Why me? Why not?

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, August 25-26, 2012

On June 8, 2010, Christopher Hitchens awoke in a New York hotel room feeling very ill indeed. “I came to consciousness,” he later wrote, “feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.” He could scarcely breathe. With difficulty he made it to the telephone and called an ambulance. At the hospital, scans indicated the presence of “some kind of shadow.” Hitchens, a lifelong smoker, had cancer of the oesophagus. Eighteen months after hearing that diagnosis he died, at the age of 62. 

Until that day in New York, Hitchens had been on a roll. He had a fair claim to being the most scintillating off-the-cuff speaker on earth. His political journalism was likewise never boring. After the September 11 attacks on America he turned savagely against his former comrades on the Anglo-American left, calling them “soft on crime and soft on fascism.” Dashing, prolific, superbly articulate, he was both an old-school man of letters and a scruffily willing verbal brawler. On YouTube, his fans coined a name for the way he trounced his hapless opponents: they called it the “Hitch slap.” In 2007, his atheist polemic God is Not Great became a best-seller. His 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, proved he was getting better with each new book. 

Then cancer intervened. Robbed of his strength but not his mental fire, increasingly bedbound, Hitchens used his regular column in Vanity Fair to write about his illness and some attendant social themes: the etiquette of terminal disease, the politics of cancer research, the uselessness of “facile maxims”. His final book, Mortality, is a compilation of those magazine pieces, fleshed out with one additional essay and some unpublished notes. Readers who followed the Vanity Fair columns as they came out will find most of the book familiar, except in one crucial respect. Back then, these essays were the work of a man who was still with us. Now they take on the weight of a posthumous text. Put together in one volume, they constitute a moving and deeply civilised work – the last meditations of a man who never stopped trying to think beyond cant and cliché, even in the direst of circumstances. 

That the great atheist declined to embrace faith on his deathbed almost goes without saying. Those who hoped he would – those who prayed for a conversion – underestimated the richness of Hitchens’s humanism. There are believers who think atheists are so ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of their own deaths that a late and hasty seeing of the light is the only response available to them. This book shows that a literate unbeliever has many more things to throw at death than that. Hitchens faced death the way he faced life: with wit, a hard head, a supreme talent for language, and a bracing lack of fear. He reminds you that a writer armed with these resources can leave behind works at least as wise as any holy text. 

On the theme of religion, the dying Hitchens remained as acerbic and rigorous as he always was. In the second of the book's essays he cruises the “websites of the faithful,” and encounters this gem of cyber-punditry: “Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him?” 

Compare the fatuity of that effort with the sprightly irony of Hitchens’s riposte. “Why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former ‘lifestyle’ would suggest that I got.” Moreover, Hitchens assures us, “my so far uncancerous throat … is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed.”

Irony was always Hitchens’s chief weapon against the closed or literal mind. You’d have forgiven him if he stopped laughing towards the end, but Mortality is one of his funniest books. It proves that wit was not a detachable component of the Hitchens world-view. It was the purest expression of his intelligence and love of life. When chemotherapy deprives him of his hair, he wonders if “the chest hair that was once the toast of two continents” will go next. His libido is another casualty. “If Penélope Cruz were one of my nurses, I wouldn’t even notice.” 

There is nothing in this book about Hitchens’s controversial support for the Iraq war, or about his vexed past as a Trotskyist. Readers wishing to hear his last word on those matters will have to turn to Hitch-22, or else to Arguably, the whopping volume of essays he published in 2011. Mortality is about the end of a life. As his body declines, Hitchens’s gaze – not unsurprisingly – begins to narrow, and to zero in on the pressing question of his own fate. 

Even so, he scrupulously avoids self-indulgence. “To the dumb question ‘Why me?’” he says, “the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: ‘Why not?’” The message is bleak, but the excellence of Hitchens’s phrasing – the way he catches the sheer indifference of the universe's shrug – counteracts the grimness. This is why we read literature. Reality seems more bearable – more human – when it is described by a writer as good as Hitchens. There are no Oprahesque slogans of hope here. Hitchens provides a deeper sort of uplift – the uplift that comes from watching a beautiful mind face the end with clarity and candour. 

Mind you, there are stretches of the book that are not easy to read. Hitchens doesn’t spare the reader much. He describes the vomiting, the “lacerating” pain, the despair when technicians must make twelve agonising attempts to get a needle into his sunken veins. Radiation treatment leaves him with burns so excruciating that he wonders if he’d have been better off dying. The subject matter is as dark as it gets. But Hitchens’s luminous intelligence is a match for it. To the end, he paid his readers the great compliment of assuming they were as tough-minded and free of illusions as he was. 

