Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, Twelve Books, New York, 2010. (Preface Copyright 2011).
“Do note aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.” Pindar: Pythian iii. (Prefae, xi)
I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. (xiii)
…moist devotional literature… (xiii)
I have spent much of the past year registering myself as an experimental subject for various clinical trials and “protocols,” mainly genome-based and aimed at enlarging human knowledge and shrinking the area of darkness and terror where cancer holds dominion. My aim here is obviously not quite disinterested, but many of the experiments are at a stage where any result will be too far in the future to be of help to me. In this book I cite Horace Mann’s injunction: “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” So this is a modest and slight response to his challenge, to be sure, but my own. The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason. (xiv)
Should the best efforts of my physician friends be unavailing, I possess a fairly clear idea of how Stage Four esophageal cancer harvests its victims. The terminal process doesn’t allow for much in the way of “activity,” or even of composed farewells, let alone Stoic or Socratic departures. This is why I am so grateful to have had, already, a lucid interval of some length, and to have filled it with the same elements, of friendship and love, and literature and the dialectic, with which… (xiv)
Before me is a handsome edition of Face to Face … The page that has caught and held my eye is… (1)
It was decidedly interesting to have become actuarially extinct… (5)
Valletta, the capital of the tiny island-state of Malta and one of the finest Baroque and Renaissance cities of Europe. A jewel set in the sea between Sicily and Libya, … Maltese tongue is a dialect version of the Arabic spoken … If you happen to attend a Maltese Catholic church during Mass, you will see the priest raising the Communion Host and calling on “Allah,” because this after all is the local word for “god.” (10)
…I am standing on the deck of this vessel in company with my mother, who holds my hand when I desire it and also lets me scamper off to explore if I insist. (10)
…elementary phonetic reading-book… This concerned the tedious adventures of… (11)
But she and my father had first been thrown together precisely because of drizzle and austerity, and the grim, grinding war against the Nazis. (12)
…she escorted me to my boarding school at the age of eight. (13)
…from the ages of eight to eighteen I was to be away from home for most of the year and the crucial rites of passage, from the pains of sexual maturity to the acquisition of friends, enemies, and an education, took place outside the bonds of family. (13)
mother… she had two books of finely bound poetry apart from the MacNeice (Rupert Brooke, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), which I will die to save even if my house burns down. (16)
…the bogus refulgences of Kahlil Gibran and the sickly tautologies of the The Prophet. (18)
Both he and she were now devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love. (19)
A second-to-last piece of wretchedness almost completes this episode. Whenever I hear the dull word “closure,” I am made to realize that I, at least, will never achieve it. This is because the Athens police made me look at a photograph of Yvonne as she had been discovered. I will tell you nothing about this except that the scene was decent and peaceful but that the was off the bed and on the floor, and that the bedside telephone had been dislodged from its cradle. It’s impossible to “read” this bit of forensics with certainty, but I shall always have to wonder if she had briefly regained consciousness, or perhaps even belatedly regretted her choice, and tried at the very last to stay alive. (25)
I have intermittently sunk myself, over the house of the past four decades or so, into dismal attempts to imagine or think or “feel” myself into my mother’s state of mind as she decided that the remainder of her life would simply not be worth living. There is a considerable literature on the subject, which I have made an effort to scrutinize, but all of it has seemed to me too portentous and general and sociological to be of much help. (26)
This is almost exactly what William Styron once told me in a greasy diner in Hartford, Connecticut, about a golden moment in Paris when he had been waiting to be given a large cash prize, an emblazoned ribbon and medal of literary achievement and a handsome dinner to which all his friends had been bidden. “I looked longingly across the lobby at the street. And I mean longingly. I thought, if I could just hurl myself through those heavy revolving doors I might get myself under the wheels of that merciful bus. And then the agony could stop.” (29)
Of the two notes that she left, one (which pardon me, I do not mean to quote) was to me. (31)
Alcohol for me has been an aspect of my optimism: the mood caught by Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited when he discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian and claims that he at lest chooses to drink “in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it.” (35)
[apropos of nothing] I do have a heroic memory of him from my boyhood, and it happens to concern water. (39)
The golf game must have taken place when I was about thirteen. … We had a round of nine holes that somehow went well for both of us, and then he treated me to a heavy “tea” in the clubhouse where, if nothing much got said, there was no tension or awkwardness, either. (40)
[for father’s funeral] I was able to see my father in his last repose before the screwing-on of the lid, and later to do for him what he had once done for me, and carry him on my shoulders. … I rather pity those Anglo-American families to whom the “Navy Hymn” is not a part of the emotional furniture: its words and music are impossibly stirring. … My own text was from that same Paul of Tarsus, and form his Epistle to the Philippians, which I select for its non-religious yet high moral character: /
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. … Philippians 4:8. (45-6)
I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I have ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass (I must have been attempting some adolescent version of the aesthetic), he almost barked: “What is this? Luxury?” That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood. (46)
Meanwhile, and speaking of books, the school possessed its very own library, and several of the masters had private collections of their own, to which one might be admitted (not always without risk to these men’s immortal souls) as a great treat. (52)
Having at that stage only cropped and grazed on the lower slopes of Wordsworthian verse, (58)
Thus I have to be honest and say that the single book that most altered my life was How Green Was My Valley… In the next few years I inhaled and imbibed it dozens of times and could at any moment have sat for an examination on its major and minor themes. (60)
Most English public schools are affiliated with the national absurdity of the Anglican or “Church of England” confession (as if there could be a version of Christianity specifically linked to a group of northerly island), whereas The Leys was Methodist, which put it in the Dissenting or Nonconformist tradition, founded by that admitted maniac and demagogue John Wesley but still better than the alliance between a state church, the monarchy, the armed forces, and the Tory Party. (64)
Oxford-Cambridge… In days gone by, plebian Londoners… loud public disputes every year… Boat Race… one of the great “who cares?” events of any epoch. (64)
Some say that Cambridge is more austere and Oxford more louche and luxurious, … (64)
They used to say that Cambridge was better at “science”; (65)
We were taught the poetry of Owen and Auden at school, and allowed to ruminate on the obsession of Owen with wounded and bleeding young soldiers, as well as on the cunning way in which Auden opened “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love/ Human on My Faithless Arm.” … but I don’t think any instructor was sufficiently phlegmatic to break the news that the two great English poets of the preceding two generations had been quite so gay. (74)
I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned. [From King Lear: ‘Thou rascal beadle, holy thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? … Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip’st her.” ] / I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their own ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place. (78)
A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. (81)
…very striking carriage and appearance… (90)
[‘Chris’] And yet, to that son’s chosen brothers and sisters of the Labour and socialist movement, it was a part of the warmth and fraternity—part of one’s very acceptance—that the informal version be adopted without any further permission or ado. (94)
senescent: Growing old. Characteristic of old age. Related to senile. Senescence refers to changes in the body after it reaches its maturity.
