The slaying of a hypothesis by an ugly fact
Anthony Howard
FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT by Christopher Hitchens Verso, £19.95, pp. 353 Of all contemporary transatlantic com- mentators Christopher Hitchens tends to provoke the strongest reactions. To his admirers, he is someone who tells it how it is — beholden to nobody, frightened of no one and with a fine instinct for the jugular, especially when it is contained in a fleshily prosperous neck.
His critics, on the other hand, claim to detect a poseur — a man who is far more at home with café society than any left-winger ought to be, a writer who aspires, above all, to be the glass of fashion, a pundit who, While strong on all questions of opinion, has always been curiously weak on matters of fact.
The attraction of this combative book — his second published collection of journal- istic pieces (not bad for someone only just over 40) — is that it impartially provides ammunition for both sides. The various essays are never anything but spirited; what they lack in knowledge they compensate for by a carefully cultivated air of knowing- ness, and they display the author's own spe- cial gift for studied invective, not to say vulgar abuse, to remarkable effect. (They also, it has to be said, occasionally produce an example of execrable writing. Who else
but an old Oxford Union hand, desperately casting around to avoid an over-used cliché, could come up with a line like 'There went the feline, screeching from the bag'?)
But the real case against Hitchens does not lie in his penchant for stylistic excesses. It rests, instead, on the cavalier way in which he never allows an awkward fact to get in the way of a pre-ordained thesis. There is a covert illustration of this in the case of the longest essay in this book. It takes some nerve to present in 1993 an Are- opagitica-type defence of Salman Rushdie without once referring, even by way of a footnote, to the moment in 1990 when he seemed ready to buy off his potential assas- sins by proclaiming his renewed faith in Islam.
Hitchens can also trip himself up by his constant desire to be centre stage — the most painful sentence of all for him to compose must, one suspects, have been the one on his Oxford days in which he is forced to acknowledge: 'I didn't personally know Clinton but I knew some in his cir- cle.' But at least this sort of admission saves him from egregious error.
He is less fortunate in giving his reminis- cences of a British Prime Minister. In his section entitled 'Rogues' Gallery' he proudly tells us that
at the Labour Party Conference in 1976 I was at a private dinner given by the Engineers' Union, at which Harold Wilson made a little speech in praise of himself.
According to the account given here, the old boy made the mistake of alluding to the fact that he had been 'leader of the party for 13 years' (unfortunate echoes, as the author points out with relish, in the light of Wilson's own 1964 battle-cry of '13 years of Tory misrule'. But, as proof that the dreadful bounder retained a certain fox- like cunning, Hitchens goes on to record that the very next day — addressing 'the full conference and the cameras' — the Prime Minister carefully substituted the safer time-span of '12 1/2 years'.
There is only one thing wrong with this story. It cannot possibly be true. Wilson had ceased to be Prime Minister and lead- er of the Labour Party in April 1976 and did not attend the 1976 Party Conference at all. Nor does it help much to plead that Hitchens has simply got his years mixed up. In September 1975 Wilson would hardly have claimed, even at a private gathering, that he had been 'leader of the party for 13 years'. In face of the hard light of evidence the entire anecdote simply collapses.
But then, to be fair, Hitchens has always seen himself as a broad-brush merchant. Not for him a Canaletto, making its impact by accumulation of accurate detail. He prefers to go for the single, shock effect and — like Andy Warhol (one of the few trendy figures pilloried in this book) — he can sometimes bring it off.
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