"How Could You Ask Such A Question": The Christopher Hitchens Interview
By Mark Grueter
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Part One
Every wised-up New Yorker is at least somewhat familiar with the British-born writer Christopher Hitchens. Over the last twenty-five years or so his literary reviews, polemics, and essays have appeared in a wide selection of popular publications including Vanity Fair and The Atlantic Monthly, along with lesser-known magazines like Dissent and even very obscure academic journals like Daedalus. Hitchens has written many popular and/or highly regarded books including Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, a collection of essays on several writers who have affected the public realm and No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family, an aggressive journalistic expose condemning Bill Clinton as a war criminal and a rapist.
Hitchens is considered one of the best, most controversial and certainly one of the more prolific writers in the western world. He also frequently appears as a commentator on the TV talk-show circuit, where he often makes quite an impression on an even larger American audience (Hitchens, appearing on Larry King Live a few years ago, told a fine joke about the late Princess Diana to which King petulantly replied, “That’s not funny.” I have not seen Hitchens on Mr. King’s show since then).
I first met Hitchens in the fall of 2002 in a graduate course he co-teaches at New School University. Based on the impressions I had from some of his more acerbic pieces of writing, his bags-under-the-eyes, pissed-off TV appearances, and the rumors about his lifestyle I was expecting a more outspokenly aggressive figure. A bit shrill perhaps. But, in person, Hitchens is soft-spoken, often reserved and even vulnerable at times. It was an interesting contrast.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, Hitchens agreed to meet up with me at the Bistro Du Coin, a French restaurant situated a few blocks north of Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The first question most people have asked me about the meeting is some version of ‘did you guys drink?’ or ‘was Hitchens drinking?’ I reply in the affirmative, while noting that this didn’t bother me as I had been drinking pretty much unhindered since the previous Wednesday. No, unlike my many alcoholic associates, Hitchens sips his scotch. So, neither one of us had to be dragged out by the proprietors. Instead, Hitchens enjoyed practicing his French with the staff, communicating our requests, as it were, in their native tongue. I find the firebrand provocateur Christopher Hitchens, in reality, to be an unusually polite, generous and rather sensitive man.
Not just a standard interview, I was hoping to learn more about the man himself and to get his views on topics that I had never heard him discuss. I soon learned that this would prove tougher than imagined; I found myself getting caught up in what he was saying at any given moment to the extent that I forgot much of what I myself intended to say...
Mark Grueter: You have said that, after coming to America for the first time, you felt as though this was where you belonged. What did you mean by that?
Christoper Hitchens: Well, I can make it more plangent for you if you’d like. Beginning at around 17 I had had actual dreams. Nothing is worse than people who discuss their dreams, or who remember them, or who share them with other people, but I did have a vivid, recurring dream of crossing the Atlantic and being in midtown Manhattan. It’s a strong yearning; it’s a feeling I’ve always had growing up in England - that I’d been born, somehow, in the wrong country. It’s not like being a woman trapped in a man’s body; it’s an aspiration of another kind, but I did have it. And then I came on a scholarship from my college at the end of my term at Oxford in 1970. I made a beeline for the Port Authority terminal - not one of the most beautiful parts of the city you’ll have to say - but I didn’t know that then. And I got the feeling right away: ‘yeah, this is what I hoped it would be like.’ I know I’ve become a bit blasé about that now…And what I cannot do is explain it (the feeling) of course…
MG: Sure you can.
CH: I guess because I came from a very small town, a small boarding school from parents who had very little background. I don’t want to sound like someone running for office, but it would have been like coming from Montana or whatever - it was very confining. And I had lived in London for 10 years before I had actually entered the United States. There’s a saying, 'if a man is tired of London then he’s tired of life' and I realized when I was quite young that that’s not quite true either. You can get quite bored of London, too. So I decided to move to America and I’ve never had one occasion where things are going well or badly to revisit that decision; I’ve never regretted it. To the contrary really, except in the ‘one doesn’t know what other life one might have had’ way.
MG: And you moved to New York right away.