Oxford … At gatherings of the “History Workshop,” held on Ruskin’s grounds and in nearby alehouses, I heard E.P. Thompson deliver an impromptu lecture on the “Enclosures” of common land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which he brought an otherwise unsentimental audience to tears with his recitation of the poems of John Clare. (101)
…his meek, modest appearance always made him a special target for the rough attentions of the police. (101)
One evening I was placed next to that great Cornish queen A. L. Rowse, who had only recently unburdened himself of a new gay theory of the origin and dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but mainly wanted to tell me what I already knew, that Hitchens was a Cornish name, and positively demanded to be told whether the Mrs. Hitchens who kept sending him such fervent and unwanted love letters was by any chance my mothers. He was so lost in conceit that he did not, I remember thinking, completely trust my denial. (105)
…Magaziner (later the man to ruin American health care on behalf of Hillary Clinton) (107)
...girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, …(107)
He left the ministry and quite some time later got married, at which point the Catholic Church excommunicated him because he had violated his vows as a priest! Many people don’t understand that the term “lapsed Catholic” entails the sinister implication that only the Church can decide who leaves it and why, or when. (108)
…it would not of course be possible or desirable to attempt any attacks or satires on the Leader of the Revolution himself. But otherwise, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute. … I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. (117)
People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does form the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question form the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. (121)
…if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone. I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity—a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect—with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then–segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady… (124)
“You’re a friend of young Fenton’s, then?” he said gruffly. I allowed as much. (128)
[starting a new paragraph with: ] I can justify this if you like. (142)
A very sudden bang convinced me that a nail bomb had been thrown at a British patrol, … Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semi-recumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. (148)
Recumbent: lying down, suggestive of repose, as in a therapy couch.
…a decent if not sumptuous menu. (149)
Driberg developed a fondness for me which I don’t think was especially sexual. He would “try” any male person at least once, on the principle that you never know your luck, … I once had to cancel a dinner engagement with him and, being asked rather querulously why this was, replied that my girlfriend was in the hospital for some tests and that I wanted to visit her after work. “Ah, yes,” said Tom with every apparent effort at solicitude, “there’s a lot to go wrong with them, isn’t there? I do so hope that it isn’t her clitoris or anything ghastly like that.” Not all of this was by any means affectation. For Tom, the entire notion of heterosexual intercourse was gruesome to the last degree. (“That awful wound, my dear Christopher. I just don’t see how you can.” (152-3)
…I was very aware that my roadworthiness (Martin prefers the term “seaworthiness”) in real grown-up company was not to be assumed. (156)
…everybody has at one point seen man standing in front of the pornography section, in either a magazine store or a video emporium, but it was Martin who observed these swaying and muttering figures pulling out and then replacing the contents and compared it to “the Wailing Wall.” (158)
[note] So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift—enviable if potentially time consuming—of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it. (159)
The words “ruggedly handsome features” appear on the first page of Nineteen Eighty-four and for a while Martin declined to go any further into the book. (“The man can’t write worth a damn.”) (160)
[note] But the more Martin absorbed himself in the man’s work, the more it was borne in on him that the recurrent twelve-year-old-girl theme in Nabokov’s writings was something more alarming and disturbing than a daring literary one-off. See, for his stern register of this disquieting business, the Guardian 14 November 2009. (161)
[Martin] I remember sitting quietly while he talked with authority about why Jane Austen was not all that good. [note: I write this in a week where I have been re-reading Northanger Abbey, and reflecting once again on the sheer justice of Kingsley’s verdict on Miss Austen’s “inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major.”] (163)
…a perfectly foul establishment… (167)
Clive James wrote… “Here is a book so dull that … If it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.” (172)
I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting form the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I though Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. … Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a denial of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. Btu she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!” / I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. (178)
But, if you exempt a solitary trip that I took to express support for the Icelandic socialists who were fighting to stop British trawlers from hovering up all their fish (and Iceland is an exotic locale all of its own, with its moonscape interior and geyser-supplied hot water with the ever-present diabolical whiff of sulphur), (179)
Christmas of 1976. The previous summer I had been very intrigued by reports of a small-scale but suggestive workers’ revolt in Communist Poland, … (187)
…a dingy Russian-backed Communist bureaucracy sitting atop a sullen and strongly Catholic people who perhaps only agreed with their rulers in distrusting Federal Germany. (An old national chestnut asks the question: If the Russians and the Germans both attack again, who do you shoot first? Answer: “The Germans. Business Before Pleasure.” You can also deduce something about a Pole who answers this question the other way around.) (188)
Rabbi Tarfon says somewhere that the task can never be quite completed, yet one has no right to give it up. Of the comrades I met that bleak winter, many of them veterans of the extremely nasty Polish prison system, none really expected to make more than a small dent in the regime. (188)
On the macro scale, it was still officially “true” that the mass graves of Katyn, across the Belarus border, in which the corpses of tens of thousands of Polish officers had been hastily interred in the 1940s, were the responsibility of the Nazis. But there simply wasn’t a single person in the whole of Poland who credited this disgusting untruth. Not even those paid to spread it believed it. (189)
Warsaw… As an interpreter he provided us with the lovely Barbara Kopec, who held down a daytime job in the “Palace of Culture” that dominated the main square of the city. It had been built as a personal gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland, and in its form and shape expressed all the good taste and goodwill that such benevolence might have implied. It wasn’t much fun working inside the building, as Barbara remarked, but at least it meant she didn’t have to look at the damn thing. (189)
Anti-semitism… It would have been even nastier if Jacek Kuron had actually been Jewish, but the fact is that he wasn’t: Polish and other Jew-baiters have been known to operate without possessing the raw material of any actual Jews to “work” with. (190)
…there was heavy snow that Christmas, and I found the icy city rather hypnotizing. We went to the nearby township of Kazimierc, once a center of Jewish life before the nearly “clean” sweep that had been made of Polish Jewry. We attended a midnight Mass in Vilanow, where the congregation was so densely packed that it spilled out of doors, with worshippers kneeling in the drifts. (190)
