Christopher once wrote of ‘the light, continuous English rain’ that was part of his ‘birthright’. I know that rain, I know that island rain, which hardly has the weight to fall and comes on tiptoe, as if trying to pose as the silent element; and it is not the silent element.
Snow is the silent element. It is also the informative element: silently snow tells you, at great length and with great precision, how old you are, how old in body, how old in mind. And how does snow communicate this?
When I was a boy in winter I used to go to sleep tearfully praying for snow, tearfully imploring the heavens to send me snow. And I can still taste the deliciously mentholated pang in my throat whenever I jerked up from sleep, two-handedly wrenched open the curtains on the side of my bed – and saw a world of white…Snow loves the young (giving them snowballs and snowmen together with many other treats); and the young love it back.
But in recent years a world of white does no more than replenish my loathing and dread. After a night of snowfall, when snow has heavily but silently settled, I winch up the blinds in the morning and face an antagonist who I half-hoped had forgotten me…Snow hates the old.
There are gradations, true. To this day, reluctantly and with thorough ill grace, I still have to hand it to snow. I don’t want to go out into it (I want to stay indoors with a rug on my lap), and I don’t want it to tell me how old I am; but I do still want to marvel at it, while it’s white and new. The silent element, snow falls silently, and has the other-worldly power to silence a city…
But all that’s over for another year, thank God; and then came spring, and here is summer.
Hello again, thank you for coming, and welcome back…All right, not back exactly. After a year as wandering freeloaders, as passengers, we’re customers again, and this is our new place, up on the twentieth floor (my sons call it the skypad). And yes thanks, you find me in fairly resilient spirits – for three reasons.
First, my Green Card finally came through, after however many years it’s been. So no more staggering from office to office at the hateful Department of Homeland Security. Tax cuts for the rich don’t trickle down, but moral squalor in high places is the Steamboat Geyser; and the atmosphere in and around the Immigration Court is now one of smug and insolent contempt. On your way into Federal Plaza you can witness teenage doormen jeering at bewildered Hispanic couples because they can’t even speak English…
Second, Trump is in trouble as the mid-term elections loom. Of course, he’s always in trouble, and always will be, for this simple reason: he honestly can’t tell the difference between right and wrong…No, even if he finagles his way to a second term, we have no plans to move to Canada. Trump’s not a reason to leave; he’s a reason to stay. Later tonight I’m joining my immediate family and about two dozen of our American cousins. And that’s what Americans are – my cousins.
Three, the last page of Inside Story is now visible to the naked eye. Finishing a novel is usually the cause of grim satisfaction with a trace of tristesse. But just now the emotions feel rather differently configured…
Anyway, I suppose, my friend, that this will be goodbye. We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve shown incredible patience and constancy. So let’s mark the occasion by taking an ice bucket and a bottle of wine out on to the roof, where we can watch the sunset.
…Have we got everything? This staircase has no handrail, not yet, and I’ve learnt that approximately 100 per cent of elderly disasters happen on stairs. And even you should be careful, carrying all that. Just two short half-flights and we’ll be there.
You know, in Uruguay, very near our house, there was a nightclub on a sloping lawn and all these young people used to gather at dusk to see the show. And when the sun at last disappeared over the far brim of the South Atlantic they would applaud, every night, with sincerity and gratitude. Very Uruguayan, that, and very sweet we always thought. And vaguely ancient as well as vaguely postmodern. Hang on. Mind the…
New York Harbor.
