one of us’ … I remember people thinking that because this guy worked for McGovern, he demonstrated against the war, so when he gets to be president, he’ll be great. I remember thinking, ‘This guy comes from Arkansas and he’s not a racist, that’s such a big thing and it’s worth voting for.’⁴¹

However, it is not obvious that Hitchens was ready to be seduced even before Hillary’s rebuff. As soon as the governor of Arkansas appeared as a serious presidential candidate, Hitchens set out to prove to liberals that Clinton was not their man and did so at first primarily by demonstrating that Clinton was, if not a racist himself, quite happy to play to Southern racist traditions.

Exhibit A in this charge was the execution of Rickey Ray Rector. Here was a man against whom punishment was futile, and not merely cruel, as he had already destroyed his frontal lobe with a self-administered gunshot. Hitchens went about showing that not only was death by lethal injection an uncivilised horror, and not only racist in its application, but even by the usual standards of America’s barbaric criminal justice system a gross affront to normal standards of clemency. As such the person who authorised this execution – William Jefferson Clinton – could be shown to have ‘opted to maintain the foulest traditions and for the meanest purposes’, even where no poll-driven exigency was involved.

As to the idea that Clinton was ‘one of us’, having demonstrated against the Vietnam War, Hitchens pointed out early on that this was something of an embarrassment to Clinton, and he was outflanking the senior Bush to the right on foreign policy.⁴²

Once Clinton was elected, he provided material in abundance for Hitchens to continue his assault. The burden of much of what Hitchens would write during the next eight years was straightforwardly leftist. He assailed the Clintons for selling out their voters on health care, showing that they had systematically aligned themselves with the largest health maintenance organisations, devising a policy to suit them while feigning operatic chagrin at the opposition mounted by the smaller and medium-sized health-care companies. (Again, a great deal of this was taken from Sam Husseini, initially without credit.) Hitchens charged Clinton with colluding with the most reactionary forces in American politics to destroy the welfare system and encourage racist scapegoating as the despair piled up.⁴³ All this was very much the bread and meat of the radical left to which Hitchens remained affiliated.

Yet Hitchens’s assault on Clinton, aside from an unexceptionable and unexceptional critique of Clintonite ‘triangulation’, workfare, and war crimes, was highly personalised. Clinton’s character, before his policies, was the subject of Hitchens’s prosecution. An element of this had been present from the very beginning of the contretemps. Indeed, Hitchens had always had a tendency to revile the personnel of American statecraft without a great deal of emphasis on the structures of power. Moreover, he coupled this with a tendency to seek feuds, individuals with whom to spark off controversy, the better to remain noticed and noticeable. It is true that there was a rape allegation against Clinton, which Hitchens found credible. But he did not even like Clinton’s having consensual sex, as this made him the ‘boss who uses subordinates as masturbatory dolls’.⁴⁴

This reached an extraordinary zenith, or nadir, when Hitchens went after Clinton by selling out his friend Sidney Blumenthal. The affair arose over something Blumenthal is alleged to have said during a dinner with Hitchens and his wife, Carol Blue. Blumenthal is supposed to have described Monica Lewinsky, whose affair with Clinton had become the basis of an impeachment of the president, as a stalker. This was at a time when Blumenthal was denying before Congress that he or anyone else in the White House had issued such rumours. Hitchens swore an affidavit that could have put his friend and cousin inside for perjury.