Snitch-22

 

When Chris and I shared the house in Lambeth with Westy and Dave Parry, we were occasionally visited by proselytising females from the Jehovah’s Witness and the WRP. The God-squaddies we tolerated because they claimed kith with some of our pals back in Liverpool. In fact, they were quite down-to–earth Scousers - I almost said Judies: one the slender, nervous type who did the talking; the other more of a sidekick - perhaps that’s what they meant by witness? Anyhow, the carrot was dangled from the stick, so to speak. As quite à-la-mode cult-members (a hint of punk in their attires) they didn’t exude the expected fanaticism; and there was never any come-on: at least their conversation was too bland and everyday to be memorable in that way. Well, they didn’t discuss religion or ask about our faith – or lack of it. And given that Westy ultimately buggered off with The Brothers of Charity (a side-cult of Mother Theresa’s), I wonder if they didn’t miss their opportunity with him? They weren’t a far-cry, shall we say, from followers of Moses David, acolytes of Hare Krishna or devotees of the Divine Light Mission. The WRP girl was black and somewhat gorgeous. My brother, who had no girlfriend in those days, would have been a little smitten. And I guess me too, had I not been smugly ensconced by Ms Kappes. So, we nice boys would dole out the quality tea and biscuits, acting the perfect hosts; while that young emissary, though not exactly tumping the thub, had us nodding here and there like potential recruits. Well, we were left-wing, anti-Thatcherites with plenty of common cause.

Back home, our friends who had opted for active politics had simply joined the CP. In those days, The Morning Star was still to be found on newsstands, and being communist did not mean you believed the Revolution was just around the corner. To our mates, it meant you preferred Marx’s analysis of the capitalist Industrial Military Complex. It signaled you were making a long-term stand, seeking to influence the Labour Party (still in power till 1979) while adhering to an Internationalist World View  - albeit, toeing the Moscow line. The WRP (the Workers’ Revolutionary Party) was one of the three main alternative groups to Labour and the CP. We had no time at all for the RCP (the Revolutionary Communist Party), who appeared to us as out-and-out Stalinists. They had short hair, wore ironed jeans and shiny Doc Martens shoes – not boots (hence their rag, The Next Step). The SWP (the Socialist Workers Party) were Trotskitish, and in a perfect world maybe would have got our votes. They were like Labour without the bullshit (or the muscle). But it was far from a perfect world, and hence the reason we wouldn’t be wasting our say on them.

The WRP were a bit shady, even back then. Later on, when I was coordinating the Peace Festival in Liverpool, it came as little surprise to me to learn they were behind the Militant Tendency that took over the City Council. Soon after the WRP girl began her visits, we started to get their daily newspaper delivered (this was before Chris and I became broadsheet addicts – he of the Guardian, me of the Times). We hadn’t taken out a subscription of The News Line, and no money changed hands - at least not from us. Every morning, Monday to Saturday, this semi-professional looking tabloid would plop through the letterbox. At first, it was no bad thing to receive free TV listings, sports reports and alternative views on the issues of the day. You know, Thatcher getting in – followed by Reagan – had us in perpetual shock. What you got from the telly and radio was hardly encouraging, some defiance here and there could only serve to redress the balance a tad. But it was their stance on Palestine that eventually turned my stomach.

I still remembered the Yom Kippur war of 1973. A schoolboy then, the Youth Theatres I belonged to were having a party. A couple of our friends were in the Shirin Foundation as well as The Everyman and Playhouse groups, and they turned up that evening with their faces white. I had never seen anyone physically affected by anything from the world outside – and it really came home to me then that Jewish people were still facing existential threats. So The News Line’s stand on Palestine was hard for me to swallow. I don’t want to trot out the owl some-of-my-best-friends line, but when I thought about Silverleaf, my dad’s pal Ben Goldstone, and those mates of ours in the Shirin, I suppose it was like Manchester had been overrun by Brummies. I’m sorry to say, I’d given no thought to the Arabs. But The News Line’s line on Israel was plain antisemitic. So, after about a year, enough was enough. By this time, we’d understood it was the local newsagent that was the source, so I went round and tried to cancel the order. It actually took two or three visits before they got the message. On further investigation, it turned out the WRP’s rag wasn’t paid for by actress Vanessa Redgrave (whom the girl had cautiously let slip was one of their sponsors) – but Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya was responsible for the funding!

1982’s events in Lebanon were to flip my view of the Middle East Crisis. Jesus wept! “Crisis what Crisis?” we used to joke about everything and anything. On my life, when hasn’t there been a Middle East Crisis? No, the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Ariel Sharon’s proxies – a decade after Yom Kippur – finally opened my eyes. My fellow peace campaigner Caroline Taylor, always a better idealist than me (and with whom I was secretly in love), was soon to marry a Lebanese man. I avoided being enveloped by the exoskeletons of left-wing and religious cults alike. The Marg and the Rajneesh had come for me just as the WRP and the Situationists, but I didn’t have to slough off their skins because I had always fled from them, no matter how desperate my situation. But in ’82, I turned against Israel for its Settlements and, though I still to this day maintain the state of Israel must exist, it can’t go on citing the promises of a god (what arrant nonsense) as the reason for stealing someone’s home. No, I say, end the settlements on the West Bank!