With Liberty Island in the middle of it. Behold…Lady Liberty often makes me think of Phoebe Phelps – physically, at seventy-five, enormous and weighty, and seemingly without an ounce of superfluous tissue, hard to the touch, like a rubber dinghy stiffly – maximally – inflated. But what’s the opposite of liberty? Subjection. Encumbrance. Thraldom. Lifelong liability (from French lier, ‘to bind’). Well then – Lady Liability…
Whenever I look out there at the whole field of view I find I’ve got myself trapped in a metaphor, because I keep imagining it as a kind of urban Serengeti. Look at all the cranes, the near ones and the ones over there, in New Jersey, look at the exact angle of their necks, and don’t you think for a moment that they’re herds of mechanical giraffes? And those various beasts in and around the water, the hippos of the storage tugs, the great stretching crocs of the barges, the Jurassic diehards of the…Et cetera, et cetera, with further correspondences rather too readily suggesting themselves. It’s known as an ‘epic simile’. But let’s cast off its shackles…
See that plane approaching so low over the water – at helicopter height. It’s a widebody, what the industry calls a heavy. Now to my sensorium it is homing in – with every sign of vicious determination – on Freedom Tower, there, One World Trade Center, the tallest structure in your sight…This trick of the eye is a ‘parallax illusion’, having to do with perceptions of depth. All will right itself the moment the plane passes safely beyond its target. As it does – now…A trick of the eye, and the reflex of a mind conditioned by 2001 – when you were a child. I really should be able to tell the difference, because the planes of September 11 were going about three times faster than that sedate and blameless 767…
Our whole section of downtown Brooklyn is a martyr to the US system of criminal justice. Courthouses and lockups and parole-board fora, and all the go-betweens – bailbondsmen, shyster lawyers, bent attorneys – who work the interface between freedom and its opposite. As well as busloads of police, who then fan out on motorbikes and in squadcars, and they’ve even got one of those pathetic two-seaters, with NYPD emblazoned on it…
See that fortified rooftop right in front of us? I tell you, that there’s the exercise yard of Brooklyn Detention Complex on Atlantic Avenue…It’s an encaged basketball court, and through the mesh you glimpse these lithe figures bobbing around within. Not much to see but plenty to hear. There was a ringing Fuck you followed by the usual six-letter salutation, but it was black-on-black – and friendly, even admiring, in tone, as if in recognition of some successful stunt or feint beneath the hoop…
They’re all black. The queues outside the seats of trial and correction, they’re all black. Last year Elena toured a high-security prison upstate – they’re all black. And we spent half a day together on the vast holding pen of Rikers Island – and they’re all black. It feels like a dogged answer to the African-American ‘question’. In about 1985 someone suddenly said, I know – let’s just lock them all up…No, really. Have a look at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
See that massive orange brick powering through the water? It could be a prison hulk on its way to Alcatraz, couldn’t it, but it’s only the Staten Island ferry, full of commuters and a few daytrippers in funny hats. I love that ferry now. So ingenuously, so loyally ploughing its furrow…
Yes, it was strange, it was passing strange with the Hitch. I don’t live in fear of being thought sentimental, as you know, but even I find it a shade embarrassing. Anyway, let’s save that for last.
…Look at Lady Liberty there, holding her golden torch aloft. She’s actually staring right at us, though we can’t clearly see that face of hers, with the Roman nose and the sneer of cold command – a conqueror’s face. And genderless too. It was always thought that the sculptor, Bartholdi, modelled her on his mother, but a recent view has it that he modelled her on his brother…
I went there, I went inside her, back in 1958, when I was nine. In her left hand she holds a tablet with a date in Roman numerals – July 4, 1776. At her feet lies a broken chain…
Far, far and away the most hateful thing about DJT is his – well, let me put it this way.
Picture in your mind the four black college students who in mid-afternoon ordered four cups of coffee at the wrong Woolworth’s lunch counter (Whites Only) on Monday, February 1, 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina; they were denied service and directed to the Colored Section, heckled by incredulous locals. But they stayed in their seats, reading, until the store closed. This taut ritual was re-enacted the next day, and the next, and the next, in ever-strengthening numbers on both sides. By the end of the week, over 1,000 black protestors were faced by an equal number of whites…
Picture in your mind Ruby Bridges, who in the same year walked to school accompanied by four federal marshals, in New Orleans, a slender six-year-old in white bobby socks, clutching a satchel and a yellow ruler; she crossed the cordon of hollering, gesticulating citizens with her head unbowed and with firm steps entered William Frantz Elementary. All the other children had been spirited away by their parents, and all the teachers had left their posts and were on strike, all except one…
As we know and have always known, there is in this country a vast and inveterate minority (about 35 per cent) whose sympathies lie not with the silently studious protestors, in Greensboro, but with the rejectionists yelling in their ears and pouring sodas on their heads and then beating them to the ground; not with six-year-old Ruby Bridges, in New Orleans, but with the hate-warped face of the housewife in the picket line brandishing a black doll in a toy coffin.
…Is Trump a genuine white supremacist – or did he surmise, early on, that white supremacism was his only path to power? Is he an entirely unreflecting barbarian or is he an unusually scurvy opportunist? He is surely both. In any case, he thought it worth doing: to take the great American stain/taint/wound/block/blight/shame/crime – hate crime – and give it another season in the sun.