…one of the strikes in the port city of Strettin had been provoked when the shipyard workers read in the Communist Party paper that they had all “volunteered” to work longer hours in the interests of production. One of the leaders of that strike, a man named Edmund Baluka, later told me that he had been sent as a soldier into Czechoslovakia during the Warsaw Pact aggression of August 1968. He had been told, and had believed, that he was going to repel a West German invasion of Prague. Discovering a complete absence of Germans in the country—except for East Germans soliders who were also taking part in the Russian-sponsored occupation—had destroyed his entire faith in anything the Party ever said. (191)
[Timerman] I borrow Jacobo’s words here because they are crystalline authentic and because my own would be no good: Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity. (197)
Borges: … He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. “You will remember,” he said, “the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.” And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—“Inclusiveness”—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. (199)
On top of this, I was becoming increasingly aware that that other old Tory, Dr. Samuel Johnson, had been quite wrong when he pronounced that a man who was tired of London was tired of life. With me, it was if anything the reverse. If I was ever going, it was time for me to go. (203)
Such an impression wasn’t corrected even by reading Mark Twain, who was presented to us as a children’s writer only and who seemed to be depicting conditions of near-primeval backwardness, … (207)
…I had to agree that the picture of New York wasn’t a very alluring one at that. America seemed either too modern, with no castles or cathedrals and no sense of history, or simply too premodern with too much wilderness and unpolished conduct. (208)
A colleague of my father’s had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came for ma place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone…) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. (208)
Yet when I had been to hear W.H. Auden recite his poems at Great St. Mary’s Church in 1966, I had noticed that he closed with the words “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.” … I couldn’t quite square this at first with my revulsion from the America of drawling and snarling accents, and cheap fizzy softdrinks and turbocharged war and racism. (209)
…made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. (212)
…the foul cocktail known as a “Manhattan” … (220)
…I became the tenant of a walk-up on East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square, … (228)
Ronald Reagan… I can easily remember…exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. … “The Russian language contains no word for ‘freedom’” was another stupefying pronouncement of his: … (232)
rebarbative : 1890-5, fearsome, forbidding, repelling, unattractive. Derived from an old French word which referred to two bearded men face to face in conflict.
…I came to appreciate that I couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t afford their leafy neighborhoods of the Northwest. I found a row house in northeast Capitol Hill, where if I wanted to cab it home late at night from Dupont Circle, African-born taxi drivers would sometimes decline to take me (on the unarguable—at least by me with them—grounds that it was “a black area). I have never since beenable to use the word “gentrification” as a sneer: the unavoidable truth is that it’s almost invariably a good symptom. (236)
…the stubborn American belief that “hot tea” is made with lukewarm or formerly boiled water… (239)
Speaking of airplanes… on a day in early September 2001 I got up at a decent hour on a morning that simply had to be described as golden and crisp, went out through the blazingly autumnal Virginia woods to Dulles Airport and boarded a flight to Seattle. … I shook a lot of hands, kissed a few cheeks, signed quite a number of my Kissinger books, and retired (as Lord Rochester once said, as if breaking the rule of a lifetime) “early, sober, and alone.” (241)
…often contented themselves with inexpensive, unserious remarks about American machismo or Bush’s “cowboy” style. (249)
…amendments abolishing the established church, postulating an armed people, opposing the… (252)
…the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan… (263)
At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back form exile on a French jet… (266)
Edward Said… It was Western presumption, he argued, to regard Islam as a problem of backwardness. It led to our first major disagreement, … (267)
Salman… He looked at me and lowered his very heavy lids: these later became so heavy that they needed a slight surgical correction but in those days he could adopt the gaze of what Martin unforgettably called “a falcon looking through a Venetian blind.” This meant his attention was engaged. (275)
At lunch afterward, Salman had talked in an unstoppably poetic way about all matters Shakespearean: unstoppable in the sense that nobody present wanted to stop him. … I soon enough realized when young that did not have the true “stuff” for fiction and poetry. … Now, listening to Salman “compose,” as it were, I suddenly wondered if this was related to my near-total inability with music, itself quite possibly [275] linked with my incapacity in chess and mathematics. Thinking quickly and checking one by one, I noticed that all my poet and novelist friends possessed at the very least some musical capacity: they could either play a little or could give a decent description of a musical event. Could it be this that marked them off from the mere essayist? I hit one iceberg-size objection right away. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the man of all men who could make one feel embarrassed to be employing the same language (English being only his third), detested music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds… The concept piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.” Ah, but that needn’t mean he wasn’t musical. … in the New York Public Library there rests a case of written material—“Nabokov Under Glass”—in which the great lepidopterist attempted a form of notation that could run along the top of his holographs. What is this if not a form of musicality? (276)
Crepuscular: of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim; indistinct. Zoology: appearing or active in the twilight, as certain insects or bats.
Owl Farm in Woody Creek, home of the storied Hunter Thompson. In these booze-fueled and crepuscular surroundings, in the intervals of our own midnight gunplay with rows of empty bottles… (290)
I have never been able to rid myself of the view that Bush was not really surprised to read the first reports from Kuwait—I watched him received them very calmly—and only became upset when he learned that Saddam Hussein has taken the entire country. The whole thing stank of a pre-arranged carve-up gone wrong. It was almost impossible to read the transcript of his envoy’s last meeting with Saddam and to form any other opinion. Ambassador April Glaspie, whom I had known briefly in London, explicitly told the Iraqi dictator that the United States took no position on his quarrel with the Kuwaitis. Had Saddam taken only the Rumaila oil filed and the Bubiyan and Warba islands, there would have been no casus belli. I printed the Glaspie memorandum in Harper’s magazine, along with some highly critical commentary, and made several speeches and media appearances saying that any war would be fought, in effect, on false pretenses. (290)
…the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. (296) Cull: to choose from a group (for example to choose the best verses from a poet’s work), to control or reduce the size of a group (as of a herd) by removing (or hunting) the weaker members. Pinion: to bind a person’s arms or cut a bird’s primary feathers to prevent flight.
