June 18, 2009 at 3:30 P.M. A new attack on my computer has removed the lower and upper portion of my screen. I will try to make due with the functions that I am still able to perform. I cannot say what damage has been done to these essays as a result of this latest intrusion and alteration of my computer's software. I will do my best to continue writing. I hope that these essays are still available on-line. No warrants or court orders of any kind, to my knowledge, support these illegal actions against my computer and writings. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
June 16, 2009 at 11:50 A.M. Overnight attacks against my computer prevent me from accessing my home e-mail or running scans and updates on my security system. I will continue to write for as long as possible at my home computer, then I will search for public computers to continue working on essays. Defacements and alterations of written works will be corrected as soon as possible. I have experienced these attacks often in the past. I expect to continue experiencing them as they seem to emanate from New Jersey government computers. This is content-based state censorship which is not only unconstitutional, but a federal crime.
Tom Stoppard, Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon (New York: Grove Press, 1966).
Martin Amis, The Information (New York: Harmony Books, 1995).
Martin Amis, Experience (London & New York: Vintage, 2001).
Martin Amis, The Moronic Inferno (New York & London: Penguin, 1986).
Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (New York: Vintage, 2001).
Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004).
Christopher Hitchens, Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (New York: Nation Books, 1990). (This curious relationship between very strange countries is one subject of John Fowles' great novel, Daniel Martin.)
Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (London & New York: Verso, 2000).
William Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (New York: Signet, 1964).
William Somerset Maugham, On Literature (London: Heineman, 1967).
William Hazlitt, Selected Writings (London: Penguin, 1985).
Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (New York & Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1937).
My subject is literary friendships and English prose. I will focus on the Coleridge and Wordsworth of our day, Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. You may substitute your personal literary equivalents for this British version of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Stoppard and Pinter? Stoppard's Lord Malquist and Mr. Moon is a study of British national identity, especially in its masculine form.
I have selected these gentlemen for analysis because they embody the current state of a mythological entity that is rarely seen and that may be permamently endangered -- this is certainly true in America -- and that is the so-called "man of letters." Yes, A.S. Byatt and Julie Burchill make the team. I suppose some of the Femi-Nazi thought police must be included in this category. Female persons such as Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia will insist on their equal status as members of this category of writers.
This literary character is a figure of fun for many cynical journalists today. Cynicism is a required course in American schools of journalism. The poet and essayist journeying forth to write of adventures -- half suffocating in poisoned gas, rarely his own perhaps -- in war-torn distant lands, such as New Jersey. The young Winston Churchill in Cuba, for example, where men were men and women were also (often) men earned the gratitude of a very macho bunch that named a phallic-looking cigar for Sir Winston. Optimistically, this cigar was about a foot-long. There was a statue of Winston Churchill in Havana not far from what used to be called "The Winston Churchill Hotel." Teddy Roosevelt charged up San Juan Hill just as the Spanish charged down that hill. A good time was had by all.
Ernest Hemingway provides one model of the bullfighting, womanizing, two-fisted, hard-drinking foreign correspondent. Naturally, such men are usually gay. Martha Gellhorn provides the female version of this cultural personage. One prototype of this character, is described by Evelyn Waugh, who -- unlike, say, Graham Greene -- would have been horrified at being dismissed in such terms:
"His novels sold fifteen thousand copies in their first year and were read by the people whose opinion John Boot respected. Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price. He had published eight books (beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians), of which most people who lunched with Lady Metroland could remember the names of three or four. He had many charming friends, of whom the most valued was the lovely Mrs. Algernon Stitch."
Scoop (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1937), p. 3.
Notice Waugh's tipping of the hat to an illustrious predecessor, Oscar Wilde. Wilde's reporting from the Western territory of America earned him the right to life as an aesthete in late Victorian, London -- for a while, that is. "Algernon" indeed. Hitchens and Amis are instructed to remember the "importance of being earnest" -- like former New Jersey Governor "Slim" Jim McGreevey. Here is Wilde discoursing on his adventures among those flesh-eating savages known as "Americans":
" ... particularly noticeable is that everybody seems to be in a hurry to catch a train."