On clear mornings she looks at her very best, she looks as she’s supposed to look, an iconic beacon lighting the way to a glorious idea. When the clouds are low and the mist thickens, she looks like the remaining stub of a civilisation that has come and gone: two vast and trunkless legs of stone, in the soiled remnants of a robe.
…Fog, the other silent element, joining everything to everything else in a night of grey. Though it can’t silence a city, fog can subdue it, fog can talk it down and make it tamer – but mere rain, mere darkness is capable of that…
Look! I’ve never seen this before. Out in the estuary, yes, but not so close, not in the stretch before Governors and Liberty. The Staten Island ferries are about to cross.
One incoming, one outgoing. It’s like an eclipse. Two become one, just for a moment – and then become two again.
Yes, now you ask, I do think about death, almost constantly in the sense that it’s always in my thoughts, like an unwanted song. That’s why I take it very kindly that you’re so young. Because you’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting. And when you go maybe my afterlife, too, will come to an end, my afterlife of words.
And I’ll join the unknown German soldier in 1918. For by my glee might many men have laughed / And of my weeping something had been left, / Which must die now. That’ll be the third death: first my urge, then my life, then my written words.
Fair’s fair, and a promise is a promise. And we’ll come to the bequest of the Hitch very soon. But first…
We’ve talked about immortality. Have you heard about the ‘transhumanist’ movement? It’s for people who not only wouldn’t mind being mechanical (like that herd of giraffes over there), with carbon-fibre ‘blades’ instead of legs and so on; they also wouldn’t mind being electronic, equipped for instance with bat radar…How many of these questing Prometheans, I wonder, are on the minimum wage. No, unlike literature, transhumanism isn’t open to everybody…
I mean, who cares, but transhumanism sounds to me like an offshoot of cryonics – the live-forever scam. Had not the presidency intervened, Trump Immortality might well’ve been Donald J.’s next business move, after Trump Faith School and Trump Meatloaf…Obedient to cryonic guidance, you get your corpse bedded down in a vatlike icebox, and then you wait. Online I saw one of the ads: the photo of a man who looked like – who looked like a coiffed American sumo wrestler, in a tweed jacket and a huge equilateral tie knot, grinning in front of his fridge – empty, I’ll bet, except for a yoghurt and a couple of beers.
Under this individual’s care, your remains will look forward to a far-future society that for some reason will feel the need to defrost and revive a squad of self-infatuated and fatally diseased old dupes – ailing hoarders who did whatever they could to linger on in the counting house…
The dead-body freeze costs about $200,000, but it’s just 80,000 if you opt for ‘the neuro’ – the head-only package.
As on the question of the earthly utopia, so with eternal life: literature is unanimous in regarding human perfection or indefinite perpetuation as essentially horrific. Try this instead.
‘The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, / The vapours weep their burden to the ground, / Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, / And after many a summer dies the swan.’ Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’. I’ve noticed again and again that it is poetry, and poetry alone, that can face death on anything like equal terms.
Prose is too fast-moving. To face death it has to be slowed down to almost a processional pace. Jorge Luis Borges (who wrote a terrifying story called ‘The Immortal’) elsewhere surmised that ‘Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’ Suggesting that death is not an intruder but a resident; the river, the tiger, the fire – they’re already there.
It is right, it is fitting, it is as it should be, that we die. ‘Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see anything,’ wrote Saul Bellow. And without death there is no art, because without death there is no interest, or to be more precise there is no fascination (a fine word, that, and as Nabokov said of a different sort of fine word, ‘a welcome guest to my prose’). Fascination means, one, the tendency to engross irresistibly, and, two (semi-archaically), the ambition ‘to deprive (prey) of the ability to resist or escape the power of a gaze’…
Why is dying so hard, physically? That’s what I want to know. Oh, the toil, the slave labour of dying. Oh, the great sweat of death…
Time is the enemy of the writer as an individual, in that the longevity of talent hasn’t kept pace with other advances; but immortality, like utopia, is the enemy of writing tout à fait – root, bole, branch, and twig. Writers used to die young, remember (in common with absolutely everyone else)…Christopher had already outlasted Shakespeare, the Immortal, by a whole decade when I joined his death watch in Houston on December 15, 2011. My best friend was sixty-two. That is not right, that is not fitting, that is not as it should be.