Before the book closes Hitchens is already gone, and we are left with a chapter of notes and fragments retrieved from his laptop, some of which offer tantalising flashes of the essays he didn’t live to write. The last of these fragments is a quotation from Alan Lightman’s 1993 novel Einstein’s Dreams. The novel imagines a world in which people do not die: “Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers … No one ever comes into his own … Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.” Who would want that? Not Hitchens, who relished freedom above everything else. 

In his time, Hitchens wrote about most other aspects of life. In the end he wrote about death, which is an aspect of life too. When the niece of Marcel Proust was mourning her uncle’s death, a kind man consoled her by saying that nobody was less dead than Proust. In the literary sense the author of Mortality is still with us, and will be for as long as people remain inclined to read good books. At a time when verbal culture is shrivelling, Hitchens reminded us of the value of a life devoted to literature, rational argument, free thought, free speech. He didn’t need to see the light on his deathbed. He had seen it already.

How Did We Get it So Wrong?

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, July 21-22, 2012 

Where were you on the night Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murdering her baby daughter? I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and when the news came over the radio I gave a cheer of approval. I was only twelve, and I like to think I’d have behaved better if I was older. But I doubt I would have. I had the same fever most other people had. I wanted her to be guilty. 

The fever lifted, eventually. All that impressive scientific proof of her guilt melted away. It had been bunkum from the start. Without that evidence, the prosecution case was little more than a theory that defied belief. In June this year, the Northern Territory issued a death certificate confirming that Azaria was taken by a dingo. This gave official sanction to something that every Australian in his or her right mind had already come to believe. The Chamberlains didn’t do it. 

The coroner’s verdict has closed the case in the official sense, but it hasn’t relieved us of the obligation to ask ourselves how we got things so drastically wrong. The Chamberlain affair was Australia’s Dreyfus case, our McCarthy hearings. It was a bacchanal of groupthink and mass credulity. How did it get so out of hand? How can we make sure it never happens again? 

Michael Chamberlain’s new book, Heart of Stone, lets you know how the calamity felt from the receiving end. Tragedy isn’t quite the right word for what the Chamberlains suffered. Their story sounds like a novel that Franz Kafka stopped writing because it was too nightmarish. First their baby girl was eaten by a dingo. Then Lindy was accused of murdering her with a pair of scissors, possibly as a religious rite, and Michael was accused of helping her to dispose of the body. They were both convicted, and Lindy was sentenced to life with hard labour. No wonder we were slow to accept that these people were really the victims of the nightmare, not the perpetrators. The magnitude of the injustice is almost too awful to contemplate. 

Heart of Stone is an uneven book, but it has the merit of telling you exactly what Michael Chamberlain thinks. There is no ghostwriter here to apply polish or spin. What you get is the unvarnished Michael Chamberlain. He is quirky, cranky, and a wee bit tedious on the theme of religion. But his book has a raw authenticity that most books of this kind lack. Chamberlain has a reputation for reining in his emotions. In this book he lets rip. He is an angry man, and he has every right to be. 

Mainly he is angry at the government and people of the Northern Territory. He believes that Territory authorities knew all along that a dingo did it, but blamed the Chamberlains so that tourists wouldn’t be scared away. “The truth,” Chamberlain says, was that “in the heart of their National Park, dingoes [were] allowed to kill children.” These are serious charges, but we must remember that Chamberlain is a fastidious man. He doesn’t say such things lightly. 

Chamberlain is angry at the press, too. He has kept a clippings archive since the early days of the case, and he makes copious use of it in this book. Journalists who made sloppy mistakes thirty years ago are named and quoted. So they should be. The injustice began with a lot of small mistakes, which took alarmingly little time to combine into a wildfire of rancorous error. Once that blaze was raging there was no stopping it. It became hard to think calmly about the facts, and anyway who wanted to? Feelings were enough. 

When the next trial of the century rolls around, we need to remember all that. If we can demonise the Chamberlains, we can demonise anyone. We believed they were guilty because they didn’t behave the way we expected innocent people to behave. Well, we know now that they were innocent. At the very least, the case should leave us with a less narrow understanding of the way innocent people act. 

Michael Chamberlain has some illuminating things to say, so it’s a pity his publishers have released his book in such ragged form. The text is littered with distracting typos. It has been edited either poorly or not at all. There are more than a few sentences that could have used radical surgery. There are references to politicians named Bob Catter and Chris Publick. Some sections don’t even seem to have been run through a spell-checker. Exhoneration? Aboroginal? 