CH: Yes, I wasn’t different from other people my age and I suppose background. When we said we wanted to go to America, we meant we wanted to go to a certain part of Manhattan Island…
But before moving to New York, the first thing I did when I came in 1970 (as a student) was to equip myself with one of those Greyhound bus tickets, which you could then buy. You had to buy them out of the country. For some reason you couldn’t buy them in America. If you bought them outside the country as a visitor they would give you 90 days unlimited travel on Greyhound for 90 bucks, or was it 99 for 99? Something like that. Anyway, it was too good to miss. And so I did go around the whole periphery and some of the interior of America that way…
MG: Did you come over with anyone else?
CH: Well the terms of the scholarship were that you could not. The scholarship is endowed by an old man named William Appleton Coolidge of Topsville, Massachusetts, a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson by the way, so whenever people say, in the reparations argument about slavery, ‘well I’m not a beneficiary of slavery. My people didn’t have anything to do with it’ I have to face the fact that the scholarship that brought me to America partly comes from that hateful institution. And Mr. Coolidge insisted that you come on your own…but I actually violated my parole on that. And this was why I didn’t overstay my visa, as I had originally planned to do. The plan was to overstay the visa, get a work permit and stay in America for good. I would have done that if she (his girlfriend) didn’t have to go back. She was in her final year at Oxford. It seemed important at the time…
MG: What were the terms or requirements of the scholarship?
CH: Well it was a very generous scholarship because the college simply awarded you, in your last year, if they thought you made the grade. And they gave you some money; I forget what it was but it seemed like a lot of money at the time, on top of $1,000 spending money, an airline ticket and a list of all the people in America who had been at Balliol (college at Oxford) who would agree to have you to stay. I’m on this list now myself. I feel I should be. So, it was basically a travel opportunity to get to America. And you were supposed to have a project…
MG: A research paper?
CH: More like a sort of ‘what I did on my vacation’ in a way, but it had to be serious. Mine was - see how you like this for solemnity - the role of African-Americans in the American labor movement. And I nearly wrote a book about it. So I spent a lot of time in Detroit with the black caucus people…I went to Chicago for the same reason…Carey McWilliams, the great editor of The Nation, who I had been to see in New York for the first time, gave me names of people I should go see and I did. That was the first contact I had with The Nation. I was lucky enough to meet Carey McWilliams when I was, what, 20, no 21 that year…
MG: How long were you at Oxford?
CH: I was only there for 3 years and I just barely got my undergraduate degree. ’67 to ’70. I got a sort of education there and I met a lot of good people but I didn’t do much work. And I didn’t want to do any further work at that time. I wanted to get out and start life as soon as I could. I already knew that. I was rather lucky or unlucky that way; I knew at about 15, if not earlier, that writing for public consumption…was the only thing I was fitted to do. There wasn’t anything else I could do; it’s not like I chose it or it chose me, it was inscribed. By the way, I find it with everyone else I know who has done this kind of thing – they’ve all had similar realizations.
MG: Why do you never write fiction? You seem to have a flair for the dramatic.
CH: Well I can write and memorize poetry. When I was younger I tried writing stories but they didn’t seem to be as good as the ones being written by some of my friends, like Martin Amis. I have noticed a correlation, in the writers I know, between their ability as fiction-writers or poets and their possession of some musical ability. Not just able to play, but able to understand - an ability, by the way, that often clusters with chess and mathematics. This would also explain my own incapacity, since I am dyslexic when it comes to music - and math and chess. I haven't researched the connection historically. Shakespeare obviously had an ear for music and goes on about it. Nabokov hated music but may well have understood it. Proust writes about music and memory....
MG: You could have been a lawyer.
CH: That’s what my parents thought. My mother particularly thought I’d make a very good barrister, and you know, do I think I could plead a case in court? Yeah…It’s all very well to picture yourself getting up in a robe and a wig and either convicting someone who should be in jail or acquitting someone who shouldn’t, and I believe I could do that. But that’s not what you do. It’s all, it’s the hashing of it out, it’s the harvesting of the law that goes on in the meantime…my contempt for the legal profession started very early on.
