Christopher Hitchens / Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, the Impossible Man

How the most exasperating of poets met his match

By Christopher Hitchens

IN MAY 1941, Philip Larkin was the treasurer of the Oxford University English Club and in that capacity had to take the visiting speaker George Orwell out to dinner after he had addressed the membership on the subject of “Literature and Totalitarianism.” Larkin’s main recollection: “We took Dylan Thomas to the Randolph and George Orwell to the not-so-good hotel. I suppose it was my first essay in practical criticism.”

Christopher Hitchens / Hurricane Lolita

HURRICANE LOLITA 

by Christopher Hitchens

In Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which young female students meet in secret with Xeroxed copies of Nabokov’s masterpiece on their often chaste and recently chadored laps, it is at first a surprise to discover how unscandalized the women are. Without exception, it turns out, they concur with Vera Nabokov in finding that the chief elements of the story are “its beauty and pathos.” They “identify” with Lolita, because they can see that she wants above all to be a normal girl-child; they see straight through Humbert, because he is always blaming his victim and claiming that it was she who seduced him. And this perspective—such a bracing change from our conventional worried emphasis on pedophilia—is perhaps more easily come by in a state where virgins are raped before execution because the Koran forbids the execution of virgins; where the censor cuts Ophelia out of the Russian movie version of Hamlet; where any move that a woman makes can be construed as lascivious and inciting; where goatish old men can be gifted with infant brides; and where the age of “consent” is more like nine. As Nafisi phrases it,

This was the story of a twelve-year-old girl who had nowhere to go. Humbert had tried to turn her into his fantasy, into his dead love, and he had destroyed her. The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her. Yet the novel, the finished work, is hopeful, beautiful even, a defense not just of beauty but of life … Warming up and suddenly inspired, I added that in fact Nabokov had taken revenge on our own solipsizers; he had taken revenge on the Ayatollah Khomeini …

Aldous Huxley

BRAVE NEW WORLD: FOREWORD BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

The 100 best novels / No 56  / Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Aldous Huxley absolutely detested mass culture and popular entertainment, and many of his toughest critical essays, as well as several intense passages in his fiction, consist of sneers and jeers at the cheapness of the cinematic ethic and the vulgarity of commercial music. He chanced to die on the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 (being cheated of a proper obituary notice as a result, and sharing the date of decease with C.S. Lewis, chronicler of Narnia), so he missed the televisual event which once and for all confirmed the “global village.” But if he were able to return to us, and cast his scornful and lofty gaze on our hedonistic society, he would probably be relatively unsurprised at the way things are going. Sex has been divorced from procreation to a degree hard to imagine even in 1963, and the current great debates in the moral sciences concern the implications of reproductive cloning and of the employment of fetal stem-cells in medicine. The study of history is everywhere, but especially in the United States, in steep decline. Public life in the richer societies is routinely compared to the rhythms of spectacle and entertainment. A flickering hunger for authenticity pushes many people to explore the peripheral and shrinking worlds of the “indigenous.” This was all prefigured in Brave New World. So, in a way, was the “one child” policy now followed in Communist China, where to the extent that the program is successful we will not only see a formerly clannish society where everyone is an only child but a formerly Marxist one that has no real cognate word for “brotherhood.” Intercontinental rocket travel has not become the commonplace Huxley anticipated, but its equivalents have become a cliché: jumbo jets do the same work of abolishing distance for the masses even though, in a strange moment of refusal, the developed world has stepped back from the supersonic Concorde and reverted to the days of voyaging comfortably below the speed of sound.

Joan Didion / Christopher Hitchens

JOAN DIDION

In The Year of Magical Thinking, the 2005 best-seller, Joan Didion dissected the trauma of losing her husband, John Gregory Dunne. With Blue Nights, to be published in November by Knopf, she agonizingly explores the heavier blow that followed: the death of their daughter, Quintana Roo. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS contemplates a tragic achievement

OCTOBER 2011 CHRISTOPHER HITCHENSANNIE LEIBOVITZ

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain. This endurance need not necessarily be one’s own: indeed, the experience of watching over a sibling or mate in extremis can be even more acute. But nothing, according to the experts, compares to the clutching, choking nightmare that engulfs the one who is slowly bereft of a child.

It is horrible to see oneself die without children. Napoleon Bonaparte said that.

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead. Euripides said that.

When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.

I said that.

Joan Didion, here slightly syncopating in the Bob Dylan manner, has striven with intense dignity and courage in Blue Nights to deepen and extend the effect of The Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 narrative of the near-simultaneous sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the onset of the fatal illness of their daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael. In the course of setting it down, she came to realize that she could no longer compose in the old style: the one that she had “supposed to be like writing music.”

And what kind of music could this have been, except the Blues? But blue is more than the shade of a symphony. It is where the “bolt” comes from, as Didion mordantly notes. It can register the transit of an entire evening, from the first, faint translucent gloaming to the near-inky cerulean black.

The long day wanes along a spectrum of blue. So did the short life of the keen, merry girl, who wasn’t too spoiled by showbiz or room service, who shrewdly opposed her mother’s choice of poem at her father’s memorial service. And whose solemn recommendation about death was “Don’t dwell on it.”

That last choice is not available to her mother:

Vanish.

Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.

Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.

Go back into the blue.

I myself placed her ashes in the wall.

I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.

I know what it is I am now experiencing.

I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.

The fear is not for what is lost.

What is lost is already in the wall.

What is lost is already behind the locked doors.

The fear is for what is still to be lost.

You may see nothing still to be lost.

Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.

In this supremely tender work of memory, Didion is paradoxically insistent that as long as one person is condemned to remember, there can still be pain and loss and anguish.

VANITY FAIR