I bet Chamberlain will be mortified that these errors slipped through, because he is a stickler for accuracy. When he mentions a car, he almost invariably specifies its make and model. Describing a brochure about dingoes, he feels obliged to inform you that it was printed in A3 format. Denying the charge that he was an obsessive car-cleaner, he reveals: “The reality was that vacuuming and using a little soap and Armoral [sic], a vinyl sheen product, was about the extent of my interior cleaning.” The man is honest and informative to a fault. He seems incapable of telling you anything less than the truth. Quite often he tells you more of it than is strictly necessary. 

This must be one of the bitterest ironies of the whole case. The Chamberlains as murderers? How did that notion ever get off the ground? They aren’t even capable of telling a lie. At what point, during their thirty years in the spotlight, has either of them said something deceptive or evasive or untrue? Most of us aren’t above rejigging the odd fact to make ourselves look good. The Chamberlains have never done that. Their story has never wavered. They have always tried to describe things exactly as they happened, even when that fetish for precision harmed their cause. 

Rilke defined fame as the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around one name. The Chamberlains had the worst kind of fame. They were famous for something they didn’t do. For years they were obscured under a mountain of misconceptions. Michael’s book clears the last vestiges of all that junk away. He reminds you that there were real people under there all along. Instead of our opprobrium, they deserved our sympathy and respect. Before it happened to the rest of us, the Chamberlain case was something that happened to the Chamberlains – and to Azaria, who was really here too, until she wasn’t.

After the post-human

Lionel Asbo by Martin Amis

Lionel Asbo, Martin Amis’s funniest and most satisfying novel in years, opens on a typically edgy note. Desmond Pepperdine, aged fifteen, is having an incestuous affair with his grandmother. The offence is mitigated, slightly, by the consideration that she is only thirty-nine. Desmond lives in the bleak London borough of Diston, where people breed early and die young – “a world of italics and exclamation marks.” He is the son of a black father he never knew, and a white mother who died when he was twelve. He lives in a council high-rise with his mother’s brother, a fearsome career thug named Lionel Asbo.

Asbo is the latest in a long line of Amis yobs, and he might be the scariest of the lot. An ASBO, in real British life, is an Anti-Social Behaviour Order. Lionel Asbo (né Pepperdine) is served his first ASBO at the age of three – a national record. At eighteen he legally changes his surname to Asbo. Why? Because Lionel goes out of his way to do stupid things. He is also capable, when roused, of committing unspeakable acts of violence ... [read more] 

A Rake's Progress

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 3-4, 2012

Doing the biography of a living writer can’t be easy. Writers like to have control over things – especially over the contents of books. When Martin Amis “co-operated” with his new biographer, Richard Bradford, he didn’t do so unconditionally. He granted Bradford a series of interviews, and gave him the green light to approach certain other approved parties. But he stipulated that some people – including his mother and his ex-wife – would not be involved.  

Considering these restrictions, Bradford hasn’t done an entirely bad job. His book is lopsided, but it’s meaty. It contains a better class of information than it would have if he’d tried to proceed without Amis’s approval. It isn’t a first-rate biography by any means, but it has one crucial thing going for it. Martin Amis has lived a life you don’t want to stop reading about. 

His personal history seems implausibly heightened, like the plot of one of his novels. His father, Kingsley, was one of the liveliest writers of his generation. His mother was a free spirit who routinely let the kids ride around on the roof-rack of her car. He published his first novel at 24; became a rakish celebrity; worked his way through a roster of stunning and well-connected girlfriends. In his mid-twenties he inadvertently fathered a daughter whom he didn’t meet till he was in his mid-forties. His cousin, Lucy Partington, vanished during the 1970s; twenty years later it emerged that she had been abducted and murdered by the serial killer Frederick West. 

The story has been told before – most artfully by Amis himself, in the memoir Experience (2000). Bradford hasn’t retold it very elegantly, but he has augmented it with generous chunks of previously unavailable information. While his interviews with Amis himself have yielded nothing startling, some of Amis’s most articulate friends – including Clive James and the late Christopher Hitchens – have disclosed things they never would have if the project had lacked Amis’s blessing. 

Bradford deserves credit for getting their testimony down, but he has no knack for digesting his source material and converting it into a fluent narrative. He tends to bung down the quotes of his interviewees in verbatim slabs, some of which go on for nearly a page. At times the project veers close to oral biography.  

