Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

In the report of our arrest in the Prague Communist paper Rude Pravo , another production that if read aloud could cause flying creatures to fall stunned from the sky, it was rightly reported that some of the suspicious foreigners detained were thought to be sympathizers with Leon Trotsky. As a sort of editorial nudge to keep the prejudices of the readers awake, as well as the readers themselves, there followed a parenthesis explaining that Trotsky was a pseudonym for “Bronstein.” Every little bit helps, or so the crack editorial team must have thought.

The sequel, which I cannot not tell, was this. We received an invitation to come down to Baghdad, which was in those awful days considered to be lethally unsafe even in the “Green Zone.” I told Alexander that it was his decision to make, and that nobody would think any the less of him for declining. He very coolly replied “But let’s go,” and so we did. I tried not to show how proud I was, which I now think was a mistake.

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one’s own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says “you’re next.” Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. That changed only when one of these, my friend Chaim Tannenbaum, invited me home to view his own first son, Moses. “You haven’t met the kaddish ,” was his unforgettable way of phrasing the invitation. This was also when I appreciated the entire implication of the poem that Jorge Luis Borges had given me—see here.

Our Friday lunch vernacular, that used to distinguish between “plain fools” and “damn fools,” upgrading or downgrading as necessary to “bloody fool” and “fucking fool,” might have classified me as the latter, also.

I should say in fairness that my brother, Peter, firmly believes that the latter explanation—ordinary xenophobia rather than Jew-hatred in other words—is the likelier explanation.

All right, even the word “transported” has its nasty modern ring of deportation. Indeed, the early martyrs of the British Labour movement were peasants from the Dorset village so bewitchingly named Tolpuddle who were transported to Australia for the offense of forming a union.

The intention had been to arouse the world’s conscience by initially showing these to the Vatican. This appeal did not work.

I pause to mention that, with my sister-in-law’s uncle Ernest Halperin, this makes three widely dispersed ancestral relations of mine who fought for the Spanish Republic: something to tell my own descendants, some of whom carry their blood, if they will only hold still and listen to my tales. This is also probably the largest difference between the two sides of my family: apart from the traditional stories of British daring, the only example of heroism and gallantry ever related to me by the Commander was that of the Francoist General Jose Moscardo who refused to surrender the besieged Alcazar even when the Red forces threatened to execute his son Luis.

My brave friend Anne Applebaum is about to confront this neglected aspect of the hidden history of the region in her study of the imposition of Communism after 1945. Of course it goes without saying that once Stalin had consolidated his power, he began to eliminate local rivals, many of whom like Artur London and Lazslo Rajk were also Jews. Interestingly, there was never such a show trial in Poland.

Born in the extremely depressed hamlet of Chrzanow, a few miles north of Auschwitz, he was later to be expelled from the Polish Communist Party for “exaggerating the dangers of Nazism.” The year was 1932.

The last time I heard an orthodox Marxist statement that was music to my ears was from a member of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, during the mass slaughter in the country. “The terms Hutu and Tutsi ,” he said severely, “are merely ideological constructs, describing different relationships to the means and mode of production.” But of course!

The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West .

I am absurdly proud that James Fenton’s poem “The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah,” which first appeared in his collection Manila Envelope and which foreshadows some of these pregnant admonitions, is dedicated to me.

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport “did more harm than good,” which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.

In his attacks on fellow Arabs—Fouad Ajami being another recipient of his ire—Edward often became distressingly thuggish and ad hominem . Perhaps I was right to notice that softness on the USSR, which had been the special practitioner of such defamatory tactics.

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he’d replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he’d kept that job?

My brother’s case, plus the late reflection this brings on John Bunyan, convinces me again that there may have been such a thing as the Protestant or even Puritan revolution. Christopher Hill’s attempt to Marxify the idea might not exactly work, but the concept of a time before kings and lords and bishops and popes is an ancient yearning. You can find it in Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, and in poems like Macaulay’s magnificent pastiche Naseby , as well as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four , where humble Smith’s struggle against “Newspeak” and the Inner Party is the moral equivalent of those of Wyclif and Tyndale and Coverdale to have the Bible translated out of arcane priestly language and into plain English. Orwell’s own favorite line—“By The Known Rules of Ancient Liberty”—was from John Milton. This might also go to support the satisfying idea of there being such a thing as a Protestant atheist. Much easier to imagine Peter Hitchens as an atheist than as a Muslim, let alone as a Jew or a Catholic. (When William Tyndale first went to school in medieval Oxford, I’m pleased to note, his family name was Hychyns.)

Her story is rather preferable to the one told me by Eric Hobsbawm, who at the time of his resignation from the Communist Party was probably the only member of any academic or intellectual or scholarly repute that it still possessed. Running into him shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I asked him if he’d retained his membership and was told “no.” What then had finally precipitated the separation? “They forgot to send me the form asking me for the annual renewal of my membership,” he said with perfect gravity, “and so I decided not to write to headquarters and remind them.” Just like that, then.