…the subject of so much lurid invention and paranoid disinformation… (298)
I think of it whenever I hear some fools say, “All right, we agree that Saddam was a bad guy.” Nobody capable of uttering that commonplace has any conception of radical evil. (299)
Purulent: related to pus.
…my nauseating carapace. (316) Carapace (car-uh-pace) : a protective, decorative, or disguising shell.
I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, … (321)
This made me relax fractionally, … (322)
Everyone was supposed to say something, but when John Daily took the first scoop form the urn and spread the ashes on the breeze, there was something so unutterably final in the gesture that tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn’t at all sure that I could go through with it. My idea had been to quote form the last scene of Macbeth, which is the only passage I know that can hope to rise to such an occasion. The tyrant and usurper has been killed, but Ross has to tell old Siward that his boy has perished in the struggle:
/
Your son, my lord, has paid a solider’s debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
/
This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds: /
/
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end. (327)
…with those whose pressing need it is to … (330)
…refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (330)
the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… (331)
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction? Dennis Barlow, Humebrt Humbert, Horatio Hornblower, Jeeves, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, Funes the Memorious , Lucifer. (333)
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction? Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea, Becky Sharp, Candy, O, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia. (333)
Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner. (334)
Who are your favorite poets? Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, W. H. Auden, James Fenton, W. B. Yeats, Chidiock Tichbourne, G. K. Chesterton, Wendy Cope. (334)
…respect that I could have forfeited if I had missed—as the French so quenchingly say—a perfectly good opportunity for keeping my mouth shut. (336)
I therefore am glad that I waited as long as I did before ingesting and digesting Marcel Proust, because one has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to emark on the project of recovering lost life. (338)
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase “terrible beauty.” Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possible wish for a father who never goes away. (340)
Suicide murderers… About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. (344)
…excrement-colored capital city of Kabul, … (345)
…the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place… (349)
At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there. /
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. (351) Sodality: A society or an association, especially a devotional or charitable society for the laity in the Roman Catholic Church.
In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland… hour’s drive form the Polish city of Wroclaw, formerly Breslau. A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, … one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), (354)
…always a version of the same cliché about the Jews being over-sharp in business… (358)
Some readers may already have caught their breath, I hope enviously. (360)
It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the “prize” loot he has extracted form his encounters with Bonaparte’s navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away form any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love detail that Hampshire’s “New Forest” is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960’s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. (360)
…revenant… spirit who comes back from the dead to get revenge or harass specific persons.
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. … I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to “make a new start” or be “born again”: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? (367)
In his view, it is still “Operation Reinhardt,” or the planned destructive of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, “roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.” (371)
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. … If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? (378)
Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very important one. When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure. (385)
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of “deconstruction” or “postmodernism” was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? (385-6)
Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies’ dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. “Mariam,” he said as if by way of explanation, “has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.” (388)
…but Orientalism was a book that made one think. [The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West] (390)
Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance beilved that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action. (394)
Said: … American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of “Orientalism” in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. (397)
Anthony Powell’s narrator… The Pilgrim’s Progress that had stuck in both … after his aunt read the book aloud to him as a child, he could never, even after he was grown-up, watch a lone figure draw nearer across a field, without thinking that this was Apollyon come to contend with him. (402)
My younger brother, Peter—aged perhaps eight—has so strongly imbibed John Bunyan’s Puritan classic as almost to have memorized it. (403)
Damascus… Damascene moments. (406)
Susan Sontag… She wanted to have everything at least three ways and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed be a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning. I consider myself pretty durable in these same sweepstakes but I once almost fell asleep standing up while preparing her a sofa bed in Washington after a very exhausting day of multiple meals and discussions: she had vanished to begin the next day long before I regained consciousness. (417)
…formally correct noises… (417)
Deracinate: to pull out from the roots, or culture, especially to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics from. (racine: root) uproot.
“Do note aspire to immortal life but exhaust the limits of the possible.” Pindar: Pythian iii. (Prefae, xi)
I can’t hope to convey the full effect of the embraces and avowals, but I can perhaps offer a crumb of counsel. If there is anybody known to you who might benefit from a letter or a visit, do not on any account postpone the writing or the making of it. (xiii)
…moist devotional literature… (xiii)
I have spent much of the past year registering myself as an experimental subject for various clinical trials and “protocols,” mainly genome-based and aimed at enlarging human knowledge and shrinking the area of darkness and terror where cancer holds dominion. My aim here is obviously not quite disinterested, but many of the experiments are at a stage where any result will be too far in the future to be of help to me. In this book I cite Horace Mann’s injunction: “Until you have done something for humanity you should be ashamed to die.” So this is a modest and slight response to his challenge, to be sure, but my own. The irruption of death into my life has enabled me to express a trifle more concretely my contempt for the false consolation of religion, and belief in the centrality of science and reason. (xiv)
Should the best efforts of my physician friends be unavailing, I possess a fairly clear idea of how Stage Four esophageal cancer harvests its victims. The terminal process doesn’t allow for much in the way of “activity,” or even of composed farewells, let alone Stoic or Socratic departures. This is why I am so grateful to have had, already, a lucid interval of some length, and to have filled it with the same elements, of friendship and love, and literature and the dialectic, with which… (xiv)
Before me is a handsome edition of Face to Face … The page that has caught and held my eye is… (1)
