Waking yesterday morning to the news of Christopher Hitchens’s death, I was gratified to hear it given second place in the Today programme’s 7am bulletin. The gratification ended moments later when the BBC reporter described him as a journalist, an atheist “and an alcoholic”.
“No he bloody wasn’t!” I yelled at the radio.
The only brief contretemps we had in over 30 years of friendship occurred when I asked him to go easy on the booze at lunchtime one day, as he and I were due on stage at a Shaftesbury Avenue theatre that evening. “Francis,” he said – and the dropping of the otherwise invariable “My dear Francis” showed how angry he was – “have you ever known me to miss a deadline or a speaking engagement because I was drunk?”
And, of course, I hadn’t. He was a heavy drinker (“No argument about that,” he would say with a throaty chuckle on those rare occasions when we found something about which even he couldn’t take a contrarian view), but also a prodigiously energetic worker whose focus, as he observed the world and its follies, was never blurred. Even when he reached for another late-night whisky, his perception remained unerringly sober.
This is not an adjective that has often been applied to the Hitch. His sobriety was perhaps disguised by the frisky playfulness of his language, the extravagance of his invective, the fearlessness of his risk-taking. Except for incest and folk-dancing, he’d try almost anything once, from being waterboarded to undergoing a Brazilian wax. Sometimes one felt that he had known everybody, read everything, been everywhere – a suspicion that his memoir, Hitch-22, did nothing to dispel. Who else could claim to have enjoyed (or, more accurately, endured) the hospitality of both Agatha Christie and Abu Nidal, or been a friend of both Gore Vidal and Paul Wolfowitz, or read poetry to Jorge Luis Borges and sheltered Salman Rushdie from the ayatollah’s assassins?
Even his amatory dalliances were a cut above anyone else’s. At Oxford University in the 1960s, as Hitchens recorded, he and Bill Clinton “both became peripherally involved (at different times, I hasten to add) with a pair of Leckford Road girls who, principally Sapphic in their interests, would arrange for sessions of group frolic”; unlike Clinton, he also found the time and the appetite for “mildly enjoyable” flings with two young men “who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s government”. Thatcher herself once spanked Christopher with a rolled-up parliamentary order paper to punish him for confessing in print that he thought her surprisingly sexy. “As she walked away,” he recalled, “she looked back over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: 'Naughty boy!’”
How right she was. “Make mischief and revel in it,” was his advice to young reporters, and even if mischief would land him in the soup, he never hesitated. After he testified against Bill Clinton, old comrades denounced him as a Judas and several Washington hostesses publicly declared – in the Society section of the Washington Post, no less – that he would no longer be welcome at their dinner tables. I saw him on television that day and he looked ghastly, as if he’d been sleeping on a park bench all week. I rang to express my concern. “Don’t worry, old thing,” he said. “I’ve just had a bit of a clearout of the friend cupboard, that’s all.”
That attitude was what made him such an irresistibly exotic figure to American readers and viewers. Unlike our own raucous and disputatious hacks, US commentators tend to be judicious pipe-suckers who take themselves (and their “insider” status) exceedingly seriously: not for nothing is the New York Times known as the Gray Lady. Over breakfast every morning, Christopher would glance at the NYT’s front page to check that it still carried the smug motto “All the news that’s fit to print” – and to check that it still irritated him. “If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be,” he wrote, “then at least I know I still have a pulse.”
In this, as in so many things, from tea-drinking to composing filthy limericks, he remained defiantly English, even after three decades in New York and Washington. Staying at his apartment once, I played Abide With Me on the piano – and looked up to see tears rolling down his cheeks. The jokes he most enjoyed depended on a set of references understood by Englishmen of his class and upbringing – hymns ancient and modern, P G Wodehouse, U and non-U, absurd nicknames, Gilbert and Sullivan, sexual incompetence, over-boiled cabbage and rain-sodden holidays in West Wittering.
“He jousts with fraudulence of every stripe, and always wins,” Joseph Heller said of Hitchens. “I regret he has only one life, one mind.” Cause for regret? I think not. Only one life and one mind; but they contained multitudes. England itself may have been too small to accommodate them, as the puritanical small-mindedness of that BBC report yesterday confirmed; but he was, for all that, a great Englishman. Is the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square still vacant?