This observation is still true -- except that, today, it is a plane that everyone is rushing to "catch."
"This is a state of things which is not favourable to poetry or romance. Had Romeo or Juliet been in a constant state of anxiety about trains, or had their minds been agitated by the question of return-tickets, Shakespeare could not have given us those lovely balcony scenes which are so full of poetry and pathos."
Wilde visited many towns in the "Wild West" while wearing silk breeches and a green cravat. Wilde was delighted to lecture on "the ethics of art" to the various desperados. In one small mining town in Colorado ...
"... I lectured them on [aesthetics]. I read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the inquiry 'Who shot him?' They afterwards took me to the dancing saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come accross. Over the piano was a printed notice: -- 'PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST. HE IS DOING HIS BEST.' ..."
Oscar Wilde, "Impressions of America," in Richard Ellman, ed., The Critic as Artist: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 9-10.
This is, of course, also the most rational form of political punditry in today's America. We should place a similar sign above the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court building: "Please do not shoot the politicians and judges. They're doing their best -- and mind the spitoon."
Charles Dickens was delighted at the large number of spitoons placed, thoughtfully, all over the Halls of Congress and the dilapidated White House. Sadly, we can no longer afford many spitoons due to the looming financial crisis. Amis and Hitchens are fascinating because of their very British appreciation of America. Both men have suggested that, in some important ways, the greatest energy in English language and literature shifted in the twentieth century from Britain to America, and (I think) back to the British isles. Zadie Smith? Penelope Lively? Rachel Cusk? Anyone seen these women? Or are they alter egos for Mr. Amis?
Salman Rushdie's Fury captured, perfectly, a difficult moment in New York and his essays are so well-written that one cannot help hating the man. Unfair, I say. Cambridge? Salman Rushdie's cosmopolitan style and flawless ear always makes me feel that I am not dressed properly. I find myself reaching for an invisible pipe when reading Rushdie's prose. Sebastian Faulks, Julian Barnes, a recent discovery for me is Christopher Rush. People say that someone named "Susan Minot" (obviously an American of upscale pedigree) can write. Perhaps Ms. Minot merely saves whales. Uncouth American "A.M. Homes" brings up the rear. Ian McKewen writes almost perfect novels, which I love to read, even as I plan to murder the man setting such an impossibly high standard of literary achievement for the rest of us. Justifiable homicide.
Literary ladies of all genders -- no, "women" or "female persons"! -- have the advantage of feigned or actual lesbianism, radical feminism, slim physiques (corpulence is a mortal offense among upper middle class white women in Manhattan), modishly left-wing views, and the undying fawning admiration of The New Yorker. Few "normal persons" (male, female, or any other option) will read their writings for pleasure, perhaps, but no doubt these chi-chi "authors" have attended something called a "bread loaf conference" in Iowa. This allows radical females to be published and favorably reviewed in The New York Times. How does it feel to reduced to a cultural stereotype, "ladies"? ("How Censorship Works in America.") Not very nice, is it? I average several hundred intrusion attempts and viruses per day. Coincidence?
What is emerging today is a kind of fusion of British-American English -- this is mostly because of movies -- a new English language is being born that is flexible, strong, incredibly beautiful, containing powerful, unexpected dissonances and tensions between tones, inflections, exploding metaphorical meanings with echoes of great literature and the abrupt, also vulgar idiom of business and law. One place to look for what I mean is in Amis' (Yes, I can write the possessive this way) muscular prose and the Hitch's street smart -- yet highly literate -- "voice" in his essays. Thus, I will supply some of my highlighted passages from the essays of these two writers:
"Holmes has one thing in common with every subsequent fictional detective, which is an innate lack of respect for the official gendarmerie. The forces of law and order are not represented as corrupt or cruel, but they are depicted as if they are not up to their job. Law-and-order man that he was, Conan-Doyle became involved in a number of nonpolitical cases of justice miscarried. The most renowned of these campaigns was his exhausting but finally successful effort to clear the name of George Edalji, an unpopular and illfavored Parsee Indian, living near Birmingham, who was falsely accused of a series of cattle mutilations. On other occasions -- sometimes approached by admirers who believed that he must possess Sherlockian skills, but also in his capacity as a gentleman and a conscientious public figure -- he was able to identify a serial killer, to reopen the case of a victim of mistaken identity named Oscar Slater, and to reprieve a collie dog named Rex, who had been set up for savaging a sheep."
