Two Men in a Boat

Christopher Hitchens’ memoir, of life amidst Leftists and literary friends, dazzles only in part.

Christopher Hitchens is nothing if not interesting for the manner in which he has taken up numerous, if contradictory, causes in his long journalistic career. A book by him most likely to hold our interest, then, as opposed to his essays or his journalistic work, is a book where he stars. A memoir should work perfectly. But like the man himself, Hitch-22 is dazzling only in part. 

For a start, the choice of the title—yes, there is a laboured explanation involving some word games and Catch-22, but it is best avoided. One can only guess that Hitchens is the kind of man who would have stuck with the title precisely because everyone around him would have said it didn’t work. 

Then there is the structure of the memoir. Those looking for details of love, sex and fatherhood won’t find them here. They will, though, find parents, literary friends and politics aplenty, held together by his belief in his own duality, sexual and otherwise. He traces this duality back to his parents: ‘So, here you have my two much-opposed and sharply discrepant ancestral stems: two stray branches that only war and chance could ever have caused to become entwined.’

Much of the first half of his life seems to have been lived out in thrall to the ideas embodied by his mother, Yvonne,  and it is in writing of her that he is at his most engaging and least polemical. Overruling his father’s financial concerns, she is clear, “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.” She gets her wish. So much so that we have to deal with an entire chapter where he speaks of his struggles with his name being abbreviated to Chris: ‘My mother had not nurtured her firstborn son in order to hear him addressed as if he were a taxi driver or pothole-filler.’

Her desire takes him to Oxford, and from the moment he lands there, he seems to have lived out the life he wishes she could have had: ‘The metropolis, with cocktail parties and theater trips and smart friends and witty conversation…’ If, with his socialist and Marxist comrades, he remained Chris, it was among writers and poets such as James Fenton, Martin Amis and later, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie, that he became Hitch. 

At one point, abjuring the very need for a memoir, he writes of the 1960s: ‘A bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should f***ing well have been there, and felt it for yourself.’ It is a point he may well make of his whole encounter with the literary set and their Friday afternoon gatherings. 

Alcohol, Fenton, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Barnes, McEwan and Rushdie at the same table must have made for heady conversation, but perhaps you f***ing well had to be there because his description leaves you with the feeling that there was far too much cleverness and too little wisdom. 

But that may be the way it was. The observation does, after all, extend to much of British fiction over the past 30 years. And no one can claim Hitchens can’t tell a good story. The book is worth the read just for the description of his first encounter with Margaret Thatcher. Dip into the memoir to find out how, at the end of it, ‘Stepping around behind me, she unmasked her batteries and smote me on the rear with parliamentary order-paper… As she walked away, she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight role of the hip while mouthing the words: ‘Naughty Boy!’’

In this double life of the Left and literature, 9/11 changed everything. Hitchens was probably headed there in any case. Given the above description, his flush of enthusiasm for Margaret Thatcher as she sends the British Navy sailing to the Falklands is no surprise. In the background lurks his father’s career in the Navy during the Second World War: ‘Sending a Nazi convoy raider to the bottom is a better day’s work than any I have ever done…’ 

His defence of Neocons is fervent, but nowhere does he follow the Oxonian code of debate—tackle the strongest case that could be made for the opposing view. And this is not to say he is wrong. The Iraq War today looks a far better idea than it did just a year ago, but his polemical arguments are about as persuasive as his attribution of the genius of his friends to their skill at parlour games. But then, one should not ask for what Hitch doesn’t promise. There may be duality in his nature, but no one has ever accused Hitchens of duplicity, or complexity.

About The Author

Hartosh Singh Bal