On December 16 I flew back from Houston to New York. Funnily and mistakenly enough, the weather was fresh and bright. But I was undeceived by the blue skies, or so I thought. This is a disaster, I kept telling myself again and again. This is clearly an absolute disaster…
I woke up the next morning in a state of puzzled self-exploration. Then I lived another day, December 17, at home with my family. And then another day, walking out once or twice in my neighbourhood and enjoying the customary interactions in the shops and outlets of Cobble Hill; and the morning after that I woke up changed. The feeling didn’t merely loiter – it had established itself. But I couldn’t trust it; I felt I just couldn’t trust it.
Then Blue, in one of our written exchanges, revealed that she had it too! Now, I’d lost a beloved friend; but Blue had lost a beloved spouse…When we met up for dinner in Manhattan we had a gripped and gripping exchange – like patients comparing symptoms, or more like a pair of hikers sharing notes about the same journey. We had both experienced it: an infusion, an invasion of overpowering happiness. Happiness: the delight of sentience. I asked her,
‘He wouldn’t be hurt, would he? Hurt that we’re not lying around ruined for ever?’
‘No! He’d be thrilled.’
‘…That’s true. Of course he would. He’d be thrilled.’
All right, this is what seemed to have taken place. The love of life of the Hitch – the existential amour fou of the Hitch, the ‘uncontrollable or obsessive passion’ – had in part transferred itself to us. And henceforth, we agreed, it would be our solemn duty to maintain it and to honour it.
After seven and a half years the happiness is still there, weakened or let’s say qualified by the narrowing stretch of time before I join him – as they used to put it. The happiness is also, I have to confide, slightly but persistently wrinkled by guilt. What am I guilty of, apart from surviving and living longer? It comes from a structural peculiarity of the death watch.
In an early poem, ‘Wants’, Larkin spoke of ‘the costly aversion of the eyes away from death’. But the fixed stare is also costly – prohibitive. Halfway through an eight-hour death watch, you stop wanting them to wake up, and start wanting them to sleep for ever: in other words, you wish them gone. The death watch forces this treason on you – you just can’t get out of the way of it…
I watched my little sister die, in the year 2000; and in her case I didn’t have time to wish her gone. Myfanwy was dead within half an hour and I never even knew it. Because she was still breathing, lustily breathing, until the nurse came back in and compassionately pointed to the flat line. Seeing my astonishment, she pointed to the respirator, the machine that was doing Myfanwy’s breathing…So there was my sister, a panting corpse at the age of forty-six. Surely, surely, I could’ve done something about that. Couldn’t I?
Anyway, down with the death watch, to hell with the death watch, death to the death watch.
Bracingly but also demandingly, it turns out that there is a moral order, and that we are moral beings. Our big transgressions of course stay with us, but so do all the little ones. Each of our sins of commission and omission, every instance of cruelty and neglect, every snub – every slight: every brick we’ve ever dropped lands on our own foot, in the end, and goes on smarting till we die.
Now there is the sun, and we can stare at it…Jesus, it looks like a real star, don’t you think? Not the twinkle-twinkle type but a star as it actually is – a steady-state fusion bomb of boiling gas, with in this case a diameter of a million earthling miles. I have the greatest respect for the prince of our solar system, but I’ve never seen it look more like a furious cosmic zit getting ready to burst. And to the eye it’s almost as smooth as glass…There it goes, there it goes. And now it’s gone.
A final piece of vocational advice.
Temperament (as I’ve said) is vital. You need an unusual appetite for solitude, and a strong and durable commitment to the creative form (you have to want to be in it for life). These are qualities that the dedicated reader already has. You will also need this strange affinity with the reader – unendingly complex though almost entirely unconscious. Then there is a fourth element…
One night in my twentieth year Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard and I watched a TV play about a poet. Not a historical poet. It didn’t begin, ‘John Clare grew up in a rural setting’, and then give you a shot of a sheep saying baa. No, the poet was contemporary, and it seemed uncomplainingly minor, getting on in years now, and pottering about in and around his suburban semi-detached. The play was called He Used to Notice Such Things, and it was narrated by the poet’s wife.
‘Cuthbert would take an orange from the fruit bowl and weigh it in his hands and examine the tiny stipples on its surface with a smile of childish wonder.’ That kind of thing. Old Cuthbert was the same in the street, like a medieval village idiot airdropped into a metropolis – utterly confounded by the sight of a bus, a letterbox, a telegraph pole…Jane was quietly sceptical, but Kingsley and I writhed and swore and sneered our way through the whole ninety minutes.