So – in terms of the seventy-year long crisis-what-crisis in the Middle East - I am in broad agreement with much of what Christopher Hitchens has to say in his Memoir, Hitch-22. It’s also fascinating to read how it was the likes of him behind the SWP – though curious how he never mentions China. I’m zooming onto the likes of David Hare and the fashionable, but to me inexplicable, fascination of the middle classes for Fanshen (continuous revolution). Anyhow, whatever his brand of socialist fanaticism was, it started to peter out soon after the Tories got in. There but for the grace of God – as the saying goes. I especially liked the bit where he gets a mock spanking from his new heroine, Margaret Thatcher (well, didn’t he accuse her of being sexy!); and that came even before the great flip-flop he performed when he joined the rebels Stateside. He was a great wordsmith, and – like Marx before him – his analysis of issues (such as torture and religion) is required reading. This was a guy who went from one great cult to another – like Tiresias, I suppose, or Gloucester. He was blind when he had eyes! Great insight. But in this day and age, can you ever really trust a man who speaks of someone - and their lovely wife - (in this case Edward Said; my italics)?

I’ve been suspicious of public friendships since I read Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin. Larkin’s bezzie mate Kingsley Amis and he spent a year together at Oxford University just before WW2 broke out. After that, apart from long telephone calls and once or twice a decade get-togethers, they were basically penpals who shared a deep love of English bigotry (and poetry, I guess). Amis’s son Martin once (or possibly twice) bumped into Hitchens at Oxford. Thereafter, and as their fan bases slowly but steadily swelled during the 1970s, they were seen genuinely side-by-side at literary lunches most Friday afternoons. Since that time they both fed and nurtured the myth and mysticism of their chumminess, or mutual benefit society. That’s the way the literary world works, like father like son, no man but a damn fool, etc. etc..

Anyhow, this memoir is very largely another volume of old-boy network anecdotes, and therefore scintillating stuff. Heading for Widecombe aboard the grey mare - alongside the Amises Kingsley and Martin - go Ian McEwan, Clive James, Salman Rushdie, James Fenton, Anthony Powell, Edward Said, Susan Sontag (yes, a woman, there’s radical tokenism for all y’all), Gore Vidal, Owl Uncle Tom Cobley et al.

There are some really juicy titbits (sic) here. For example, someone who’s read Martin Amis’s Money will remember John Self’s visit to the New York hand-job parlour. Well, it turns out, Christopher accompanied Martin on the field trip. Which, given how we’d marvelled at the dude’s imaginative powers, takes bum-chummery to new heights of depth. But these are folk who are free to bitch about each other, then close ranks when any of their cohort are attacked from outside. This is the nature of The Beast. Hitchens, for all he’s worth though, was mostly self-made. Having risen to the top of the Oxford Debating Society, capped his poor academic career there (like Lady Thatcher he got a poor Third class degree) with a publicity stunt that made headlines and even the Television News. I always preferred the guys at Durham who suspended a Mini over the river Wear (I naturally gravitate towards Anarchy). Hitchens, as Secretary of the Oxford Debating Union, humiliated UK Foreign Minister Michael Stewart - a guest speaker. This anti-Vietnam War protest earned him the title of Second Most Famous Man at Oxford (the year 1969).

After that, the inevitable round of nice work came his way and whereas a great deal of folk spent a great deal of the 1970s chasing after an ever decreasing supply of dreary jobs, these angry young men never lacked the price of lunch in smart London restaurants. What about the workers, eh?

If Christopher Hitchens ever changed a nappy, did the washing up or took a dog for a walk, he’s not letting on here. He was never seen in jeans, either. When not decked out in a linen suit (à la Our Man in Havana) he’s lounging in slacks and the inevitable slip-on brogues with the metal buckle (now only £175 the pair, Oxfam, 17, Broad St). He wears the sweaty face of an afternoon drinker, dispenses wit with the largesse of a Raymond Chandler character, and keeps his powder as dry as the magazine of a fast cruiser on convoy duty. Well, his father helped sink the Scharnhorst, as we are constantly reminded, in an example of a truly good day’s work. Hitch regretted his lack of language skills, though surely he must have been effluent in Vulgar Latin and Ancient Geek? He never acquired the American lingo, keeping his English accent more or less intact despite spending half his life over there. When the film of his life is made, who will play him? Not some snotty nosed working-class upstart, anyhow.

If it weren’t for his exposure of water boarding by undergoing the torture himself and then writing it up in a famous article, his legacy might have rested on the antitheist (atheist) tract God Ain’t All That, Innit? His use of Occam’s razor to reveal religious faith to be a dangerous delusion borders on the philosophic. But what he offers in its stead – the ‘moderate’ consumption of two bottles of wine per day – is an equally toxic sacrament. Hic. Sorry, Hitch.

N-N-N-Nitch!