Snippet 2 of this series touches on the friendship of Amis and Christopher Hitchens and the left’s penchant for breaking the truth.
During the mid-1970s I worked for the famous and historic and now perhaps obsolescent Labour weekly, the New Statesman (or the NEW STATESMAN, in its own house style). § My contemporaries there were Julian Barnes (novelist and critic), Christopher Hitchens (journalist, essayist, political man of letters), and James Fenton (journalist, critic, essayist and, above all, poet). Politically we broke down as follows. Julian was broadly Labour…. I was quietist and unaligned. Fenton and Hitchens, on the other hand, were proselytizing Trotskyists who (for instance) spent their Saturdays selling copies of the Socialist Worker on impoverished London high streets. “What do I call you if I write this piece?” I said to Christopher, on the phone to him in Washington, D.C. “Trotskyites or Trotskyists?” “Oh, Trotskyists. Only a Stalinist would have called us Trotskyites.” I laughed. I laughed indulgently. We talked on.
Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 318-326). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Hitchens and I used to argue about Communism in the corridors, sporadically, semi-seriously. The fascist novelist John Braine … used to say to left-wingers: “Why do you love despotism? Why do you yearn for tyranny?”
And this was more or less the question I put to the Hitch:
“Rule by yobs. That’s what you want. Why?”
“Yup. Rule by yobs. What I want is the berks in the saddle. Rule by yobs.”These exchanges took place in a spirit of humorous appraisal, mutual appraisal. We were not quite yet the best friends we would become, and politics was part of the distance between us. Rule by yobs, incidentally, or the dictatorship of the proletariat (an outcome only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks), provided the flavor of the superficial and temporary rearrangement taking place in England then: the transfer of wealth, as the Labour Party put it, to the working classes and their families. I was partly going with the culture, perhaps, but this idea (with 99 percent income tax in the top bracket, etc.) so little offended me that I too voted for the continuation of Labour policies. …
Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 335-348). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
…one of the Bolsheviks’ most promethean projects. They intended to break the peasantry; they intended to break the church; they intended to break all opposition and dissent. And they also intended (as Conquest, writing of Stalin, put it) “to break the truth.”
Sometimes, in our casual office arguments, I saw an acknowledgment of this in Christopher’s eyes. He could joke about it. But he wasn’t secure. How could he have been?
“What about the famine?” I once asked him.
“There wasn’t a famine,” he said, smiling slightly and lowering his gaze. “There may have been occasional shortages.…”
He knew it wasn’t true. But the truth, like much else, was postponable; there were things that, for now, were more important.k Although I always liked Christopher’s journalism, there seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something faintly but pervasively self-defeating: the sense that the truth could be postponed. This flaw disappeared in 1989, and his prose made immense gains in burnish and authority.Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Vintage International) (Kindle Locations 670-673). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