It was decidedly interesting to have become actuarially extinct… (5)
Valletta, the capital of the tiny island-state of Malta and one of the finest Baroque and Renaissance cities of Europe. A jewel set in the sea between Sicily and Libya, … Maltese tongue is a dialect version of the Arabic spoken … If you happen to attend a Maltese Catholic church during Mass, you will see the priest raising the Communion Host and calling on “Allah,” because this after all is the local word for “god.” (10)
…I am standing on the deck of this vessel in company with my mother, who holds my hand when I desire it and also lets me scamper off to explore if I insist. (10)
…elementary phonetic reading-book… This concerned the tedious adventures of… (11)
But she and my father had first been thrown together precisely because of drizzle and austerity, and the grim, grinding war against the Nazis. (12)
…she escorted me to my boarding school at the age of eight. (13)
…from the ages of eight to eighteen I was to be away from home for most of the year and the crucial rites of passage, from the pains of sexual maturity to the acquisition of friends, enemies, and an education, took place outside the bonds of family. (13)
mother… she had two books of finely bound poetry apart from the MacNeice (Rupert Brooke, and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury), which I will die to save even if my house burns down. (16)
…the bogus refulgences of Kahlil Gibran and the sickly tautologies of the The Prophet. (18)
Both he and she were now devotees of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi: the sinister windbag who had brought enlightenment to the Beatles in the summer of love. (19)
A second-to-last piece of wretchedness almost completes this episode. Whenever I hear the dull word “closure,” I am made to realize that I, at least, will never achieve it. This is because the Athens police made me look at a photograph of Yvonne as she had been discovered. I will tell you nothing about this except that the scene was decent and peaceful but that the was off the bed and on the floor, and that the bedside telephone had been dislodged from its cradle. It’s impossible to “read” this bit of forensics with certainty, but I shall always have to wonder if she had briefly regained consciousness, or perhaps even belatedly regretted her choice, and tried at the very last to stay alive. (25)
I have intermittently sunk myself, over the house of the past four decades or so, into dismal attempts to imagine or think or “feel” myself into my mother’s state of mind as she decided that the remainder of her life would simply not be worth living. There is a considerable literature on the subject, which I have made an effort to scrutinize, but all of it has seemed to me too portentous and general and sociological to be of much help. (26)
This is almost exactly what William Styron once told me in a greasy diner in Hartford, Connecticut, about a golden moment in Paris when he had been waiting to be given a large cash prize, an emblazoned ribbon and medal of literary achievement and a handsome dinner to which all his friends had been bidden. “I looked longingly across the lobby at the street. And I mean longingly. I thought, if I could just hurl myself through those heavy revolving doors I might get myself under the wheels of that merciful bus. And then the agony could stop.” (29)
Of the two notes that she left, one (which pardon me, I do not mean to quote) was to me. (31)
Alcohol for me has been an aspect of my optimism: the mood caught by Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited when he discourses on aspects of the Bacchic and the Dionysian and claims that he at lest chooses to drink “in the love of the moment, and the wish to prolong and enhance it.” (35)
[apropos of nothing] I do have a heroic memory of him from my boyhood, and it happens to concern water. (39)
The golf game must have taken place when I was about thirteen. … We had a round of nine holes that somehow went well for both of us, and then he treated me to a heavy “tea” in the clubhouse where, if nothing much got said, there was no tension or awkwardness, either. (40)
[for father’s funeral] I was able to see my father in his last repose before the screwing-on of the lid, and later to do for him what he had once done for me, and carry him on my shoulders. … I rather pity those Anglo-American families to whom the “Navy Hymn” is not a part of the emotional furniture: its words and music are impossibly stirring. … My own text was from that same Paul of Tarsus, and form his Epistle to the Philippians, which I select for its non-religious yet high moral character: /
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. … Philippians 4:8. (45-6)
I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I have ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass (I must have been attempting some adolescent version of the aesthetic), he almost barked: “What is this? Luxury?” That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood. (46)
Meanwhile, and speaking of books, the school possessed its very own library, and several of the masters had private collections of their own, to which one might be admitted (not always without risk to these men’s immortal souls) as a great treat. (52)
Having at that stage only cropped and grazed on the lower slopes of Wordsworthian verse, (58)
Thus I have to be honest and say that the single book that most altered my life was How Green Was My Valley… In the next few years I inhaled and imbibed it dozens of times and could at any moment have sat for an examination on its major and minor themes. (60)
Most English public schools are affiliated with the national absurdity of the Anglican or “Church of England” confession (as if there could be a version of Christianity specifically linked to a group of northerly island), whereas The Leys was Methodist, which put it in the Dissenting or Nonconformist tradition, founded by that admitted maniac and demagogue John Wesley but still better than the alliance between a state church, the monarchy, the armed forces, and the Tory Party. (64)
Oxford-Cambridge… In days gone by, plebian Londoners… loud public disputes every year… Boat Race… one of the great “who cares?” events of any epoch. (64)
Some say that Cambridge is more austere and Oxford more louche and luxurious, … (64)
They used to say that Cambridge was better at “science”; (65)
We were taught the poetry of Owen and Auden at school, and allowed to ruminate on the obsession of Owen with wounded and bleeding young soldiers, as well as on the cunning way in which Auden opened “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love/ Human on My Faithless Arm.” … but I don’t think any instructor was sufficiently phlegmatic to break the news that the two great English poets of the preceding two generations had been quite so gay. (74)
I always take it for granted that sexual moralizing by public figures is a sign of hypocrisy or worse, and most usually a desire to perform the very act that is most being condemned. [From King Lear: ‘Thou rascal beadle, holy thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? … Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip’st her.” ] / I understand in retrospect that this was my first introduction to a conflict that dominates all our lives: the endless, irreconcilable conflict between the values of Athens and Jerusalem. On the one hand, very approximately, is the world not of hedonism but of tolerance of the recognition that sex and love have their own ironic and perverse dimensions. On the other is the stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance, all invoked as if this very fanaticism did not give its whole game away. Repression is the problem in the first place. (78)
A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. (81)
…very striking carriage and appearance… (90)
[‘Chris’] And yet, to that son’s chosen brothers and sisters of the Labour and socialist movement, it was a part of the warmth and fraternity—part of one’s very acceptance—that the informal version be adopted without any further permission or ado. (94)
senescent: Growing old. Characteristic of old age. Related to senile. Senescence refers to changes in the body after it reaches its maturity.