Unacknowledged Legislation, p. 339. (Hitchens.)
In this passage and many others like it, Hitchens' American and British styles blend perfectly, while the motive of his own journalism and crusading on behalf of "the little guy or gal" and against abuse of power is revealed. Hitchens is passionate about justice for powerless individuals and, socially, for all of us. His humanity is found in his most "objective" prose, together with a wonderful ear for the rythms of English sentences. Read the foregoing paragraph out loud and you will not detect a single bump in the road nor a harsh note. This is not unusual for Hitchens. Euphony is rare in today's popular journalism. Discussing Oscar Wilde's journalism, for example, Hitchens provides observations that are highly poignant to my life-experiences:
"Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who knew everybody and went everywhere and was one of the great poets of the decade, went to a 'brilliant luncheon' given by Margot Asquith and her husband shortly after their wedding. He could not keep the word 'brilliant' out of his diary entry: 'Of all those present, and they were most of them brilliant talkers, he [Oscar Wilde] was without comparison the most brilliant, and in a perverse mood he chose to cross swords with one after the other of them, overpowering each in turn with his wit, and making special fun of Asquith, his host that day, who only a few months later, as Home Secretary, was prosecuting him.' ... "
This sounds depressingly familiar to me:
"Yes, quite. There is a revenge that the bores and the bullies and the bigots exact on those who are too witty. Wilde could never hope to escape the judgment of the pompous and hypocritical, because he could not help teasing them."
Unacknowledged Legislation, p. 7. (Hitchens.)
By way of comparison, see the discussion of Evelyn Waugh's genius in Hitchens' Blood, Class and Empire (pp. 38-39, pp. 46-47). Finally, Hitchens' review of a new biography of Byron is a delight for the eye and ear. I have read it several times. You will learn how to write a book review from this article:
"The two great and contrasting episodes when his life and work functioned in harmony, rather than in antagonism, were his experiences in Venice and Greece. Byron had a prejudice in favor of amphibious locations, perhaps because in the water his crippled leg was no disadvantage; but his feeling for the Serenissima [Venice] went well beyond that, and so much did he help to rekindle aesthetic and poetic sympathy for the city that John Ruskin decades later, viewed it almost entirely through his eyes. ... "
Love, Poverty and War, p. 106. (Hitchens.)
The figure emerging from Amis' memoir, Experience is a Byronic-Wildean-Churchillian journalist, a man improbably called "Christopher Hitchens," who is clearly the product of Evelyn Waugh's imagination surfacing in a moment of dementia for the British novelist of Brideshead Revisited fame, and only then regurgitated by Martin Amis:
"My passenger was Christopher Hitchens and I was taking him to Vermont to meet Saul Bellow. We would have dinner and stay the night and drive back to Cape Cod the following morning. Cape Cod was where I spent eight or nine summers with my first wife, and with the boys, on Horseleech pond, south of Wellfleet ... The trope sinister balls went back to our days at the New Statesman. In 1978 the incumbent editor, Anthony Howard, bowed to historical forces and honorably stepped down. I and the Hitch were part of the complicated, two-tier, six-member committee that would decide on his successor. During an interview Neal Acheson, one of the three candidates on the final shortlist, came up with the following: 'Anyone who resists the closed shop is going to get the biggest bloody nose of all time.' I said afterwards that this was sinister balls, and Christopher, whether or not he agreed (he was, of course, much more pro-union than I was), certainly seemed to be taken by the phrase. So no 'sinister balls' meant no vehement assertions of left-wing tendency. In 1989 temporary fluctuations -- going under the name of Political Correctness -- had rigged up Saul Bellow as a figure of the right; he was under frequent attack, and I felt that he deserved a peaceful evening in his own home. As it happens I now believe that Bellow and Hitchens are not dissimilar in their political intuitions -- especially in their sense of how America is carved up."