I might have made quite a good diplomat if you think of a diplomat as being someone who might conceivably represent one country to another and get to know the other country but that’s not what it’s about…And I did, for awhile, want to run for parliament. Yes, it took a long time for that impulse to leave me. I was asked to run at the start of my career. But I was then expelled from the Labour Party over the Vietnam War and it took me a long time to get over the fact that I would never be a Labour candidate for parliament…
MG: You could run now.
CH: Sure I could. And I’d actually be more suited to run as a Labour candidate now than I would have been then, for various reasons with probably some ironies of history to the story, but I don’t think I’d be inducted. Whatever you think about Blair is good. But one of the things that I don’t like about him is that he’s reduced the role of a member of Parliament somewhat to that of, you know, a cipher…a fiend of the party and of the Downing Street patronage…A certain amount of conformism is required.
MG: I was listening to C-SPAN radio yesterday and they had a taped segment of Tony Blair on the BBC fielding questions from the general public.
CH: Yes.
MG: Can you imagine…
CH: No.
MG: President Bush or any president doing that? Why is that?
CH: I read a piece about this once. One of the many, many good things about when C-SPAN got going here, just when I arrived in Washington, was that they decided to screen live ‘Question Time’ in the British House of Commons and also Canadian Parliament. Most American viewers did not know this kind of proceeding occurred in other deliberative bodies. And so there was a mass write-in, not organized by anybody, to Congress and to others saying, ‘why don’t we have such a thing in the United States?’ So Congressman Sam Gejdenson of Connecticut put in a bill to propose it and it very nearly passed. And Clinton, after his first State of the Union, was invited by Gephardt who asked, ‘why don’t you stay to have a free and open discussion as our guest?’ And Clinton was almost ready to do it before his advisors called him back…
It’s a pity there isn’t something like that here. As it is, the President never has to justify himself to anymore than a few self-selected journalists who…
(Confusion results after the waitress brings us one glass of the red wine Hitchens ordered. Hitchens had wanted the whole bottle but isn’t sure if one of us should drink the glass while we’re waiting for her to bring the bottle over, or if she should just take the glass back as well).
My recommendation to everyone is that they reprint the questions he (the President) is asked, to see how illiterate, ungrammatical, stupid they are. It’s very hard to answer a question that’s banal, repetitive, circular without yourself degenerating into it. When The New York Times does print the questions you read them, as a journalist, with a moan of shame. How could your colleagues, given the chance to ask the President about an important matter at an important time, fuck up that badly?
MG: Have you ever tried to get in there, to ask our Presidents’ questions?
CH: I have refused all my life, to be part of the White House press corps. Because it’s a stage-managed event, you become their prop if you ask a good or a bad question. And it’s very unlikely you’ll be called upon if they think you have a challenging question. Either way, you become a part of the scenery.
So that’s the worst a President has to contend with – it’s terrible. It’s what they get in their prep room…Blair can more or less pull it out (when he’s asked questions from the public) because he has to do it in Parliament every week. Harold MacMillan, who everyone used to think was the image of an imperturbable, Edwardian, red-mustached, old-school Tory – the Prime Minister when I was growing up - well, before he took questions from Parliament he had to go and throw up, because he was so nervous. It’s only 15 minutes or so but your career can be over in that 15 minutes…it’s the one bit of business of the week you cannot control. A big thing that I try to write about is why the US and the UK borrow the wrong things from each other. The emulation is of the wrong stuff.
MG: There’s a lack of a public realm in America. And it seems to me that all these things are connected – secrecy in government, uninterest in talking politics, low voter turnout rates, you know, a lack of real questioning of the President…
CH: They are. They’re adversaries, all of them, to democratic culture. The President is completed insulated…And then if he does do something, such as in Atlanta this week, going to the Martin Luther King event – something I would hope he would feel he could hardly not do – then he’s accused of stepping outside his role and doing something demagogic and for opportunistic reasons, and so, gets nothing for it. This is at least as old as the political generation of my age, because after the Kennedy assassination there was never really a non-bogus meeting between the President and anyone who lived under his rule, except Nixon going mad – a forgotten event – and wandering around the Lincoln Memorial at four in the morning…
Click Here for Part Two.
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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He may be contacted at grueter@methree.net.
© 2004 Me Three