For a long time now I’ve been wanting to get hold of Kingsley’s spirit and say, Dad, I’m sorry about this, but do you remember the TV play about that fucking old fool of a poet? Cuthbert? He Used to Notice Such Things? Well listen. It was trite and corny and thoroughly and comprehensively ballsaching – but it wasn’t wrong. Not wrong. To be a poet, to be a writer, you have to be continuously surprised. You have to have something of the fucking old fool in you.
Borges, in his long conversation with the Paris Review, at one point spoke with bafflement about all the people who simply fail to notice the mystery and glamour of the observable world. In a sentence that stands out for its homeliness, he said, ‘They take it all for granted.’ They accept the face value of things…
Writers take nothing for granted. See the world with ‘your original eyes’, ‘your first heart’, but don’t play the child, don’t play the innocent – don’t examine an orange like a caveman toying with an iPhone. You know more than that, you know better than that. The world you see out there is ulterior: it is other than what is obvious or admitted.
So never take a single speck of it for granted. Don’t trust anything, don’t even dare to get used to anything. Be continuously surprised. Those who accept the face value of things are the true innocents, endearingly and in a way enviably rational: far too rational to attempt a novel or a poem. They are unsuspecting – yes, that’s it. They are the unsuspecting.
As a counterpoise this too remember. You are a stranger in a strange land – but you come to it with a…
All right. Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, was written in a Berlin boarding house, when both the author and the century were about twenty-five. His situation was as follows: having fled the Bolsheviks, he and his Jewish bride now awaited the Nazis (the NSDAP was formed in 1920); his father had been shot dead by a (Russian) fascist in 1922; his mother and his sisters were penniless in Prague. Vladimir was deracinated, declassed, and destitute. And yet Mary bears not the slightest trace of melancholy, let alone alienation or nausée. Indeed, the only angst Nabokov ever suffered from had to do with ‘the impossibility of assimilating, swallowing, all the beauty in the world’. And his first novel ends with his promise to meet that world with ‘a fresh, loving eye’. That’s your situation. You are a stranger in a strange land; but you come to it with a fresh and loving eye.
Saul Bellow was a phenomenon of love; he loved the world in such a way that his readers reciprocated and loved him in return. The same goes for Philip Larkin, but more lopsidedly; the world loved him and he loved the world in his way (he certainly didn’t want to leave it), but so far as I can tell he didn’t love a single one of its inhabitants (except, conceivably, my wholly unfrightening mother: ‘without being in the least pretty’, she was, he wrote in his last letter, ‘the most beautiful woman I have ever seen’). Anyway, the love transaction has always operated, to various degrees, with each and every repeatedly published novelist and poet. With essayists, the love transaction was more or less unknown until Christopher Hitchens came along – until he came along, and then went away again.
This is literature’s dewy little secret. Its energy is the energy of love. All evocations of people, places, animals, objects, feelings, concepts, landscapes, seascapes, and cloudscapes: all such evocations are in spirit amorous and celebratory. Love gets put into the writing, and love gets taken out…
Now I must get ready to go, I’m afraid. Come on, I’ll see you to the door. Pick up that glass there, if you would, and follow me down.
…Did you bring anything, a coat, a bag, a hat? Now my parting words to you would normally be: I’ll see you – or some slightly different version of you – in due course, in 2021, say, or soon thereafter. But next August I enter my seventieth year. There are a good few short stories I mean to get done (most of them about race in America), and I have in mind a third fiction about the Third Reich – a modest novella. You see, another full-length fiction, let alone another long fiction, now seems unlikely. Time will tell. Maybe towards the end I’ll just shut up and read…In which case, oh, I’ll miss it, I’ll grieve for everything about it, even its pains, trifling and fleeting compared to its pleasures, but formidable in their way. With every work of fiction, with every voyage of discovery, you’re at some point utterly becalmed (like Conrad on the Otago), and you drop overboard and sink through the fathoms until you reach the following dual certainty: that not only is the book you’re writing no good, no good at all, but also that every line you’ve ever written is no good either, no good at all. Then, when you’re deep down there, among the rocks and the shipwrecks and the blind and brainless bottomfeeders, you touch sand, and can start to gird yourself to kick back up again.
I’ll miss that. And I’ll miss you too, your warmth, your encouragement, your clemency. Here we are.
‘Well, goodbye.’
Goodbye, my reader, I said. Goodbye, my dear, my close, my gentle.