the officer corps who had overthrown the old dictatorship and the rank-and-file soldiery. The government, led by the Socialist Party, was desperate to contain the growing turbulence and particularly to assert its control of the state machinery. The IS urged the PRP to focus less on armed manoeuvres and more on encouraging the development of popular councils of workers and soldiers, which could be the basis for a new socialist democracy. In the end, the PRP participated in an abortive coup d’état, which gave the right wing the chance to go on the offensive and restore discipline in the military. Hitchens lamented the IS stance, and specifically criticised Callinicos for talking about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in this context.20 Recollecting this period, Hitchens excoriated the party in characteristically bilious terms. It had
openly allied itself with semi-Baader Meinhof elements in that most open and hopeful of all revolutions: a revolution which can now be seen as the last spasm of 1968 enthusiasm. Not being very choosy politically, the aforesaid elements went in with a stupid and nasty attempted coup, mounted by the associates of the Portuguese Stalinists … Thus not only had the comrades moved from Luxemburg to the worst of Lenin, but in making this shift of principle they had also changed ships on a falling tide. Time to go. Still, I recollect the empty feeling I had when I quietly cancelled my membership and did a fade. I remember trying to tell myself that I was leaving for the same reasons I had joined. But the relief – at ceasing to hear about ‘rank and file’ and ‘building links’ – soon supplanted the guilt.21
At any rate, the picture Hitchens gave of fading into the background is accurate. Nor is there any sign that he fell out with his former comrades. Even when he publicly repudiated his old comrades for having inadvertently published an ‘anti-Zionist’ letter in the party newspaper, Socialist Worker, which was in fact written by a member of the National Front, Hitchens retained his sympathy for the organisation. In a letter to John Rose, who then worked on the organ, Hitchens expressed his respect for Tony Cliff.22 Hitchens continued to speak at the party’s meetings when it was known as the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Yet, Hitchens was evidently exhausted by both the revolutionary and reformist left in Britain. Having left the IS, he had briefly joined the Labour Party.23 But he came to resent the ‘tax-funded statism’ of the old consensus as much as the union bureaucracy and the Labour right. Hitchens later confessed to being physically unable to vote for Labour in 1979 and to having realised that this was because he wanted Thatcher to win. He admired her determination to take on the stale postwar arrangements and was relieved that she could at last do so.24
At any rate, he was on the brink of abandoning the small, wet, defeated islands of the United Kingdom and making off for the United States – a surrogate patria, so far as Hitchens was concerned, and a more promising prospect for a talented writer.
A COMPOUND IDENTITY: AMERICAN AND JEWISH QUESTIONS
Hitchens had been, before he joined the International Socialists, what he called a ‘Left Social Democrat (or “LSD” in the jargon of the movement)’.25 This, roughly speaking, is the position to which he reverted after leaving amid the backwash of the revolutionary upsurge of 1968. But the state of social democracy was dire, its left was weaker than ever, and Hitchens had a troubling feeling that Thatcher might have a point. Yet if he did not have much faith in the British left, he was increasingly interested in two other, larger political canvases: Third World revolutionary movements, and the United States, to which he emigrated. Hitchens’s brief fondness for Saddam – ‘the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser’ – was of a piece with the former but so was his far more enduring interest in the issue of Cyprus.26
In his early years in America, Hitchens seemed to have moved slightly to the left, barring the brief expostulation of patriotic bullishness over the Falklands/Malvinas. Partly, this may reflect the milieu upon which he was initially dependent – friends such as Alexander Cockburn provided Hitchens’s entrées to the New York scene, while his colleagues at the Nation were unlikely to be susceptible to any pleading for Mrs Thatcher. But his focus on international struggles also gave him a strong position from which to assail the Reaganites, even if he had no enthusiasm for the Democrats.
D. D. Guttenplan, a correspondent at the Nation who knew Hitchens well through the 1980s, recalls that when Hitchens migrated to the United States and began working at the Nation, he ‘came across as a left internationalist, someone for whom liberation movements were much more important than the internal politics of any country, certainly the US, where he was deeply uninterested in American politics’. Mike Davis had a similar recollection of Hitchens in the 1990s, as ‘a charming and bighearted guy’ who ‘had a tendency to develop profound emotional attachments to third world groups, particularly the Cypriots and the Kurds, and I think that eventually blinded him to the reality of American wars’.27
Yet, if Hitchens’s interest in domestic politics was limited, his early writing on US foreign policy did not substantially deviate from an anti-imperialist position. Indeed, he consistently drew a direct relationship between the US invasion of Vietnam and the proxy wars in Central America. But ascending the steep career slope in US media circles also encouraged Hitchens’s propensity for ingratiating himself with the chattering class. Guttenplan recalls:
I remember in ’88, I was writing a media column for New York Newsday, and there was a fake award which Christopher organised for journalists in Washington called the Osric Award, for the most suck-up journalists. It was a roll-call of shame. They had an awards dinner, and I was invited to report on it … And it was a kind of Washington snark-fest. Most of the people there were vaguely liberal, left-of-centre, but it was much more about attitude than politics. And Christopher was really in his element. You could tell that all these people looked up to him, and thought he was just a swell fellow. I remember thinking, ‘This is very clever self- promotion.’ If you get publicity for being the person who denounces other people, then you get a kind of power.28
In the summer of 1988 Hitchens brought the tidings to his reading public that he was Jewish, or at least of Jewish descent.
‘I was pleased’, he said, ‘to find that I was pleased.’ Perhaps Lesley Hazleton erred on an uncharitable interpretation of this by suggesting that he obviously expected another response. But let us recall what he had said about his mother. She was the daughter of Dorothy Levin, who in turn was the daughter of Lionel Levin, who had married the daughter of a Mr Nathaniel Blumenthal, a nineteenth–century Jewish refugee from Poland who had ‘married out’ but nonetheless raised all his children in the Orthodox manner. This was the basis for Hitchens’s claim to Jewish descent. But according to Hitchens, his mother had attempted ‘to “pass” as English’ in order to avoid being the subject of anti-Semitism. The invocation of the concept of racial passing in this context is odd. By implication his mother was not English, because she was Jewish; thus to be English was to be white and Christian. Ironically, Hitchens, in describing his mother’s dilemma, performed the racialising gesture that had victimised his grandparents and forced his mother to disavow her lineage.29
Moreover, Hitchens had a tendency, particularly in his later writing, to speak of the ‘Jewish people’ as if they were all implicated in the state of Israel. For example, in the context of a fairly standard argument against Zionism, he added: ‘A sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning.’30 Of course, this is not anti-Semitism in its most toxic sense. But it does remind one that philo-Semitism is a not-too-distant cousin of anti-Semitism (particularly in England). And, when read in conjunction with his critique of Said (see Chapter 2), it does suggest that the latter had a point when he said that Orientalism and anti-Semitism are joined at the hip.31 Further, an unavoidable aspect of this discovery must be Hitchens’s sense of how it would affect his career.
‘When I read that piece in Grand Street’, Guttenplan recalled,
I