Oxford … At gatherings of the “History Workshop,” held on Ruskin’s grounds and in nearby alehouses, I heard E.P. Thompson deliver an impromptu lecture on the “Enclosures” of common land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which he brought an otherwise unsentimental audience to tears with his recitation of the poems of John Clare. (101)
…his meek, modest appearance always made him a special target for the rough attentions of the police. (101)
One evening I was placed next to that great Cornish queen A. L. Rowse, who had only recently unburdened himself of a new gay theory of the origin and dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets but mainly wanted to tell me what I already knew, that Hitchens was a Cornish name, and positively demanded to be told whether the Mrs. Hitchens who kept sending him such fervent and unwanted love letters was by any chance my mothers. He was so lost in conceit that he did not, I remember thinking, completely trust my denial. (105)
…Magaziner (later the man to ruin American health care on behalf of Hillary Clinton) (107)
...girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, …(107)
He left the ministry and quite some time later got married, at which point the Catholic Church excommunicated him because he had violated his vows as a priest! Many people don’t understand that the term “lapsed Catholic” entails the sinister implication that only the Church can decide who leaves it and why, or when. (108)
…it would not of course be possible or desirable to attempt any attacks or satires on the Leader of the Revolution himself. But otherwise, the freedom of conscience and creativity was absolute. … I made the mere observation that if the most salient figure in the state and society was immune from critical comment, then all the rest was detail. (117)
People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does form the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question form the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. (121)
…if you can give a decent speech in public or cut any kind of figure on the podium, then you need never dine or sleep alone. I was actually a bit more confident on the platform than I was in the sack, and I can remember losing my virginity—a bit later than most of my peers, I suspect—with a girl who, inviting me to tea at one of the then–segregated female colleges, allowed me to notice that her walls were covered with photographs taken of me by an unseen cameraman who’d followed my public career. Since apparently I could do no wrong with this young lady… (124)
“You’re a friend of young Fenton’s, then?” he said gruffly. I allowed as much. (128)
[starting a new paragraph with: ] I can justify this if you like. (142)
A very sudden bang convinced me that a nail bomb had been thrown at a British patrol, … Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semi-recumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. (148)
Recumbent: lying down, suggestive of repose, as in a therapy couch.
…a decent if not sumptuous menu. (149)
Driberg developed a fondness for me which I don’t think was especially sexual. He would “try” any male person at least once, on the principle that you never know your luck, … I once had to cancel a dinner engagement with him and, being asked rather querulously why this was, replied that my girlfriend was in the hospital for some tests and that I wanted to visit her after work. “Ah, yes,” said Tom with every apparent effort at solicitude, “there’s a lot to go wrong with them, isn’t there? I do so hope that it isn’t her clitoris or anything ghastly like that.” Not all of this was by any means affectation. For Tom, the entire notion of heterosexual intercourse was gruesome to the last degree. (“That awful wound, my dear Christopher. I just don’t see how you can.” (152-3)
…I was very aware that my roadworthiness (Martin prefers the term “seaworthiness”) in real grown-up company was not to be assumed. (156)
…everybody has at one point seen man standing in front of the pornography section, in either a magazine store or a video emporium, but it was Martin who observed these swaying and muttering figures pulling out and then replacing the contents and compared it to “the Wailing Wall.” (158)
[note] So far from being some jaded Casanova, Martin possesses the rare gift—enviable if potentially time consuming—of being able to find something attractive in almost any woman. If this be misogyny, then give us increase of it. (159)
The words “ruggedly handsome features” appear on the first page of Nineteen Eighty-four and for a while Martin declined to go any further into the book. (“The man can’t write worth a damn.”) (160)
[note] But the more Martin absorbed himself in the man’s work, the more it was borne in on him that the recurrent twelve-year-old-girl theme in Nabokov’s writings was something more alarming and disturbing than a daring literary one-off. See, for his stern register of this disquieting business, the Guardian 14 November 2009. (161)
[Martin] I remember sitting quietly while he talked with authority about why Jane Austen was not all that good. [note: I write this in a week where I have been re-reading Northanger Abbey, and reflecting once again on the sheer justice of Kingsley’s verdict on Miss Austen’s “inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major.”] (163)
…a perfectly foul establishment… (167)
Clive James wrote… “Here is a book so dull that … If it were to be read in the open air, birds would fall stunned from the sky.” (172)
I had also written a shorter piece for the New Statesman, reporting form the Conservative Party conference and saying in passing that I though Mrs. Thatcher was surprisingly sexy. … Almost as soon as we shook hands on immediate introduction, I felt that she knew my name and had perhaps connected it to the socialist weekly that had recently called her rather sexy. While she struggled adorably with this moment of pretty confusion, I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a denial of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. Btu she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly to emphasize my acknowledgment. “No,” she said. “Bow lower!” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!” By this time, a little group of interested bystanders was gathering. I again bent forward, this time much more self-consciously. Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper that she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back. I regained the vertical with some awkwardness. As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!” / I had and have eyewitnesses to this. At the time, though, I hardly believed it myself. (178)
But, if you exempt a solitary trip that I took to express support for the Icelandic socialists who were fighting to stop British trawlers from hovering up all their fish (and Iceland is an exotic locale all of its own, with its moonscape interior and geyser-supplied hot water with the ever-present diabolical whiff of sulphur), (179)
Christmas of 1976. The previous summer I had been very intrigued by reports of a small-scale but suggestive workers’ revolt in Communist Poland, … (187)
…a dingy Russian-backed Communist bureaucracy sitting atop a sullen and strongly Catholic people who perhaps only agreed with their rulers in distrusting Federal Germany. (An old national chestnut asks the question: If the Russians and the Germans both attack again, who do you shoot first? Answer: “The Germans. Business Before Pleasure.” You can also deduce something about a Pole who answers this question the other way around.) (188)
Rabbi Tarfon says somewhere that the task can never be quite completed, yet one has no right to give it up. Of the comrades I met that bleak winter, many of them veterans of the extremely nasty Polish prison system, none really expected to make more than a small dent in the regime. (188)
On the macro scale, it was still officially “true” that the mass graves of Katyn, across the Belarus border, in which the corpses of tens of thousands of Polish officers had been hastily interred in the 1940s, were the responsibility of the Nazis. But there simply wasn’t a single person in the whole of Poland who credited this disgusting untruth. Not even those paid to spread it believed it. (189)
Warsaw… As an interpreter he provided us with the lovely Barbara Kopec, who held down a daytime job in the “Palace of Culture” that dominated the main square of the city. It had been built as a personal gift from Joseph Stalin to the people of Poland, and in its form and shape expressed all the good taste and goodwill that such benevolence might have implied. It wasn’t much fun working inside the building, as Barbara remarked, but at least it meant she didn’t have to look at the damn thing. (189)
Anti-semitism… It would have been even nastier if Jacek Kuron had actually been Jewish, but the fact is that he wasn’t: Polish and other Jew-baiters have been known to operate without possessing the raw material of any actual Jews to “work” with. (190)