By letting his sources speak at such length, Bradford keeps reminding you how few of them there are, and how tightly clustered together they are on the Amis sympathy axis. Hitchens goes on the record, lavishly, about the disintegration of Amis’s friendship with Julian Barnes. He divulges the contents of a hostile private letter that Barnes wrote to Amis. This is juicy stuff, all right. But it is, palpably, just one side of the story. Whether Barnes was offered the chance to give his side I don’t know. If he wasn’t, he’s got a right to feel angry all over again. 

It isn’t that one longs to hear Amis get bad-mouthed. It’s that Bradford’s information comes from too few angles to give you a properly rounded account of the man. The pages dealing with the break-up of Martin’s first marriage, to the philosopher Antonia Phillips, are especially threadbare. Forget about getting both sides of that story: Bradford is hard-pressed getting just one.   

But those were the rules, and Bradford can’t be blamed for obeying them. What he can be blamed for, quite loudly, is the slapdash way he handles his material. Bradford has written three previous biographies, including one of Amis’s father. But there are times when you’d be willing to bet he’d never read a literary biography before, let alone written one. He has a weird way of dispensing essential information. 

On page 48, for example, Amis makes an unheralded reference to somebody named Rob. Bradford, not very helpfully, appends the word “Henderson” in square brackets. Four pages later we’re told what we should have been told straight away: that Rob Henderson was, for some time, Amis’s best friend. Rob sticks around in the narrative for several years. Then on page 102 Bradford casually, and without elaboration, announces that Rob, these days, is “dead.” He doesn’t feel the need to expand on that until page 363, where he discloses the cause of death: cancer, in 2001.     

Bradford seems temperamentally averse to saying the right things in the right order, or indeed at all. A biography of Amis, you might think, would be the right place for a clear account of the famous dental procedures he underwent during the nineties. But Bradford doesn’t seem all that interested in clearing the matter up. He quotes a newspaper report suggesting that Amis spent $20,000 having his molars replaced, but doesn’t say whether or not this is accurate. A while later he takes another brief pass at the question, and leaves you with the impression that Amis’s oral issues amounted to nothing worse than a pair of infected wisdom teeth. But Amis’s own memoir recounted, in excruciating detail, the surgical removal and replacement of nearly every tooth in his head. 

On the subject of Amis’s novels, Bradford can be illuminating. When he analyses portions of The Information (1995) in the light of Martin’s concurrent marriage breakdown, he is performing useful criticism, even if he does misremember a couple of plot details. (The hack novelist Gwyn Barry scores his first raging success with Amelior, not with Summertown.) 

Bradford forgets, though, that a biographical approach to Amis’s work can only get you so far. Amis is principally a satirist. He is interested – fearlessly – in the outside world. No doubt the novels contain wisps of his personal history, but that is not what they are about. A critic who plunges into the books in pursuit of Martin’s shadow risks seeing less in them than the average reader will, not more.    

Bradford, a couple of times, can be observed doing exactly that. Pursuing his notion that The Information is “a story about Martin Amis,” he cites the biographical fact that the father of one of Martin’s aristocratic girlfriends was fascinated by Martin’s velvet trousers. He then quotes a long scene from the novel in which an ageing aristocrat contemplates the trousers of Richard Tull, the book’s luckless anti-hero, and demands that he remove them. 

But the joke, in the novel, is that the trousers aren’t Richard’s; they’ve been lent to him by the old man’s daughter, and the old man has abruptly recognized them as his own. Instead of quoting the parts of the passage that make this clear, Bradford replaces them with ellipses. This is a bit naughty of him. It makes the passage sound more straightforwardly autobiographical than it really is.   

Bradford does some similar textual pruning when psychoanalysing Kingsley’s Girl, 20 (1971). He feels that one of the protagonist’s children resembles Kingsley’s rebellious older son, Philip, who by this time was well into his twenties. The character, says Bradford, “frequently tells members of the family and visitors to ‘fuck off’, refuses to go to school and urinates regularly on the bathroom floor.” So he does, but it’s a trifle misleading of Bradford not to mention that he is six years old. 

First-rate biographers do the simple things well. Zachary Leader’s Life of Kingsley Amis (2006) was a model of the genre: lucid, panoramic, reader-friendly. Leader, admittedly, had the luxury of writing about a figure who was no longer around to help or hinder him. But he also had the right temperament for the job. If he had any personal quirks, he kept them out of his book. Bradford puts his in. His book is okay as an interim biography. But when the job of definitive biographer is being filled, I have a feeling that Bradford will, as the early Amis might have phrased it, get aimed.