Experience, pp. 254-255. (Amis.)
The account of these two British adventurers in Vermont is already a classic. Needless to say, the evening with Bellow was less than a glittering success. I am sure that, at some level, Amis expected as much and was supplying himself with the ingredients for a key chapter in his memoir. There is a curious, Holmes and Watson-like feel to this literary friendship between Amis and the Hitch.
The two British-American writers exchange roles in order to keep the critics guessing. Occasionally, the Hitch appears as an incarnation of Evelyn Waugh's nightmarish vision of Fleet Street or a Graham Greene-like sinner, doomed, tottering on the edge of damnation as Amis observes the spectacle from the wings and takes careful notes. At other times, Amis surfaces in dark glasses and trailing a long scarf, as a senior Harry Potter figure, fresh from an Oxford Union debate and a night out with fashion models in New York's seamy underbelly, while Hitchens trails along with a tape recorder. Each man has created a legend for his friend. Both are great actors who have constructed larger-than-life characters bearing their names and enjoying strange adventures in the so-called "real world." This is certainly not to deny that the events described by each man have indeed taken place, it is to remind readers that their genius is all in the telling. Speaking of genius, here is the famous first paragraph of The Information -- a book that takes you into the heart of darkness that is manhood in maturity:
"Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that ... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women -- and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses -- will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female-need-to-know, 'What is it?' And the men say, 'Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.' ... "
The Information, p. 3. (Amis.)
I recall an interview with Iris Murdoch -- she used a phrase that turns up in several of her best novels -- where the (by then) Grand Damme of British letters said: "People live with the most astonishing burdens of suffering. It is the business of the writer to discover that burden and reveal it," sometimes to the sufferer him- or herself.
It is not enough for artists or philosophers to say "adjust" when confronted with human tragedy and despair. A culture that travels from Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter or Silvia Plath to "Dr. Phil" for wisdom is in a very sad state. One more quote and I will bring this elegant essay to a gentle and classy close, like a Noel Coward comedy, with a hope that you will read the books of these two friends:
"I thought I was wise to all his [Gore Vidal's] moves. I knew Vidal would have me frowning and nodding and smiling and smirking -- with admiration, and exasperation, and scandalized dissent. I never dreamed Vidal would have me piping my eyes, and staring wanly out of the window, and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timber). Approaching seventy, Vidal now takes cognisance of the human heart, [he always did, Martin,] and reveals that he has one. Palimpsest is a tremendous read from start to finish. [I agree.] It is also a proud and serious and truthful book."
War Against Cliche, p. 279. (Amis.)
Palimpsest is Vidal's The Information. Vice versa? Just "vice," Vidal would say. I know that I am in the presence of a magnificent writer merely on the basis of the sound of the word "and" in this paragraph by Amis. I thought I knew all their moves -- Amis and Hitchens were familiar to me -- then they have the gall, the unmitigated cheek, to write at the level of genius of men's lives and of the always shameful and evil figures that appear in public life with passion and rage at these figures' many crimes in politics or world events. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
These middle-aged British writers have managed to get me to reenlist in one more "crusade" for justice and love. The greatest masculine intimacy is shared anger at injustice leading to participation in struggle for a good cause. This masculine intimacy is not gender-specific. ("Playing Snookers With Martin Amis.")
Amis and Hitchens are two of the "good guys." We need good guys and gals these days when the villains are winning -- or so it seems -- and those of us dusting off our suits of armor, sharpening our swords to slay the dragons of greed, thievery, rape, exploitation and duplicity find our ranks diminished, while former friends are increasingly attracted by the rewards and perks available on the side of darkness. These rewards include tangible things -- like tenure and judgeships. What is one to do? Life is easier on the Dark Side. Sinister balls.
I put on my dented armor, take up my shield, join Christopher and Martin at Agincourt. Make that, New Jersey. As we await the arrival of the enemy, laughter can be heard and sometimes poetry is whispered, moments before the battle resumes. We charge the enemy as we raise our voices in unison. "Once more into the breach! ..."