…there was heavy snow that Christmas, and I found the icy city rather hypnotizing. We went to the nearby township of Kazimierc, once a center of Jewish life before the nearly “clean” sweep that had been made of Polish Jewry. We attended a midnight Mass in Vilanow, where the congregation was so densely packed that it spilled out of doors, with worshippers kneeling in the drifts. (190)
…one of the strikes in the port city of Strettin had been provoked when the shipyard workers read in the Communist Party paper that they had all “volunteered” to work longer hours in the interests of production. One of the leaders of that strike, a man named Edmund Baluka, later told me that he had been sent as a soldier into Czechoslovakia during the Warsaw Pact aggression of August 1968. He had been told, and had believed, that he was going to repel a West German invasion of Prague. Discovering a complete absence of Germans in the country—except for East Germans soliders who were also taking part in the Russian-sponsored occupation—had destroyed his entire faith in anything the Party ever said. (191)
[Timerman] I borrow Jacobo’s words here because they are crystalline authentic and because my own would be no good: Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity. (197)
Borges: … He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. “You will remember,” he said, “the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.” And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—“Inclusiveness”—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. (199)
On top of this, I was becoming increasingly aware that that other old Tory, Dr. Samuel Johnson, had been quite wrong when he pronounced that a man who was tired of London was tired of life. With me, it was if anything the reverse. If I was ever going, it was time for me to go. (203)
Such an impression wasn’t corrected even by reading Mark Twain, who was presented to us as a children’s writer only and who seemed to be depicting conditions of near-primeval backwardness, … (207)
…I had to agree that the picture of New York wasn’t a very alluring one at that. America seemed either too modern, with no castles or cathedrals and no sense of history, or simply too premodern with too much wilderness and unpolished conduct. (208)
A colleague of my father’s had a daughter who got herself married and found that an American friend she had met on holiday had offered to pay the whole cost of the nuptial feast. I forget the name of this paladin, but he had a crew-cut and amputated trouser-bottoms and a cigar stub and he came for ma place called Yonkers, which seemed to me a ridiculous name to give to a suburb. (I, who had survived Crapstone…) Anyway, once again one received a Henry Jamesian impression of brash generosity without overmuch refinement. (208)
Yet when I had been to hear W.H. Auden recite his poems at Great St. Mary’s Church in 1966, I had noticed that he closed with the words “God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.” … I couldn’t quite square this at first with my revulsion from the America of drawling and snarling accents, and cheap fizzy softdrinks and turbocharged war and racism. (209)
…made me think for many years—that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted. (212)
…the foul cocktail known as a “Manhattan” … (220)
…I became the tenant of a walk-up on East Tenth Street, on the north side of Tompkins Square, … (228)
Ronald Reagan… I can easily remember…exactly why I found him so rebarbative at the time. There was, first, his appallingly facile manner as a liar. … “The Russian language contains no word for ‘freedom’” was another stupefying pronouncement of his: … (232)
rebarbative : 1890-5, fearsome, forbidding, repelling, unattractive. Derived from an old French word which referred to two bearded men face to face in conflict.
…I came to appreciate that I couldn’t and perhaps shouldn’t afford their leafy neighborhoods of the Northwest. I found a row house in northeast Capitol Hill, where if I wanted to cab it home late at night from Dupont Circle, African-born taxi drivers would sometimes decline to take me (on the unarguable—at least by me with them—grounds that it was “a black area). I have never since beenable to use the word “gentrification” as a sneer: the unavoidable truth is that it’s almost invariably a good symptom. (236)
…the stubborn American belief that “hot tea” is made with lukewarm or formerly boiled water… (239)
Speaking of airplanes… on a day in early September 2001 I got up at a decent hour on a morning that simply had to be described as golden and crisp, went out through the blazingly autumnal Virginia woods to Dulles Airport and boarded a flight to Seattle. … I shook a lot of hands, kissed a few cheeks, signed quite a number of my Kissinger books, and retired (as Lord Rochester once said, as if breaking the rule of a lifetime) “early, sober, and alone.” (241)
…often contented themselves with inexpensive, unserious remarks about American machismo or Bush’s “cowboy” style. (249)
…amendments abolishing the established church, postulating an armed people, opposing the… (252)
…the monstrous birth of a spoiled theocracy in Pakistan… (263)
At the moment when Iran stood at the threshold of modernity, a black-winged ghoul came flapping back form exile on a French jet… (266)
Edward Said… It was Western presumption, he argued, to regard Islam as a problem of backwardness. It led to our first major disagreement, … (267)
Salman… He looked at me and lowered his very heavy lids: these later became so heavy that they needed a slight surgical correction but in those days he could adopt the gaze of what Martin unforgettably called “a falcon looking through a Venetian blind.” This meant his attention was engaged. (275)
At lunch afterward, Salman had talked in an unstoppably poetic way about all matters Shakespearean: unstoppable in the sense that nobody present wanted to stop him. … I soon enough realized when young that did not have the true “stuff” for fiction and poetry. … Now, listening to Salman “compose,” as it were, I suddenly wondered if this was related to my near-total inability with music, itself quite possibly [275] linked with my incapacity in chess and mathematics. Thinking quickly and checking one by one, I noticed that all my poet and novelist friends possessed at the very least some musical capacity: they could either play a little or could give a decent description of a musical event. Could it be this that marked them off from the mere essayist? I hit one iceberg-size objection right away. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the man of all men who could make one feel embarrassed to be employing the same language (English being only his third), detested music: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds… The concept piano and all wind instruments bore me in smaller doses and flay me in larger ones.” Ah, but that needn’t mean he wasn’t musical. … in the New York Public Library there rests a case of written material—“Nabokov Under Glass”—in which the great lepidopterist attempted a form of notation that could run along the top of his holographs. What is this if not a form of musicality? (276)
Crepuscular: of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim; indistinct. Zoology: appearing or active in the twilight, as certain insects or bats.
Owl Farm in Woody Creek, home of the storied Hunter Thompson. In these booze-fueled and crepuscular surroundings, in the intervals of our own midnight gunplay with rows of empty bottles… (290)
I have never been able to rid myself of the view that Bush was not really surprised to read the first reports from Kuwait—I watched him received them very calmly—and only became upset when he learned that Saddam Hussein has taken the entire country. The whole thing stank of a pre-arranged carve-up gone wrong. It was almost impossible to read the transcript of his envoy’s last meeting with Saddam and to form any other opinion. Ambassador April Glaspie, whom I had known briefly in London, explicitly told the Iraqi dictator that the United States took no position on his quarrel with the Kuwaitis. Had Saddam taken only the Rumaila oil filed and the Bubiyan and Warba islands, there would have been no casus belli. I printed the Glaspie memorandum in Harper’s magazine, along with some highly critical commentary, and made several speeches and media appearances saying that any war would be fought, in effect, on false pretenses. (290)
…the cull continues, and faces and bodies go slack as their owners are pinioned and led away. (296) Cull: to choose from a group (for example to choose the best verses from a poet’s work), to control or reduce the size of a group (as of a herd) by removing (or hunting) the weaker members. Pinion: to bind a person’s arms or cut a bird’s primary feathers to prevent flight.
…the subject of so much lurid invention and paranoid disinformation… (298)
I think of it whenever I hear some fools say, “All right, we agree that Saddam was a bad guy.” Nobody capable of uttering that commonplace has any conception of radical evil. (299)
Purulent: related to pus.
…my nauseating carapace. (316) Carapace (car-uh-pace) : a protective, decorative, or disguising shell.
I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, … (321)
This made me relax fractionally, … (322)
Everyone was supposed to say something, but when John Daily took the first scoop form the urn and spread the ashes on the breeze, there was something so unutterably final in the gesture that tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn’t at all sure that I could go through with it. My idea had been to quote form the last scene of Macbeth, which is the only passage I know that can hope to rise to such an occasion. The tyrant and usurper has been killed, but Ross has to tell old Siward that his boy has perished in the struggle:
/
Your son, my lord, has paid a solider’s debt;
He only lived but till he was a man;
The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d
In the unshrinking station where he fought,
But like a man he died.
/
This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds: /
/
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end. (327)
…with those whose pressing need it is to … (330)
…refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (330)
the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… (331)
Who are your favorite heroes of fiction? Dennis Barlow, Humebrt Humbert, Horatio Hornblower, Jeeves, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, Funes the Memorious , Lucifer. (333)
Who are your favorite heroines of fiction? Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea, Becky Sharp, Candy, O, Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia. (333)
Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner. (334)
Who are your favorite poets? Philip Larkin, Robert Conquest, W. H. Auden, James Fenton, W. B. Yeats, Chidiock Tichbourne, G. K. Chesterton, Wendy Cope. (334)
…respect that I could have forfeited if I had missed—as the French so quenchingly say—a perfectly good opportunity for keeping my mouth shut. (336)
I therefore am glad that I waited as long as I did before ingesting and digesting Marcel Proust, because one has to have endured a few decades before wanting, let alone needing, to emark on the project of recovering lost life. (338)
To be the father of growing daughters is to understand something of what Yeats evokes with his imperishable phrase “terrible beauty.” Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened: it’s a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else’s body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death: I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possible wish for a father who never goes away. (340)
Suicide murderers… About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. (344)
…excrement-colored capital city of Kabul, … (345)
…the eerie wretchedness and interstellar frigidity of the place… (349)
At about half past midday, a decent slug of Mr. Walker’s amber restorative, cut with Perrier water (an ideal delivery system) and no ice. At luncheon, perhaps half a bottle red wine: not always more but never less. Then back to the desk, and ready to repeat the treatment at the evening meal. No “after dinner drinks”—most especially nothing sweet and never, ever any brandy. “Nightcaps” depend on how well the day went, but always the mixture as before. No mixing: no messing around with a gin here and a vodka there. /
Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. (351) Sodality: A society or an association, especially a devotional or charitable society for the laity in the Roman Catholic Church.
In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland… hour’s drive form the Polish city of Wroclaw, formerly Breslau. A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, … one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), (354)
…always a version of the same cliché about the Jews being over-sharp in business… (358)
Some readers may already have caught their breath, I hope enviously. (360)
It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the “prize” loot he has extracted form his encounters with Bonaparte’s navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away form any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love detail that Hampshire’s “New Forest” is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960’s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I’ll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. (360)
…revenant… spirit who comes back from the dead to get revenge or harass specific persons.
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. … I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to “make a new start” or be “born again”: Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? (367)
In his view, it is still “Operation Reinhardt,” or the planned destructive of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, “roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.” (371)
I think I have a very good idea why it is that anti-Semitism is so tenacious and so protean and so enduring. … If you meet a devout Christian or a believing Muslim, you are meeting someone who would give everything he owned for a personal, face-to-face meeting with the blessed founder or prophet. But in the visage of the Jew, such ardent believers encounter the very figure who did have such a precious moment, and who spurned the opportunity and turned shrugging aside. Do you imagine for a microsecond that such a vile, churlish transgression will ever be forgiven? (378)
Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very important one. When he laughed, it was as if he was surrendering unconditionally to some guilty pleasure. (385)
I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in Beginnings, and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of “deconstruction” or “postmodernism” was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Edward talked about English literature and quoted from it, he passed the test that I always privately apply: Do you truly love this subject and could you bear to live for one moment if it was obliterated? (385-6)
Taking coffee with him once in a shopping mall in Stanford, I saw him suddenly register something over my shoulder. It was a ladies’ dress shop. He excused himself and dashed in, to emerge soon after with some fashionable and costly looking bags. “Mariam,” he said as if by way of explanation, “has never worn anything that I have not bought for her.” (388)
…but Orientalism was a book that made one think. [The best critique of it is Ibn Warraq’s Defending the West] (390)
Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance beilved that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action. (394)
Said: … American arrival in Baghdad as a grand example of “Orientalism” in action. The looting and destruction of the exhibits in the Iraq National Museum had, he wrote, been a deliberate piece of their cultural patrimony and demonstrate to them their new servitude. Even at a time when anything at all could be said and believed so long as it was sufficiently and hysterically anti-Bush, this could be described as exceptionally mendacious. (397)
Anthony Powell’s narrator… The Pilgrim’s Progress that had stuck in both … after his aunt read the book aloud to him as a child, he could never, even after he was grown-up, watch a lone figure draw nearer across a field, without thinking that this was Apollyon come to contend with him. (402)
My younger brother, Peter—aged perhaps eight—has so strongly imbibed John Bunyan’s Puritan classic as almost to have memorized it. (403)
Damascus… Damascene moments. (406)
Susan Sontag… She wanted to have everything at least three ways and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed be a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning. I consider myself pretty durable in these same sweepstakes but I once almost fell asleep standing up while preparing her a sofa bed in Washington after a very exhausting day of multiple meals and discussions: she had vanished to begin the next day long before I regained consciousness. (417)
…formally correct noises… (417)
Deracinate: to pull out from the roots, or culture, especially to remove the racial or ethnic characteristics from. (racine: root) uproot.
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